Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [103]
‘Madam, where am I?’ I inquired.
‘In a very safe asylum; well protected for the present: make your mind quite easy till you get a little better; you look ill this morning.’
‘I am so entirely bewildered, I do not know whether I can trust my senses at all, or whether they are misleading me in every particular: but you speak English, do you not, madam?’
‘I should think you might hear that: it would puzzle me to hold a long discourse in French.’
‘You do not come from England?’
‘I am lately arrived thence. Have you been long in this country? You seem to know my son?’
‘Do I, madam? Perhaps I do. Your son—the picture there?’
‘This is his portrait as a youth. While looking at it, you pronounced his name.’
‘Graham Bretton?’
She nodded.
‘I speak to Mrs. Bretton, formerly of Bretton,—shire?’
‘Quite right; and you, I am told, are an English teacher in a foreign school here: my son recognized you as such.’
‘How was I found, madam, and by whom?’
‘My son shall tell you that by-and-by,’ said she; ‘but at present you are too confused and weak for conversation: try to eat some breakfast, and then sleep.’
Notwithstanding all I had undergone—the bodily fatigue, the perturbation of spirits, the exposure to weather—it seemed that I was better: the fever, the real malady which had oppressed my frame, was abating; for, whereas during the last nine days I had taken no solid food, and suffered from continual thirst, this morning, on breakfast being offered, I experienced a craving for nourishment: an inward faintness which caused me eagerly to taste the tea this lady offered, and to eat the morsel of dry toast she allowed in accompaniment. It was only a morsel, but it sufficed; keeping up my strength till some two or three hours afterwards, when the bonne brought me a little cup of broth and a biscuit.
As evening began to darken, and the ceaseless blast still blew wild and cold, and the rain streamed on, deluge-like, I grew weary—very weary of my bed. The room, though pretty, was small: I felt it confining; I longed for a change. The increasing chill and gathering gloom, too, depressed me; I wanted to see—to feel firelight. Besides, I kept thinking of the son of that tall matron: when should I see him? Certainly not till I left my room.
At last the bonne came to make my bed for the night. She prepared to wrap me in a blanket and place me in the little chintz chair; but, declining these attentions, I proceeded to dress myself. The business was just achieved, and I was sitting down to take breath, when Mrs. Bretton once more appeared.
‘Dressed!’ she exclaimed, smiling with that smile I so well knew—a pleasant smile, though not soft;—‘You are quite better then? Quite strong—eh?’
She spoke to me so much as of old she used to speak that I almost fancied she was beginning to know me. There was the same sort of patronage in her voice and manner that, as a girl, I had always experienced from her—a patronage I yielded to and even liked; it was not founded on conventional grounds of superior wealth or station (in the last particular there had never been any inequality; her degree was mine) but on natural reasons of physical advantage: it was the shelter the tree gives the herb. I put a request without further ceremony.
‘Do let me go down stairs, madam; I am so cold and dull here.’
‘I desire nothing better, if you are strong enough to bear the change,’ was her reply. ‘Come then; here is an arm.’ And she offered me hers: I took it, and we descended one flight of carpeted steps to a landing where a tall door, standing open, gave admission into the blue damask room. How pleasant it was in its air of perfect domestic comfort! How warm in its amber lamp-light and vermilion fire-flush! To render the picture perfect, tea stood ready on the table—an English tea, whereof the whole shining service glanced at me familiarly; from the solid silver urn, of antique pattern, and the massive pot of the same metal, to the thin porcelain cups, dark with purple and gilding. I knew the very seed-cake of peculiar