Malone entered it with her pretty, wilful pupil hanging on her arm, the scholars were already assembled, and, having nothing else to do, stared at the new-comers with all their might, till the opposite door creaked.
“M. Pierre Talobre,” said cheery, consequential, little Herr Popp, and the girls rose to make reverence to their new instructor.
Miss Malone hated doing reverence to anyone. Taking her work from her pocket, she walked carelessly to the window, and leaning upon the ledge began to sew. With her back half turned towards M. Talobre, she now glanced at him.
His eyes were fixed upon her own stealthily, composedly, but with infinite surprise. His spirit seemed to leap up into them to question her, to defy her, to daze her. A deep, deep flush, fading to a livid pallor, a quick, short catching of the breath—only by these signs did Miss Malone testify her consciousness of a presence that amazed, overpowered her, filled her with passion and dread more terrible to bear than death.
No one but Alexandrina saw the sword that had been struck into her governess’s heart. She, perhaps the dullest pupil at conjugations and inflections in the room, was quick as lightning to observe, what it would have been well she had never observed.
The silence was broken by the rich deep voice of the master who inaugurated himself, as the custom is, by a few words of friendliness, advice, and critique on the French language. It was not his mode, he said, ever to teach a language as if it were a piece of mechanism. Life, vitality, feeling, all these are incarnated in the words we learn at our mother’s knee—life, vitality, feeling, all these ought to be incarnated in the words that we learn in advanced years of any language, sweet or sonorous, grand or graceful, in which people think, speak, hope, love, hate, or despair. It was not his purpose to give them dry rules and masses of meaningless words. It was his intention to give them the living language of a living people; to show them, not the museum-like specimens of an extinct species, but to create the beautiful animate form before their eyes. For this purpose he should read to them one of Corneille’s most glowing scenes, which he should afterwards divide into lessons, rising, as he did so, from simple elements of beauty and agreement to those higher and more complicated harmonies that only become apparent to the thoughtful and sympathetic.
All the girls listened, as girls should listen to their master, with wide-open eyes of admiration and homage, quite prepared to make an idol of M. Pierre Talobre at once, and embroider no end of shaving serviettes for him.
Alexandrina sat at the foot of the table, with one hand supporting her chin, the other playing carelessly with her pencil. But her eyes, her whole face, seemed fixed upon M. Talobre, as if by a spell. The colour, the freshness, the beauty of her face heightened with that earnestness, the white teeth were entirely hidden, the steely glisten of the eyes softened as a cold sky will soften under the first blush of the morning. One could have loved the girl then.
I never describe people. In the first place, because other people’s descriptions so seldom give me any real idea of the person described, and in the second, because individuality generally depends upon those delicate and subtle characteristics that can never be seized at once and defined in broad English, but must be caught one at a time, softly and delicately, as we used to catch butterflies—no legs torn off, no wings broken, or our pains are nought. But M. Pierre Talobre’s physique is easy to outline on account of its remarkableness; and whatever pains I shall henceforth take to discover to my readers his morale, which is far more difficult, I feel that I am helping myself by telling you that M. Pierre Talobre was remarkably tall and slender, with a delicate transparency of skin that augured weakness of health; that he stooped in his carriage as if he were always trying to bring other people’s eyes in a line with his own; that his own were peculiar both in form and colour, being large and round, with dark pupils that could not be called exactly black or blue or grey or brown—but of whatever colour they were, must be set down as the most unfathomable in the world. Without a mouth of so much delicacy of outline and softness of expression, I fear M. Pierre would have found those dark unreadable eyes of his rather unprepossessing cartes de visite; but the mouth and eyes told such different stories that the former, being pleasantest, was always believed instead of the latter.
Adding that M. Talobre’s age was forty-three, I will say no more on my own part regarding him.
As soon as the lesson was over, Alexandrina sprang to her governess, and, linking her arm in hers, prepared to quit the room.
“You have left your books and slate on the table,” said Miss Malone, quite calmly, and without looking at the master.
Sasha’s eyes were steel in a moment.
“It is not often that you are so particular about the books,” she said, pertly. “The slate and dictionary I shall certainly leave here.”
A voice close by made Miss Malone’s frame thrill with an agony half of terror, half of joy. She was a proud woman, however, and fought for her ground bravely. Neither Sasha nor M. Talobre could have detected any agitation.
“The dictionary I can hardly permit you to leave behind,” said the master, smiling, “remember your forthcoming description of spring.”
Sasha blushed crimson, and her hand trembled as she took the book which M. Talobre politely handed to her. Did their fingers meet, or did his hair touch her forehead as he bent forward? I know not: but so confused, so absorbed was the young blushing girl in her own feelings that she did not see a look M. Talobre gave Miss Malone ere they parted. It was but momentary, yet it had answered a question involving the cruelest doubt and dread, the acutest suffering of long unspeakable despair and bitterness, perhaps the hardest struggle of which a woman’s nature is capable.
As they returned to their apartments Sasha’s heedless, spiteful, young tongue inflicted a hundred asp-bites. She was not radically hard-hearted,
