Chapter XIX: 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.