Villette

brought to the spot by vigilance or an inscrutable instinct, pressed so near, she almost thrust herself between me and M. Emanuel. »Come, Paul!« she reiterated, her eye grazing me with its hard ray like a steel stylet. She pushed against her kinsman. I thought he receded; I thought he would go. Pierced deeper than I could endure, made now to feel what defied suppression, I cried –
    »My heart will break!«
    What I felt seemed literal heart-break; but the seal of another fountain yielded under the strain: one breath from M. Paul, the whisper, »Trust me!« lifted a load, opened an outlet. With many a deep sob, with thrilling, with icy shiver, with strong trembling, and yet with relief – I wept.
    »Leave her to me; it is a crisis; I will give her a cordial, and it will pass,« said the calm Madame Beck.
    To be left to her and her cordial, seemed to me something like being left to the poisoner and her bowl. When M. Paul answered deeply, harshly, and briefly –
    »Laissez-moi!« in the grim sound I felt a music strange, strong, but life-giving.
    »Laissez-moi!« he repeated, his nostrils opening, and his facial muscles all quivering as he spoke.
    »But this will never do,« said Madame, with sternness. More sternly rejoined her kinsman –
    »Sortez d'ici!«
    »I will send for Père Silas; on the spot I will send for him,« she threatened pertinaciously.
    »Femme!« cried the professor, not now in his deep tones, but in his highest and most excited key, »Femme! sortez à l'instant!«
    He was roused, and I loved him in his wrath with a passion beyond what I had yet felt.
    »What you do is wrong,« pursued Madame; »it is an act characteristic of men of your unreliable, imaginative temperament; a step impulsive, injudicious, inconsistent – a proceeding vexatious, and not estimable in the view of persons of steadier and more resolute character.«
    »You know not what I have of steady and resolute in me,« said he, »but you shall see; the event shall teach you. Modeste,« he continued less fiercely, »be gentle, be pitying, be a woman; look at this poor face, and relent. You know I am your friend, and the friend of your friends; in spite of your taunts, you well and deeply know I may be trusted. Of sacrificing myself I made no difficulty, but my heart is pained by what I see; it
must
have and give solace.
Leave me!
«
    This time, in the »
leave me,
« there was an intonation so bitter and so imperative, I wondered that even Madame Beck herself could for one moment delay obedience; but she stood firm; she gazed upon him dauntless; she met his eye, forbidding and fixed as stone. She was opening her lips to retort; I saw over all M. Paul's face a quick rising light and fire: I can hardly tell how he managed the movement; it did not seem violent; it kept the form of courtesy; he gave his hand; it scarce touched her, I thought; she ran, she whirled from the room; she was gone and the door shut in one second.
    This flash of passion was all over very soon. He smiled as he told me to wipe my eyes; he waited quietly till I was calm, dropping from time to time a stilling, solacing word. Ere long I sat beside him once more myself – re-assured – not desperate, nor yet desolate; not friendless, not hopeless, not sick of life, and seeking death.
    »It made you very sad then to lose your friend?« said he.
    »It kills me to be forgotten, monsieur,« I said. »All these weary days I have not heard from you one word, and I was crushed with the possibility, growing to certainty, that you would depart without saying farewell!«
    »Must I tell you what I told Modeste Beck – that you do not know me? Must I show and teach you my character? You
will
have proof that I can be a firm friend? Without clear proof this hand will not lie still in mine, it will not trust my shoulder as a safe stay? Good. The proof is ready. I come to justify myself.«
    »Say anything, teach anything, prove anything, monsieur: I can listen now.«
    »Then, in the first place, you must go out with me a good distance into the town. I came on purpose to fetch you.«
    Without questioning his meaning, or sounding his plan, or offering the semblance of an objection, I re-tied my bonnet: I was ready.
    The route he took was by the boulevards: he several times made me sit down on the seats stationed under the lime-trees; he did not ask if I was tired, but looked, and drew his own conclusions.
    »›All these weary days,‹« said he, repeating my words, with a