Wilhelm Ruland - "Legends of the Rhine"

Arthur Weir - "Fleurs de lys and other poems"

John. T. Morse - "John Quincy Adams"

George Mueller - "A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller"

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




* * * * *

As he read the last word, Manisty flung the sheets down upon the table
beside him, and rising, he began to pace the room with his hands upon his
sides, frowning and downcast. When he came to Mrs. Burgoyne's chair he
paused beside her--

'I don't see what it has to do with the book. It is time lost'--he said to
her abruptly, almost angrily.

'I think not,' she said, smiling at him. But her tone wavered a little, and
his look grew still more irritable.

'I shall destroy it!'--he said, with energy--'nothing more intolerable than
ornament out of place!'

'Oh don't!--don't alter it at all!' said a quick imploring voice.

Manisty turned in astonishment.

Lucy Foster was looking at him steadily. A glow of pleasure was on her
cheek, her beautiful eyes were warm and eager. Manisty for the first time
observed her, took note also of the loosened hair and Eleanor's cloak.

'You liked it?' he said with some embarrassment. He had entirely forgotten
that she was in the room.

She drew a long breath.

'Yes!'--she said softly, looking down.

He thought that she was too shy to express herself. In reality her feeling
was divided between her old enthusiasm and her new disillusion. She would
have liked to tell him that his reading had reminded her of the book she
loved. But the man, standing beside her, chilled her. She wished she had
not spoken. It began to seem to her a piece of forwardness.

'Well, you're very kind'--he said, rather formally--'But I'm afraid it
won't do. That lady there won't pass it.'

'What have I said?'--cried Mrs. Burgoyne, protesting.

Manisty laughed. 'Nothing. But you'll agree with me.' Then he gathered up
his papers under his arm in a ruthless confusion, and walked away into his
study, leaving discomfort behind him.

Mrs. Burgoyne sat silent, a little tired and pale. She too would have
liked to praise and to give pleasure. It was not wonderful indeed that the
child's fancy had been touched. That thrilling, passionate voice--her own
difficulty always was to resist it--to try and see straight in spite of it.

* * * * *

Later that evening, when Miss Foster had withdrawn, Manisty and Mrs.
Burgoyne were lingering and talking on a stone balcony that ran along the
eastern front of the villa. The Campagna and the sea were behind them.
Here, beyond a stretch of formal garden, rose a curved front of wall with
statues and plashing water showing dimly in the moonlight; and beyond the
wall there was a space of blue and silver lake; and girdling the lake the
forest-covered Monte Cavo rose towering into the moonlit sky, just showing
on its topmost peak that white speck which once was the temple of the
Latian Jupiter, and is now, alas! only the monument of an Englishman's
crime against history, art, and Rome. The air was soft, and perfumed with
scent from the roses in the side-alleys below. A monotonous bird-note came
from the ilex darkness, like the note of a thin passing bell. It was the
cry of a small owl, which, in its plaintiveness and changelessness, had
often seemed to Manisty and Eleanor the very voice of the Roman night.

Suddenly Mrs. Burgoyne said--'I have a different version of your Nemi story
running in my head!--more tragic than yours. My priest is no murderer. He
found his predecessor dead under the tree; the place was empty; he took it.
He won't escape his own doom, of course, but he has not deserved it. There
is no blood on his hand--his heart is pure. There!--I imagine it so.'

There was a curious tremor in her voice, which Manisty, lost in his own
thoughts, did not detect. He smiled.

'Well!--you'll compete with Renan. He made a satire out of it. His priest
is a moral gentleman who won't kill anybody. But the populace soon settle
that. They knock him on the head, as a disturber of religion.'

'I had forgotten--' said Mrs. Burgoyne absently.

'But you didn't like it, Eleanor--my little piece!' said Manisty, after a
pause. 'So don't pretend!'

She roused herself at once, and began to talk with her usual eagerness and
sympathy. It was a repetition of the scene before dinner. Only this time
her effect was not so great. Manisty's depression did not yield.

Presently, however, he looked down upon her. In the kind, concealing
moonlight she was all grace and charm. The man's easy tenderness awoke.

'Eleanor--this air is too keen for that thin dress.'

And stooping over her he took her cloak from her arm, and wrapped it about
her.

'You lent it to Miss Foster'--he said, surveying her. 'It became her--but
it knows its mistress!'

The colour mounted an instant in her cheek. Then she moved further away
from him.

'Have you discovered yet'--she said--'that that girl is extraordinarily
handsome?'

'Oh yes'--he said carelessly--'with a handsomeness that doesn't matter.'

She laughed.

'Wait till Aunt Pattie and I have dressed her and put her to rights.'

'Well, you can do most things no doubt--both with bad books, and raw
girls,'--he said, with a shrug and a sigh.

They bade each other good-night, and Mrs. Burgoyne disappeared through the
glass door behind them.

* * * * *

The moon was sailing gloriously above the stone-pines of the garden. Mrs.
Burgoyne, half-undressed, sat dreaming in a corner room, with a high
painted ceiling, and both its windows open to the night.

She had entered her room in a glow of something which had been half
torment, half happiness. Now, after an hour's dreaming, she suddenly bent
forward and, parting the cloud of fair hair that fell about her, she
looked in the glass before her, at the worn, delicate face haloed within
it--thinking all the time with a vague misery of Lucy Foster's untouched
bloom.

Then her eyes fell upon two photographs that stood upon her table. One
represented a man in yeomanry uniform; the other a tottering child of two.

'Oh! my boy--my darling!'--she cried in a stifled agony, and snatching up
the picture, she bowed her head upon it, kissing it. The touch of it calmed
her. But she could not part from it. She put it in her breast, and when she
slept, it was still there.




CHAPTER III


'Eleanor--where are you off to?'

'Just to my house of Simmon,' said that lady, smiling. She was standing on
the eastern balcony, buttoning a dainty grey glove, while Manisty a few
paces from her was lounging in a deck-chair, with the English newspapers.

'What?--to mass? I protest. Look at the lake--look at the sky--look at that
patch of broom on the lake side. Come and walk there before _dejeuner_--and
make a round home by Aricia.'

Mrs. Burgoyne shook her head.

'No--I like my little idolatries,' she said, with decision. It was Sunday
morning. The bells in Marinata were ringing merrily. Women and girls with
black lace scarves upon their heads, handsome young men in short coats and
soft peaked hats, were passing along the road between the villa and the
lake, on their way to mass. It was a warm April day. The clouds of yellow
banksia, hanging over the statued wall that girdled the fountain-basin,
were breaking into bloom; and the nightingales were singing with a
prodigality that was hardly worthy of their rank and dignity. Nature in
truth is too lavish of nightingales on the Alban Hills in spring! She
forgets, as it were, her own sweet arts, and all that rareness adds to
beauty. One may hear a nightingale and not mark him; which is a _lese
majeste_.

Mrs. Burgoyne's toilette matched the morning. The grey dress, so fresh and
elegant, the broad black hat above the fair hair, the violets dewy from the
garden that were fastened at her slender waist, and again at her throat
beneath the pallor of the face,--these things were of a perfection quite
evident to the critical sense of Edward Manisty. It was the perfection
that was characteristic. So too was the faded fairness of hair and skin,
the frail distinguished look. So, above all, was the contrast between the
minute care for personal adornment implied in the finish of the dress, and
the melancholy shrinking of the dark-rimmed eyes.

He watched her, through the smoke wreaths of his cigarette,--pleasantly and
lazily conscious both of her charm and her inconsistencies.

'Are you going to take Miss Foster?' he asked her.

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed.

'I made the suggestion. She looked at me with amazement, coloured crimson,
and went away. I have lost all my chances with her.'

'Then she must be an ungrateful minx'--said Manisty, lowering his voice and
looking round him towards the villa, 'considering the pains you take.'

'_Some_ of us must take pains,' said Mrs. Burgoyne, significantly.

'Some of us do'--he said, laughing. 'The others profit.--One goes on
praying for the primitive,--but when it comes--No!--it is not permitted to
be as typical as Miss Foster.'

'Typical of what?'

'The dissidence of Dissent, apparently--and the Protestantism of the
Protestant religion. Confess:--it was an odd caprice on the part of high
Jove to send her here?'

'I am sure she has a noble character--and an excellent intelligence!'

Manisty shrugged his shoulders.

'--Her grandfather'--continued the lady--'was a divinity professor and
wrote a book on the Inquisition!'--

Manisty repeated his gesture.

'--And as I told you last night, she is almost as handsome as your Greek
head--and very like her.'

'My dear lady--you have the wildest notions!'

Mrs. Burgoyne picked up her parasol.

'Quite true.--Your aunt tells me she was so disappointed, poor child, that
there was no church of her own sort for her to go to this morning.'

'What!'--cried Manisty--'Did she expect a conventicle in the Pope's own
town!'

For Marinata owned a Papal villa and had once been a favourite summer
residence of the Popes.

'No--but she thought she might have gone into Rome, and she missed the
trains. I found her wandering about the salon looking quite starved and
restless.'

'Those are hungers that pass!--My heart is hard.--There--your bell is
stopping. Eleanor!--I wonder why you go to these functions?'

He turned to look at her, his fine eye sharp and a little mocking.

'Because I like it.'

'You like the thought of it. But when you get there, the reality won't
please you at all. There will be the dirty floor, and the bad music,--and
the little priest intoning through his nose--and the scuffling boys,--and
the abominable pictures--and the tawdry altars. Much better stay at
home--and help me praise the Holy Roman Church from a safe distance!'

'What a hypocrite people would think you, if they could hear you talk like
that!' she said, flushing.

'Then they would think it unjustly.--I don't mean to be my own dupe, that's
all.'

'The dupes are the happiest,' she said in a low voice. 'There is something
between them, and--Ah! well, never mind!'--

She stood still a moment, looking across the lake, her hands resting
lightly on the stone balustrade of the terrace. Manisty watched her in
silence, occasionally puffing at his cigarette.

'Well, I shall be back very soon,' she said, gathering up her prayer-book
and her parasol. 'Will it then be our duty to take Miss Foster for a walk?'

'Why not leave her to my aunt?'

She passed him with a little nod of farewell. Presently, through the
openings of the balustrade, Manisty could watch her climbing the village
street with her dress held high above her daintily shod feet, a crowd of
children asking for a halfpenny following at her heels. Presently he saw
her stop irresolutely, open a little velvet bag that hung from her waist
and throw a shower of _soldi_ among the children. They swooped upon it,
fighting and shrieking.

Mrs. Burgoyne looked at them half smiling, half repentant, shook her head
and walked on.

'Eleanor--you coward!' said Manisty, throwing himself back in his chair
with a silent laugh.

Under his protection, or his aunt's, as he knew well, Mrs. Burgoyne could
walk past those little pests of children, even the poor armless and legless
horrors on the way to Albano, and give a firm adhesion to Miss Manisty's
Scotch doctrines on the subject of begging. But by herself, she could not
refuse--she could not bear to be scowled on--even for a moment. She must
yield--must give herself the luxury of being liked. It was all of a piece
with her weakness towards servants and porters and cabmen--her absurdities
in the way of tips and gifts--the kindnesses she had been showing during
the last three days to the American girl. Too kind! Insipidity lay that
way.

Manisty returned to his newspapers. When he had finished them he got up and
began to pace the stone terrace, his great head bent forward as usual, as
though the weight of it were too much for the shoulders. The newspapers had
made him restless again, had dissipated the good humour of the morning,
born perhaps of the mere April warmth and _bien etre_.

'Idling in a villa--with two women'--he said to himself, bitterly--'while
all these things are happening.'

For the papers were full of news--of battles lost and won, on questions
with which he had been at one time intimately concerned. Once or twice in
the course of these many columns he had found his own name, his own opinion
quoted, but only as belonging to a man who had left the field--a man of the
past--politically dead.

As he stood there with his hands upon his sides, looking out over the Alban
Lake, and its broom-clad sides, a great hunger for London swept suddenly
upon him, for the hot scent of its streets, for its English crowd, for
the look of its shops and clubs and parks. He had a vision of the club
writing-room--of well-known men coming in and going out--discussing the
news of the morning, the gossip of the House--he saw himself accosted
as one of the inner circle,--he was sensible again of those short-lived
pleasures of power and office. Not that he had cared half as much for these
pleasures, when he had them, as other men. To affirm with him meant to be
already half way on the road to doubt; contradiction was his character.
Nevertheless, now that he was out of it, alone and forgotten--now that the
game was well beyond his reach--it had a way of appearing to him at moments
intolerably attractive!

Nothing before him now, in these long days at the villa, but the hours of
work with Eleanor, the walks With Eleanor, the meals with his aunt and
Eleanor--and now, for a stimulating change, Miss Foster! The male in him
was restless. He had been eager to come to the villa, and the quiet of the
hills, so as to push this long delaying book to its final end. And, behold,
day by day, in the absence of the talk and distractions of Rome, a thousand
discontents and misgivings were creeping upon him. In Rome he was still
a power. In spite of his strange detached position, it was known that he
was the defender of the Roman system, the panegyrist of Leo XIII., the
apologist of the Papal position in Italy. And this had been more than
enough to open to him all but the very inmost heart of Catholic life. Their
apartments in Rome, to the scandal of Miss Manisty's Scotch instincts, had
been haunted by ecclesiastics of every rank and kind. Cardinals, Italian
and foreign, had taken their afternoon tea from Mrs. Burgoyne's hands; the
black and white of the Dominicans, the brown of the Franciscans, the black
of the Jesuits,--the staircase in the Via Sistina had been well acquainted
with them all. Information not usually available had been placed lavishly
at Manisty's disposal; he had felt the stir and thrill of the great
Catholic organisation as all its nerve-threads gather to its brain and
centre in the Vatican. Nay, on two occasions, he had conversed freely with
Leo XIII. himself.

All this he had put aside, impatiently, that he might hurry on his book,
and accomplish his _coup_. And in the tranquillity of the hills, was he
beginning to lose faith in the book, and the compensation it was to bring
him? Unless this book, with its scathing analysis of the dangers and
difficulties of the secularist State, were not only a book, but _an event_,
of what use would it be to him? He was capable both of extravagant conceit,
and of the most boundless temporary disgust with his own doings and ideas.
Such a disgust seemed to be mounting now through all his veins, taking
all the savour out of life and work. No doubt it would be the same to
the end,--the politician in him just strong enough to ruin the man of
letters--the man of letters always ready to distract and paralyse the
politician. And as for the book, there also he had been the victim of
a double mind. He had endeavoured to make it popular, as Chateaubriand
made the great argument of the _Genie du Christianisme_ popular, by the
introduction of an element of poetry and romance. For the moment he was
totally out of love with the result. What was the plain man to make of it?
And nowadays the plain man settles everything.

Well!--if the book came to grief, it was not only he that would
suffer.--Poor Eleanor!--poor, kind, devoted Eleanor!

Yet as the thought of her passed through his meditations, a certain
annoyance mingled with it. What if she had been helping to keep him, all
this time, in a fool's paradise--hiding the truth from him by this soft
enveloping sympathy of hers?

His mind started these questions freely. Yet only to brush them away with a
sense of shame. Beneath his outer controlling egotism there were large and
generous elements in his mixed nature. And nothing could stand finally
against the memory of that sweet all-sacrificing devotion which had been
lavished upon himself and his work all the winter!

What right had he to accept it? What did it mean? Where was it leading?

He guessed pretty shrewdly what had been the speculations of the friends
and acquaintances who had seen them together in Rome. Eleanor Burgoyne
was but just thirty, very attractive, and his distant kinswoman. As for
himself, he knew very well that according to the general opinion of the
world, beginning with his aunt, it was his duty to marry and marry soon.
He was in the prime of life; he had a property that cried out for an heir;
and a rambling Georgian house that would be the better for a mistress. He
was tolerably sure that Aunt Pattie had already had glimpses of Eleanor
Burgoyne in that position.

Well--if so, Aunt Pattie was less shrewd than usual. Marriage! The notion
of its fetters and burdens was no less odious to him now than it had been
at twenty. What did he want with a wife--still more, with a son? The
thought of his own life continued in another's filled him with a shock of
repulsion. Where was the sense of infusing into another being the black
drop of discontent that poisoned his own? A daughter perhaps--with the eyes
of his mad sister Alice? Or a son--with the contradictions and weaknesses,
without the gifts, of his father? Men have different ways of challenging
the future. But that particular way called paternity had never in his most
optimistic moments appealed to Manisty.

And of course Eleanor understood him! He had not been ungrateful. No!--he
knew well enough that he had the power to make a woman's hours pass
pleasantly. Eleanor's winter had been a happy one; her health and spirits
had alike revived. Friendship, as they had known it, was a very rare and
exquisite thing. No doubt when the book was done with, their relations must
change somewhat. He confessed that he might have been imprudent; that he
might have been appropriating the energies and sympathies of a delightful
woman, as a man is hardly justified in doing, unless--. But, after all, a
few weeks more would see the end of it; and friends, dear, close friends,
they must always be.

For now there was plenty of room and leisure in his life for these subtler
bonds. The day of great passions was gone by. There were one or two
incidents in his earlier manhood on which he could look back with the
half-triumphant consciousness that no man had dived deeper to the heart of
feeling, had drunk more wildly, more inventively, of passion than he, in
more than one country of Europe, in the East as in the West. These events
had occurred in those wander-years between twenty and thirty, which he had
spent in travelling, hunting and writing, in the pursuit, alternately eager
and fastidious, of as wide an experience as possible. But all that was
over. These things concerned another man, in another world. Politics and
ambition had possessed him since, and women now appealed to other instincts
in him--instincts rather of the diplomatist and intriguer than of the
lover. Of late years they had been his friends and instruments. And by
no unworthy arts. They were delightful to him; and his power with them
was based on natural sympathies and divinations that were perhaps his
birthright. His father had had the same gift. Why deny that both his father
and he had owed much to women? What was there to be ashamed of? His father
had been one of the ablest and most respected men of his day and so far as
English society was concerned, the son had no scandal, nor the shadow of
one, upon his conscience.

How far did Eleanor divine him? He raised his shoulder with a smile.
Probably she knew him better than he knew himself. Besides, she was no
mere girl, brimful of illusions and dreaming of love-affairs. What a
history!--Good heavens! Why had he not known and seen something of her in
the days when she was still under the tyranny of that intolerable husband?
He might have eased the weight a little--protected her--as a kinsman may.
Ah well--better not! They were both younger then.--

As for the present,--let him only extricate himself from this coil in which
he stood, find his way back to activity and his rightful place, and many
things might look differently. Perhaps--who could say?--in the future, when
youth was still further forgotten by both of them, he and Eleanor might
after all take each other by the hand--sit down on either side of the same
hearth--their present friendship pass into one of another kind? It was
quite possible, only--

The sudden crash of a glass door made him look round. It was Miss Foster
who was hastening along the enclosed passage leading to the outer stair.
She had miscalculated the strength of the wind on the north side of the
house, and the glass door communicating with the library had slipped from
her hand. She passed Manisty with a rather scared penitent look, quickly
opened the outer door, and ran downstairs.

Manisty watched her as she turned into the garden. The shadows of the
ilex-avenue chequered her straw bonnet, her prim black cape, her white
skirt. There had been no meddling of freakish hands with her dark hair
this morning. It was tightly plaited at the back of her head. Her plain
sun-shade, her black kid gloves were neatness itself--middle-class,
sabbatical neatness.

Manisty recalled his thoughts of the last half-hour with a touch of
amusement. He had been meditating on 'women'--the delightfulness of
'women,' his own natural inclination to their society. But how narrow is
everybody's world!

His collective noun of course had referred merely to that small, high-bred,
cosmopolitan class which presents types like Eleanor Burgoyne. And here
came this girl, walking through his dream, to remind him of what 'woman,'
average virtuous woman of the New or the Old World, is really like.

All the same, she walked well,--carried her head remarkably well. There
was a free and springing youth in all her movements that he could not but
follow with eyes that noticed all such things as she passed through the old
trees, and the fragments of Graeco-Roman sculpture placed among them.

* * * * *

That afternoon Lucy Foster was sitting by herself in the garden of the
villa. She had a volume of sermons by a famous Boston preacher in her
hand, and was alternately reading--and looking. Miss Manisty had told her
that some visitors from Rome would probably arrive between four and five
o'clock, and close to her indeed the little butler, running hither and
thither with an anxiety, an effusion that no English servant would have
deigned to show, was placing chairs and tea-tables and putting out
tea-things.

Presently indeed Alfredo approached the silent lady sitting under the
trees, on tip-toe.

Would the signorina be so very kind as to come and look at the tables?
The signora--so all the household called Miss Manisty--had given
directions--but he, Alfredo, was not sure--and it would be so sad if when
she came out she were not satisfied!

Lucy rose and went to look. She discovered some sugar-tongs missing.
Alfredo started like the wind in search of them, running down the avenue
with short, scudding steps, his coat-tails streaming behind him.

What a child-like eagerness to please! Yet he had been five years in the
cavalry; he was admirably educated; he wrote a better hand than Manisty's
own, and when his engagement at the villa came to an end he was already,
thanks to a very fair scientific knowledge, engaged as manager in a
firework factory in Rome.

Lucy's look pursued the short flying figure of the butler with a smiling
kindness. What was wrong with this clever and loveable people that Mr.
Manisty should never have a good word for their institutions, or their
history, or their public men? Unjust! Nor was he even consistent with his
own creed. He, so moody and silent with Mrs. Burgoyne and Miss Manisty,
could always find a smile and a phrase for the natives. The servants adored
him, and all the long street of Marinata welcomed him with friendly eyes.
His Italian was fluency itself; and his handsome looks perhaps, his keen
commanding air gave him a natural kingship among a susceptible race.

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