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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Echoes of Autonomy – 4 Classic Victorian Novels of Female Agency is a compelling anthology that captures the evolving narrative of female empowerment during the 19th century. Encompassed within its pages are works of notable literary range and stylistic diversity, each reflecting the era's complex social fabric. These seminal novels explore themes of autonomy, identity, and resistance against societal constraints. Together, they transcend mere storytelling, offering profound insights into the personal and societal struggles women faced. Through vivid narrative and emotional depth, each voice emerges uniquely, yet harmoniously, crafting a cohesive tapestry of resilience and introspection. This anthology brings together the trailblazing minds behind some of the Golden Age of literature's finest works. Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Mrs. Humphry Ward have all contributed significantly to literary history through their rich and varied portrayer of women's lived experiences. Aligned with Victorian-era social reform and burgeoning feminist thought, these authors delve into historical and cultural narratives that challenged and expanded contemporary understanding of women's roles. By drawing on both personal experiences and broader societal underpinnings, they have forged a collective force that profoundly resonates within the feminist literary canon. For readers seeking to immerse themselves in Victorian literature, Echoes of Autonomy offers an unparalleled diversity of perspectives and styles. Each narrative provides a distinct lens through which to explore themes of agency and self-realization, making it an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the confluence of gender and literary expression. By weaving together the voices of these pioneering authors, this anthology not only educates but also invites reflection on how these historical texts continue to inspire and provoke dialogue today. Herein lies an invaluable opportunity to experience the rich, multifaceted discourse of women's literature in a single, cohesive volume.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Echoes of Autonomy – 4 Classic Victorian Novels of Female Agency
Table of Contents
Introduction
Echoes of Autonomy brings together four Victorian narratives that probe how a woman’s will meets the textures of family, work, belief, and community. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s The Testing of Diana Mallory examine the capacities and limits of self-direction within social worlds that press for conformity. Each work stages decisions that define identity without reducing agency to defiance alone; feeling, patience, ambition, and responsibility all enter the ledger. As a constellation, they illuminate how inward resolve, ethical imagination, and outward circumstance interact, creating varied maps of freedom within constraint.
Two titles announce individual women by name, while the other two name communities, suggesting complementary vantage points. Aurora Leigh and The Testing of Diana Mallory foreground a single figure whose aspirations and trials concentrate the question of what a self can choose. Villette and Middlemarch, by contrast, signal environments—a town and a provincial center—where agency unfolds amid layered relations. Read together, they trace a spectrum from interior self-formation to the choreography of lives within a shared civic fabric. This interplay between the named woman and the named place becomes a structural motif, framing autonomy as both personal endeavor and social negotiation.
Tone and mode also vary productively. Villette cultivates an intimate intensity, attentive to solitude, desire, and the fragile scaffolding of hope. Aurora Leigh carries artistic urgency, linking the claim to selfhood with the labor of making. Middlemarch orchestrates many converging paths, revealing how choices reverberate across a community’s moral economy. The Testing of Diana Mallory emphasizes trial, principle, and the forging of steadiness under pressure. The resulting dialogue juxtaposes lyric inwardness, aesthetic vocation, communal responsibility, and ethical steadfastness, allowing each work to refract the others while maintaining a distinct cadence and horizon.
Across the collection, recurring motifs surface: the search for meaningful work, the complexity of attachment, the pressures of reputation, and the cultivation of conscience. Agency appears not as a single decisive gesture but as a pattern of daily negotiations, compromises, and acts of courage. The named tests in Ward’s title align with trials implicit in the others, where initiative is measured against obligation and desire alongside duty. Whether through artistic aspiration, civic involvement, or quiet persistence, these works explore how a woman defines her sphere without surrendering her horizon, insisting that the private life and the public world are inseparable terrains.
The conversation among these books is sharpened by contrasts of scale and vantage. Some pages lean toward the solitary hour, attentive to perception and mood; others toward the web of households, professions, and civic projects that compose a locality. Aesthetic reflection takes center stage in one, while social analysis structures another; testing and deliberation ground a third; patient observation infuses the fourth. Together they model how narrative can register both the tremor of a thought and the movement of a community. This alternating focus—microcosm and milieu—keeps the theme of autonomy from abstraction, embedding choice within texture, history, and the contingencies of relation.
These works resonate today because they treat autonomy as an evolving practice rather than a fixed possession. In artistic circles, professional life, and civic debate, questions persist about how to reconcile ambition with care, solidarity with independence, vision with responsibility. The collection offers narratives in which voice, vocation, and community are not rivals but interlocutors, each shaping the other. Their attention to process—learning, revising, persisting—speaks to contemporary understandings of growth and accountability. By portraying agency as situated, they expand the imaginative resources for thinking about choice in a world crowded with obligations, opportunities, and the shifting architectures of belonging.
Set side by side, Villette, Aurora Leigh, Middlemarch, and The Testing of Diana Mallory compose a chorus whose harmonies and dissonances clarify one another. Each proposes a distinctive path toward self-direction, and each acknowledges the claims of others that any path must honor. The collection’s title names echoes, and indeed the books answer and transform shared concerns across differing settings and sensibilities. Their combined effect is to render autonomy audible as relation, action, and art. In returning to these Victorian works, one encounters not relics but living inquiries, still capable of unsettling assumptions and widening the field of possible lives.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
These novels chart a century in which political power widened yet remained embattled. Middlemarch situates provincial life amid agitation for parliamentary reform and professional regulation. Aurora Leigh moves through London’s social question—charity, factory labor, and urban poverty—testing artistic vocation against policy-minded philanthropy. Villette relocates an Englishwoman to a continental monarchy, where state surveillance, clerical authority, and national suspicion expose fragile liberties. The Testing of Diana Mallory enters a later milieu of party maneuvering, press scrutiny, and imperial aftershocks, where private decisions bear public consequence. Across them, authority migrates from patrician patronage toward bureaucratic and media regimes, complicating women’s avenues to influence.
Formal rights lagged behind expanding literacy and employment for women, and the novels register that tension. Middlemarch’s marriages entangle property, guardianship, and vocation, revealing how law disciplines desire and knowledge. Aurora Leigh insists that authorship can be a woman’s profession, yet frames success within unequal patronage and propriety. In Villette, the schoolroom becomes a precarious enclave where wages, respectability, and surveillance intersect. The Testing of Diana Mallory explores social power exercised through drawing-room coalitions, philanthropy, and electoral rumor, even as arguments about women’s political citizenship intensify. Together they trace incremental, contested shifts from domestic tutelage to public, negotiated agency.
Religious contention and imperial context inflect these narratives without eclipsing localities. Villette’s Protestant–Catholic friction dramatizes anxieties about conscience, education, and national identity under bureaucratic rule. Aurora Leigh’s Italian–English horizons complicate British self-understanding, as cosmopolitan culture and exile reshape moral judgment. Middlemarch scrutinizes provincial hierarchies—landed power, clerical influence, and mercantile ambition—during a gradual transition toward professional expertise. In The Testing of Diana Mallory, the press amplifies scandal and policy disputes connected to imperial war and administrative reform, tightening the mesh of public opinion. Across the collection, religion, empire, class, and media recalibrate the mechanisms through which authority circulates.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Form and method mirror the era’s appetite for inquiry. Middlemarch refines realist narration—analytic, ethically probing, and structurally panoramic—linking individual motives to social systems. Villette intensifies psychological depth through reticence, withheld disclosure, and a calibrated interplay of Gothic suggestion with quotidian detail, creating a study in perception and repression. Both works leverage the period’s fascination with science and case-study thinking, translating observation into narrative experiment. Their techniques—free-indirect sympathy, ironic commentary, and self-conscious framing—model how fiction can test hypotheses about character while resisting reduction, thereby educating readers in scrutiny, patience, and the contingency of knowledge.
Aurora Leigh reconfigures the Victorian marriage of art and ethics by casting a woman poet as critic of culture and participant in urban reform. As a verse-novel, it fuses epic amplitude with novelistic immediacy, appropriating the periodical city’s montage—streets, salons, slums—into a single artistic conscience. Its poetics defend daily life as modern subject matter, challenging hierarchies that separated high art from social work. The text explores apprenticeship, the market for print, and the rhetoric of benevolence, asking whether imagination can rival institutions in remaking attention. It thereby reframes vocation as civic labor, aesthetically exacting and politically answerable.
Late-century fiction in The Testing of Diana Mallory amplifies the “discussion novel”: scenes double as deliberative forums where characters weigh evidence, policy, and conscience. Ward’s controlled omniscience, attentive to newspapers, committees, and clubs, studies how opinion hardens into norm. Read alongside Middlemarch and Villette, the quartet maps a continuum from inward trial to public inquiry, tracking the passage from private scruple to institutional choice. Religious debate, secular ethics, and educational reform supply argumentative energy, while innovations in free-indirect style, dramatic set-pieces, and epistolary interpolation diversify texture. Aesthetic ambition and social explanation thus appear as mutually necessary experiments.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Reception histories chart shifting criteria for agency and form. Middlemarch, once praised mainly for breadth, now anchors debates about the ethics of attention, the narrator’s authority, and the limits of reform; adaptations for television and radio foreground its ensemble politics. Villette has drawn modernist and psychoanalytic reassessments for its strategic opacity and treatment of surveillance, as well as post-secular readings of doubt and discipline. Aurora Leigh, intermittently marginalized as hybrid, has been reclaimed by critics of women’s authorship and urban poetics; staged readings and scholarly editions highlight its engagement with labor, charity, and the marketplace of print.
Critical fortunes for The Testing of Diana Mallory have fluctuated with judgments of its politics and its author’s activism. Early popularity yielded to mid‑century neglect, as its parliamentary focus and topical controversies seemed dated. Recent scholarship revisits its portrayal of publicity, elite networks, and moral trial, situating Diana’s choices within debates about women’s civic presence before and after formal enfranchisement. Across the collection, classroom and editorial canons now stress female autonomy not as solitary defiance but as negotiated participation in institutions—schools, presses, parties, professions—inviting comparative readings that connect psychological interiority, aesthetic experiment, and structural change.
Echoes of Autonomy – 4 Classic Victorian Novels of Female Agency
Inner Voice and Creative/Intellectual Autonomy
Social Navigation, Institutions, and Public Agency
Charlotte Brontë
Villette
Chapter I. Bretton.
My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. Her husband’s family had been residents there for generations, and bore, indeed, the name of their birthplace — Bretton of Bretton: whether by coincidence, or because some remote ancestor had been a personage of sufficient importance to leave his name to his neighbourhood, I know not.
When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit. The house and its inmates specially suited me. The large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the clear wide windows, the balcony outside, looking down on a fine antique street, where Sundays and holidays seemed always to abide — so quiet was its atmosphere, so clean its pavement — these things pleased me well.
One child in a household of grown people is usually made very much of, and in a quiet way I was a good deal taken notice of by Mrs. Bretton, who had been left a widow, with one son, before I knew her; her husband, a physician, having died while she was yet a young and handsome woman.
She was not young, as I remember her, but she was still handsome, tall, well-made, and though dark for an Englishwoman, yet wearing always the clearness of health in her brunette cheek, and its vivacity in a pair of fine, cheerful black eyes. People esteemed it a grievous pity that she had not conferred her complexion on her son, whose eyes were blue — though, even in boyhood, very piercing — and the colour of his long hair such as friends did not venture to specify, except as the sun shone on it, when they called it golden. He inherited the lines of his mother’s features, however; also her good teeth, her stature (or the promise of her stature, for he was not yet full-grown), and, what was better, her health without flaw, and her spirits of that tone and equality which are better than a fortune to the possessor.
In the autumn of the year — — I was staying at Bretton; my godmother having come in person to claim me of the kinsfolk with whom was at that time fixed my permanent residence. I believe she then plainly saw events coming, whose very shadow I scarce guessed; yet of which the faint suspicion sufficed to impart unsettled sadness, and made me glad to change scene and society.
Time always flowed smoothly for me at my godmother’s side; not with tumultuous swiftness, but blandly, like the gliding of a full river through a plain. My visits to her resembled the sojourn of Christian and Hopeful beside a certain pleasant stream, with “green trees on each bank, and meadows beautified with lilies all the year round.” The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and wished rather it had still held aloof.
One day a letter was received of which the contents evidently caused Mrs. Bretton surprise and some concern. I thought at first it was from home, and trembled, expecting I know not what disastrous communication: to me, however, no reference was made, and the cloud seemed to pass.
The next day, on my return from a long walk, I found, as I entered my bedroom, an unexpected change. In, addition to my own French bed in its shady recess, appeared in a corner a small crib, draped with white; and in addition to my mahogany chest of drawers, I saw a tiny rosewood chest. I stood still, gazed, and considered.
“Of what are these things the signs and tokens?” I asked. The answer was obvious. “A second guest is coming: Mrs. Bretton expects other visitors.”
On descending to dinner, explanations ensued. A little girl, I was told, would shortly be my companion: the daughter of a friend and distant relation of the late Dr. Bretton’s. This little girl, it was added, had recently lost her mother; though, indeed, Mrs. Bretton ere long subjoined, the loss was not so great as might at first appear. Mrs. Home (Home it seems was the name) had been a very pretty, but a giddy, careless woman, who had neglected her child, and disappointed and disheartened her husband. So far from congenial had the union proved, that separation at last ensued — separation by mutual consent, not after any legal process. Soon after this event, the lady having over-exerted herself at a ball, caught cold, took a fever, and died after a very brief illness. Her husband, naturally a man of very sensitive feelings, and shocked inexpressibly by too sudden communication of the news, could hardly, it seems, now be persuaded but that some over-severity on his part — some deficiency in patience and indulgence — had contributed to hasten her end. He had brooded over this idea till his spirits were seriously affected; the medical men insisted on travelling being tried as a remedy, and meanwhile Mrs. Bretton had offered to take charge of his little girl. “And I hope,” added my godmother in conclusion, “the child will not be like her mamma; as silly and frivolous a little flirt as ever sensible man was weak enough to marry. For,” said she, “Mr. Home is a sensible man in his way, though not very practical: he is fond of science, and lives half his life in a laboratory trying experiments — a thing his butterfly wife could neither comprehend nor endure; and indeed” confessed my godmother, “I should not have liked it myself.”
In answer to a question of mine, she further informed me that her late husband used to say, Mr. Home had derived this scientific turn from a maternal uncle, a French savant; for he came, it seems; of mixed French and Scottish origin, and had connections now living in France, of whom more than one wrote de before his name, and called himself noble.
That same evening at nine o’clock, a servant was despatched to meet the coach by which our little visitor was expected. Mrs. Bretton and I sat alone in the drawing-room waiting her coming; John Graham Bretton being absent on a visit to one of his schoolfellows who lived in the country. My godmother read the evening paper while she waited; I sewed. It was a wet night; the rain lashed the panes, and the wind sounded angry and restless.
“Poor child!” said Mrs. Bretton from time to time. “What weather for her journey! I wish she were safe here.”
A little before ten the doorbell announced Warren’s return. No sooner was the door opened than I ran down into the hall; there lay a trunk and some bandboxes, beside them stood a person like a nurse-girl, and at the foot of the staircase was Warren with a shawled bundle in his arms.
“Is that the child?” I asked.
“Yes, miss.”
I would have opened the shawl, and tried to get a peep at the face, but it was hastily turned from me to Warren’s shoulder.
“Put me down, please,” said a small voice when Warren opened the drawing-room door, “and take off this shawl,” continued the speaker, extracting with its minute hand the pin, and with a sort of fastidious haste doffing the clumsy wrapping. The creature which now appeared made a deft attempt to fold the shawl; but the drapery was much too heavy and large to be sustained or wielded by those hands and arms. “Give it to Harriet, please,” was then the direction, “and she can put it away.” This said, it turned and fixed its eyes on Mrs. Bretton.
“Come here, little dear,” said that lady. “Come and let me see if you are cold and damp: come and let me warm you at the fire.”
The child advanced promptly. Relieved of her wrapping, she appeared exceedingly tiny; but was a neat, completely-fashioned little figure, light, slight, and straight. Seated on my godmother’s ample lap, she looked a mere doll; her neck, delicate as wax, her head of silky curls, increased, I thought, the resemblance.
Mrs. Bretton talked in little fond phrases as she chafed the child’s hands, arms, and feet; first she was considered with a wistful gaze, but soon a smile answered her. Mrs. Bretton was not generally a caressing woman: even with her deeply-cherished son, her manner was rarely sentimental, often the reverse; but when the small stranger smiled at her, she kissed it, asking, “What is my little one’s name?”
“Missy.”
“But besides Missy?”
“Polly, papa calls her.”
“Will Polly be content to live with me?”
“Not always; but till papa comes home. Papa is gone away.” She shook her head expressively.
“He will return to Polly, or send for her.”
“Will he, ma’am? Do you know he will?”
“I think so.”
“But Harriet thinks not: at least not for a long while. He is ill.”
Her eyes filled. She drew her hand from Mrs. Bretton’s and made a movement to leave her lap; it was at first resisted, but she said — “Please, I wish to go: I can sit on a stool.”
She was allowed to slip down from the knee, and taking a footstool, she carried it to a corner where the shade was deep, and there seated herself. Mrs. Bretton, though a commanding, and in grave matters even a peremptory woman, was often passive in trifles: she allowed the child her way. She said to me, “Take no notice at present.” But I did take notice: I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep. Other children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint; but this being wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion. Mrs. Bretton did not hear it: which was quite as well. Ere long, a voice, issuing from the corner, demanded — “May the bell be rung for Harriet!”
I rang; the nurse was summoned and came.
“Harriet, I must be put to bed,” said her little mistress. “You must ask where my bed is.”
Harriet signified that she had already made that inquiry.
“Ask if you sleep with me, Harriet.”
“No, Missy,” said the nurse: “you are to share this young lady’s room,” designating me.
Missy did not leave her seat, but I saw her eyes seek me. After some minutes’ silent scrutiny, she emerged from her corner.
“I wish you, ma’am, good night,” said she to Mrs. Bretton; but she passed me mute.
“Goodnight, Polly,” I said.
“No need to say goodnight, since we sleep in the same chamber,” was the reply, with which she vanished from the drawing-room. We heard Harriet propose to carry her upstairs. “No need,” was again her answer — “no need, no need:” and her small step toiled wearily up the staircase.
On going to bed an hour afterwards, I found her still wide awake. She had arranged her pillows so as to support her little person in a sitting posture: her hands, placed one within the other, rested quietly on the sheet, with an old-fashioned calm most unchildlike. I abstained from speaking to her for some time, but just before extinguishing the light, I recommended her to lie down.
“By and by,” was the answer.
“But you will take cold, Missy.”
She took some tiny article of raiment from the chair at her crib side, and with it covered her shoulders. I suffered her to do as she pleased. Listening awhile in the darkness, I was aware that she still wept, — wept under restraint, quietly and cautiously.
On awaking with daylight, a trickling of water caught my ear. Behold! there she was risen and mounted on a stool near the washstand, with pains and difficulty inclining the ewer (which she could not lift) so as to pour its contents into the basin. It was curious to watch her as she washed and dressed, so small, busy, and noiseless. Evidently she was little accustomed to perform her own toilet; and the buttons, strings, hooks and eyes, offered difficulties which she encountered with a perseverance good to witness. She folded her night-dress, she smoothed the drapery of her couch quite neatly; withdrawing into a corner, where the sweep of the white curtain concealed her, she became still. I half rose, and advanced my, head to see how she was occupied. On her knees, with her forehead bent on her hands, I perceived that she was praying.
Her nurse tapped at the door. She started up.
“I am dressed, Harriet,” said she; “I have dressed myself, but I do not feel neat. Make me neat!”
“Why did you dress yourself, Missy?”
“Hush! speak low, Harriet, for fear of waking the girl” (meaning me, who now lay with my eyes shut). “I dressed myself to learn, against the time you leave me.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“When you are cross, I have many a time wanted you to go, but not now.
Tie my sash straight; make my hair smooth, please.”
“Your sash is straight enough. What a particular little body you are!”
“It must be tied again. Please to tie it.”
“There, then. When I am gone you must get that young lady to dress you.”
“On no account.”
“Why? She is a very nice young lady. I hope you mean to behave prettily to her, Missy, and not show your airs.”
“She shall dress me on no account.”
“Comical little thing!”
“You are not passing the comb straight through my hair, Harriet; the line will be crooked.”
“Ay, you are ill to please. Does that suit?”
“Pretty well. Where should I go now that I am dressed?”
“I will take you into the breakfast-room.”
“Come, then.”
They proceeded to the door. She stopped.
“Oh! Harriet, I wish this was papa’s house! I don’t know these people.”
“Be a good child, Missy.”
“I am good, but I ache here;” putting her hand to her heart, and moaning while she reiterated, “Papa! papa!”
I roused myself and started up, to check this scene while it was yet within bounds.
“Say good-morning to the young lady,” dictated Harriet. She said, “Good-morning,” and then followed her nurse from the room. Harriet temporarily left that same day, to go to her own friends, who lived in the neighbourhood.
On descending, I found Paulina (the child called herself Polly, but her full name was Paulina Mary) seated at the breakfast-table, by Mrs. Bretton’s side; a mug of milk stood before her, a morsel of bread filled her hand, which lay passive on the tablecloth: she was not eating.
“How we shall conciliate this little creature,” said Mrs. Bretton to me, “I don’t know: she tastes nothing, and by her looks, she has not slept.”
I expressed my confidence in the effects of time and kindness.
“If she were to take a fancy to anybody in the house, she would soon settle; but not till then,” replied Mrs. Bretton.
Chapter II. Paulina.
Some days elapsed, and it appeared she was not likely to take much of a fancy to anybody in the house. She was not exactly naughty or wilful: she was far from disobedient; but an object less conducive to comfort — to tranquillity even — than she presented, it was scarcely possible to have before one’s eyes. She moped: no grown person could have performed that uncheering business better; no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe’s antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of home sickness than did her infant visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted.
And again, when of moonlight nights, on waking, I beheld her figure, white and conspicuous in its night-dress, kneeling upright in bed, and praying like some Catholic or Methodist enthusiast — some precocious fanatic or untimely saint — I scarcely know what thoughts I had; but they ran risk of being hardly more rational and healthy than that child’s mind must have been.
I seldom caught a word of her prayers, for they were whispered low: sometimes, indeed, they were not whispered at all, but put up unuttered; such rare sentences as reached my ear still bore the burden, “Papa; my dear papa!” This, I perceived, was a one-idea’d nature; betraying that monomaniac tendency I have ever thought the most unfortunate with which man or woman can be cursed.
What might have been the end of this fretting, had it continued unchecked, can only be conjectured: it received, however, a sudden turn.
One afternoon, Mrs. Bretton, coaxing her from her usual station in a corner, had lifted her into the window-seat, and, by way of occupying her attention, told her to watch the passengers and count how many ladies should go down the street in a given time. She had sat listlessly, hardly looking, and not counting, when — my eye being fixed on hers — I witnessed in its iris and pupil a startling transfiguration. These sudden, dangerous natures — sensitive as they are called — offer many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured from participation in their angular vagaries. The fixed and heavy gaze swum, trembled, then glittered in fire; the small, overcast brow cleared; the trivial and dejected features lit up; the sad countenance vanished, and in its place appeared a sudden eagerness, an intense expectancy. “It is!” were her words.
Like a bird or a shaft, or any other swift thing, she was gone from the room, How she got the house-door open I cannot tell; probably it might be ajar; perhaps Warren was in the way and obeyed her behest, which would be impetuous enough. I — watching calmly from the window — saw her, in her black frock and tiny braided apron (to pinafores she had an antipathy), dart half the length of the street; and, as I was on the point of turning, and quietly announcing to Mrs. Bretton that the child was run out mad, and ought instantly to be pursued, I saw her caught up, and rapt at once from my cool observation, and from the wondering stare of the passengers. A gentleman had done this good turn, and now, covering her with his cloak, advanced to restore her to the house whence he had seen her issue.
I concluded he would leave her in a servant’s charge and withdraw; but he entered: having tarried a little while below, he came upstairs.
His reception immediately explained that he was known to Mrs. Bretton. She recognised him; she greeted him, and yet she was fluttered, surprised, taken unawares. Her look and manner were even expostulatory; and in reply to these, rather than her words, he said, — “I could not help it, madam: I found it impossible to leave the country without seeing with my own eyes how she settled.”
“But you will unsettle her.”
“I hope not. And how is papa’s little Polly?”
This question he addressed to Paulina, as he sat down and placed her gently on the ground before him.
“How is Polly’s papa?” was the reply, as she leaned on his knee, and gazed up into his face.
It was not a noisy, not a wordy scene: for that I was thankful; but it was a scene of feeling too brimful, and which, because the cup did not foam up high or furiously overflow, only oppressed one the more. On all occasions of vehement, unrestrained expansion, a sense of disdain or ridicule comes to the weary spectator’s relief; whereas I have ever felt most burdensome that sort of sensibility which bends of its own will, a giant slave under the sway of good sense.
Mr. Home was a stern-featured — perhaps I should rather say, a hard-featured man: his forehead was knotty, and his cheekbones were marked and prominent. The character of his face was quite Scotch; but there was feeling in his eye, and emotion in his now agitated countenance. His northern accent in speaking harmonised with his physiognomy. He was at once proud-looking and homely-looking. He laid his hand on the child’s uplifted head. She said — “Kiss Polly.”
He kissed her. I wished she would utter some hysterical cry, so that I might get relief and be at ease. She made wonderfully little noise: she seemed to have got what she wanted — all she wanted, and to be in a trance of content. Neither in mien nor in features was this creature like her sire, and yet she was of his strain: her mind had been filled from his, as the cup from the flagon.
Indisputably, Mr. Home owned manly self-control, however he might secretly feel on some matters. “Polly,” he said, looking down on his little girl, “go into the hall; you will see papa’s greatcoat lying on a chair; put your hand into the pockets, you will find a pocket-handkerchief there; bring it to me.”
She obeyed; went and returned deftly and nimbly. He was talking to Mrs. Bretton when she came back, and she waited with the handkerchief in her hand. It was a picture, in its way, to see her, with her tiny stature, and trim, neat shape, standing at his knee. Seeing that he continued to talk, apparently unconscious of her return, she took his hand, opened the unresisting fingers, insinuated into them the handkerchief, and closed them upon it one by one. He still seemed not to see or to feel her; but by-and-by, he lifted her to his knee; she nestled against him, and though neither looked at nor spoke to the other for an hour following, I suppose both were satisfied.
During tea, the minute thing’s movements and behaviour gave, as usual, full occupation to the eye. First she directed Warren, as he placed the chairs.
“Put papa’s chair here, and mine near it, between papa and Mrs.
Bretton: I must hand his tea.”
She took her own seat, and beckoned with her hand to her father.
“Be near me, as if we were at home, papa.”
And again, as she intercepted his cup in passing, and would stir the sugar, and put in the cream herself, “I always did it for you at home; papa: nobody could do it as well, not even your own self.”
Throughout the meal she continued her attentions: rather absurd they were. The sugar-tongs were too wide for one of her hands, and she had to use both in wielding them; the weight of the silver cream-ewer, the bread-and-butter plates, the very cup and saucer, tasked her insufficient strength and dexterity; but she would lift this, hand that, and luckily contrived through it all to break nothing. Candidly speaking, I thought her a little busybody; but her father, blind like other parents, seemed perfectly content to let her wait on him, and even wonderfully soothed by her offices.
“She is my comfort!” he could not help saying to Mrs. Bretton. That lady had her own “comfort” and nonpareil on a much larger scale, and, for the moment, absent; so she sympathised with his foible.
This second “comfort” came on the stage in the course of the evening. I knew this day had been fixed for his return, and was aware that Mrs. Bretton had been expecting him through all its hours. We were seated round the fire, after tea, when Graham joined our circle: I should rather say, broke it up — for, of course, his arrival made a bustle; and then, as Mr. Graham was fasting, there was refreshment to be provided. He and Mr. Home met as old acquaintance; of the little girl he took no notice for a time.
His meal over, and numerous questions from his mother answered, he turned from the table to the hearth. Opposite where he had placed himself was seated Mr. Home, and at his elbow, the child. When I say child I use an inappropriate and undescriptive term — a term suggesting any picture rather than that of the demure little person in a mourning frock and white chemisette, that might just have fitted a good-sized doll — perched now on a high chair beside a stand, whereon was her toy workbox of white varnished wood, and holding in her hands a shred of a handkerchief, which she was professing to hem, and at which she bored perseveringly with a needle, that in her fingers seemed almost a skewer, pricking herself ever and anon, marking the cambric with a track of minute red dots; occasionally starting when the perverse weapon — swerving from her control — inflicted a deeper stab than usual; but still silent, diligent, absorbed, womanly.
Graham was at that time a handsome, faithless-looking youth of sixteen. I say faithless-looking, not because he was really of a very perfidious disposition, but because the epithet strikes me as proper to describe the fair, Celtic (not Saxon) character of his good looks; his waved light auburn hair, his supple symmetry, his smile frequent, and destitute neither of fascination nor of subtlety (in no bad sense). A spoiled, whimsical boy he was in those days.
“Mother,” he said, after eyeing the little figure before him in silence for some time, and when the temporary absence of Mr. Home from the room relieved him from the half-laughing bashfulness, which was all he knew of timidity — -”Mother, I see a young lady in the present society to whom I have not been introduced.”
“Mr. Home’s little girl, I suppose you mean,” said his mother.
“Indeed, ma’am,” replied her son, “I consider your expression of the least ceremonious: Miss Home I should certainly have said, in venturing to speak of the gentlewoman to whom I allude.”
“Now, Graham, I will not have that child teased. Don’t flatter yourself that I shall suffer you to make her your butt.”
“Miss Home,” pursued Graham, undeterred by his mother’s remonstrance, “might I have the honour to introduce myself, since no one else seems willing to render you and me that service? Your slave, John Graham Bretton.”
She looked at him; he rose and bowed quite gravely. She deliberately put down thimble, scissors, work; descended with precaution from her perch, and curtsying with unspeakable seriousness, said, “How do you do?”
“I have the honour to be in fair health, only in some measure fatigued with a hurried journey. I hope, ma’am, I see you well?”
“Tor-rer-ably well,” was the ambitious reply of the little woman and she now essayed to regain her former elevation, but finding this could not be done without some climbing and straining — a sacrifice of decorum not to be thought of — and being utterly disdainful of aid in the presence of a strange young gentleman, she relinquished the high chair for a low stool: towards that low stool Graham drew in his chair.
“I hope, ma’am, the present residence, my mother’s house, appears to you a convenient place of abode?”
“Not par-tic-er-er-ly; I want to go home.”
“A natural and laudable desire, ma’am; but one which, notwithstanding,
I shall do my best to oppose. I reckon on being able to get out of you
a little of that precious commodity called amusement, which mamma and
Mistress Snowe there fail to yield me.”
“I shall have to go with papa soon: I shall not stay long at your mother’s.”
“Yes, yes; you will stay with me, I am sure. I have a pony on which you shall ride, and no end of books with pictures to show you.”
“Are you going to live here now?”
“I am. Does that please you? Do you like me?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I think you queer.”
“My face, ma’am?”
“Your face and all about you: You have long red hair.”
“Auburn hair, if you please: mamma, calls it auburn, or golden, and so do all her friends. But even with my ‘long red hair’” (and he waved his mane with a sort of triumph — tawny he himself well knew that it was, and he was proud of the leonine hue), “I cannot possibly be queerer than is your ladyship.”
“You call me queer?”
“Certainly.”
(After a pause), “I think I shall go to bed.”
“A little thing like you ought to have been in bed many hours since; but you probably sat up in the expectation of seeing me?”
“No, indeed.”
“You certainly wished to enjoy the pleasure of my society. You knew I was coming home, and would wait to have a look at me.”
“I sat up for papa, and not for you.”
“Very good, Miss Home. I am going to be a favourite: preferred before papa soon, I daresay.”
She wished Mrs. Bretton and myself goodnight; she seemed hesitating whether Graham’s deserts entitled him to the same attention, when he caught her up with one hand, and with that one hand held her poised aloft above his head. She saw herself thus lifted up on high, in the glass over the fireplace. The suddenness, the freedom, the disrespect of the action were too much.
“For shame, Mr. Graham!” was her indignant cry, “put me down!” — and when again on her feet, “I wonder what you would think of me if I were to treat you in that way, lifting you with my hand” (raising that mighty member) “as Warren lifts the little cat.”
So saying, she departed.
Chapter III. The Playmates.
Mr. Home stayed two days. During his visit he could not be prevailed on to go out: he sat all day long by the fireside, sometimes silent, sometimes receiving and answering Mrs. Bretton’s chat, which was just of the proper sort for a man in his morbid mood — not over-sympathetic, yet not too uncongenial, sensible; and even with a touch of the motherly — she was sufficiently his senior to be permitted this touch.
As to Paulina, the child was at once happy and mute, busy and watchful.
Her father frequently lifted her to his knee; she would sit there till
she felt or fancied he grew restless; then it was — “Papa, put me down;
I shall tire you with my weight.”
And the mighty burden slid to the rug, and establishing itself on carpet or stool just at “papa’s” feet, the white workbox and the scarlet-speckled handkerchief came into play. This handkerchief, it seems, was intended as a keepsake for “papa,” and must be finished before his departure; consequently the demand on the sempstress’s industry (she accomplished about a score of stitches in half-an-hour) was stringent.
The evening, by restoring Graham to the maternal roof (his days were passed at school), brought us an accession of animation — a quality not diminished by the nature of the scenes pretty sure to be enacted between him and Miss Paulina.
A distant and haughty demeanour had been the result of the indignity put upon her the first evening of his arrival: her usual answer, when he addressed her, was — “I can’t attend to you; I have other things to think about.” Being implored to state what things:
“Business.”
Graham would endeavour to seduce her attention by opening his desk and displaying its multifarious contents: seals, bright sticks of wax, penknives, with a miscellany of engravings — some of them gaily coloured — which he had amassed from time to time. Nor was this powerful temptation wholly unavailing: her eyes, furtively raised from her work, cast many a peep towards the writing-table, rich in scattered pictures. An etching of a child playing with a Blenheim spaniel happened to flutter to the floor.
“Pretty little dog!” said she, delighted.
Graham prudently took no notice. Ere long, stealing from her corner, she approached to examine the treasure more closely. The dog’s great eyes and long ears, and the child’s hat and feathers, were irresistible.
“Nice picture!” was her favourable criticism.
“Well — you may have it,” said Graham.
She seemed to hesitate. The wish to possess was strong, but to accept would be a compromise of dignity. No. She put it down and turned away.
“You won’t have it, then, Polly?”
“I would rather not, thank you.”
“Shall I tell you what I will do with the picture if you refuse it?”
She half turned to listen.
“Cut it into strips for lighting the taper.”
“No!”
“But I shall.”
“Please — don’t.”
Graham waxed inexorable on hearing the pleading tone; he took the scissors from his mother’s work-basket.
“Here goes!” said he, making a menacing flourish. “Right through Fido’s head, and splitting little Harry’s nose.”
“No! No! NO!”
“Then come to me. Come quickly, or it is done.”
She hesitated, lingered, but complied.
“Now, will you have it?” he asked, as she stood before him.
“Please.”
“But I shall want payment.”
“How much?”
“A kiss.”
“Give the picture first into my hand.”
Polly, as she said this, looked rather faithless in her turn. Graham gave it. She absconded a debtor, darted to her father, and took refuge on his knee. Graham rose in mimic wrath and followed. She buried her face in Mr. Home’s waistcoat.
“Papa — papa — send him away!”
“I’ll not be sent away,” said Graham.
With face still averted, she held out her hand to keep him off
“Then, I shall kiss the hand,” said he; but that moment it became a miniature fist, and dealt him payment in a small coin that was not kisses.
Graham — not failing in his way to be as wily as his little playmate — retreated apparently quite discomfited; he flung himself on a sofa, and resting his head against the cushion, lay like one in pain. Polly, finding him silent, presently peeped at him. His eyes and face were covered with his hands. She turned on her father’s knee, and gazed at her foe anxiously and long. Graham groaned.
“Papa, what is the matter?” she whispered.
“You had better ask him, Polly.”
“Is he hurt?” (groan second.)
“He makes a noise as if he were,” said Mr. Home.
“Mother,” suggested Graham, feebly, “I think you had better send for the doctor. Oh my eye!” (renewed silence, broken only by sighs from Graham.)
“If I were to become blind — — ?” suggested this last.
His chastiser could not bear the suggestion. She was beside him directly.
“Let me see your eye: I did not mean to touch it, only your mouth; and
I did not think I hit so very hard.”
Silence answered her. Her features worked, — “I am sorry; I am sorry!”
Then succeeded emotion, faltering; weeping.
“Have done trying that child, Graham,” said Mrs. Bretton.
“It is all nonsense, my pet,” cried Mr. Home.
And Graham once more snatched her aloft, and she again punished him; and while she pulled his lion’s locks, termed him — “The naughtiest, rudest, worst, untruest person that ever was.”
*
On the morning of Mr. Home’s departure, he and his daughter had some conversation in a window-recess by themselves; I heard part of it.
“Couldn’t I pack my box and go with you, papa?” she whispered earnestly.
He shook his head.
“Should I be a trouble to you?”
“Yes, Polly.”
“Because I am little?”
“Because you are little and tender. It is only great, strong people that should travel. But don’t look sad, my little girl; it breaks my heart. Papa, will soon come back to his Polly.”
“Indeed, indeed, I am not sad, scarcely at all.”
“Polly would be sorry to give papa pain; would she not?”
“Sorrier than sorry.”
“Then Polly must be cheerful: not cry at parting; not fret afterwards.
She must look forward to meeting again, and try to be happy meanwhile.
Can she do this?”
“She will try.”
“I see she will. Farewell, then. It is time to go.”
“Now? — just now?
“Just now.”
She held up quivering lips. Her father sobbed, but she, I remarked, did not. Having put her down, he shook hands with the rest present, and departed.
When the street-door closed, she dropped on her knees at a chair with a cry — “Papa!”
It was low and long; a sort of “Why hast thou forsaken me?” During an ensuing space of some minutes, I perceived she endured agony. She went through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as some never feel; it was in her constitution: she would have more of such instants if she lived. Nobody spoke. Mrs. Bretton, being a mother, shed a tear or two. Graham, who was writing, lifted up his eyes and gazed at her. I, Lucy Snowe, was calm.
The little creature, thus left unharassed, did for herself what none other could do — contended with an intolerable feeling; and, ere long, in some degree, repressed it. That day she would accept solace from none; nor the next day: she grew more passive afterwards.
On the third evening, as she sat on the floor, worn and quiet, Graham, coming in, took her up gently, without a word. She did not resist: she rather nestled in his arms, as if weary. When he sat down, she laid her head against him; in a few minutes she slept; he carried her upstairs to bed. I was not surprised that, the next morning, the first thing she demanded was, “Where is Mr. Graham?”
It happened that Graham was not coming to the breakfast-table; he had some exercises to write for that morning’s class, and had requested his mother to send a cup of tea into the study. Polly volunteered to carry it: she must be busy about something, look after somebody. The cup was entrusted to her; for, if restless, she was also careful. As the study was opposite the breakfast-room, the doors facing across the passage, my eye followed her.
“What are you doing?” she asked, pausing on the threshold.
“Writing,” said Graham.
“Why don’t you come to take breakfast with your mamma?”
“Too busy.”
“Do you want any breakfast?”
“Of course.”
“There, then.”
And she deposited the cup on the carpet, like a jailor putting a prisoner’s pitcher of water through his cell-door, and retreated. Presently she returned.
“What will you have besides tea — what to eat?”
“Anything good. Bring me something particularly nice; that’s a kind little woman.”
She came back to Mrs. Bretton.
“Please, ma’am, send your boy something good.”
“You shall choose for him, Polly; what shall my boy have?”
She selected a portion of whatever was best on the table; and, ere long, came back with a whispered request for some marmalade, which was not there. Having got it, however, (for Mrs. Bretton refused the pair nothing), Graham was shortly after heard lauding her to the skies; promising that, when he had a house of his own, she should be his housekeeper, and perhaps — if she showed any culinary genius — his cook; and, as she did not return, and I went to look after her, I found Graham and her breakfasting tête-à-tête — she standing at his elbow, and sharing his fare: excepting the marmalade, which she delicately refused to touch, lest, I suppose, it should appear that she had procured it as much on her own account as his. She constantly evinced these nice perceptions and delicate instincts.
The league of acquaintanceship thus struck up was not hastily dissolved; on the contrary, it appeared that time and circumstances served rather to cement than loosen it. Ill-assimilated as the two were in age, sex, pursuits, &c., they somehow found a great deal to say to each other. As to Paulina, I observed that her little character never properly came out, except with young Bretton. As she got settled, and accustomed to the house, she proved tractable enough with Mrs. Bretton; but she would sit on a stool at that lady’s feet all day long, learning her task, or sewing, or drawing figures with a pencil on a slate, and never kindling once to originality, or showing a single gleam of the peculiarities of her nature. I ceased to watch her under such circumstances: she was not interesting. But the moment Graham’s knock sounded of an evening, a change occurred; she was instantly at the head of the staircase. Usually her welcome was a reprimand or a threat.
“You have not wiped your shoes properly on the mat. I shall tell your mamma.”
“Little busybody! Are you there?”
“Yes — and you can’t reach me: I am higher up than you” (peeping between the rails of the banister; she could not look over them).
“Polly!”
“My dear boy!” (such was one of her terms for him, adopted in imitation of his mother.)
“I am fit to faint with fatigue,” declared Graham, leaning against the passage-wall in seeming exhaustion. “Dr. Digby” (the headmaster) “has quite knocked me up with overwork. Just come down and help me to carry up my books.”
“Ah! you’re cunning!”
“Not at all, Polly — it is positive fact. I’m as weak as a rush. Come down.”
“Your eyes are quiet like the cat’s, but you’ll spring.”
“Spring? Nothing of the kind: it isn’t in me. Come down.”
“Perhaps I may — if you’ll promise not to touch — not to snatch me up, and not to whirl me round.”
“I? I couldn’t do it!” (sinking into a chair.)
“Then put the books down on the first step, and go three yards off”
This being done, she descended warily, and not taking her eyes from the feeble Graham. Of course her approach always galvanized him to new and spasmodic life: the game of romps was sure to be exacted. Sometimes she would be angry; sometimes the matter was allowed to pass smoothly, and we could hear her say as she led him upstairs: “Now, my dear boy, come and take your tea — I am sure you must want something.”
It was sufficiently comical to observe her as she sat beside Graham, while he took that meal. In his absence she was a still personage, but with him the most officious, fidgety little body possible. I often wished she would mind herself and be tranquil; but no — herself was forgotten in him: he could not be sufficiently well waited on, nor carefully enough looked after; he was more than the Grand Turk in her estimation. She would gradually assemble the various plates before him, and, when one would suppose all he could possibly desire was within his reach, she would find out something else: “Ma’am,” she would whisper to Mrs. Bretton, — “perhaps your son would like a little cake — sweet cake, you know — there is some in there” (pointing to the sideboard cupboard). Mrs. Bretton, as a rule, disapproved of sweet cake at tea, but still the request was urged, — “One little piece — only for him — as he goes to school: girls — such as me and Miss Snowe — don’t need treats, but he would like it.”
Graham did like it very well, and almost always got it. To do him justice, he would have shared his prize with her to whom he owed it; but that was never allowed: to insist, was to ruffle her for the evening. To stand by his knee, and monopolize his talk and notice, was the reward she wanted — not a share of the cake.
With curious readiness did she adapt herself to such themes as interested him. One would have thought the child had no mind or life of her own, but must necessarily live, move, and have her being in another: now that her father was taken from her, she nestled to Graham, and seemed to feel by his feelings: to exist in his existence. She learned the names of all his schoolfellows in a trice: she got by heart their characters as given from his lips: a single description of an individual seemed to suffice. She never forgot, or confused identities: she would talk with him the whole evening about people she had never seen, and appear completely to realise their aspect, manners, and dispositions. Some she learned to mimic: an under-master, who was an aversion of young Bretton’s, had, it seems, some peculiarities, which she caught up in a moment from Graham’s representation, and rehearsed for his amusement; this, however, Mrs. Bretton disapproved and forbade.
The pair seldom quarrelled; yet once a rupture occurred, in which her feelings received a severe shock.
One day Graham, on the occasion of his birthday, had some friends — lads of his own age — to dine with him. Paulina took much interest in the coming of these friends; she had frequently heard of them; they were amongst those of whom Graham oftenest spoke. After dinner, the young gentlemen were left by themselves in the dining-room, where they soon became very merry and made a good deal of noise. Chancing to pass through the hall, I found Paulina sitting alone on the lowest step of the staircase, her eyes fixed on the glossy panels of the dining-room door, where the reflection of the hall-lamp was shining; her little brow knit in anxious, meditation.
“What are you thinking about, Polly?”
“Nothing particular; only I wish that door was clear glass — that I might see through it. The boys seem very cheerful, and I want to go to them: I want to be with Graham, and watch his friends.”
“What hinders you from going?”
“I feel afraid: but may I try, do you think? May I knock at the door, and ask to be let in?”
I thought perhaps they might not object to have her as a playmate, and therefore encouraged the attempt.
She knocked — too faintly at first to be heard, but on a second essay the door unclosed; Graham’s head appeared; he looked in high spirits, but impatient.
“What do you want, you little monkey?”
“To come to you.”
“Do you indeed? As if I would be troubled with you! Away to mamma and Mistress Snowe, and tell them to put you to bed.” The auburn head and bright flushed face vanished, — the door shut peremptorily. She was stunned.
“Why does he speak so? He never spoke so before,” she said in consternation. “What have I done?”
“Nothing, Polly; but Graham is busy with his school-friends.”
“And he likes them better than me! He turns me away now they are here!”
I had some thoughts of consoling her, and of improving the occasion by inculcating some of those maxims of philosophy whereof I had ever a tolerable stock ready for application. She stopped me, however, by putting her fingers in her ears at the first words I uttered, and then lying down on the mat with her face against the flags; nor could either Warren or the cook root her from that position: she was allowed to lie, therefore, till she chose to rise of her own accord.
Graham forgot his impatience the same evening, and would have accosted her as usual when his friends were gone, but she wrenched herself from his hand; her eye quite flashed; she would not bid him goodnight; she would not look in his face. The next day he treated her with indifference, and she grew like a bit of marble. The day after, he teased her to know what was the matter; her lips would not unclose. Of course he could not feel real anger on his side: the match was too unequal in every way; he tried soothing and coaxing. “Why was she so angry? What had he done?” By-and-by tears answered him; he petted her, and they were friends. But she was one on whom such incidents were not lost: I remarked that never after this rebuff did she seek him, or follow him, or in any way solicit his notice. I told her once to carry a book or some other article to Graham when he was shut up in his study.
“I shall wait till he comes out,” said she, proudly; “I don’t choose to give him the trouble of rising to open the door.”
Young Bretton had a favourite pony on which he often rode out; from the window she always watched his departure and return. It was her ambition to be permitted to have a ride round the courtyard on this pony; but far be it from her to ask such a favour. One day she descended to the yard to watch him dismount; as she leaned against the gate, the longing wish for the indulgence of a ride glittered in her eye.
“Come, Polly, will you have a canter?” asked Graham, half carelessly.
I suppose she thought he was too careless.
