CHAPTER X.
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 precisly of that nature
to which one like Constance would have been the least indulgent.
