Chapter XVII: 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.