Villette
thought the tomb unquiet, and dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and
of hair, still golden, and living, obtruded through coffin-chinks.
Had I been too hasty? I used to ask myself; and this question would
occur with a cruel sharpness after some brief chance interview with Dr.
John. He had still such kind looks, such a warm hand; his voice still
kept so pleasant a tone for my name; I never liked “Lucy” so well as
when he uttered it. But I learned in time that this benignity, this
cordiality, this music, belonged in no shape to me: it was a part of
himself; it was the honey of his temper; it was the balm of his mellow
mood; he imparted it, as the ripe fruit rewards with sweetness the
rifling bee; he diffused it about him, as sweet plants shed their
perfume. Does the nectarine love either the bee or bird it feeds? Is
the sweetbriar enamoured of the air?
“Good-night, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful; but you are not
mine. Good-night, and God bless you!”
Thus I closed my musings. “Good-night” left my lips in sound; I heard
the words spoken, and then I heard an echo—quite close.
“Good-night, Mademoiselle; or, rather, good-evening—the sun is scarce
set; I hope you slept well?”
I started, but was only discomposed a moment; I knew the voice and
speaker.
“Slept, Monsieur! When? where?”
“You may well inquire when—where. It seems you turn day into night, and
choose a desk for a pillow; rather hard lodging—?”
“It was softened for me, Monsieur, while I slept. That unseen,
gift-bringing thing which haunts my desk, remembered me. No matter how
I fell asleep; I awoke pillowed and covered.”
“Did the shawls keep you warm?”
“Very warm. Do you ask thanks for them?”
“No. You looked pale in your slumbers: are you home-sick?”
“To be home-sick, one must have a home; which I have not.”
“Then you have more need of a careful friend. I scarcely know any one,
Miss Lucy, who needs a friend more absolutely than you; your very
faults imperatively require it. You want so much checking, regulating,
and keeping down.”
This idea of “keeping down” never left M. Paul’s head; the most
habitual subjugation would, in my case, have failed to relieve him of
it. No matter; what did it signify? I listened to him, and did not
trouble myself to be too submissive; his occupation would have been
gone had I left him nothing to “keep down.”
“You need watching, and watching over,” he pursued; “and it is well for
you that I see this, and do my best to discharge both duties. I watch
you and others pretty closely, pretty constantly, nearer and oftener
than you or they think. Do you see that window with a light in it?”
He pointed to a lattice in one of the college boarding-houses.
“That,” said he, “is a room I have hired, nominally for a
study—virtually for a post of observation. There I sit and read for
hours together: it is my way—my taste. My book is this garden; its
contents are human nature—female human nature. I know you all by heart.
Ah! I know you well—St. Pierre, the Parisienne—cette maîtresse-femme,
my cousin Beck herself.”
“It is not right, Monsieur.”
“Comment? it is not right? By whose creed? Does some dogma of Calvin or
Luther condemn it? What is that to me? I am no Protestant. My rich
father (for, though I have known poverty, and once starved for a year
in a garret in Rome—starved wretchedly, often on a meal a day, and
sometimes not that—yet I was born to wealth)—my rich father was a good
Catholic; and he gave me a priest and a Jesuit for a tutor. I retain
his lessons; and to what discoveries, grand Dieu! have they not aided
me!”
“Discoveries made by stealth seem to me dishonourable discoveries.”
“Puritaine! I doubt it not. Yet see how my Jesuit’s system works. You
know the St. Pierre?”
“Partially.”
He laughed. “You say right—_‘partially’_; whereas _I_ know her
_thoroughly_; there is the difference. She played before me the
amiable; offered me patte de velours; caressed, flattered, fawned on
me. Now, I am accessible to a woman’s flattery—accessible against my
reason. Though never pretty, she was—when I first knew her—young, or
knew how to look young. Like all her countrywomen, she had the art of
dressing—she had a certain cool, easy, social assurance, which spared
me the pain of embarrassment—”
“Monsieur, that must have been unnecessary. I never saw you embarrassed
in my life.”
“Mademoiselle, you know little of me; I can be embarrassed as a petite
pensionnaire; there is a fund of modesty and diffidence in my nature—”
“Monsieur, I never saw it.”
“Mademoiselle, it is there. You ought to have seen it.”
“Monsieur, I have observed you in public—on platforms, in tribunes,
before titles and crowned heads—and you were as easy as you are in the
third division.”
“Mademoiselle, neither titles nor crowned heads excite my modesty; and
publicity is very much my element. I like it well, and breathe in it
quite freely;—but—but, in short, here is the sentiment brought into
action, at this very moment; however, I disdain to be worsted by it.
If, Mademoiselle, I were a marrying man (which I am not; and you may
spare yourself the trouble of any sneer you may be contemplating at the
thought), and found it necessary to ask a lady whether she could look
upon me in the light of a future husband, then would it be proved that
I am as I say—modest.”
I quite believed him now; and, in believing, I honoured him with a
sincerity of esteem which made my heart ache.
“As to the St. Pierre,” he went on, recovering himself, for his voice
had altered a little, “she once intended to be Madame Emanuel; and I
don’t know whither I might have been led, but for yonder little lattice
with the light. Ah, magic lattice! what miracles of discovery hast thou
wrought! Yes,” he pursued, “I have seen her rancours, her vanities, her
levities—not only here, but elsewhere: I have witnessed what bucklers
me against all her arts: I am safe from poor Zélie.”
“And my pupils,” he presently recommenced, “those blondes jeunes
filles—so mild and meek—I have seen the most reserved—romp like boys,
the demurest—snatch grapes from the walls, shake pears from the trees.
When the English teacher came, I saw her, marked her early preference
for this alley, noticed her taste for seclusion, watched her well, long
before she and I came to speaking terms; do you recollect my once
coming silently and offering you a little knot of white violets when we
were strangers?”
“I recollect it. I dried the violets, kept them, and have them still.”
“It pleased me when you took them peacefully and promptly, without
prudery—that sentiment which I ever dread to excite, and which, when it
is revealed in eye or gesture, I vindictively detest. To return. Not
only did _I_ watch you; but often—especially at eventide—another
guardian angel was noiselessly hovering near: night after night my
cousin Beck has stolen down yonder steps, and glidingly pursued your
movements when you did not see her.”
“But, Monsieur, you could not from the distance of that window see what
passed in this garden at night?”
“By moonlight I possibly might with a glass—I use a glass—but the
garden itself is open to me. In the shed, at the bottom, there is a
door leading into a court, which communicates with the college; of that
door I possess the key, and thus come and go at pleasure. This
afternoon I came through it, and found you asleep in classe; again this
evening I have availed myself of the same entrance.”
I could not help saying, “If you were a wicked, designing man, how
terrible would all this be!”
His attention seemed incapable of being arrested by this view of the
subject: he lit his cigar, and while he puffed it, leaning against a
tree, and looking at me in a cool, amused way he had when his humour
was tranquil, I thought proper to go on sermonizing him: he often
lectured me by the hour together—I did not see why I should not speak
my mind for once. So I told him my impressions concerning his
Jesuit-system.
“The knowledge it brings you is bought too dear, Monsieur; this coming
and going by stealth degrades your own dignity.”
“My dignity!” he cried, laughing; “when did you ever see me trouble my
head about my dignity? It is you, Miss Lucy, who are ‘digne.’ How
often, in your high insular presence, have I taken a pleasure in
trampling upon, what you are pleased to call, my dignity; tearing it,
scattering it to the winds, in those mad transports you witness with
such hauteur, and which I know you think very like the ravings of a
third-rate London actor.”
“Monsieur, I tell you every glance you cast from that lattice is a
wrong done to the best part of your own nature. To study the human
heart thus, is to banquet secretly and sacrilegiously on Eve’s apples.
I wish you were a Protestant.”
Indifferent to the wish, he smoked on. After a space of smiling yet
thoughtful silence, he said, rather suddenly—“I have seen other
things.”
“What other things?”
Taking the weed from his lips, he threw the remnant amongst the shrubs,
where, for a moment, it lay glowing in the gloom.
“Look, at it,” said he: “is not that spark like an eye watching you and
me?”
He took a turn down the walk; presently returning, he went on:—“I have
seen, Miss Lucy, things to me unaccountable, that have made me watch
all night for a solution, and I have not yet found it.”
The tone was peculiar; my veins thrilled; he saw me shiver.
“Are you afraid? Whether is it of my words or that red jealous eye just
winking itself out?”
“I am cold; the night grows dark and late, and the air is changed; it
is time to go in.”
“It is little past eight, but you shall go in soon. Answer me only this
question.”
Yet he paused ere he put it. The garden was truly growing dark; dusk
had come on with clouds, and drops of rain began to patter through the
trees. I hoped he would feel this, but, for the moment, he seemed too
much absorbed to be sensible of the change.
“Mademoiselle, do you Protestants believe in the supernatural?”
“There is a difference of theory and belief on this point amongst
Protestants as amongst other sects,” I answered. “Why, Monsieur, do you
ask such a question?”
“Why do you shrink and speak so faintly? Are you superstitious?”
“I am constitutionally nervous. I dislike the discussion of such
subjects. I dislike it the more because—”
“You believe?”
“No: but it has happened to me to experience impressions—”
“Since you came here?”
“Yes; not many months ago.”
“Here?—in this house?”
“Yes.”
“Bon! I am glad of it. I knew it, somehow; before you told me. I was
conscious of rapport between you and myself. You are patient, and I am
choleric; you are quiet and pale, and I am tanned and fiery; you are a
strict Protestant, and I am a sort of lay Jesuit: but we are
alike—there is affinity between us. Do you see it, Mademoiselle, when
you look in the glass? Do you observe that your forehead is shaped like
mine—that your eyes are cut like mine? Do you hear that you have some
of my tones of voice? Do you know that you have many of my looks? I
perceive all this, and believe that you were born under my star. Yes,
you were born under my star! Tremble! for where that is the case with
mortals, the threads of their destinies are difficult to disentangle;
knottings and catchings occur—sudden breaks leave damage in the web.
But these ‘impressions,’ as you say, with English caution. I, too, have
had my ‘impressions.’”
“Monsieur, tell me them.”
“I desire no better, and intend no less. You know the legend of this
house and garden?”
“I know it. Yes. They say that hundreds of years ago a nun was buried
here alive at the foot of this very tree, beneath the ground which now
bears us.”
“And that in former days a nun’s ghost used to come and go here.”