Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [177]
Several of M. de Bassompierre’s friends—the savants—being more or less connected with the Athénée, they were expected to attend on this occasion; together with the worshipful municipality of Villette, M. le Chevalier Staas, the burgomaster, and the parents and kinsfolk of the Athenians in general. M. de Bassompierre was engaged by his friends to accompany them; his fair daughter would, of course, be of the party, and she wrote a little note to Ginevra and myself, bidding us come early that we might join her.
As Miss Fanshawe and I were dressing in the dormitory of the Rue Fossette, she (Miss F.) suddenly burst into a laugh.
‘What now?’ I asked; for she had suspended the operation of arranging her attire, and was gazing at me.
‘It seems so odd,’ she replied, with her usual half-honest, half-insolent unreserve, ‘that you and I should now be so much on a level, visiting in the same sphere; having the same connections.’
‘Why yes,’ said I; ‘I had not much respect for the connections you chiefly frequented awhile ago: Mrs. Cholmondeley and Co. would never have suited me at all.’
‘Who are you, Miss Snowe?’ she inquired, in a tone of such undisguised and unsophisticated curiosity, as made me laugh in my turn.
‘You used to call yourself a nursery-governess; when you first came here you really had the care of the children in this house: I have seen you carry little Georgette in your arms, like a bonne—few governesses would have condescended so far—and now Madame Beck treats you with more courtesy than she treats the Parisienne, St. Pierre; and that proud chit, my cousin, makes you her bosom friend!’
‘Wonderful!’ I agreed, much amused at her mystification. ‘Who am I indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise. Pity I don’t look the character.’
‘I wonder you are not more flattered by all this,’ she went on: ‘you take it with strange composure. If you really are the nobody I once thought you, you must be a cool hand.’
‘The nobody you once thought me!’ I repeated, and my face grew a little hot; but I would not be angry: of what importance was a school-girl’s crude use of the terms nobody and somebody? I confined myself, therefore, to the remark that I had merely met with civility; and asked ‘what she saw in civility to throw the recipient into a fever of confusion?’
‘One can’t help wondering at some things,’ she persisted.
‘Wondering at marvels of your own manufacture. Are you ready at last?’
‘Yes; let me take your arm.’
‘I would rather not: we will walk side by side.’
When she took my arm, she always leaned upon me her whole weight; and, as I was not a gentleman, or her lover, I did not like it.
‘There, again!’ she cried. ‘I thought, by offering to take your arm, to intimate approbation of your dress and general appearance: I meant it as a compliment.’
‘You did? You meant, in short, to express that you are not ashamed to be seen in the street with me? That if Mrs. Cholmondeley should be fondling her lap-dog at some window, or Colonel de Hamal picking his teeth in a balcony, and should catch a glimpse of us, you would not quite blush for your companion?’
‘Yes,’ said she, with that directness which was her best point—which gave an honest plainness to her very fibs when she told them—which was, in short, the salt, the sole preservative ingredient of a character otherwise not formed to keep.
I delegated the trouble of commenting on this ‘yes’ to my countenance; or rather, my under-lip voluntarily anticipated my tongue: of course, reverence and solemnity were not the feelings expressed in the look I gave her.
‘Scornful, sneering creature!’ she went on, as we crossed a great square, and entered the quiet, pleasant park, our nearest way to the Rue Crécy. ‘Nobody in this world was ever such a Turk to me as you are!’
‘You bring it on yourself: let me alone: have the sense to be quiet: I will let you alone.’
‘As if one could let you alone, when you are so peculiar and so mysterious!’
‘The mystery and peculiarity being entirely the conception of your own brain—maggots—neither