Villette

from sight.
    »You may hide it, but I can possess it any moment I choose. You don't know my skill in sleight of hand: I might practise as a conjuror if I liked. Mama says sometimes, too, that I have an harmonizing property of tongue and eye; but you never saw that in me – did you, Lucy?«
    »Indeed – indeed – when you were a mere boy I used to see both: far more then than now – for now you are strong, and strength dispenses with subtlety. But still, Dr. John, you have what they call in this country ›un air fin,‹ that nobody can mistake. Madame Beck saw it, and –«
    »And liked it,« said he, laughing, »because she has it herself. But, Lucy, give me that letter – you don't really care for it.«
    To this provocative speech I made no answer. Graham in mirthful mood must not be humoured too far. Just now there was a new sort of smile playing about his lips – very sweet, but it grieved me somehow – a new sort of light sparkling in his eyes: not hostile, but not reassuring. I rose to go – I bid him good night a little sadly.
    His sensitiveness – that peculiar, apprehensive, detective faculty of his – felt in a moment the unspoken complaint – the scarce-thought reproach. He asked quietly if I was offended. I shook my head as implying a negative.
    »Permit me, then, to speak a little seriously to you before you go. You are in a highly nervous state. I feel sure from what is apparent in your look and manner, however well-controlled, that whilst alone this evening in that dismal, perishing sepulchral garret – that dungeon under the leads, smelling of damp and mould, rank with pthisis and catarrh: a place you never ought to enter – that you saw, or
thought
you saw, some appearance peculiarly calculated to impress the imagination. I know you
are
not, nor ever were, subject to material terrors, fears of robbers, etc. – I am not so sure that a visitation, bearing a spectral character, would not shake your very mind. Be calm now. This is all a matter of the nerves, I see: but just specify the vision.«
    »You will tell nobody?«
    »Nobody – most certainty. You may trust me as implicitly as you did Père Silas. Indeed, the doctor is perhaps the safer confessor of the two, though he has not gray hair.«
    »You will not laugh?«
    »Perhaps I may, to do you good; but not in scorn. Lucy, I feel as a friend towards you, though your timid nature is slow to trust.«
    He now looked like a friend: that indescribable smile and sparkle were gone; those formidable arched curves of lip, nostril, eyebrow, were depressed; repose marked his attitude – attention sobered his aspect. Won to confidence, I told him exactly what I had seen: ere now I had narrated to him the legend of the house – whiling away with that narrative an hour of a certain mild October afternoon, when he and I rode through Bois l'Etang.
    He sat and thought, and while he thought, we heard them all coming down stairs.
    »Are they going to interrupt?« said he, glancing at the door with an annoyed expression.
    »They will not come here,« I answered; for we were in the little salon where Madame never sat in the evening, and where it was by mere chance that heat was still lingering in the stove. They passed the door and went on to the salle-à-manger.
    »Now,« he pursued, »they will talk about thieves, burglars, and so on: let them do so – mind you say nothing, and keep your resolution of describing your nun to nobody. She may appear to you again: don't start.«
    »You think then,« I said, with secret horror, »she came out of my brain, and is now gone in there, and may glide out again at an hour and a day when I look not for her?«
    »I think it a case of spectral illusion: I fear, following on and resulting from long-continued mental conflict.«
    »Oh, Doctor John – I shudder at the thought of being liable to such an illusion! It seemed so real. Is there no cure? – no preventive?«
    »Happiness is the cure – a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both.«
    No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to
cultivate
happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.
    »Cultivate happiness!« I said briefly to the doctor: