Villette by Charlotte Brontë Read Free Book Online

then.’
    They proceeded to the door. She stopped.
    ‘Oh! Harriet, I wish this was papa’s house! I don’t know these people.’
    ‘Be a good child, missy.’
    ‘I am good, but I ache here;’ putting her hand to her heart, and moaning while she reiterated ‘Papa! papa!’
    I roused myself and started up, to check this scene while it was yet within bounds.
    ‘Say good morning to the young lady,’ dictated Harriet.
    She said ‘good morning,’ and then followed her nurse from the room. Harriet temporarily left that same day, to go to her own friends, who lived in the neighbourhood.
    On descending, I found Paulina (the child called herself Polly, but her full name was Paulina Mary) seated at the breakfast table, by Mrs. Bretton’s side; a mug of milk stood before her, a morsel of bread filled her hand, which lay passive on the tablecloth: she was not eating.
    ‘How we shall conciliate this little creature,’ said Mrs. Bretton to me, ‘I don’t know: she tastes nothing, and, by her looks, she has not slept.’
    I expressed my confidence in the effects of time and kindness.
    ‘If she were to take a fancy to anybody in the house, she would soon settle; but not till then,’ replied Mrs. Bretton.

CHAPTER 2
    Paulina
    S ome days elapsed, and it appeared she was not likely to take much of a fancy to anybody in the house. She was not exactly naughty or wilful: she was far from disobedient; but an object less conducive to comfort—to tranquillity even—than she presented, it was scarcely possible to have before one’s eyes. She moped: no grown person could have performed that uncheering business better; no furrowed face of adult exile, longing for Europe at Europe’s antipodes, ever bore more legibly the signs of home sickness than did her infant visage. She seemed growing old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, 2 3 plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me not inhabited, but haunted.
    And again, when of moonlight nights, on waking, I beheld her figure, white and conspicuous in its night-dress, kneeling upright in bed, and praying like some Catholic or Methodist enthusiast—some precocious fanatic or untimely saint—I scarcely know what thoughts I had; but they ran risk of being hardly more rational and healthy than that child’s mind must have been.
    I seldom caught a word of her prayers, for they were whispered low: sometimes, indeed, they were not whispered at all, but put up unuttered; such rare sentences as reached my ear still bore the burden, ‘Papa; my dear papa!’ This, I perceived, was a one-idea’d nature; betraying that monomaniac tendency I have ever thought the most unfortunate with which man or woman can be cursed.
    What might have been the end of this fretting, had it continued unchecked, can only be conjectured: it received, however, a sudden turn.
    One afternoon Mrs. Bretton, coaxing her from her usual station in a corner, had lifted her into the window-seat, and, by way of occupying her attention, told her to watch the passengers and count how many ladies should go down the street in a given time. She had sat listlessly, hardly looking, and not counting, when—my eyes being fixed on hers—I witnessed in its iris and pupil a startling transfiguration. These sudden, dangerous natures— sensitive as they are called—offer many a curious spectacle to those whom a cooler temperament has secured from participation in their angular vagaries. The fixed and heavy gaze swum, trembled, then glittered in fire; the small overcast brow cleared; the trivial and dejected features lit up; the sad countenance vanished, and in its place appeared a sudden eagerness, an intense expectancy.
    ‘It is!’ were her words.
    Like a bird or a shaft, or any other swift thing, she was gone from the room. How she got the house-door open I cannot tell; probably it might be