Villette (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charlotte Bronte [240]
More than once when we were alone, Paulina would tell me how wonderful and curious it was to discover the richness and accuracy of his memory in this matter. How, while he was looking at her, recollections would seem to be suddenly quickened in his mind. He reminded her that she had once gathered his head in her arms, caressed his leonine graces, and cried out, ‘Graham, I do like you!’ He told her how she would set a foot-stool beside him, and climb by its aid to his knee. At this day he said he could recall the sensation of her little hands smoothing his cheek, or burying themselves in his thick mane. He remembered the touch of her small forefinger, placed half tremblingly, half curiously, in the cleft of his chin, the lisp, the look with which she would name it ‘a pretty dimple,’ then seek his eyes and question why they pierced so, telling him he had a ‘nice, strange face; far nicer, far stranger, than either his mama or Lucy Snowe.’
‘Child as I was,’ remarked Paulina, ‘I wonder how I dared be so venturous. To me he seems now all sacred, his locks are inaccessible, and, Lucy, I feel a sort of fear when I look at his firm, marble chin, at his straight Greek features. Women are called beautiful, Lucy; he is not like a woman, therefore I suppose he is not beautiful, but what is he then? Do other people see him with my eyes? Do you admire him?’
‘I’ll tell you what I do, Paulina,’ was once my answer to her many questions. ‘I never see him. I looked at him twice or thrice about a year ago, before he recognized me, and then I shut my eyes; and if he were to cross their balls twelve times between each day’s sunset and sunrise, except from memory, I should hardly know what shape had gone by.’
‘Lucy, what do you mean?’ said she, under her breath.
‘I mean that I value vision, and dread being struck stone blind.’ It was best to answer her strongly at once, and to silence for ever the tender, passionate confidences which left her lips, sweet honey, and sometimes dropped in my ear—molten lead. To me, she commented no more on her lover’s beauty.
Yet speak of him she would; sometimes shyly in quiet, brief phrases; sometimes with a tenderness of cadence, and music of voice exquisite in itself, but which chafed me at times miserably; and then, I know, I gave her stern looks and words; but cloudless happiness had dazzled her native clear sight, and she only thought Lucy—fitful.
‘Spartan girl! Proud Lucy!’ she would say, smiling at me.
‘Graham says you are the most peculiar, capricious little woman he knows; but yet you are excellent; we both think so.’
‘You both think you know not what,’ said I. ‘Have the goodness to make me as little the subject of your mutual talk and thoughts as possible. I have my sort of life apart from yours.’
‘But ours, Lucy, is a beautiful life, or it will be; and you shall share it.’
‘I shall share no man’s or woman’s life in this world, as you understand sharing. I think I have one friend of my own, but am not sure; and till I am sure, I live solitary.’
‘But solitude is sadness.’
‘Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy, lies heartbreak.’
‘Lucy, I wonder if anybody will ever comprehend you altogether.’
There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may. Paulina had forbidden letters, yet Dr. Bretton wrote; she had resolved against correspondence, yet she answered, were it only to chide. She showed me these letters; with something of the spoiled child’s wilfulness, and of the heiress’s imperious-ness, she made me read them. As I read Graham’s, I scarce wondered at her exaction, and understood her pride: they were fine letters—manly and fond—modest and gallant. Hers must have appeared to him beautiful. They had not been written to show her talents; still less, I think, to express