Villette
savours of vindictiveness. Night, too, becomes an unkindly time, and
sleep and his nature cannot agree: strange starts and struggles harass
his couch: the sinister band of bad dreams, with horror of calamity,
and sick dread of entire desertion at their head, join the league
against him. Poor wretch! He does his best to bear up, but he is a
poor, pallid, wasting wretch, despite that best.
Towards the last of these long seven weeks I admitted, what through the
other six I had jealously excluded—the conviction that these blanks
were inevitable: the result of circumstances, the fiat of fate, a part
of my life’s lot and—above all—a matter about whose origin no question
must ever be asked, for whose painful sequence no murmur ever uttered.
Of course I did not blame myself for suffering: I thank God I had a
truer sense of justice than to fall into any imbecile extravagance of
self-accusation; and as to blaming others for silence, in my reason I
well knew them blameless, and in my heart acknowledged them so: but it
was a rough and heavy road to travel, and I longed for better days.
I tried different expedients to sustain and fill existence: I commenced
an elaborate piece of lace-work, I studied German pretty hard, I
undertook a course of regular reading of the driest and thickest books
in the library; in all my efforts I was as orthodox as I knew how to
be. Was there error somewhere? Very likely. I only know the result was
as if I had gnawed a file to satisfy hunger, or drank brine to quench
thirst.
My hour of torment was the post-hour. Unfortunately, I knew it too
well, and tried as vainly as assiduously to cheat myself of that
knowledge; dreading the rack of expectation, and the sick collapse of
disappointment which daily preceded and followed upon that
well-recognised ring.
I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always
upon the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter.
Oh!—to speak truth, and drop that tone of a false calm which long to
sustain, outwears nature’s endurance—I underwent in those seven weeks
bitter fears and pains, strange inward trials, miserable defections of
hope, intolerable encroachments of despair. This last came so near me
sometimes that her breath went right through me. I used to feel it like
a baleful air or sigh, penetrate deep, and make motion pause at my
heart, or proceed only under unspeakable oppression. The letter—the
well-beloved letter—would not come; and it was all of sweetness in life
I had to look for.
In the very extremity of want, I had recourse again, and yet again, to
the little packet in the case—the five letters. How splendid that month
seemed whose skies had beheld the rising of these five stars! It was
always at night I visited them, and not daring to ask every evening for
a candle in the kitchen, I bought a wax taper and matches to light it,
and at the study-hour stole up to the dormitory and feasted on my crust
from the Barmecide’s loaf. It did not nourish me: I pined on it, and
got as thin as a shadow: otherwise I was not ill.
Reading there somewhat late one evening, and feeling that the power to
read was leaving me—for the letters from incessant perusal were losing
all sap and significance: my gold was withering to leaves before my
eyes, and I was sorrowing over the disillusion—suddenly a quick
tripping foot ran up the stairs. I knew Ginevra Fanshawe’s step: she
had dined in town that afternoon; she was now returned, and would come
here to replace her shawl, &c. in the wardrobe.
Yes: in she came, dressed in bright silk, with her shawl falling from
her shoulders, and her curls, half-uncurled in the damp of night,
drooping careless and heavy upon her neck. I had hardly time to
recasket my treasures and lock them up when she was at my side her
humour seemed none of the best.
“It has been a stupid evening: they are stupid people,” she began.
“Who? Mrs. Cholmondeley? I thought you always found her house
charming?”
“I have not been to Mrs. Cholmondeley’s.”
“Indeed! Have you made new acquaintance?”
“My uncle de Bassompierre is come.”
“Your uncle de Bassompierre! Are you not glad?—I thought he was a
favourite.”
“You thought wrong: the man is odious; I hate him.”
“Because he is a foreigner? or for what other reason of equal weight?”
“He is not a foreigner. The man is English enough, goodness knows; and
had an English name till three or four years ago; but his mother was a
foreigner, a de Bassompierre, and some of her family are dead and have
left him estates, a title, and this name: he is quite a great man now.”
“Do you hate him for that reason?”
“Don’t I know what mamma says about him? He is not my own uncle, but
married mamma’s sister. Mamma detests him; she says he killed aunt
Ginevra with unkindness: he looks like a bear. Such a dismal evening!”
she went on. “I’ll go no more to his big hotel. Fancy me walking into a
room alone, and a great man fifty years old coming forwards, and after
a few minutes’ conversation actually turning his back upon me, and then
abruptly going out of the room. Such odd ways! I daresay his conscience
smote him, for they all say at home I am the picture of aunt Ginevra.
Mamma often declares the likeness is quite ridiculous.”
“Were you the only visitor?”
“The only visitor? Yes; then there was missy, my cousin: little
spoiled, pampered thing.”
“M. de Bassompierre has a daughter?”
“Yes, yes: don’t tease one with questions. Oh, dear! I am so tired.”
She yawned. Throwing herself without ceremony on my bed she added, “It
seems Mademoiselle was nearly crushed to a jelly in a hubbub at the
theatre some weeks ago.”
“Ah! indeed. And they live at a large hotel in the Rue Crécy?”
“Justement. How do _you_ know?”
“I have been there.”
“Oh, you have? Really! You go everywhere in these days. I suppose
Mother Bretton took you. She and Esculapius have the _entrée_ of the de
Bassompierre apartments: it seems ‘my son John’ attended missy on the
occasion of her accident—Accident? Bah! All affectation! I don’t think
she was squeezed more than she richly deserves for her airs. And now
there is quite an intimacy struck up: I heard something about ‘auld
lang syne,’ and what not. Oh, how stupid they all were!”
“_All!_ You said you were the only visitor.”
“Did I? You see one forgets to particularize an old woman and her boy.”
“Dr. and Mrs. Bretton were at M. de Bassompierre’s this evening?”
“Ay, ay! as large as life; and missy played the hostess. What a
conceited doll it is!”
Soured and listless, Miss Fanshawe was beginning to disclose the causes
of her prostrate condition. There had been a retrenchment of incense, a
diversion or a total withholding of homage and attention coquetry had
failed of effect, vanity had undergone mortification. She lay fuming in
the vapours.
“Is Miss de Bassompierre quite well now?” I asked.
“As well as you or I, no doubt; but she is an affected little thing,
and gave herself invalid airs to attract medical notice. And to see the
old dowager making her recline on a couch, and ‘my son John’
prohibiting excitement, etcetera—faugh! the scene was quite sickening.”
“It would not have been so if the object of attention had been changed:
if you had taken Miss de Bassompierre’s place.”
“Indeed! I hate ‘my son John!’”
“‘My son John!’—whom do you indicate by that name? Dr. Bretton’s mother
never calls him so.”
“Then she ought. A clownish, bearish John he is.”
“You violate the truth in saying so; and as the whole of my patience is
now spun off the distaff, I peremptorily desire you to rise from that
bed, and vacate this room.”
“Passionate thing! Your face is the colour of a coquelicot. I wonder
what always makes you so mighty testy à l’endroit du gros Jean? ‘John
Anderson, my Joe, John!’ Oh, the distinguished name!”
Thrilling with exasperation, to which it would have been sheer folly to
have given vent—for there was no contending with that unsubstantial
feather, that mealy-winged moth—I extinguished my taper, locked my
bureau, and left her, since she would not leave me. Small-beer as she
was, she had turned insufferably acid.
The morrow was Thursday and a half-holiday. Breakfast was over; I had
withdrawn to the first classe. The dreaded hour, the post-hour, was
nearing, and I sat waiting it, much as a ghost-seer might wait his
spectre. Less than ever was a letter probable; still, strive as I
would, I could not forget that it was possible. As the moments
lessened, a restlessness and fear almost beyond the average assailed
me. It was a day of winter east wind, and I had now for some time
entered into that dreary fellowship with the winds and their changes,
so little known, so incomprehensible to the healthy. The north and east
owned a terrific influence, making all pain more poignant, all sorrow
sadder. The south could calm, the west sometimes cheer: unless, indeed,
they brought on their wings the burden of thunder-clouds, under the
weight and warmth of which all energy died.
Bitter and dark as was this January day, I remember leaving the classe,
and running down without bonnet to the bottom of the long garden, and
then lingering amongst the stripped shrubs, in the forlorn hope that
the postman’s ring might occur while I was out of hearing, and I might
thus be spared the thrill which some particular nerve or nerves, almost
gnawed through with the unremitting tooth of a fixed idea, were
becoming wholly unfit to support. I lingered as long as I dared without
fear of attracting attention by my absence. I muffled my head in my
apron, and stopped my ears in terror of the torturing clang, sure to be
followed by such blank silence, such barren vacuum for me. At last I
ventured to re-enter the first classe, where, as it was not yet nine
o’clock, no pupils had been admitted. The first thing seen was a white
object on my black desk, a white, flat object. The post had, indeed,
arrived; by me unheard. Rosine had visited my cell, and, like some
angel, had left behind her a bright token of her presence. That shining
thing on the desk was indeed a letter, a real letter; I saw so much at
the distance of three yards, and as I had but one correspondent on
earth, from that one it must come. He remembered me yet. How deep a
pulse of gratitude sent new life through my heart.
Drawing near, bending and looking on the letter, in trembling but
almost certain hope of seeing a known hand, it was my lot to find, on
the contrary, an autograph for the moment deemed unknown—a pale female
scrawl, instead of a firm, masculine character. I then thought fate was
_too_ hard for me, and I said, audibly, “This is cruel.”
But I got over that pain also. Life is still life, whatever its pangs:
our eyes and ears and their use remain with us, though the prospect of
what pleases be wholly withdrawn, and the sound of what consoles be
quite silenced.
I opened the billet: by this time I had recognised its handwriting as
perfectly familiar. It was dated “La Terrasse,” and it ran thus:—
“DEAR LUCY,—It occurs to me to inquire what you have been doing with
yourself for the last month or two? Not that I suspect you would have
the least difficulty in giving an account of your proceedings. I
daresay you have been just as busy and as happy as ourselves at La
Terrasse. As to Graham, his professional connection extends daily: he
is so much sought after, so much engaged, that I tell him he will grow
quite conceited. Like a right good mother, as I am, I do my best to
keep him down: no flattery does he get from me, as you know. And yet,
Lucy, he is a fine fellow: his mother’s heart dances at the sight of
him. After being hurried here and there the whole day, and passing the
ordeal of fifty sorts of tempers, and combating a hundred caprices, and