Villette
nights to undergo in that huge empty house. How I used to pray to
Heaven for consolation and support! With what dread force the
conviction would grasp me that Fate was my permanent foe, never to be
conciliated. I did not, in my heart, arraign the mercy or justice of
God for this; I concluded it to be a part of his great plan that some
must deeply suffer while they live, and I thrilled in the certainty
that of this number, I was one.
It was some relief when an aunt of the crétin, a kind old woman, came
one day, and took away my strange, deformed companion. The hapless
creature had been at times a heavy charge; I could not take her out
beyond the garden, and I could not leave her a minute alone: for her
poor mind, like her body, was warped: its propensity was to evil. A
vague bent to mischief, an aimless malevolence, made constant vigilance
indispensable. As she very rarely spoke, and would sit for hours
together moping and mowing, and distorting her features with
indescribable grimaces, it was more like being prisoned with some
strange tameless animal, than associating with a human being. Then
there were personal attentions to be rendered which required the nerve
of a hospital nurse; my resolution was so tried, it sometimes fell
dead-sick. These duties should not have fallen on me; a servant, now
absent, had rendered them hitherto, and in the hurry of holiday
departure, no substitute to fill this office had been provided. This
tax and trial were by no means the least I have known in life. Still,
menial and distasteful as they were, my mental pain was far more
wasting and wearing. Attendance on the crétin deprived me often of the
power and inclination to swallow a meal, and sent me faint to the fresh
air, and the well or fountain in the court; but this duty never wrung
my heart, or brimmed my eyes, or scalded my cheek with tears hot as
molten metal.
The crétin being gone, I was free to walk out. At first I lacked
courage to venture very far from the Rue Fossette, but by degrees I
sought the city gates, and passed them, and then went wandering away
far along chaussées, through fields, beyond cemeteries, Catholic and
Protestant, beyond farmsteads, to lanes and little woods, and I know
not where. A goad thrust me on, a fever forbade me to rest; a want of
companionship maintained in my soul the cravings of a most deadly
famine. I often walked all day, through the burning noon and the arid
afternoon, and the dusk evening, and came back with moonrise.
While wandering in solitude, I would sometimes picture the present
probable position of others, my acquaintance. There was Madame Beck at
a cheerful watering-place with her children, her mother, and a whole
troop of friends who had sought the same scene of relaxation. Zélie St.
Pierre was at Paris, with her relatives; the other teachers were at
their homes. There was Ginevra Fanshawe, whom certain of her
connections had carried on a pleasant tour southward. Ginevra seemed to
me the happiest. She was on the route of beautiful scenery; these
September suns shone for her on fertile plains, where harvest and
vintage matured under their mellow beam. These gold and crystal moons
rose on her vision over blue horizons waved in mounted lines.
But all this was nothing; I too felt those autumn suns and saw those
harvest moons, and I almost wished to be covered in with earth and
turf, deep out of their influence; for I could not live in their light,
nor make them comrades, nor yield them affection. But Ginevra had a
kind of spirit with her, empowered to give constant strength and
comfort, to gladden daylight and embalm darkness; the best of the good
genii that guard humanity curtained her with his wings, and canopied
her head with his bending form. By True Love was Ginevra followed:
never could she be alone. Was she insensible to this presence? It
seemed to me impossible: I could not realize such deadness. I imagined
her grateful in secret, loving now with reserve; but purposing one day
to show how much she loved: I pictured her faithful hero half conscious
of her coy fondness, and comforted by that consciousness: I conceived
an electric chord of sympathy between them, a fine chain of mutual
understanding, sustaining union through a separation of a hundred
leagues—carrying, across mound and hollow, communication by prayer and
wish. Ginevra gradually became with me a sort of heroine. One day,
perceiving this growing illusion, I said, “I really believe my nerves
are getting overstretched: my mind has suffered somewhat too much a
malady is growing upon it—what shall I do? How shall I keep well?”
Indeed there was no way to keep well under the circumstances. At last a
day and night of peculiarly agonizing depression were succeeded by
physical illness, I took perforce to my bed. About this time the Indian
summer closed and the equinoctial storms began; and for nine dark and
wet days, of which the hours rushed on all turbulent, deaf,
dishevelled—bewildered with sounding hurricane—I lay in a strange fever
of the nerves and blood. Sleep went quite away. I used to rise in the
night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. A rattle of
the window, a cry of the blast only replied—Sleep never came!
I err. She came once, but in anger. Impatient of my importunity she
brought with her an avenging dream. By the clock of St. Jean Baptiste,
that dream remained scarce fifteen minutes—a brief space, but sufficing
to wring my whole frame with unknown anguish; to confer a nameless
experience that had the hue, the mien, the terror, the very tone of a
visitation from eternity. Between twelve and one that night a cup was
forced to my lips, black, strong, strange, drawn from no well, but
filled up seething from a bottomless and boundless sea. Suffering,
brewed in temporal or calculable measure, and mixed for mortal lips,
tastes not as this suffering tasted. Having drank and woke, I thought
all was over: the end come and past by. Trembling fearfully—as
consciousness returned—ready to cry out on some fellow-creature to help
me, only that I knew no fellow-creature was near enough to catch the
wild summons—Goton in her far distant attic could not hear—I rose on my
knees in bed. Some fearful hours went over me: indescribably was I
torn, racked and oppressed in mind. Amidst the horrors of that dream I
think the worst lay here. Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved
_me_ well in life, met me elsewhere, alienated: galled was my inmost
spirit with an unutterable sense of despair about the future. Motive
there was none why I should try to recover or wish to live; and yet
quite unendurable was the pitiless and haughty voice in which Death
challenged me to engage his unknown terrors. When I tried to pray I
could only utter these words: “From my youth up Thy terrors have I
suffered with a troubled mind.”
Most true was it.
On bringing me my tea next morning Goton urged me to call in a doctor.
I would not: I thought no doctor could cure me.
One evening—and I was not delirious: I was in my sane mind, I got up—I
dressed myself, weak and shaking. The solitude and the stillness of the
long dormitory could not be borne any longer; the ghastly white beds
were turning into spectres—the coronal of each became a death’s-head,
huge and sun-bleached—dead dreams of an elder world and mightier race
lay frozen in their wide gaping eyeholes. That evening more firmly than
ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and
Hope a false idol—blind, bloodless, and of granite core. I felt, too,
that the trial God had appointed me was gaining its climax, and must
now be turned by my own hands, hot, feeble, trembling as they were. It
rained still, and blew; but with more clemency, I thought, than it had
poured and raged all day. Twilight was falling, and I deemed its
influence pitiful; from the lattice I saw coming night-clouds trailing
low like banners drooping. It seemed to me that at this hour there was
affection and sorrow in Heaven above for all pain suffered on earth
beneath; the weight of my dreadful dream became alleviated—that
insufferable thought of being no more loved—no more owned, half-yielded
to hope of the contrary—I was sure this hope would shine clearer if I
got out from under this house-roof, which was crushing as the slab of a
tomb, and went outside the city to a certain quiet hill, a long way
distant in the fields. Covered with a cloak (I could not be delirious,
for I had sense and recollection to put on warm clothing), forth I set.
The bells of a church arrested me in passing; they seemed to call me in
to the _salut_, and I went in. Any solemn rite, any spectacle of
sincere worship, any opening for appeal to God was as welcome to me
then as bread to one in extremity of want. I knelt down with others on
the stone pavement. It was an old solemn church, its pervading gloom
not gilded but purpled by light shed through stained glass.
Few worshippers were assembled, and, the _salut_ over, half of them
departed. I discovered soon that those left remained to confess. I did
not stir. Carefully every door of the church was shut; a holy quiet
sank upon, and a solemn shade gathered about us. After a space,
breathless and spent in prayer, a penitent approached the confessional.
I watched. She whispered her avowal; her shrift was whispered back; she
returned consoled. Another went, and another. A pale lady, kneeling
near me, said in a low, kind voice:—“Go you now, I am not quite
prepared.”
Mechanically obedient, I rose and went. I knew what I was about; my
mind had run over the intent with lightning-speed. To take this step
could not make me more wretched than I was; it might soothe me.
The priest within the confessional never turned his eyes to regard me;
he only quietly inclined his ear to my lips. He might be a good man,
but this duty had become to him a sort of form: he went through it with
the phlegm of custom. I hesitated; of the formula of confession I was
ignorant: instead of commencing, then, with the prelude usual, I
said:—“Mon père, je suis Protestante.”
He directly turned. He was not a native priest: of that class, the cast
of physiognomy is, almost invariably, grovelling: I saw by his profile
and brow he was a Frenchman; though grey and advanced in years, he did
not, I think, lack feeling or intelligence. He inquired, not unkindly,
why, being a Protestant, I came to him?
I said I was perishing for a word of advice or an accent of comfort. I
had been living for some weeks quite alone; I had been ill; I had a
pressure of affliction on my mind of which it would hardly any longer
endure the weight.
“Was it a sin, a crime?” he inquired, somewhat startled. I reassured
him on this point, and, as well as I could, I showed him the mere
outline of my experience.
He looked thoughtful, surprised, puzzled. “You take me unawares,” said
he. “I have not had such a case as yours before: ordinarily we know our
routine, and are prepared; but this makes a great break in the common
course of confession. I am hardly furnished with counsel fitting the
circumstances.”
Of course, I had not expected he would be; but the mere relief of
communication in an ear which was human and sentient, yet
consecrated—the mere pouring out of some portion of long accumulating,
long pent-up pain into a vessel whence it could not be again
diffused—had done me good. I was already solaced.
“Must I go, father?” I asked of him as he sat silent.
“My daughter,” he said kindly—and I am sure he was a kind man: he had a
compassionate eye—“for the present you had better go: but I assure you
your words have struck me. Confession, like other things, is apt to
become formal and trivial with habit. You have come and poured your