Villette (47 page)

In the very extremity of want, I had recourse again, and yet again, to the little packet in the case—the five letters. How splendid that month seemed whose skies had beheld the rising of these five stars! It was always at night I visited them, and not daring to ask every evening for a candle in the kitchen, I bought a wax-taper and matches to light it, and at the study-hour stole up to the dormitory, and feasted on my crust from the Barmecide’s loaf.
¹⁰
It did not nourish me: I pined on it, and got as thin as a shadow: otherwise I was not ill.

Reading there somewhat late one evening, and feeling that the power to read was leaving me—for the letters from incessant perusal were losing all sap and significance: my gold was withering to leaves before my eyes, and I was sorrowing over the disillusion—suddenly a quick tripping foot ran up the stairs. I knew Ginevra Fanshawe’s step: she had dined in town that afternoon; she was now returned, and would come here to replace her shawl, &c., in the wardrobe.

Yes: in she came, dressed in bright silk, with her shawl falling from her shoulders, and her curls, half-uncurled in the damp of night, drooping careless and heavy upon her neck. I had hardly time to recasket my treasures and lock them up when she was at my side: her humour seemed none of the best.

‘It has been a stupid evening: they are stupid people,’ she began.

‘Who? Mrs. Cholmondeley? I thought you always found her house charming.’

‘I have not been to Mrs. Cholmondeley’s.’

‘Indeed! Have you made new acquaintance?’

‘My uncle de Bassompierre is come.’

‘Your uncle de Bassompierre! Are you not glad?—I thought he was a favourite.’

‘You thought wrong: the man is odious; I hate him.’

‘Because he is a foreigner? or for what other reason of equal weight?’

‘He is not a foreigner. The man is English enough, goodness knows; and had an English name till three or four years ago; but his mother was a foreigner, a de Bassompierre, and some of her family are dead and have left him estates, a title, and this name: he is quite a great man now.’

‘Do you hate him for that reason?’

‘Don’t I know what mama says about him? He is not my own uncle, but married mama’s sister. Mama detests him; she says he killed aunt Ginevra with unkindness: he looks like a bear. Such a dismal evening!’ she went on. ‘I’ll go no more to his big hotel. Fancy me walking into a room alone, and a great man fifty years old coming forwards, and after a few minutes’ conversation actually turning his back upon me, and then abruptly going out of the room. Such odd ways! I daresay his conscience smote him, for they all say at home I am the picture of Aunt Ginevra. Mama often declares the likeness is quite ridiculous.’

‘Were you the only visitor?’

‘The only visitor? Yes, then there was missy, my cousin: little spoiled, pampered thing.’

’M. de Bassompierre has a daughter?’

‘Yes, yes: don’t tease one with questions. Oh dear! I am so tired.’

She yawned. Throwing herself without ceremony on my bed, she added, ‘It seems Mademoiselle was nearly crushed to a jelly in a hubbub at the theatre some weeks ago.’

‘Ah! indeed. And they live at a large hotel in the Rue Crécy?’

Justement. How do you know?’

‘I have been there.’

‘Oh you have? Really! You go everywhere in these days. I suppose Mother Bretton took you? She and Esculapius
^ez
have the
entree
of the de Bassompierre apartments: it seems “my son John” attended missy on the occasion of her accident—accident? Bah! All affectation! I don’t think she was squeezed more than she richly deserves for her airs. And now there is quite an intimacy struck up: I heard something about “Auld lang syne,” and what not? Oh, how stupid they all were!’

‘All!You
said you were the only visitor?’

‘Did I? You see one forgets to particularize an old woman and her boy.’

‘Dr. and Mrs. Bretton were at M. de Bassompierre’s this evening?’

‘Ay, ay! as large as life; and missy played the hostess. What a conceited doll it is!’

Soured and listless, Miss Fanshawe was beginning to disclose the causes of her prostrate condition. There had been a retrenchment of incense, a diversion or a total withholding of homage and attention: coquetry had failed of effect, vanity had undergone mortification. She lay fuming in the vapours.

‘Is Miss de Bassompierre quite well now?’ I asked.

‘As well as you or I, no doubt; but she is an affected little thing, and gave herself invalid airs to attract medical notice. And to see the old dowager making her recline on a couch, and “my son John” prohibiting excitement, etcetera—faugh! the scene was quite sickening.’

‘It would not have been so if the object of attention had been changed:
if you
had taken Miss de Bassompierre’s place.’

‘Indeed! I hate “my son John!” ’

‘ “My son John!”—whom do you indicate by that name? Dr. Bretton’s mother never calls him so.’

‘Then she ought. A clownish, bearish John he is.’

‘You violate the truth in saying so; and as the whole of my patience is now spun off the distaff, I peremptorily desire you to rise from that bed, and vacate this room.’

‘Passionate thing! Your face is the colour of a coquelicot.
^fa
I wonder what always makes you so mighty testy à l’endroit du gros Jean?
^fb
‘John Anderson, my joe, John!“ Oh! the distinguished name!’

Thrilling with exasperation, to which it would have been sheer folly to have given vent—for there was no contending with that unsubstantial feather, that mealy—winged moth—I extinguished my taper, locked my bureau, and left her, since she would not leave me. Small-beer as she was, she had turned insufferably acid.

The morrow was Thursday and a half-holiday. Breakfast was over; I had withdrawn to the first classe. The dreaded hour, the post-hour, was nearing, and I sat waiting it, much as a ghost-seer might wait his spectre. Less than ever was a letter probable; still, strive as I would, I could not forget that it was possible. As the moments lessened, a restlessness and fear almost beyond the average assailed me. It was a day of winter east wind, and I had now for some time entered into that dreary fellowship with the winds and their changes, so little known, so incomprehensible to the healthy. The north and east owned a terrific influence, making all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder. The south could calm, the west sometimes cheer: unless, indeed, they brought on their wings the burden of thunder-clouds, under the weight and warmth of which all energy died.

Bitter and dark as was this January day, I remember leaving the classe, and running down without bonnet to the bottom of the long garden, and then lingering amongst the stripped shrubs; in the forlorn hope that the postman’s ring might occur while I was out of hearing, and I might thus be spared the thrill which some particular nerve or nerves, almost gnawed through with the unremitting tooth of a fixed idea, were becoming wholly unfit to support. I lingered as long as I dared without fear of attracting attention by my absence. I muffled my head in my apron, and stopped my ears in terror of the torturing clang, sure to be followed by such blank silence, such barren vacuum for me. At last I ventured to re-enter the first-classe, where, as it was not yet nine o’clock, no pupils had been admitted. The first thing seen was a white object on my black desk, a white, flat object. The post had, indeed, arrived; by me unheard. Rosine had visited my cell, and, like some angel, had left behind her a bright token of her presence. That shining thing on the desk was indeed a letter, a real letter; I saw so much at the distance of three yards, and as I had but one correspondent on earth, from that one it must come. He remembered me yet. How deep a pulse of gratitude sent new life through my heart.

Drawing near, bending and looking on the letter, in trembling but almost certain hope of seeing a known hand, it was my lot to find, on the contrary, an autograph for the moment deemed unknown—a pale female scrawl, instead of a firm masculine character. I then thought fate was too hard for me, and I said, audibly, ‘This is cruel.’

But I got over that pain also. Life is still life, whatever its pangs: our eyes and ears and their use remain with us, though the prospect of what pleases be wholly withdrawn, and the sound of what consoles be quite silenced.

I opened the billet: by this time I had recognized its handwriting as perfectly familiar. It was dated ‘La Terrasse,’ and it ran thus:—

Now, a letter like that sets one to rights! I might still be sad after reading that letter, but I was more composed; not exactly cheered, perhaps, but relieved. My friends, at least, were well and happy: no accident had occurred to Graham; no illness had seized his mother—calamities that had so long been my dream and thought. Their feelings for me too were—as they had been. Yet, how strange it was to look on Mrs. Bretton’s seven weeks and contrast them with my seven weeks! Also, how very wise it is in people placed in an exceptional position to hold their tongues and not rashly declare how such position galls them! The world can understand well enough the process of perishing for want of food: perhaps few persons can enter into or follow out that of going mad from solitary confinement. They see the long-buried prisoner disinterred, a maniac or an idiot!—how his senses left him—how his nerves, first inflamed, underwent nameless agony, and then sunk to palsy—is a subject too intricate for examination, too abstract for popular comprehension. Speak of it! you might almost as well stand up in an European market-place, and propound dark sayings in that language and mood wherein Nebuchadnezzar, the imperial hypochondriac, communed with his baffled Chaldeans. And long, long may the minds to whom such themes are no mystery—by whom their bearings are sympathetically seized—be few in number, and rare of rencounter. Long may it be generally thought that physical privations alone merit compassion, and that the rest is a figment. When the world was younger and haler than now, moral trials were a deeper mystery still: perhaps in all the land of Israel there was but one Saul—certainly but one David to soothe or comprehend him.