Waking Among Ghosts of the Past — Villette

Lucy cannot say where her soul went in the swoon. She only knows the return is painful: sight comes back red, hearing like thunder, and at first a wall is not a wall. She is no longer on the step where she fell. Night and storm are shut out. She thinks of the pensionnat, then sees that the room is none of its dormitories. An easy-chair of blue damask, matching seats, a wood fire, a gilded mirror, forget-me-nots on pale walls: she is lying on a sofa, looking spectral, in a house she does not know. The longer she looks, the more the objects accuse her of knowing them. A scroll-couch, a round table with a blue cover, worked footstools, an ebony chair of brilliant flowers, two oval miniatures whose pearls and lace she could number, china as thin as egg-shell, and a pair of handscreens drawn in a schoolgirl pencil her eyes ache to remember. She left these things at fourteen. Ten years have passed. She gasps, where is she? A servant in a print dress, a bonne who speaks neither French nor English that Lucy can follow, bathes her temples, signs that she must not talk, and goes back to her knitting. Lucy tries to call it fever. She knows it is not. The room is the drawing-room of her godmother's house at Bretton, and yet the proportions are wrong, as if the household gods had been carried somewhere else. The bonne offers a dark draught. Lucy swallows it. A tide of quiet thought puts her to sleep.

She wakes to raw autumn daylight and the sound of rain and wind in trees, and she is sure she is back at the pensionnat until she lifts the dimity curtains. The room is a small sea-green cabinet, not the long white dormitory. One lattice, a toilette dressed like a lady for a ball, green-and-white china, a marble washstand split at one corner: she knows them as she knew the parlour. On the pincushion she made herself, crimson satin and gold beads, the cipher reads L. L. B., Louisa Lucy Bretton. She pulls the blind, expecting St Ann's Street or at least a street in Villette, and sees a lawn, a terrace, and tall beeches in an October gale. Turning to the wall does not shut the riddle out. Between the curtains hangs a watercolour of a boy of sixteen, fair, arch, pleasant, the mouth beautiful and a little cruel to anything too easy. That portrait used to hang in the breakfast-room. She remembers lifting little Polly Home to look at it, and the child asking to be put down. Lucy says the name Graham aloud. A voice at the bedside asks if she wants him. The woman in widow's silk is little changed, sterner and more robust, and she is Mrs Bretton. Lucy asks where she is. In a safe asylum, her godmother says, until she is better. Lucy is not sure she can trust her senses, except that the lady speaks English and has lately arrived from England. The portrait is her son as a youth. Lucy has been recognised as the English teacher. Breakfast is tea and a morsel of toast, the first solid food in nine days. Later, broth. By evening she is weary of the small room and dresses herself. Mrs Bretton laughs, offers an arm, and takes her down to the blue room, where an English tea waits, urn, seed-cake, and Graham's knife already set.

Mrs Bretton listens for her son more than she reads the paper. The gate clashes, the bell rings, and he comes in late, takes her chair, and asks after the patient. Lucy comes forward from the shade of the sofa and thanks him as Dr John. The tall son, the host, Graham Bretton, is the doctor, and she is scarcely surprised. She has known since a day when she looked at him too fixedly and he rebuked her. She kept the knowledge. He heard her called Miss Lucy and never asked the surname. During tea he is kind. Afterwards he settles her among cushions. His mother stares, says she has seldom seen a stronger likeness, and asks him whom the young lady resembles. He will not play. Lucy ends it. She says he has had too much to do, since they last shook hands in St Ann's Street, to recognise Lucy Snowe, though she recognised him months ago. Mrs Bretton kisses her, with little bustle. Graham sits through his astonishment, admits he never suspected, and asks how she could have known him and said nothing. She says that she did know. He does not press the why. She asks if he remembers being cross when she looked at him. He remembers wondering what enormity in his face had fixed her eyes. Now he sees. They talk through the old troubles, the estrangement, the fight with grief. The Brettons have not been spared either. Fortune thinned. He has taken this small château outside the Porte de Crécy for his mother's health, and she brought the unsold furniture of St Ann's Street, which is why the chairs returned like ghosts. At eleven he stops his mother. Lucy is pale and must retire. Tomorrow he will ask what broke her health. He remembers her in July, acting a fine gentleman with spirit. He lights her upstairs. In bed she knows she still has friends, moderate friends, not a vehement love. She begs Reason to let her be content with a temperate draught, rare and tranquil. She repeats the word tranquil, and she wets the pillow with tears.