Cranford

Major Gordon’s Return

The narrator and Miss Jessie fall to talking of the past until Miss Jenkyns reappears in an odd, excited state and announces that a caller has arrived—someone Miss Jessie once knew. Miss Jessie turns pale, then scarlet, and can barely stammer a question. The card reveals it to be Major Gordon, a tall, frank man of forty who once served in Captain Brown’s regiment. In the store-room, Miss Jenkyns shares Major Gordon’s history: he had fallen in love with the blooming Miss Jessie of eighteen, eventually proposed after inheriting a Scottish estate, and been refused because she would not abandon her ailing sister. He had gone abroad angry and believing her cold, only to see the account of Captain Brown’s death in Galignani at Rome on his way home.

A Proper Place for His Arm

Before the story is finished, Miss Matty bursts in, fresh from a morning out, aghast at the sight of a gentleman sitting in the drawing-room with his arm around Miss Jessie’s waist. Miss Jenkyns instantly snubs her down, declaring it “the most proper place in the world for his arm to be in,” and orders her to mind her own business. The rebuke, from a sister long held up as a model of feminine decorum, strikes Miss Matty a double blow and sends her from the room.

The Last Memory of Miss Jenkyns

Many years later, the narrator sees Miss Jenkyns again, now old and feeble, with something of her strong mind diminished. Little Flora Gordon—Mrs. Gordon’s daughter—is staying with the Misses Jenkyns and reading aloud from the Rambler on the sofa beside her. Miss Jenkyns, her eyes failing, rambles on about the wonderful, improving book and then drifts back to a memory of her girlhood, when she acted Lucy in “Old Poz,” the very book whose reading she associates, with fond absurdity, with Captain Brown’s death.