THE EDUCATION OF CONSTANCE’S MIND.
Meanwhile, Constance Vernon grew up in womanhood and beauty. All around
her contributed to feed that stern remembrance which her father’s dying
words had bequeathed. Naturally proud, quick, susceptible, she felt
slights, often merely incidental, with a deep and brooding resentment.
The forlorn and dependent girl could not, indeed, fail to meet with many
bitter proofs that her situation was not forgotten by a world in which
prosperity and station are the cardinal virtues. Many a loud whisper,
many an intentional “aside,” reached her haughty ear, and coloured
her pale cheek. Such accidents increased her early-formed asperity
of thought; chilled the gushing flood of her young affections; and
sharpened, with a relentless edge, her bitter and caustic hatred to
a society she deemed at once insolent and worthless. To a taste
intuitively fine and noble the essential vulgarities--the fierceness
to-day, the cringing to-morrow; the veneration for power; the
indifference to virtue, which characterised the framers and rulers of
“society”--could not but bring contempt as well as anger; and amidst
the brilliant circles, to which so many aspirers looked up with hopeless
ambition, Constance moved only to ridicule, to loathe, to despise.
So strong, so constantly nourished, was this sentiment of contempt, that
it lasted with equal bitterness when Constance afterwards became the
queen and presider over that great world in which she now shone--to
dazzle, but not to rule. What at first might have seemed an exaggerated
and insane prayer on the part of her father, grew, as her experience
ripened, a natural and laudable command. She was thrown entirely with
that party amongst whom were his early friends and his late deserters.
She resolved to humble the crested arrogance around her, as much from
her own desire, as from the wish to obey and avenge her father. From
contempt for rank rose naturally the ambition of rank. The young beauty
resolved, to banish love from her heart; to devote herself to one aim
and object; to win title and station, that she might be able to give
power and permanence to her disdain of those qualities in others; and
in the secrecy of night she repeated the vow which had consoled her
father’s death-bed, and solemnly resolved to crush love within her heart
and marry solely for station and for power.
As the daughter of so celebrated a politician, it was natural that
Constance should take interest in politics. She lent to every discussion
of state events an eager and thirsty ear. She embraced with masculine
ardour such sentiments as were then considered the extreme of
liberality; and she looked on that career which society limits to man,
as the noblest, the loftiest in the world. She regretted that she was a
woman, and prevented from personally carrying into effect the sentiments
she passionately espoused. Meanwhile, she did not neglect, nor suffer to
rust, the bright weapon of a wit which embodied at times all the biting
energies of her contempt. To insolence she retorted sarcasm; and, early
able to see that society, like virtue, must be trampled upon in order
to yield forth its incense, she rose into respect by the hauteur of her
manner, the bluntness of her satire, the independence of her mind, far
more than by her various accomplishments and her unrivalled beauty.
Of Lady Erpingham she had nothing to complain; kind, easy, and
characterless, her protectress sometimes wounded her by carelessness,
but never through design; on the contrary, the Countess at once loved
and admired her, and was as anxious that her protegee should form a
brilliant alliance as if she had been her own daughter. Constance,
therefore, loved Lady Erpingham with sincere and earnest warmth, and
endeavoured to forget all the commonplaces and littlenesses which made
up the mind of her protectress, and which, otherwise, would have been
precisely of that nature to which one like Constance would have been the
least indulgent.