Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (127 page)

“Unhumbled, I can take what is mine. Did I not give from the altar the very flame which lit Eva’s being? Come again into the heaven whence thou wert sent.”

That Presence, invisible but mighty, gathered her in like a lamb to the fold; that voice, soft but all-pervading, vibrated through her heart like music. Her eye received no image; and yet a sense visited her vision and her brain as of the serenity of stainless air, the power of sovereign seas, the majesty of marching stars, the energy of colliding elements, the rooted endurance of hills wide based, and, above all, as of the lustre of heroic beauty rushing victorious on the Night, vanquishing its shadows like a diviner sun.

Such was the bridal hour of Genius and Humanity. Who shall rehearse the tale of their after-union? Who shall depict its bliss and bale? Who shall tell how He between whom and the Woman God put enmity forged deadly plots to break the bond or defile its purity? Who shall record the long strife between Serpent and Seraph: — How still the Father of Lies insinuated evil into good, pride into wisdom, grossness into glory, pain into bliss, poison into passion? How the “dreadless Angel” defied, resisted, and repelled? How again and again he refined the polluted cup, exalted the debased emotion, rectified the perverted impulse, detected the lurking venom, baffled the frontless temptation — purified, justified, watched, and withstood? How, by his patience, by his strength, by that unutterable excellence he held from God — his Origin — this faithful Seraph fought for Humanity a good fight through time; and, when Time’s course closed, and Death was encountered at the end, barring with fleshless arm the portals of Eternity, how Genius still held close his dying bride, sustained her through the agony of the passage, bore her triumphant into his own home, Heaven; restored her, redeemed, to Jehovah, her Maker; and at last, before Angel and Archangel, crowned her with the crown of Immortality?

Who shall of these things write the chronicle?

“I never could correct that composition,” observed Shirley, as Moore concluded. “Your censor-pencil scored it with condemnatory lines, whose signification I strove vainly to fathom.”

She had taken a crayon from the tutor’s desk, and was drawing little leaves, fragments of pillars, broken crosses, on the margin of the book.

“French may be half forgotten, but the habits of the French lesson are retained, I see,” said Louis. “My books would now, as erst, be unsafe with you. My newly-bound St. Pierre would soon be like my Racine — Miss Keeldar, her mark, traced on every page.”

Shirley dropped her crayon as if it burned her fingers.

“Tell me what were the faults of that
devoir
?” she asked. “Were they grammatical errors, or did you object to the substance?”

“I never said that the lines I drew were indications of faults at all. You would have it that such was the case, and I refrained from contradiction.”

“What else did they denote?”

“No matter now.”

“Mr. Moore,” cried Henry, “make Shirley repeat some of the pieces she used to say so well by heart.”

“If I ask for any, it will be ‘Le Cheval Dompté,’” said Moore, trimming with his penknife the pencil Miss Keeldar had worn to a stump.

She turned aside her head; the neck, the clear cheek, forsaken by their natural veil, were seen to flush warm.

“Ah! she has not forgotten, you see, sir,” said Henry, exultant. “She knows how naughty she was.”

A smile, which Shirley would not permit to expand, made her lip tremble; she bent her face, and hid it half with her arms, half in her curls, which, as she stooped, fell loose again. “Certainly I was a rebel,” she answered.

“A rebel!” repeated Henry. “Yes; you and papa had quarrelled terribly, and you set both him and mamma, and Mrs. Pryor, and everybody, at defiance. You said he had insulted you —
 
— “

“He
had
insulted me,” interposed Shirley.

“And you wanted to leave Sympson Grove directly. You packed your things up, and papa threw them out of your trunk; mamma cried, Mrs. Pryor cried; they both stood wringing their hands begging you to be patient; and you knelt on the floor with your things and your up-turned box before you, looking, Shirley, looking — why, in one of
your
passions. Your features, in such passions, are not distorted; they are fixed, but quite beautiful. You scarcely look angry, only resolute, and in a certain haste; yet one feels that at such times an obstacle cast across your path would be split as with lightning. Papa lost heart, and called Mr. Moore.”

“Enough, Henry.”

“No, it is not enough. I hardly know how Mr. Moore managed, except that I recollect he suggested to papa that agitation would bring on his gout; and then he spoke quietly to the ladies, and got them away; and afterwards he said to you, Miss Shirley, that it was of no use talking or lecturing now, but that the tea-things were just brought into the schoolroom, and he was very thirsty, and he would be glad if you would leave your packing for the present and come and make a cup of tea for him and me. You came; you would not talk at first, but soon you softened and grew cheerful. Mr. Moore began to tell us about the Continent, the war, and Bonaparte — subjects we were both fond of listening to. After tea he said we should neither of us leave him that evening; he would not let us stray out of his sight, lest we should again get into mischief. We sat one on each side of him. We were so happy. I never passed so pleasant an evening. The next day he gave you, missy, a lecture of an hour, and wound it up by marking you a piece to learn in Bossuet as a punishment-lesson — ‘Le Cheval Dompté.’ You learned it instead of packing up, Shirley. We heard no more of your running away. Mr. Moore used to tease you on the subject for a year afterwards.”

“She never said a lesson with greater spirit,” subjoined Moore. “She then, for the first time, gave me the treat of hearing my native tongue spoken without accent by an English girl.”

“She was as sweet as summer cherries for a month afterwards,” struck in Henry: “a good hearty quarrel always left Shirley’s temper better than it found it.”

“You talk of me as if I were not present,” observed Miss Keeldar, who had not yet lifted her face.

“Are you sure you
are
present?” asked Moore. “There have been moments since my arrival here when I have been tempted to inquire of the lady of Fieldhead if she knew what had become of my former pupil.”

“She is here now.”

“I see her, and humble enough; but I would neither advise Harry nor others to believe too implicitly in the humility which one moment can hide its blushing face like a modest little child, and the next lift it pale and lofty as a marble Juno.”

“One man in times of old, it is said, imparted vitality to the statue he had chiselled; others may have the contrary gift of turning life to stone.”

Moore paused on this observation before he replied to it. His look, at once struck and meditative, said, “A strange phrase; what may it mean?” He turned it over in his mind, with thought deep and slow, as some German pondering metaphysics.

“You mean,” he said at last, “that some men inspire repugnance, and so chill the kind heart.”

“Ingenious!” responded Shirley. “If the interpretation pleases you, you are welcome to hold it valid.
I
don’t care.”

And with that she raised her head, lofty in look and statue-like in hue, as Louis had described it.

“Behold the metamorphosis!” he said; “scarce imagined ere it is realized: a lowly nymph develops to an inaccessible goddess. But Henry must not be disappointed of his recitation, and Olympia will deign to oblige him. Let us begin.”

“I have forgotten the very first line.”

“Which I have not.
My
memory, if a slow, is a retentive one. I acquire deliberately both knowledge and liking. The acquisition grows into my brain, and the sentiment into my breast; and it is not as the rapid-springing produce which, having no root in itself, flourishes verdurous enough for a time, but too soon falls withered away. Attention, Henry! Miss Keeldar consents to favour you. ‘Voyez ce cheval ardent et impétueux,’ so it commences.”

Miss Keeldar did consent to make the effort; but she soon stopped.

“Unless I heard the whole repeated I cannot continue it,” she said.

“Yet it was quickly learned — ‘soon gained, soon gone,’” moralized the tutor. He recited the passage deliberately, accurately, with slow, impressive emphasis.

Shirley, by degrees, inclined her ear as he went on. Her face, before turned from him,
re
turned towards him. When he ceased, she took the word up as if from his lips; she took his very tone; she seized his very accent; she delivered the periods as he had delivered them; she reproduced his manner, his pronunciation, his expression.

It was now her turn to petition.

“Recall ‘Le Songe d’Athalie,’” she entreated, “and say it.”

He said it for her. She took it from him; she found lively excitement in the pleasure of making his language her own. She asked for further indulgence; all the old school pieces were revived, and with them Shirley’s old school days.

He had gone through some of the best passages of Racine and Corneille, and then had heard the echo of his own deep tones in the girl’s voice, that modulated itself faithfully on his. “Le chêne et le Roseau,” that most beautiful of La Fontaine’s fables, had been recited, well recited, by the tutor, and the pupil had animatedly availed herself of the lesson. Perhaps a simultaneous feeling seized them now, that their enthusiasm had kindled to a glow, which the slight fuel of French poetry no longer sufficed to feed; perhaps they longed for a trunk of English oak to be thrown as a Yule log to the devouring flame. Moore observed, “And these are our best pieces! And we have nothing more dramatic, nervous, natural!”

And then he smiled and was silent. His whole nature seemed serenely alight. He stood on the hearth, leaning his elbow on the mantelpiece, musing not unblissfully.

Twilight was closing on the diminished autumn day. The schoolroom windows — darkened with creeping plants, from which no high October winds had as yet swept the sere foliage — admitted scarce a gleam of sky; but the fire gave light enough to talk by.

And now Louis Moore addressed his pupil in French, and she answered at first with laughing hesitation and in broken phrase. Moore encouraged while he corrected her. Henry joined in the lesson; the two scholars stood opposite the master, their arms round each other’s waists. Tartar, who long since had craved and obtained admission, sat sagely in the centre of the rug, staring at the blaze which burst fitful from morsels of coal among the red cinders. The group were happy enough, but —

“Pleasures are like poppies spread;

You seize the flower — its bloom is shed.”

The dull, rumbling sound of wheels was heard on the pavement in the yard.

“It is the carriage returned,” said Shirley; “and dinner must be just ready, and I am not dressed.”

A servant came in with Mr. Moore’s candle and tea; for the tutor and his pupil usually dined at luncheon time.

“Mr. Sympson and the ladies are returned,” she said, “and Sir Philip Nunnely is with them.”

“How you did start, and how your hand trembled, Shirley!” said Henry, when the maid had closed the shutter and was gone. “But I know why — don’t you, Mr. Moore? I know what papa intends. He is a little ugly man, that Sir Philip. I wish he had not come. I wish sisters and all of them had stayed at De Walden Hall to dine. — Shirley should once more have made tea for you and me, Mr. Moore, and we would have had a happy evening of it.”

Moore was locking up his desk and putting away his St. Pierre. “That was
your
plan, was it, my boy?”

“Don’t you approve it, sir?”

“I approve nothing utopian. Look Life in its iron face; stare Reality out of its brassy countenance. Make the tea, Henry; I shall be back in a minute.”

He left the room; so did Shirley, by another door.