Shirley Charlotte Brontë (free ebook reader for pc .txt) 📖

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, returned 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