"It would be so delightful if we could walk out for once by ourselves. If there were only something to see—somewhere to go."
"Girls!" exclaimed Axelle, suddenly, "was not the scene of Villette laid in Brussels? Is not Charlotte Brontë's boarding-school here? I am sure it is. Suppose we seek it out—we four girls alone."
"But how, and where?" and "Wouldn't that be fine?" chorused the others. There was a hasty search through guide-books; but alas! not a clew could we find, not a peg upon which to hang the suspicions that were almost certainties.
"I am sure it was here," persisted Axelle. "I wish we had a Villette."
"We could get one at an English library," suggested another.
"If there is any English library here," added a third, doubtfully.
Evidently that must be our first point of departure. We could ask for information there. Accordingly we planned our crusade, as girls do,—the elders smiling unbelief, as elders will,—and sallied out at last into the summer sunshine, very brave in our hopes, very glad in our unwonted liberty. A commissionaire gave us the address of the bookstore we sought as we were leaving the hotel. "There are no obstacles in the path of the determined," we said, stepping out upon the Rue Royale. Across the way was the grand park, a maze of winding avenues, shaded by lofty trees, with nymphs, and fauns, and satyrs hiding among the shrubbery, and with all the tortuous paths made into mosaic pavement by the shimmering sunlight. But to Axelle Villette was more real than that June day.
"Do you remember," she said, "how Lucy Snow reached the city alone and at night?—how a young English stranger conducted her across the park, she following in his footsteps through the darkness, and hearing only the tramp, tramp, before her, and the drip of the rain as it fell from the soaked leaves? This must be the park."
When we had passed beyond its limits, we espied a little square, only a kind of alcove in the street, in the centre of which was the statue of some military hero. Behind it a quadruple flight of broad stone steps led down into a lower and more quiet street. Facing us, as we looked down, was a white stuccoed house, with a glimpse of a garden at one side.
"See!" exclaimed Axelle, joyfully; "I believe this is the very place. Don't you remember when they had come out from the park, and Lucy's guide left her to find an inn near by, she ran,—being frightened,—and losing her way, came at last to a flight of steps like these, which she descended, and found, instead of the inn, the pensionnat of Madame Beck?" Only the superior discretion and worldly wisdom of the others prevented Axelle from following in Lucy Snow's footsteps, and settling the question of identity then and there. As it was, we went on to the library, a stuffy little place, with a withered old man for sole attendant, who, seated before a table in the back shop, was poring over an old book. We darted in, making a bewildering flutter of wings, and pecked him with a dozen questions at once, oddly inflected: "Was the scene of Villette laid in Brussels?" and "Is the school really here?" and "You don't say so!" though we had insisted upon it from the first, and he had just replied in the affirmative; lastly, "O, do tell us how we may find it."