Villette by Charlotte Brontë (free e reader .TXT) 📕

in this simple and somewhat pretty sleeping-closet to startle the most timid? Merely this⁠—These articles of furniture could not be real, solid armchairs, looking-glasses, and washstands⁠—they must be the ghosts of such articles; or, if this were denied as too wild an hypothesis⁠—and, confounded as I was, I did deny it⁠—there remained but to conclude that I had myself passed into an abnormal state of mind; in short, that I was very ill and delirious: and even then, mine was the strangest figment with which delirium had ever harassed a victim.

I knew⁠—I was obliged to know⁠—the green chintz of that little chair; the little snug chair itself, the carved, shining-black, foliated frame of that glass; the smooth, milky-green of the china vessels on the stand; the very stand too, with its top of grey marble, splintered at one corner;⁠—all these I was compelled to recognise and to hail, as last night I had, perforce, recognised and hailed the rosewood, the drapery, the porcelain, of the drawing-room.

Bretton! Bretton! and ten years ago shone reflected in that mirror. And why did Bretton and my fourteenth year haunt me thus? Why, if they came at all, did they not return complete? Why hovered before my distempered vision the mere furniture, while the rooms and the locality were gone? As to that pincushion made of crimson satin, ornamented with gold beads and frilled with thread-lace, I had the same right to know it as to know the screens⁠—I had made it myself. Rising with a start from the bed, I took the cushion in my hand and examined it. There was the cipher L. L. B. formed in gold beds, and surrounded with an oval wreath embroidered in white silk. These were the initials of my godmother’s name⁠—Lonisa Lucy Bretton.

“Am I in England? Am I at Bretton?” I muttered; and hastily pulling up the blind with which the lattice was shrouded, I looked out to try and discover where I was; half-prepared to meet the calm, old, handsome buildings and clean grey pavement of St. Ann’s Street, and to see at the end the towers of the minster: or, if otherwise, fully expectant of a town view somewhere, a rue in Villette, if not a street in a pleasant and ancient English city.

I looked, on the contrary, through a frame of leafage, clustering round the high lattice, and forth thence to a grassy mead-like level, a lawn-terrace with trees rising from the lower ground beyond⁠—high forest-trees, such as I had not seen for many a day. They were now groaning under the gale of October, and between their trunks I traced the line of an avenue, where yellow leaves lay in heaps and drifts, or were whirled singly before the sweeping west wind. Whatever landscape might lie further must have been flat, and these tall beeches shut it out. The place seemed secluded, and was to me quite strange: I did not know it at all.

Once more I lay down. My bed stood in a little alcove; on turning my face to the wall, the room with its bewildering accompaniments became excluded. Excluded? No! For as I arranged my position in this hope, behold, on the green space between the divided and looped-up curtains, hung a broad, gilded picture-frame enclosing a portrait. It was drawn⁠—well drawn, though but a sketch⁠—in watercolours; a head, a boy’s head, fresh, lifelike, speaking, and animated. It seemed a youth of sixteen, fair-complexioned, with sanguine health in his cheek; hair long, not dark, and with a sunny sheen; penetrating eyes, an arch mouth, and a gay smile. On the whole a most pleasant face to look at, especially for, those claiming a right to that youth’s affections⁠—parents, for instance, or sisters. Any romantic little schoolgirl might almost have loved it in its frame. Those eyes looked as if when somewhat older they would flash a lightning-response to love: I cannot tell whether they kept in store the steady-beaming shine of faith. For whatever sentiment met him in form too facile, his lips menaced, beautifully but surely, caprice and light esteem.

Striving to take each new discovery as quietly as I could, I whispered to myself⁠—

“Ah! that portrait used to hang in the breakfast-room, over the mantelpiece: somewhat too high, as I thought. I well remember how I used to mount a music-stool for the purpose of unhooking it, holding it in my hand, and searching into those bonny wells of eyes, whose glance under their hazel lashes seemed like a pencilled laugh; and well I liked to note the colouring of the cheek, and the expression of the mouth.” I hardly believed fancy could improve on the curve of that mouth, or of the chin; even my ignorance knew that both were beautiful, and pondered perplexed over this doubt: “How it was that what charmed so much, could at the same time so keenly pain?” Once, by way of test, I took little Missy Home, and, lifting her in my arms, told her to look at the picture.

“Do you like it, Polly?” I asked. She never answered, but gazed long, and at last a darkness went trembling through her sensitive eye, as she said, “Put me down.” So I put her down, saying to myself: “The child feels it too.”

All these things do I now think over, adding, “He had his faults, yet scarce ever was a finer nature; liberal, suave, impressible.” My reflections closed in an audibly pronounced word, “Graham!”

“Graham!” echoed a sudden voice at the bedside. “Do you want Graham?”

I looked. The plot was but thickening; the wonder but culminating. If it was strange to see that well-remembered pictured form on the wall, still stranger was it to turn and behold the equally well-remembered living form opposite⁠—a woman, a lady, most real and substantial, tall, well-attired, wearing widow’s silk, and such a cap as best became her matron and motherly braids of hair. Hers, too, was a good face; too marked, perhaps, now for beauty, but