Villette

E QUARREL.

During the first days of my stay at the Terrace, Graham never took a
seat near me, or in his frequent pacing of the room approached the
quarter where I sat, or looked pre-occupied, or more grave than usual,
but I thought of Miss Fanshawe and expected her name to leap from his
lips. I kept my ear and mind in perpetual readiness for the tender
theme; my patience was ordered to be permanently under arms, and my
sympathy desired to keep its cornucopia replenished and ready for
outpouring. At last, and after a little inward struggle, which I saw
and respected, he one day launched into the topic. It was introduced
delicately; anonymously as it were.

“Your friend is spending her vacation in travelling, I hear?”

“Friend, forsooth!” thought I to myself: but it would not do to
contradict; he must have his own way; I must own the soft impeachment:
friend let it be. Still, by way of experiment, I could not help asking
whom he meant?

He had taken a seat at my work-table; he now laid hands on a reel of
thread which he proceeded recklessly to unwind.

“Ginevra—Miss Fanshawe, has accompanied the Cholmondeleys on a tour
through the south of France?”

“She has.”

“Do you and she correspond?”

“It will astonish you to hear that I never once thought of making
application for that privilege.”

“You have seen letters of her writing?”

“Yes; several to her uncle.”

“They will not be deficient in wit and naïveté; there is so much
sparkle, and so little art in her soul?”

“She writes comprehensively enough when she writes to M. de
Bassompierre: he who runs may read.” (In fact, Ginevra’s epistles to
her wealthy kinsman were commonly business documents, unequivocal
applications for cash.)

“And her handwriting? It must be pretty, light, ladylike, I should
think?”

It was, and I said so.

“I verily believe that all she does is well done,” said Dr. John; and
as I seemed in no hurry to chime in with this remark, he added “You,
who know her, could you name a point in which she is deficient?”

“She does several things very well.” (“Flirtation amongst the rest,”
subjoined I, in thought.)

“When do you suppose she will return to town?” he soon inquired.

“Pardon me, Dr. John, I must explain. You honour me too much in
ascribing to me a degree of intimacy with Miss Fanshawe I have not the
felicity to enjoy. I have never been the depositary of her plans and
secrets. You will find her particular friends in another sphere than
mine: amongst the Cholmondeleys, for instance.”

He actually thought I was stung with a kind of jealous pain similar to
his own!

“Excuse her,” he said; “judge her indulgently; the glitter of fashion
misleads her, but she will soon find out that these people are hollow,
and will return to you with augmented attachment and confirmed trust. I
know something of the Cholmondeleys: superficial, showy, selfish
people; depend on it, at heart Ginevra values you beyond a score of
such.”

“You are very kind,” I said briefly.

A disclaimer of the sentiments attributed to me burned on my lips, but
I extinguished the flame. I submitted to be looked upon as the
humiliated, cast-off, and now pining confidante of the distinguished
Miss Fanshawe: but, reader, it was a hard submission.

“Yet, you see,” continued Graham, “while I comfort you, I cannot take
the same consolation to myself; I cannot hope she will do me justice.
De Hamal is most worthless, yet I fear he pleases her: wretched
delusion!”

My patience really gave way, and without notice: all at once. I suppose
illness and weakness had worn it and made it brittle.

“Dr. Bretton,” I broke out, “there is no delusion like your own. On all
points but one you are a man, frank, healthful, right-thinking,
clear-sighted: on this exceptional point you are but a slave. I
declare, where Miss Fanshawe is concerned, you merit no respect; nor
have you mine.”

I got up, and left the room very much excited.

This little scene took place in the morning; I had to meet him again in
the evening, and then I saw I had done mischief. He was not made of
common clay, not put together out of vulgar materials; while the
outlines of his nature had been shaped with breadth and vigour, the
details embraced workmanship of almost feminine delicacy: finer, much
finer, than you could be prepared to meet with; than you could believe
inherent in him, even after years of acquaintance. Indeed, till some
over-sharp contact with his nerves had betrayed, by its effects, their
acute sensibility, this elaborate construction must be ignored; and the
more especially because the sympathetic faculty was not prominent in
him: to feel, and to seize quickly another’s feelings, are separate
properties; a few constructions possess both, some neither. Dr. John
had the one in exquisite perfection; and because I have admitted that
he was not endowed with the other in equal degree, the reader will
considerately refrain from passing to an extreme, and pronouncing him
unsympathizing, unfeeling: on the contrary, he was a kind, generous
man. Make your need known, his hand was open. Put your grief into
words, he turned no deaf ear. Expect refinements of perception,
miracles of intuition, and realize disappointment. This night, when Dr.
John entered the room, and met the evening lamp, I saw well and at one
glance his whole mechanism.

To one who had named him “slave,” and, on any point, banned him from
respect, he must now have peculiar feelings. That the epithet was well
applied, and the ban just, might be; he put forth no denial that it was
so: his mind even candidly revolved that unmanning possibility. He
sought in this accusation the cause of that ill-success which had got
so galling a hold on his mental peace: Amid the worry of a
self-condemnatory soliloquy, his demeanour seemed grave, perhaps cold,
both to me and his mother. And yet there was no bad feeling, no malice,
no rancour, no littleness in his countenance, beautiful with a man’s
best beauty, even in its depression. When I placed his chair at the
table, which I hastened to do, anticipating the servant, and when I
handed him his tea, which I did with trembling care, he said: “Thank
you, Lucy,” in as kindly a tone of his full pleasant voice as ever my
ear welcomed.

For my part, there was only one plan to be pursued; I must expiate my
culpable vehemence, or I must not sleep that night. This would not do
at all; I could not stand it: I made no pretence of capacity to wage
war on this footing. School solitude, conventual silence and
stagnation, anything seemed preferable to living embroiled with Dr.
John. As to Ginevra, she might take the silver wings of a dove, or any
other fowl that flies, and mount straight up to the highest place,
among the highest stars, where her lover’s highest flight of fancy
chose to fix the constellation of her charms: never more be it mine to
dispute the arrangement. Long I tried to catch his eye. Again and again
that eye just met mine; but, having nothing to say, it withdrew, and I
was baffled. After tea, he sat, sad and quiet, reading a book. I wished
I could have dared to go and sit near him, but it seemed that if I
ventured to take that step, he would infallibly evince hostility and
indignation. I longed to speak out, and I dared not whisper. His mother
left the room; then, moved by insupportable regret, I just murmured the
words “Dr. Bretton.”

He looked up from his book; his eyes were not cold or malevolent, his
mouth was not cynical; he was ready and willing to hear what I might
have to say: his spirit was of vintage too mellow and generous to sour
in one thunder-clap.

“Dr. Bretton, forgive my hasty words: do, do forgive them.”

He smiled that moment I spoke. “Perhaps I deserved them, Lucy. If you
don’t respect me, I am sure it is because I am not respectable. I fear,
I am an awkward fool: I must manage badly in some way, for where I wish
to please, it seems I don’t please.”

“Of that you cannot be sure; and even if such be the case, is it the
fault of your character, or of another’s perceptions? But now, let me
unsay what I said in anger. In one thing, and in all things, I deeply
respect you. If you think scarcely enough of yourself, and too much of
others, what is that but an excellence?”

“Can I think too much of Ginevra?”

“I believe you may; you believe you can’t. Let us agree to differ.
Let me be pardoned; that is what I ask.”

“Do you think I cherish ill-will for one warm word?”

“I see you do not and cannot; but just say, ‘Lucy, I forgive you!’ Say
that, to ease me of the heart-ache.”

“Put away your heart-ache, as I will put away mine; for you wounded me
a little, Lucy. Now, when the pain is gone, I more than forgive: I feel
grateful, as to a sincere well-wisher.”

“I am your sincere well-wisher: you are right.”

Thus our quarrel ended.

Reader, if in the course of this work, you find that my opinion of Dr.
John undergoes modification, excuse the seeming inconsistency. I give
the feeling as at the time I felt it; I describe the view of character
as it appeared when discovered.

He showed the fineness of his nature by being kinder to me after that
misunderstanding than before. Nay, the very incident which, by my
theory, must in some degree estrange me and him, changed, indeed,
somewhat our relations; but not in the sense I painfully anticipated.
An invisible, but a cold something, very slight, very transparent, but
very chill: a sort of screen of ice had hitherto, all through our two
lives, glazed the medium through which we exchanged intercourse. Those
few warm words, though only warm with anger, breathed on that frail
frost-work of reserve; about this time, it gave note of dissolution. I
think from that day, so long as we continued friends, he never in
discourse stood on topics of ceremony with me. He seemed to know that
if he would but talk about himself, and about that in which he was most
interested, my expectation would always be answered, my wish always
satisfied. It follows, as a matter of course, that I continued to hear
much of “Ginevra.”

“Ginevra!” He thought her so fair, so good; he spoke so lovingly of her
charms, her sweetness, her innocence, that, in spite of my plain prose
knowledge of the reality, a kind of reflected glow began to settle on
her idea, even for me. Still, reader, I am free to confess, that he
often talked nonsense; but I strove to be unfailingly patient with him.
I had had my lesson: I had learned how severe for me was the pain of
crossing, or grieving, or disappointing him. In a strange and new
sense, I grew most selfish, and quite powerless to deny myself the
delight of indulging his mood, and being pliant to his will. He still
seemed to me most absurd when he obstinately doubted, and desponded
about his power to win in the end Miss Fanshawe’s preference. The fancy
became rooted in my own mind more stubbornly than ever, that she was
only coquetting to goad him, and that, at heart, she coveted every one
of his words and looks. Sometimes he harassed me, in spite of my
resolution to bear and hear; in the midst of the indescribable
gall-honey pleasure of thus bearing and hearing, he struck so on the
flint of what firmness I owned, that it emitted fire once and again. I
chanced to assert one day, with a view to stilling his impatience, that
in my own mind, I felt positive Miss Fanshawe must intend eventually
to accept him.

“Positive! It was easy to say so, but had I any grounds for such
assurance?”

“The best grounds.”

“Now, Lucy, do tell me what!”

“You know them as well as I; and, knowing them, Dr. John, it really
amazes me that you should not repose the frankest confidence in her
fidelity. To doubt, under the circumstances, is almost to insult.”

“Now you are beginning to speak fast and to breathe short; but speak a
little faster and breathe a little shorter, till you have given an
explanation—a full explanation: I must have it.”

“You shall, Dr. John. In some cases, you are a lavish, generous man:
you are a worshipper ever ready with the votive offering should Père
Silas ever convert you, you will give him abundance of alms for his
poor, you will supply his altar with tapers, and the shrine of your
favourite saint you will do your best to enrich: Ginevra, Dr. John—”

“Hush!” said he, “don’t go on.”

“Hush, I will not: and go on I will: Ginevra has had her hands
filled from your hands more times than I can count. You have sought for
her the costliest flowers; you have busied your brain in devising gifts
the most delicate: such, one would have thought, as only a woman could
have imagined; and in addition, Miss Fanshawe owns a set of ornaments,
to purchase which your generosity must have verged on extravagance.”

The modesty Ginevra herself had never evinced in this matter, now
flushed all over the face of her admirer.

“Nonsense!” he said, destructively snipping a skein of silk with my
scissors. “I offered them to please myself: I felt she did me a favour
in accepting them.”

“She did more than a favour, Dr. John: she pledged her very honour that
she would make you some return; and if she cannot pay you in affection,
she ought to hand out a business-like equivalent, in the shape of some
rouleaux of gold pieces.”

“But you don’t understand her; she is far too disinterested to care for
my gifts, and too simple-minded to know their value.”

I laughed out: I had heard her adjudge to every jewel its price; and
well I knew money-embarrassment, money-schemes; money’s worth, and
endeavours to realise supplies, had, young as she was, furnished the
most frequent, and the favourite stimulus of her thoughts for years.

He pursued. “You should have seen her whenever I have laid on her lap
some trifle; so cool, so unmoved: no eagerness to take, not even
pleasure in contemplating. Just from amiable reluctance to grieve me,
she would permit the bouquet to lie beside her, and perhaps consent to
bear it away. Or, if I achieved the fastening of a bracelet on her
ivory arm, however pretty the trinket might be (and I always carefully
chose what seemed to me pretty, and what of course was not
valueless), the glitter never dazzled her bright eyes: she would hardly
cast one look on my gift.”

“Then, of course, not valuing it, she would unloose, and return it to
you?”

“No; for such a repulse she was too good-natured. She would consent to
seem to forget what I had done, and retain the offering with lady-like
quiet and easy oblivion. Under such circumstances, how can a man build
on acceptance of his presents as a favourable symptom? For my part,
were I to offer her all I have, and she to take it, such is her
incapacity to be swayed by sordid considerations, I should not venture
to believe the transaction advanced me one step.”

“Dr. John,” I began, “Love is blind;” but just then a blue subtle ray
sped sideways from Dr. John’s eye: it reminded me of old days, it
reminded me of his picture: it half led me to think that part, at
least, of his professed persuasion of Miss Fanshawe’s naïveté was
assumed; it led me dubiously to conjecture that perhaps, in spite of
his passion for her beauty, his appreciation of her foibles might
possibly be less mistaken, more clear-sighted, than from his general
language was presumable. After all it might be only a chance look, or
at best the token of a merely momentary impression. Chance or
intentional real or imaginary, it closed the conversation.