Villette
here, rushing there, snuffing and sniffing everywhere; she at last
discovered me in classe. Instantly she flew barking at the panes, as if
to urge me forth to share her pleasure or her master’s toil; she had
seen me occasionally walking in that alley with M. Paul; and I doubt
not, considered it my duty to join him now, wet as it was.
She made such a bustle that M. Paul at last looked up, and of course
perceived why, and at whom she barked. He whistled to call her off; she
only barked the louder. She seemed quite bent upon having the glass
door opened. Tired, I suppose, with her importunity, he threw down his
spade, approached, and pushed the door ajar. Sylvie burst in all
impetuous, sprang to my lap, and with her paws at my neck, and her
little nose and tongue somewhat overpoweringly busy about my face,
mouth, and eyes, flourished her bushy tail over the desk, and scattered
books and papers far and wide.
M. Emanuel advanced to still the clamour and repair the disarrangement.
Having gathered up the books, he captured Sylvie, and stowed her away
under his paletôt, where she nestled as quiet as a mouse, her head just
peeping forth. She was very tiny, and had the prettiest little innocent
face, the silkiest long ears, the finest dark eyes in the world. I
never saw her, but I thought of Paulina de Bassompierre: forgive the
association, reader, it _would_ occur.
M. Paul petted and patted her; the endearments she received were not to
be wondered at; she invited affection by her beauty and her vivacious
life.
While caressing the spaniel, his eye roved over the papers and books
just replaced; it settled on the religious tract. His lips moved; he
half checked the impulse to speak. What! had he promised never to
address me more? If so, his better nature pronounced the vow “more
honoured in the breach than in the observance,” for with a second
effort, he spoke.—“You have not yet read the brochure, I presume? It is
not sufficiently inviting?”
I replied that I had read it.
He waited, as if wishing me to give an opinion upon it unasked.
Unasked, however, I was in no mood to do or say anything. If any
concessions were to be made—if any advances were demanded—that was the
affair of the very docile pupil of Père Silas, not mine. His eye
settled upon me gently: there was mildness at the moment in its blue
ray—there was solicitude—a shade of pathos; there were meanings
composite and contrasted—reproach melting into remorse. At the moment
probably, he would have been glad to see something emotional in me. I
could not show it. In another minute, however, I should have betrayed
confusion, had I not bethought myself to take some quill-pens from my
desk, and begin soberly to mend them.
I knew that action would give a turn to his mood. He never liked to see
me mend pens; my knife was always dull-edged—my hand, too, was
unskilful; I hacked and chipped. On this occasion I cut my own
finger—half on purpose. I wanted to restore him to his natural state,
to set him at his ease, to get him to chide.
“Maladroit!” he cried at last, “she will make mincemeat of her hands.”
He put Sylvie down, making her lie quiet beside his bonnet-grec, and,
depriving me of the pens and penknife, proceeded to slice, nib, and
point with the accuracy and celerity of a machine.
“Did I like the little book?” he now inquired.
Suppressing a yawn, I said I hardly knew.
“Had it moved me?”
“I thought it had made me a little sleepy.”
(After a pause) “Allons donc! It was of no use taking that tone with
him. Bad as I was—and he should be sorry to have to name all my faults
at a breath—God and nature had given me ‘trop de sensibilité et de
sympathie’ not to be profoundly affected by an appeal so touching.”
“Indeed!” I responded, rousing myself quickly, “I was not affected at
all—not a whit.”
And in proof, I drew from my pocket a perfectly dry handkerchief, still
clean and in its folds.
Hereupon I was made the object of a string of strictures rather piquant
than polite. I listened with zest. After those two days of unnatural
silence, it was better than music to hear M. Paul haranguing again just
in his old fashion. I listened, and meantime solaced myself and Sylvie
with the contents of a bonbonnière, which M. Emanuel’s gifts kept well
supplied with chocolate comfits: It pleased him to see even a small
matter from his hand duly appreciated. He looked at me and the spaniel
while we shared the spoil; he put up his penknife. Touching my hand
with the bundle of new-cut quills, he said:—“Dites donc, petite
sœur—speak frankly—what have you thought of me during the last two
days?”
But of this question I would take no manner of notice; its purport made
my eyes fill. I caressed Sylvie assiduously. M. Paul, leaning—over the
desk, bent towards me:—“I called myself your brother,” he said: “I
hardly know what I am—brother—friend—I cannot tell. I know I think of
you—I feel I wish, you well—but I must check myself; you are to be
feared. My best friends point out danger, and whisper caution.”
“You do right to listen to your friends. By all means be cautious.”
“It is your religion—your strange, self-reliant, invulnerable creed,
whose influence seems to clothe you in, I know not what, unblessed
panoply. You are good—Père Silas calls you good, and loves you—but your
terrible, proud, earnest Protestantism, there is the danger. It
expresses itself by your eye at times; and again, it gives you certain
tones and certain gestures that make my flesh creep. You are not
demonstrative, and yet, just now—when you handled that tract—my God! I
thought Lucifer smiled.”
“Certainly I don’t respect that tract—what then?”
“Not respect that tract? But it is the pure essence of faith, love,
charity! I thought it would touch you: in its gentleness, I trusted
that it could not fail. I laid it in your desk with a prayer: I must
indeed be a sinner: Heaven will not hear the petitions that come
warmest from my heart. You scorn my little offering. Oh, cela me fait
mal!”
“Monsieur, I don’t scorn it—at least, not as your gift. Monsieur, sit
down; listen to me. I am not a heathen, I am not hard-hearted, I am not
unchristian, I am not dangerous, as they tell you; I would not trouble
your faith; you believe in God and Christ and the Bible, and so do I.”
“But _do_ you believe in the Bible? Do you receive Revelation? What
limits are there to the wild, careless daring of your country and sect.
Père Silas dropped dark hints.”
By dint of persuasion, I made him half-define these hints; they
amounted to crafty Jesuit-slanders. That night M. Paul and I talked
seriously and closely. He pleaded, he argued. _I_ could not argue—a
fortunate incapacity; it needed but triumphant, logical opposition to
effect all the director wished to be effected; but I could talk in my
own way—the way M. Paul was used to—and of which he could follow the
meanderings and fill the hiatus, and pardon the strange stammerings,
strange to him no longer. At ease with him, I could defend my creed and
faith in my own fashion; in some degree I could lull his prejudices. He
was not satisfied when he went away, hardly was he appeased; but he was
made thoroughly to feel that Protestants were not necessarily the
irreverent Pagans his director had insinuated; he was made to
comprehend something of their mode of honouring the Light, the Life,
the Word; he was enabled partly to perceive that, while their
veneration for things venerable was not quite like that cultivated in
his Church, it had its own, perhaps, deeper power—its own more solemn
awe.
I found that Père Silas (himself, I must repeat, not a bad man, though
the advocate of a bad cause) had darkly stigmatized Protestants in
general, and myself by inference, with strange names, had ascribed to
us strange “isms;” Monsieur Emanuel revealed all this in his frank
fashion, which knew not secretiveness, looking at me as he spoke with a
kind, earnest fear, almost trembling lest there should be truth in the
charges. Père Silas, it seems, had closely watched me, had ascertained
that I went by turns, and indiscriminately, to the three Protestant
Chapels of Villette—the French, German, and English—_id est_, the
Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopalian. Such liberality argued in the
father’s eyes profound indifference—who tolerates all, he reasoned, can
be attached to none. Now, it happened that I had often secretly
wondered at the minute and unimportant character of the differences
between these three sects—at the unity and identity of their vital
doctrines: I saw nothing to hinder them from being one day fused into
one grand Holy Alliance, and I respected them all, though I thought
that in each there were faults of form, incumbrances, and trivialities.
Just what I thought, that did I tell M. Emanuel, and explained to him
that my own last appeal, the guide to which I looked, and the teacher
which I owned, must always be the Bible itself, rather than any sect,
of whatever name or nation.
He left me soothed, yet full of solicitude, breathing a wish, as strong
as a prayer, that if I were wrong, Heaven would lead me right. I heard,
poured forth on the threshold, some fervid murmurings to “Marie, Reine
du Ciel,” some deep aspiration that _his_ hope might yet be _mine_.
Strange! I had no such feverish wish to turn him from the faith of his
fathers. I thought Romanism wrong, a great mixed image of gold and
clay; but it seemed to me that _this_ Romanist held the purer elements
of his creed with an innocency of heart which God must love.
The preceding conversation passed between eight and nine o’clock of the
evening, in a schoolroom of the quiet Rue Fossette, opening on a
sequestered garden. Probably about the same, or a somewhat later hour
of the succeeding evening, its echoes, collected by holy obedience,
were breathed verbatim in an attent ear, at the panel of a
confessional, in the hoary church of the Magi. It ensued that Père
Silas paid a visit to Madame Beck, and stirred by I know not what
mixture of motives, persuaded her to let him undertake for a time the
Englishwoman’s spiritual direction.
Hereupon I was put through a course of reading—that is, I just glanced
at the books lent me; they were too little in my way to be thoroughly
read, marked, learned, or inwardly digested. And besides, I had a book
up-stairs, under my pillow, whereof certain chapters satisfied my needs
in the article of spiritual lore, furnishing such precept and example
as, to my heart’s core, I was convinced could not be improved on.
Then Père Silas showed me the fair side of Rome, her good works; and
bade me judge the tree by its fruits.
In answer, I felt and I avowed that these works were _not_ the fruits
of Rome; they were but her abundant blossoming, but the fair promise
she showed the world, that bloom when set, savoured not of charity; the
apple full formed was ignorance, abasement, and bigotry. Out of men’s
afflictions and affections were forged the rivets of their servitude.
Poverty was fed and clothed, and sheltered, to bind it by obligation to
“the Church;” orphanage was reared and educated that it might grow up
in the fold of “the Church;” sickness was tended that it might die
after the formula and in the ordinance of “the Church;” and men were
overwrought, and women most murderously sacrificed, and all laid down a
world God made pleasant for his creatures’ good, and took up a cross,
monstrous in its galling weight, that they might serve Rome, prove her
sanctity, confirm her power, and spread the reign of her tyrant
“Church.”
For man’s good was little done; for God’s glory, less. A thousand ways
were opened with pain, with blood-sweats, with lavishing of life;
mountains were cloven through their breasts, and rocks were split to