Villette - Charlotte Brontë (best fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

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 soeur⁠—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 hardhearted, 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