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.
