Villette
of spirits and volubility, he listening with an air of good-natured
amenity, dashed with that unconscious roguish archness I find it
difficult to describe.
I noticed that though he spoke French well, he spoke English better; he
had, too, an English complexion, eyes, and form. I noticed more. As he
passed me in leaving the room, turning his face in my direction one
moment—not to address me, but to speak to Madame, yet so standing, that
I almost necessarily looked up at him—a recollection which had been
struggling to form in my memory, since the first moment I heard his
voice, started up perfected. This was the very gentleman to whom I had
spoken at the bureau; who had helped me in the matter of the trunk; who
had been my guide through the dark, wet park. Listening, as he passed
down the long vestibule out into the street, I recognised his very
tread: it was the same firm and equal stride I had followed under the
dripping trees.
It was to be concluded that this young surgeon-physician’s first visit
to the Rue Fossette would be the last. The respectable Dr. Pillule
being expected home the next day, there appeared no reason why his
temporary substitute should again represent him; but the Fates had
written their decree to the contrary.
Dr. Pillule had been summoned to see a rich old hypochondriac at the
antique university town of Bouquin-Moisi, and upon his prescribing
change of air and travel as remedies, he was retained to accompany the
timid patient on a tour of some weeks; it but remained, therefore, for
the new doctor to continue his attendance at the Rue Fossette.
I often saw him when he came; for Madame would not trust the little
invalid to Trinette, but required me to spend much of my time in the
nursery. I think he was skilful. Fifine recovered rapidly under his
care, yet even her convalescence did not hasten his dismissal. Destiny
and Madame Beck seemed in league, and both had ruled that he should
make deliberate acquaintance with the vestibule, the private staircase
and upper chambers of the Rue Fossette.
No sooner did Fifine emerge from his hands than Désirée declared
herself ill. That possessed child had a genius for simulation, and
captivated by the attentions and indulgences of a sick-room, she came
to the conclusion that an illness would perfectly accommodate her
tastes, and took her bed accordingly. She acted well, and her mother
still better; for while the whole case was transparent to Madame Beck
as the day, she treated it with an astonishingly well-assured air of
gravity and good faith.
What surprised me was, that Dr. John (so the young Englishman had
taught Fifine to call him, and we all took from her the habit of
addressing him by this name, till it became an established custom, and
he was known by no other in the Rue Fossette)—that Dr. John consented
tacitly to adopt Madame’s tactics, and to fall in with her manœuvres.
He betrayed, indeed, a period of comic doubt, cast one or two rapid
glances from the child to the mother, indulged in an interval of
self-consultation, but finally resigned himself with a good grace to
play his part in the farce. Désirée eat like a raven, gambolled day and
night in her bed, pitched tents with the sheets and blankets, lounged
like a Turk amidst pillows and bolsters, diverted herself with throwing
her shoes at her bonne and grimacing at her sisters—over-flowed, in
short, with unmerited health and evil spirits; only languishing when
her mamma and the physician paid their diurnal visit. Madame Beck, I
knew, was glad, at any price, to have her daughter in bed out of the
way of mischief; but I wondered that Dr. John did not tire of the
business.
Every day, on this mere pretext of a motive, he gave punctual
attendance; Madame always received him with the same empressement, the
same sunshine for himself, the same admirably counterfeited air of
concern for her child. Dr. John wrote harmless prescriptions for the
patient, and viewed her mother with a shrewdly sparkling eye. Madame
caught his rallying looks without resenting them—she had too much good
sense for that. Supple as the young doctor seemed, one could not
despise him—this pliant part was evidently not adopted in the design to
curry favour with his employer: while he liked his office at the
pensionnat, and lingered strangely about the Rue Fossette, he was
independent, almost careless in his carriage there; and yet, too, he
was often thoughtful and preoccupied.
It was not perhaps my business to observe the mystery of his bearing,
or search out its origin or aim; but, placed as I was, I could hardly
help it. He laid himself open to my observation, according to my
presence in the room just that degree of notice and consequence a
person of my exterior habitually expects: that is to say, about what is
given to unobtrusive articles of furniture, chairs of ordinary joiner’s
work, and carpets of no striking pattern. Often, while waiting for
Madame, he would muse, smile, watch, or listen like a man who thinks
himself alone. I, meantime, was free to puzzle over his countenance and
movements, and wonder what could be the meaning of that peculiar
interest and attachment—all mixed up with doubt and strangeness, and
inexplicably ruled by some presiding spell—which wedded him to this
demi-convent, secluded in the built-up core of a capital. He, I
believe, never remembered that I had eyes in my head, much less a brain
behind them.
Nor would he ever have found this out, but that one day, while he sat
in the sunshine and I was observing the colouring of his hair,
whiskers, and complexion—the whole being of such a tone as a strong
light brings out with somewhat perilous force (indeed I recollect I was
driven to compare his beamy head in my thoughts to that of the “golden
image” which Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up), an idea new, sudden,
and startling, riveted my attention with an over-mastering strength and
power of attraction. I know not to this day how I looked at him: the
force of surprise, and also of conviction, made me forget myself; and I
only recovered wonted consciousness when I saw that his notice was
arrested, and that it had caught my movement in a clear little oval
mirror fixed in the side of the window recess—by the aid of which
reflector Madame often secretly spied persons walking in the garden
below. Though of so gay and sanguine a temperament, he was not without
a certain nervous sensitiveness which made him ill at ease under a
direct, inquiring gaze. On surprising me thus, he turned and said, in a
tone which, though courteous, had just so much dryness in it as to mark
a shade of annoyance, as well as to give to what was said the character
of rebuke, “Mademoiselle does not spare me: I am not vain enough to
fancy that it is my merits which attract her attention; it must then be
some defect. Dare I ask—what?”
I was confounded, as the reader may suppose, yet not with an
irrecoverable confusion; being conscious that it was from no emotion of
incautious admiration, nor yet in a spirit of unjustifiable
inquisitiveness, that I had incurred this reproof. I might have cleared
myself on the spot, but would not. I did not speak. I was not in the
habit of speaking to him. Suffering him, then, to think what he chose
and accuse me of what he would, I resumed some work I had dropped, and
kept my head bent over it during the remainder of his stay. There is a
perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by
misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known,
we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored. What honest
man, on being casually taken for a housebreaker, does not feel rather
tickled than vexed at the mistake?
CHAPTER XI.
THE PORTRESS’S CABINET.
It was summer and very hot. Georgette, the youngest of Madame Beck’s
children, took a fever. Désirée, suddenly cured of her ailments, was,
together with Fifine, packed off to Bonne-Maman, in the country, by way
of precaution against infection. Medical aid was now really needed, and
Madame, choosing to ignore the return of Dr. Pillule, who had been at
home a week, conjured his English rival to continue his visits. One or
two of the pensionnaires complained of headache, and in other respects
seemed slightly to participate in Georgette’s ailment. “Now, at last,”
I thought, “Dr. Pillule must be recalled: the prudent directress will
never venture to permit the attendance of so young a man on the
pupils.”
The directress was very prudent, but she could also be intrepidly
venturous. She actually introduced Dr. John to the school-division of
the premises, and established him in attendance on the proud and
handsome Blanche de Melcy, and the vain, flirting Angélique, her
friend. Dr. John, I thought, testified a certain gratification at this
mark of confidence; and if discretion of bearing could have justified
the step, it would by him have been amply justified. Here, however, in
this land of convents and confessionals, such a presence as his was not
to be suffered with impunity in a “pensionnat de demoiselles.” The
school gossiped, the kitchen whispered, the town caught the rumour,
parents wrote letters and paid visits of remonstrance. Madame, had she
been weak, would now have been lost: a dozen rival educational houses
were ready to improve this false step—if false step it were—to her
ruin; but Madame was not weak, and little Jesuit though she might be,
yet I clapped the hands of my heart, and with its voice cried “brava!”
as I watched her able bearing, her skilled management, her temper and
her firmness on this occasion.
She met the alarmed parents with a good-humoured, easy grace for nobody
matched her in, I know not whether to say the possession or the
assumption of a certain “rondeur et franchise de bonne femme;” which on
various occasions gained the point aimed at with instant and complete
success, where severe gravity and serious reasoning would probably have
failed.
“Ce pauvre Docteur Jean!” she would say, chuckling and rubbing joyously
her fat little white hands; “ce cher jeune homme! le meilleur créature
du monde!” and go on to explain how she happened to be employing him
for her own children, who were so fond of him they would scream
themselves into fits at the thought of another doctor; how, where she
had confidence for her own, she thought it natural to repose trust for
others, and au reste, it was only the most temporary expedient in the
world; Blanche and Angélique had the migraine; Dr. John had written a
prescription; voilà tout!
The parents’ mouths were closed. Blanche and Angélique saved her all
remaining trouble by chanting loud duets in their physician’s praise;
the other pupils echoed them, unanimously declaring that when they were
ill they would have Dr. John and nobody else; and Madame laughed, and
the parents laughed too. The Labassecouriens must have a large organ of
philoprogenitiveness: at least the indulgence of offspring is carried
by them to excessive lengths; the law of most households being the
children’s will. Madame now got credit for having acted on this
occasion in a spirit of motherly partiality: she came off with flying
colours; people liked her as a directress better than ever.
To this day I never fully understood why she thus risked her interest
for the sake of Dr. John. What people said, of course I know well: the
whole house—pupils, teachers, servants included—affirmed that she was
going to marry him. So they had settled it; difference of age seemed to
make no obstacle in their eyes: it was to be so.
It must be admitted that appearances did not wholly discountenance this
idea; Madame seemed so bent on retaining his services, so oblivious of
her former protégé, Pillule. She made, too, such a point of personally