When an indolent, easy-going, trouble-hating man, such as my father, marries an energetic, bustling, authority-loving woman, such as Mrs. Grove, it is not hard to foresee which of the two will bear rule in the establishment. A very brief acquaintance with Sir Anthony sufficed to show the widow that, with a little management on her part, she would be able to govern the household as she liked; that as long as he was kept amused he would not bother himself to interfere with her arrangements; and that all she need do in order to keep the reins entirely in her own hands, was to take care that her way and his were identical in whatever affected his personal comfort—she would then be free to please herself as far as all other things were concerned. She was not, at first, altogether easy in her mind as to how he would bear the discovery of what the real state of her money matters was; which discovery, as she knew, he must inevitably make soon, and might possibly cause him to be seriously angry with her. But she need not have feared this with a man of his disposition, who never worried himself about anything that could not be helped. Though he was, undoubtedly, much annoyed to find how much poorer she was than he had supposed, yet he reflected, with his usual philosophy, that it was no use making a fuss about it, now that he had married her, and that what could not be altered had better be made the best of. So he gulped down the disappointment with a wry face or two, and did not attempt to make her suffer for her deceitfulness as she deserved.
As soon as she was satisfied on this head, and felt that she was established in her seat securely, she turned her attention to me—who would infinitely have preferred being let alone. I had never trusted to the sincerity of the professions of affection she had lavished on me in the early stages of our acquaintance, when she had imagined me to be my father's especial pet; and it speedily became evident that this distrust of mine had been well founded. She thought it quite worth while taking trouble to keep the master of the house in good humour, and would study and humour his likes and dislikes in the most amiable manner possible. But she saw no reason for extending the same consideration to a mere insignificant nobody; and when she had discovered how little he cared for me, and that she might do as she pleased regarding me and my affairs without danger of interference from him, she proceeded to take my education in hand, and conduct it according to her own notions. As her ideas on the subject and mine were entirely different, and as the more she and I saw of one another the more we disliked each other, the result of this meddling of hers was fatal to my comfort. And the two or three years following my father's second marriage were so horribly dull and tedious to me that I cannot recall them without a shudder.
Everything seemed to go against me from the time of that wedding. In the first place, I resented having a stepmother, and finding myself forced suddenly into terms of intimacy with the three strangers (her and her two daughters) who had all at once become part of my family. Then came the termination of the foreign wanderings that I had found so pleasant. And now came the culminating misery of being under the commands of a selfish, vulgar, lying, bullying, stingy, pretentious, plausible, tyrannical woman, whom I could not endure, and who fully returned my dislike.
I had an unlucky knack of perpetually irritating her, and was always sure to be in the wrong in her eyes. Either I said or did something that was contrary to her notions of what I ought to have said or done; or I scandalised her by displaying grievous ignorance of some subject which she deemed an essential branch of knowledge; or else I shocked her prejudices in some other way. She was not the woman to put up quietly with offences of this kind in her own household, and proceeded without delay to attempt to remedy my deficiencies. Accordingly she informed my father that she considered my mental condition to have been neglected terribly; that I had been allowed to run wild till I was very nearly ruined; and that she saw no chance of my ever becoming a properly behaved young lady and decent member of society unless a governess were procured for me immediately, and I were kept strictly to the schoolroom until such time as I should come out. Should she, therefore, engage a governess? My father, as usual, made no objection to a proposal which would in no way interfere with his own comfort. All he said was that she could do just as she thought best about it; that he did not himself see much to complain of in me, and had thought I was not at all bad company, considering my youth; but that he had no doubt she understood better than him what was necessary for girls, and that whatever she did was sure to be right.
Armed with this permission, she at once took steps to carry out her intention, and a few days afterwards announced to me the contemplated innovation.
"Your father and I have agreed, Ina," she said, "that it is high time to make a change in your present mode of life—you need to be put into harness for a bit and broken in. Therefore, I have engaged a governess for you, and she will be here next week. What I wish to impress upon you now is, that when she comes you must do what she tells you, and that I shall expect you to pass your time with her. I do not approve of your fondness for sitting in your own room; nor yet of your habit of appearing continually amongst us elders when there are visitors here, just as if you were grown up and already introduced into society! The drawing-room is not the proper place for a girl of your age. Remember that in future you are to remain always in the schoolroom when indoors, and that, when not at lessons, you must employ yourself there in some quiet and ladylike pursuit—needlework perhaps, or something of that kind. And when you go out you will walk with your governess, and not go climbing trees, or digging out rabbits, or racing all over the place like a wild thing, as you generally do."
The idea of being thus hampered and restrained filled me with dismay; and in my despair I appealed to my father, in hopes that he would protect my cherished liberty of action.
"Why should I have a governess at all?" I exclaimed to him; "I'm sure I've got on very well without, for ever so long! But even if I am to have one, surely I may be free of the hateful thing out of lesson-time, mayn't I? Just think how horrid it would be to be obliged to be always with her—sitting in the room with her all day, and only going for stupid, straight-on-end grinds along the hard high road with her when I go out! Do say that I'm not to be condemned to that, at all events!"
No doubt I was a fool for my pains, and ought to have known better than to suppose that I could move him to oppose his wife on my behalf. So the event proved, for he declined to interfere in the matter, and the only effect produced by my appeal was to strengthen Lady Trecastle's hands by increasing her conviction of the extreme unlikelihood of my father's ever paying attention to any complaint that I might make to him. From that time forth, therefore, she felt more secure than ever in her authority over me, and her tyranny increased accordingly. When the governess arrived I was kept immured in the schoolroom the greater part of each day, and was surrounded by a variety of petty restraints and restrictions which were enough to have worried any girl, and were especially vexatious and irksome to one who had had the unusual amount of independence which I had been enjoying of recent years. I found myself deprived of freedom; always under surveillance; obliged to learn uninteresting lessons; bored; and constantly tacked on to the petticoats of an individual whose office of governess made her necessarily hateful in my eyes, however charming—even angelic—she might really be. Of course such an existence was perfectly odious to me, and I do not think that I could have anyhow managed to endure it as long as I did, if I had not fortunately hit upon a means whereby I could to some extent relieve its dreary monotony. This resource consisted in victimising, to the extent of my power, any rash female who had undertaken to instruct me, playing off upon her ill-natured pranks of all kinds, and leaving no stone unturned to make her life a burden to her till I had fairly driven her out of the house.
What a dreadful confession of unamiability! some reader may, perhaps, here exclaim. Well—I do not deny it. Be it remembered that the purpose of this narrative is, not to set forth an imaginary picture of virtue and excellence, but simply an accurate likeness of myself; and I should evidently fail of accomplishing that purpose if I were to conceal or gloss over those sentiments which I really entertained and acted upon. But even if my behaviour does lay me open to the charge of unamiability, I do not think that that need be wondered at, when the peculiarities of my natural disposition, of my bringing-up, and of my whole circumstances, are taken into consideration.
The occupation of bullying and annoying my governesses to the utmost possible extent had a double recommendation in my eyes. Not only did it supply an ample field for my ingenuity, and give me something amusing to think about in the dreary walks and long hours spent in the schoolroom, but also it afforded me the satisfaction of retaliation. I had a savage joy in knowing that I was able to pay off my companion for some of the vexations that she was the means of inflicting on me; and I relished the thought that even if I did have a rough time myself, yet at all events I did not suffer alone. Endless, therefore, were the tricks and practical jokes which I used to devise and execute for the aggravation of whatever unlucky individual happened to have taken charge of my education; and so skilful was I in my operations that it was but seldom any piece of mischief could be traced home to me, however greatly I might be suspected of its authorship. I was an adept, too, at the art of being extremely insulting and provoking without saying anything that would seem a just cause of irritation if repeated to a third person. I knew how to speak with an offensiveness of voice and manner which gave an injurious significance to words that were in themselves innocent; and by this method I have often succeeded in making a governess wildly angry, although I had given her nothing tangible that could be taken hold of and brought against me to substantiate a charge of rudeness. If she complained that I had been impertinent, I assumed an air of injured innocence, repeated exactly what I had said, asked what harm there was in that? and declared that it was very unfair to blame me because Miss so-and-so had chosen to fly into a passion about nothing. In fact I was aggravating enough to have provoked the patient Grizzel herself; and as governesses are not much apt to be patient Grizzels in their relations to their pupils (however gentle and long-suffering they may make themselves appear to the heads of the establishment), our schoolroom was in a constant state of turmoil and ferment, and there was a remarkable difficulty in getting governesses to stay at Castle Manor. About a month or six weeks was generally enough to disgust them with the situation, and they rarely failed to give notice at the end of that time. This was an event that always gave me a sensation of unmixed satisfaction; as, for one thing, I then felt that I had scored a fresh victory and routed another enemy, and also, I knew that the arrival of her successor could not fail to bring some small amount of variety into the monotonous routine of existence of which I was so deadly tired.
But this constant change of governesses over which I rejoiced, and which was chiefly my doing, was by no means equally agreeable to Lady Trecastle. When an instructress went, it was she who had to procure a successor, and she did not find it at all amusing to be incessantly answering advertisements, writing for characters, and that sort of thing. And as, notwithstanding the difficulty of ever actually proving a misdemeanour against me, she had strong doubts of my innocence, therefore she considered me responsible for the bother she continually had about governesses, and regarded me with increased disfavour on that account. She had the sense to suspect that there would not be such endless storms in the schoolroom if the pupil were not unusually unmanageable and turbulent; and, acting on that opinion, she made several efforts to induce me to be more tractable, in order that thereby she might be saved the trouble that my conduct entailed upon her.
At one time she tried the effect of addressing serious rebukes and admonitions to me; but I cared not one straw for them. Then she increased the strictness of my confinement, and ordained that every disturbance should always be followed by the loss of the next half-holiday or other pleasure of which I might have a chance; but still I remained unsubdued. Then a third method of overcoming me suddenly struck her, and she one day wound up a lengthy scolding by declaring that her patience was at an end, that she would not stand the perpetual commotions I caused any longer, and that the very next time one occurred I should be packed off to some school at once.
Now it was all very well for her to talk big of sending me to school; but in point of fact I felt pretty sure that she would do nothing of the kind, because it was very convenient to her to have a governess in the house on account of her own two daughters, for whom she did not want to go to the expense of masters, and who often needed assistance in the various accomplishments she wished them to acquire. This assistance they were in the habit of receiving from whoever happened to be in charge of me, though they were too old to be regularly in the schoolroom, and as my going to school would remove the ostensible reason for having a governess at Castle Manor, it was not at all likely that she meant to do what she said.
But though she knew the threat to be an empty one, that did not at all hinder her from uttering it. Being at her wits' end for something to hold over me in terrorem, it suddenly occurred to her that a girl who had always lived with her own belongings, as I had done, would probably dread the notion of being sent away alone amongst strangers, and that therefore the school project stood a very good chance of awing me into submission.
Instead of that, however, I evinced such delight at the prospect as took the wind out of her sails completely. I had not in reality the slightest objection to school, because it would be a change, and anything in the shape of a change would be welcome. And of course my manifestations of delight were all the more exaggerated as I perceived her annoyance at finding me look forward joyfully to the thing she hoped I should have feared. Thus she was thoroughly discomfited; and never again did I hear her say I was to go to school, though I several times returned to the subject of myself, asking to know when I was going, saying I hoped it would be soon, etc. etc. I must say that I greatly enjoyed having triumphed over her so completely; and I reflected with malicious pleasure on the vexation and humiliation it must be to her to know that I had detected the emptiness of her threat, and could henceforth look down upon her with all the contempt which an utterer of such threats is sure to inspire.
But though I did what I could to procure a little change and excitement by making myself disagreeable, and plaguing my stepmother and teachers, yet the tedium of my life was so great as to be almost unendurable; and again and again did I consider the expediency of putting an end to it by running away from home, and trusting to my own resources for getting a livelihood. I used to meditate seriously on how the thing was to be done, arranging every detail, foreseeing and meeting probable obstacles, providing for possible contingencies, and working the whole scheme out from beginning to end in my own mind. It seemed to me quite feasible; and as I was not a bit afraid of failure, or of what might happen to me when cast upon the world by myself, I should certainly have put my idea into practice if there had not been one consideration which deterred me and kept me where I was. This was the thought that I was very nearly seventeen. At that age I was convinced that girls invariably came out, and therefore took it for granted that I should do so also. And as the yoke under which I groaned would be broken before long in the natural course of events, it seemed better to resign myself for the short space during which I should still be subject to it, rather than to anticipate the day of emancipation by so desperate a measure as running away from home.
But in my calculations as to the time of my being brought out, I had quite omitted one most important factor, viz. what might be my stepmother's wishes in regard to that matter. These, as it happened, were diametrically opposed to mine. She had no fancy to go about with three young ladies in tow, nor did she feel inclined to risk spoiling the matrimonial chances of Margaret or Jane by leaving either of them at home, and taking me out with her instead. Therefore she intended to keep me back in a state of pupilage as long as possible, and to endeavour to get one or both of her own daughters married out of the way before I should make my appearance in society. In consequence of this private scheme of hers, the attainment of the age of seventeen, from which I had hoped such great things, produced no amelioration in my condition. I was astonished and disgusted to find that the days and weeks dragged heavily on at lessons as before, and brought no indications of the approach of that liberty to which I had looked forward confidently. Of course, I was not going to stand this without complaining, so I remonstrated with Lady Trecastle, declaring that I was being treated very unfairly, that every girl came out at seventeen, and that I ought now to be let to share equally with my step-sisters in whatever invitations for balls, dinners, or other gaieties might arrive at Castle Manor. My complaints were unheeded, however, and my grievance remained unredressed. I was not fit to go into society, she said; I was so untrained, stupid, disagreeable, and bad-tempered, that she would be ashamed to take me out, and I must positively remain in the schoolroom till my manners and temper should be improved. Chafing and fretting under repeated disappointments, I managed to get through another dreary year of monotony, but when my eighteenth birthday arrived and found me still a prisoner in the schoolroom, I resolved not to stand this treatment any longer. It became evident to me that her ladyship destined me to play the part of Cinderella. As I had no fancy for that rôle, and as I had not a fairy godmother to come to my assistance, I must take the matter into my own hands and act fairy godmother for myself. Therefore I determined to execute the plan which I had already reflected upon so often, and to run away from home and take my chance of what might afterwards befall me.