White Lies Part 45

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 pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sure 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 appet.i.te.

"Oh, as to her appet.i.te," 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 succ.u.mb. 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 st.i.tch. 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 st.i.tching, 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, a.s.sented 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.s 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 succ.u.mbed 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."