Maurice Leblanc - "The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar"

Edward William Thomson - "Old Man Savarin and Other Stories"

Charles Kingsley - "Women and Politics"

Richard Henry Dana - "Two Years Before the Mast"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor




'I changed the orders for my dress to-day. I have discovered that black is
positively disagreeable to him. So Mathilda will have to devise something
else.

'April 5. He is away at Florence, and I am working at some difficult points
for him--about some suppressed monasteries. I have asked Count B--, who
knows all about such things, to help me, and am working very hard. He comes
back in four days.

'April 9. He came back to-day. Such a gay and happy evening. When he saw
what I had done, he took both my hands, and kissed them impetuously.
"Eleanor, my queen of cousins!" And now we shall be at the villa directly.
And there will be no interruption. There is one visitor coming. But Aunt
Pattie will look after her. I think the book should be out in June. Of
course there are some doubtful things. But it must, it will have a great
effect.--How wonderfully well I have been lately! The doctor last week
looked at me in astonishment. He thought that the Shadow and I were to be
soon acquainted, when he saw me first!

'I hope that Edward will get as much inspiration from the hills as from
Rome. Every little change makes me anxious. Why should we change? Dear
beloved, golden Rome!--even to be going fourteen miles away from you
somehow tears my heart.'

* * * * *

Yes, there they were, those entries,--mocking, ineffaceable, for ever.

As she had read them, driving through all the memories they suggested,
like a keen and bitter wind that kills and blights the spring bloom,
there had pressed upon her the last memory of all,--the memory of this
forlorn, this intolerable day. Had Manisty ever yet forgotten her so
completely--abandoned her so utterly? She had simply dropped out of his
thoughts. She had become as much of a stranger to him again, as on her
first arrival at Rome. Nay, more! For when two people are first brought
into a true contact, there is the secret delightful sense on either side of
possibilities, of the unexplored. But when the possibilities are all known,
and all exhausted?

What had happened between him and Lucy Foster? Of course she understood
that he had deliberately contrived their interview. But as Lucy and she
came home together they had said almost nothing to each other. She had
a vision of their two silent figures in the railway-carriage side by
side,--her hand in Lucy's. And Lucy--so sad and white herself!--with the
furrowed brow that betrayed the inner stress of thought.

Had the crisis arrived?--and had she refused him? Eleanor had not dared to
ask.

Suddenly she rose from her chair. She clasped her hands above her head,
and began to walk tempestuously up and down the bare floor of her room. In
this creature so soft, so loving, so compact of feeling and of tears, there
had gradually arisen an intensity of personal claim, a hardness, almost
a ferocity of determination, which was stiffening and transforming the
whole soul. She could waver still--as she had wavered in that despairing,
anguished moment with Lucy in the Embassy garden. But the wavering would
soon be over. A jealousy so overpowering that nothing could make itself
heard against it was closing upon her like a demoniacal possession. Was it
the last effort of self-preservation?--the last protest of the living thing
against its own annihilation?

He was not to be hers--but this treachery, this wrong should be prevented.

She thought of Lucy in Manisty's arms--of that fresh young life against his
breast--and the thought maddened her. She was conscious of a certain terror
of herself--of this fury in the veins, so strange, so alien, so debasing.
But it did not affect her will.

Was Lucy's own heart touched? Over that question Eleanor had been racking
herself for days past. But if so it could be only a passing fancy. It made
it only the more a duty to protect her from Manisty. Manisty--the soul of
caprice and wilfulness--could never make a woman like Lucy happy. He would
tire of her and neglect her. And what would be left for Lucy--Lucy the
upright, simple, profound--but heartbreak?

Eleanor paused absently in front of the glass, and then looked at herself
with a start of horror. That face--to fight with Lucy's!

On the dressing-table there were still lying the two terra-cotta heads from
Nemi, the Artemis, and the Greek fragment with the clear brow and nobly
parted hair, in which Manisty had seen and pointed out the likeness to
Lucy. Eleanor recalled his words in the garden--his smiling, absorbed look
as the girl approached.

Yes!--it was like her. There was the same sweetness in strength, the same
adorable roundness and youth.

And that was the beauty that Eleanor had herself developed and made doubly
visible--as a man may free a diamond from the clay.

A mad impulse swept through her--that touch of kinship with the criminal
and the murderer that may reveal itself in the kindest and the noblest.

She took up the little mask, and, reaching to the window, she tore back the
curtains and pushed open the sun-shutters outside.

The night burst in upon her, the starry night hanging above the immensity
of the Campagna, and the sea. There was still a faint glow in the western
heaven. On the plain were a few scattered lights, fires lit, perhaps, by
wandering herdsmen against malaria. On the far edge of the land to the
south-west, a revolving light flashed its message to the Mediterranean and
the passing ships. Otherwise, not a sign of life. Below, a vast abyss of
shadow swallowed up the olive-garden, the road, and the lower slopes of the
hills.

Eleanor felt herself leaning out above the world, alone with her agony
and the balmy peace which mocked it. She lifted her arm, and, stretching
forward, she flung the little face violently into the gulf beneath. The
villa rose high above the olive-ground, and the olive-ground itself sank
rapidly towards the road. The fragment had far to fall. It seemed to
Eleanor that in the deep stillness she heard a sound like the striking of
a stone among thick branches. Her mind followed with a wild triumph the
breaking of the terra-cotta,--the shivering of the delicate features--their
burial in the stony earth.

With a long breath she tottered from the window and sank into her chair. A
horrible feeling of illness overtook her, and she found herself gasping for
breath. 'If I could only reach that medicine on my table!' she thought. But
she could not reach it. She lay helpless.

The door opened.

Was it a dream? She seemed to struggle through rushing waters back to land.

There was a low cry. A light step hurried across the room. Lucy Foster sank
on her knees beside her and threw her arms about her.

'Give me--those drops--on the table,' said Eleanor, with difficulty.

Lucy said not a word. Quietly, with steady hands, she brought and measured
the medicine. It was a strong heart-stimulant, and it did its work. But
while her strength came back, Lucy saw that she was shivering with cold,
and closed the window.

Then, silently, Lucy looked down upon the figure in the chair. She was
almost as white as Eleanor. Her eyes showed traces of tears. Her forehead
was still drawn with thought as it had been in the train.

Presently she sank again beside Eleanor.

'I came to see you, because I could not sleep, and I wanted to suggest a
plan to you. I had no idea you were ill. You should have called me before.'

Eleanor put out a feeble hand. Lucy took it tenderly, and laid it against
her cheek. She could not understand why Eleanor looked, at her with this
horror and wildness,--how it was that she came to be up, by this open
window, in this state of illness and collapse. But the discovery only
served an antecedent process--a struggle from darkness to light--which had
brought her to Eleanor's room.

She bent forward and said some words in Eleanor's ear.

Gradually Eleanor understood and responded. She raised herself piteously
in her chair. The two women sat together, hand locked in hand, their faces
near to each other, the murmur of their voices flowing on brokenly, for
nearly an hour.

Once Lucy rose to get a guide book that lay on Eleanor's table. And on
another occasion, she opened a drawer by Eleanor's direction, took out
a leather pocket-book and counted some Italian notes that it contained.
Finally she insisted on Eleanor's going to bed, and on helping her to
undress.

Eleanor had just sunk into her pillows, when a noise from the library
startled them. Eleanor looked up with strained eyes.

'It must be Mr. Manisty,' said Lucy hurriedly. 'He was out when I came
through the glass passage. The doors were all open, and his lamp burning.'
I am nearly sure that I heard him unbar the front door. I must wait now
till he is gone.'

They waited--Eleanor staring into the darkness of the room--till there had
been much opening and shutting of doors, and all was quiet again.

Then the two women clung to each other in a strange and pitiful
embrace--offered with passion on Lucy's side, accepted with a miserable
shame on Eleanor's--and Lucy slipped away.

'He was out?--in the garden?' said Eleanor to herself bewildered. And with
those questions on her lips, and a mingled remorse and fever in her blood,
she lay sleepless waiting for the morning.

* * * * *

Manisty indeed had also been under the night, bathing passion and doubt in
its cool purity.

Again and again had he wandered up and down the terrace in the starlight,
proving and examining his own heart, raised by the growth of love to a more
manly and more noble temper than had been his for years.

What was in his way? His conduct towards his cousin? He divined what seemed
to him the scruple in the girl's sensitive and tender mind. He could only
meet it by truth and generosity--by throwing himself on Eleanor's mercy.
_She_ knew what their relations had been--she would not refuse him this
boon of life and death--the explanation of them to Lucy.

Unless! There came a moment when his restless walk was tormented with the
prickly rise of a whole new swarm of fears. He recalled that moment in
the library after the struggle with Alice, when Lucy was just awakening
from unconsciousness--when Eleanor came in upon them. Had she heard? He
remembered that the possibility of it had crossed his mind. Was she in
truth working against him--avenging his neglect--establishing a fatal
influence over Lucy?

His soul cried out in fierce and cruel protest. Here at last was the great
passion of his life. Come what would, Eleanor should not be allowed to
strangle it.

Absently he wandered down a little path leading from the terrace to the
_podere_ below, and soon found himself pacing the dim grass walks among
the olives. The old villa rose above him, dark and fortress-like. That was
no longer her room--that western corner? No--he had good cause to remember
that she had been moved, to the eastern side, beyond his library, beyond
the glass passage! Those were now Eleanor's windows, he believed.

Ah!--what was that sudden light? He threw his head back in astonishment.
One of the windows at which he had been looking was flung open, and in the
bright lamplight a figure appeared. It stooped forward. Eleanor! Something
fell close beside him. He heard the breaking of a branch from one of the
olives.

In his astonishment, he stood motionless, watching the window. It remained
open for a while. Then again some one appeared--not the same figure as
at first. A thrill of delight and trouble ran through him. He sent his
salutation, his homage through the night.

But the window shut--the light went out. All was once more still and dark.

Then he struck a match and groped under the tree close by him. Yes, there
was the fallen branch. But what had broken it? He lit match after match,
holding the light with his left hand while he turned over the dry ground
with his knife. Presently he brought up a handful of stones and earth, and
laid them on a bit of ruined wall close by. Stooping over them with his
dim, sputtering lights, he presently discovered some terra-cotta fragments.
His eye, practised in such things, detected them at once. They were the
fragments of a head, which had measured about three inches from brow to
chin.

The head, or rather the face, which he had given Eleanor at Nemi! The
parting of the hair above the brow was intact--so was the beautiful curve
of the cheek.

He knew it--and the likeness to Lucy. He remembered his words to Eleanor in
the garden. Holding the pieces in his hand, he went slowly back towards the
terrace.

Thrown out?--flung out into the night--by Eleanor? But why? He thought--and
thought. A black sense of entanglement and fate grew upon him in the
darkness, as he thought of the two women together, in the midnight silence,
while he was pacing thus, alone. He met it with the defiance of newborn
passion--with the resolute planning of a man who feels himself obscurely
threatened, and realises that his chief menace lies, not in the power of
any outside enemy, but in the very goodness of the woman he loves.




PART II.


'_Alas! there is no instinct like the heart--

The heart--which may be broken: happy they!
Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould,
The precious porcelain of human clay,
Break with the first fall: they can ne'er behold
The long year linked with heavy clay on day,
And all which must be borne, and never told._'




CHAPTER XV


'Can you stand this heat?' said Lucy, anxiously.

'Oh, it will soon be cooler,' was Eleanor's languid reply.

She and Lucy sat side by side in a large and ancient landau; Mrs.
Burgoyne's maid, Marie Vefour, was placed opposite to them, a little sulky
and silent. On the box, beside the driver of the lean brown horses, was a
bright-eyed, neatly-dressed youth who was going with the ladies to Torre
Amiata.

They had just left the hill-town of Orvieto, had descended rapidly into
the valley lying to the south-west of its crested heights, and were now
mounting again on the further side. As they climbed higher and higher Lucy,
whose attention had been for a time entirely absorbed by the weariness
of the frail woman beside her, began to realise that they were passing
through a scene of extraordinary beauty. Her eyes, which had been drawn and
anxious, relaxed. She looked round her with a natural and rising joy.

To their left, as the road turned in zig-zag to the east, was the
marvellous town which the traveller who has seen Palestine likens to
Jerusalem, so steep and high and straight is the crest of warm brown
and orange precipice on which it stands, so deep the valleys round it,
so strange and complete the fusion between the city and the rock, so
conspicuous the place of the great cathedral, which is Orvieto, as the
Temple was Zion.

It was the sixth of June, and the day had been very hot. The road was deep
in thick white dust. The fig-trees and vines above the growing crops were
almost at a full leafiness; scarlet poppies grew thick among the corn; and
at the dusty edges of the road, wild roses of a colour singularly vivid and
deep, the blue flowers of love-in-a-mist, and some spikes of wine-coloured
gladiolus struck strangely on a northern eye.

Then as the road turned back again--behold! a great valley, opening out
westward, beyond Orvieto,--the valley of the Paglia; a valley with wooded
hills on either side, of a bluish-green colour, chequered with hill-towns
and slim campaniles and winding roads; and binding it all in one, the loops
and reaches of a full brown river. Heat everywhere!--on the blinding walls
of the buildings, on the young green of the vineyards, on the yellowing
corn, on the beautiful ragged children running barefoot and bareheaded
beside the carriage, on the peasants working among the vines, on the
drooping heads of the horses, on the brick-red face of the driver.

'If Madame had only stayed at Orvieto!' murmured Marie the maid, looking
back at the city and then at her mistress.

Eleanor smiled faintly and tapped the girl's hand.

'_Rassure-toi_, Marie! Remember how soon we made ourselves comfortable at
the villa.'

Marie shook her much be-curled head. Because it had taken them three months
to make the Marinata villa decently habitable, was that any reason for
tempting the wilderness again?

Lucy, too, had her misgivings. Nominally she was travelling, she supposed,
under Eleanor Burgoyne's chaperonage. Really she was the guardian of the
whole party, and she was conscious of a tender and anxious responsibility.
Already they had been delayed a whole week in Orvieto by Eleanor's
prostrate state. She had not been dangerously ill; but it had been clearly
impossible to leave doctor and chemist behind and plunge into the wilds. So
they had hidden themselves in a little Italian inn in a back street, and
the days had passed somehow.

* * * * *

Surely this hot evening and their shabby carriage and the dusty unfamiliar
road were all dream-stuff--an illusion from which she was to wake directly
and find herself once more in her room at Marinata, looking out on Monte
Cavo?

Yet as this passed across Lucy's mind, she felt again upon her face the
cool morning wind, as she and Eleanor fled down the Marinata hill in the
early sunlight, between six and seven o'clock,--through the streets of
Albano, already full and busy,--along the edge of that strange green crater
of Aricia, looking up to Pio Nono's great viaduct, and so to Cecchina, the
railway station in the plain.

An escape!--nothing else; planned the night before when Lucy's strong
commonsense had told her that the only chance for her own peace and
Eleanor's was to go at once, to stop any further development of the
situation, and avoid any fresh scene with Mr. Manisty.

She thought of the details--the message left for Aunt Pattie that they
had gone into Rome to shop before the heat; then the telegram 'Urgente,'
despatched to the villa after they were sure that Mr. Manisty must
have safely left it for that important field day of his clerical and
Ultramontane friends in Rome, in which he was pledged to take part; then
the arrival of the startled and bewildered Aunt Pattie at the small hotel
where they were in hiding--her conferences--first with Eleanor, then with
Lucy.

Strange little lady, Aunt Pattie! How much had she guessed? What had passed
between her and Mrs. Burgoyne? When at last she and Lucy stood together
hand in hand, the girl's sensitive spirit had divined in her a certain
stiffening, a certain diminution of that constant kindness which she had
always shown her guest. Did Aunt Pattie blame her? Had she cherished her
own views and secret hopes for her nephew and Mrs. Burgoyne? Did she feel
that Lucy had in some way unwarrantably and ambitiously interfered with
them?

At any rate, Lucy had divined the unspoken inference 'You must have given
him encouragement!' and behind it--perhaps?--the secret ineradicable pride
of family and position that held her no fitting match for Edward Manisty.
Lucy's inmost mind was still sore and shrinking from this half-hour's
encounter with Aunt Pattie.

But she had not shown it. And at the end of it Aunt Pattie had kissed
her ruefully with tears--'It's _very_ good of you! You'll take care of
Eleanor!'

Lucy could hear her own answer--'Indeed, indeed, I will!'--and Aunt
Pattie's puzzled cry, 'If only someone would tell me what I'm to do with
_him_!'

And then she recalled her own pause of wonder as Aunt Pattie left
her--beside the hotel window, looking into the narrow side street. Why
was it 'very good of her'?--and why, nevertheless, was this dislocation
of all their plans felt to be somehow her fault and responsibility?--even
by herself? There was a sudden helpless inclination to laugh over the
topsy-turviness of it all.

And then her heart had fluttered in her breast, stabbed by the memory of
Eleanor's cry the night before. 'It is of no use to say that you know
nothing--that he has said nothing. _I_ know. If you stay, he will give you
no peace--his will is indomitable. But if you go, he will guess my part in
it. I shall not have the physical strength to conceal it--and he can be
a hard man when he is resisted! What am I to do? I would go home at
once--but--I might die on the way. Why not?'

And then--in painful gasps--the physical situation had been revealed to
her--the return of old symptoms and the reappearance of arrested disease.
The fear of the physical organism alternating with the despair of the
lonely and abandoned soul,--never could Lucy forget the horror of that
hour's talk, outwardly so quiet, as she sat holding Eleanor's hands in
hers, and the floodgates of personality and of grief were opened before
her.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the patient, sweating horses climbed and climbed. Soon they were
at the brow of the hill, and looking back for their last sight of Orvieto.
And now they were on a broad tableland, a bare, sun-baked region where huge
flocks of sheep, of white, black, and brown goats wandered with ragged
shepherds over acres of burnt and thirsty pasture. Here and there were
patches of arable land and groups of tilling peasants in the wide untidy
expanse; once or twice too an _osteria_, with its bush or its wine-stained
tables under the shadow of its northern wall. But scarcely a farmhouse.
Once indeed a great building like a factory or a workhouse, in the midst of
wide sun-beaten fields. 'Ecco! la fattoria,' said the driver, pointing to
it. And once a strange group of underground dwellings, their chimneys level
with the surrounding land, whence wild swarms of troglodyte children rushed
up from the bowels of the earth to see the carriage pass and shriek for
_soldi_.

But the beauty of the sun-scorched upland was its broom! Sometimes they
were in deep tufa lanes; like English lanes, save for their walls and
canopies of gold; sometimes they journeyed through wide barren stretches,
where only broom held the soil against all comers, spreading in sheets
of gold beneath the dazzling sky. Large hawks circled overhead; in the
rare woods the nightingales were loud and merry; and goldfinches were
everywhere. A hot, lonely, thirsty land--the heart of Italy--where the
rocks are honeycombed with the tombs of that mysterious Etruscan race, the
Melchisedek of the nations, coming no one knows whence, 'without father
and without mother'--a land which has to the west of it the fever-stricken
Maremma and the heights of the Amiata range, and to the south the forest
country of Viterbo.

Eleanor looked out upon the road and the fields with eyes that faintly
remembered, and a heart held now, as always, in the grip of that _tempo
felice_ which was dead.

It was she who had proposed this journey. Once in late November she and
Aunt Pattie and Manisty had spent two or three days at Orvieto with
some Italian friends. They had made the journey back to Rome, partly by
_vetturino_, driving from Orvieto to Bolsena and Viterbo, and spending a
night on the way at a place of remote and enchanting beauty which had left
a deep mark on Eleanor's imagination. They owed the experience to their
Italian friends, acquaintances of the great proprietor whose agent gave
the whole party hospitality for the night; and as they jogged on through
this June heat she recalled with bitter longing the bright November day,
the changing leaves, the upland air, and Manisty's delight in the strange
unfamiliar country, in the vast oak woods above the Paglia, and the
marvellous church at Monte Fiascone.

But it was not the agent's house, the scene of their former stay, to which
she was now guiding Lucy. When she and Manisty, hurrying out for an early
walk before the carriage started, had explored a corner of the dense oak
woods below the _palazzo_ on the hill, they had come across a deserted
convent, with a contadino's family in one corner of it, and a ruinous
chapel with a couple of dim frescoes attributed to Pinturicchio.

How well she remembered Manisty's rage over the spoliation of the convent
and the ruin of the chapel! He had gone stalking over the deserted place,
raving against 'those brigands from Savoy,' and calculating how much it
would cost to buy back the place from the rascally Municipio of Orvieto, to
whom it now belonged, and return it to its former Carmelite owners.

Meanwhile Eleanor had gossiped with the _massaja_, or farmer's wife, and
had found out that there were a few habitable rooms in the convent still,
roughly furnished, and that in summer, people of a humble sort came there
sometimes from Orvieto for coolness and change--the plateau being 3,000
feet above the sea. Eleanor had inquired if English people ever came.

'_Inglesi! no!--mai Inglesi_,' said the woman in astonishment.

The family were, however, in some sort of connection with an hotel
proprietor at Orvieto, through whom they got their lodgers. Eleanor had
taken down the name and all particulars in a fit of enthusiasm for the
beauty and loneliness of the place. 'Suppose some day we came here to
write?' Manisty had said vaguely, looking round him with regret as they
drove away. The mere suggestion had made the name of Torre Amiata sweet to
Eleanor thenceforward.

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