Read Online The Professor by Charlotte Brontë - Free Book Online Page B

peak above; my imagination was with the refulgent
firmament beyond, and I thought nothing of the stones turning
under my feet, or of the thorns scratching my face and hands.
    I gazed often, and always with delight, from the window of the
diligence (these, be it remembered, were not the days of trains
and railroads). Well! and what did I see? I will tell you
faithfully. Green, reedy swamps; fields fertile but flat,
cultivated in patches that made them look like magnified
kitchen-gardens; belts of cut trees, formal as pollard willows,
skirting the horizon; narrow canals, gliding slow by the
road-side; painted Flemish farmhouses; some very dirty hovels; a
gray, dead sky; wet road, wet fields, wet house-tops: not a
beautiful, scarcely a picturesque object met my eye along the
whole route; yet to me, all was beautiful, all was more than
picturesque. It continued fair so long as daylight lasted,
though the moisture of many preceding damp days had sodden the
whole country; as it grew dark, however, the rain recommenced,
and it was through streaming and starless darkness my eye caught
the first gleam of the lights of Brussels. I saw little of the
city but its lights that night. Having alighted from the
diligence, a fiacre conveyed me to the Hotel de —, where I had
been advised by a fellow-traveller to put up; having eaten a
traveller's supper, I retired to bed, and slept a traveller's
sleep.
    Next morning I awoke from prolonged and sound repose with the
impression that I was yet in X—, and perceiving it to be
broad daylight I started up, imagining that I had overslept
myself and should be behind time at the counting-house. The
momentary and painful sense of restraint vanished before the
revived and reviving consciousness of freedom, as, throwing back
the white curtains of my bed, I looked forth into a wide, lofty
foreign chamber; how different from the small and dingy, though
not uncomfortable, apartment I had occupied for a night or two at
a respectable inn in London while waiting for the sailing of the
packet! Yet far be it from me to profane the memory of that
little dingy room! It, too, is dear to my soul; for there, as I
lay in quiet and darkness, I first heard the great bell of St.
Paul's telling London it was midnight, and well do I recall the
deep, deliberate tones, so full charged with colossal phlegm and
force. From the small, narrow window of that room, I first saw
THE dome, looming through a London mist. I suppose the
sensations, stirred by those first sounds, first sights, are felt
but once; treasure them, Memory; seal them in urns, and keep them
in safe niches! Well—I rose. Travellers talk of the apartments
in foreign dwellings being bare and uncomfortable; I thought my
chamber looked stately and cheerful. It had such large windows
—CROISEES that opened like doors, with such broad, clear panes
of glass; such a great looking-glass stood on my dressing-table
—such a fine mirror glittered over the mantelpiece—the painted
floor looked so clean and glossy; when I had dressed and was
descending the stairs, the broad marble steps almost awed me, and
so did the lofty hall into which they conducted. On the first
landing I met a Flemish housemaid: she had wooden shoes, a short
red petticoat, a printed cotton bedgown, her face was broad, her
physiognomy eminently stupid; when I spoke to her in French, she
answered me in Flemish, with an air the reverse of civil; yet I
thought her charming; if she was not pretty or polite, she was, I
conceived, very picturesque; she reminded me of the female
figures in certain Dutch paintings I had seen in other years at
Seacombe Hall.
    I repaired to the public room; that, too, was very large and very
lofty, and warmed by a stove; the floor was black, and the stove
was black, and most of the furniture was black: yet I never
experienced a freer sense of exhilaration than when I sat down at
a very long, black table (covered, however, in part by a white
cloth), and, having ordered