Villette
heart out; a thing seldom done. I would fain think your case over, and
take it with me to my oratory. Were you of our faith I should know what
to say—a mind so tossed can find repose but in the bosom of retreat,
and the punctual practice of piety. The world, it is well known, has no
satisfaction for that class of natures. Holy men have bidden penitents
like you to hasten their path upward by penance, self-denial, and
difficult good works. Tears are given them here for meat and
drink—bread of affliction and waters of affliction—their recompence
comes hereafter. It is my own conviction that these impressions under
which you are smarting are messengers from God to bring you back to the
true Church. You were made for our faith: depend upon it our faith
alone could heal and help you—Protestantism is altogether too dry,
cold, prosaic for you. The further I look into this matter, the more
plainly I see it is entirely out of the common order of things. On no
account would I lose sight of you. Go, my daughter, for the present;
but return to me again.”
I rose and thanked him. I was withdrawing when he signed me to return.
“You must not come to this church,” said he: “I see you are ill, and
this church is too cold; you must come to my house: I live——” (and he
gave me his address). “Be there to-morrow morning at ten.”
In reply to this appointment, I only bowed; and pulling down my veil,
and gathering round me my cloak, I glided away.
Did I, do you suppose, reader, contemplate venturing again within that
worthy priest’s reach? As soon should I have thought of walking into a
Babylonish furnace. That priest had arms which could influence me: he
was naturally kind, with a sentimental French kindness, to whose
softness I knew myself not wholly impervious. Without respecting some
sorts of affection, there was hardly any sort having a fibre of root in
reality, which I could rely on my force wholly to withstand. Had I gone
to him, he would have shown me all that was tender, and comforting, and
gentle, in the honest Popish superstition. Then he would have tried to
kindle, blow and stir up in me the zeal of good works. I know not how
it would all have ended. We all think ourselves strong in some points;
we all know ourselves weak in many; the probabilities are that had I
visited Numero 10, Rue des Mages, at the hour and day appointed, I
might just now, instead of writing this heretic narrative, be counting
my beads in the cell of a certain Carmelite convent on the Boulevard of
Crécy, in Villette. There was something of Fénélon about that benign
old priest; and whatever most of his brethren may be, and whatever I
may think of his Church and creed (and I like neither), of himself I
must ever retain a grateful recollection. He was kind when I needed
kindness; he did me good. May Heaven bless him!
Twilight had passed into night, and the lamps were lit in the streets
ere I issued from that sombre church. To turn back was now become
possible to me; the wild longing to breathe this October wind on the
little hill far without the city walls had ceased to be an imperative
impulse, and was softened into a wish with which Reason could cope: she
put it down, and I turned, as I thought, to the Rue Fossette. But I had
become involved in a part of the city with which I was not familiar; it
was the old part, and full of narrow streets of picturesque, ancient,
and mouldering houses. I was much too weak to be very collected, and I
was still too careless of my own welfare and safety to be cautious; I
grew embarrassed; I got immeshed in a network of turns unknown. I was
lost and had no resolution to ask guidance of any passenger.
If the storm had lulled a little at sunset, it made up now for lost
time. Strong and horizontal thundered the current of the wind from
north-west to south-east; it brought rain like spray, and sometimes a
sharp hail, like shot: it was cold and pierced me to the vitals. I bent
my head to meet it, but it beat me back. My heart did not fail at all
in this conflict; I only wished that I had wings and could ascend the
gale, spread and repose my pinions on its strength, career in its
course, sweep where it swept. While wishing this, I suddenly felt
colder where before I was cold, and more powerless where before I was
weak. I tried to reach the porch of a great building near, but the mass
of frontage and the giant spire turned black and vanished from my eyes.
Instead of sinking on the steps as I intended, I seemed to pitch
headlong down an abyss. I remember no more.
CHAPTER XVI.
AULD LANG SYNE.
Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw,
or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept
her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling
imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and
come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and
deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While
she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven’s
threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more,
all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of
whose companionship she was grown more than weary.
I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a
moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were
hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a
racking sort of struggle. The returning sense of sight came upon me,
red, as if it swam in blood; suspended hearing rushed back loud, like
thunder; consciousness revived in fear: I sat up appalled, wondering
into what region, amongst what strange beings I was waking. At first I
knew nothing I looked on: a wall was not a wall—a lamp not a lamp. I
should have understood what we call a ghost, as well as I did the
commonest object: which is another way of intimating that all my eye
rested on struck it as spectral. But the faculties soon settled each in
his place; the life-machine presently resumed its wonted and regular
working.
Still, I knew not where I was; only in time I saw I had been removed
from the spot where I fell: I lay on no portico-step; night and tempest
were excluded by walls, windows, and ceiling. Into some house I had
been carried—but what house?
I could only think of the pensionnat in the Rue Fossette. Still
half-dreaming, I tried hard to discover in what room they had put me;
whether the great dormitory, or one of the little dormitories. I was
puzzled, because I could not make the glimpses of furniture I saw
accord with my knowledge of any of these apartments. The empty white
beds were wanting, and the long line of large windows. “Surely,”
thought I, “it is not to Madame Beck’s own chamber they have carried
me!” And here my eye fell on an easy-chair covered with blue damask.
Other seats, cushioned to match, dawned on me by degrees; and at last I
took in the complete fact of a pleasant parlour, with a wood fire on a
clear-shining hearth, a carpet where arabesques of bright blue relieved
a ground of shaded fawn; pale walls over which a slight but endless
garland of azure forget-me-nots ran mazed and bewildered amongst myriad
gold leaves and tendrils. A gilded mirror filled up the space between
two windows, curtained amply with blue damask. In this mirror I saw
myself laid, not in bed, but on a sofa. I looked spectral; my eyes
larger and more hollow, my hair darker than was natural, by contrast
with my thin and ashen face. It was obvious, not only from the
furniture, but from the position of windows, doors, and fireplace, that
this was an unknown room in an unknown house.
Hardly less plain was it that my brain was not yet settled; for, as I
gazed at the blue arm-chair, it appeared to grow familiar; so did a
certain scroll-couch, and not less so the round centre-table, with a
blue-covering, bordered with autumn-tinted foliage; and, above all, two
little footstools with worked covers, and a small ebony-framed chair,
of which the seat and back were also worked with groups of brilliant
flowers on a dark ground.
Struck with these things, I explored further. Strange to say, old
acquaintance were all about me, and “auld lang syne” smiled out of
every nook. There were two oval miniatures over the mantel-piece, of
which I knew by heart the pearls about the high and powdered “heads;”
the velvets circling the white throats; the swell of the full muslin
kerchiefs: the pattern of the lace sleeve-ruffles. Upon the
mantel-shelf there were two china vases, some relics of a diminutive
tea-service, as smooth as enamel and as thin as egg-shell, and a white
centre ornament, a classic group in alabaster, preserved under glass.
Of all these things I could have told the peculiarities, numbered the
flaws or cracks, like any _clairvoyante_. Above all, there was a pair
of handscreens, with elaborate pencil-drawings finished like line
engravings; these, my very eyes ached at beholding again, recalling
hours when they had followed, stroke by stroke and touch by touch, a
tedious, feeble, finical, school-girl pencil held in these fingers, now
so skeleton-like.
Where was I? Not only in what spot of the world, but in what year of
our Lord? For all these objects were of past days, and of a distant
country. Ten years ago I bade them good-by; since my fourteenth year
they and I had never met. I gasped audibly, “Where am I?”
A shape hitherto unnoticed, stirred, rose, came forward: a shape
inharmonious with the environment, serving only to complicate the
riddle further. This was no more than a sort of native bonne, in a
common-place bonne’s cap and print-dress. She spoke neither French nor
English, and I could get no intelligence from her, not understanding
her phrases of dialect. But she bathed my temples and forehead with
some cool and perfumed water, and then she heightened the cushion on
which I reclined, made signs that I was not to speak, and resumed her
post at the foot of the sofa.
She was busy knitting; her eyes thus drawn from me, I could gaze on her
without interruption. I did mightily wonder how she came there, or what
she could have to do among the scenes, or with the days of my girlhood.
Still more I marvelled what those scenes and days could now have to do
with me.
Too weak to scrutinize thoroughly the mystery, I tried to settle it by
saying it was a mistake, a dream, a fever-fit; and yet I knew there
could be no mistake, and that I was not sleeping, and I believed I was
sane. I wished the room had not been so well lighted, that I might not
so clearly have seen the little pictures, the ornaments, the screens,
the worked chair. All these objects, as well as the blue-damask
furniture, were, in fact, precisely the same, in every minutest detail,
with those I so well remembered, and with which I had been so
thoroughly intimate, in the drawing-room of my godmother’s house at
Bretton. Methought the apartment only was changed, being of different
proportions and dimensions.
I thought of Bedreddin Hassan, transported in his sleep from Cairo to
the gates of Damascus. Had a Genius stooped his dark wing down the
storm to whose stress I had succumbed, and gathering me from the
church-steps, and “rising high into the air,” as the eastern tale said,
had he borne me over land and ocean, and laid me quietly down beside a
hearth of Old England? But no; I knew the fire of that hearth burned
before its Lares no more—it went out long ago, and the household gods
had been carried elsewhere.
The bonne turned again to survey me, and seeing my eyes wide open, and,
I suppose, deeming their expression perturbed and excited, she put down
her knitting. I saw her busied for a moment at a little stand; she