AN ILLUSION.
Oliver Constable, watching the young aristocratic beauty Agneta
Stanhope masquerading with her brothers, thought of Marie Antoinette
essaying a Dresden china shepherdess’s life at Little Trianon. He
judged that Marie Thérèse’s high-spirited, frolicsome daughter, whose
fair-haired beauty, in its flower, was not without its buxomness,
princess and queen though she was, had less refined traits, so far as
he could make out from her early pictures, till terrible misfortune
lent the face tragic majesty, than were to be found in the pale,
delicately cut little features of this simply well-born English girl
who had been brought up in the calculated shade, seclusion, and
exclusivism, of an aristocratic schoolroom, with only a formal walk, or
ride or drive for exercise, while she had remained totally uninitiated
in the swimming, rowing, and skating exercises which are beginning at
last to be allowed to diversify more elderly forms of ‘constitutionals’
for the girls of the upper ten thousand. Agneta’s lawn games even had
been generally affairs of two, with one of the two what Harry would
have called ‘a confirmed duffer and fogy,’ while the girl’s early romps
with her schoolboy brothers had been few and far between.
Agneta Stanhope was in perfect health of body and mind, yet she
appeared at Copley Grange Farm like a hothouse flower which had never
been exposed to sun or wind, while welcoming them with such a sweet
exultant wooing of their tanning, hardening influences, as added to
the grace of her ignorance and helplessness—such ignorance and
helplessness as charm in a gentle young foreigner who is all frankness
and guilelessness, and willingly makes herself at home in a hitherto
unexplored region, of which the rude simplicity alone is perceptible
to her. In such a _rôle_ Agneta Stanhope was still more engaging and
interesting than beautiful. Indeed her greatest claim to beauty lay
in the air of exquisite tender fragility—which had to do with her
rearing, but not with her character, not even with her constitution,
in spite of her slight figure, which, however, was elastic and wiry
enough—and the sky-blueness of her eyes—like Harry’s, very unlike
Catherine Hilliard’s—set in a miniature face, the colour of which
inclined to that of a lily rather than of a rose, when she came
first, though a single week’s life with her brothers brought into
the soft cheeks a tinge of the red which qualifies the whiteness of
apple-blossom.
It was really in all respects as if Agneta Stanhope were visiting
her brothers in one of the distant colonies to which they had been
originally destined, though she was not reduced to washing her clothes
or baking her bread; certainly she would not have objected to these
sports in her ignorance of what they led to. On the one hand, she was
childishly ignorant, a creature who had never stood alone or thought
for herself, or been conscious of a single responsibility to her
fellow-creatures since she was born, while—like Catherine Hilliard
here—neither had she been of vital consequence to anybody, or been
cherished and petted, as might well have been the lot of such a girl
in different circumstances. She had suffered a curiously crippling
experience of life on two sides of her nature. On another, she was
precocious, and early instructed in obligations, necessities, and
experiences; but this element in her education and second nature was
not on the surface or readily perceived.
Agneta was not likely, even if fortune in the person of her Aunt Julia
favoured her present wishes, to stay long enough at Copley Grange
Farm for yeoman life to pall upon her. And when she was wearied in
the least, she took refuge—the power of changing her place when and
how she liked was another allurement to her—with her own and her
brothers’ friends at Friarton Mill. Agneta could not draw the nice
lines of distinction which were so skilfully defined by the magnates of
Friarton. She was blind enough in her youthful obtuseness not to see
magnates in the town. What was the great difference between the master
of a grammar school who taught Latin or mathematics, the doctor who
felt pulses, the old established family solicitor and banker who drew
out wills and leases and counted sovereigns, even the vicar, who wrote
sermons and took a class in the Sunday-school, and Oliver Constable,
who ruled over working-men indeed, instead of boys, clerks, and
curates, but who had been at Oxford with her brothers and who lived in
such a perfect old place as Friarton Mill?
In what respect was Oliver Constable’s sister, who had been educated
in good schools at home and abroad, very inferior to the other ladies
in the neighbourhood, whom, in her heart of hearts, Agneta Stanhope
appearing so humble in that innocent youth—of which at the same time
arrogance is perhaps the commoner immature accompaniment—never dreamt
of reckoning her own equals?
Agneta was actually disposed to put more weight on the line of yeomen,
from which the Constables had sprung, than on the fashionable London
doctor, who was the father of one of the master’s wives, or on the
gallant major in the line from whom another lady claimed descent.
Agneta showed herself extremely perverse where the best houses in
Friarton were concerned. To her there was no particular goodness about
them; and they had not the glamour of the farm and mill-houses. The
Friarton drawing-rooms, from Mrs. Hilliard’s downwards, were only more
or less sorry reflections of the drawing-room at home, they were not
at all like the delicious little parlours—all chimney-corners and
cupboards, at Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill.
Agneta was just a trifle haughty and reserved when Harry took her among
the professional people in Friarton, and all the time she was as gay
as a lark, and as playful as a kitten, at Friarton Mill. She did not
emulate Harry in winning every heart. She piqued the Friarton ladies
by her neglect and incapacity for measuring their titles to respect.
Mrs. Hilliard and her cousin Catherine formed the only exceptions. Mrs.
Hilliard laughed at Agneta’s preferences, and Catherine simply held
Agneta as a big baby fit to rank with the overgrown school boy her
brother.
Truth to tell, Agneta Stanhope, who was assured of her position, while
she did not approve from principle and instinct of debatable middle
ground, still never so much as imagined that she could compromise
herself by temporary association with people like the Wrights and
Fremantles. It was as a pure matter of taste that she chose to disport
herself among pronounced yeomen and tradespeople, whose habits and
tastes, from an accident of education and a piquancy of flavour, were
the opposite of oppressive to her.
Fan Constable repaid Harry Stanhope’s confidence. She was very good to
Agneta, devoting herself to the girl’s gratification with an abstract
devotion—disinterested, guiltless of ulterior motives, peculiar to the
young woman. It was no matter that Agneta’s pleasures, when they took
the form of seeking for hens’ nests, and carrying the eggs home in the
skirt of her gown, or wishing to milk cows, were not only startling
but wholly antagonistic to Fan’s frame of mind and sense of fitness.
It was rather the old story of the roc’s egg which Fan would have
got at any price for her visitor. Fan in her solemn earnestness and
absolute matter-of-factness, masqueraded too to please Agneta, played
at the ideal miller’s daughter for whom the real miller’s daughter had
been wont to entertain a great contempt, dawdling among the sedges by
Buller’s Brook, sitting among the sacks in the mill gallery, munching
groats with her white teeth, roasting them in the kiln, having herself
weighed in the scales. And when Agneta requested, with fearless
directness and insistance, to be taken to Friarton to see what she
called ‘the ancestral shop,’ and be shown all over the premises in
order to have the complicated processes of making bread rendered clear
to her understanding, Fan went with the young lady without a demur. It
was on this occasion that Fan heard Agneta beg for an unbaked cake, and
pray that Oliver would carve her initials with his penknife on the soft
crust, as if it were the bark of a tree, and he were another Orlando to
her Rosalind, and then entreat that she might put it with her own hand
into the oven, concluding by calling everybody to promise faithfully
that when it came out, _her_ cake should be duly forwarded with the
rest of the bread to Copley Grange Farm.
Fan witnessed the ridiculous performance without more than a fleeting
pang. And if Agneta Stanhope had further taken it into her head—full
of fantastic whims—during the intoxication of these weeks which
formed her first holidays, that she and Fan should fill baskets with
floury loaves and carry them with their own hands to feed the poor,
there would have been some danger of Fan’s complying with the absurd
suggestion, in the height of her infatuation to please Harry Stanhope’s
sister.
Shrewd as Fan was, she became thoroughly taken in by the stranger.
Fan learnt to believe in Agneta, and there was relief and joy in
the belief, as entirely as Fan believed, with more reason where
single-heartedness was concerned, in Harry.
After all, Agneta, though she was fond of Fan, liked Oliver still
better. He was neither her victim nor her slave, though he could not
help admiring what was admirable in her high breeding, and natural
sweetness and affectionateness, and being tolerant and kind to her. He
was not a son of the soil, neither had he been brought up in such total
unfamiliarity with girls of Agneta Stanhope’s stamp that he should fall
down and worship her, caught chiefly by the charm of her conventional
grace and refinement in their contrast with the conventional
uncouthness and vulgarity of the girls he had previously known.
To Oliver Constable’s mind there was a considerable amount of snobbery
and caddishness—an absolute disloyalty to all which lies below the
immediate surface—in this ready subserviency of the self-made man to
the material advantages of the first conventional lady with whom he
comes in close contact. And as fine feathers did not necessarily make
fine birds to Oliver, he had been tempted to feel a grim satisfaction
when he read of such men’s being played with and fooled by exquisite
triflers who had subdued their captives, almost without an effort, by
trifles light as air. ‘Serve the duffers right,’ Oliver had growled.
He had imagined that if he were to love a woman with his whole heart
and soul, it would be the woman independent of the attributes of
any station, the noble woman, who, if she were technically as well
as ideally a lady, would be as indifferent to mere technicalities,
perhaps as weary of them, as Catherine Hilliard often looked.
Oliver Constable stood in no danger of being bound in thrall by Agneta
Stanhope, and his insensibility formed another racy distinction in her
eyes. No doubt in her cloistered schoolroom days, she had not yet begun
her career of conquest. But she had moved in circles where it is the
business of many men’s lives to please women, where it becomes a trick
of habit which keeps the hand in play, even when it is not pursued
for the sake of any individual woman. She had been accustomed, during
her passing glimpses of the world she was to live in, to be outwardly
deferred to, flattered and complimented. Now Mr. Constable, while she
was sure he was incapable of being anything save chivalrously good
to any woman, did not flatter her a bit. He had a strong propensity
to speak the truth always. Sometimes he forgot himself so far as to
take her off almost as he took off his sister, or, worse still, to
lose sight of her existence for the moment, as he lost sight of Fan’s.
Withal, in spite of the brotherly obliviousness, and the difference of
opinion on many points between Oliver and Fan, Agneta could not fail
to see that in the middle of his dry jokes and bitter enough sarcasms,
Oliver Constable regarded his sister far more as his equal than Harry
regarded his sister whom he habitually petted. Mr. Constable consulted
Miss Constable seriously, even when he did not take her advice. But
Harry, though he was sufficiently interested to notice Agneta’s mode
of doing her hair, her changes of dress, her adopted occupations,
and would even, as she was gratefully persuaded few brothers would,
put himself about to contribute to her occupations and render them
agreeable, never talked to her even as he talked to Horry, never made
her the confidante of his schemes and plans, never asked her opinion
on any subject of more consequence than a neck-tie or the cutting of
his hair. Harry would never think of behaving in any other manner to a
girl like Agneta.
Agneta Stanhope was not a born coquette, but she had been taught to
estimate at their proper value all her advantages, whether natural or
acquired. She was well aware, in this her girlhood, that they were the
weapons with which she was to cut her way to fortune—the only fortune
which could possibly await a well-born, fairly attractive girl of her
rank, who had no portion beyond what served for her slender allowance
of pocket-money, though she had influential friends, who could at
least lead her into the arena where she was to secure a creditable
establishment, or prove a failure and remain a poor relation to the end
of her days. There was an obligation on Agneta’s part, to herself as
well as to her kindred, for the future in addition to the present, to
be agreeable, to charm men—that she might grow skilful in the art of
war, that she might not only smite down one antagonist, but overthrow
the foe by sixes and tens, so as to have several suitors to pick and
choose from, with the greater chance of escaping the collapse of a
_mauvais parti_ for a husband.
Certainly, the prevailing burden of her first, and all her succeeding
unmarried seasons, still sat lightly on Agneta Stanhope, yet she was
not without a latent, pervading sense of it, which caused her, in
very sport, to polish and poise her spear, and essay it against any
natural enemy, let him be ever so far beyond the pale of her claims and
requirements.
Thus, Agneta, out of a kind of womanly instinct, though one not
known to the higher order of women, set herself, with her eyes open,
to please Oliver Constable, to beguile him into making it his main
object to please her, and into sliding imperceptibly into platonically
romantic and tender relations with her. Undoubtedly, Agneta was not
so well acquainted with human nature as to anticipate any danger of
scorching her own wings in the process of consuming the heart of
another, far less to measure the degree of injury and suffering which
might be involved in that same casual scorching of her fairy queen and
butterfly attributes. But though she had been wise beyond her years and
before her time, such wisdom would not have sufficed to arrest her in
her course. Her latent high spirits, which became her antecedents, had
survived her lifetime of discipline.
In the dire necessity of subjugating men till they became her open or
secret lovers, she would have said, laughing with good-natured mockery,
at the most distant suspicion of such a peril, ‘if my wings are to be
scorched, let them. I shall survive to flutter them as bravely as ever,
till they are confined by a marriage ring. I must have Mr. Constable
think me nice—the nicest girl he has ever known.’
When Agneta Stanhope turned back her hair, or made it into a silken
fringe for Oliver, as Alice Grey braided her hair for another; when
Agneta set her gipsy hat in the most bewitching fashion at Oliver, and
gathered blackberries in the company of the miller of Friarton Mill
and his sister, the blackberries not being by any means Agneta’s chief
object; when she turned a demure little dissenter, in the teeth of
Fan Constable’s being a loyal churchwoman in right of the Constables’
mother, the curate’s daughter, and drew away the said churchwoman,
to the great edification of Jack Dadd and ’Mily Polley, to evening
attendance at the chapel favoured by the shopkeepers, where Oliver
continued to worship as his fathers had worshipped before him; when
Agneta sang her ballads, which, like homely Christian names, had begun
to reappear in her set in proportion as they had died out in lower
circles, her ‘Sweet Homes,’ and ‘Maids of Allanwater,’—the maid having
been a miller’s daughter, let us observe in passing—her ‘Brooks’
and ‘Rosebuds,’ and told her naïve stories of the mild maidenly
adventures she and Miss Dennison had met with in their quiet life,
to Oliver, he showed no sign of perceiving her delicate manœuvres.
He offered only a passive resistance. He stood like a rock assailed
by summer waves rippling back from it with an incessant murmur, or
like a giant Gulliver submitting with a patient, hardly perceptible
shrug of his shoulders, awkward man as he was in his invulnerability,
because he could not avoid the assault, to the airy overtures of a fair
Lilliputian, who, reaching up on tiptoe, did not attain to the height
of his knee.
Harry Stanhope opened his eyes wide, and laughed aloud at the fine,
and, of course, perfectly decorous little farce. ‘What a desperate
flirt that monkey Aggie is going to prove, to be sure,’ he remarked
to his gossip Horace; ‘barely out of the nursery, yet ready to fly
at game like Constable! What would the child do with him if she did
succeed in bringing him down? He would cumber her bag at starting, with
a vengeance. Not Aunt Julia’s game, eh, Horry? But the old man can take
care of himself, though he is as much in earnest in his way as his
sister is in hers, and would be fit to do something outrageous if he
were winged. The chit knows what she is about also, and, as no harm can
come of it, she may be left to amuse herself, after the fashion of her
kind.’
If Harry had not given _carte blanche_ Horry might have called it a
positive disgrace for Aggie to attempt a flirtation with a man in
Constable’s position, forgetting for the moment that he and Harry had
elected to be yeomen, and that Agneta could therefore be viewed as the
sister of two yeomen. But the oracle had spoken, and silenced any
voice Horry might have exercised in the matter.
It was sensible, severe Fan Constable who looked on at the play which
sometimes provoked, and sometimes amused Oliver—for he was a young man
and so susceptible to various influences—with glistening eyes and a
throbbing heart. Was there more than one, true aristocrat, forgetful,
not simply of self, but of the world? Might the friendship between
Copley Grange Farm and Friarton Mill be cemented by a double alliance?
Fan was the last girl in the world to stoop, even for the purpose of
conquering. If she did not receive allegiance unsought, she would
never, by premeditation and with design, seek it. But she could find no
condemnation for the doings of her new friend. All Fan’s blame was for
Oliver, who continued, or pretended to continue, utterly insensible to
the wonderful irresistible honour conferred upon him. Fan discovered
springs of sympathy with Agneta, while she had no patience with Oliver.
She was impelled to say something to him one evening when brother and
sister had just parted from the Stanhopes and seen them go on their
way through Copley Grange Park to the Farm. The group lingered on the
road, in order to go up close to the half-shut-up house, examine the
objectionable façade, and stand—figures in keeping—in the portico,
while they ascertained for themselves how Friarton Mill looked from
the great house in whose prospect it was understood to form such an
ornament. The two Constables, on their part, stood on their own side of
the Brook in the mill-house court.
‘I am not fond of gushing, I believe,’ said Fan, slowly and
deliberately, as if she were making a searching analysis of her private
propensities. ‘As a rule, I am convinced I am not fond of superlatives
or caressing expressions’—speaking with studied moderation—‘but I
will say’—becoming ardent at a bound—‘Miss Stanhope, Agneta—I may
call her behind her back as well as before her face, since she has
asked me to call her by her Christian name,’ proclaimed Fan, with
honest, affectionate pride in the permission—‘is the most lovable,
darling girl I ever met.’
‘She is not a bad specimen of her class, I dare say,’ said Oliver with
provoking impartiality.
‘Oh! Oliver,’ protested Fan, hot and indignant as at an unfeeling
slight to her idol, ‘I am sure her testimony to your merits would be
very different, and—and much warmer. She thinks so much of your good
opinion, too. Oh! Oliver, I am tempted to think you without eyes, or
ears, or heart, and you a young man seeing nobody—here, at least—who
is fit to be mentioned in the same breath with Agneta Stanhope, while
it will be your own fault if——’ Fan stopped in time, she was the
last woman to betray what looked to her upright, unsophisticated
eyes, another woman’s weakness, however transparently that woman might
herself reveal it. Fan had also become aware, in the case of the Polley
girls, who, whatever their offences, had not lost their claim to modest
womanhood, that she could not go nearer to mortally offending her
brother than to hint at an unsolicited preference for him.
Even at the mere implication he grew red again with a manly, modest
man’s shame, mingled now with a strong dash of impatience and scorn.
‘You are grossly mistaken, Fan,’ he said, in the first impulse
of anger; then he recovered himself and went on with a laugh not
altogether forced, ‘Miss Stanhope (Oliver no more called her Agneta
behind her back than to her face) is a little goose—save her young
ladyship’s pretensions; but you are a greater fool than I took you
for, Fannikin, if you imagine for a moment that she is sincere in
more than in making the most of her holiday rustication—this is
life in _villeggiatura_ to her—and in compelling us all to like her.
She and Harry are extravagantly fond of being liked. I am afraid it
don’t answer in his case, but in hers it will cause her to be a very
popular great lady some day, I have no question. She has exceedingly
pretty, gracious, high-bred ways—you hear I grant they are pretty, the
prettier that they are second nature rather than affectation. But she
is also as thorough a woman of the world as if she were ten—twenty
years older, ready to counsel her daughter as Tennyson’s aristocratic
matron instructed her child.’
Fan was utterly incredulous and gravely offended. She would not give up
Agneta Stanhope’s looking upon Fan and her brother as perfect equals,
even if she were not suffered to add that, so far as Agneta’s personal
choice went, she would not have objected to casting in her lot with
them.
Fan was only a little staggered by some words which Harry let fall when
he came over unexpectedly one morning to offer his sister’s excuses for
having been hurried away sooner than she had counted on from the Farm,
without being able to bid good-bye to Miss Constable. For, in truth,
like the sweet, graceful vision that she had flashed upon them, Agneta
Stanhope vanished in a moment, vision-like, out of the Constables’
sphere.
‘Aunt Julia found out that she could send old Jennings and meet Aggie
in time for them to join her and the General at Crewe station and go
on with them to Blackcombe, where the Herveys are to have some special
affair for Dolph’s coming of age. They are old friends and connections
of ours, you know, so it don’t matter that Aggie should be out at their
ball before she has regularly come out of her shell. Ungrateful little
wretch!—she professed to be bitten with our farm life, but wasn’t she
quickly cured when she heard what was in store for her? All the same,’
Harry corrected himself, remembering to whom he was speaking, and
prompted by his natural kindly feeling, ‘she was very sorry that she
could not get over to see and thank you.’
Still in the face of this shock, which Oliver was too magnanimous
to enlarge upon, Fan clung to her faith in Agneta’s eternal
friendship—nay, sisterly affection. Fan was only confirmed in her
tenacious belief by getting an inkling of the fact that not only Mrs.
Hilliard, but all Friarton, not possessing a grain of Oliver’s tender
consideration and unbounded generosity, were laughing at the end of the
temporary alliance between the girls with more exuberant mirth than
charitable sympathy.