The Apple of Discord — Villette

Before the new friendship can settle, Lucy feels another power in the room. Rome watches Paul through the sliding panel of the confessional. She had liked hearing him call her sister, on condition she was not being reserved for some future wife, and his vow of celibacy had seemed to remove that danger. She lies awake wanting morning, then wanting the literature lesson, so she can see how much of the brother he will be and how much of the sister she is. He comes. The day does not match the hope. He teaches more quietly, more mildly, more gravely, is fatherly to the pupils, and gives Lucy one hurried, shy nod. The distance continues and increases. He had told her to tease and try him. She cannot. Repulsed, she withdraws.

On the evening set aside for her lesson she waits in the large division with books, pen, and ink. He stands among the pupils in the ruddy carré, then turns to the orange trees, geraniums, and cactuses, cigar alight, while little Sylvie the spaniel guards his dropped handkerchief like a flag. The clock strikes again. He goes down the alleys to the roses, Sylvie at his heel. When he returns there is no time left for a lesson. He washes, lifts the dog, calls her tender names within a yard of Lucy's window, looks along the façade, and is gone. She is not sure he bowed. The next day belongs to his college. That evening, heavy with the hours, she opens her desk and finds a lilac pamphlet that was not there before dinner.

It is not a tale. It is a soft theological tract, milk for babes, urging the Protestant to turn by comfort rather than threat, and offering the solace of praying the dead out of purgatory. Lucy is amused, not won. The title page names Père Silas. A flyleaf carries Paul's pencil: from P. C. D. E. to L, y. She laughs, and the riddle clears. He has been with his director and has not been allowed a secret. The covenant of fraternity has been told. A priest would annul communion with a heretic and command the frost she has been living in. The guess is painful, and she prefers it to believing the change began in Paul himself.

Rain keeps the watering-pot by the well, but Sylvie barks her welcome and Lucy finds Paul digging hard in the wet mould, the work he does when thought or self-reproach drives him. The dog will have the glass door opened. She scatters the papers and lands in Lucy's lap. He sees the tract. Lucy will not give an opinion unasked. She mends pens badly, her knife dull, and cuts her finger half on purpose so he will chide in the old way. He does. He asks whether the book moved her. She shows a dry handkerchief. After two days of unnatural silence, the scolding is better than music. Then he asks what she has thought of him, and says he called himself her brother without knowing what he is. His best friends point out danger and whisper caution. The danger is her Protestantism. Père Silas calls her good, even loves her, and still fears the creed. Paul laid the tract in the desk with a prayer, and her scorn hurts him. She makes him sit. She is not a heathen, she says, and she will not trouble his faith. They talk seriously. She cannot argue in the logical way that would have pleased the director. She can talk in the way Paul already knows how to follow. He leaves soothed, not satisfied, murmuring to Marie, Reine du Ciel, that his hope may yet be hers. She has no matching wish to pull him from his fathers' faith.

She believes the conversation is breathed again, the next evening, at the confessional in the church of the Magi. Père Silas visits Madame Beck and is allowed, for a time, to direct the Englishwoman. Lucy glances at the books he lends and keeps her own book under her pillow. He shows her Rome's good works and takes her to solemn churches. From a balcony she watches priests with relics and soldiers with weapons, an obese archbishop in lace, and garlanded girls. She tells Paul she did not like it and wishes to see no more. The more of that pomp she sees, the closer she holds her own creed, with fewer forms between the soul and God. After she has separated herself so widely, he answers that God is good and loves the sincere, and that they share at least one prayer: God be merciful to me, a sinner. He leans on her chair and blesses her.