Villette, Charlotte Brontë [if you liked this book .txt] 📗

herbs my lapful, and shred them green into the pot. Messieurs Boissec and Rochemorte did not perceive this. They mistook my work for the work of a ripe scholar.

They would not yet let me go: I must sit down and write before them. As I dipped my pen in the ink with a shaking hand, and surveyed the white paper with eyes half-blinded and overflowing, one of my judges began mincingly to apologize for the pain he caused.

“Nous agissons dans l’intérêt de la vérité. Nous ne voulons pas vous blesser,” said he.

Scorn gave me nerve. I only answered,—

“Dictate, Monsieur.”

Rochemorte named this theme: “Human Justice.”

Human Justice! What was I to make of it? Blank, cold abstraction, unsuggestive to me of one inspiring idea; and there stood M. Emanuel, sad as Saul, and stern as Joab, and there triumphed his accusers.

At these two I looked. I was gathering my courage to tell them that I would neither write nor speak another word for their satisfaction, that their theme did not suit, nor their presence inspire me, and that, notwithstanding, whoever threw the shadow of a doubt on M. Emanuel’s honour, outraged that truth of which they had announced themselves the—champions: I meant to utter all this, I say, when suddenly, a light darted on memory.

Those two faces looking out of the forest of long hair, moustache, and whisker—those two cold yet bold, trustless yet presumptuous visages— were the same faces, the very same that, projected in full gaslight from behind the pillars of a portico, had half frightened me to death on the night of my desolate arrival in Villette. These, I felt morally certain, were the very heroes who had driven a friendless foreigner beyond her reckoning and her strength, chased her breathless over a whole quarter of the town.

“Pious mentors!” thought I. “Pure guides for youth! If `Human Justice’ were what she ought to be, you two would scarce hold your present post, or enjoy your present credit.”

An idea once seized, I fell to work. “Human Justice” rushed before me in novel guise, a red, random beldame, with arms akimbo. I saw her in her house, the den of confusion: servants called to her for orders or help which she did not give; beggars stood at her door waiting and starving unnoticed; a swarm of children, sick and quarrelsome, crawled round her feet, and yelled in her ears appeals for notice, sympathy, cure, redress. The honest woman cared for none of these things. She had a warm seat of her own by the fire, she had her own solace in a short black pipe, and a bottle of Mrs. Sweeny’s soothing syrup; she smoked and she sipped, and she enjoyed her paradise; and whenever a cry of the suffering souls about her ‘pierced her ears too keenly—my jolly dame seized the poker or the hearth-brush: if the offender was weak, wronged, and sickly, she effectually settled him: if he was strong, lively, and violent, she only menaced, then plunged her hand in her deep pouch, and flung a liberal shower of sugar-plums.

Such was the sketch of “Human Justice,” scratched hurriedly on paper, and placed at the service of Messrs. Boissec and Rochemorte. M. Emanuel read it over my shoulder. Waiting no comment, I curtsied to the trio, and withdrew.

After school that day, M. Paul and I again met. Of course the meeting did not at first run smooth; there was a crow to pluck with him; that forced examination could not be immediately digested. A crabbed dialogue terminated in my being called “une petite moqueuse et sans-coeur,” and in Monsieur’s temporary departure.

Not wishing him to go quite away, only desiring he should feel that such a transport as he had that day given way to, could not be indulged with perfect impunity, I was not sorry to see him, soon after, gardening in the berceau. He approached the glass door; I drew near also. We spoke of some flowers growing round it. By-and-by Monsieur laid down his spade; by-and-by he recommenced conversation, passed to other subjects, and at last touched a point of interest.

Conscious that his proceeding of that day was specially open to a charge of extravagance, M. Paul half apologized; he half regretted, too, the fitfulness of his moods at all times, yet he hinted that some allowance ought to be made for him. “But,” said he, “I can hardly expect it at your hands, Miss Lucy; you know neither me, nor my position, nor my history.”

His history. I took up the word at once; I pursued the idea.

“No, Monsieur,” I rejoined. “Of course, as you say, I know neither your history, nor your position, nor your sacrifices, nor any of your sorrows, or trials, or affections, or fidelities. Oh, no! I know nothing about you; you are for me altogether a stranger.”

“Hein?” he murmured, arching his brows in surprise.

“You know, Monsieur, I only see you in classe—stern, dogmatic, hasty, imperious. I only hear of you in town as active and wilful, quick to originate, hasty to lead, but slow to persuade, and hard to bend. A man like you, without ties, can have no attachments; without dependants, no duties. All we, with whom you come in contact, are machines, which you thrust here and there, inconsiderate of their feelings. You seek your recreations in public, by the light of the evening chandelier: this school and yonder college are your workshops, where you fabricate the ware called pupils. I don’t so much as know where you live; it is natural to take it for granted that you have no home, and need none.”

“I am judged,” said he. “Your opinion of me is just what I thought it was. For you I am neither a man nor a Christian. You see me void of affection and religion, unattached by friend or family, unpiloted by principle or faith. It is well, Mademoiselle; such is our reward in this life.”

“You are a philosopher, Monsieur; a cynic philosopher” (and I looked at his paletôt, of which he straightway brushed the dim sleeve with his hand), “despising the foibles of humanity—above its luxuries— independent of its comforts.”

“Et vous, Mademoiselle? vous êtes proprette et douillette, et affreusement insensible, par-dessus le marché.”

“But, in short, Monsieur, now I think of it, you must live somewhere? Do tell me where; and what establishment of servants do you keep?”

With a fearful projection of the under-lip, implying an impetus of scorn the most decided, he broke out—

“Je vis dans un trou! I inhabit a den, Miss—a cavern, where you would not put your dainty nose. Once, with base shame of speaking the whole truth, I talked about my ‘study’ in that college: know now that this ‘study’ is my whole abode; my chamber is there and my drawing-room. As for my ‘establishment of servants’” (mimicking my voice) “they number ten; les voilà.”

And he grimly spread, close under my eyes, his ten fingers.

“I black my boots,” pursued he savagely. “I brush my paletôt.”

“No, Monsieur, it is too plain; you never do that,” was my parenthesis.

“Je fais mon lit et mon ménage; I seek my dinner in a restaurant; my supper takes care, of itself; I pass days laborious and loveless; nights long and lonely; I am ferocious, and bearded and monkish; and nothing now living in this world loves me, except some old hearts worn like my own, and some few beings, impoverished, suffering, poor in purse and in spirit, whom the kingdoms of this world own not, but to whom a will and testament not to be disputed has bequeathed the kingdom of heaven.”

“Ah, Monsieur; but I know!”

“What do you know? many things, I verily believe; yet not me, Lucy!”

“I know that you have a pleasant old house in a pleasant old square of the Basse-Ville—why don’t you go and live there?”

“Hein?” muttered he again.

“I liked it much, Monsieur; with the steps ascending to the door, the grey flags in front, the nodding trees behind—real trees, not shrubs —trees dark, high, and of old growth. And the boudoir-oratoire—you should make that room your study; it is so quiet and solemn.”

He eyed me closely; he half-smiled, half-coloured. “Where did you pick up all that? Who told you?” he asked.

“Nobody told me. Did I dream it, Monsieur, do you think?”

“Can I enter into your visions? Can I guess a woman’s waking thoughts, much less her sleeping fantasies?”

“If I dreamt it, I saw in my dream human beings as well as a house. I saw a priest, old, bent, and grey, and a domestic—old, too, and picturesque; and a lady, splendid but strange; her head would scarce reach to my elbow—her magnificence might ransom a duke. She wore a gown bright as lapis-lazuli—a shawl worth a thousand francs: she was decked with ornaments so brilliant, I never saw any with such a beautiful sparkle; but her figure looked as if it had been broken in two and bent double; she seemed also to have outlived the common years of humanity, and to have attained those which are only labour and sorrow. She was become morose—almost malevolent; yet somebody, it appears, cared for her in her infirmities—somebody forgave her trespasses, hoping to have his trespasses forgiven. They lived together, these three people—the mistress, the chaplain, the servant —all old, all feeble, all sheltered under one kind wing.”

He covered with his hand the upper part of his face, but did not conceal his mouth, where I saw hovering an expression I liked.

“I see you have entered into my secrets,” said he, “but how was it done?”

So I told him how—the commission on which I had been sent, the storm which had detained me, the abruptness of the lady, the kindness of the priest.

“As I sat waiting for the rain to cease, Père Silas whiled away the time with a story,” I said.

“A story! What story? Père Silas is no romancist.”

“Shall I tell Monsieur the tale?”

“Yes: begin at the beginning. Let me hear some of Miss Lucy’s French— her best or her worst—I don’t much care which: let us have a good poignée of barbarisms, and a bounteous dose of the insular accent.”

“Monsieur is not going to be gratified by a tale of ambitious proportions, and the spectacle of the narrator sticking fast in the midst. But I will tell him the title—the ‘Priest’s Pupil.’”

“Bah!” said he, the swarthy flush again dyeing his dark cheek. “The good old father could not have chosen a worse subject; it is his weak point. But what of the ‘Priest’s Pupil?’”

“Oh! many things.”

You may as well define what things. I mean to know.”

“There was the pupil’s youth, the pupil’s manhood;—his avarice, his ingratitude, his implacability, his inconstancy. Such a bad pupil, Monsieur!—so thankless, cold-hearted, unchivalrous, unforgiving!

“Et puis?” said he, taking a cigar.

“Et puis,” I pursued, “he underwent calamities which one did not pity —bore them in a spirit one did not admire—endured wrongs for which one felt no sympathy; finally took the unchristian revenge of heaping coals of fire on his adversary’s head.”

“You have not told me all,” said he.

“Nearly all, I think: I have indicated the heads of Père Silas’s chapters.”

“You have forgotten one-that which touched on the pupil’s lack of affection—on his hard, cold, monkish heart.”

“True; I remember now. Père Silas did say that his vocation was almost that of a priest—that his life was considered consecrated.”

“By what bonds or duties?”

“By the ties of the past and the charities of the present.”

“You have, then, the whole situation?”

“I have now told Monsieur all that was told me.”

Some meditative minutes passed.

“Now, Mademoiselle Lucy, look at me, and with that truth which I believe