Villette (55 page)

The worst of the matter was, that Dr. Bretton, whose ears, as I have said, were quick and fine, caught every word of this apostrophe; he put his handkerchief to his face and laughed till he shook.

‘Well done, Lucy,’ cried he; ‘capital! petite chatte, petite coquette! Oh, I must tell my mother! Is it true, Lucy, or half-true? I believe it is: you redden to the colour of Miss Fanshawe’s gown. And really, by my word, now I examine him, that is the same little man who was so savage with you at the concert: the very same, and in his soul he is frantic at this moment because he sees me laughing. Oh! I must tease him.’

And Graham, yielding to his bent for mischief, laughed, jested, and whispered on till I could bear no more, and my eyes filled.

Suddenly he was sobered: a vacant space appeared near Miss de Bassompierre; the circle surrounding her seemed about to dissolve. This movement was instantly caught by Graham’s eye-ever-vigilant, even while laughing; he rose, took his courage in both hands, crossed the room, and made the advantage his own. Dr. John, throughout his whole life, was a man of luck—a man of success. And why? Because he had the eye to see his opportunity, the heart to prompt to well-timed action, the nerve to consummate a perfect work. And no tyrant-passion dragged him back; no enthusiasms, no foibles encumbered his way. How well he looked at this very moment! When Paulina looked up as he reached her side, her glance mingled at once with an encountering glance, animated, yet modest; his colour, as he spoke to her, became half a blush, half a glow. He stood in her presence brave and bashful: subdued and unobtrusive, yet decided in his purpose and devoted in his ardour. I gathered all this by one view. I did not prolong my observation—time failed me, had inclination served: the night wore late; Ginevra and I ought already to have been in the Rue Fossette. I rose, and bade good-night to my godmother and M. de Bassompierre.

I know not whether Professor Emanuel had noticed my reluctant acceptance of Dr. Bretton’s badinage, or whether he perceived that I was pained, and that, on the whole, the evening had not been one flow of exultant enjoyment for the volatile, pleasure-loving, Mademoiselle Lucy; but, as I was leaving the room, he stepped up and inquired whether I had any one to attend me to the Rue Fossette. The professor
now
spoke politely, and even deferentially, and he looked apologetic and repentant; but I could not recognize his civility at a word, nor meet his contrition with crude, premature oblivion. Never hitherto had I felt seriously disposed to resent his brusqueries, or freeze before his fierceness; what he had said to-night, however, I considered unwarranted: my extreme disapprobation of the proceeding must be marked, however slightly. I merely said:—

‘I am provided with attendance.’

Which was true, as Ginevra and I were to be sent home in the carriage; and I passed him with the sliding obeisance with which he was wont to be saluted in classe by pupils crossing his estrade.

Having sought my shawl I returned to the vestibule. M. Emanuel stood there as if waiting. He observed that the night was fine.

‘Is it?’ I said, with a tone and manner whose consummate chariness and frostiness I could not but applaud. It was so seldom I could properly act out my own resolution to be reserved and cool where I had been grieved or hurt, that I felt almost proud of this one successful effort. That ‘Is it?’ sounded just like the manner of other people. I had heard hundreds of such little minced, docked, dry phrases, from the pursed-up coral lips of a score of self-possessed, self-sufficing misses and mesdemoiselles. That M. Paul would not stand any prolonged experience of this sort of dialogue I knew; but he certainly merited a sample of the curt and arid, I believe he thought so himself, for he took the dose quietly. He looked at my shawl and objected to its lightness. I decidedly told him it was as heavy as I wished. Receding aloof, and standing apart, I leaned on the banister of the stairs, folded my shawl about me, and fixed my eyes on a dreary religious painting darkening the wall.

Ginevra was long in coming: tedious seemed her loitering. M. Paul was still there, my ear expected from his lips an angry tone. He came nearer. ‘Now for another hiss!’ thought I: had not the action been too uncivil I could have stopped my ears with my fingers in terror of the thrill. Nothing happens as we expect: listen for a coo or a murmur; it is then you will hear a cry of prey or pain. Await a piercing shriek, an angry threat, and welcome an amicable greeting, a low kind whisper. M. Paul spoke gently:—

‘Friends,’ said he, ‘do not quarrel for a word. Tell me, was it I or ce grand fat d’Anglais’ (so he profanely denominated Dr. Bretton), ‘who made your eyes so humid, and your cheeks so hot as they are even now?’

‘I am not conscious of you, monsieur, or of any other having excited such emotion as you indicate,’ was my answer; and in giving it, I again surpassed my usual self, and achieved a neat, frosty falsehood.

‘But what did I say?’ he pursued, ‘tell me: I was angry: I have forgotten my words; what were they.’

‘Such as it is best to forget!’ said I, still quite calm and chill.

‘Then it was
my
words which wounded you? Consider them unsaid: permit my retractation; accord my pardon.’

‘I am not angry, monsieur.’

‘Then you are worse than angry—grieved. Forgive me, Miss Lucy.’

’M. Emanuel, I do forgive you.’

‘Let me hear you say, in the voice natural to you, and not in that alien tone, “Mon ami, je vous pardonne.” ’

He made me smile. Who could help smiling at his wistfulness, his simplicity, his earnestness?

‘Bon!’ he cried; ‘Voilà que le jour va poindre! Dites donc, mon ami.’
^fk

‘Monsieur Paul, je vous pardonne.’

‘I will have no monsieur: speak the other word, or I shall not believe you sincere: another effort—
mon ami,
or else in English, —my friend!’

Now, ‘my friend’ had rather another sound and significancy than
‘mon ami,’
it did not breathe the same sense of domestic nd intimate affection:‘
‘mon ami
’ I could
not
say to M. Paul; ‘my friend,’ I could, and did say without difficulty. This distinction existed not for him, however, and he was quite satisfied with the English phrase. He smiled. You should have seen him smile, reader; and you should have marked the difference between his countenance now, and that he wore half an hour ago. I cannot affirm that I had ever witnessed the smile of pleasure, or content, or kindness round M. Paul’s lips, or in his eyes before. The ironic, the sarcastic, the disdainful, the passionately exultant, I had hundreds of times seen him express by what he called a smile, but any illuminated sign of milder or warmer feeling struck me as wholly new in his visage. It changed it as from a mask to a face: the deep lines left his features; the very complexion seemed clearer and fresher; that swart, sallow, southern darkness which spoke his Spanish blood, became displaced by a lighter hue. I know not that I have ever seen in any other human face an equal metamorphosis from a similar cause. He now took me to the carriage; at the same moment M. de Bassompierre came out with his niece.

In a pretty humour was Mistress Fanshawe; she had found the evening a grand failure: completely upset as to temper, she gave way to the most uncontrolled moroseness as soon as we were seated, and the carriage door closed. Her invectives against Dr. Bretton had something venomous in them. Having found herself impotent either to charm or sting him, hatred was her only resource; and this hatred she expressed in terms so unmeasured and proportion so monstrous, that, after listening for a while with assumed stoicism, my outraged sense of justice at last and suddenly caught fire. An explosion ensued: for I could be passionate, too; especially with my present fair but faulty associate, who never failed to stir the worst dregs of me. It was well that the carriage-wheels made a tremendous rattle over the flinty Choseville pavement, for I can assure the reader there was neither dead silence nor calm discussion within the vehicle. Half in earnest, half in seeming, I made it my business to storm down Ginevra. She had set out rampant from the Rue Crécy; it was necessary to tame her before we reached the Rue Fossette: to this end it was indispensable to show up her sterling value and high deserts; and this must be done in language of which the fidelity and homeliness might challenge comparison with the compliments of a John Knox to a Mary Stuart.
^fl
This was the right discipline for Ginevra; it suited her. I am quite sure she went to bed that night all the better and more settled in mind and mood, and slept all the more sweetly for having undergone a sound moral drubbing.

M.
Paul Emanuel owned an acute sensitiveness to the annoyance of interruption, from whatsoever cause, occurring during his lessons: to pass through the classe under such circumstances was considered by the teachers and pupils of the school, individually and collectively, to be as much as a woman’s or girl’s life was worth.

Madame Beck herself, if forced to the enterprise, would ‘skurry’ through, retrenching her skirts, and carefully coasting the formidable estrade, like a ship dreading breakers. As to Rosine, the portress—on whom, every half-hour, devolved the fearful duty of fetching pupils out of the very heart of one or other of the divisions, to take their music-lessons in the oratory, the great or little salon, the salle à manger, or some other pianostation—she would, upon her second or third attempt, frequently become almost tongue-tied from excess of consternation—a sentiment inspired by the unspeakable looks levelled at her through a pair of dart-dealing spectacles.

One morning I was sitting in the carré, at work upon a piece of embroidery which one of the pupils had commenced but delayed to finish, and while my fingers wrought at the frame, my ears regaled themselves with listening to the crescendos and cadences of a voice haranguing in the neighbouring classe, in tones that waxed momently more unquiet, more ominously varied. There was a good strong partition-wall between me and the gathering storm, as well as a facile means of flight through the glass-door to the court, in case it swept this way; so I am afraid I derived more amusement than alarm from these thickening symptoms. Poor Rosine was not so safe: four times that blessed morning had she made the passage of peril; and now, for the fifth time it became her dangerous duty to snatch, as it were, a brand from the burning—a pupil from under M. Paul’s nose.

‘Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!’ cried she. ‘Que vais je devenir? Monsieur va me tuer, je suis sure; car il est d’une colère!’
^fm

Nerved by the courage of desperation, she opened the door.

‘Mademoiselle La Malle au piano!’ was her cry. Ere she could make good her retreat, or quite close the door, this voice uttered itself:—

‘Dès ce moment!—la classe est défendue. La premiere qui ouvrira cette porte, ou passera par cette division, sera pen-due—fut-ce Madame Beck elle même!’
^fn

Ten minutes had not succeeded the promulgation of this decree, when Rosine’s French pantoufles were again heard shuffling along the corridor.

‘Mademoiselle,’ said she, ‘I would not for a five franc piece go into that classe again just now: Monsieur’s lunettes are really terrible; and here is a commissionaire come with a message from the Athénée. I have told Madame Beck I dare not deliver it, and she says I am to charge you with it.’

‘Me? No, that is rather too bad! It is not in my line of duty. Come, come, Rosine! bear your own burden. Be brave—charge once more!’

‘I, Mademoiselle?—impossible! Five times I have crossed him this day. Madame must really hire a gendarme for this service. Ouf! Je n’en puis plus!“
^fo

‘Bah! you are only a coward. What is the message?’

‘Precisely of the kind with which Monsieur least likes to be pestered: an urgent summons to go directly to the Athénée, as there is an official visitor—inspector—I know not what—arrived, and Monsieur
must
meet him: you know how he hates a
must.’

Yes, I knew well enough. The restive little man detested spur or curb: against whatever was urgent or obligatory, he was sure to revolt. However, I accepted the responsibility—not, certainly, without fear, but fear blent with other sentiments, curiosity amongst them. I opened the door, I entered. I closed it behind me as quickly and quietly as a rather unsteady hand would permit; for to be slow or bustling, to rattle a latch, or leave a door gaping wide, were aggravations of crime, often more disastrous in result than the main crime itself. There I stood then, and there he sat; his humour was visibly bad—almost at its worst; he had been giving a lesson in arithmetic—for he gave lessons on any and every subject that struck his fancy—and arithmetic being a dry subject, invariably disagreed with him: not a pupil but trembled when he spoke of figures. He sat, bent above his desk: to look up at the sound of an entrance, at the occurrence of a direct breach of his will and law, was an effort he could not for the moment bring himself to make. It was quite as well: I thus gained time to walk up the long classe; and it suited my idiosyncracy far better to encounter the near burst of anger like his, than to bear its menace at a distance.