AGNETA STANHOPE.
Before the autumn had well begun, while the Stanhopes flattered
themselves they were like the other farmers in the heat of harvest
work, their only sister was permitted to come on a visit to them at
Copley Grange Farm, and she entered into the situation with girlish
relish equal to, though different from, Harry’s.
Agneta Stanhope’s seventeen years of life had been dull and monotonous,
and apart from the ordinary experiences of girlhood, though she had
suffered no outward privations during their progress. The childless
aunt who had volunteered to take the little girl in charge, had been
faithful according to Mrs. Stanhope’s light. She had taken care to
provide Agne—that her own expense certainly—with a good governess and
skilled masters. Mrs. Stanhope had been conscientious in making it a
point that the child should have every material comfort, and she and
her governess had shared all the advantages, which Mrs. Stanhope held
fit for them, that could be derived from General Stanhope’s position
and income. Agneta had always been duly recognised as the niece and
adopted daughter of the house, whether in town or country. She had even
found a little establishment formed for her own especial well-being at
the seaside, when other children were sent there. In short, Agneta had
been treated with perfect humanity and consideration, and could lay
no claim to being the persecuted, neglected orphan child of romance.
But the General and his wife were neither of them particularly fond of
children, though they did not call the grapes which had not been given
to them sour. Accepting with philosophic adaptability the lot which
they regarded as assigned to them, they replaced private by public
interests. The couple went much into society and travelled a great
deal. They were spirited, intelligent, liberal-minded in a conventional
way, decidedly popular, and overwhelmed with engagements.
To such a pair, though they fulfilled their obligations to Agneta in a
perfectly honourable well-bred manner, the child and girl was of small
account—at least till she was old enough to come out formally, go into
company with her guardians, and obtain the establishment which Mrs.
Stanhope felt bound to put in her way.
Indeed, Agneta had seen as little of her uncle and aunt as was
compatible with their relations. She had spent nearly the whole of
her short life in schoolrooms, within the confines of a park and a
few neighbouring lanes, or in the narrower bounds of West-end squares
and gardens—on marine parades, or occasionally for a change on the
promenades of foreign watering places. She had been largely consigned
to the companionship of an unexceptionable elderly governess, who had
become a martinet, with the most of any originality or spirit she
had ever possessed pressed out of her by the exigencies of a long
and toilsome professional career. It was little wonder that Miss
Dennison, though she was all that her certificates proclaimed her
and Mrs. Stanhope’s fancy painted her, as a well-born, well-bred,
well-principled woman, whose solid education had not been entirely
neglected, while her French accent was that of a native, and her music
and drawing those of an accomplished amateur, proved still not a
congenial companion for a girl whose heart was stirring and fluttering
with the ardent impulses of that spring-time, which when repressed into
a walk is all the readier the next moment to break out in a gallop.
Indeed Miss Dennison was chiefly concerned—so far as the duties of
her office would allow—with securing the ease and rest which she had
laboriously earned.
It happened also that there were few contemporary young people among
those branches of Agneta Stanhope’s father’s and mother’s families, the
heads of which troubled themselves, amidst the distractions of modern
life, to remember her existence and send her invitations to spend some
of her holidays in their circles.
Beyond her family connections, there was an embargo laid by Mrs.
Stanhope, and especially by Miss Dennison, in her increasing
scrupulousness and dislike to interruptions of her routine, on juvenile
friends for Agneta, beyond a very select few, until the girl grew up
with hardly a playfellow or intimate companion save her brothers, who
had only been with her at brief intervals, separated by long spaces of
time.
The visits of Harry and Horry at the General’s had been the bright
spots in Agneta’s life which had aroused the young humanity in her and
kept it from stagnation. To Harry especially she had owed the greatest
enjoyments in keeping with her years which she had ever known. Harry,
a manly little fellow from childhood, had always been rather fond
and proud of his younger sister, and had shown himself as careful of
her, and indulgent to her, as could be expected from his habitual
thoughtlessness, though he had never dreamt of ranking her with Horry
in his regard, or supposing that he owed to her the same allegiance. He
and Horry had never been sundered. Horry was in a measure necessary to
Harry, as Harry was to Horry, while Agneta had merely proved a pet and
play-thing now and then, and, after all, was but a girl, who belonged
by rights to Aunt Julia and the General—not to the lads.
Horace, in his infirmity with its attendant jealousy, had been tempted
to look upon Agneta as an interloper between him and his brother, and
it had only been Harry’s staunchness to both which had preserved the
fraternal bond intact in either case. Harry was the medium, not only of
communication—seeing that Horry peevishly complained he could never
hear his sister’s soft treble voice—but of such mild family affection
as subsisted between the other two.
Most girls in Agneta Stanhope’s class would find it difficult to
conceive that a fortnight’s stay with her brothers, in the rusticity of
their new estate, could be a treat of treats to Agneta, having all that
was wanting to render it ‘perfectly exquisite,’ in the extravagance of
her girlish speech, supplied by the misfortune of Miss Dennison’s being
attacked by influenza on the eve of their setting out, and so prevented
from accompanying her pupil. ‘Poor dear old Madam Punctilio, as Harry
wickedly nicknames her,’ reflected Agneta gleefully; ‘she would
undoubtedly have been in the way and spoiled so much. Since she is in
no danger and is not suffering particularly, while she misses nothing
by being detained in her comfortable quarters at Thornley Lodge and
escaping the worse than bachelors’ housekeeping at the Farm, it is not
cruel, is it? to be a little glad that she has become so opportunely
ill?’
Unfortunately Mrs. Stanhope had not anticipated the possibility of
the accident, when she consented, with considerable hesitation and
reluctance, to allow Agneta to go to her brothers for a couple of weeks.
But Mrs. Stanhope could not bring herself to separate entirely
the members of the same family, though Harry and Horace had been
disappointing in failing to develop any faculties their friends could
lay hold of, to push them on in the world, and in the stupid lads’
obstinately sticking to each other, so as to make matters worse, until
this miserable _dernier ressort_ of a farm had to be tolerated for
them, still the young men had not done anything which could warrant
their aunt in forbidding their sister to visit them. As an habitual
practice, of course, living with her brothers in their primitive
establishment, was not to be thought of for Agneta. Her prospects
must be considered in the first place; her time was not to be wasted.
But she had not yet come out, she had not gone far beyond the point
when childhood and girlhood meet. If ever the liberty were to be
permitted, here was the opportunity when she would incur the least
observation, and run the slightest risk. For Miss Dennison would still
be responsible, since it would be as her pupil, in her charge, that
Agneta should go to Copley Grange Farm. And very likely a single trial
of the life on which her brothers had resolved—a species of Robinson
Crusoe isolation—rather than any steep decline into a lower stratum
of society, in Mrs. Stanhope’s mind, would rob the girl of any farther
inclination to go to them.
When the expedition was about to start into the wilds, and Miss
Dennison broke down against all calculation, Mrs. Stanhope was heavily
hampered by the nature of her own engagements. It was an impossibility
for her to sacrifice herself and them, so far as to undertake to
chaperon Agneta and countenance Harry and Horace, even for the matter
of a couple of days, in their yeoman establishment, where she knew her
presence must create the greatest disturbance. She could not attempt
another compensating alteration in the programme. She did not see
herself warranted in anticipating Agneta’s entrance on the great world,
and her career, by carrying her niece with her for the gaieties of a
race week, to which Mrs. Stanhope and the General were pledged.
Mrs. Stanhope, in the hurry of the dilemma, seemed to see herself
compelled to send Agneta, to the girl’s unbounded delight, to Copley
Grange Farm, under no more qualified escort than that of a steady old
waiting-maid.
Mrs. Stanhope’s chief dependence was on the brothers’ having sufficient
_esprit de corps_, where their sister was concerned, to look after her
when she was with them. Then Agneta, in her own person, was not so
destitute of dawning discretion as to run straightway into mischief
for the short interval of time during which she was to be Harry and
Horace’s guest.
The very first use which Harry made of his guardianship was to carry
Agneta to Friarton Mill. ‘I have brought over my sister Aggie to you,
Miss Constable, that you may be a friend to her also,’ said Harry in
his winning way, which was not so much graciously affable as frankly
confiding in the friendliness of his kind.
Fan was more than proud and pleased, she was deeply gratified by the
trust, and grateful for it. It raised her in her own estimation, and
she was satisfied it would elevate her in that of others. If Harry
Stanhope chose to commit his young sister to the care of Fan—of all
people—during Agneta Stanhope’s stay at the Farm, it showed not only
his conviction of Fan’s claims to be a gentlewoman, it proved to Fan
that her own instincts of ladyhood had been correct and genuine.
As for Agneta, she went into still greater raptures over lovely old
Friarton Mill than over the quaint antiquated farmhouse. She privately
included Miss Constable, who had been so good to Agneta’s ‘boys,’ who
was such a nice, pretty, quiet-looking little woman in her mourning,
in her enthusiastic admiration. Miss Constable was quick to guess
her—Agneta’s—wishes, and was evidently going to be very kind to
her. With regard to the big, awkward, but gentlemanlike—Agneta knew
a gentleman when she saw him—master of the house, whom Harry was so
impertinent as to call to his face ‘the Miller,’ he was even a more
wonderful novelty than his sister.
Agneta prized all the enchanting wonder, strangeness, and freedom of
the new world she had entered, with the vivid appreciation of a girl
who had been kept strictly in leading-strings all her days, who had
followed one narrow, worn path till it was direly commonplace and stale
to her, who, in the middle of a continual round of book-teaching, was
as profoundly ignorant of the work-a-day world, and the struggling,
suffering, rejoicing, sorrowing life lived on every side of her, as if
she were a novice in a convent parlour.
To rise two or three hours before her accustomed time the one day, to
have breakfast standing on the parlour table till noon the next—since
Harry was fitful, to say the least, in his practices of getting up
and taking his meals—formed an agreeable variety on Miss Dennison’s
petrified virtues of punctuality and method. To be invested with the
important functions involved in pouring out coffee for Harry and Horry
was flattering to Agneta’s still starved vanity. To have no tasks in
Ariosto, Corneille, and Schiller—which, though custom enabled her to
get through them glibly, the absence of all student affinities rendered
irksome—was a sensible relief to her. Instead, Agneta could dawdle in
the porch or in the shadow of the great pear-tree in the paddock, and
read one of Harry’s red-and-yellow railway-stall volumes. She could not
dip far into it, certainly, without noticing that it was as horribly
‘loud’ inside as out. But it was also new and exciting like everything
else on this untrodden ground. Its characters bounced and struggled
after a robust fashion, did not trip or stalk in a shadowy manner, as
the heroes and heroines of her classics had tripped and stalked to
Agneta.
To be exonerated from practising was another huge boon to a girl who
was not intensely musical, and to whom the news that there was no
piano in the house sounded the best of jokes.
The small, austerely plain farmhouse, with the ‘lean-to’ preserving
a venerable houseleek which flaunted over the greater portion of the
sloping roof, was out of all proportion to its large offices where they
stood massed together,
‘Warm with the breath of kine.’
The voices of poultry resounded through the shaggy paddock. Cowslips
and primroses, as well as daisies, flourished in their season, among
the uncut grass, and the white buttons of mushrooms showed themselves
conspicuously among the seeded flowers and withered leaves of autumn.
The dairy and kitchen were by far the largest rooms in the farmhouse,
so that Agneta felt justified in haunting them, even without the
inducement of playing at making butter and cheese, and baking home-made
bread, much as Harry and Horry played at cutting down and gathering in
sheaves, and driving home and stacking the corn. Agneta found another
excuse in hopeless endeavours to sketch the great open chimney-place,
and its clumsy oven piled round with billets of wood; or a section of
the dark beams of the low roof which Harry’s middle-aged housekeeper
had already hung again thickly, as of old, with red and white beef
and bacon, brown nets full of pale green onions, and bunches of olive
and sage-coloured pot-herbs; or the wooden trap stair which ascended
to a room above, that Harry, like a true farmer, had immediately
appropriated to himself because it lacked a partition on the kitchen
side, and from the narrow elevated platform, looking down into the
yawning gulf beneath, Harry was supposed to inspect and address his
farm servants assembled of a morning, to give in their reports and
receive his orders.
Of course there was no accommodation in either of the two tiny
parlours for morning callers, or dinner guests—who must have come to
dine before they came to call, or so much as had lunch—a topsy-turvy
reversal of all household arrangements hitherto known to Agneta, which
fascinated her like every other unapprehended possibility of primitive
housekeeping. As to an evening party, with hired music, dancing, ices
and supper anywhere else save spread like a gipsy tea on the rough
grass of the paddock, Agneta laughed the low tuneful laugh which was
almost as purely gleeful as Harry’s, at the mere absurdity of the
picture conjured up by the imagination.
But who wanted morning callers, or the wittiest diners-out, such as
Agneta had heard her Aunt Julia talk of, or even the best waltzer in
London—whom anybody could have, so soon as she was presented and came
out—down here at Copley Grange Farm with the boys in their retreat?
Harry hunted for hens’ and ducks’ eggs with Agneta in the poultry
and straw yards and by the pond, just as he had formerly hunted
with her for blackbirds’ and chaffinches’ nests in the shrubberies
at Thornley Lodge. He took her, too, every day to his stables and
cowhouse, and he had promised she should milk a cow before she left.
He let her accompany him and Horry when the weather was fine to the
fields, and when it was bad to the barn, to watch the operations of the
thrashing-mill and fanners. He had helped her to climb up once beside
him, to a throne of sheaves in a corn-cart, and driven her in triumph
into the yard, which Agneta held for the moment to be much better than
occupying the box-seat on a drag, as most girls had an opportunity of
doing on some occasion in their lives.