Villette
hardly ever will think and study for themselves—who have no idea of
grappling with a difficulty, and overcoming it by dint of reflection or
application—our progress, which in truth was very leisurely, seemed to
astound her. In her eyes, we were a pair of glacial prodigies, cold,
proud, and preternatural.
The young Countess _was_ a little proud, a little fastidious: and
perhaps, with her native delicacy and beauty, she had a right to these
feelings; but I think it was a total mistake to ascribe them to me. I
never evaded the morning salute, which Paulina would slip when she
could; nor was a certain little manner of still disdain a weapon known
in my armoury of defence; whereas, Paulina always kept it clear, fine,
and bright, and any rough German sally called forth at once its steelly
glisten.
Honest Anna Braun, in some measure, felt this difference; and while she
half-feared, half-worshipped Paulina, as a sort of dainty nymph—an
Undine—she took refuge with me, as a being all mortal, and of easier
mood.
A book we liked well to read and translate was Schiller’s Ballads;
Paulina soon learned to read them beautifully; the Fräulein would
listen to her with a broad smile of pleasure, and say her voice sounded
like music. She translated them, too, with a facile flow of language,
and in a strain of kindred and poetic fervour: her cheek would flush,
her lips tremblingly smile, her beauteous eyes kindle or melt as she
went on. She learnt the best by heart, and would often recite them when
we were alone together. One she liked well was “Des Mädchens Klage:”
that is, she liked well to repeat the words, she found plaintive melody
in the sound; the sense she would criticise. She murmured, as we sat
over the fire one evening:—
Du Heilige, rufe dein Kind zurück,
Ich habe genossen das irdische Glück,
Ich habe gelebt und geliebet!
“Lived and loved!” said she, “is that the summit of earthly happiness,
the end of life—to love? I don’t think it is. It may be the extreme of
mortal misery, it may be sheer waste of time, and fruitless torture of
feeling. If Schiller had said to _be_ loved, he might have come nearer
the truth. Is not that another thing, Lucy, to be loved?”
“I suppose it may be: but why consider the subject? What is love to
you? What do you know about it?”
She crimsoned, half in irritation, half in shame.
“Now, Lucy,” she said, “I won’t take that from you. It may be well for
papa to look on me as a baby: I rather prefer that he should thus view
me; but _you_ know and shall learn to acknowledge that I am verging on
my nineteenth year.”
“No matter if it were your twenty-ninth; we will anticipate no feelings
by discussion and conversation; we will not talk about love.”
“Indeed, indeed!” said she—all in hurry and heat—“you may think to
check and hold me in, as much as you please; but I _have_ talked about
it, and heard about it too; and a great deal and lately, and
disagreeably and detrimentally: and in a way you wouldn’t approve.”
And the vexed, triumphant, pretty, naughty being laughed. I could not
discern what she meant, and I would not ask her: I was nonplussed.
Seeing, however, the utmost innocence in her countenance—combined with
some transient perverseness and petulance—I said at last,—
“Who talks to you disagreeably and detrimentally on such matters? Who
that has near access to you would dare to do it?”
“Lucy,” replied she more softly, “it is a person who makes me miserable
sometimes; and I wish she would keep away—I don’t want her.”
“But who, Paulina, can it be? You puzzle me much.”
“It is—it is my cousin Ginevra. Every time she has leave to visit Mrs.
Cholmondeley she calls here, and whenever she finds me alone she begins
to talk about her admirers. Love, indeed! You should hear all she has
to say about love.”
“Oh, I have heard it,” said I, quite coolly; “and on the whole, perhaps
it is as well you should have heard it too: it is not to be regretted,
it is all right. Yet, surely, Ginevra’s mind cannot influence yours.
You can look over both her head and her heart.”
“She does influence me very much. She has the art of disturbing my
happiness and unsettling my opinions. She hurts me through the feelings
and people dearest to me.”
“What does she say, Paulina? Give me some idea. There may be
counteraction of the damage done.”
“The people I have longest and most esteemed are degraded by her. She
does not spare Mrs. Bretton—she does not spare…. Graham.”
“No, I daresay: and how does she mix up these with her sentiment and
her…._love_? She does mix them, I suppose?”
“Lucy, she is insolent; and, I believe, false. You know Dr. Bretton. We
both know him. He may be careless and proud; but when was he ever mean
or slavish? Day after day she shows him to me kneeling at her feet,
pursuing her like her shadow. She—repulsing him with insult, and he
imploring her with infatuation. Lucy, is it true? Is any of it true?”
“It may be true that he once thought her handsome: does she give him
out as still her suitor?”
“She says she might marry him any day: he only waits her consent.”
“It is these tales which have caused that reserve in your manner
towards Graham which your father noticed.”
“They have certainly made me all doubtful about his character. As
Ginevra speaks, they do not carry with them the sound of unmixed truth:
I believe she exaggerates—perhaps invents—but I want to know how far.”
“Suppose we bring Miss Fanshawe to some proof. Give her an opportunity
of displaying the power she boasts.”
“I could do that to-morrow. Papa has asked some gentlemen to dinner,
all savants. Graham, who, papa is beginning to discover, is a savant,
too—skilled, they say, in more than one branch of science—is among the
number. Now I should be miserable to sit at table unsupported, amidst
such a party. I could not talk to Messieurs A—— and Z——, the Parisian
Academicians: all my new credit for manner would be put in peril. You
and Mrs. Bretton must come for my sake; Ginevra, at a word, will join
you.”
“Yes; then I will carry a message of invitation, and she shall have the
chance of justifying her character for veracity.”
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE HÔTEL CRÉCY.
The morrow turned out a more lively and busy day than we—or than I, at
least—had anticipated. It seems it was the birthday of one of the young
princes of Labassecour—the eldest, I think, the Duc de Dindonneau, and
a general holiday was given in his honour at the schools, and
especially at the principal “Athénée,” or college. The youth of that
institution had also concocted, and were to present a loyal address;
for which purpose they were to be assembled in the public building
where the yearly examinations were conducted, and the prizes
distributed. After the ceremony of presentation, an oration, or
“discours,” was to follow from one of the professors.
Several of M. de Bassompierre’s friends—the savants—being more or less
connected with the Athénée, they were expected to attend on this
occasion; together with the worshipful municipality of Villette, M. le
Chevalier Staas, the burgomaster, and the parents and kinsfolk of the
Athenians in general. M. de Bassompierre was engaged by his friends to
accompany them; his fair daughter would, of course, be of the party,
and she wrote a little note to Ginevra and myself, bidding us come
early that we might join her.
As Miss Fanshawe and I were dressing in the dormitory of the Rue
Fossette, she (Miss F.) suddenly burst into a laugh.
“What now?” I asked; for she had suspended the operation of arranging
her attire, and was gazing at me.
“It seems so odd,” she replied, with her usual half-honest
half-insolent unreserve, “that you and I should now be so much on a
level, visiting in the same sphere; having the same connections.”
“Why, yes,” said I; “I had not much respect for the connections you
chiefly frequented awhile ago: Mrs. Cholmondeley and Co. would never
have suited me at all.”
“Who _are_ you, Miss Snowe?” she inquired, in a tone of such
undisguised and unsophisticated curiosity, as made me laugh in my turn.
“You used to call yourself a nursery governess; when you first came
here you really had the care of the children in this house: I have seen
you carry little Georgette in your arms, like a bonne—few governesses
would have condescended so far—and now Madame Beck treats you with more
courtesy than she treats the Parisienne, St. Pierre; and that proud
chit, my cousin, makes you her bosom friend!”
“Wonderful!” I agreed, much amused at her mystification. “Who am I
indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise. Pity I don’t look the
character.”
“I wonder you are not more flattered by all this,” she went on; “you
take it with strange composure. If you really are the nobody I once
thought you, you must be a cool hand.”
“The nobody you once thought me!” I repeated, and my face grew a little
hot; but I would not be angry: of what importance was a school-girl’s
crude use of the terms nobody and somebody? I confined myself,
therefore, to the remark that I had merely met with civility; and asked
“what she saw in civility to throw the recipient into a fever of
confusion?”
“One can’t help wondering at some things,” she persisted.
“Wondering at marvels of your own manufacture. Are you ready at last?”
“Yes; let me take your arm.”
“I would rather not: we will walk side by side.”
When she took my arm, she always leaned upon me her whole weight; and,
as I was not a gentleman, or her lover, I did not like it.
“There, again!” she cried. “I thought, by offering to take your arm, to
intimate approbation of your dress and general appearance: I meant it
as a compliment.”
“You did? You meant, in short, to express that you are not ashamed to
be seen in the street with me? That if Mrs. Cholmondeley should be
fondling her lapdog at some window, or Colonel de Hamal picking his
teeth in a balcony, and should catch a glimpse of us, you would not
quite blush for your companion?”
“Yes,” said she, with that directness which was her best point—which
gave an honest plainness to her very fibs when she told them—which was,
in short, the salt, the sole preservative ingredient of a character
otherwise not formed to keep.
I delegated the trouble of commenting on this “yes” to my countenance;
or rather, my under-lip voluntarily anticipated my tongue of course,
reverence and solemnity were not the feelings expressed in the look I
gave her.
“Scornful, sneering creature!” she went on, as we crossed a great
square, and entered the quiet, pleasant park, our nearest way to the
Rue Crécy. “Nobody in this world was ever such a Turk to me as you
are!”
“You bring it on yourself: let me alone: have the sense to be quiet: I
will let you alone.”
“As if one _could_ let you alone, when you are so peculiar and so
mysterious!”
“The mystery and peculiarity being entirely the conception of your own
brain—maggots—neither more nor less, be so good as to keep them out of
my sight.”
“But _are_ you anybody?” persevered she, pushing her hand, in spite of
me, under my arm; and that arm pressed itself with inhospitable
closeness against my side, by way of keeping out the intruder.
“Yes,” I said, “I am a rising character: once an old lady’s companion,
then a nursery-governess, now a school-teacher.”
“Do—_do_ tell me who you are? I’ll not repeat it,” she urged, adhering
with ludicrous tenacity to the wise notion of an incognito she had got
hold of; and she squeezed the arm of which she had now obtained full
possession, and coaxed and conjured till I was obliged to pause in the
park to laugh. Throughout our walk she rang the most fanciful changes
on this theme; proving, by her obstinate credulity, or incredulity, her
incapacity to conceive how any person not bolstered up by birth or