Confession Read Online Free PDF Page B

passes too rapidly – hitherto both Emily and I have had good health & therefore we have been able to work well There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken Monsieur Heger the husband of Madame – he is professor of Rhetoric a man of power as to mind but very choleric and irritable in temperament.’
Was that an unfair description? I read it back to myself. No, it was accurate – perhaps even mild – ‘
he is a little, black, ugly being with a face that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane Tom-cat
,’ I wrote stealing Emily’s phrase. I admit that at the time she had said it I had not found it in the slightest degree amusing, but now as I penned the words a smile played on my lips.
    ‘
Very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you call mild & gentleman-like he is very angry with me just at present because I have written a translation which he chose to stigmatize as
peu-correct
– not because it was particularly so in reality but because he happened to be in a bad humourwhen he read it
.’
    ‘Finished!’ Emily exclaimed closing her exercise book and emitting, an exhausted sigh. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’
    ‘I am writing to Ellen. I won’t be much longer. You go ahead and I will join you shortly?’
    But Emily hung back. ‘I shall wait with you. Have you told Ellen about these Papist girls?’ she added raising her head and staring over at the other students who were sat in a tight little huddle around the stove.
    ‘I’ve not had time. I think if we talked to them more, they might like us better perhaps?
’
    ‘How would that be?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said picking up my pen again while Emily continued to stare at her adversaries.
    ‘You will abuse this letter for being short I daresay, and there are a hundred things which I wish to tell you but I have not the time. Do write to me and cherish Christian charity in your heart! Brussels is a beautiful city – the Belgians hate the English – their external morality is more rigid than ours – to lace the stays without any handkerchief on the neck is considered a disgusting piece of indelicacy – Remember me to Mercy & your Mother, and believe me, my dear Ellen – Yours, sundered by the sea –
’

V
    I don’t recall if it was the third or fourth Sunday after our arrival at the Pensionnat that Emily and I left the building for the first time.
    We were to attend church.
    The only Protestant church in the city – the Chapelle Royale.
    As we walked we studied our new surroundings carefully. Carts and carriages clattered across the cobbles, birds rose in grey flurries from the tops of the buildings, children ran to and fro, some carrying baskets, others scampering in and out of the alleyways – half angels, half rats.
    ‘Look at the way that man is dressed.’
    ‘Can you see those trees? Their bark is so white.’
    ‘What
is
that woman shouting?’
    ‘That girl’s hair is redder than madder.’
    ‘I still miss home,’ Emily said, softly slipping the sentence into our conversation like a knife into butter.
    I did not know what to say.
    ‘Look at that?’ I pointed out a young woman we had just passed in the street whose hat was so lacey she resembled a Michalemas daisy.
    Back home Emily would have laughed at such an absurdity. Today she simply leant her head on my shoulder.
    ‘I know,’ I murmured. ‘I know my darling, but what can I do?’ I continued to prattle on about the surrounding beauty which even on a day such as this – when the cold bit visciously at our cheeks – was nothing less than astounding. The sparkling fountains and dress shops whose windows were brimful with velvet and silk, the faraway domes and nearby gardens ablaze with spring flowers. Finally we turned into the Place du Musée at the far end of which stood the Chapelle Royale. The building, once a Catholic church had been decreed Protestant by Napoleon