Villette
hundred years in her features, and more perhaps in her eyes—her malign,
unfriendly eyes, with thick grey brows above, and livid lids all round.
How severely they viewed me, with a sort of dull displeasure!
This being wore a gown of brocade, dyed bright blue, full-tinted as the
gentianella flower, and covered with satin foliage in a large pattern;
over the gown a costly shawl, gorgeously bordered, and so large for
her, that its many-coloured fringe swept the floor. But her chief
points were her jewels: she had long, clear earrings, blazing with a
lustre which could not be borrowed or false; she had rings on her
skeleton hands, with thick gold hoops, and stones—purple, green, and
blood-red. Hunchbacked, dwarfish, and doting, she was adorned like a
barbarian queen.
“Que me voulez-vous?” said she, hoarsely, with the voice rather of male
than of female old age; and, indeed, a silver beard bristled her chin.
I delivered my basket and my message.
“Is that all?” she demanded.
“It is all,” said I.
“Truly, it was well worth while,” she answered. “Return to Madame Beck,
and tell her I can buy fruit when I want it, et quant à ses
félicitations, je m’en moque!” And this courteous dame turned her back.
Just as she turned, a peal of thunder broke, and a flash of lightning
blazed broad over salon and boudoir. The tale of magic seemed to
proceed with due accompaniment of the elements. The wanderer, decoyed
into the enchanted castle, heard rising, outside, the spell-wakened
tempest.
What, in all this, was I to think of Madame Beck? She owned strange
acquaintance; she offered messages and gifts at an unique shrine, and
inauspicious seemed the bearing of the uncouth thing she worshipped.
There went that sullen Sidonia, tottering and trembling like palsy
incarnate, tapping her ivory staff on the mosaic parquet, and muttering
venomously as she vanished.
Down washed the rain, deep lowered the welkin; the clouds, ruddy a
while ago, had now, through all their blackness, turned deadly pale, as
if in terror. Notwithstanding my late boast about not fearing a shower,
I hardly liked to go out under this waterspout. Then the gleams of
lightning were very fierce, the thunder crashed very near; this storm
had gathered immediately above Villette; it seemed to have burst at the
zenith; it rushed down prone; the forked, slant bolts pierced athwart
vertical torrents; red zigzags interlaced a descent blanched as white
metal: and all broke from a sky heavily black in its swollen abundance.
Leaving Madame Walravens’ inhospitable salon, I betook myself to her
cold staircase; there was a seat on the landing—there I waited.
Somebody came gliding along the gallery just above; it was the old
priest.
“Indeed Mademoiselle shall not sit there,” said he. “It would
displeasure our benefactor if he knew a stranger was so treated in this
house.”
And he begged me so earnestly to return to the salon, that, without
discourtesy, I could not but comply. The smaller room was better
furnished and more habitable than the larger; thither he introduced me.
Partially withdrawing the blind, he disclosed what seemed more like an
oratory than a boudoir, a very solemn little chamber, looking as if it
were a place rather dedicated to relics and remembrance, than designed
for present use and comfort.
The good father sat down, as if to keep me company; but instead of
conversing, he took out a book, fastened on the page his eyes, and
employed his lips in whispering—what sounded like a prayer or litany. A
yellow electric light from the sky gilded his bald head; his figure
remained in shade—deep and purple; he sat still as sculpture; he seemed
to forget me for his prayers; he only looked up when a fiercer bolt, or
a harsher, closer rattle told of nearing danger; even then, it was not
in fear, but in seeming awe, he raised his eyes. I too was awe-struck;
being, however, under no pressure of slavish terror, my thoughts and
observations were free.
To speak truth, I was beginning to fancy that the old priest resembled
that Père Silas, before whom I had kneeled in the church of the
Béguinage. The idea was vague, for I had seen my confessor only in dusk
and in profile, yet still I seemed to trace a likeness: I thought also
I recognized the voice. While I watched him, he betrayed, by one lifted
look, that he felt my scrutiny; I turned to note the room; that too had
its half mystic interest.
Beside a cross of curiously carved old ivory, yellow with time, and
sloped above a dark-red _prie-dieu_, furnished duly, with rich missal
and ebon rosary—hung the picture whose dim outline had drawn my eyes
before—the picture which moved, fell away with the wall and let in
phantoms. Imperfectly seen, I had taken it for a Madonna; revealed by
clearer light, it proved to be a woman’s portrait in a nun’s dress. The
face, though not beautiful, was pleasing; pale, young, and shaded with
the dejection of grief or ill health. I say again it was not beautiful;
it was not even intellectual; its very amiability was the amiability of
a weak frame, inactive passions, acquiescent habits: yet I looked long
at that picture, and could not choose but look.
The old priest, who at first had seemed to me so deaf and infirm, must
yet have retained his faculties in tolerable preservation; absorbed in
his book as he appeared, without once lifting his head, or, as far as I
knew, turning his eyes, he perceived the point towards which my
attention was drawn, and, in a slow distinct voice, dropped, concerning
it, these four observations:—
“She was much beloved.
“She gave herself to God.
“She died young.
“She is still remembered, still wept.”
“By that aged lady, Madame Walravens?” I inquired, fancying that I had
discovered in the incurable grief of bereavement, a key to that same
aged lady’s desperate ill-humour.
The father shook his head with half a smile.
“No, no,” said he; “a grand-dame’s affection for her children’s
children may be great, and her sorrow for their loss, lively; but it is
only the affianced lover, to whom Fate, Faith, and Death have trebly
denied the bliss of union, who mourns what he has lost, as Justine
Marie is still mourned.”
I thought the father rather wished to be questioned, and therefore I
inquired who had lost and who still mourned “Justine Marie.” I got, in
reply, quite a little romantic narrative, told not unimpressively, with
the accompaniment of the now subsiding storm. I am bound to say it
might have been made much more truly impressive, if there had been less
French, Rousseau-like sentimentalizing and wire-drawing; and rather
more healthful carelessness of effect. But the worthy father was
obviously a Frenchman born and bred (I became more and more persuaded
of his resemblance to my confessor)—he was a true son of Rome; when he
did lift his eyes, he looked at me out of their corners, with more and
sharper subtlety than, one would have thought, could survive the wear
and tear of seventy years. Yet, I believe, he was a good old man.
The hero of his tale was some former pupil of his, whom he now called
his benefactor, and who, it appears, had loved this pale Justine Marie,
the daughter of rich parents, at a time when his own worldly prospects
were such as to justify his aspiring to a well-dowered hand. The
pupil’s father—once a rich banker—had failed, died, and left behind him
only debts and destitution. The son was then forbidden to think of
Marie; especially that old witch of a grand-dame I had seen, Madame
Walravens, opposed the match with all the violence of a temper which
deformity made sometimes demoniac. The mild Marie had neither the
treachery to be false, nor the force to be quite staunch to her lover;
she gave up her first suitor, but, refusing to accept a second with a
heavier purse, withdrew to a convent, and there died in her noviciate.
Lasting anguish, it seems, had taken possession of the faithful heart
which worshipped her, and the truth of that love and grief had been
shown in a manner which touched even me, as I listened.
Some years after Justine Marie’s death, ruin had come on her house too:
her father, by nominal calling a jeweller, but who also dealt a good
deal on the Bourse, had been concerned in some financial transactions
which entailed exposure and ruinous fines. He died of grief for the
loss, and shame for the infamy. His old hunchbacked mother and his
bereaved wife were left penniless, and might have died too of want; but
their lost daughter’s once-despised, yet most true-hearted suitor,
hearing of the condition of these ladies, came with singular
devotedness to the rescue. He took on their insolent pride the revenge
of the purest charity—housing, caring for, befriending them, so as no
son could have done it more tenderly and efficiently. The mother—on the
whole a good woman—died blessing him; the strange, godless, loveless,
misanthrope grandmother lived still, entirely supported by this
self-sacrificing man. Her, who had been the bane of his life, blighting
his hope, and awarding him, for love and domestic happiness, long
mourning and cheerless solitude, he treated with the respect a good son
might offer a kind mother. He had brought her to this house, “and,”
continued the priest, while genuine tears rose to his eyes, “here, too,
he shelters me, his old tutor, and Agnes, a superannuated servant of
his father’s family. To our sustenance, and to other charities, I know
he devotes three-parts of his income, keeping only the fourth to
provide himself with bread and the most modest accommodations. By this
arrangement he has rendered it impossible to himself ever to marry: he
has given himself to God and to his angel-bride as much as if he were a
priest, like me.”
The father had wiped away his tears before he uttered these last words,
and in pronouncing them, he for one instant raised his eyes to mine. I
caught this glance, despite its veiled character; the momentary gleam
shot a meaning which struck me.
These Romanists are strange beings. Such a one among them—whom you know
no more than the last Inca of Peru, or the first Emperor of China—knows
you and all your concerns; and has his reasons for saying to you so and
so, when you simply thought the communication sprang impromptu from the
instant’s impulse: his plan in bringing it about that you shall come on
such a day, to such a place, under such and such circumstances, when
the whole arrangement seems to your crude apprehension the ordinance of
chance, or the sequel of exigency. Madame Beck’s suddenly-recollected
message and present, my artless embassy to the Place of the Magi, the
old priest accidentally descending the steps and crossing the square,
his interposition on my behalf with the bonne who would have sent me
away, his reappearance on the staircase, my introduction to this room,
the portrait, the narrative so affably volunteered—all these little
incidents, taken as they fell out, seemed each independent of its
successor; a handful of loose beads: but threaded through by that
quick-shot and crafty glance of a Jesuit-eye, they dropped pendent in a
long string, like that rosary on the prie-dieu. Where lay the link of
junction, where the little clasp of this monastic necklace? I saw or
felt union, but could not yet find the spot, or detect the means of
connection.
Perhaps the musing-fit into which I had by this time fallen, appeared
somewhat suspicious in its abstraction; he gently interrupted:
“Mademoiselle,” said he, “I trust you have not far to go through these
inundated streets?”
“More than half a league.”
“You live——?”
“In the Rue Fossette.”
“Not” (with animation), “not at the pensionnat of Madame Beck?”
“The same.”
“Donc” (clapping his hands), “donc, vous devez connaître mon noble
élève, mon Paul?”