White Lies by Charles Reade (page 5)

Josephine quaked. Camille was devoured with secret rage: he lashed the horse and away they went.

It was a silent party. The doctor seemed in a reverie. The others did not know what to think, much less to say. Aubertin sat by Camille’s side; so the latter could hold no secret communication with either lady.

Now it was not the doctor’s habit to rise at this time of the morning: yet there he was, going with them to Frejus uninvited.

Josephine was in agony; had their intention transpired through some imprudence of Camille?

Camille was terribly uneasy. He concluded the secret had transpired through female indiscretion. Then they all tortured themselves as to the old man’s intention. But what seemed most likely was, that he was with them to prevent a clandestine marriage by his bare presence, without making a scene and shocking Josephine’s pride: and if so, was he there by his own impulse? No, it was rather to be feared that all this was done by order of the baroness. There was a finesse about it that smacked of a feminine origin, and the baroness was very capable of adopting such a means as this, to spare her own pride and her favorite daughter’s. “The clandestine” is not all sugar. A more miserable party never went along, even to a wedding.

After waiting a long time for the doctor to declare himself, they turned desperate, and began to chatter all manner of trifles. This had a good effect: it roused Aubertin from his reverie, and presently he gave them the following piece of information: “I told you the other day that a nephew of mine was just dead; a nephew I had not seen for many years. Well, my friends, I received last night a hasty summons to his funeral.”

“At Frejus?”

“No, at Paris. The invitation was so pressing, that I was obliged to go. The letter informed me, however, that a diligence passes through Frejus, at eleven o’clock, for Paris. I heard you say you were going to Frejus; so I packed up a few changes of linen, and my MS., my work on entomology, which at my last visit to the capital all the publishers were mad enough to refuse: here it is. Apropos, has Jacintha put my bag into the carriage?”

On this a fierce foot-search, and the bag was found. Meantime, Josephine leaned back in her seat with a sigh of thankfulness. She was more intent on not being found out than on being married. But Camille, who was more intent on being married than on not being found out, was asking himself, with fury, how on earth they should get rid of Aubertin in time.

Well, of course, under such circumstances as these the diligence did not come to its time, nor till long after; and all the while, they were waiting for it they were failing their rendezvous with the mayor, and making their rendezvous with the curate impossible. But, above all, there was the risk of one or other of those friends coming up and blurting all out, taking for granted that the doctor must be in their confidence, or why bring him.

At last, at half-past eleven o’clock, to their great relief, up came the diligence. The doctor prepared to take his place in the interior, when the conductor politely informed him that the vehicle stopped there a quarter of an hour.

“In that case I will not abandon my friends,” said the doctor, affectionately.

One of his friends gnashed his teeth at this mark of affection. But Josephine smiled sweetly.

At last he was gone; but it wanted ten minutes only to twelve.

Josephine inquired amiably, whether it would not be as well to postpone matters to another day–meaning forever. “My ARDOR is chilled,” said she, and showed symptoms of crying at what she had gone through.

Camille replied by half dragging them to the mayor. That worthy received them with profound, though somewhat demure respect, and invited them to a table sumptuously served. The ladies, out of politeness, were about to assent, but Camille begged permission to postpone that part until after the ceremony.

At last, to their astonishment, they were married. Then, with a promise to return and dine with the mayor, they went to the cure. Lo and behold! he was gone to visit a sick person. “He had waited a long time for them,” said the servant.

Josephine was much disconcerted, and showed a disposition to cry again. The servant, a good-natured girl, nosed a wedding, and offered to run and bring his reverence in a minute.

Presently there came an old silvery-haired man, who addressed them all as his children. He took them to the church, and blessed their union; and for the first time Josephine felt as if Heaven consented. They took a gentle farewell of him, and went back to the mayor’s to dine; and at this stage of the business Rose and Josephine at last effected a downright simultaneous cry, apropos of nothing that was then occurring.

This refreshed them mightily, and they glowed at the mayor’s table like roses washed with dew.

But oh! how glad at heart they all were to find themselves in the carriage once more going home to Beaurepaire.

Rose and Josephine sat intertwined on the back seat; Camille, the reins in his right hand, nearly turned his back on the horse, and leaned back over to them and purred to Rose and his wife with ineffable triumph and tenderness.

The lovers were in Elysium, and Rose was not a little proud of her good management in ending all their troubles. Their mother received them back with great, and as they fancied, with singular, affection. She was beginning to be anxious about them, she said. Then her kindness gave these happy souls a pang it never gave them before.

Since the above events scarce a fortnight had elapsed; but such a change! Camille sunburnt and healthy, and full of animation and confidence; Josephine beaming with suppressed happiness, and more beautiful than Rose could ever remember to have seen her. For a soft halo of love and happiness shone around her head; a new and indefinable attraction bloomed on her face. She was a wife. Her eye, that used to glance furtively on Camille, now dwelt demurely on him; dwelt with a sort of gentle wonder and admiration as well as affection, and, when he came or passed very near her, a keen observer might have seen her thrill.

She kept a good deal out of her mother’s way; for she felt within that her face must be too happy. She feared to shock her mother’s grief with her radiance. She was ashamed of feeling unmixed heaven. But the flood of secret bliss she floated in bore all misgivings away. The pair were forever stealing away together for hours, and on these occasions Rose used to keep out of her mother’s sight, until they should return. So then the new-married couple could wander hand in hand through the thick woods of Beaurepaire, whose fresh green leaves were now just out, and hear the distant cuckoo, and sit on mossy banks, and pour love into one another’s eyes, and plan ages of happiness, and murmur their deep passion and their bliss almost more than mortal; could do all this and more, without shocking propriety. These sweet duets passed for trios: for on their return Rose would be out looking for them, or would go and meet them at some distance, and all three would go up together to the baroness, as from a joint excursion. And when they went up to their bedrooms, Josephine would throw her arms round her sister’s neck, and sigh, “It is not happiness, it is beatitude!”

Meantime, the baroness mourned for Raynal. Her grief showed no decrease. Rose even fancied at times she wore a gloomy and discontented look as well; but on reflection she attributed that to her own fancy, or to the contrast that had now sprung up in her sister’s beaming complacency.

Rose, when she found herself left day after day alone for hours, was sad and thought of Edouard. And this feeling gained on her day by day.

At last, one afternoon, she locked herself in her own room, and, after a long contest with her pride, which, if not indomitable, was next door to it, she sat down to write him a little letter. Now, in this letter, in the place devoted by men to their after-thoughts, by women to their pretended after-thoughts; i. e., to what they have been thinking of all through the letter, she dropped a careless hint that all the party missed him very much, “even the obnoxious colonel, who, by-the-by, has transferred his services elsewhere. I have forgiven him that, because he has said civil things about you.”

Rose was reading her letter over again, to make sure that all the principal expressions were indistinct, and that the composition generally, except the postscript, resembled a Delphic oracle, when there was a hasty footstep, and a tap at her door, and in came Jacintha, excited.

“He is come, mademoiselle,” cried she, and nodded her head like a mandarin, only more knowingly; then she added, “So you may burn that.” For her quick eye had glanced at the table.

“Who is come?” inquired Rose, eagerly.

“Why, your one?”

“My one?” asked the young lady, reddening, “my what?”

“The little one–Edouard–Monsieur Riviere.”

“Oh, Monsieur Riviere,” said Rose, acting nonchalance. “Why could you not say so? you use such phrases, who can conjecture what you mean? I will come to Monsieur Riviere directly; mamma will be so glad.”

Jacintha gone, Rose tore up the letter and locked up the pieces, then ran to the glass. Etc.

Edouard had been so profoundly miserable he could stand it no longer; in spite of his determination not to visit Beaurepaire while it contained a rival, he rode over to see whether he had not tormented himself idly: above all, to see the beloved face.

Jacintha put him into the salle a manger. “By that you will see her alone,” said the knowing Jacintha. He sat down, hat and whip in hand, and wondered how he should be received–if at all.

In glides Rose all sprightliness and good-humor, and puts out her hand to him; the which he kisses.

“How could I keep away so long?” asked he vaguely, and self- astonished.

“How indeed, and we missing you so all the time!”

“Have YOU missed me?” was the eager inquiry.

“Oh, no!” was the cheerful reply; “but all the rest have.”

Presently the malicious thing gave a sudden start.

“Oh! such a piece of news; you remember Colonel Dujardin, the obnoxious colonel?”

No answer.

“Transferred his attentions. Fancy!”

“Who to?”

“To Josephine and mamma. But such are the military. He only wanted to get rid of you: this done (through your want of spirit), he scorns the rich prize; so now I scorn HIM. Will you come for a walk?”

“Oh, yes!”

“We will go and look for my deserter. I say, tell me now; cannot I write to the commander-in-chief about this? a soldier has no right to be a deserter, has he? tell me, you are a public man, and know everything except my heart.”

“Is it not too bad to tease me to-day?”

“Yes! but please! I have had few amusements of late. I find it so dull without you to tease.”

Formal permission to tease being conceded, she went that instant on the opposite tack, and began to tell him how she had missed him, and how sorry she had been anything should have occurred to vex their kind good friend. In short, Edouard spent a delightful day, for Rose took him one way to meet Josephine, who, she knew, was coming another. At night the last embers of jealousy got quenched, for Josephine was a wife now, and had already begun to tell Camille all her little innocent secrets; and she told him all about Edouard and Rose, and gave him his orders; so he treated Rose with great respect before Edouard; but paid her no marked attention; also he was affable to Riviere, who, having ceased to suspect, began to like him.

In the course of the evening, the colonel also informed the baroness that he expected every day an order to join the army of the Rhine.

Edouard pricked his ears.

The baroness said no more than politeness dictated. She did not press him to stay, but treated his departure as a matter of course. Riviere rode home late in the evening in high spirits.

The next day Rose varied her late deportment; she sang snatches of melody, going about the house; it was for all the world like a bird chirping. In the middle of one chirp Jacintha interfered. “Hush, mademoiselle, your mamma! she is at the bottom of the corridor.”

“What was I thinking of?” said Rose.

“Oh! I dare say you know, mademoiselle,” replied the privileged domestic.

A letter of good news came from Aubertin. That summons to his nephew’s funeral was an era in his harmless life.

The said nephew was a rich man and an oddity; one of those who love to surprise folk. Moreover, he had no children, and detected his nephews and nieces being unnaturally civil to him. “Waiting to cut me up,” was his generous reading of them. So with this he made a will, and there defied, as far as in him lay, the laws of nature; for he set his wealth a-flowing backwards instead of forwards; he handed his property up to an ancestor, instead of down to posterity.

All this the doctor’s pen set down with some humor, and in the calm spirit with which a genuine philosopher receives prosperity as well as adversity. Yet one natural regret escaped him; that all this wealth, since it was to come, had not come a year or two sooner.

All at Beaurepaire knew what their dear old friend meant.

His other news to them was that they might expect him any moment.

So here was another cause of rejoicing.

“I am so glad,” said Josephine. “Now, perhaps, he will be able to publish his poor dear entomology, that the booksellers were all so unkind, so unfeeling about.”

I linger on the brink of painful scenes to observe that a sweet and loving friendship, such as this was between the good doctor and three persons of another sex, is one of the best treasures of the human heart. Poverty had strengthened it; yet now wealth could not weaken it. With no tie of blood it yet was filial, sisterly, brotherly, national, chivalrous; happy, unalloyed sentiment, free from ups and downs, from heats and chills, from rivalry, from caprice; and, indeed, from all mortal accidents but one–and why say one? methinks death itself does but suspend these gentle, rare, unselfish amities a moment, then waft them upward to their abiding home.

CHAPTER XV.

It was a fair morning in June: the sky was a bright, deep, lovely, speckless blue: the flowers and bushes poured perfume, and sprinkled song upon the balmy air. On such a day, so calm, so warm, so bright, so scented, so tuneful, to live and to be young is to be happy. With gentle hand it wipes all other days out of the memory; it smiles, it smells, it sings, and clouds and rain and biting wind seem as far off and impossible as grief and trouble.

Camille and Josephine had stolen out, and strolled lazily up and down close under the house, drinking the sweet air, fragrant with perfume and melody; the blue sky, and love.

Rose was in the house. She had missed them; but she thought they must be near; for they seldom took long walks early in the day. Meeting Jacintha on the landing of the great staircase, she asked her where her sister was.

“Madame Raynal is gone for a walk. She has taken the colonel with her. You know she always takes the colonel out with her now.”

“That will do. You can finish your work.”

Jacintha went into Camille’s room.

Rose, who had looked as grave as a judge while Jacintha was present, bubbled into laughter. She even repeated Jacintha’s words aloud, and chuckled over them. “You know she always takes the colonel out with her now–ha, ha, ha!”

“Rose!” sighed a distant voice.

She looked round, and saw the baroness at some distance in the corridor, coming slowly towards her, with eyes bent gloomily on the ground. Rose composed her features into a settled gravity, and went to meet her.

“I wish to speak with you,” said the baroness; “let us sit down; it is cool here.”

Rose ran and brought a seat without a back, but well stuffed, and set it against the wall. The old lady sat down and leaned back, and looked at Rose in silence a good while; then she said,–

“There is room for you; sit down, for I want to speak seriously to you.”

“Yes, mamma; what is it?”

“Turn a little round, and let me see your face.”

Rose complied; and began to feel a little uneasy.

“Perhaps you can guess what I am going to say to you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, I am going to put a question to you.”

“With all my heart, dear mamma.”

“I invite you to explain to me the most singular, the most unaccountable thing that ever fell under my notice. Will you do this for your mother?”

“O mamma! of course I will do anything to please you that I can; but, indeed, I don’t know what you mean.”

“I am going to tell you.”

The old lady paused. The young one, naturally enough, felt a chill of vague anxiety strike across her frame.

“Rose,” said the old lady, speaking very gently but firmly, and leaning in a peculiar way on her words, while her eye worked like an ice gimlet on her daughter’s face, “a little while ago, when my poor Raynal–our benefactor–was alive–and I was happy–you all chilled my happiness by your gloom: the whole house seemed a house of mourning–tell me now why was this.”

“Mamma!” said Rose, after a moment’s hesitation, “we could hardly be gay. Sickness in the house! And if Colonel Raynal was alive, still he was absent, and in danger.”

“Oh! then it was out of regard for him we were all dispirited?”

“Why, I suppose so,” said Rose, stoutly; but then colored high at her own want of candor. However, she congratulated herself that her mother’s suspicion was confined to past events.

Her self-congratulation on that score was short; for the baroness, after eying her grimly for a second or two in silence, put her this awkward question plump.

“If so, tell me why is it that ever since that black day when the news of his DEATH reached us, the whole house has gone into black, and has gone out of mourning?”

“Mamma,” stammered Rose, “what DO you mean?”

“Even poor Camille, who was so pale and wan, has recovered like magic.”

“O mamma! is not that fancy?” said Rose, piteously. “Of what do you suspect me? Can you think I am unfeeling–ungrateful? I should not be YOUR daughter.”

“No, no,” said the baroness, “to do you justice, you attempt sorrow; as you put on black. But, my poor child, you do it with so little skill that one sees a horrible gayety breaking through that thin disguise: you are no true mourners: you are like the mutes or the undertakers at a funeral, forced grief on the surface of your faces, and frightful complacency below.”

“Tra la! lal! la! la! Tra la! la! Tra la! la!” carolled Jacintha, in the colonel’s room hard by.

The ladies looked at one another: Rose in great confusion.

“Tra la! la! la! Tra lal! lal! la! la! la!”

“Jacintha!” screamed Rose angrily.

“Hush! not a word,” said the baroness. “Why remonstrate with HER? Servants are but chameleons: they take the color of those they serve. Do not cry. I wanted your confidence, not your tears, love. There, I will not twice in one day ask you for your heart: it would be to lower the mother, and give the daughter the pain of refusing it, and the regret, sure to come one day, of having refused it. I will discover the meaning of it all by myself.” She went away with a gentle sigh; and Rose was cut to the heart by her words; she resolved, whatever it might cost her and Josephine, to make a clean breast this very day. As she was one of those who act promptly, she went instantly in search of her sister, to gain her consent, if possible.

Now, the said Josephine was in the garden walking with Camille, and uttering a wife’s tender solicitudes.

“And must you leave me? must you risk your life again so soon; the life on which mine depends?”

“My dear, that letter I received from headquarters two days ago, that inquiry whether my wound was cured. A hint, Josephine–a hint too broad for any soldier not to take.”

“Camille, you are very proud,” said Josephine, with an accent of reproach, and a look of approval.

“I am obliged to be. I am the husband of the proudest woman in France.”

“Hush! not so loud: there is Dard on the grass.”

“Dard!” muttered the soldier with a word of meaning. “Josephine,” said he after a pause, and a little peevishly, “how much longer are we to lower our voices, and turn away our eyes from each other, and be ashamed of our happiness?”

“Five months longer, is it not?” answered Josephine quietly.

“Five months longer!”

Josephine was hurt at this, and for once was betrayed into a serious and merited remonstrance.

“Is this just?” said she. “Think of two months ago: yes, but two months ago, you were dying. You doubted my love, because it could not overcome my virtue and my gratitude: yet you might have seen it was destroying my life. Poor Raynal, my husband, my benefactor, died. Then I could do more for you, if not with delicacy, at least with honor; but no! words, and looks, and tender offices of love were not enough, I must give stronger proof. Dear Camille, I have been reared in a strict school: and perhaps none of your sex can know what it cost me to go to Frejus that day with him I love.”

“My own Josephine!”

“I made but one condition: that you would not rob me of my mother’s respect: to her our hasty marriage would appear monstrous, heartless. You consented to be secretly happy for six months. One fortnight has passed, and you are discontented again.”

“Oh, no! do not think so. It is every word true. I am an ungrateful villain.”

“How dare you say so? and to me! No! but you are a man.”

“So I have been told; but my conduct to you, sweet one, has not been that of a man from first to last. Yet I could die for you, with a smile on my lips. But when I think that once I lifted this sacrilegious hand against your life–oh!”

“Do not be silly, Camille. I love you all the better for loving me well enough to kill me. What woman would not? I tell you, you foolish thing, you are a man: monseigneur is one of the lordly sex, that is accustomed to have everything its own way. My love, in a world that is full of misery, here are two that are condemned to be secretly happy a few months longer: a hard fate for one of your sex, it seems: but it is so much sweeter than the usual lot of mine, that really I cannot share your misery,” and she smiled joyously.

“Then share my happiness, my dear wife.”

“I do; only mine is deep, not loud.”

“Why, Dard is gone, and we are out of doors; will the little birds betray us?”

“The lower windows are open, and I saw Jacintha in one of the rooms.”

“Jacintha? we are in awe of the very servants. Well, if I must not say it loud I will say it often,” and putting his mouth to her ear, he poured a burning whisper of love into it–“My love! my angel! my wife! my wife! my wife!”

She turned her swimming eyes on him.

“My husband!” she whispered in return.

Rose came out, and found them billing and cooing. “You MUST not be so happy, you two,” said she authoritatively.

“How can we help it?” asked Camille.

“You must and shall help it, somehow,” retorted this little tyrant. “Mamma suspects. She has given me such a cross-examination, my blood runs cold. No, on second thoughts, kiss her again, and you may both be as happy as you like; for I am going to tell mamma all, and no power on earth shall hinder me.”

“Rose,” said Camille, “you are a sensible girl; and I always said so.”

But Josephine was horrified. “What! tell my mother that within a month of my husband’s death?”–

“Don’t say your husband,” put in Camille wincing; “the priest never confirmed that union; words spoken before a magistrate do not make a marriage in the sight of Heaven.”

Josephine cut him short. “Amongst honorable men and women all oaths are alike sacred: and Heaven’s eye is in a magistrate’s room as in a church. A daughter of Beaurepaire gave her hand to him, and called herself his wife. Therefore, she was his wife: and is his widow. She owes him everything; the house you are all living in among the rest. She ought to be proud of her brief connection with that pure, heroic spirit, and, when she is so little noble as to disown him, then say that gratitude and justice have no longer a place among mankind.”

“Come into the chapel,” said Camille, with a voice that showed he was hurt.

They entered the chapel, and there they saw something that thoroughly surprised them: a marble monument to the memory of Raynal. It leaned at present against the wall below the place prepared to receive it. The inscription, short, but emphatic, and full of feeling, told of the battles he had fought in, including the last fatal skirmish, and his marriage with the heiress of Beaurepaire; and, in a few soldier-like words, the uprightness, simplicity, and generosity of his character.

They were so touched by this unexpected trait in Camille that they both threw their arms round his neck by one impulse. “Am I wrong to be proud of him?” said Josephine, triumphantly.

“Well, don’t say too much to me,” said Camille, looking down confused. “One tries to be good; but it is very hard–to some of us–not to you, Josephine; and, after all, it is only the truth that we have written on that stone. Poor Raynal! he was my old comrade; he saved me from death, and not a soldier’s death–drowning; and he was a better man than I am, or ever shall be. Now he is dead, I can say these things. If I had said them when he was alive, it would have been more to my credit.”

They all three went back towards the house; and on the way Rose told them all that had passed between the baroness and her. When she came to the actual details of that conversation, to the words, and looks, and tones, Josephine’s uneasiness rose to an overpowering height; she even admitted that further concealment would be very difficult.

“Better tell her than let her find out,” said Rose. “We must tell her some day.”

At last, after a long and agitated discussion, Josephine consented; but Rose must be the one to tell. “So then, you at least will make your peace with mamma,” argued Josephine, “and let us go in and do this before our courage fails; besides, it is going to rain, and it has turned cold. Where have all these clouds come from? An hour ago there was not one in the sky.”

They went, with hesitating steps and guilty looks, to the saloon. Their mother was not there. Here was a reprieve.

Rose had an idea. She would take her to the chapel, and show her the monument, and that would please her with poor Camille. “After that,” said Rose, “I will begin by telling her all the misery you have both gone through; and, when she pities you, then I will show her it was all my fault your misery ended in a secret marriage.”

The confederates sat there in a chilly state, waiting for the baroness. At last, as she did not come, Rose got up to go to her. “When the mind is made up, it is no use being cowardly, and putting off,” said she, firmly. For all that, her cheek had but little color left in it, when she left her chair with this resolve.

Now as Rose went down the long saloon to carry out their united resolve, Jacintha looked in; and, after a hasty glance to see who was present, she waited till Rose came up to her, and then whipped a letter from under her apron and gave it her.

“For my mistress,” said she, with an air of mystery.

“Why not take it to her, then?” inquired Rose.

“I thought you might like to see it first, mademoiselle,” said Jacintha, with quiet meaning.

“Is it from the dear doctor?” asked Josephine.

“La, no, mademoiselle, don’t you know the doctor is come home? Why, he has been in the house near an hour. He is with my lady.”

The doctor proved Jacintha correct by entering the room in person soon after; on this Rose threw down the letter, and she and the whole party were instantly occupied in greeting him.

When the ladies had embraced him and Camille shaken hands with him, they plied him with a thousand questions. Indeed, he had not half satisfied their curiosity, when Rose happened to catch sight of the letter again, and took it up to carry to the baroness. She now, for the first time, eyed it attentively, and the consequence was she uttered an exclamation, and took the first opportunity to beckon Aubertin.

He came to her; and she put the letter into his hand.

He put up his glasses, and eyed it. “Yes!” whispered he, “it is from HIM.”

Josephine and Camille saw something was going on; they joined the other two, with curiosity in their faces.

Rose put her hand on a small table near her, and leaned a moment. She turned half sick at a letter coming from the dead. Josephine now came towards her with a face of concern, and asked what was the matter.

The reply came from Aubertin. “My poor friends,” said he, solemnly, “this is one of those fearful things that you have not seen in your short lives, but it has been more than once my lot to witness it. The ships that carry letters from distant countries vary greatly in speed, and are subject to detaining accidents. Yes, this is the third time I have seen a letter come written by a hand known to be cold. The baroness is a little excited to-day, I don’t know from what cause. With your approbation, Madame Raynal, I will read this letter before I let her see it.”

“Read it, if you please.”

“Shall I read it out?”

“Certainly. There may be some wish expressed in it; oh, I hope there is!”

Camille, from delicacy, retired to some little distance, and the doctor read the letter in a low and solemn voice.

“MY DEAR MOTHER,–I hope all are well at Beaurepaire, as I am, or I hope soon to be. I received a wound in our last skirmish; not a very severe one; but it put an end to my writing for some time.”

“Poor fellow! it was his death wound. Why, when was this written?– why,” and the doctor paused, and seemed stupefied: “why, my dears, has my memory gone, or”–and again he looked eagerly at the letter– “what was the date of the battle in which he was killed? for this letter is dated the 15th of May. Is it a dream? no! this was written since the date of his death.”

“No, doctor,” said Rose, “you deceive yourself.”

“Why, what was the date of the Moniteur, then?” asked Aubertin, in great agitation.

“Considerably later than this,” said Camille.

“I don’t think so; the journal! where is it?”

“My mother has it locked up. I’ll run.”

“No, Rose; no one but me. Now, Josephine, do not you go and give way to hopes that may be delusive. I must see that journal directly. I will go to the baroness. I shall excuse her less than you would.”

He was scarcely gone when a cry of horror filled the room, a cry as of madness falling like a thunderbolt on a human mind. It was Josephine, who up to this had not uttered one word. But now she stood, white as a corpse, in the middle of the room, and wrung her hands. “What have I done? What shall I do? It was the 3d of May. I see it before me in letters of fire; the 3d of May! the 3d of May!–and he writes the 15th.”

“No! no!” cried Camille wildly. “It was long, long after time 3d.”

“It was the 3d of May,” repeated Josephine in a hoarse voice that none would have known for hers.

Camille ran to her with words of comfort and hope; he did not share her fears. He remembered about when the Moniteur came, though not the very day. He threw his arm lovingly round her as if to protect her against these shadowy terrors. Her dilating eyes seemed fixed on something distant in space or time, at some horrible thing coming slowly towards her. She did not see Camille approach her, but the moment she felt him she turned upon him swiftly.

“Do you love me?” still in the hoarse voice that had so little in it of Josephine. “I mean, does one grain of respect or virtue mingle in your love for me?”

“What words are these, my wife?”

“Then leave Raynal’s house upon the instant. You wonder I can be so cruel? I wonder too; and that I can see my duty so clear in one short moment. But I have lived twenty years since that letter came. Oh! my brain has whirled through a thousand agonies. And I have come back a thousand times to the same thing; you and I must see each other’s face no more.”

“Oh!” cried Rose, “is there no way but this?”

“Take care,” she screamed, wildly, to her and Camille, “I am on the verge of madness; is it for you two to thrust me over the precipice? Come, now, if you are a man of honor, if you have a spark of gratitude towards the poor woman who has given you all except her fair name–that she will take to the grave in spite of you all– promise that you will leave Raynal’s house this minute if he is alive, and let me die in honor as I have lived.”

“No, no!” cried Camille, terror-stricken; “it cannot be. Heaven is merciful, and Heaven sees how happy we are. Be calm! these are idle fears; be calm! I say. For if it is so I will obey you. I will stay; I will go; I will die; I will live; I will obey you.”

“Swear this to me by the thing you hold most sacred,” she almost shrieked.

“I swear by my love for you,” was his touching reply.

Ere they had recovered a miserable composure after this passionate outburst, all the more terrible as coming from a creature so tender as Josephine, agitated voices were heard at the door, and the baroness tottered in, followed by the doctor, who was trying in vain to put some bounds to her emotion and her hopes.

“Oh, my children! my children!” cried she, trembling violently. “Here, Rose, my hands shake so; take this key, open the cabinet, there is the Moniteur. What is the date?”

The journal was found, and rapidly examined. The date was the 20th of May.

“There!” cried Camille. “I told you!”

The baroness uttered a feeble moan. Her hopes died as suddenly as they had been born, and she sank drooping into a chair, with a bitter sigh.

Camille stole a joyful look at Josephine. She was in the same attitude looking straight before her as at a coming horror. Presently Rose uttered a faint cry, “The battle was BEFORE.”

“To be sure,” cried the doctor. “You forget, it is not the date of the paper we want, but of the battle it records. For Heaven’s sake, when was the battle?”

“The 3d of May,” said Josephine, in a voice that seemed to come from the tomb.

Rose’s hands that held the journal fell like a dead weight upon her knees, journal and all. She whispered, “It was the 3d of May.”

“Ah!” cried the baroness, starting up, “he may yet be alive. He must be alive. Heaven is merciful! Heaven would not take my son from me, a poor old woman who has not long to live. There was a letter; where is the letter?”

“Are we mad, not to read the letter?” said the doctor. “I had it; it has dropped from my old fingers when I went for the journal.”

A short examination of the room showed the letter lying crumpled up near the door. Camille gave it to the baroness. She tried to read it, but could not.

“I am old,” said she; “my hand shakes and my eyes are troubled. This young gentleman will read it to us. His eyes are not dim and troubled. Something tells me that when I hear this letter, I shall find out whether my son lives. Why do you not read it to me, Camille?” cried she, almost fiercely.

Camille, thus pressed, obeyed mechanically, and began to read Raynal’s letter aloud, scarce knowing what he did, but urged and driven by the baroness.

“MY DEAR MOTHER,–I hope all are well at Beaurepaire, as I am, or I hope soon to be. I received a wound in our last skirmish; not a very severe one, but it put an end to my writing for some time.”

“Go on, dear Camille! go on.”

“The page ends there, madame,”

The paper was thin, and Camille, whose hand trembled, had some difficulty in detaching the leaves from one another. He succeeded, however, at last, and went on reading and writhing.

“By the way, you must address your next letter to me as Colonel Raynal. I was promoted just before this last affair, but had not time to tell you; and my wound stopped my writing till now.”

“There, there!” cried the baroness. “He was Colonel Raynal, and Colonel Raynal was not killed.”

The doctor implored her not to interrupt.

“Go on, Camille. Why do you hesitate? what is the matter? Do for pity’s sake go on, sir.”

Camille cast a look of agony around, and put his hand to his brow, on which large drops of cold perspiration, like a death dew, were gathering; but driven to the stake on all sides, he gasped on rather than read, for his eye had gone down the page.

“A namesake of mine, Commandant Raynal,”–

“Ah!”

“has not been–so fortunate. He”–

“Go on! go on!”

The wretched man could now scarcely utter Raynal’s words; they came from him in a choking groan.

“he was killed, poor fellow! while heading a gallant charge upon the enemy’s flank.”

He ground the letter convulsively in his hand, then it fell all crumpled on the floor.

“Bless you, Camille!” cried the baroness, “bless you! bless you! I have a son still.”

She stooped with difficulty, took up the letter, and, kissing it again and again, fell on her knees, and thanked Heaven aloud before them all. Then she rose and went hastily out, and her voice was heard crying very loud, “Jacintha! Jacintha!”

The doctor followed in considerable anxiety for the effects of this violent joy on so aged a person. Three remained behind, panting and pale like those to whom dead Lazarus burst the tomb, and came forth in a moment, at a word. Then Camille half kneeled, half fell, at Josephine’s feet, and, in a voice choked with sobs, bade her dispose of him.

She turned her head away. “Do not speak to me; do not look at me; if we look at one another, we are lost. Go! die at your post, and I at mine.”

He bowed his head, and kissed her dress, then rose calm as despair, and white as death, and, with his knees knocking under him, tottered away like a corpse set moving.

He disappeared from the house.

The baroness soon came back, triumphant and gay.

“I have sent her to bid them ring the bells in the village. The poor shall be feasted; all shall share our joy: my son was dead, and lives. Oh, joy! joy! joy!”

“Mother!” shrieked Josephine.

“Mad woman that I am, I am too boisterous. Help me, Rose! she is going to faint; her lips are white.”

Dr. Aubertin and Rose brought a chair. They forced Josephine into it. She was not the least faint; yet her body obeyed their hands just like a dead body. The baroness melted into tears; tears streamed from Rose’s eyes. Josephine’s were dry and stony, and fixed on coming horror. The baroness looked at her with anxiety. “Thoughtless old woman! It was too sudden; it is too much for my dear child; too much for me,” and she kneeled, and laid her aged head on her daughter’s bosom, saying feebly through her tears, “too much joy, too much joy!”

Josephine took no notice of her. She sat like one turned to stone looking far away over her mother’s head with rigid eyes fixed on the air and on coming horrors.

Rose felt her arm seized. It was Aubertin. He too was pale now, though not before. He spoke in a terrible whisper to Rose, his eye fixed on the woman of stone that sat there.

“IS THIS JOY?”

Rose, by a mighty effort, raised her eyes and confronted his full. “What else should it be?” said she.

And with these words this Spartan girl was her sister’s champion once more against all comers, friend or foe.

CHAPTER XVI.

Dr. Aubertin received one day a note from a publishing bookseller, to inquire whether he still thought of giving the world his valuable work on insects. The doctor was amazed. “My valuable work! Why, Rose, they all refused it, and this person in particular recoiled from it as if my insects could sting on paper.”

The above led to a correspondence, in which the convert to insects explained that the work must be published at the author’s expense, the publisher contenting himself with the profits. The author, thirsting for the public, consented. Then the publisher wrote again to say that the immortal treatise must be spiced; a little politics flung in: “Nothing goes down, else.” The author answered in some heat that he would not dilute things everlasting with the fleeting topics of the day, nor defile science with politics. On this his Mentor smoothed him down, despising him secretly for not seeing that a book is a matter of trade and nothing else. It ended in Aubertin going to Paris to hatch his Phoenix. He had not been there a week, when a small deputation called on him, and informed him he had been elected honorary member of a certain scientific society. The compliment was followed by others, till at last certain ladies, with the pliancy of their sex, find out they had always secretly cared for butterflies. Then the naturalist smelt a rat, or, in other words, began to scent that entomology, a form of idiocy in a poor man, is a graceful decoration of the intellect in a rich one.

Philosopher without bile, he saw through this, and let it amuse, not shock him. His own species, a singularly interesting one in my opinion, had another trait in reserve for him.

He took a world of trouble to find out the circumstances of his nephew’s nephews and nieces: then he made arrangements for distributing a large part of his legacy among them. His intentions and the proportions of his generosity transpired.

Hitherto they had been silent, but now they all fell-to and abused him: each looking only to the amount of his individual share, not at the sum total the doctor was giving way to an ungrateful lot.

The donor was greatly amused, and noted down the incident and some of the remarks in his commonplace book, under the general head of “Bestiarium;” and the particular head of “Homo.”

Paris with its seductions netted the good doctor, and held him two or three months; would have detained him longer, but for alarming accounts the baroness sent of Josephine’s health. These determined him to return to Beaurepaire; and, must I own it, the announcement was no longer hailed at Beaurepaire with universal joy as heretofore.

Josephine Raynal, late Dujardin, is by this time no stranger to my intelligent reader. I wish him to bring his knowledge of her character and her sensibility to my aid. Imagine, as the weary hours and days and weeks roll over her head, what this loving woman feels for her lover whom she has dismissed; what this grateful wife feels for the benefactor she has unwittingly wronged; but will never wrong with her eyes open; what this lady pure as snow, and proud as fire, feels at the seeming frailty into which a cruel combination of circumstances has entrapped her.

Put down the book a moment: shut your eyes: and imagine this strange and complicated form of human suffering.

Her mental sufferings were terrible; and for some time Rose feared for her reason. At last her agonies subsided into a listlessness and apathy little less alarming. She seemed a creature descending inch by inch into the tomb. Indeed, I fully believe she would have died of despair: but one of nature’s greatest forces stepped into the arena and fought on the side of life. She was affected with certain bilious symptoms that added to Rose’s uneasiness, but Jacintha assured her it was nothing, and would retire and leave the sufferer better. Jacintha, indeed, seemed now to take a particular interest in Josephine, and was always about her with looks of pity and interest.

“Good creature!” thought Rose, “she sees my sister is unhappy: and that makes her more attentive and devoted to her than ever.”

One day these three were together in Josephine’s room. Josephine was mechanically combing her long hair, when all of a sudden she stretched out her hand and cried, “Rose!”

Rose ran to her, and coming behind her saw in the glass that her lips were colorless. She screamed to Jacintha, and between them they supported Josephine to the bed. She had hardly touched it when she fainted dead away. “Mamma! mamma!” cried Rose in her terror.

“Hush!” cried Jacintha roughly, “hold your tongue: it is only a faint. Help me loosen her: don’t make any noise, whatever.” They loosened her stays, and applied the usual remedies, but it was some time before she came-to. At last the color came back to her lips, then to her cheek, and the light to her eye. She smiled feebly on Jacintha and Rose, and asked if she had not been insensible.

“Yes, love, and frightened us–a little–not much–oh, dear! oh, dear!”

“Don’t be alarmed, sweet one, I am better. And I will never do it again, since it frightens you.” Then Josephine said to her sister in a low voice, and in the Italian language, “I hoped it was death, my sister; but he comes not to the wretched.”

“If you hoped that,” replied Rose in the same language, “you do not love your poor sister who so loves you.”

While the Italian was going on, Jacintha’s dark eyes glanced suspiciously on each speaker in turn. But her suspicions were all wide of the mark.

“Now may I go and tell mamma?” asked Rose.

“No, mademoiselle, you shall not,” said Jacintha. “Madame Raynal, do take my side, and forbid her.”

“Why, what is it to you?” said Rose, haughtily.

“If it was not something to me, should I thwart my dear young lady?”

“No. And you shall have your own way, if you will but condescend to give me a reason.”

This to some of us might appear reasonable, but not to Jacintha: it even hurt her feelings.

“Mademoiselle Rose,” she said, “when you were little and used to ask me for anything, did I ever say to you, ‘Give me a REASON first’?”

“There! she is right,” said Josephine. “We should not make terms with tried friends. Come, we will pay her devotion this compliment. It is such a small favor. For my part I feel obliged to her for asking it.”

Josephine’s health improved steadily from that day. Her hollow cheeks recovered their plump smoothness, and her beauty its bloom, and her person grew more noble and statue-like than ever, and within she felt a sense of indomitable vitality. Her appetite had for some time been excessively feeble and uncertain, and her food tasteless; but of late, by what she conceived to be a reaction such as is common after youth has shaken off a long sickness, her appetite had been not only healthy but eager. The baroness observed this, and it relieved her of a large portion of her anxiety. One day at dinner her maternal heart was so pleased with Josephine’s performance that she took it as a personal favor, “Well done, Josephine,” said she; “that gives your mother pleasure to see you eat again. Soup and bouillon: and now twice you have been to Rose for some of that pate, which does you so much credit, Jacintha.”

Josephine colored high at this compliment.

“It is true,” said she, “I eat like a pig;” and, with a furtive glance at the said pate, she laid down her knife and fork, and ate no more of anything. The baroness had now a droll misgiving.

“The doctor will be angry with me,” said she: “he will find her as well as ever.”

“Madame,” said Jacintha hastily, “when does the doctor come, if I may make so bold, that I may get his room ready, you know?”

“Well thought of, Jacintha. He comes the day after to-morrow, in the afternoon.”

At night when the young ladies went up to bed, what did they find but a little cloth laid on a little table in Josephine’s room, and the remains of the pate she had liked. Rose burst out laughing. “Look at that dear duck of a goose, Jacintha! Our mother’s flattery sank deep: she thinks we can eat her pates at all hours of the day and night. Shall I send it away?”

“No,” said Josephine, “that would hurt her culinary pride, and perhaps her affection: only cover it up, dear, for just now I am not in the humor: it rather turns me.”

It was covered up. The sisters retired to rest. In the morning Rose lifted the cover and found the plate cleared, polished. She was astounded.

The large tapestried chamber, once occupied by Camille Dujardin, was now turned into a sitting-room, and it was a favorite on account of the beautiful view from the windows.

One day Josephine sat there alone with some work in her hand; but the needle often stopped, and the fair head drooped. She heaved a deep sigh. To her surprise it was echoed by a sigh that, like her own, seemed to come from a heart full of sighs.

She turned hastily round and saw Jacintha.

Now Josephine had all a woman’s eye for reading faces, and she was instantly struck by a certain gravity in Jacintha’s gaze, and a flutter which the young woman was suppressing with tolerable but not complete success.

Disguising the uneasiness this discovery gave her, she looked her visitor full in the face, and said mildly, but a little coldly, “Well, Jacintha?”

Jacintha lowered her eyes and muttered slowly,–

“The doctor–comes–to-day,” then raised her eyes all in a moment to take Josephine off her guard; but the calm face was impenetrable. So then Jacintha added, “to our misfortune,” throwing in still more meaning.

“To our misfortune? A dear old friend–like him?”

Jacintha explained. “That old man makes me shake. You are never safe with him. So long as his head is in the clouds, you might take his shoes off, and on he’d walk and never know it; but every now and then he comes out of the clouds all in one moment, without a word of warning, and when he does his eye is on everything, like a bird’s. Then he is so old: he has seen a heap. Take my word for it, the old are more knowing than the young, let them be as sharp as you like: the old have seen everything. WE have only heard talk of the most part, with here and there a glimpse. To know life to the bottom you must live it out, from the soup to the dessert; and that is what the doctor has done, and now he is coming here. And Mademoiselle Rose will go telling him everything; and if she tells him half what she has seen, your secret will be no secret to that old man.”

“My secret!” gasped Josephine, turning pale.

“Don’t look so, madame: don’t be frightened at poor Jacintha. Sooner or later you MUST trust somebody besides Mademoiselle Rose.”

Josephine looked at her with inquiring, frightened eyes.

Jacintha drew nearer to her.

“Mademoiselle,–I beg pardon, madame,–I carried you in my arms when I was a child. When I was a girl you toddled at my side, and held my gown, and lisped my name, and used to put your little arms round my neck, and kissed me, you would; and if ever I had the least pain or sickness your dear little face would turn as sorrowful, and all the pretty color leave it for Jacintha; and now you are in trouble, in sore trouble, yet you turn away from me, you dare not trust me, that would be cut in pieces ere I would betray you. Ah, mademoiselle, you are wrong. The poor can feel: they have all seen trouble, and a servant is the best of friends where she has the heart to love her mistress; and do not I love you? Pray do not turn from her who has carried you in her arms, and laid you to sleep upon her bosom, many’s and many’s the time.”

Josephine panted audibly. She held out her hand eloquently to Jacintha, but she turned her head away and trembled.

Jacintha cast a hasty glance round the room. Then she trembled too at what she was going to say, and the effect it might have on the young lady. As for Josephine, terrible as the conversation had become, she made no attempt to evade it: she remained perfectly passive. It was the best way to learn how far Jacintha had penetrated her secret, if at all.

Jacintha looked fearfully round and whispered in Josephine’s ear, “When the news of Colonel Raynal’s death came, you wept, but the color came back to your cheek. When the news of his life came, you turned to stone. Ah! my poor young lady, there has been more between you and THAT MAN than should be. Ever since one day you all went to Frejus together, you were a changed woman. I have seen you look at him as–as a wife looks at her man. I have seen HIM”–

“Hush, Jacintha! Do not tell me what you have seen: oh! do not remind me of joys I pray God to help me forget. He was my husband, then!–oh, cruel Jacintha, to remind me of what I have been, of what I am! Ah me! ah me! ah me!”

“Your husband!” cried Jacintha in utter amazement.

Then Josephine drooped her head on this faithful creature’s shoulder, and told her with many sobs the story I have told you. She told it very briefly, for it was to a woman who, though little educated, was full of feeling and shrewdness, and needed but the bare facts: she could add the rest from her own heart and experience: could tell the storm of feelings through which these two unhappy lovers must have passed. Her frequent sighs of pity and sympathy drew Josephine on to pour out all her griefs. When the tale was ended she gave a sigh of relief.

“It might have been worse: I thought it was worse the more fool I. I deserve to have my head cut off.” This was Jacintha’s only comment at that time.

It was Josephine’s turn to be amazed. “It could have been worse?” said she. “How? tell me,” added she bitterly. “It would be a consolation to me, could I see that.”

Jacintha colored and evaded this question, and begged her to go on, to keep nothing back from her. Josephine assured her she had revealed all. Jacintha looked at her a moment in silence.

“It is then as I half suspected. You do not know all that is before you. You do not see why I am afraid of that old man.”

“No, not of him in particular.”

“Nor why I want to keep Mademoiselle Rose from prattling to him?”

“No. I assure you Rose is to be trusted; she is wise–wiser than I am.”

“You are neither of you wise. You neither of you know anything. My poor young mistress, you are but a child still. You have a deep water to wade through,” said Jacintha, so solemnly that Josephine trembled. “A deep water, and do not see it even. You have told me what is past, now I must tell you what is coming. Heaven help me! But is it possible you have no misgiving? Tell the truth, now.”

“Alas! I am full of them; at your words, at your manner, they fly around me in crowds.”

“Have you no ONE?”

“No.”

“Then turn your head from me a bit, my sweet young lady; I am an honest woman, though I am not so innocent as you, and I am forced against my will to speak my mind plainer than I am used to.”

Then followed a conversation, to detail which might anticipate our story; suffice it to say, that Rose, coming into the room rather suddenly, found her sister weeping on Jacintha’s bosom, and Jacintha crying and sobbing over her.

She stood and stared in utter amazement.

Dr. Aubertin, on his arrival, was agreeably surprised at Madame Raynal’s appearance. He inquired after her appetite.

“Oh, as to her appetite,” cried the baroness, “that is immense.”

“Indeed!”

“It was,” explained Josephine, “just when I began to get better, but now it is as much as usual.” This answer had been arranged beforehand by Jacintha. She added, “The fact is, we wanted to see you, doctor, and my ridiculous ailments were a good excuse for tearing you from Paris.”–“And now we have succeeded,” said Rose, “let us throw off the mask, and talk of other things; above all, of Paris, and your eclat.”

“For all that,” persisted the baroness, “she was ill, when I first wrote, and very ill too.”

“Madame Raynal,” said the doctor solemnly, “your conduct has been irregular; once ill, and your illness announced to your medical adviser, etiquette forbade you to get well but by his prescriptions. Since, then, you have shown yourself unfit to conduct a malady, it becomes my painful duty to forbid you henceforth ever to be ill at all, without my permission first obtained in writing.”

This badinage was greatly relished by Rose, but not at all by the baroness, who was as humorless as a swan.

He stayed a month at Beaurepaire, then off to Paris again: and being now a rich man, and not too old to enjoy innocent pleasures, he got a habit of running backwards and forwards between the two places, spending a month or so at each alternately. So the days rolled on. Josephine fell into a state that almost defies description; her heart was full of deadly wounds, yet it seemed, by some mysterious, half-healing balm, to throb and ache, but bleed no more. Beams of strange, unreasonable complacency would shoot across her; the next moment reflection would come, she would droop her head, and sigh piteously. Then all would merge in a wild terror of detection. She seemed on the borders of a river of bliss, new, divine, and inexhaustible: and on the other bank mocking malignant fiends dared her to enter that heavenly stream. The past to her was full of regrets; the future full of terrors, and empty of hope. Yet she did not, could not succumb. Instead of the listlessness and languor of a few months back, she had now more energy than ever; at times it mounted to irritation. An activity possessed her: it broke out in many feminine ways. Among the rest she was seized with what we men call a cacoethes of the needle: “a raging desire” for work. Her fingers itched for work. She was at it all day. As devotees retire to pray, so she to stitch. On a wet day she would often slip into the kitchen, and ply the needle beside Jacintha: on a dry day she would hide in the old oak-tree, and sit like a mouse, and ply the tools of her craft, and make things of no mortal use to man or woman; and she tried little fringes of muslin upon her white hand, and held it up in front of her, and smiled, and then moaned. It was winter, and Rose used sometimes to bring her out a thick shawl, as she sat in the old oak-tree stitching, but Josephine nearly always declined it. SHE WAS NEARLY IMPERVIOUS TO COLD.

Then, her purse being better filled than formerly, she visited the poor more than ever, and above all the young couples; and took a warm interest in their household matters, and gave them muslin articles of her own making, and sometimes sniffed the soup in a young housewife’s pot, and took a fancy to it, and, if invited to taste it, paid her the compliment of eating a good plateful of it, and said it was much better soup than the chateau produced, and, what is stranger, thought so: and, whenever some peevish little brat set up a yell in its cradle and the father naturally enough shook his fist at the destroyer of his peace, Madame Raynal’s lovely face filled with concern not for the sufferer but the pest, and she flew to it and rocked it and coaxed it and consoled it, till the young housewife smiled and stopped its mouth by other means. And, besides the five-franc pieces she gave the infants to hold, these visits of Madame Raynal were always followed by one from Jacintha with a basket of provisions on her stalwart arm, and honest Sir John Burgoyne peeping out at the corner. Kind and beneficent as she was, her temper deteriorated considerably, for it came down from angelic to human. Rose and Jacintha were struck with the change, assented to everything she said, and encouraged her in everything it pleased her caprice to do. Meantime the baroness lived on her son Raynal’s letters (they came regularly twice a month). Rose too had a correspondence, a constant source of delight to her. Edouard Riviere was posted at a distance, and could not visit her; but their love advanced rapidly. Every day he wrote down for his Rose the acts of the day, and twice a week sent the budget to his sweetheart, and told her at the same time every feeling of his heart. She was less fortunate than he; she had to carry a heavy secret; but still she found plenty to tell him, and tender feelings too to vent on him in her own arch, shy, fitful way. Letters can enchain hearts; it was by letters that these two found themselves imperceptibly betrothed. Their union was looked forward to as certain, and not very distant. Rose was fairly in love.

One day, Dr. Aubertin, coming back from Paris to Beaurepaire rather suddenly, found nobody at home but the baroness. Josephine and Rose were gone to Frejus; had been there more than a week. She was ailing again; so as Frejus had agreed with her once, Rose thought it might again. “She would send for them back directly.”

“No,” said the doctor, “why do that? I will go over there and see them.” Accordingly, a day or two after this, he hired a carriage, and went off early in the morning to Frejus. In so small a place he expected to find the young ladies at once; but, to his surprise, no one knew them nor had heard of them. He was at a nonplus, and just about to return home and laugh at himself and the baroness for this wild-goose chase, when he fell in with a face he knew, one Mivart, a surgeon, a young man of some talent, who had made his acquaintance in Paris. Mivart accosted him with great respect; and, after the first compliments, informed him that he had been settled some months in this little town, and was doing a fair stroke of business.

“Killing some, and letting nature cure others, eh?” said the doctor; then, having had his joke, he told Mivart what had brought him to Frejus.

“Are they pretty women, your friends? I think I know all the pretty women about,” said Mivart with levity. “They are not pretty,” replied Aubertin. Mivart’s interest in them faded visibly out of his countenance. “But they are beautiful. The elder might pass for Venus, and the younger for Hebe.”

“I know them then!” cried he; “they are patients of mine.”

The doctor colored. “Ah, indeed!”

“In the absence of your greater skill,” said Mivart, politely; “it is Madame Aubertin and her sister you are looking for, is it not?”

Aubertin groaned. “I am rather too old to be looking for a Madame Aubertin,” said he; “no; it is Madame Raynal, and Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire.”

Mivart became confidential. “Madame Aubertin and her sister,” said he, “are so lovely they make me ill to look at them: the deepest blue eyes you ever saw, both of them; high foreheads; teeth like ivory mixed with pearl; such aristocratic feet and hands; and their arms–oh!” and by way of general summary the young surgeon kissed the tips of his fingers, and was silent; language succumbed under the theme. The doctor smiled coldly.

Mivart added, “If you had come an hour sooner, you might have seen Mademoiselle Rose; she was in the town.”

“Mademoiselle Rose? who is that?”

“Why, Madame Aubertin’s sister.”

At this Dr. Aubertin looked first very puzzled, then very grave.

“Hum!” said he, after a little reflection, “where do these paragons live?”

“They lodge at a small farm; it belongs to a widow; her name is Roth.” They parted. Dr. Aubertin walked slowly towards his carriage, his hands behind him, his eyes on the ground. He bade the driver inquire where the Widow Roth lived, and learned it was about half a league out of the town. He drove to the farmhouse; when the carriage drove up, a young lady looked out of the window on the first floor. It was Rose de Beaurepaire. She caught the doctor’s eye, and he hers. She came down and welcomed him with a great appearance of cordiality, and asked him, with a smile, how he found them out.

“From your medical attendant,” said the doctor, dryly.

Rose looked keenly in his face.

“He said he was in attendance on two paragons of beauty, blue eyes, white teeth and arms.”

“And you found us out by that?” inquired Rose, looking still more keenly at him.

“Hardly; but it was my last chance of finding you, so I came. Where is Madame Raynal?”

“Come into this room, dear friend. I will go and find her.”

Full twenty minutes was the doctor kept waiting, and then in came Rose, gayly crying, “I have hunted her high and low, and where do you think my lady was? sitting out in the garden–come.”

Sure enough, they found Josephine in the garden, seated on a low chair. She smiled when the doctor came up to her, and asked after her mother. There was an air of languor about her; her color was clear, delicate, and beautiful.

“You have been unwell, my child.”

“A little, dear friend; you know me; always ailing, and tormenting those I love.”

“Well! but, Josephine, you know this place and this sweet air always set you up. Look at her now, doctor; did you ever see her look better? See what a color. I never saw her look more lovely.”

“I never saw her look SO lovely; but I have seen her look better. Your pulse. A little languid?”

“Yes, I am a little.”

“Do you stay at Beaurepaire?” inquired Rose; “if so, we will come home.”

“On the contrary, you will stay here another fortnight,” said the doctor, authoritatively.

“Prescribe some of your nice tonics for me, doctor,” said Josephine, coaxingly.

“No! I can’t do that; you are in the hands of another practitioner.”

“What does that matter? You were at Paris.”

“It is not the etiquette in our profession to interfere with another man’s patients.”

“Oh, dear! I am so sorry,” began Josephine.

“I see nothing here that my good friend Mivart is not competent to deal with,” said the doctor, coldly.

Then followed some general conversation, at the end of which the doctor once more laid his commands on them to stay another fortnight where they were, and bade them good-by.

He was no sooner gone than Rose went to the door of the kitchen, and called out, “Madame Jouvenel! Madame Jouvenel! you may come into the garden again.”

The doctor drove away; but, instead of going straight to Beaurepaire, he ordered the driver to return to the town. He then walked to Mivart’s house.

In about a quarter of an hour he came out of it, looking singularly grave, sad, and stern.

CHAPTER XVII.

Edouard Riviere contrived one Saturday to work off all arrears of business, and start for Beaurepaire. He had received a very kind letter from Rose, and his longing to see her overpowered him. On the road his eyes often glittered, and his cheek flushed with expectation. At last he got there. His heart beat: for four months he had not seen her. He ran up into the drawing-room, and there found the baroness alone; she welcomed him cordially, but soon let him know Rose and her sister were at Frejus. His heart sank. Frejus was a long way off. But this was not all. Rose’s last letter was dated from Beaurepaire, yet it must have been written at Frejus. He went to Jacintha, and demanded an explanation of this. The ready Jacintha said it looked as if she meant to be home directly; and added, with cool cunning, “That is a hint for me to get their rooms ready.”

“This letter must have come here enclosed in another,” said Edouard, sternly.

“Like enough,” replied Jacintha, with an appearance of sovereign indifference.

Edouard looked at her, and said, grimly, “I will go to Frejus.”

“So I would,” said Jacintha, faltering a little, but not perceptibly; “you might meet them on the road, if so be they come the same road; there are two roads, you know.”

Edouard hesitated; but he ended by sending Dard to the town on his own horse, with orders to leave him at the inn, and borrow a fresh horse. “I shall just have time,” said he. He rode to Frejus, and inquired at the inns and post-office for Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire. They did not know her; then he inquired for Madame Raynal. No such name known. He rode by the seaside upon the chance of their seeing him. He paraded on horseback throughout the place, in hopes every moment that a window would open, and a fair face shine at it, and call him. At last his time was up, and he was obliged to ride back, sick at heart, to Beaurepaire. He told the baroness, with some natural irritation, what had happened. She was as much surprised as he was.

“I write to Madame Raynal at the post-office, Frejus,” said she.

“And Madame Raynal gets your letters?”

“Of course she does, since she answers them; you cannot have inquired at the post.”

“Why, it was the first place I inquired at, and neither Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire nor Madame Raynal were known there.”

Jacintha, who could have given the clew, seemed so puzzled herself, that they did not even apply to her. Edouard took a sorrowful leave of the baroness, and set out on his journey home.

Oh! how sad and weary that ride seemed now by what it had been coming. His disappointment was deep and irritating; and ere he had ridden half way a torturer fastened on his heart. That torture is suspicion; a vague and shadowy, but gigantic phantom that oppresses and rends the mind more terribly than certainty. In this state of vague, sickening suspicion, he remained some days: then came an affectionate letter from Rose, who had actually returned home. In this she expressed her regret and disappointment at having missed him; blamed herself for misleading him, but explained that their stay at Frejus had been prolonged from day to day far beyond her expectation. “The stupidity of the post-office was more than she could account for,” said she. But, what went farthest to console Edouard, was, that after this contretemps she never ceased to invite him to come to Beaurepaire. Now, before this, though she said many kind and pretty things in her letters, she had never invited him to visit the chateau; he had noticed this. “Sweet soul,” thought he, “she really is vexed. I must be a brute to think any more about it. Still”–

So this wound was skinned over.

At last, what he called his lucky star ordained that he should be transferred to the very post his Commandant Raynal had once occupied. He sought and obtained permission to fix his quarters in the little village near Beaurepaire, and though this plan could not be carried out for three months, yet the prospect of it was joyful all that time–joyful to both lovers. Rose needed this consolation, for she was very unhappy: her beloved sister, since their return from Frejus, had gone back. The flush of health was faded, and so was her late energy. She fell into deep depression and languor, broken occasionally by fits of nervous irritation.

She would sit for hours together at one window languishing and fretting. Can the female reader guess which way that window looked?

Now, Edouard was a favorite of Josephine’s; so Rose hoped he would help to distract her attention from those sorrows which a lapse of years alone could cure.

On every account, then, his visit was looked forward to with hope and joy.

He came. He was received with open arms. He took up his quarters at his old lodgings, but spent his evenings and every leisure hour at the chateau.

He was very much in love, and showed it. He adhered to Rose like a leech, and followed her about like a little dog.

This would have made her very happy if there had been nothing great to distract her attention and her heart; but she had Josephine, whose deep depression and fits of irritation and terror filled her with anxiety; and so Edouard was in the way now and then. On these occasions he was too vain to see what she was too polite to show him offensively.

But on this she became vexed at his obtuseness.

“Does he think I can be always at his beck and call?” thought she.

“She is always after her sister,” said he.

He was just beginning to be jealous of Josephine when the following incident occurred:–

Rose and the doctor were discussing Josephine. Edouard pretended to be reading a book, but he listened to every word.

Dr. Aubertin gave it as his opinion that Madame Raynal did not make enough blood.

“Oh! if I thought that!” cried Rose.

“Well, then, it is so, I assure you.”

“Doctor,” said Rose, “do you remember, one day you said healthy blood could be drawn from robust veins and poured into a sick person’s?”

“It is a well-known fact,” said Aubertin.

“I don’t believe it,” said Rose, dryly.

“Then you place a very narrow limit to science,” said the doctor, coldly.

“Did you ever see it done?” asked Rose, slyly.

“I have not only seen it done, but have done it myself.”

“Then do it for us. There’s my arm; take blood from that for dear Josephine!” and she thrust a white arm out under his eye with such a bold movement and such a look of fire and love as never beamed from common eyes.

A keen, cold pang shot through the human heart of Edouard Riviere.

The doctor started and gazed at her with admiration: then he hung his head. “I could not do it. I love you both too well to drain either of life’s current.”

Rose veiled her fire, and began to coax. “Once a week; just once a week, dear, dear doctor; you know I should never miss it. I am so full of that health, which Heaven denies to her I love.”

“Let us try milder measures first,” said the doctor. “I have most faith in time.”

“What if I were to take her to Frejus? hitherto, the sea has always done wonders for her.”

“Frejus, by all means,” said Edouard, mingling suddenly in the conversation; “and this time I will go with you, and then I shall find out where you lodged before, and how the boobies came to say they did not know you.”

Rose bit her lip. She could not help seeing then how much dear Edouard was in her way and Josephine’s. Their best friends are in the way of all who have secrets. Presently the doctor went to his study. Then Edouard let fall a mock soliloquy. “I wonder,” said he, dropping out his words one by one, “whether any one will ever love me well enough to give a drop of their blood for me.”

“If you were in sickness and sorrow, who knows?” said Rose, coloring up.

“I would soon be in sickness and sorrow if I thought that.”

“Don’t jest with such matters, monsieur.”

“I am serious. I wish I was as ill as Madame Raynal is, to be loved as she is.”

“You must resemble her in some other things to be loved as she is.

“You have often made me feel that of late, dear Rose.”

This touched her. But she fought down the kindly feeling. “I am glad of it,” said she, out of perverseness. She added after a while, “Edouard, you are naturally jealous.”

“Not the least in the world, Rose, I assure you. I have many faults, but jealous I am not.”

“Oh, yes, you are, and suspicious, too; there is something in your character that alarms me for our happiness.”

“Well, if you come to that, there are things in YOUR conduct I could wish explained.”

“There! I said so. You have not confidence in me.”

“Pray don’t say that, dear Rose. I have every confidence in you; only please don’t ask me to divest myself of my senses and my reason.”

“I don’t ask you to do that or anything else for me; good-by, for the present.”

“Where are you going now? tic! tic! I never can get a word in peace with you.”

“I am not going to commit murder. I’m only going up-stairs to my sister.”

“Poor Madame Raynal, she makes it very hard for me not to dislike her.”

“Dislike my Josephine?” and Rose bristled visibly.

“She is an angel, but I should hate an angel if it came forever between you and me.”

“Excuse me, she was here long before you. It is you that came between her and me.”

“I came because I was told I should be welcome,” said Edouard bitterly, and equivocating a little; he added, “and I dare say I shall go when I am told I am one too many.”

“Bad heart! who says you are one too many in the house? But you are too exigent, monsieur; you assume the husband, and you tease me. It is selfish; can you not see I am anxious and worried? you ought to be kind to me, and soothe me; that is what I look for from you, and, instead of that, I declare you are getting to be quite a worry.”

“I should not be if you loved me as I love you. I give YOU no rival. Shall I tell you the cause of all this? you have secrets.”

“What secrets?”

“Is it me you ask? am I trusted with them? Secrets are a bond that not even love can overcome. It is to talk secrets you run away from me to Madame Raynal. Where did you lodge at Frejus, Mademoiselle the Reticent?”

“In a grotto, dry at low water, Monsieur the Inquisitive.”

“That is enough: since you will not tell me, I will find it out before I am a week older.”

This alarmed Rose terribly, and drove her to extremities. She decided to quarrel.

“Sir,” said she, “I thank you for playing the tyrant a little prematurely; it has put me on my guard. Let us part; you and I are not suited to each other, Edouard Riviere.”

He took this more humbly than she expected. “Part!” said he, in consternation; “that is a terrible word to pass between you and me. Forgive me! I suppose I am jealous.”

“You are; you are actually jealous of my sister. Well, I tell you plainly I love you, but I love my sister better. I never could love any man as I do her; it is ridiculous to expect such a thing.”

“And do you think I could bear to play second fiddle to her all my life?”

“I don’t ask you. Go and play first trumpet to some other lady.”

“You speak your wishes so plainly now, I have nothing to do but to obey.”

He kissed her hand and went away disconsolately.

Rose, instead of going to Josephine, her determination to do which had mainly caused the quarrel, sat sadly down, and leaned her head on her hand. “I am cruel. I am ungrateful. He has gone away broken-hearted. And what shall I do without him?–little fool! I love him better than he loves me. He will never forgive me. I have wounded his vanity; and they are vainer than we are. If we meet at dinner I will be so kind to him, he will forget it all. No! Edouard will not come to dinner. He is not a spaniel that you can beat, and then whistle back again. Something tells me I have lost him, and if I have, what shall I do? I will write him a note. I will ask him to forgive me.”

She sat down at the table, and took a sheet of notepaper and began to write a few conciliatory words. She was so occupied in making these kind enough, and not too kind, that a light step approached her unobserved. She looked up and there was Edouard. She whipped the paper off the table.

A look of suspicion and misery crossed Edouard’s face.

Rose caught it, and said, “Well, am I to be affronted any more?”

“No, Rose. I came back to beg you to forget what passed just now,” said he.

Rose’s eye flashed; his return showed her her power. She abused it directly.

“How can I forget it if you come reminding me?”

“Dear Rose, now don’t be so unkind, so cruel–I have not come back to tease you, sweet one. I come to know what I can do to please you; to make you love me again?” and he was about to kneel graciously on one knee.

“I’ll tell you. Don’t come near me for a month.”

Edouard started up, white as ashes with mortification and wounded love.

“This is how you treat me for humbling myself, when it is you that ought to ask forgiveness.”

“Why should I ask what I don’t care about?”

“What DO you care about?–except that sister of yours? You have no heart. And on this cold-blooded creature I have wasted a love an empress might have been proud of inspiring. I pray Heaven some man may sport with your affections, you heartless creature, as you have played with mine, and make you suffer what I suffer now!”

And with a burst of inarticulate grief and rage he flung out of the room.

Rose sank trembling on the sofa a little while: then with a mighty effort rose and went to comfort her sister.

Edouard came no more to Beaurepaire.

There is an old French proverb, and a wise one, “Rien n’est certain que l’imprevu;” it means you can make sure of nothing but this, that matters will not turn as you feel sure they will. And, even for this reason, you, who are thinking of suicide because trade is declining, speculation failing, bankruptcy impending, or your life going to be blighted forever by unrequited love–DON’T DO IT. Whether you are English, American, French, or German, listen to a man that knows what is what, and DON’T DO IT. I tell you none of those horrors, when they really come, will affect you as you fancy they will. The joys we expect are not a quarter so bright, nor the troubles half so dark as we think they will be. Bankruptcy coming is one thing, come is quite another: and no heart or life was ever really blighted at twenty years of age. The love-sick girls that are picked out of the canal alive, all, without exception, marry another man, have brats, and get to screech with laughter when they think of sweetheart No. 1, generally a blockhead, or else a blackguard, whom they were fools enough to wet their clothes for, let alone kill their souls. This happens INVARIABLY. The love-sick girls that are picked out of the canal dead have fled from a year’s misery to eternal pain, from grief that time never failed to cure, to anguish incurable. In this world “Rien n’est certain que l’imprevu.”

Edouard and Rose were tender lovers, at a distance. How much happier and more loving they thought they should be beneath the same roof. They came together: their prominent faults of character rubbed: the secret that was in the house did its work: and altogether, they quarrelled. L’imprevu.

Dard had been saying to Jacintha for ever so long, “When granny dies, I will marry you.”

Granny died. Dard took possession of her little property. Up came a glittering official, and turned him out; he was not her heir. Perrin, the notary, was. He had bought the inheritance of her two sons, long since dead.

Dard had not only looked on the cottage and cow, as his, but had spoken of them as such for years. The disappointment and the irony of comrades ate into him.

“I will leave this cursed place,” said he.

Josephine instantly sent for him to Beaurepaire. He came, and was factotum with the novelty of a fixed salary. Jacintha accommodated him with a new little odd job or two. She set him to dance on the oak floors with a brush fastened to his right foot; and, after a rehearsal or two, she made him wait at table. Didn’t he bang the things about: and when he brought a lady a dish, and she did not instantly attend, he gave her elbow a poke to attract attention: then she squeaked; and he grinned at her double absurdity in minding a touch, and not minding the real business of the table.

But his wrongs rankled in him. He vented antique phrases such as, “I want a change;” “This village is the last place the Almighty made,” etc.

Then he was attacked with a moral disease: affected the company of soldiers. He spent his weekly salary carousing with the military, a class of men so brilliant that they are not expected to pay for their share of the drink; they contribute the anecdotes and the familiar appeals to Heaven: and is not that enough?

Present at many recitals, the heroes of which lost nothing by being their own historians, Dard imbibed a taste for military adventure. His very talk, which used to be so homely, began now to be tinselled with big swelling words of vanity imported from the army. I need hardly say these bombastical phrases did not elevate his general dialect: they lay fearfully distinct upon the surface, “like lumps of marl upon a barren soil, encumbering the ground they could not fertilize.”

Jacintha took leave to remind him of an incident connected with warfare–wounds.

“Do you remember how you were down upon your luck when you did but cut your foot? Why, that is nothing in the army. They never go out to fight but some come back with arms off, and some with legs off and some with heads; and the rest don’t come back at all: and how would you like that?”

This intrusion of statistics into warfare at first cooled Dard’s impatience for the field. But presently the fighting half of his heart received an ally in one Sergeant La Croix (not a bad name for a military aspirant). This sergeant was at the village waiting to march with the new recruits to the Rhine. Sergeant La Croix was a man who, by force of eloquence, could make soldiering appear the most delightful as well as glorious of human pursuits. His tongue fired the inexperienced soul with a love of arms, as do the drums and trumpets and tramp of soldiers, and their bayonets glittering in the sun. He would have been worth his weight in fustian here, where we recruit by that and jargon; he was superfluous in France, where they recruited by force: but he was ornamental: and he set Dard and one or two more on fire. Indeed, so absorbing was his sense of military glory, that there was no room left in him for that mere verbal honor civilians call veracity.

To speak plainly, the sergeant was a fluent, fertile, interesting, sonorous, prompt, audacious liar: and such was his success, that Dard and one or two more became mere human fiction pipes–of comparatively small diameter–irrigating a rural district with false views of military life, derived from that inexhaustible reservoir, La Croix.

At last the long-threatened conscription was levied: every person fit to bear arms, and not coming under the allowed exceptions, drew a number: and at a certain hour the numbers corresponding to these were deposited in an urn, and one-third of them were drawn in presence of the authorities. Those men whose numbers were drawn had to go for soldiers. Jacintha awaited the result in great anxiety. She could not sit at home for it; so she went down the road to meet Dard, who had promised to come and tell her the result as soon as known. At last she saw him approaching in a disconsolate way. “O Dard! speak! are we undone? are you a dead man?” cried she. “Have they made a soldier of you?”

“No such luck: I shall die a man of all work,” grunted Dard.

“And you are sorry? you unnatural little monster! you have no feeling for me, then.”

“Oh, yes, I have; but glory is No. 1 with me now.”

“How loud the bantams crow! You leave glory to fools that be six feet high.”

“General Bonaparte isn’t much higher than I am, and glory sits upon his brow. Why shouldn’t glory sit upon my brow?”

“Because it would weigh you down, and smother you, you little fool.” She added, “And think of me, that couldn’t bear you to be killed at any price, glory or no glory.”

Then, to appease her fears, Dard showed her his number, 99; and assured her he had seen the last number in the functionary’s hand before he came away, and it was sixty something.

This ocular demonstration satisfied Jacintha; and she ordered Dard to help her draw the water.

“All right,” said he, “there is no immortal glory to be picked up to-day, so I’ll go in for odd jobs.”

While they were at this job a voice was heard hallooing. Dard looked up, and there was a rigid military figure, with a tremendous mustache, peering about. Dard was overjoyed. It was his friend, his boon-companion. “Come here, old fellow,” cried he, “ain’t I