Quotation from: Villette

Written by: Charlotte Bronte


There went a tradition that Madame Beck's house had in old days been a
convent. That in years gone by--how long gone by I cannot tell, but I
think some centuries--before the city had over-spread this quarter,
and when it was tilled ground and avenue, and such deep and leafy
seclusion as ought to embosom a religious house-that something had
happened on this site which, rousing fear and inflicting horror, had
left to the place the inheritance of a ghost-story. A vague tale went
of a black and white nun, sometimes, on some night or nights of the
year, seen in some part of this vicinage. The ghost must have been
built out some ages ago, for there were houses all round now; but
certain convent-relics, in the shape of old and huge fruit-trees, yet
consecrated the spot; and, at the foot of one--a Methuselah of a pear-
tree, dead, all but a few boughs which still faithfully renewed their
perfumed snow in spring, and their honey-sweet pendants in autumn--you
saw, in scraping away the mossy earth between the half-bared roots, a
glimpse of slab, smooth, hard, and black. The legend went, unconfirmed
and unaccredited, but still propagated, that this was the portal of a
vault, imprisoning deep beneath that ground, on whose surface grass
grew and flowers bloomed, the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave
of the drear middle ages had here buried alive for some sin against
her vow. Her shadow it was that tremblers had feared, through long
generations after her poor frame was dust; her black robe and white
veil that, for timid eyes, moonlight and shade had mocked, as they
fluctuated in the night-wind through the garden-thicket.

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