But Charlotte had not the beau rôle, but the tragic one, in the real drama. The Directress, who stands between her and the beloved Professor, is not her rival, but the Professor's wife. And the beau rôle, in the sense of having the right to stand in the way, and also in being the woman preferred by the man whom both women love, is Madame Heger's in every way, for Madame Heger is charming to look at, and Charlotte plain. Therefore it is not in the least incredible, but it seems so natural as to be almost inevitably true, that when in the very moment that poor Charlotte has obtained, after so much suspense and waiting, and as the result of a heaven-sent accident, the almost despaired of chance of a personal interview with her loved Professor, before she loses sight of him, perhaps for ever, and when in this moment, and just when he has taken her hand in his,... Madame Heger enters, and thrusts herself between them, and commands her husband, 'Come, Constantin,' and Charlotte believes he will obey, it seems to me so eminently credible as to be almost inevitably true, that what Charlotte describes happened, and that then, in dread of this new frustration of the hope so long deferred, an anguish that 'defied suppression' rang out in the cry 'My heart will break!' Put oneself in Charlotte's place, and it seems to me the emotion startled to expression by this new shock, expresses just what one knows she felt. And, therefore, I find it myself impossible to doubt that this account is literally true, and may and should be studied in the light of the assurance that we have here the faithful description of what really took place, upon the very day, perhaps, when Charlotte left Bruxelles.
Let us leave Lucy Snowe's love-story on one side, and judge this page as one torn out of Charlotte's life—and then decide whether it rings true.
Shall I yet see him before he goes? Will he bear me in mind? Does he purpose to come? Will this day—will the next hour bring him? or must I again essay that corroding pain of long attent, that rude agony of rupture at the close, that mute, mortal wrench, which, in at once uprooting hope and doubt, shakes life, while the hand that does the violence cannot be caressed to pity, because absence interposes her barrier.
It was the Feast of the Assumption[1]; no school was held. The boarders and teachers, after attending mass in the morning, were gone a long walk into the country to take their goûter, or afternoon meal, at some farmhouse. I did not go with them, for now but two days remained ere the Paul et Virginie must sail, and I was clinging to my last chance, as the living waif of a wreck clings to his last raft or cable.
There was some joiner-work to do in the first classe, some bench or desk to repair. Holidays were often turned to account for the performance of these operations, which could not be executed when the rooms were filled with pupils. As I sat solitary, purposing to adjourn to the garden and leave the coast clear, but too listless to fulfil my own intent, I heard the workmen coming.
Foreign artisans and servants do everything by couples. I believe it would take two Labassecourian carpenters to drive a nail. While tying on my bonnet, which had hitherto hung by its ribbons from my idle hand, I vaguely and momentarily wondered to hear the step of but one ouvrier. I noted, too—as captives in dungeons find sometimes dreary leisure to note the merest trifles—that this man wore shoes, and not sabots. I concluded that it must be the master-carpenter coming to inspect before he sent his journeymen. I threw round me my scarf. He advanced; he opened the door. My back was towards it. I felt a little thrill, a curious sensation, too quick and transient to be analysed. I turned, I stood in the supposed master-artisan's presence. Looking towards the doorway I saw it filled with a figure, and my eyes printed upon my brain the picture of M. Paul.
Hundreds of the prayers with which we weary Heaven bring to the suppliant no fulfilment. Once haply in life one golden gift falls prone in the lap—one boon full and bright, perfect from Fruition's mint.
M. Emanuel wore the dress in which he probably purposed to travel—a surtout, guarded with velvet. I thought him prepared for instant departure, and yet I had understood that two days were yet to run before the ship sailed. He looked well and cheerful. He looked kind and benign. He came in with eagerness; he was close to me in one second; he was all amity. It might be his bridegroom-mood which thus brightened him. Whatever the cause, I could not meet his sunshine with cloud. If this were my last moment with him, I would not waste it in forced, unnatural distance. I loved him well—too well not to smite out of my path even Jealousy herself, when she would have obstructed a kind farewell. A cordial word from his lips, or a gentle look from his eyes, would do me good for all the span of life that remained to me. It would be comfort in the last strait of loneliness. I would take it—I would taste the elixir, and pride should not spill the cup.
The interview would be short, of course. He would say to me just what he had said to each of the assembled pupils. He would take and hold my hand two minutes. He would touch my cheek with his lips for the first, last, only time, and then—no more. Then, indeed, the final parting, then the wide separation, the great gulf I could not pass to go to him, across which, haply, he would not glance to remember me.
He took my hand in one of his; with the other he put back my bonnet. He looked into my face, his luminous smile went out, his lips expressed something almost like the wordless language of a mother who finds a child greatly and unexpectedly changed, broken with illness, or worn out by want. A check supervened.
'Paul, Paul!' said a woman's hurried voice behind—'Paul, come into the salon. I have yet a great many things to say to you—conversation for the whole day—and so has Victor; and Josef is here. Come, Paul—come to your friends.'
Madame Beck, 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 heartbreak; 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 eyes, 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.
The 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—reassured, 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.'
After this, in Villette, the story drifts away from the real experience of Charlotte herself, not only in the circumstances related, but even in the emotions pictured, now painted, not from what she has felt herself, but from what she imagines for her heroine, that other happier self, lifted up into the heaven of romance, who, assured of Paul Emanuel's love, and his betrothed, waits and works in the school where he has appointed her Directress; in patient expectation of his return,—that never comes to pass! For (why or wherefore, no literary critic of Villette who measures the book by simply artistic standards can find any reason to explain) Charlotte won't let Lucy Snowe, the heroine, who is her other self, find happiness at last with Paul Emanuel: or even find him again, after that cruel separation, all due to the wicked craft and selfish jealousy of Madame Beck. Destiny interferes; a storm; a shipwreck—one is not told what has happened: one is made to hear wailing winds and moaning ocean, that is all; we know nothing further than this: Lucy Snowe waited and hoped; hoped and waited; but Paul Emanuel never came back.
But, at any rate, before he sailed on that last fatal voyage, all misunderstandings, all doubts had been swept away. He had driven Madame Beck from the room, and shown her his contempt and indignation. He had, with tenderness and passion, declared his love for Lucy; and had asked her to be his wife. This is what had followed after those scenes between Lucy and Madame Beck in the late night scene in the class-rooms and between Lucy and Paul Emanuel, when Madame Beck is put out of the room by Paul Emanuel, who insists upon saying good-bye to Lucy.
All that we know of what followed these scenes, enacted under different circumstances, in Charlotte's life, must be gathered, not by a quite literal acceptance, but by an intelligent and impartial weighing, of her statements, contained in a letter written on the 23rd January 1844, three weeks after her return to Haworth.
'I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Heger cost me: it grieved me so much to grieve him, who had been so true, kind and disinterested a friend. At parting, he gave me a kind of diploma certifying my abilities as a teacher sealed with the seal of the Athenée Royal of which he is a professor.... I do not know whether you feel as I do, but there are times when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from what they used to be. Something in me which used to be enthusiasm is tamed down and broken. I no longer regard myself as young—indeed I shall soon be twenty-eight—and it seems as if I ought to be working and having the rough realities of the world as other people do.'[2]
[1] New Year's Day, perhaps? Charlotte left Bruxelles 2nd January 1843.
[2] Life, p. 273.