A Day of Sunshine — Villette

Paulina has said she will not correspond with Graham until her father sanctions it. Dr Bretton cannot live within a league of the Hôtel Crécy and keep away. They manage to be distant in demonstrative courtship, and in feeling they soon draw near. His admiration of Ginevra had asked little of his mind. With Paulina his intellect and his highest tastes come into play. She does not set out to improve him. She thinks him perfect. He mentions a book by chance, hears a harmony in her answer, and talks on better than he has talked before. Their thoughts match like carefully chosen pearls. Her reserve thaws. Old Bretton days return in his own voice: the child gathering his head in her arms, the footstool, the small forefinger in the cleft of his chin, her verdict that he had a nice, strange face, nicer than his mamma or Lucy.

More than once, when they are alone, Paulina asks Lucy if she admires him, and whether other people see him with her eyes. Lucy answers that she looked at him twice or thrice a year ago, before he recognised her, and then shut her eyes. She values vision, and she dreads being struck stone blind. It is the strongest way she can find to stop confidences that fall on her ear like molten lead. Paulina comments no more on his beauty, though she still speaks of him, sometimes in a cadence that chafes, and Lucy gives her stern looks. Cloudless happiness makes Paulina think Lucy only fitful. She calls her a Spartan girl and says Lucy shall share their beautiful life. Lucy says she will share no man's or woman's life in that sense. She thinks she has one friend of her own, and she is not sure. Solitude is sadness, she grants, and heart-break lies deeper.

Lovers want a witness. Paulina has forbidden letters, yet Graham writes, and she answers if only to chide, and with a spoiled child's will she makes Lucy read them. The letters are manly and fond. Hers glow with a feeling she had meant to hide. She begins to murmur that she wishes papa knew, and that she fears he will be angry and almost dislike her. He says nothing to his daughter. When she is not looking, Lucy sees him gaze and meditate.

One evening Paulina is upstairs writing, and M. de Bassompierre asks Lucy to remain in the library. His old pocket-book tells him his daughter was born on the 5th of May, eighteen years ago. He had been thinking of her as twelve or fourteen, a child. He calls her his only pearl and says others will covet her. Graham has dined with them and shone, and the father has at last caught the direction of that homage. Lucy tells him that nothing is done until he approves, only that they love each other, and that Graham, for all his courage, fears him mortally. He would have given Ginevra with all his heart. Polly he cannot let go. He says Graham is not her equal, and the world will think of the fortune. Lucy asks whether any suitor would look like Paulina's match, and whether he wants a duc or a vicomte of Villette. He does not. She tells him the French guests found his daughter full of wit and grace, and that Graham feels her finest qualities. The fortune is known, and it is not the bait. He remembers Polly nursing him when they thought he would die. He does not want to part with her. He groans that the lad repays old friendship with robbery.

Paulina comes in with the letter folded and unsealed, meaning Lucy to read it, and blushes to find her father. She hates hiding. She lays the letter on his knee. He reads it, shaking, and says there is nothing wrong in it, but it pains him. She offers to tear it up, then says she loves him above everything but God, and loves Graham too because she cannot help it. He calls Graham a young scamp, talks of red whiskers and Siberia, and tells her to cease to be a daughter. She says no one can wean her. Her dignity fails. She falls on his neck and cries that she will never leave him and never pain him.

Graham is in the anteroom, drawing off his gloves, smiling through a suspense that would have looked like fever on another face. Lucy tells him Paulina is faithful. He asks her to say Amen, and the old habit of doing as he bids brings the word. In the library Mr Home says he has been bereaved of the one precious thing he had. Graham cannot repent. He asks for her as a gift he can never earn. Paulina says she loves them both and can take care of both. She makes their hands meet. The father's diamond ring cuts Graham's flesh and draws blood, and pain only makes him laugh. They go into the study. The questions are many. His answers show wisdom, integrity, affairs retrieved, and a position in which he can marry. The father returns, points to his daughter, and says: take her, and may God deal with you as you deal with her.

About a fortnight later Lucy sees the three on one seat under a tree in the grounds of the palace at Bois l'Etang, the carriage waiting beyond the gates, the evening star over the white palace. Paulina sits between them and, with tiny scissors, cuts a grey lock and a gold one, plaits them, binds the plait with a tress of her own hair, and lays the amulet in a locket on her heart, so they can never quarrel while she wears it. Lucy, telling it later, says they did marry, that his faults decayed and his virtues ripened, that years brought prosperity and also the deaths of M. de Bassompierre and Louisa Bretton, and that children carried his looks and his rearing. The seat under the tree is the day the three lives sit down together.