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White Lies

by Charles Reade · English · Gutenberg #2472 · 676,084 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: White Lies

Author: Charles Reade


        
Release date: May 17, 2006 [eBook #2472]
                Most recently updated: September 27, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2472

Credits: Produced by Donald Lainson; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE LIES ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





WHITE LIES

By Charles Reade




CHAPTER I.


Towards the close of the last century the Baron de Beaurepaire lived
in the chateau of that name in Brittany. His family was of prodigious
antiquity; seven successive barons had already flourished on this spot
when a younger son of the house accompanied his neighbor the Duke of
Normandy in his descent on England, and was rewarded by a grant of
English land, on which he dug a mote and built a chateau, and called it
Beaurepaire (the worthy Saxons turned this into Borreper without delay).
Since that day more than twenty gentlemen of the same lineage had held
in turn the original chateau and lands, and handed them down to their
present lord.

Thus rooted in his native Brittany, Henri Lionel Marie St. Quentin de
Beaurepaire was as fortunate as any man can be pronounced before he
dies. He had health, rank, a good income, a fair domain, a goodly
house, a loving wife, and two lovely young daughters, all veneration and
affection. Two months every year he visited the Faubourg St. Germain and
the Court. At both every gentleman and every lacquey knew his name, and
his face: his return to Brittany after this short absence was celebrated
by a rustic fete.

Above all, Monsieur de Beaurepaire possessed that treasure of treasures,
content. He hunted no heart-burns. Ambition did not tempt him; why
should he listen to long speeches, and court the unworthy, and descend
to intrigue, for so precarious and equivocal a prize as a place in the
Government, when he could be De Beaurepaire without trouble or loss of
self-respect? Social ambition could get little hold of him; let parvenus
give balls half in doors, half out, and light two thousand lamps,
and waste their substance battling and manoeuvring for fashionable
distinction; he had nothing to gain by such foolery, nothing to lose by
modest living; he was the twenty-ninth Baron of Beaurepaire. So wise,
so proud, so little vain, so strong in health and wealth and honor,
one would have said nothing less than an earthquake could shake
this gentleman and his house. Yet both were shaken, though rooted by
centuries to the soil; and by no vulgar earthquake.

For years France had bowed in silence beneath two galling burdens--a
selfish and corrupt monarchy, and a multitudinous, privileged, lazy, and
oppressive aristocracy, by whom the peasant was handled like a Russian
serf. [Said peasant is now the principal proprietor of the soil.]

The lower orders rose upon their oppressors, and soon showed themselves
far blacker specimens of the same breed. Law, religion, humanity, and
common sense, hid their faces; innocent blood flowed in a stream, and
terror reigned. To Monsieur de Beaurepaire these republicans--murderers
of women, children, and kings--seemed the most horrible monsters nature
had ever produced; he put on black, and retired from society; he felled
timber, and raised large sums of money upon his estate. And one day he
mounted his charger, and disappeared from the chateau.

Three months after this, a cavalier, dusty and pale, rode into the
courtyard of Beaurepaire, and asked to see the baroness. She came to
him; he hung his head and held her out a letter.

It contained a few sad words from Monsieur de Laroche-jaquelin. The
baron had just fallen in La Vendee, fighting for the Crown.

From that hour till her death the baroness wore black.

The mourner would have been arrested, and perhaps beheaded, but for a
friend, the last in the world on whom the family reckoned for any solid
aid. Dr. Aubertin had lived in the chateau twenty years. He was a man of
science, and did not care a button for money; so he had retired from
the practice of medicine, and pursued his researches at ease under
the baron’s roof. They all loved him, and laughed at his occasional
reveries, in the days of prosperity; and now, in one great crisis, the
protege became the protector, to their astonishment and his own. But it
was an age of ups and downs. This amiable theorist was one of the oldest
verbal republicans in Europe. And why not? In theory a republic is
the perfect form of government: it is merely in practice that it is
impossible; it is only upon going off paper into reality, and trying
actually to self-govern limited nations, after heating them white hot
with the fire of politics and the bellows of bombast--that the thing
resolves itself into bloodshed silvered with moonshine.

Dr. Aubertin had for years talked and written speculative republicanism.
So they applied to him whether the baroness shared her husband’s
opinions, and he boldly assured them she did not; he added, “She is a
pupil of mine.” On this audacious statement they contented themselves
with laying a heavy fine on the lands of Beaurepaire.

Assignats were abundant, but good mercantile paper, a notorious coward,
had made itself wings and fled, and specie was creeping into strong
boxes like a startled rabbit into its hole. The fine was paid; but
Beaurepaire had to be heavily mortgaged, and the loan bore a high rate
of interest. This, with the baron’s previous mortgages, swamped the
estate.

The baroness sold her carriage and horses, and she and her daughters
prepared to deny themselves all but the bare necessaries of life, and
pay off their debts if possible. On this their dependants fell away from
them; their fair-weather friends came no longer near them; and many a
flush of indignation crossed their brows, and many an aching pang their
hearts, as adversity revealed the baseness and inconstancy of common
people high or low.

When the other servants had retired with their wages, one Jacintha
remained behind, and begged permission to speak to the baroness.

“What would you with me, my child?” asked that lady, with an accent in
which a shade of surprise mingled with great politeness.

“Forgive me, madame,” began Jacintha, with a formal courtesy; “but how
can I leave you, and Mademoiselle Josephine, and Mademoiselle Rose? I
was born at Beaurepaire; my mother died in the chateau: my father died
in the village; but he had meat every day from the baron’s own
table, and fuel from the baron’s wood, and died blessing the house of
Beaurepaire. I CANNOT go. The others are gone because prosperity is here
no longer. Let it be so; I will stay till the sun shines again upon the
chateau, and then you shall send me away if you are bent on it; but
not now, my ladies--oh, not now! Oh! oh! oh!” And the warm-hearted girl
burst out sobbing ungracefully.

“My child,” said the baroness, “these sentiments touch me, and honor
you. But retire, if you please, while I consult my daughters.”

Jacintha cut her sobs dead short, and retreated with a formal reverence.

The consultation consisted of the baroness opening her arms, and both
her daughters embracing her at once. Proud as they were, they wept
with joy at having made one friend amongst all their servants. Jacintha
stayed.

As months rolled on, Rose de Beaurepaire recovered her natural gayety in
spite of bereavement and poverty; so strong are youth, and health,
and temperament. But her elder sister had a grief all her own: Captain
Dujardin, a gallant young officer, well-born, and his own master, had
courted her with her parents’ consent; and, even when the baron began to
look coldly on the soldier of the Republic, young Dujardin, though too
proud to encounter the baron’s irony and looks of scorn, would not yield
love to pique. He came no more to the chateau, but he would wait hours
and hours on the path to the little oratory in the park, on the bare
chance of a passing word or even a kind look from Josephine. So much
devotion gradually won a heart which in happier times she had been half
encouraged to give him; and, when he left her on a military service
of uncommon danger, the woman’s reserve melted, and, in that moment of
mutual grief and passion, she vowed she loved him better than all the
world.

Letters from the camp breathing a devotion little short of worship
fed her attachment; and more than one public mention of his name and
services made her proud as well as fond of the fiery young soldier.

Still she did not open her heart to her parents. The baron, alive at
that time, was exasperated against the Republic, and all who served it;
and, as for the baroness, she was of the old school: a passionate
love in a lady’s heart before marriage was contrary to her notions of
etiquette. Josephine loved Rose very tenderly; but shrank with modest
delicacy from making her a confidante of feelings, the bare relation of
which leaves the female hearer a child no longer.

So she hid her heart, and delicious first love nestled deep in her
nature, and thrilled in every secret vein and fibre.

They had parted two years, and he had joined the army of the Pyrenees
about one month, when suddenly all correspondence ceased on his part.

Restless anxiety rose into terror as this silence continued; and
starting and trembling at every sound, and edging to the window at every
footstep, Josephine expected hourly the tidings of her lover’s death.

Months rolled on in silence.

Then a new torture came. He must not be dead but unfaithful. At this all
the pride of her race was fired in her.

The struggle between love and ire was almost too much for nature:
violently gay and moody by turns she alarmed both her mother and the
good Dr. Aubertin. The latter was not, I think, quite without suspicion
of the truth; however, he simply prescribed change of air and place;
she must go to Frejus, a watering-place distant about five leagues.
Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire yielded a languid assent. To her all places
were alike.

But when they returned from Frejus a change had taken place. Rose had
extracted her sister’s secret, and was a changed girl. Pity, and the
keen sense of Josephine’s wrong, had raised her sisterly love to a
passion. The great-hearted girl hovered about her lovely, suffering
sister like an angel, and paid her the tender attentions of a devoted
lover, and hated Camille Dujardin with all her heart: hated him all the
more that she saw Josephine shrink even from her whenever she inveighed
against him.

At last Rose heard some news of the truant lover. The fact is, this
young lady was as intelligent as she was inexperienced; and she had
asked Jacintha to tell Dard to talk to every soldier that passed through
the village, and ask him if he knew anything about Captain Dujardin
of the 17th regiment. Dard cross-examined about a hundred invalided
warriors, who did not even recognize the captain’s name; but at last,
by extraordinary luck, he actually did fall in with two, who told him
strange news about Captain Dujardin. And so then Dard told Jacintha; and
Jacintha soon had the men into the kitchen and told Rose. Rose ran to
tell Josephine; but stopped in the passage, and turned suddenly very
cold. Her courage failed her; she feared Josephine would not take the
news as she ought; and perhaps would not love her so well if SHE told
her; so she thought to herself she would let the soldiers tell their own
tale. She went into the room where Josephine was reading to the baroness
and Dr. Aubertin; she sat quietly down; but at the first opportunity
made Josephine one of those imperceptible signals which women, and above
all, sisters, have reduced to so subtle a system. This done, she went
carelessly out: and Josephine in due course followed her, and found her
at the door.

“What is it?” said Josephine, earnestly.

“Have you courage?” was Rose’s reply.

“He is dead?” said Josephine, turning pale as ashes.

“No, no;” said Rose hastily; “he is alive. But you will need all your
courage.”

“Since he lives I fear nothing,” said Josephine; and stood there and
quivered from head to foot. Rose, with pitying looks, took her by the
hand and drew her in silence towards the kitchen.

Josephine yielded a mute submission at first; but at the very door hung
back and faltered, “He loves another; he is married: let me go.” Rose
made no reply, but left her there and went into the kitchen and found
two dragoons seated round a bottle of wine. They rose and saluted her.

“Be seated, my brave men,” said she; “only please tell me what you told
Jacintha about Captain Dujardin.”

“Don’t stain your mouth with the captain, my little lady. He is a
traitor.”

“How do you know?”

“Marcellus! mademoiselle asks us how we know Captain Dujardin to be a
traitor. Speak.”

Marcellus, thus appealed to, told Rose after his own fashion that he
knew the captain well: that one day the captain rode out of the camp and
never returned: that at first great anxiety was felt on his behalf, for
the captain was a great favorite, and passed for the smartest soldier in
the division: that after awhile anxiety gave place to some very awkward
suspicions, and these suspicions it was his lot and his comrade’s here
to confirm. About a month later he and the said comrade and two more
were sent, well mounted, to reconnoitre a Spanish village. At the door
of a little inn they caught sight of a French uniform. This so excited
their curiosity that he went forward nearer than prudent, and distinctly
recognized Captain Dujardin seated at a table drinking between two
guerillas; then he rode back and told the others, who then came up and
satisfied themselves it was so: that if any of the party had entertained
a doubt, it was removed in an unpleasant way; he, Marcellus, disgusted
at the sight of a French uniform drinking among Spaniards, took down his
carabine and fired at the group as carefully as a somewhat restive horse
permitted: at this, as if by magic, a score or so of guerillas poured
out from Heaven knows where, musket in hand, and delivered a volley;
the officer in command of the party fell dead, Jean Jacques here got a
broken arm, and his own horse was wounded in two places, and fell from
loss of blood a few furlongs from the French camp, to the neighborhood
of which the vagabonds pursued them, hallooing and shouting and firing
like barbarous banditti as they were.

“However, here I am,” concluded Marcellus, “invalided for awhile, my
lady, but not expended yet: we will soon dash in among them again for
death or glory. Meantime,” concluded he, filling both glasses, “let
us drink to the eyes of beauty (military salute); and to the renown
of France; and double damnation to all her traitors, like that Captain
Dujardin; whose neck may the devil twist.”

Ere they could drink to this energetic toast, a low wail at the door,
like a dying hare’s, arrested the glasses on their road, and the rough
soldiers stood transfixed, and looked at one another in some dismay.
Rose flew to the door with a face full of concern.

Josephine was gone.

Then Rose had the tact and resolution to say a few kind, encouraging
words to the soldiers, and bid Jacintha be hospitable to them. This done
she darted up-stairs after Josephine; she reached the main corridor just
in time to see her creep along it with the air and carriage of a woman
of fifty, and enter her own room.

Rose followed softly with wet eyes, and turned the handle gently. But
the door was locked.

“Josephine! Josephine!”

No answer.

“I want to speak to you. I am frightened. Oh, do not be alone.”

A choking voice answered, “Give me a little while to draw my breath.”
 Rose sank down at the door, and sat close to it, with her head against
it, sobbing bitterly. She was hurt at not being let in; such a friend as
she had proved herself. But this personal feeling was only a fraction of
her grief and anxiety.

A good half hour elapsed ere Josephine, pale and stern as no one had
ever seen her till that hour, suddenly opened the door. She started at
sight of Rose couched sorrowful on the threshold; her stern look relaxed
into tender love and pity; she sank, blushing, on her knees, and took
her sister’s head quickly to her bosom. “Oh, my little love, have you
been here all this time?”--“Oh! oh! oh!” was all the little love could
reply. Then the deserted one, still kneeling, took Rose in her lap, and
caressed and comforted her, and poured words of gratitude and affection
over her like a warm shower.

They rose hand in hand.

Then Rose suddenly seized Josephine, and looked long and anxiously down
into her eyes. They flashed fire under the scrutiny. “Yes, it is all
over; I could not despise and love. I am dead to him, as he is dead to
France.”

This was joyful news to Rose. “I hoped it would be so,” said she; “but
you frightened me. My noble sister, were I ever to lose your esteem, I
should die. Oh, how awful yet how beautiful is your scorn. For worlds
I would not be that Cam”--Josephine laid her hand imperiously on Rose’s
mouth. “To mention his name to me will be to insult me; De Beaurepaire
I am, and a Frenchwoman. Come, dear, let us go down and comfort our
mother.”

They went down; and this patient sufferer, and high minded conqueror, of
her own accord took up a commonplace book, and read aloud for two mortal
hours to her mother and Aubertin. Her voice only wavered twice.

To feel that life is ended; to wish existence, too, had ceased; and so
to sit down, an aching hollow, and take a part and sham an interest in
twaddle to please others; such are woman’s feats. How like nothing at
all they look!

A man would rather sit on the buffer of a steam-engine and ride at the
Great Redan.

Rose sat at her elbow, a little behind her, and turned the leaves, and
on one pretence or other held Josephine’s hand nearly all the rest of
the day. Its delicate fibres remained tense, like a greyhound’s sinews
after a race, and the blue veins rose to sight in it, though her voice
and eyes were mastered.

So keen was the strife, so matched the antagonists, so hard the victory.

For ire and scorn are mighty. And noble blood in a noble heart is
heroic. And Love is a giant.




CHAPTER II.


The French provinces were now organized upon a half military plan, by
which all the local authorities radiated towards a centre of government.
By-the-by, this feature has survived subsequent revolutions and
political changes.

In days of change, youth is at a premium; because, though experience is
valuable, the experience of one order of things unfits ordinary men for
another order of things. So a good many old fogies in office were shown
the door, and a good deal of youth and energy infused into the veins of
provincial government. For instance, Edouard Riviere, who had but just
completed his education with singular eclat at a military school, was
one fine day ordered into Brittany to fill a responsible post under
Commandant Raynal, a blunt, rough soldier, that had risen from the
ranks, and bore a much higher character for zeal and moral integrity
than for affability.

This officer was the son of a widow that kept a grocer’s shop in Paris.
She intended him for spice, but he thirsted for glory, and vexed her. So
she yielded, as mothers will.

In the armies of the republic a good soldier rose with unparalleled
certainty, and rapidity, too; for when soldiers are being mowed down
like oats, it is a glorious time for such of them as keep their feet.
Raynal mounted fast, and used to write to his mother, and joke her about
the army being such a bad profession; and, as he was all for glory, not
money, he lived with Spartan frugality, and saved half his pay and all
his prize money for the old lady in Paris.

But this prosperous man had to endure a deep disappointment; on the very
day he was made commandant and one of the general’s aides-de-camp, came
a letter into the camp. His mother was dead after a short illness. This
was a terrible blow to the simple, rugged soldier, who had never had
much time nor inclination to flirt with a lot of girls, and toughen his
heart. He came back to Paris honored and rich, but downcast. The old
home, empty of his mother, seemed to him not to have the old look.
It made him sadder. To cheer him up they brought him much money. The
widow’s trade had taken a wonderful start the last few years, and she
had been playing the same game as he had, living on ten-pence a day, and
saving all for him. This made him sadder, if anything.

“What,” said he, “have we both been scraping all this dross together
for? I would give it all to sit one hour by the fire, with her hand in
mine, and hear her say, ‘Scamp, you made me unhappy when you were young,
but I have lived to be proud of you.’”

He applied for active service, no matter what: obtained at once this
post in Brittany, and threw himself into it with that honest zeal and
activity, which are the best earthly medicine for all our griefs. He was
busy writing, when young Riviere first presented himself. He looked up
for a moment, and eyed him, to take his measure; then put into his
hand a report by young Nicole, a subordinate filling a post of the same
nature as Riviere’s; and bade him analyze that report on the spot: with
this he instantly resumed his own work.

Edouard Riviere was an adept at this sort of task, and soon handed him
a neat analysis. Raynal ran his eye over it, nodded cold approval, and
told him to take this for the present as a guide as to his own duties.
He then pointed to a map on which Riviere’s district was marked in
blue ink, and bade him find the centre of it. Edouard took a pair
of compasses off the table, and soon discovered that the village of
Beaurepaire was his centre. “Then quarter yourself at Beaurepaire; and
good-day,” said Raynal.

The chateau was in sight from Riviere’s quarters, and he soon learned
that it belonged to a royalist widow and her daughters, who all three
held themselves quite aloof from the rest of the world. “Ah,” said the
young citizen, “I see. If these rococo citizens play that game with me,
I shall have to take them down.” Thus a fresh peril menaced this family,
on whose hearts and fortunes such heavy blows had fallen.

One evening our young official, after a day spent in the service of
the country, deigned to take a little stroll to relieve the cares of
administration. He imprinted on his beardless face the expression of
a wearied statesman, and strolled through an admiring village. The men
pretended veneration from policy; the women, whose views of this great
man were shallower but more sincere, smiled approval of his airs; and
the young puppy affected to take no notice of either sex.

Outside the village, Publicola suddenly encountered two young ladies,
who resembled nothing he had hitherto met with in his district; they
were dressed in black, and with extreme simplicity; but their easy grace
and composure, and the refined sentiment of their gentle faces, told at
a glance they belonged to the high nobility. Publicola divined them at
once, and involuntarily raised his hat to so much beauty and dignity,
instead of poking it with a finger as usual. On this the ladies
instantly courtesied to him after the manner of their party, with a
sweep and a majesty, and a precision of politeness, that the pup would
have laughed at if he had heard of it; but seeing it done, and well
done, and by lovely women of rank, he was taken aback by it, and lifted
his hat again, and bowed again after he had gone by, and was generally
flustered. In short, instead of a member of the Consular Government
saluting private individuals of a decayed party that existed only
by sufferance, a handsome, vain, good-natured boy had met two
self-possessed young ladies of distinction and breeding, and had cut the
usual figure.

For the next hundred yards his cheeks burned and his vanity cooled. But
bumptiousness is elastic in France, as in England, and doubtless among
the Esquimaux. “Well, they are pretty girls,” says he to himself. “I
never saw two such pretty girls together; they will do for me to flirt
with while I am banished to this Arcadia.” Banished from school, I beg
to observe.

And “awful beauty” being no longer in sight, Mr. Edouard resolved he
would flirt with them to their hearts’ content. But there are ladies
with whom a certain preliminary is required before you can flirt with
them. You must be on speaking terms. How was this to be managed?

He used to watch at his window with a telescope, and whenever the
sisters came out of their own grounds, which unfortunately was not
above twice a week, he would throw himself in their way by the merest
accident, and pay them a dignified and courteous salute, which he had
carefully got up before a mirror in the privacy of his own chamber.

One day, as he took off his hat to the young ladies, there broke from
one of them a smile, so sudden, sweet, and vivid, that he seemed to feel
it smite him first on the eyes then in the heart. He could not sleep for
this smile.

Yet he had seen many smilers; but to be sure most of them smiled without
effect, because they smiled eternally; they seemed cast with their
mouths open, and their pretty teeth forever in sight; and this has a
saddening influence on a man of sense--when it has any. But here a fair,
pensive face had brightened at sight of him; a lovely countenance, on
which circumstances, not nature, had impressed gravity, had sprung back
to its natural gayety for a moment, and had thrilled and bewitched the
beholder.

The next Sunday he went to church--and there worshipped--whom? Cupid.
He smarted for his heathenism; for the young ladies went with higher
motives, and took no notice of him. They lowered their long silken
lashes over one breviary, and scarcely observed the handsome citizen.
Meantime he, contemplating their pious beauty with earthly eyes, was
drinking long draughts of intoxicating passion. And when after the
service they each took an arm of Dr. Aubertin, and he with the air of an
admiral convoying two ships choke-full of specie, conducted his precious
charge away home, our young citizen felt jealous, and all but hated the
worthy doctor.

This went on till he became listless and dejected on the days he did not
see them. Then he asked himself whether he was not a cowardly fool
to keep at such a distance. After all he was a man in authority. His
friendship was not to be despised, least of all by a family suspected of
disaffection to the state.

He put on his glossy beaver with enormous brim, high curved; his
blue coat with brass buttons; his white waistcoat, gray breeches, and
top-boots; and marched up to the chateau of Beaurepaire, and sent in his
card with his name and office inscribed.

Jacintha took it, bestowed a glance of undisguised admiration on
the young Adonis, and carried it to the baroness. That lady sent her
promptly down again with a black-edged note to this effect.


Highly flattered by Monsieur de Riviere’s visit, the baroness must
inform him that she receives none but old acquaintances, in the present
grief of the family, and of the KINGDOM.


Young Riviere was cruelly mortified by this rebuff. He went off
hurriedly, grinding his teeth with rage.

“Cursed aristocrats! We have done well to pull you down, and we will
have you lower still. How I despise myself for giving any one the chance
to affront me thus. The haughty old fool; if she had known her interest,
she would have been too glad to make a powerful friend. These royalists
are in a ticklish position; I can tell her that. She calls me De
Riviere; that implies nobody without a ‘De’ to their name would have the
presumption to visit her old tumble-down house. Well, it is a lesson; I
am a republican, and the Commonwealth trusts and honors me; yet I am
so ungrateful as to go out of the way to be civil to her enemies, to
royalists; as if those worn-out creatures had hearts, as if they could
comprehend the struggle that took place in my mind between duty, and
generosity to the fallen, before I could make the first overture to
their acquaintance; as if they could understand the politeness of
the heart, or anything nobler than curving and ducking and heartless
etiquette. This is the last notice I will ever take of that old woman,
unless it is to denounce her.”

He walked home to the town very fast, his heart boiling, and his lips
compressed, and his brow knitted.

To this mood succeeded a sullen and bitter one. He was generous, but
vain, and his love had humiliated him so bitterly, he resolved to tear
it out of his heart. He absented himself from church; he met the young
ladies no more. He struggled fiercely with his passion; he went about
dogged, silent, and sighing. Presently he devoted his leisure hours
to shooting partridges instead of ladies. And he was right; partridges
cannot shoot back; whereas beautiful women, like Cupid, are all archers
more or less, and often with one arrow from eye or lip do more execution
than they have suffered from several discharges of our small shot.

In these excursions, Edouard was generally accompanied by a thick-set
rustic called Dard, who, I believe, purposes to reveal his own character
to you, and so save me that trouble.

One fine afternoon, about four o’clock, this pair burst remorselessly
through a fence, and landed in the road opposite Bigot’s Auberge; a long
low house, with “ICI ON LOGE A PIED ET A CHEVAL,” written all across it
in gigantic letters. Riviere was for moving homeward, but Dard halted
and complained dismally of “the soldier’s gripes.” The statesman had
never heard of that complaint, so Dard explained that the VULGAR name
for it was hunger. “And only smell,” said he, “the soup is just fit to
come off the fire.”

Riviere smiled sadly, but consented to deign to eat a morsel in the
porch. Thereat Dard dashed wildly into the kitchen.

They dined at one little round table, each after his fashion. When Dard
could eat no more, he proceeded to drink; and to talk in proportion.
Riviere, lost in his own thoughts, attended to him as men of business do
to a babbling brook; until suddenly from the mass of twaddle broke forth
a magic word--Beaurepaire; then the languid lover pricked up his ears
and found Mr. Dard was abusing that noble family right and left. Young
Riviere inquired what ground of offence they had given HIM. “I’ll tell
you,” said Dard; “they impose on Jacintha; and so she imposes on me.”
 Then observing he had at last gained his employer’s ear, he became
prodigiously loquacious, as such people generally are when once they get
upon their own griefs.

“These Beaurepaire aristocrats,” said he, with his hard peasant
good-sense, “are neither the one thing nor the other; they cannot keep
up nobility, they have not the means; they will not come down off their
perch, they have not the sense. No, for as small as they are, they must
look and talk as big as ever. They can only afford one servant, and
I don’t believe they pay her; but they must be attended on just as
obsequious as when they had a dozen. And this is fatal to all us little
people that have the misfortune to be connected with them.”

“Why, how are you connected with them?”

“By the tie of affection.”

“I thought you hated them.”

“Of course I do; but I have the ill-luck to love Jacintha, and she loves
these aristocrats, and makes me do little odd jobs for them.” And at
this Dard’s eyes suddenly glared with horror.

“Well, what of that?” asked Riviere.

“What of it, citizen, what? you do not know the fatal meaning of those
accursed words?”

“Why, I never heard of a man’s back being broken by little odd jobs.”

“Perhaps not his back, citizen, but his heart? if little odd jobs will
not break that, why nothing will. Torn from place to place, and from
trouble to trouble; as soon as one tiresome thing begins to go a bit
smooth, off to a fresh plague, in-doors work when it is dry, out-a-doors
when it snows; and then all bustle; no taking one’s work quietly, the
only way it agrees with a fellow. ‘Milk the cow, Dard, but look sharp;
the baroness’s chair wants mending. Take these slops to the pig, but you
must not wait to see him enjoy them: you are wanted to chop billets.’
Beat the mats, take down the curtains, walk to church (best part of
a league), and heat the pew cushions; come back and cut the cabbages,
paint the door, and wheel the old lady about the terrace, rub
quicksilver on the little dog’s back,--mind he don’t bite you to make
hisself sick,--repair the ottoman, roll the gravel, scour the kettles,
carry half a ton of water up two purostairs, trim the turf, prune the
vine, drag the fish-pond; and when you ARE there, go in and gather water
lilies for Mademoiselle Josephine while you are drowning the puppies;
that is little odd jobs: may Satan twist her neck who invented them!”

“Very sad all this,” said young Riviere.

Dard took the little sneer for sympathy, and proceeded to “the cruellest
wrong of all.”

“When I go into their kitchen to court Jacintha a bit, instead of
finding a good supper there, which a man has a right to, courting a
cook, if I don’t take one in my pocket, there is no supper, not to
say supper, for either her or me. I don’t call a salad and a bit of
cheese-rind--SUPPER. Beggars in silk and satin! Every sou they have goes
on to their backs, instead of into their bellies.”

“I have heard their income is much reduced,” said Edouard gently.

“Income! I would not change with them if they’d throw me in half a
pancake a day. I tell you they are the poorest family for leagues round;
not that they need be quite so starved, if they could swallow a little
of their pride. But no, they must have china and plate and fine linen
at dinner; so their fine plates are always bare, and their silver
trays empty. Ask the butcher, if you don’t believe ME. Just you ask him
whether he does not go three times to the smallest shopkeeper, for once
he goes to Beaurepaire. Their tenants send them a little meal and eggs,
and now and then a hen; and their great garden is chock full of fruit
and vegetables, and Jacintha makes me dig in it gratis; and so they
muddle on. But, bless your heart, coffee! they can’t afford it; so they
roast a lot of horse-beans that cost nothing, and grind them, and serve
up the liquor in a silver coffee-pot, on a silver salver. Haw, haw,
haw!”

“Is it possible? reduced to this?” said Edouard gravely.

“Don’t you be so weak as to pity them,” cried the remorseless plebeian.
“Why don’t they melt their silver into soup, and cut down their plate
into rashers of bacon? why not sell the superfluous, and buy the
needful, which it is grub? And, above all, why don’t they let their old
tumble-down palace to some rich grocer, and that accursed garden along
with it, where I sweat gratis, and live small and comfortable, and pay
honest men for their little odd jobs, and”--

Here Riviere interrupted him, and asked if it was really true about the
beans.

“True?” said Dard, “why, I have seen Rose doing it for the old woman’s
breakfast: it was Rose invented the move. A girl of nineteen beginning
already to deceive the world! But they are all tarred with the same
stick. Down with the aristocrats!”

“Dard,” said Riviere, “you are a brute.”

“Me, citizen?” inquired Dard with every appearance of genuine surprise.

Edouard Riviere rose from his seat in great excitement. Dard’s abuse of
the family he was lately so bitter against had turned him right round.
He pitied the very baroness herself, and forgave her declining his
visit.

“Be silent,” said he, “for shame! There is such a thing as noble
poverty; and you have described it. I might have disdained these people
in their prosperity, but I revere them in their affliction. And I’ll
tell you what, don’t you ever dare to speak slightly of them again in my
presence, or”--

He did not conclude his threat, for just then he observed that a
strapping girl, with a basket at her feet, was standing against the
corner of the Auberge, in a mighty careless attitude, but doing nothing,
so most likely listening with all her ears and soul. Dard, however, did
not see her, his back being turned to her as he sat; so he replied at
his ease,--

“I consent,” said he very coolly: “that is your affair; but permit me,”
 and here he clenched his teeth at remembrance of his wrongs, “to say
that I will no more be a scullery man without wages to these high-minded
starvelings, these illustrious beggars.” Then he heated himself red-hot.
“I will not even be their galley slave. Next, I have done my last little
odd job in this world,” yelled the now infuriated factotum, bouncing
up to his feet in brief fury. “Of two things one: either Jacintha quits
those aristos, or I leave Jacin--eh?--ah!--oh!--ahem! How--‘ow d’ye do,
Jacintha?” And his roar ended in a whine, as when a dog runs barking
out, and receives in full career a cut from his master’s whip, his
generous rage turns to whimper with ludicrous abruptness. “I was just
talking of you, Jacintha,” quavered Dard in conclusion.

“I heard you, Dard,” replied Jacintha slowly, softly, grimly.

Dard withered.

It was a lusty young woman, with a comely peasant face somewhat
freckled, and a pair of large black eyes surmounted by coal-black brows.
She stood in a bold attitude, her massive but well-formed arms folded so
that the pressure of each against the other made them seem gigantic, and
her cheek red with anger, and her eyes glistening like basilisks upon
citizen Dard. She looked so grand, with her lowering black brows, that
even Riviere felt a little uneasy. As for Jacintha, she was evidently
brooding with more ire than she chose to utter before a stranger. She
just slowly unclasped her arms, and, keeping her eye fixed on Dard,
pointed with a domineering gesture towards Beaurepaire. Then the doughty
Dard seemed no longer master of his limbs: he rose slowly, with his eyes
fastened to hers, and was moving off like an ill-oiled automaton in the
direction indicated; but at that a suppressed snigger began to shake
Riviere’s whole body till it bobbed up and down on the seat. Dard turned
to him for sympathy.

“There, citizen,” he cried, “do you see that imperious gesture? That
means you promised to dig in the aristocrat’s garden this afternoon,
so march! Here, then, is one that has gained nothing by kings being put
down, for I am ruled with a mopstick of iron. Thank your stars, citizen,
that you are not in may place.”

“Dard,” retorted Jacintha, “if you don’t like your place, I’d quit it.
There are two or three young men down in the village will be glad to
take it.”

“I won’t give them the chance, the vile egotists!” cried Dard. And he
returned to the chateau and little odd jobs.

Jacintha hung behind, lowered her eyes, put on a very deferential
manner, and thanked Edouard for the kind sentiments he had uttered; but
at the same time she took the liberty to warn him against believing the
extravagant stories Dard had been telling about her mistress’s poverty.
She said the simple fact was that the baron had contracted debts, and
the baroness, being the soul of honor, was living in great economy to
pay them off. Then, as to Dard getting no supper up at Beaurepaire, a
complaint that appeared to sting her particularly, she assured him she
was alone to blame: the baroness would be very angry if she knew it.
“But,” said she, “Dard is an egotist. Perhaps you may have noticed that
trait in him.”

“Glimpses of it,” replied Riviere, laughing.

“Monsieur, he is so egotistic that he has not a friend in the world
but me. I forgive him, because I know the reason; he has never had a
headache or a heartache in his life.”

Edouard, aged twenty, and a male, did not comprehend this piece of
feminine logic one bit: and, while he puzzled over it in silence,
Jacintha went on to say that if she were to fill her egotist’s paunch,
she should never know whether he came to Beaurepaire for her, or
himself. “Now, Dard,” she added, “is no beauty, monsieur; why, he is
three inches shorter than I am.”

“You are joking! he looks a foot,” said Edouard.

“He is no scholar neither, and I have had to wipe up many a sneer and
many a sarcasm on his account; but up to now I have always been able
to reply that this five feet one of egotism loves me sincerely; and the
moment I doubt this, I give him the sack,--poor little fellow!”

“In a word,” said Riviere, a little impatiently, “the family at
Beaurepaire are not in such straits as he pretends?”

“Monsieur, do I look like one starved?”

“By Jove, no! by Ceres, I mean.”

“Are my young mistresses wan, and thin?”

“Treason! blasphemy! ah, no! By Venus and Hebe, no!”

Jacintha smiled at this enthusiastic denial, and also because her sex is
apt to smile when words are used they do not understand.

“Dard is a fool,” suggested Riviere, by way of general solution. He
added, “And yet, do you know I wish every word he said had been true.”
 (Jacintha’s eyes expressed some astonishment.) “Because then you and I
would have concerted means to do them kindnesses, secretly; for I see
you are no ordinary servant; you love your young mistresses. Do you
not?”

These simple words seemed to touch a grander chord in Jacintha’s nature.

“Love them?” said she, clasping her hands; “ah, sir, do not be offended;
but, believe me, it is no small thing to serve an old, old family. My
grandfather lived and died with them; my father was their gamekeeper,
and fed to his last from off the poor baron’s plate (and now they have
killed him, poor man); my mother died in the house and was buried in
the sacred ground near the family chapel. They put an inscription on her
tomb praising her fidelity and probity. Do you think these things do not
sink into the heart of the poor?--praise on her tomb, and not a word on
their own, but just the name, and when each was born and died, you know.
Ah! the pride of the mean is dirt; but the pride of the noble is gold.”

“For, look you, among parvenues I should be a servant, and nothing more;
in this proud family I am a humble friend; of course they are not always
gossiping with me like vulgar masters and mistresses; if they did, I
should neither respect nor love them; but they all smile on me whenever
I come into the room, even the baroness herself. I belong to them, and
they belong to me, by ties without number, by the many kind words in
many troubles, by the one roof that sheltered us a hundred years, and
the grave where our bones lie together till the day of judgment.” *

     * The French peasant often thinks half a sentence, and
     utters the other half aloud, and so breaks air in the middle
     of a thought. Probably Jacintha’s whole thought, if we had
     the means of knowing it, would have run like this--“Besides,
     I have another reason: I could not be so comfortable myself
     elsewhere--for, look you”--

Jacintha clasped her hands, and her black eyes shone out warm through
the dew. Riviere’s glistened too.

“That is well said,” he cried; “it is nobly said: yet, after all, these
are ties that owe their force to the souls they bind. How often have
such bonds round human hearts proved ropes of sand! They grapple YOU
like hooks of steel; because you are steel yourself to the backbone. I
admire you, Jacintha. Such women as you have a great mission in France
just now.”

Jacintha shook her head incredulously. “What can we poor women do?”

“Bring forth heroes,” cried Publicola with fervor. “Be the mothers of
great men, the Catos and the Gracchi of the future!”

Jacintha smiled. She did not know the Gracchi nor their politics; but
the name rang well. “Gracchi!” Aristocrats, no doubt. “That would be too
much honor,” replied she modestly. “At present, I must say adieu!” and
she moved off an inch at a time, in an uncertain hesitating manner, not
very difficult to read; but Riviere, you must know, had more than once
during this interview begged her to sit down, and in vain; she had
always thanked him, but said she had not a moment to stay. So he made no
effort to detain her now. The consequence was--she came slowly back
of her own accord, and sat down in a corner of the porch, where nobody
could see her, and then she sighed deeply.

“What is the matter now?” said Edouard, opening his eyes.

She looked at him point-blank for one moment; and her scale turned.

“Monsieur,” said she timidly, “you have a good face, and a good heart.
All I told you was--give me your honor not to betray us.”

“I swear it,” said Edouard, a little pompously.

“Then--Dard was not so far from the truth; it was but a guess of his,
for I never trusted my own sweetheart as I now trust a stranger. But to
see what I see every day, and have no one I dare breathe a word to, oh,
it is very hard! But on what a thread things turn! If any one had told
me an hour ago it was you I should open my heart to! It’s not economy:
it’s not stinginess; they are not paying off their debts. They never
can. The baroness and the Demoiselles de Beaurepaire--are paupers.”

“Paupers, Jacintha?”

“Ay, paupers! their debts are greater than their means. They live here
by sufferance. They have only their old clothes to wear. They have
hardly enough to eat. Just now our cow is in full milk, you know; so
that is a great help: but, when she goes dry, Heaven knows what we shall
do; for I don’t. But that is not the worst; better a light meal than a
broken heart. Your precious government offers the chateau for sale.
They might as well send for the guillotine at once, and cut off all our
heads. You don’t know my mistress as I do. Ah, butchers, you will drag
nothing out of that but her corpse. And is it come to this? the great
old family to be turned adrift like beggars. My poor mistress! my pretty
demoiselles that I played with and nursed ever since I was a child! (I
was just six when Josephine was born) and that I shall love with my last
breath”--

She could say no more, but choked by the strong feeling so long pent up
in her own bosom, fell to sobbing hysterically, and trembling like one
in an ague.

The statesman, who had passed all his short life at school and college,
was frightened, and took hold of her and pulled her, and cried,
“Oh! don’t, Jacintha; you will kill yourself, you will die; this is
frightful: help here! help!” Jacintha put her hand to his mouth, and,
without leaving off her hysterics, gasped out, “Ah! don’t expose me.”
 So then he didn’t know what to do; but he seized a tumbler and filled
it with wine, and forced it between her lips. All she did was to bite a
piece out of the glass as clean as if a diamond had cut it. This did
her a world of good: destruction of sacred household property gave her
another turn. “There, I’ve broke your glass now,” she cried, with a
marvellous change of tone; and she came-to and cried quietly like a
reasonable person, with her apron to her eyes.

When Edouard saw she was better, he took her hand and said proudly,
“Secret for secret. I choose this moment to confide to you that I love
Mademoiselle Rose de Beaurepaire. Love her? I did love her; but now you
tell me she is poor and in distress, I adore her.” The effect of this
declaration on Jacintha was magical, comical. Her apron came down from
one eye, and that eye dried itself and sparkled with curiosity: the
whole countenance speedily followed suit and beamed with sacred joy.
What! an interesting love affair confided to her all in a moment! She
lowered her voice to a whisper directly. “Why, how did you manage? She
never goes into company.”

“No; but she goes to church. Besides, I have met her eleven times out
walking with her sister, and twice out of the eleven she smiled on me.
O Jacintha! a smile such as angels smile; a smile to warm the heart and
purify the soul and last forever in the mind.”

“Well, they say ‘man is fire and woman tow:’ but this beats all. Ha!
ha!”

“Oh! do not jest. I did not laugh at you. Jacintha, it is no laughing
matter; I revere her as mortals revere the saints; I love her so that
were I ever to lose all hope of her I would not live a day. And now that
you have told me she is poor and in sorrow, and I think of her walking
so calm and gentle--always in black, Jacintha,--and her low courtesy to
me whenever we met, and her sweet smile to me though her heart must be
sad, oh! my heart yearns for her. What can I do for her? How shall I
surround her with myself unseen--make her feel that a man’s love waits
upon her feet every step she takes--that a man’s love floats in the air
round that lovely head?” Then descending to earth for a moment, “but I
say, you promise not to betray me; come, secret for secret.”

“I will not tell a soul; on the honor of a woman,” said Jacintha.

The form of protestation was quite new to Edouard, and not exactly the
one his study of the ancient writers would have led him to select. But
the tone was convincing: he trusted her. They parted sworn allies; and,
at the very moment of parting, Jacintha, who had cast many a furtive
glance at the dead game, told Edouard demurely, Mademoiselle Rose was
very fond of roast partridge. On this he made her take the whole bag;
and went home on wings. Jacintha’s revelation roused all that was noble
and forgiving in him. His understanding and his heart expanded from that
hour, and his fancy spread its pinions to the sun of love. Ah! generous
Youth, let who will betray thee; let who will sneer at thee; let me,
though young no longer, smile on thee and joy in thee! She he loved was
sad, was poor, was menaced by many ills; then she needed a champion. He
would be her unseen friend, her guardian angel. A hundred wild schemes
whirled in his beating heart and brain. He could not go in-doors,
indeed, no room could contain him: he made for a green lane he knew at
the back of the village, and there he walked up and down for hours.
The sun set, and the night came, and the stars glittered; but still he
walked alone, inspired, exalted, full of generous and loving schemes: of
sweet and tender fancies: a heart on fire; and youth the fuel, and the
flame vestal.




CHAPTER III.


This very day was the anniversary of the baron’s death.

The baroness kept her room all the morning, and took no nourishment but
one cup of spurious coffee Rose brought her. Towards evening she came
down-stairs. In the hall she found two chaplets of flowers; they were
always placed there for her on this sad day. She took them in her hand,
and went into the little oratory that was in the park; there she found
two wax candles burning, and two fresh chaplets hung up. Her daughters
had been there before her.

She knelt and prayed many hours for her husband’s soul; then she rose
and hung up one chaplet and came slowly away with the other in her hand.
At the gate of the park, Josephine met her with tender anxiety in her
sapphire eyes, and wreathed her arms round her, and whispered, “But you
have your children still.”

The baroness kissed her and they came towards the house together, the
baroness leaning gently on her daughter’s elbow.

Between the park and the angle of the chateau was a small plot of turf
called at Beaurepaire the Pleasance, a name that had descended
along with other traditions; and in the centre of this Pleasance,
or Pleasaunce, stood a wonderful oak-tree. Its circumference was
thirty-four feet. The baroness came to this ancient tree, and hung her
chaplet on a mutilated limb called the “knights’ bough.”

The sun was setting tranquil and red; a broad ruby streak lingered on
the deep green leaves of the prodigious oak. The baroness looked at it
awhile in silence.

Then she spoke slowly to it and said, “You were here before us: you will
be here when we are gone.”

A spasm crossed Josephine’s face, but she said nothing at the time. And
so they went in together.

Now as this tree was a feat of nature, and, above all, played a curious
part in our story, I will ask you to stay a few minutes and look at it,
while I say what was known about it; not the thousandth part of what it
could have told, if trees could speak as well as breathe.

The baroness did not exaggerate; the tree was far older than even this
ancient family. They possessed among other archives a manuscript written
by a monk, a son of the house, about four hundred years before our
story, and containing many of the oral traditions about this tree that
had come down to him from remote antiquity. According to this authority,
the first Baron of Beaurepaire had pitched his tent under a fair
oak-tree that stood prope rivum, near a brook. His grandson built a
square tower hard by, and dug a moat that enclosed both tree and tower,
and received the waters of the brook aforesaid.

At this time the tree seems only to have been remarked for its height.
But, a century and a half before the monk wrote, it had become famous in
all the district for its girth, and in the monk’s own day had ceased
to grow; but not begun to decay. The mutilated arm I have mentioned
was once a long sturdy bough, worn smooth as velvet in one part from
a curious cause: it ran about as high above the ground as a full-sized
horse, and the knights and squires used to be forever vaulting upon
it, the former in armor; the monk, when a boy, had seen them do it a
thousand times. This bough broke in two, A.D. 1617: but the mutilated
limb was still called the knights’ bough, nobody knew why. So do names
survive their ideas.

What had not this tree seen since first it came green and tender as
a cabbage above the soil, and stood at the mercy of the first hare or
rabbit that should choose to cut short its frail existence!

Since then eagles had perched on its crown, and wild boars fed without
fear of man upon its acorns. Troubadours had sung beneath it to lords
and ladies seated round, or walking on the grass and commenting the
minstrel’s tales of love by exchange of amorous glances. Mediaeval
sculptors had taken its leaves, and wisely trusting to nature, had
adorned churches with those leaves cut in stone.

It had seen a Norman duke conquer England, and English kings invade
France and be crowned at Paris. It had seen a girl put knights to the
rout, and seen the warrior virgin burned by envious priests with common
consent both of the curs she had defended and the curs she had defeated.

Why, in its old age it had seen the rise of printing, and the first dawn
of national civilization in Europe. It flourished and decayed in France;
but it sprung in Gaul. And more remarkable still, though by all accounts
it may see the world to an end, it was a tree in ancient history: its
old age awaits the millennium; its first youth belonged to that great
tract of time which includes the birth of Christ, the building of Rome,
and the siege of Troy.

The tree had, ere this, mingled in the fortunes of the family. It had
saved their lives and taken their lives. One lord of Beaurepaire, hotly
pursued by his feudal enemies, made for the tree, and hid himself partly
by a great bough, partly by the thick screen of leaves. The foe darted
in, made sure he had taken to the house, ransacked it, and got into the
cellar, where by good-luck was a store of Malvoisie: and so the oak and
the vine saved the quaking baron. Another lord of Beaurepaire, besieged
in his castle, was shot dead on the ramparts by a cross-bowman who had
secreted himself unobserved in this tree a little before the dawn.

A young heir of Beaurepaire, climbing for a raven’s nest to the top
of this tree, lost his footing and fell, and died at its foot: and his
mother in her anguish bade them cut down the tree that had killed her
boy. But the baron her husband refused, and spake in this wise: “ytte ys
eneugh that I lose mine sonne, I will nat alsoe lose mine Tre.” In
the male you see the sober sentiment of the proprietor outweighed the
temporary irritation of the parent. Then the mother bought fifteen ells
of black velvet, and stretched a pall from the knights’ bough across the
west side to another branch, and cursed the hand that should remove it,
and she herself “wolde never passe the Tre neither going nor coming, but
went still about.” And when she died and should have been carried past
the tree to the park, her dochter did cry from a window to the bearers,
“Goe about! goe about!” and they went about, and all the company. And in
time the velvet pall rotted, and was torn and driven away by the winds:
and when the hand of Nature, and no human hand, had thus flouted and
dispersed the trappings of the mother’s grief, two pieces were picked up
and preserved among the family relics: but the black velvet had turned a
rusty red.

So the baroness did nothing new in this family when she hung her chaplet
on the knights’ bough; and, in fact, on the west side, about
eighteen feet from the ground, there still mouldered one corner of
an Atchievement an heir of Beaurepaire had nailed there two centuries
before, when his predecessor died: “For,” said he, “the chateau is of
yesterday, but the tree has seen us all come and go.” The inside of the
oak was hollow as a drum; and on its east side yawned a fissure as
high as a man and as broad as a street-door. Dard used to wheel his
wheelbarrow into the tree at a trot, and there leave it.

Yet in spite of excavation and mutilation not life only but vigor
dwelt in this wooden shell. The extreme ends of the longer boughs were
firewood, touchwood, and the crown was gone this many a year: but narrow
the circle a very little to where the indomitable trunk could still
shoot sap from its cruse deep in earth, and there on every side burst
the green foliage in its season countless as the sand. The leaves carved
centuries ago from these very models, though cut in stone, were most of
them mouldered, blunted, notched, deformed: but the delicate types came
back with every summer, perfect and lovely as when the tree was but
their elder brother: and greener than ever: for, from what cause nature
only knows, the leaves were many shades richer than any other tree could
show for a hundred miles round; a deep green, fiery, yet soft; and then
their multitude--the staircases of foliage as you looked up the tree,
and could scarce catch a glimpse of the sky. An inverted abyss of color,
a mound, a dome, of flake emeralds that quivered in the golden air.

And now the sun sets; the green leaves are black; the moon rises: her
cold light shoots across one half that giant stem.

How solemn and calm stands the great round tower of living wood, half
ebony, half silver, with its mighty cloud above of flake jet leaves
tipped with frosty fire!

Now is the still hour to repeat in a whisper the words of the dame of
Beaurepaire, “You were here before us: you will be here when we are
gone.”

We leave the hoary king of trees standing in the moonlight, calmly
defying time, and follow the creatures of a day; for, what they were, we
are.


A spacious saloon panelled; dead but showy white picked out sparingly
with gold. Festoons of fruits and flowers finely carved in wood on some
of the panels. These also not smothered in gilding, but as it were gold
speckled here and there, like tongues of flame winding among insoluble
snow. Ranged against the walls were sofas and chairs covered with rich
stuffs well worn. And in one little distant corner of the long room
a gray-haired gentleman and two young ladies sat round a small plain
table, on which burned a solitary candle; and a little way apart in
this candle’s twilight an old lady sat in an easy-chair, thinking of
the past, scarce daring to inquire the future. Josephine and Rose were
working: not fancy-work but needle-work; Dr. Aubertin writing. Every
now and then he put the one candle nearer the girls. They raised no
objection: only a few minutes after a white hand would glide from one
or other of them like a serpent, and smoothly convey the light nearer to
the doctor’s manuscript.

“Is it not supper-time?” he inquired. “I have an inward monitor; and I
think our dinner was more ethereal than usual.”

“Hush!” said Josephine, and looked uneasily towards her mother. “Wax is
so dear.”

“Wax?--ah!--pardon me:” and the doctor returned hastily to his work.
But Rose looked up and said, “I wonder Jacintha does not come; it is
certainly past the hour;” and she pried into the room as if she
expected to see Jacintha on the road. But she saw in fact very little of
anything, for the spacious room was impenetrable to her eye; midway from
the candle to the distant door its twilight deepened, and all became
shapeless and sombre. The prospect ended sharp and black, as in those
out-o’-door closets imagined and painted by a certain great painter,
whose Nature comes to a full stop as soon as he has no further
commercial need of her, instead of melting by fine expanse and exquisite
gradation into genuine distance, as nature does in Claude and in nature.
To reverse the picture, if you stood at the door you looked across forty
feet of black, and the little corner seemed on fire, and the fair heads
about the candle shone like the St. Cecilias and Madonnas in an antique
stained-glass window.

At last the door opened, and another candle fired Jacintha’s comely
peasant face in the doorway. She put down her candle outside the door,
and started as crow flies for the other light. After glowing a moment in
the doorway she dived into the shadow and emerged into light again
close to the table with napkins on her arm. She removed the work-box
reverentially, the doctor’s manuscript unceremoniously, and proceeded to
lay a cloth: in which operation she looked at Rose a point-blank glance
of admiration: then she placed the napkins; and in this process she
again cast a strange look of interest upon Rose. The young lady noticed
it this time, and looked inquiringly at her in return, half expecting
some communication; but Jacintha lowered her eyes and bustled about the
table. Then Rose spoke to her with a sort of instinct of curiosity, on
the chance of drawing her out.

“Supper is late to-night, is it not, Jacintha?”

“Yes, mademoiselle; I have had more cooking than usual,” and with this
she delivered another point-blank look as before, and dived into the
palpable obscure, and came to light in the doorway.

Her return was anxiously expected; for, if the truth must be told,
they were very hungry. So rigorous was the economy in this decayed but
honorable house that the wax candles burned to-day in the oratory had
scrimped their dinner, unsubstantial as it was wont to be. Think of
that, you in fustian jackets who grumble after meat. The door opened,
Jacintha reappeared in the light of her candle a moment with a tray
in both hands, and, approaching, was lost to view; but a strange and
fragrant smell heralded her. All their eyes turned with curiosity
towards the unwonted odor, and Jacintha dawned with three roast
partridges on a dish.

They were wonder-struck, and looked from the birds to her in mute
surprise, that was not diminished by a certain cynical indifference
she put on. She avoided their eyes, and forcibly excluded from her face
everything that could imply she did not serve up partridges to this
family every night of her life.

“The supper is served, madame,” said she, with a respectful courtesy
and a mechanical tone, and, plunging into the night, swam out at her own
candle, shut the door, and, unlocking her face that moment, burst out
radiant, and so to the kitchen, and, with a tear in her eye, set-to and
polished all the copper stewpans with a vigor and expedition unknown to
the new-fangled domestic.

“Partridges, mamma! What next?”

“Pheasants, I hope,” cried the doctor, gayly. “And after them hares; to
conclude with royal venison. Permit me, ladies.” And he set himself to
carve with zeal.

Now nature is nature, and two pair of violet eyes brightened and dwelt
on the fragrant and delicate food with demure desire; for all that,
when Aubertin offered Josephine a wing, she declined it. “No partridge?”
 cried the savant, in utter amazement.

“Not to-day, dear friend; it is not a feast day to-day.”

“Ah! no; what was I thinking of?”

“But you are not to be deprived,” put in Josephine, anxiously. “We will
not deny ourselves the pleasure of seeing you eat some.”

“What!” remonstrated Aubertin, “am I not one of you?”

The baroness had attended to every word of this. She rose from her
chair, and said quietly, “Both you and he and Rose will be so good as to
let me see you eat.”

“But, mamma,” remonstrated Josephine and Rose in one breath.

“Je le veux,” was the cold reply.

These were words the baroness uttered so seldom that they were little
likely to be disputed.

The doctor carved and helped the young ladies and himself.

When they had all eaten a little, a discussion was observed to be going
on between Rose and her sister. At last Aubertin caught these words, “It
will be in vain; even you have not influence enough for that, Rose.”

“We shall see,” was the reply, and Rose put the wing of a partridge on a
plate and rose calmly from her chair. She took the plate and put it on
a little work-table by her mother’s side. The others pretended to be all
mouths, but they were all ears. The baroness looked in Rose’s face
with an air of wonder that was not very encouraging. Then, as Rose said
nothing, she raised her aristocratic hand with a courteous but decided
gesture of refusal.

Undaunted Rose laid her palm softly on the baroness’s shoulder, and said
to her as firmly as the baroness herself had just spoken,--

“Il le veut.”

The baroness was staggered. Then she looked with moist eyes at the fair
young face, then she reflected. At last she said, with an exquisite
mixture of politeness and affection, “It is his daughter who has told me
‘Il le veut.’ I obey.”

Rose returning like a victorious knight from the lists, saucily
exultant, and with only one wet eyelash, was solemnly kissed and petted
by Josephine and the doctor.

Thus they loved one another in this great, old, falling house. Their
familiarity had no coarse side; a form, not of custom but affection, it
went hand-in-hand with courtesy by day and night.

The love of the daughters for their mother had all the tenderness,
subtlety, and unselfishness of womanly natures, together with a certain
characteristic of the female character. And whither that one defect
led them, and by what gradations, it may be worth the reader’s while to
observe.

The baroness retired to rest early; and she was no sooner gone than
Josephine leaned over to Rose, and told her what their mother had
said to the oak-tree. Rose heard this with anxiety; hitherto they had
carefully concealed from their mother that the government claimed the
right of selling the chateau to pay the creditors, etc.; and now both
sisters feared the old lady had discovered it somehow, or why that
strange thing she had said to the oak-tree? But Dr. Aubertin caught
their remarks, and laid down his immortal MS. on French insects, to
express his hope that they were putting a forced interpretation on the
baroness’s words.

“I think,” said he, “she merely meant how short-lived are we all
compared with this ancient oak. I should be very sorry to adopt the
other interpretation; for if she knows she can at any moment be expelled
from Beaurepaire, it will be almost as bad for her as the calamity
itself; THAT, I think, would kill her.”

“Why so?” said Rose, eagerly. “What is this house or that? Mamma will
still have her daughters’ love, go where she will.”

Aubertin replied, “It is idle to deceive ourselves; at her age men and
women hang to life by their habits; take her away from her chateau, from
the little oratory where she prays every day for the departed, from her
place in the sun on the south terrace, and from all the memories that
surround her here; she would soon pine, and die.”

Here the savant seeing a hobby-horse near, caught him and jumped on. He
launched into a treatise upon the vitality of human beings, and proved
that it is the mind which keeps the body of a man alive for so great a
length of time as fourscore years; for that he had in the earlier part
of his studies carefully dissected a multitude of animals,--frogs,
rabbits, dogs, men, horses, sheep, squirrels, foxes, cats, etc.,--and
discovered no peculiarity in man’s organs to account for his singular
longevity, except in the brain or organ of mind. Thence he went to
the longevity of men with contented minds, and the rapid decay of the
careworn. Finally he succeeded in convincing them the baroness was so
constituted, physically and mentally, that she would never move from
Beaurepaire except into her grave. However, having thus terrified them,
he proceeded to console them. “You have a friend,” said he, “a powerful
friend; and here in my pocket--somewhere--is a letter that proves it.”

The letter was from Mr. Perrin the notary. It appeared by it that Dr.
Aubertin had reminded the said Perrin of his obligations to the late
baron, and entreated him to use all his influence to keep the estate in
this ancient family.

Perrin had replied at first in a few civil lines; but his present letter
was a long and friendly one. It made both the daughters of Beaurepaire
shudder at the peril they had so narrowly escaped. For by it they now
learned for the first time that one Jaques Bonard, a small farmer,
to whom they owed but five thousand francs, had gone to the mayor and
insisted, as he had a perfect right, on the estate being put up to
public auction. This had come to Perrin’s ears just in time, and he had
instantly bought Bonard’s debt, and stopped the auction; not, however,
before the very bills were printed; for which he, Perrin, had paid, and
now forwarded the receipt. He concluded by saying that the government
agent was personally inert, and would never move a step in the matter
unless driven by a creditor.

“But we have so many,” said Rose in dismay. “We are not safe a day.”

Aubertin assured her the danger was only in appearance. “Your large
creditors are men of property, and such men let their funds lie unless
compelled to move them. The small mortgagee, the petty miser, who has,
perhaps, no investment to watch but one small loan, about which he is
as anxious and as noisy as a hen with one chicken, he is the clamorous
creditor, the harsh little egoist, who for fear of risking a crown piece
would bring the Garden of Eden to the hammer. Now we are rid of
that little wretch, Bonard, and have Perrin on our side; so there is
literally nothing to fear.”

The sisters thanked him warmly, and Rose shared his hopes; and said so;
but Josephine was silent and thoughtful. Nothing more worth recording
passed that night. But the next day was the first of May, Josephine’s
birthday.

Now they always celebrated this day as well as they could; and used to
plant a tree, for one thing. Dard, well spurred by Jacintha, had got
a little acacia; and they were all out in the Pleasaunce to plant it.
Unhappily, they were a preposterous time making up their feminine minds
where to have it set; so Dard turned rusty and said the park was the
best place for it. There it could do no harm, stick it where you would.

“And who told you to put in your word?” inquired Jacintha. “You’re here
to dig the hole where mademoiselle chooses; not to argufy.”

Josephine whispered Rose, “I admire the energy of her character. Could
she be induced to order once for all where the poor thing is to be
planted?”

“Then where WILL you have it, mademoiselle?” asked Dard, sulkily.

“Here, I think, Dard,” said Josephine sweetly.

Dard grinned malignantly, and drove in his spade. “It will never be much
bigger than a stinging nettle,” thought he, “for the roots of the oak
have sucked every atom of heart out of this.” His black soul exulted
secretly.

Jacintha stood by Dard, inspecting his work; the sisters intertwined,
a few feet from him. The baroness turned aside, and went to look for a
moment at the chaplet she had placed yesterday on the oak-tree bough.
Presently she uttered a slight ejaculation; and her daughters looked up
directly.

“Come here, children,” said she. They glided to her in a moment; and
found her eyes fixed upon an object that lay on the knights’ bough.

It was a sparkling purse.

I dare say you have noticed that the bark on the boughs of these very
ancient trees is as deeply furrowed as the very stem of an oak tree that
boasts but a few centuries; and in one of these deep furrows lay a green
silk purse with gold coins glittering through the glossy meshes.

Josephine and Rose eyed it a moment like startled deer; then Rose
pounced on it. “Oh, how heavy!” she cried. This brought up Dard and
Jacintha, in time to see Rose pour ten shining gold pieces out of the
purse into her pink-white palm, while her face flushed and her eyes
glittered with excitement. Jacintha gave a scream of joy; “Our luck is
turned,” she cried, superstitiously. Meanwhile, Josephine had found a
slip of paper close to the purse. She opened it with nimble fingers;
it contained one line in a hand like that of a copying clerk: FROM A
FRIEND: IN PART PAYMENT OF A GREAT DEBT.

Keen, piquant curiosity now took the place of surprise. Who could it
be? The baroness’s suspicion fell at once on Dr. Aubertin. But Rose
maintained he had not ten gold pieces in the world. The baroness
appealed to Josephine. She only blushed in an extraordinary way, and
said nothing. They puzzled, and puzzled, and were as much in the dark as
ever, when lo! one of the suspected parties delivered himself into
the hands of justice with ludicrous simplicity. It happened to be Dr.
Aubertin’s hour of out-a-door study; and he came mooning along, buried
in a book, and walked slowly into the group--started, made a slight
apology, and was mooning off, lost in his book again. Then the
baroness, who had eyed him with grim suspicion all the time, said with
well-affected nonchalance, “Doctor, you dropped your purse; we have just
picked it up.” And she handed it to him. “Thank you, madame,” said he,
and took it quietly without looking at it, put it in his pocket,
and retired, with his soul in his book. They stared comically at one
another, and at this cool hand. “It’s no more his than it’s mine,” said
Jacintha, bluntly. Rose darted after the absorbed student, and took
him captive. “Now, doctor,” she cried, “be pleased to come out of the
clouds.” And with the word she whipped the purse out of his coat pocket,
and holding it right up before his eye, insisted on his telling her
whether that was his purse or not, money and all. Thus adjured, he
disowned the property mighty coolly, for a retired physician, who had
just pocketed it.

“No, my dear,” said he; “and, now I think of it, I have not carried a
purse this twenty years.”

The baroness, as a last resource, appealed to his honor whether he had
not left a purse and paper on the knights’ bough. The question had to be
explained by Josephine, and then the doctor surprised them all by being
rather affronted--for once in his life.

“Baroness,” said he, “I have been your friend and pensioner nearly
twenty years; if by some strange chance money were to come into my
hands, I should not play you a childish trick like this. What! have I
not the right to come to you, and say, ‘My old friend, here I bring you
back a very small part of all I owe you?’”

“What geese we are,” remarked Rose. “Dear doctor, YOU tell us who it
is.”

Dr. Aubertin reflected a single moment; then said he could make a shrewd
guess.

“Who? who? who?” cried the whole party.

“Perrin the notary.”

It was the baroness’s turn to be surprised; for there was nothing
romantic about Perrin the notary. Aubertin, however, let her know that
he was in private communication with the said Perrin, and this was not
the first friendly act the good notary had done her in secret.

While he was converting the baroness to his view, Josephine and Rose
exchanged a signal, and slipped away round an angle of the chateau.

“Who is it?” said Rose.

“It is some one who has a delicate mind.”

“Clearly, and therefore not a notary.”

“Rose, dear, might it not be some person who has done us some wrong, and
is perhaps penitent?”

“Certainly; one of our tenants, or creditors, you mean; but then, the
paper says ‘a friend.’ Stay, it says a debtor. Why a debtor? Down with
enigmas!”

“Rose, love,” said Josephine, coaxingly, “think of some one that
might--since it is not the doctor, nor Monsieur Perrin, might it not
be--for after all, he would naturally be ashamed to appear before me.”

“Before you? Who do you mean?” asked Rose nervously, catching a glimpse
now.

“He who once pretended to love me.”

“Josephine, you love that man still.”

“No, no. Spare me!”

“You love him just the same as ever. Oh, it is wonderful; it is
terrible; the power he has over you; over your judgment as well as your
heart.”

“No! for I believe he has forgotten my very name; don’t you think so?”

“Dear Josephine, can you doubt it? Come, you do doubt it.”

“Sometimes.”

“But why? for what reason?”

“Because of what he said to me as we parted at that gate; the words and
the voice seem still to ring like truth across the weary years. He said,
‘I am to join the army of the Pyrenees, so fatal to our troops; but say
to me what you never yet have said, Camille, I love you: and I swear
I will come back alive.’ So then I said to him, ‘I love you,’--and he
never came back.”

“How could he come here? a deserter, a traitor!”

“It is not true; it is not in his nature; inconstancy may be. Tell me
that he never really loved me, and I will believe you; but not that he
is a traitor. Let me weep over my past love, not blush for it.”

“Past? You love him to-day as you did three years ago.”

“No,” said Josephine, “no; I love no one. I never shall love any one
again.”

“But him. It is that love which turns your heart against others.
Oh, yes, you love him, dearest, or why should you fancy our secret
benefactor COULD be that Camille?”

“Why? Because I was mad: because it is impossible; but I see my folly. I
am going in.”

“What! don’t you care to know who I think it was, perhaps?”

“No,” said Josephine sadly and doggedly; she added with cold
nonchalance, “I dare say time will show.” And she went slowly in, her
hand to her head.

“Her birthday!” sighed Rose.

The donor, whoever he was, little knew the pain he was inflicting on
this distressed but proud family, or the hard battle that ensued
between their necessities and their delicacy. The ten gold pieces were
a perpetual temptation: a daily conflict. The words that accompanied the
donation offered a bait. Their pride and dignity declined it; but these
bright bits of gold cost them many a sharp pang. You must know that
Josephine and Rose had worn out their mourning by this time; and were
obliged to have recourse to gayer materials that lay in their great
wardrobes, and were older, but less worn. A few of these gold pieces
would have enabled the poor girls to be neat, and yet to mourn their
father openly. And it went through and through those tender, simple
hearts, to think that they must be disunited, even in so small a thing
as dress; that while their mother remained in her weeds, they must seem
no longer to share her woe.

The baroness knew their feeling, and felt its piety, and yet could not
bow her dignity to say, “Take five of these bits of gold, and let us
all look what we are--one.” Yet in this, as in everything else, they
supported each other. They resisted, they struggled, and with a wrench
they conquered day by day. At last, by general consent, Josephine locked
up the tempter, and they looked at it no more. But the little bit of
paper met a kinder fate. Rose made a little frame for it, and it was
kept in a drawer, in the salon: and often looked at and blessed. Just
when they despaired of human friendship, this paper with the sacred
word “friend” written on it, had fallen all in a moment on their aching
hearts.

They could not tell whence it came, this blessed word.

But men dispute whence comes the dew?

Then let us go with the poets, who say it comes from heaven.

And even so that sweet word, friend, dropped like the dew from heaven on
these afflicted ones.

So they locked the potent gold away from themselves, and took the kind
slip of paper to their hearts.

The others left off guessing: Aubertin had it all his own way: he upheld
Perrin as their silent benefactor, and bade them all observe that the
worthy notary had never visited the chateau openly since the day the
purse was left there. “Guilty conscience,” said Aubertin dryly.

One day in his walks he met a gaunt figure ambling on a fat pony: he
stopped him, and, holding up his finger, said abruptly, “We have found
you out, Maitre Perrin.”

The notary changed color.

“Oh, never be ashamed,” said Aubertin; “a good action done slyly is none
the less a good action.”

The notary wore a puzzled air.

Aubertin admired his histrionic powers in calling up this look.

“Come, come, don’t overdo it,” said he. “Well, well; they cannot profit
by your liberality; but you will be rewarded in a better world, take my
word for that.”

The notary muttered indistinctly. He was a man of moderate desires;
would have been quite content if there had been no other world in
perspective. He had studied this one, and made it pay: did not desire a
better; sometimes feared a worse.

“Ah!” said Aubertin, “I see how it is; we do not like to hear ourselves
praised, do we? When shall we see you at the chateau?”

“I propose to call on the baroness the moment I have good news to
bring,” replied Perrin; and to avoid any more compliments spurred the
dun pony suddenly; and he waddled away.

Now this Perrin was at that moment on the way to dine with a character
who plays a considerable part in the tale--Commandant Raynal. Perrin had
made himself useful to the commandant, and had become his legal adviser.
And, this very day after dinner, the commandant having done a good day’s
work permitted himself a little sentiment over the bottle, and to a man
he thought his friend. He let out that he had a heap of money he did not
know what to do with, and almost hated it now his mother was gone and
could not share it.

The man of law consoled him with oleaginous phrases: told him he very
much underrated the power of money. His hoard, directed by a judicious
adviser, would make him a landed proprietor, and the husband of some
young lady, all beauty, virtue, and accomplishment, whose soothing
influence would soon heal the sorrow caused by an excess of filial
sentiment.

“Halt!” shouted Raynal: “say that again in half the words.”

Perrin was nettled, for he prided himself on his colloquial style.

“You can buy a fine estate and a chaste wife with the money,” snapped
this smooth personage, substituting curt brutality for honeyed
prolixity.

The soldier was struck by the propositions the moment they flew at him
small and solid, like bullets.

“I’ve no time,” said he, “to be running after women. But the estate I’ll
certainly have, because you can get that for me without my troubling my
head.”

“Is it a commission, then?” asked the other sharply.

“Of course. Do you think I speak for the sake of talking?”

And so Perrin received formal instructions to look out for a landed
estate; and he was to receive a handsome commission as agent.

Now to settle this affair, and pocket a handsome percentage for himself,
he had only to say “Beaurepaire.”

Well, he didn’t. Never mentioned the place; nor the fact that it was for
sale.

Such are all our agents, when rival speculators. Mind that. Still it
is a terrible thing to be so completely in the power of any man of the
world, as from this hour Beaurepaire was in the power of Perrin the
notary.




CHAPTER IV.


Edouard Riviere was unhappy. She never came out now. This alone made the
days dark to him. And then he began to fear it was him she shunned. She
must have seen him lie in wait for her; and so she would come out no
more. He prowled about and contrived to fall in with Jacintha; he told
her his grief. She assured him the simple fact was their mourning was
worn out, and they were ashamed to go abroad in colors. This revelation
made his heart yearn still more.

“O Jacintha,” said he, “if I could only make a beginning; but here we
might live a century in the same parish, and not one chance for a poor
wretch to make acquaintance.”

Jacintha admitted this, and said gentlefolks were to be pitied. “Why, if
it was the likes of me, you and I should have made friends long before
now.”

Jacintha herself was puzzled what to do; she would have told Rose if she
had felt sure it would be well received; but she could not find out that
the young lady had even noticed the existence of Edouard. But her brain
worked, and lay in wait for an opportunity.

One came sooner than she expected. One morning at about six o’clock, as
she came home from milking the cow, she caught sight of young Riviere
trying to open the iron gate. “What is up now?” thought she; suddenly
the truth flashed upon her, clear as day. She put her pail down and
stole upon him. “You want to leave us another purse,” said she. He
colored all over and panted.

“How did you know? how could you know? you won’t betray me? you won’t be
so cruel? you promised.”

“Me betray you,” said Jacintha; “why, I’ll help you; and then they will
be able to buy mourning, you know, and then they will come out, and give
you a chance. You can’t open that gate, for it’s locked. But you come
round to the lane, and I’ll get you the key; it is hanging up in the
kitchen.”

The key was in her pocket. But the sly jade wanted him away from that
gate; it commanded a view of the Pleasaunce. He was no sooner safe in
the lane, than she tore up-stairs to her young ladies, and asked them
with affected calm whether they would like to know who left the purse.

“Oh, yes, yes!” screamed Rose.

“Then come with me. You ARE dressed; never mind your bonnets, or you
will be too late.”

Questions poured on her; but she waived all explanation, and did not
give them time to think, or Josephine, for one, she knew would raise
objections. She led the way to the Pleasaunce, and, when she got to the
ancestral oak, she said hurriedly, “Now, mesdemoiselles, hide in there,
and as still as mice. You’ll soon know who leaves the purses.”

With this she scudded to the lane, and gave Edouard the key. “Look
sharp,” said she, “before they get up; it’s almost their dressing time.”

“YOU’LL SOON KNOW WHO LEAVES THE PURSES!”

Curiosity, delicious curiosity, thrilled our two daughters of Eve.

This soon began to alternate with chill misgivings at the novelty of the
situation.

“She is not coming back,” said Josephine ruefully.

“No,” said Rose, “and suppose when we pounce out on him, it should be a
stranger.”

“Pounce on him? surely we are not to do that?”

“Oh, y-yes; that is the p-p-programme,” quavered Rose.

A key grated, and the iron gate creaked on its hinges. They ran together
and pinched one another for mutual support, but did not dare to speak.

Presently a man’s shadow came slap into the tree. They crouched and
quivered, and expected to be caught instead of catching, and wished
themselves safe back in bed, and all this a nightmare, and no worse.

At last they recovered themselves enough to observe that this shadow,
one half of which lay on the ground, while the head and shoulders went a
little way up the wall of the tree, represented a man’s profile, not his
front face. The figure, in short, was standing between them and the sun,
and was contemplating the chateau, not the tree.

The shadow took off its hat to Josephine, in the tree. Then would she
have screamed if she had not bitten her white hand instead, and made a
red mark thereon.

It wiped its brow with a handkerchief; it had walked fast, poor thing!
The next moment it was away.

They looked at one another and panted. They scarcely dared do it before.
Then Rose, with one hand on her heaving bosom, shook her little white
fist viciously at where the figure must be, and perhaps a comical
desire of vengeance stimulated her curiosity. She now glided through the
fissure like a cautious panther from her den; and noiseless and supple
as a serpent began to wind slowly round the tree. She soon came to a
great protuberance in the tree, and twining and peering round it with
diamond eye, she saw a very young, very handsome gentleman, stealing on
tiptoe to the nearest flower-bed. Then she saw him take a purse out of
his bosom, and drop it on the bed. This done, he came slowly past the
tree again, and was even heard to vent a little innocent chuckle of
intense satisfaction: but of brief duration; for, when Rose saw the
purse leave his hand, she made a rapid signal to Josephine to wheel
round the other side of the tree, and, starting together with admirable
concert, both the daughters of Beaurepaire glided into sight with a vast
appearance of composure.

Two women together are really braver than fifteen separate; but still,
most of this tranquillity was merely put on, but so admirably that
Edouard Riviere had no chance with them. He knew nothing about their
tremors; all he saw or heard was, a rustle, then a flap on each side of
him as of great wings, and two lovely women were upon him with angelic
swiftness. “Ah!” he cried out with a start, and glanced from the
first-comer, Rose, to the gate. But Josephine was on that side by this
time, and put up her hand, as much as to say, “You can’t pass here.” In
such situations, the mind works quicker than lightning. He took off his
hat, and stammered an excuse--“Come to look at the oak.” At this moment
Rose pounced on the purse, and held it up to Josephine. He was caught.
His only chance now was to bolt for the mark and run; but it was not
the notary, it was a novice who lost his presence of mind, or perhaps
thought it rude to run when a lady told him to stand still. All he did
was to crush his face into his two hands, round which his cheeks and
neck now blushed red as blood. Blush? they could both see the color rush
like a wave to the very roots of his hair and the tips of his fingers.

The moment our heroines, who, in that desperation which is one of
the forms of cowardice, had hurled themselves on the foe, saw this,
flash--the quick-witted poltroons exchanged purple lightning over
Edouard’s drooping head, and enacted lionesses in a moment.

It was with the quiet composure of lofty and powerful natures that
Josephine opened on him. “Compose yourself, sir; and be so good as
to tell us who you are.” Edouard must answer. Now he could not speak
through his hands; and he could not face a brace of tranquil lionesses:
so he took a middle course, removed one hand, and shading himself from
Josephine with the other, he gasped out, “I am--my name is Riviere; and
I--I--ladies!”

“I am afraid we frighten you,” said Josephine, demurely.

“Don’t be frightened,” said Rose, majestically; “we are not VERY angry,
only a LITTLE curious to know why you water our flowers with gold.”

At this point-blank thrust, and from her, Edouard was so confounded and
distressed, they both began to pity him. He stammered out that he was
so confused he did not know what to say. He couldn’t think how ever he
could have taken such a liberty; might he be permitted to retire? and
with this he tried to slip away.

“Let me detain you one instant,” said Josephine, and made for the house.

Left alone so suddenly with the culprit, the dignity, and majesty, and
valor of Rose seemed to ooze gently out; and she stood blushing, and had
not a word to say; no more had Edouard. But he hung his head, and she
hung her head. And, somehow or other, whenever she raised her eyes
to glance at him, he raised his to steal a look at her, and mutual
discomfiture resulted.

This awkward, embarrassing delirium was interrupted by Josephine’s
return. She now held another purse in her hand, and quietly poured the
rest of the coin into it. She then, with a blush, requested him to take
back the money.

At that he found his tongue. “No, no,” he cried, and put up his hands in
supplication. “Ladies, do let me speak ONE word to you. Do not reject my
friendship. You are alone in the world; your father is dead; your mother
has but you to lean on. After all, I am your neighbor, and neighbors
should be friends. And I am your debtor; I owe you more than you could
ever owe me; for ever since I came into this neighborhood I have been
happy. No man was ever so happy as I, ever since one day I was
walking, and met for the first time an angel. I don’t say it was you,
Mademoiselle Rose. It might be Mademoiselle Josephine.”

“How pat he has got our names,” said Rose, smiling.

“A look from that angel has made me so good, so happy. I used to
vegetate, but now I live. Live! I walk on wings, and tread on roses. Yet
you insist on declining a few miserable louis d’or from him who owes you
so much. Well, don’t be angry; I’ll take them back, and throw them into
the nearest pond, for they are really no use to me. But then you will
be generous in your turn. You will accept my devotion, my services.
You have no brother, you know; well, I have no sisters; let me be your
brother, and your servant forever.”

At all this, delivered in as many little earnest pants as there were
sentences, the water stood in the fair eyes he was looking into so
piteously.

Josephine was firm, but angelical. “We thank you, Monsieur Riviere,”
 said she, softly, “for showing us that the world is still embellished
with hearts like yours. Here is the money;” and she held it out in her
creamy hand.

“But we are very grateful,” put in Rose, softly and earnestly.

“That we are,” said Josephine, “and we beg to keep the purse as a
souvenir of one who tried to do us a kindness without mortifying us. And
now, Monsieur Riviere, you will permit us to bid you adieu.”

Edouard was obliged to take the hint. “It is I who am the intruder,”
 said he. “Mesdemoiselles, conceive, if you can, my pride and my
disappointment.” He then bowed low; they courtesied low to him in
return; and he retired slowly in a state of mixed feeling indescribable.

With all their sweetness and graciousness, he felt overpowered by their
high breeding, their reserve, and their composure, in a situation that
had set his heart beating itself nearly out of his bosom. He acted the
scene over again, only much more adroitly, and concocted speeches for
past use, and was very hot and very cold by turns.

I wish he could have heard what passed between the sisters as soon as
ever he was out of earshot. It would have opened his eyes, and given him
a little peep into what certain writers call “the sex.”

“Poor boy,” murmured Josephine, “he has gone away unhappy.”

“Oh, I dare say he hasn’t gone far,” replied Rose, gayly. “I shouldn’t
if I was a boy.”

Josephine held up her finger like an elder sister; then went on to say
she really hardly knew why she had dismissed him.

“Well, dear,” said Rose, dryly, “since you admit so much, I must say I
couldn’t help thinking--while you were doing it--we were letting ‘the
poor boy’ off ridiculously cheap.”

“At least I did my duty?” suggested Josephine, inquiringly.

“Magnificently; you overawed even me. So now to business, as the
gentlemen say. Which of us two takes him?”

“Takes whom?” inquired Josephine, opening her lovely eyes.

“Edouard,” murmured Rose, lowering hers.

Josephine glared on the lovely minx with wonder and comical horror.

“Oh! you shall have him,” said Rose, “if you like. You are the eldest,
you know.”

“Fie!”

“Do now; TO OBLIGE ME.”

“For shame! Rose. Is this you? talking like that!”

“Oh! there’s no compulsion, dear; I never force young ladies’
inclinations. So you decline him?”

“Of course I decline him.”

“Then, oh, you dear, darling Josephine, this is the prettiest present
you ever made me,” and she kissed her vehemently.

Josephine was frightened now. She held Rose out at arm’s length with
both hands, and looked earnestly into her, and implored her not to play
with fire. “Take warning by me.”

Rose recommended her to keep her pity for Monsieur Riviere, “who had
fallen into nice hands,” she said. That no doubt might remain on that
head, she whispered mysteriously, but with much gravity and conviction,
“I am an Imp;” and aimed at Josephine with her forefinger to point the
remark. For one second she stood and watched this important statement
sink into her sister’s mind, then set-to and gambolled elfishly round
her as she moved stately and thoughtful across the grass to the chateau.

Two days after this a large tree was blown down in Beaurepaire park,
and made quite a gap in the prospect. You never know what a big thing a
leafy tree is till it comes down. And this ill wind blew Edouard good;
for it laid bare the chateau to his inquiring telescope. He had not
gazed above half an hour, when a female figure emerged from the chateau.
His heart beat. It was only Jacintha. He saw her look this way and that,
and presently Dard appeared, and she sent him with his axe to the fallen
tree. Edouard watched him hacking away at it. Presently his heart gave a
violent leap; for why? two ladies emerged from the Pleasaunce and walked
across the park. They came up to Dard, and stood looking at the tree and
Dard hacking it, and Edouard watched them greedily. You know we all love
to magnify her we love. And this was a delightful way of doing it. It
is “a system of espionage” that prevails under every form of government.
How he gazed, and gazed, on his now polar star; studied every turn,
every gesture, with eager delight, and tried to gather what she said, or
at least the nature of it.

But by and by they left Dard and strolled towards the other end of the
park. Then did our astronomer fling down his tube, and come running out
in hopes of intercepting them, and seeming to meet them by some strange
fortuity. Hope whispered he should be blessed with a smile; perhaps
a word even. So another minute and he was running up the road to
Beaurepaire. But his good heart was doomed to be diverted to a much
humbler object than his idol; as he came near the fallen tree he heard
loud cries for help, followed by groans of pain. He bounded over the
hedge, and there was Dard hanging over his axe, moaning. “What is the
matter? what is the matter?” cried Edouard, running to him.

“Oh! oh! cut my foot. Oh!”

Edouard looked, and turned sick, for there was a gash right through
Dard’s shoe, and the blood welling up through it. But, recovering
himself by an effort of the will, he cried out, “Courage, my lad!
don’t give in. Thank Heaven there’s no artery there. Oh, dear, it is
a terrible cut! Let us get you home, that is the first thing. Can you
walk?”

“Lord bless you, no! nor stand neither without help.”

Edouard flew to the wheelbarrow, and, reversing it, spun a lot of billet
out. “Ye must not do that,” said Dard with all the energy he was capable
of in his present condition. “Why, that is Jacintha’s wood.”--“To the
devil with Jacintha and her wood too!” cried Edouard, “a man is worth
more than a fagot. Come, I shall wheel you home: it is only just across
the park.”

With some difficulty he lifted him into the barrow. Luckily he had his
shooting-jacket on with a brandy-flask in it: he administered it with
excellent effect.

The ladies, as they walked, saw a man wheeling a barrow across the park,
and took no particular notice; but, as Riviere was making for the same
point they were, though at another angle, presently the barrow came near
enough for them to see Dard’s head and arms in it. Rose was the first to
notice this. “Look! look! if he is not wheeling Dard in the barrow now.”

“Who?”

“Can you ask? Who provides all our excitement?”

Josephine instantly divined there was something amiss. “Consider,” said
she, “Monsieur Riviere would not wheel Dard all across the park for
amusement.”

Rose assented; and in another minute, by a strange caprice of fate,
those Edouard had come to intercept, quickened their pace to intercept
him. As soon as he saw their intention he thrilled all over, but did not
slacken his pace. He told Dard to take his coat and throw it over his
foot, for here were the young ladies coming.

“What for?” said Dard sulkily. “No! let them see what they have done
with their little odd jobs: this is my last for one while. I sha’n’t go
on two legs again this year.”

The ladies came up with them.

“O monsieur!” said Josephine, “what is the matter?”

“We have met with a little accident, mademoiselle, that is all. Dard has
hurt his foot; nothing to speak of, but I thought he would be best at
home.”

Rose raised the coat which Riviere, in spite of Dard, had flung over his
foot.

“He is bleeding! Dard is bleeding! Oh, my poor Dard. Oh! oh!”

“Hush, Rose!”

“No, don’t put him out of heart, mademoiselle. Take another pull at the
flask, Dard. If you please, ladies, I must have him home without delay.”

“Oh yes, but I want him to have a surgeon,” cried Josephine. “And we
have no horses nor people to send off as we used to have.”

“But you have me, mademoiselle,” said Edouard tenderly. “Me, who would
go to the world’s end for you.” He said this to Josephine, but his eye
sought Rose. “I’m a famous runner,” he added, a little bumptiously;
“I’ll be at the town in half an hour, and send a surgeon up full
gallop.”

“You have a good heart,” said Rose simply.

He bowed his blushing, delighted face, and wheeled Dard to his cottage
hard by with almost more than mortal vigor. How softly, how nobly, that
frolicsome girl could speak! Those sweet words rang in his ears and ran
warm round and round his heart, as he straightened his arms and his back
to the work. When they had gone about a hundred yards, a single snivel
went off in the wheelbarrow. Five minutes after, Dard was at home in
charge of his grandmother, his shoe off, his foot in a wet linen cloth;
and Edouard, his coat tied round the neck, squared his shoulders, and
ran the two short leagues out. He ran them in forty minutes, found the
surgeon at home, told the case, pooh-poohed that worthy’s promise to
go to the patient presently, darted into his stable, saddled the horse,
brought him round, saw the surgeon into the saddle, started him, dined
at the restaurateur’s, strolled back, and was in time to get a good look
at the chateau of Beaurepaire just as the sun set on it.

Jacintha came into Dard’s cottage that evening.

“So you have been at it, my man,” cried she cheerfully and rather
roughly, then sat down and rocked herself, with her apron over her head.
She explained this anomalous proceeding to his grandmother privately. “I
thought I would keep his heart up anyway, but you see I was not fit.”

Next morning, as Riviere sat writing, he received an unexpected visit
from Jacintha. She came in with her finger to her lips, and said, “You
prowl about Dard’s cottage. They are sure to go and see him every day,
and him wounded in their service.”

“Oh, you good girl! you dear girl!” cried Edouard.

She did not reply in words, but, after going to the door, returned and
gave him a great kiss without ceremony. “Dare say you know what that’s
for,” said she, and went off with a clear conscience and reddish cheeks.

Dard’s grandmother had a little house, a little land, a little money,
and a little cow. She could just maintain Dard and herself, and her
resources enabled Dard to do so many little odd jobs for love, yet keep
his main organ tolerably filled.

“Go to bed, my little son, since you have got hashed,” said she.--“Bed
be hanged,” cried he. “What good is bed? That’s a silly old custom wants
doing away with. It weakens you: it turns you into train oil: it is the
doctor’s friend, and the sick man’s bane. Many a one dies through taking
to bed, that could have kept his life if he had kept his feet like a
man. If I had cut myself in two I would not go to bed,--till I go to the
bed with a spade in it. No! sit up like Julius Caesar; and die as you
lived, in your clothes: don’t strip yourself: let the old women strip
you; that is their delight laying out a chap; that is the time they
brighten up, the old sorceresses.” He concluded this amiable rhapsody,
the latter part of which was levelled at a lugubrious weakness of his
grandmother’s for the superfluous embellishment of the dead, by telling
her it was bad enough to be tied by the foot like an ass, without
settling down on his back like a cast sheep. “Give me the armchair. I’ll
sit in it, and, if I have any friends, they will show it now: they will
come and tell me what is going on in the village, for I can’t get out to
see it and hear it, they must know that.”

Seated in state in his granny’s easy-chair, the loss of which after
thirty years’ use made her miserable, she couldn’t tell why, le Sieur
Dard awaited his friends.

They did not come.

The rain did, and poured all the afternoon. Night succeeded, and
solitude. Dard boiled over with bitterness. “They are a lot of pigs
then, all those fellows I have drunk with at Bigot’s and Simmet’s. Down
with all fair-weather friends.”

The next day the sun shone, the air was clear, and the sky blue. “Ah!
let us see now,” cried Dard.

Alas! no fellow-drinkers, no fellow-smokers, came to console their hurt
fellow. And Dard, who had boiled with anger yesterday, was now sad and
despondent. “Down with egotists,” he groaned.

About three in the afternoon came a tap at the door.

“Ah! at last,” cried Dard: “come in!”

The door was slowly opened, and two lovely faces appeared at the
threshold. The demoiselles De Beaurepaire wore a tender look of
interest and pity when they caught sight of Dard, and on the old woman
courtesying to them they courtesied to her and Dard. The next moment
they were close to him, one a little to his right, the other to his
left, and two pair of sapphire eyes with the mild lustre of sympathy
playing down incessantly upon him. How was he? How had he slept? Was he
in pain? Was he in much pain? tell the truth now. Was there anything to
eat or drink he could fancy? Jacintha should make it and bring it, if
it was within their means. A prince could not have had more solicitous
attendants, nor a fairy king lovelier and less earthly ones.

He looked in heavy amazement from one to the other. Rose bent, and was
by some supple process on one knee, taking the measure of the wounded
foot. When she first approached it he winced: but the next moment he
smiled. He had never been touched like this--it was contact and no
contact--she treated his foot as the zephyr the violets--she handled
it as if it had been some sacred thing. By the help of his eye he
could just know she was touching him. Presently she informed him he
was measured for a list shoe: and she would run home for the materials.
During her absence came a timid tap to the door; and Edouard Riviere
entered. He was delighted to see Josephine, and made sure Rose was not
far off. It was Dard who let out that she was gone to Beaurepaire for
some cloth to make him a shoe. This information set Edouard fidgeting
on his chair. He saw such a chance as was not likely to occur again. He
rose with feigned nonchalance, and saying, “I leave you in good hands;
angel visitors are best enjoyed alone,” slowly retired, with a deep
obeisance. Once outside the door, dignity vanished in alacrity; he flew
off into the park, and ran as hard as he could towards the chateau.
He was within fifty yards of the little gate, when sure enough Rose
emerged. They met; his heart beat violently. “Mademoiselle,” he
faltered.

“Ah! it is Monsieur Riviere, I declare,” said Rose, coolly; all over
blushes though.

“Yes, mademoiselle, and I am so out of breath. Mademoiselle Josephine
awaits you at Dard’s house.”

“She sent you for me?” inquired Rose, demurely.

“Not positively. But I could see I should please her by coming for you;
there is, I believe, a bull or so about.”

“A bull or two! don’t talk in that reckless way about such things. She
has done well to send you; let us make haste.”

“But I am a little out of breath.”

“Oh, never mind that! I abhor bulls.”

“But, mademoiselle, we are not come to them yet, and the faster we go
now the sooner we shall.”

“Yes; but I always like to get a disagreeable thing over as soon as
possible,” said Rose, slyly.

“Ah,” replied Edouard, mournfully, “in that case let us make haste.”

After a little spurt, mademoiselle relaxed the pace of her own accord,
and even went slower than before. There was an awkward silence. Edouard
eyed the park boundary, and thought, “Now what I have to say I must say
before we get to you;” and being thus impressed with the necessity of
immediate action, he turned to lead.

Rose eyed him and the ground, alternately, from under her long lashes.

At last he began to color and flutter. She saw something was coming, and
all the woman donned defensive armor.

“Mademoiselle.”

“Monsieur.”

“Is it quite decided that your family refuse my acquaintance, my
services, which I still--forgive me--press on you? Ah! Mademoiselle
Rose, am I never to have the happiness of--of--even speaking to you?”

“It seems so,” said Rose, ironically.

“Have you then decided against me too?”

“I?” asked Rose. “What have I to do with questions of etiquette? I am
only a child: so considered at least.”

“You a child--an angel like you?”

“Ask any of them, they will tell you I am a child; and it is to that I
owe this conversation, no doubt; if you did not look on me as a child,
you would not take this liberty with me,” said the young cat, scratching
without a moment’s notice.

“Mademoiselle, do not be angry. I was wrong.”

“Oh! never mind. Children are little creatures without reserve, and
treated accordingly, and to notice them is to honor them.”

“Adieu then, mademoiselle. Try to believe no one respects you more than
I do.”

“Yes, let us part, for there is Dard’s house; and I begin to suspect
that Josephine never sent you.”

“I confess it.”

“There, he confesses it. I thought so all along; WHAT A DUPE I HAVE
BEEN!”

“I will offend no more,” said poor silly Edouard. “Adieu, mademoiselle.
May you find friends as sincere as I am, and more to your taste!”

“Heaven hear your prayers!” replied the malicious thing, casting up her
eyes with a mock tragic air.

Edouard sighed; a chill conviction that she was both heartless and empty
fell on him. He turned away without another word. She called to him
with a sudden airy cheerfulness that made him start. “Stay, monsieur, I
forgot--I have a favor to ask you.”

“I wish I could believe that:” and his eyes brightened.

Rose stopped, and began to play with her parasol. “You seem,” said
she softly, “to be pretty generous in bestowing your acquaintance on
strangers. I should be glad if I might secure you for a dear friend of
mine, Dr. Aubertin. He will not discredit my recommendation; and he will
not make so many difficulties as we do; shall I tell you why? Because
he is really worth knowing. In short, believe me, it will be a valuable
acquaintance for you--and for him,” added she with all the grace of the
De Beaurepaires.

Many a man, inferior in a general way to Edouard Riviere, would have
made a sensible reply to this. Such as, “Oh, any friend of yours,
mademoiselle, must be welcome to me,” or the like. But the proposal
caught Edouard on his foible, his vanity, to wit; and our foibles are
our manias. He was mortified to the heart’s core. “She refuses to know
me herself,” thought he, “but she will use my love to make me amuse that
old man.” His heart swelled against her injustice and ingratitude,
and his crushed vanity turned to strychnine. “Mademoiselle,” said he,
bitterly and doggedly, but sadly, “were I so happy as to have your
esteem, my heart would overflow, not only on the doctor but on every
honest person around. But if I must not have the acquaintance I value
more than life, suffer me to be alone in the world, and never to say a
word either to Dr. Aubertin, or to any human creature if I can help it.”

The imperious young beauty drew herself up directly. “So be it,
monsieur; you teach me how a child should be answered that forgets
herself, and asks a favor of a stranger--a perfect stranger,” added she,
maliciously.

Could one of the dog-days change to mid-winter in a second, it would
hardly seem so cold and cross as Rose de Beaurepaire turned from the
smiling, saucy fairy of the moment before. Edouard felt as it were a
portcullis of ice come down between her and him. She courtesied and
glided away. He bowed and stood frozen to the spot.

He felt so lonely and so bitter, he must go to Jacintha for comfort.

He took advantage of the ladies being with Dard, and marched boldly into
the kitchen of Beaurepaire.

“Well, I never,” cried Jacintha. “But, after all, why not?”

He hurled himself on the kitchen table (clean as china), and told her it
was all over. “She hates me now; but it is not my fault,” and so poured
forth his tale, and feeling sure of sympathy, asked Jacintha whether it
was not bitterly unjust of Rose to refuse him her own acquaintance, yet
ask him to amuse that old fogy.

Jacintha stood with her great arms akimbo, taking it all in, and looking
at him with a droll expression of satirical wonder.

“Now you listen to a parable,” said she. “Once there was a little boy
madly in love with raspberry jam.”

“A thing I hate.”

“Don’t tell me! Who hates raspberry jam? He came to the store closet,
where he knew there were jars of it, and--oh! misery--the door was
locked. He kicked the door, and wept bitterly. His mamma came and said,
‘Here is the key,’ and gave him the key. And what did he do? Why,
he fell to crying and roaring, and kicking the door. ‘I don’t
wa-wa-wa-wa-nt the key-ey-ey. I wa-a-ant the jam--oh! oh! oh! oh!’”
 and Jacintha mimicked, after her fashion, the mingled grief and ire of
infancy debarred its jam. Edouard wore a puzzled air, but it was only
for a moment; the next he hid his face in his hands, and cried, “Fool!”

“I shall not contradict you,” said his Mentor.

“She was my best friend. Once acquainted with the doctor, I could visit
at Beaurepaire.”

“Parbleu!”

“She had thought of a way to reconcile my wishes with this terrible
etiquette that reigns here.”

“She thinks to more purpose than you do; that is clear.”

“Nothing is left now but to ask her pardon, and to consent; I am off.”

“No, you are not,” and Jacintha laid a grasp of iron on him. “Will you
be quiet?--is not one blunder a day enough? If you go near her now, she
will affront you, and order the doctor not to speak to you.”

“O Jacintha! your sex then are fiends of malice?”

“While it lasts. Luckily with us nothing lasts very long. Now you don’t
go near her till you have taken advantage of her hint, and made the
doctor’s acquaintance; that is easy done. He walks two hours on the east
road every day, with his feet in the puddles and his head in the clouds.
Them’s HIS two tastes.”

“But how am I to get him out of the clouds and the puddles?” inquired
Riviere half peevishly.

“How?” asked Jacintha, with a dash of that contempt uneducated persons
generally have for any one who does not know some little thing they
happen to know themselves. “How? Why, with the nearest blackbeetle, to
be sure.”

“A blackbeetle?”

“Black or brown; it matters little. Have her ready for use in your
handkerchief: pull a long face: and says you--‘Excuse me, sir, I have
THE MISFORTUNE not to know the Greek name of this merchandise here.’ Say
that, and behold him launched. He will christen you the beast in Hebrew
and Latin as well as Greek, and tell you her history down from the
flood: next he will beg her of you, and out will come a cork and a pin,
and behold the creature impaled. For that is how men love beetles. He
has a thousand pinned down at home--beetles, butterflies, and so forth.
When I go near the rubbish with my duster he trembles like an aspen.
I pretend to be going to clean them, but it is only to see the face he
makes, for even a domestic must laugh now and then--or die. But I never
do clean them, for after all he is more stupid than wicked, poor man: I
have not therefore the sad courage to make him wretched.”

“Let us return to our beetle--what will his tirades about its antiquity
advance me?”

“Oh! one begins about a beetle, but one ends Heaven knows where.”

Riviere profited by this advice. He even improved on it. In due
course he threw himself into Aubertin’s way. He stopped the doctor
reverentially, and said he had heard he was an entomologist. WOULD he
be kind enough to tell him what was this enormous chrysalis he had just
found?

“The death’s head moth!” cried Aubertin with enthusiasm--“the death’s
head moth! a great rarity in this district. Where found you this?”
 Riviere undertook to show him the place.

It was half a league distant. Coming and going he had time to make
friends with Aubertin, and this was the easier that the old gentleman,
who was a physiognomist as well as ologist, had seen goodness and
sensibility in Edouard’s face. At the end of the walk he begged the
doctor to accept the chrysalis. The doctor coquetted. “That would be a
robbery. You take an interest in these things yourself--at least I hope
so.”

The young rogue confessed modestly to the sentiment of entomology, but
“the government worked him so hard as to leave him no hopes of shining
in so high a science,” said he sorrowfully.

The doctor pitied him. “A young man of your attainments and tastes to
be debarred from the everlasting secrets of nature, by the fleeting
politics of the day.”

Riviere shrugged his shoulders. “Somebody must do the dirty work,” said
he, chuckling inwardly.

The chrysalis went to Beaurepaire in the pocket of a grateful man,
who that same evening told the whole party his conversation with
young Riviere, on whom he pronounced high encomiums. Rose’s saucy eyes
sparkled with fun: you might have lighted a candle at one and exploded a
mine at the other; but not a syllable did she utter.

The doctor proved a key, and opened the enchanted castle. One fine
day he presented his friend in the Pleasaunce to the baroness and her
daughters.

They received him with perfect politeness. Thus introduced, and as he
was not one to let the grass grow under his feet, he soon obtained a
footing as friend of the family, which, being now advised by Josephine,
he took care not to compromise by making love to Rose before the
baroness. However, he insisted on placing his financial talent at their
service. He surveyed and valued their lands, and soon discovered that
all their farms were grossly underlet. Luckily most of the leases were
run out. He prepared a new rent roll, and showed it Aubertin, now his
fast friend. Aubertin at his request obtained a list of the mortgages,
and Edouard drew a balance-sheet founded on sure data, and proved to the
baroness that in able hands the said estate was now solvent.

This was a great comfort to the old lady: and she said to Aubertin,
“Heaven has sent us a champion, a little republican--with the face of an
angel.”

Descending to practice, Edouard actually put three of the farms into
the market, and let them at an advance of twenty per cent on the expired
leases. He brought these leases signed; and the baroness had scarcely
done thanking him, when her other secret friend, Monsieur Perrin, was
announced. Edouard exchanged civilities with him, and then retired to
the Pleasaunce. There he found both sisters, who were all tenderness and
gratitude to him. By this time he had learned to value Josephine: she
was so lovely and so good, and such a true womanly friend to him. Even
Rose could not resist her influence, and was obliged to be kind to him,
when Josephine was by. But let Josephine go, and instead of her being
more tender, as any other girl would, left alone with her lover,
sauciness resumed its empire till sweet Josephine returned. Whereof
cometh an example; for the said Josephine was summoned to a final
conference with the baroness and Monsieur Perrin.

“Don’t be long,” said Rose, as Josephine glided away, and (taking the
precaution to wait till she was quite out of hearing), “I shall be so
dull, dear, till you come back.”

“I shall not though,” said Edouard.

“I am not so sure of that. Now then.”

“Now then, what?”

“Begin.”

“Begin what?”

“Amusing me.” And she made herself look sullen and unamusable all over.

“I will try,” said Riviere. “I’ll tell you what they say of you: that
you are too young to love.”

“So I am, much.”

“No, no, no! I made a mistake. I mean too young to be loved.”

“Oh, I am not too young for that, not a bit.”

This point settled, she suggested that, if he could not amuse her, he
had better do THE NEXT BEST THING, and that was, talk sense.

“I think I had better not talk at all,” said he, “for I am no match
for such a nimble tongue. And then you are so remorseless. I’ll hold my
tongue, and make a sketch of this magnificent oak.”

“Ay, do: draw it as it appeared on a late occasion: with two ladies
flying out of it, and you rooted with dismay.”

“There is no need; that scene is engraved.”

“Where? in all the shops?”

“No; on all our memories.”

“Not on mine; not on mine. How terrified you were--ha, ha! and how
terrified we should have been if you had not. Listen: once upon a
time--don’t be alarmed: it was long after Noah--a frightened hare ran by
a pond; the frogs splashed in the water, smit with awe. Then she said,
‘Ah ha! there are people in the world I frighten in my turn; I am the
thunderbolt of war.’ Excuse my quoting La Fontaine: I am not in ‘Charles
the Twelfth of Sweden’ yet. I am but a child.”

“And it’s a great mercy, for when you grow up, you will be too much
for me, that is evident. Come, then, Mademoiselle the Quizzer, come and
adorn my sketch.”

“Monsieur, shall I make you a confession? You will not be angry: I could
not support your displeasure. I have a strange inclination to walk
up and down this terrace while you go and draw that tree in the
Pleasaunce.”

“Resist that inclination; perhaps it will fly from you.”

“No; you fly from me, and draw. I will rejoin you in a few minutes.”

“Thank you, I’m not so stupid. You will step indoors directly.”

“Do you doubt my word, sir?” asked she haughtily.

He had learned to obey all her caprices; so he went and placed himself
on the west side of the oak and took out his sketch-book, and worked
zealously and rapidly. He had done the outlines of the tree and was
finishing in detail a part of the huge trunk, when his eyes were
suddenly dazzled: in the middle of the rugged bark, deformed here and
there with great wart-like bosses, and wrinkled, seamed, and ploughed
all over with age, burst a bit of variegated color; bright as a poppy on
a dungeon wall, it glowed and glittered out through a large hole in the
brown bark; it was Rose’s face peeping. To our young lover’s eye how
divine it shone! None of the half tints of common flesh were there,
but a thing all rose, lily, sapphire, and soul. His pencil dropped, his
mouth opened, he was downright dazzled by the glowing, bewitching face,
sparkling with fun, in the gaunt tree. Tell me, ladies, did she know,
even at that age, the value of that sombre frame to her brightness? The
moment she found herself detected, the gaunt old tree rang musical with
a crystal laugh, and out came the arch-dryad. “I have been there all the
time. How solemn you looked! Now for the result of such profound study.”
 He showed her his work; she altered her tone. “Oh, how clever!” she
cried, “and how rapid! What a facility you have! Monsieur is an artist,”
 said she gravely; “I will be more respectful,” and she dropped him a low
courtesy. “Mind you promised it me,” she added sharply.

“You will accept it, then?”

“That I will, now it is worth having: dear me, I never reckoned on that.
Finish it directly,” cried this peremptory young person.

“First I must trouble you to stand out there near the tree.”

“Me? what for?”

“Because art loves contrasts. The tree is a picture of age and gradual
decay; by its side then I must place a personification of youth and
growing loveliness.”

She did not answer, but made a sort of defiant pirouette, and went where
she was bid, and stood there with her back to the artist. “That will
never do,” said he; “you really must be so good as to turn round.”

“Oh, very well.” And when she came round, behold her color had risen
mightily. Flattery is sweet.

This child of nature was delighted, and ashamed it should be seen that
she was.

And so he drew her, and kept looking off the paper at her, and had a
right in his character of artist to look her full in the face; and he
did so with long lingering glances. To be sure, they all began severe
and businesslike with half-closed eyes, and the peculiar hostile
expression art puts on; but then they always ended open-eyed, and so
full and tender, that she, poor girl, who was all real gold, though sham
brass, blushed and blushed, and did not know which way to look not to
be scorched up by his eye like a tender flower, or blandly absorbed like
the pearly dew. Ah, happy hour! ah, happy days of youth and innocence
and first love!

Trouble loves to intrude on these halcyon days.

The usually quiet Josephine came flying from the house, pale and
agitated, and clung despairingly to Rose, and then fell to sobbing and
lamenting piteously.

I shall take leave to relate in my own words what had just occurred
to agitate her so. When she entered her mother’s room, she found the
baroness and Perrin the notary seated watching for her. She sat down
after the usual civilities, and Perrin entered upon the subject that had
brought him.

He began by confessing to them that he had not overcome the refractory
creditor without much trouble; and that he had since learned there was
another, a larger creditor, likely to press for payment or for sale of
the estate. The baroness was greatly troubled by this communication: the
notary remained cool as a cucumber, and keenly observant. After a pause
he went on to say all this had caused him grave reflections. “It seems,”
 said he with cool candor, “a sad pity the estate should pass from a
family that has held it since the days of Charlemagne.”

“Now God forbid!” cried the baroness, lifting her eyes and her quivering
hands to heaven.

The notary held the republican creed in all its branches. “Providence,
madame, does not interfere--in matters of business,” said he. “Nothing
but money can save the estate. Let us then be practical. Has any means
occurred to you of raising money to pay off these incumbrances?”

“No. What means can there be? The estate is mortgaged to its full value:
so they say, at least.”

“And they say true,” put in the notary quickly. “But do not distress
yourself, madame: confide in me.”

“Ah, my good friend, may Heaven reward you.”

“Madame, up to the present time I have no complaint to make of Heaven.
I am on the rise: here, mademoiselle, is a gimcrack they have given me;”
 and he unbuttoned his overcoat, and showed them a piece of tricolored
ribbon and a clasp. “As for me, I look to ‘the solid;’ I care little for
these things,” said he, swelling visibly, “but the world is dazzled by
them. However, I can show you something better.” He took out a letter.
“This is from the Minister of the Interior to a client of mine: a
promise I shall be the next prefect; and the present prefect--I am happy
to say--is on his death-bed. Thus, madame, your humble servant in a few
short months will be notary no longer, but prefect; I shall then sell my
office of notary: and I flatter myself when I am a prefect you will not
blush to own me.”

“Then, as now, monsieur,” said the baroness politely, “we shall
recognize your merit. But”--

“I understand, madame: like me you look to ‘the solid.’ Thus then it is;
I have money.”

“Ah! all the better for you.”

“I have a good deal of money. But it is dispersed in a great many small
but profitable investments: to call it in suddenly would entail some
loss. Nevertheless, if you and my young lady there have ever so little
of that friendly feeling towards me of which I have so much towards you,
all my investments shall be called in, and two-thirds of your creditors
shall be paid off at once. A single client of mine, no less a man than
the Commandant Raynal, will, I am sure, advance me the remaining third
at an hour’s notice; and so Beaurepaire chateau, park, estate, and
grounds, down to the old oak-tree, shall be saved; and no power shall
alienate them from you, mademoiselle, and from the heirs of your body.”

The baroness clasped her hands in ecstasy.

“But what are we to do for this?” inquired Josephine calmly, “for it
seems to me that it can only be effected by a sacrifice on your part.”

“I thank you, mademoiselle, for your penetration in seeing that I must
make sacrifices. I would never have told you, but you have seen it;
and I do not regret that you have seen it. Madame--mademoiselle--those
sacrifices appear little to me; will seem nothing; will never be
mentioned, or even alluded to after this day, if you, on your part, will
lay me under a far heavier obligation, if in short”--here the contemner
of things unsubstantial reopened his coat, and brought his ribbon to
light again--“if you, madame, will accept me for your son-in-law--if
you, mademoiselle, will take me for your husband.”

The baroness and her daughter looked at one another in silence.

“Is it a jest?” inquired the former of the latter.

“Can you think so? Answer Monsieur Perrin. He has just done us a kind
office, mother.”

“I shall remember it. Monsieur, permit me to regret that having lately
won our gratitude and esteem, you have taken this way of modifying those
feelings. But after all,” she added with gentle courtesy, “we may well
put your good deeds against this--this error in judgment. The balance is
in your favor still, provided you never return to this topic. Come,
is it agreed?” The baroness’s manner was full of tact, and the latter
sentences were said with an open kindliness of manner. There was nothing
to prevent Perrin from dropping the subject, and remaining good friends.
A gentleman or a lover would have so done. Monsieur Perrin was neither.
He said bitterly, “You refuse me, then.”

The tone and the words were each singly too much for the baroness’s
pride. She answered coldly but civilly,--

“I do not refuse you. I do not take an affront into consideration.”

“Be calm, mamma; no affront whatever was intended.”

“Ah! here is one that is more reasonable,” cried Perrin.

“There are men,” continued Josephine without noticing him, “who look
to but one thing--interest. It was an offer made politely in the way of
business: decline it in the same spirit; that is what you have to do.”

“Monsieur, you hear what mademoiselle says? She carries politeness
a long way. After all it is a good fault. Well, monsieur, I need not
answer you, since Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire has answered you; but I
detain you no longer.”

Strictly a weasel has no business with the temper of a tiger, but this
one had, and the long vindictiveness of a Corsican. “Ah! my little lady,
you turn me out of the house, do you?” cried he, grinding his teeth.

“Turn him out of the house? what a phrase! where has this man lived?”

“A man!” snarled Perrin, “whom none ever yet insulted without repenting
it, and repenting in vain. You are under obligations to me, and you
think to turn me out! You are at my mercy, and you think I will let you
turn me to your door! In less than a mouth I will stand here, and say to
you, Beaurepaire is mine. Begone from it!”

When he uttered these terrible words, each of which was like a
sword-stroke to the baroness, the old lady, whose courage was not
equal to her strength, shrank over the side of her arm-chair, and cried
piteously--“He threatens me! he threatens me! I am frightened;” and put
up her trembling hands, for the notary’s eloquence, being accompanied
with abundance of gesture, bordered upon physical violence. His
brutality received an unexpected check. Imagine that a sparrow-hawk had
seized a trembling pigeon, and that a royal falcon swooped, and with one
lightning-like stroke of body and wing, buffeted him away, and sent him
gaping and glaring and grasping at pigeonless air with his claws. So
swift and majestic, Josephine de Beaurepaire came from her chair with
one gesture of her body between her mother and the notary, who was
advancing with arms folded in a brutal, menacing way--not the Josephine
we have seen her, the calm languid beauty, but the demoiselle de
Beaurepaire--her great heart on fire--her blood up--not her own only,
but all the blood of all the De Beaurepaires--pale as ashes with great
wrath, her purple eyes on fire, and her whole panther-like body full
of spring. “Wretch! you dare to insult her, and before me! Arriere
miserable! or I soil my hand with your face.” And her hand was up with
the word, up, up, higher it seemed than ever a hand was raised before.
And if he had hesitated one moment, I really believe it would have come
down; not heavily, perhaps--the lightning is not heavy. But there was
no need. The towering threat and the flaming eye and the swift rush
buffeted the caitiff away: he recoiled. She followed him as he went,
strong, FOR A MOMENT OR TWO, as Hercules, beautiful and terrible as
Michael driving Satan. He dared not, or could not stand before her: he
writhed and cowered and recoiled all down the room, while she marched
upon him. But the driven serpent hissed horribly as it wriggled away.

“You shall both be turned out of Beaurepaire by me, and forever; I swear
it, parole de Perrin.”

He had not been gone a minute when Josephine’s courage oozed away,
and she ran, or rather tottered, into the Pleasaunce, and clung like a
drowning thing to Rose, and, when Edouard took her hand, she clung to
him. They had to gather what had happened how they could: the account
was constantly interrupted with her sobs and self-reproaches. She said
she had ruined all she loved: ruined her sister, ruined her mother,
ruined the house of Beaurepaire. Why was she ever born? Why had she
not died three years ago? (Query, what was the date at which Camille’s
letters suddenly stopped?) “That coward,” said she, “has the heart of a
fiend. He told us he never forgave an affront; and he holds our fate
in his hands. He will drive our mother from her home, and she will die:
murdered by her own daughter. After all, why did I refuse him? What
should I have sacrificed by marrying him? Rose, write to him, and
say--say--I was taken by surprise, I--I”--a violent flood of tears
interrupted the sentence.

Rose flung her arms round her neck. “My beautiful Josephine marry that
creature? Let house and lands go a thousand times sooner. I love my
sister a thousand times better than the walls of this or any other
house.”

“Come, come,” cried Edouard, “you are forgetting ME all this time. Do
you really think I am the sort of man to stand by with my hands in
my pockets, and let her marry that cur, or you be driven out of
Beaurepaire? Neither, while I live.”

“Alas! dear boy,” sighed Josephine, “what can you do?”

“I’ll soon show you. From this hour forth it is a duel between that
Perrin and me. Now, Josephine--Rose--don’t you cry and fret like that:
but just look quietly on, and enjoy the fight, both of you.”

Josephine shook her head with a sad smile: but Rose delivered herself
thus, after a sob, “La, yes; I forgot: we have got a gentleman now;
that’s one comfort.”

Edouard rose to the situation: he saw that Perrin would lose no time;
and that every day, or even hour, might be precious. He told them that
the first thing he must do for them was to leave the company he loved
best on earth, and run down to the town to consult Picard the rival
notary: he would be back by supper-time, when he hoped they would do
him the honor, in a matter of such importance, to admit him to a family
council.

Josephine assented with perfect simplicity; Rose with a deep blush, for
she was too quick not to see all the consequences of admitting so brisk
a wooer into a family council.


It was a wet evening, and a sad and silent party sat round a wood fire
in the great dining-hall. The baroness was almost prostrated by the
scene with Perrin; and a sombre melancholy and foreboding weighed on
all their spirits, when presently Edouard Riviere entered briskly, and
saluted them all profoundly, and opened the proceedings with a little
favorite pomposity. “Madame the baroness, and you Monsieur Aubertin, who
honor me with your esteem, and you Mademoiselle de Beaurepaire, whom I
adore, and you Mademoiselle Rose, whom I hoped to be permitted--you have
this day done me the honor to admit me as your adviser. I am here to
lay my plans before you. I believe, madame, I have already convinced
you that your farms are under-let, and your property lowered in value by
general mismanagement; this was doubtless known to Perrin, and set him
scheming. Well, I rely on the same circumstance to defeat him. I have
consulted Picard and shown him the rent-roll and balance-sheet I had
already shown you. He has confessed that the estate is worth more
than its debts, so capitalists can safely advance the money. To-morrow
morning, then, I ride to Commandant Raynal for a week’s leave of
absence; then, armed with Picard’s certificate, shall proceed to my
uncle and ask him to lend the money. His estate is very small compared
with Beaurepaire, but he has always farmed it himself. ‘I’ll have no
go-between,’ says he, ‘to impoverish both self and soil.’ He is also a
bit of a misanthrope, and has made me one. I have a very poor opinion of
my fellow-creatures, very.”

“Well, but,” said Rose, “if he is all that, he will not sympathize with
us, who have so mismanaged Beaurepaire. Will he not despise us?”

Edouard was a little staggered, but Aubertin came to his aid.

“Permit me, Josephine,” said he. “Natural history steps in here, and
teaches by me, its mouth-piece. A misanthrope hates all mankind, but is
kind to every individual, generally too kind. A philanthrope loves the
whole human race, but dislikes his wife, his mother, his brother, and
his friends and acquaintances. Misanthrope is the potato: rough and
repulsive outside, but good to the core. Philanthrope is a peach: his
manner all velvet and bloom, his words sweet juice, his heart of hearts
a stone. Let me read Philanthrope’s book, and fall into the hands of
Misanthrope.”

Edouard admitted the shrewdness of this remark.

“And so,” said he, “my misanthrope will say plenty of biting
words,--which, by-the-by, will not hurt you, who will not hear them,
only me,--and then he’ll lend us the money, and Beaurepaire will be
free, and I shall have had a hand in it. Hurrah!”

Then came a delicious hour to Edouard Riviere. Young and old poured out
their glowing thanks and praises upon him till his checks burned like
fire.

The baroness was especially grateful, and expressed a gentle regret that
she could see no way of showing her gratitude except in words. “What can
we do for this little angel?” said she, turning to Josephine.

“Leave that to me, mamma,” replied Josephine, turning her lovely eyes
full on Edouard, with a look the baroness misunderstood directly.

She sat and watched Josephine and Edouard with comical severity all the
rest of the time she was there; and, when she retired, she kissed Rose
affectionately, but whispered her eldest daughter, “I hope you are not
serious. A mere boy compared with you.”

“But such a sweet one,” suggested Josephine, apologetically.

“What will the world come to?” said the baroness out loud, and retreated
with a sour glance at all of them--except Rose.

She had not been gone five minutes when a letter came by messenger to
Edouard. It was from Picard. He read it out.


“Perrin has been with me, to raise money. He wants it in forty-eight
hours. Promises good legal security. I have agreed to try and arrange
the matter for him.”


They were all astonished at this.

“The double-faced traitor!” cried Edouard. “Stay; wait a minute. Let us
read it to an end.”


“This promise is, of course, merely to prevent his going elsewhere. At
the end of the forty-eight hours I shall begin to make difficulties.
Meantime, as Perrin is no fool, you had better profit to the full by
this temporary delay.”


“Well done, Picard!” shouted Edouard. “Notary cut notary. I won’t
lose an hour. I’ll start at five; Commandant Raynal is an early riser
himself.”

Accordingly, at five he was on the road; Raynal’s quarters lay in the
direct line to his uncle’s place. He found the commandant at home, and
was well received. Raynal had observed his zeal, and liked his manners.
He gave him the week’s leave, and kept him to breakfast, and had his
horse well fed. At eight o’clock Edouard rode out of the premises in
high spirits. At the very gate he met a gaunt figure riding in on a
squab pony. It was Perrin the notary coming in hot haste to his friend
and employer, Commandant Raynal.




CHAPTER V.


After Edouard’s departure, Josephine de Beaurepaire was sad, and weighed
down with presentiments. She felt as soldiers sometimes feel who know
the enemy is undermining them; no danger on the surface; nothing that
can be seen, met, baffled, attacked, or evaded; in daily peril, all the
more horrible that it imitates perfect serenity, they await the fatal
match. She imparted her misgivings to Aubertin; but he assured her she
exaggerated the danger.

“We have a friend still more zealous and active than our enemy; believe
me, your depression is really caused by his absence; we all miss the
contact of that young heroic spirit; we are a body, and he its soul.”

Josephine was silent, for she said to herself, “Why should I dash their
spirits? they are so happy and confident.”

Edouard had animated Rose and Aubertin with his own courage, and had
even revived the baroness.

It had been agreed between him and Picard that the latter should
communicate with Dr. Aubertin direct, should anything fresh occur. And
on the third day after Edouard’s departure, Picard sent up a private
message: “Perrin has just sent me a line to say he will not trouble us,
as he is offered the money in another quarter.”

This was a heavy blow, and sent them all to bed more or less despondent.

The next day brought a long letter from Edouard to Rose, telling her he
had found his uncle crusty at first; but at last with a little patience,
and the co-operation of Martha, his uncle’s old servant, and his nurse,
the old boy had come round. They might look on the affair as all but
settled.

The contents of this letter were conveyed to the baroness. The house
brightened under it: the more so that there was some hope of their
successful champion returning in person next day. Meantime Perrin had
applied to Raynal for the immediate loan of a large sum of money on
excellent security. Raynal refused plump. Perrin rode away disconsolate.

But the next day he returned to the charge with another proposal: and
the nature of this second proposal we shall learn from events.

The day Edouard was expected opened deliciously. It was a balmy morning,
and tempted the sisters out before breakfast. They strolled on the
south terrace with their arms round each other’s waists, talking about
Edouard, and wondering whether they should really see him before night.
Rose owned she had missed him, and confessed for the first time she was
a proud and happy girl.

“May I tell him so?” asked Josephine.

“Not for all the world. Would you dare?”

Further discussion of that nice point was stopped by the baroness coming
out, leaning on Dr. Aubertin.

Then--how we young people of an unceremonious age should have
stared--the demoiselles de Beaurepaire, inasmuch as this was their
mother’s first appearance, lowered their fair heads at the same time
like young poplars bowing to the wind, and so waited reverently till she
had slightly lifted her hands, and said, “God bless you, my children!”

It was done in a moment on both sides, but full of grace and piety, and
the charm of ancient manners.

“How did our dear mother sleep?” inquired Josephine. Aubertin interposed
with a theory that she slept very well indeed if she took what he gave
her.

“Ay, IF,” suggested Rose, saucily.

“I slept,” said the baroness, “and I wish I had not for I dreamed an
ugly dream.” They all gathered round her, and she told her dream.

“I thought I was with you all in this garden. I was admiring the flowers
and the trees, and the birds were singing with all their might. Suddenly
a dark cloud came; it cleared almost directly; but flowers, trees, sky,
and birds were gone now, and I could see the chateau itself no more. It
means that I was dead. An ugly dream, my children, an ugly dream.”

“But only a dream, dear mother,” said Rose: then with a sweet, consoling
smile, “See, here is your terrace and your chateau.”

“And here are your daughters,” said Josephine; and they both came
and kissed her to put their existence out of doubt. “And here is your
Aesculapius,” said Aubertin. “And here is your Jacintha.”

“Breakfast, madame,” said Jacintha. “Breakfast, mesdemoiselles.
Breakfast, monsieur:” dropping each a distinct courtesy in turn.

“She has turned the conversation very agreeably,” said the baroness, and
went in leaning on her old friend.

But the sisters lagged behind and took several turns in silence. Rose
was the first to speak. “How superstitious of you!”

“I said nothing.”

“No; but you looked volumes at me while mamma was telling her dream. For
my part I feel sure love is stronger than hate; and we shall stay all
our days in this sweet place: and O Josey! am I not a happy girl that
it’s all owing to HIM!”

At this moment Jacintha came running towards them. They took it for a
summons to breakfast, and moved to meet her. But they soon saw she was
almost as white as her apron, and she came open-mouthed and wringing her
hands. “What shall I do? what shall I do? Oh, don’t let my poor mistress
know!”

They soon got from her that Dard had just come from the town, and
learned the chateau was sold, and the proprietor coming to take
possession this very day. The poor girls were stupefied by the blow.

If anything, Josephine felt it worst. “It is my doing,” she gasped, and
tottered fainting. Rose supported her: she shook it off by a violent
effort. “This is no time for weakness,” she cried, wildly; “come to the
Pleasaunce; there is water there. I love my mother. What will I not do
for her? I love my mother.”

Muttering thus wildly she made for the pond in the Pleasaunce. She had
no sooner turned the angle of the chateau than she started back with
a convulsive cry, and her momentary feebleness left her directly; she
crouched against the wall and griped the ancient corner-stone with her
tender hand till it powdered, and she spied with dilating eye into the
Pleasaunce, Rose and Jacintha panting behind her. Two men stood with
their backs turned to her looking at the oak-tree; one an officer in
full uniform, the other the human snake Perrin. Though the soldier’s
back was turned, his off-handed, peremptory manner told her he was
inspecting the place as its master.

“The baroness! the baroness!” cried Jacintha, with horror. They looked
round, and the baroness was at their very backs.

“What is it?” cried she, gayly.

“Nothing, mamma.”

“Let me see this nothing.”

They glanced at one another, and, idle as the attempt was, the habit
of sparing her prevailed, and they flung themselves between her and the
blow.

“Josephine is not well,” said Rose. “She wants to go in.” Both girls
faced the baroness.

“Jacintha,” said the baroness, “fetch Dr. Aubertin. There, I have sent
her away. So now tell me, why do you drive me back so? Something has
happened,” and she looked keenly from one to the other.

“O mamma! do not go that way: there are strangers in the Pleasaunce.”

“Let me see. So there are. Call Jacintha back that I may order these
people out of my premises.” Josephine implored her to be calm.

“Be calm when impertinent intruders come into my garden?”

“Mother, they are not intruders.”

“What do you mean?”

“They have a right to be in our Pleasaunce. They have bought the
chateau.”

“It is impossible. HE was to buy it for us--there is some mistake--what
man would kill a poor old woman like me? I will speak to this gentleman:
he wears a sword. Soldiers do not trample on women. Ah! that man.”

The notary, attracted by her voice, was coming towards her, a paper in
his hand.

Raynal coolly inspected the tree, and tapped it with his scabbard, and
left Perrin to do the dirty work. The notary took off his hat, and, with
a malignant affectation of respect, presented the baroness with a paper.

The poor old thing took it with a courtesy, the effect of habit, and
read it to her daughters as well as her emotion permitted, and the
language, which was as new to her as the dialect of Cat Island to
Columbus.

“Jean Raynal, domiciled by right, and lodging in fact at the Chateau
of Beaurepaire, acting by the pursuit and diligence of Master Perrin,
notary; I, Guillaume Le Gras, bailiff, give notice to Josephine Aglae
St. Croix de Beaurepaire, commonly called the Baroness de Beaurepaire,
having no known place of abode”--

“Oh!”

“But lodging wrongfully at the said Chateau of Beaurepaire, that she is
warned to decamp within twenty-four hours”--

“To decamp!”

“Failing which that she will be thereto enforced in the manner for that
case made and provided with the aid of all the officers and agents of
the public force.”

“Ah! no, messieurs, pray do not use force. I am frightened enough
already. I did not know I was doing anything wrong. I have been here
thirty years. But, since Beaurepaire is sold, I comprehend perfectly
that I must go. It is just. As you say, I am not in my own house. I will
go, gentlemen, I will go. Whither shall I go, my children? The house
where you were born to me is ours no longer. Excuse me, gentlemen--this
is nothing to you. Ah! sir, you have revenged yourself on two weak
women--may Heaven forgive you!”

The notary turned on his heel. The poor baroness, all whose pride the
iron law, with its iron gripe, had crushed into dismay and terror,
appealed to him. “O sir! send me from the house, but not from the soil
where my Henri is laid! is there not in all this domain a corner where
she who was its mistress may lie down and die? Where is the NEW BARON,
that I may ask this favor of him on my knees?”

She turned towards Raynal and seemed to be going towards him with
outstretched arms. But Rose checked her with fervor. “Mamma! do not
lower yourself. Ask nothing of these wretches. Let us lose all, but not
forget ourselves.”

The baroness had not her daughter’s spirit. Her very person tottered
under this blow. Josephine supported her, and the next moment Aubertin
came out and hastened to her side. Her head fell back; what little
strength she had failed her; she was half lifted, half led, into the
house.

Commandant Raynal was amazed at all this, and asked what the deuce was
the matter.

“Oh!” said the notary, “we are used to these little scenes in our
business.”

“But I am not,” replied the soldier. “You never told me there was to be
all this fuss.”

He then dismissed his friend rather abruptly and strode up and down the
Pleasaunce. He twisted his mustaches, muttered, and “pested,” and
was ill at ease. Accustomed to march gayly into a town, and see the
regiment, that was there before, marching gayly out, or vice versa, and
to strike tents twice a quarter at least, he was little prepared for
such a scene as this. True, he did not hear all the baroness’s words,
but more than one tone of sharp distress reached him where he stood, and
the action of the whole scene was so expressive, there was little need
of words. He saw the notice given; the dismay it caused, and the old
lady turn imploringly towards him with a speaking gesture, and above all
he saw her carried away, half fainting, her hands clasped, her
reverend face pale. He was not a man of quick sensibilities. He did not
thoroughly take the scene in at first: it grew upon him afterwards.

“Confound it,” thought he, “I am the proprietor. They all say so.
Instead of which I feel like a thief. Fancy her getting so fond of a
PLACE as all this.”

Presently it occurred to him that the shortness of the notice might
have much to do with her distress. “These notaries,” said he to himself,
“understand nothing save law: women have piles of baggage, and can’t
strike tents directly the order comes, as we can. Perhaps if I were to
give them twenty-four days instead of hours?--hum!”

With this the commandant fell into a brown study. Now each of us has his
attitude of brown study. One runs about the room like hyena in his den;
another stands stately with folded arms (this one seldom thinks to the
purpose); another sits cross-legged, brows lowered: another must put
his head into his hand, and so keep it up to thinking mark: another must
twiddle a bit of string, or a key; grant him this, he can hatch an epic.
This commandant must draw himself up very straight, and walk six paces
and back very slowly, till the problem was solved: I suspect he had done
a good bit of sentinel work in his time.

Now whilst he was guarding the old oak-tree, for all the world as if
it had been the gate of the Tuileries or the barracks, Josephine de
Beaurepaire came suddenly out from the house and crossed the Pleasaunce:
her hair was in disorder, her manner wild: she passed swiftly into the
park.

Raynal recognized her as one of the family; and after a moment’s
reflection followed her into the park with the good-natured intention of
offering her a month to clear out instead of a day.

But it was not so easy to catch her: she flew. He had to take his
scabbard in his left hand and fairly run after her. Before he could
catch her, she entered the little chapel. He came up and had his foot on
the very step to go in, when he was arrested by that he heard within.

Josephine had thrown herself on her knees and was praying aloud: praying
to the Virgin with sighs and sobs and all her soul: wrestling so in
prayer with a dead saint as by a strange perversity men cannot or will
not wrestle with Him, who alone can hear a million prayers at once from
a million different places,--can realize and be touched with a sense
of all man’s infirmities in a way no single saint with his partial
experience of them can realize and be touched by them; who unasked
suspended the laws of nature that had taken a stranger’s only son, and
she a widow; and wept at another great human sorrow, while the eyes of
all the great saints that stood around it and Him were dry.

Well, the soldier stood, his right foot on the step and his sword in
his left hand, transfixed: listening gravely to the agony of prayer the
innocent young creature poured forth within:--

“O Madonna! hear me: it is for my mother’s life. She will die--she will
die. You know she cannot live if she is taken away from her house and
from this holy place where she prays to you this many years. O Queen
of Heaven! put out your hand to us unfortunates! Virgin, hear a virgin:
mother, listen to a child who prays for her mother’s life! The doctor
says she will not live away from here. She is too old to wander over the
world. Let them drive us forth: we are young, but not her, mother, oh,
not her! Forgive the cruel men that do this thing!--they are like those
who crucified your Son--they know not what they are doing. But you,
Queen of Heaven, you know all; and, sweet mother, if you have kind
sentiments towards me, poor Josephine, ah! show them now: for you know
that it was I who insulted that wicked notary, and it is out of hatred
to me he has sold our beloved house to a hard stranger. Look down on me,
a child who loves her mother, yet will destroy her unless you pity me
and help me. Oh! what shall I say?--what shall I do? mercy! mercy! for
my poor mother, for me!”

Here her utterance was broken by sobs.

The soldier withdrew his foot quietly. Her words had knocked against
his very breast-bone. He marched slowly to and fro before the chapel,
upright as a dart, and stiff as a ramrod, and actually pale: for even
our nerves have their habits; a woman’s passionate grief shook him as a
cannon fired over his head could not.

Josephine little thought who was her sentinel. She came to the door
at last, and there he was marching backwards and forwards, upright and
stiff. She gave a faint scream and drew back with a shudder at the sight
of their persecutor. She even felt faintish at him, as women will in
such cases.

Not being very quick at interpreting emotion, Raynal noticed her alarm,
but not her repugnance; he saluted her with military precision by
touching his cap as only a soldier can, and said rather gently for him,
“A word with you, mademoiselle.”

She replied only by trembling.

“Don’t be frightened,” said Raynal, in a tone not very reassuring. “I
propose an armistice.”

“I am at your disposal, sir,” said Josephine, now assuming a calmness
that was belied by the long swell of her heaving bosom.

“Of course you look on me as an enemy.”

“How can I do otherwise, sir? yet perhaps I ought not. You did not know
us. You just wanted an estate, I suppose--and--oh!”

“Well, don’t cry; and let us come to the point, since I am a man of few
words.”

“If you please, sir. My mother may miss me.”

“Well, I was in position on your flank when the notary delivered his
fire. And I saw the old woman’s distress.”

“Ah, sir!”

“When you came flying out I followed to say a good word to you. I could
not catch you. I listened while you prayed to the Virgin. That was not a
soldier-like trick, you will say. I confess it.”

“It matters little, sir, and you heard nothing I blush for.”

“No! by St. Denis; quite the contrary. Well, to the point. Young lady,
you love your mother.”

“What has she on earth now but her children’s love?”

“Now look here, young lady, I had a mother; I loved her in my humdrum
way very dearly. She promised me faithfully not to die till I should be
a colonel; and she went and died before I was a commandant, even; just
before, too.”

“Then I pity you,” murmured Josephine; and her soft purple eye began to
dwell on him with less repugnance.

“Thank you for that word, my good young lady,” said Raynal. “Now, I
declare, you are the first that has said that word to me about my losing
the true friend, that nursed me on her knee, and pinched and pinched to
make a man of me. I should like to tell you about her and me.”

“I shall feel honored,” said Josephine, politely, but with considerable
restraint.

Then he told her all about how he had vexed her when he was a boy, and
gone for a soldier, though she was all for trade, and how he had
been the more anxious to see her enjoy his honors and success. “And,
mademoiselle,” said he, appealingly, “the day this epaulet was put on my
shoulder in Italy, she died in Paris. Ah! how could you have the heart
to do that, my old woman?”

The soldier’s mustache quivered, and he turned away brusquely, and
took several steps. Then he came back to Josephine, and to his infinite
surprise saw that her purple eyes were thick with tears. “What? you are
within an inch of crying for my mother, you who have your own trouble at
this hour.”

“Monsieur, our situations are so alike, I may well spare some little
sympathy for your misfortune.”

“Thank you, my good young lady. Well, then, to business; while you were
praying to the Virgin, I was saying a word or two for my part to her who
is no more.”

“Sir!”

“Oh! it was nothing beautiful like the things you said to the other.
Can I turn phrases? I saw her behind her little counter in the Rue
Quincampoix; for she is a woman of the people, is my mother. I saw
myself come to the other side of the counter, and I said, ‘Look here,
mother, here is the devil to pay about this new house. The old woman
talks of dying if we take her from her home, and the young one weeps
and prays to all the saints in paradise; what shall we do, eh?’ Then
I thought my old woman said to me, ‘Jean, you are a soldier, a sort of
vagabond; what do you want with a house in France? you who are always in
a tent in Italy or Austria, or who knows where. Have you the courage to
give honest folk so much pain for a caprice? Come now,’ says she, ‘the
lady is of my age, say you, and I can’t keep your fine house, because
God has willed it otherwise; so give her my place; so then you can fancy
it is me you have set down at your hearth: that will warm your heart up
a bit, you little scamp,’ said my old woman in her rough way. She was
not well-bred like you, mademoiselle. A woman of the people, nothing
more.”

“She was a woman of God’s own making, if she was like that,” cried
Josephine, the tears now running down her cheeks.

“Ah, that she was, she was. So between her and me it is settled--what
are you crying for NOW? why, you have won the day; the field is yours;
your mother and you remain; I decamp.” He whipped his scabbard up with
his left hand, and was going off without another word, if Josephine had
not stopped him.

“But, sir, what am I to think? what am I to hope? it is impossible that
in this short interview--and we must not forget what is due to you. You
have bought the estate.”

“True; well, we will talk over that, to-morrow; but being turned out of
the house, that was the bayonet thrust to the old lady. So you run in
and put her heart at rest about it. Tell her that she may live and die
in this house for Jean Raynal; and tell her about the old woman in the
Rue Quincampoix.”

“God bless you, Jean Raynal!” cried Josephine, clasping her hands.

“Are you going?” said he, peremptorily.

“Oh, yes!” and she darted towards the chateau.

But when she had taken three steps she paused, and seemed irresolute.
She turned, and in a moment she had glided to Raynal again and had taken
his hand before he could hinder her, and pressed two velvet lips on it,
and was away again, her cheeks scarlet at what she had done, and her wet
eyes beaming with joy. She skimmed the grass like a lapwing; you would
have taken her at this minute for Rose, or for Virgil’s Camilla; at the
gate she turned an instant and clasped her hands together, with such a
look, to show Raynal she blessed him again, then darted into the house.

“Aha, my lady,” said he, as he watched her fly, “behold you changed a
little since you came out.” He was soon on the high road marching
down to the town at a great rate, his sword clanking, and thus ran his
thoughts: “This does one good; you are right, my old woman. Your son’s
bosom feels as warm as toast. Long live the five-franc pieces! And they
pretend money cannot make a fellow happy. They lie; it is because they
do not know how to spend it.”

Meantime at the chateau, as still befalls in emergencies and trials,
the master spirit came out and took its real place. Rose was now the
mistress of Beaurepaire; she set Jacintha, and Dard, and the doctor,
to pack up everything of value in the house. “Do it this moment!” she
cried; “once that notary gets possession of the house, it may be too
late. Enough of folly and helplessness. We have fooled away house and
lands; our movables shall not follow them.”

The moment she had set the others to work, she wrote a single line to
Riviere to tell him the chateau and lands were sold, and would he come
to Beaurepaire at once? She ran with it herself to Bigot’s auberge, the
nearest post-office, and then back to comfort her mother.

The baroness was seated in her arm-chair, moaning and wringing her
hands, and Rose was nursing and soothing her, and bathing her temples
with her last drop of eau de Cologne, and trying in vain to put some of
her own courage into her, when in came Josephine radiant with happiness,
crying “Joy! joy! joy!” and told her strange tale, with this difference,
that she related her own share in it briefly and coldly, and was more
eloquent than I about the strange soldier’s goodness, and the interest
her mother had awakened in his heart. And she told about the old woman
in the Rue Quincampoix, her rugged phrases, and her noble, tender heart.
The baroness, deaf to Rose’s consolations, brightened up directly at
Josephine’s news, and at her glowing face, as she knelt pouring the good
news, and hope, and comfort, point blank into her. But Rose chilled them
both.

“It is a generous offer,” said, she, “but one we cannot accept. We
cannot live under so great an obligation. Is all the generosity to be on
the side of this Bonapartist? Are we noble in name only? What would our
father have said to such a proposal?”

Josephine hung her head. The baroness groaned.

“No, mother,” continued Rose; “let house and land go, but honor and true
nobility remain.”

“What shall I do? you are cruel to me, Rose.”

“Mamma,” cried the enthusiastic girl, “we need depend on no one.
Josephine and I have youth and spirit.”

“But no money.”

“We have plenty of jewels, and pictures, and movables. We can take a
farm.”

“A farm!” shrieked the baroness.

“Why, his uncle has a farm, and we have had recourse to him for help:
better a farmhouse than an almshouse, though that almshouse were a
palace instead of a chateau.”

Josephine winced and held up her hand deprecatingly. The baroness paled:
it was a terrible stroke of language to come from her daughter. She said
sternly, “There is no answer to that. We were born nobles, let us die
farmers: only permit me to die first.”

“Forgive me, mother,” said Rose, kneeling. “I was wrong; it is for me
to obey you, not to dictate. I speak no more.” And, after kissing her
mother and Josephine, she crept away, but she left her words sticking in
both their consciences.

“HIS uncle,” said the shrewd old lady. “She is no longer a child; and
she says his uncle. This makes me half suspect it is her that dear
boy--Josephine, tell me the truth, which of you is it?”

“Dear mother, who should it be? they are nearly of an age: and what man
would not love our sweet Rose, that had eyes or a heart?”

The baroness sighed deeply; and was silent. After awhile she said, “The
moment they have a lover, he detaches their hearts from their poor old
mother. She is no longer what my Josephine is to me.”

“Mamma, she is my superior. I see it more and more every day. She is
proud: she is just; she looks at both sides. As for me, I am too apt to
see only what will please those I love.”

“And that is the daughter for me,” cried the poor baroness, opening her
arms wide to her.

The next morning when they were at breakfast, in came Jacintha to say
the officer was in the dining-room and wanted to speak with the young
lady he talked to yesterday. Josephine rose and went to him. “Well,
mademoiselle,” said he gayly, “the old woman was right. Here I have just
got my orders to march: to leave France in a month. A pretty business
it would have been if I had turned your mother out. So you see there is
nothing to hinder you from living here.”

“In your house, sir?”

“Why not, pray?”

“Forgive us. But we feel that would be unjust to you, humiliating to us:
the poor are sometimes proud.”

“Of course they are,” said Raynal: “and I don’t want to offend your
pride. Confound the house: why did I go and buy it? It is no use to
me except to give pain to worthy people.” He then, after a moment’s
reflection, asked her if the matter could not be arranged by some third
party, a mutual friend. “Then again,” said he, “I don’t know any friend
of yours.”

“Yes, sir,” said Josephine; “we have one friend, who knows you, and
esteems you highly.”

She wanted to name Edouard; but she hesitated, and asked her conscience
if it was fair to name him: and while she blushed and hesitated, lo and
behold a rival referee hove in sight. Raynal saw him, suddenly opened a
window, and shouted, “Hallo come in here: you are wanted.”

Perrin had ridden up to complete the exodus of the De Beaurepaires, and
was strolling about inspecting the premises he had expelled them from.

Here was a pretty referee!

Josephine almost screamed--“What are you doing? that is our enemy, our
bitterest enemy. He has only sold you the estate to spite us, not for
the love of you. I had--we had--we mortified his vanity. It was not our
fault: he is a viper. Sir, pray, pray, pray be on your guard against his
counsels.”

These words spoken with rare fire and earnestness carried conviction:
but it was too late to recall the invitation. The notary entered the
room, and was going to bow obsequiously to Raynal, when he caught sight
of Josephine, and almost started. Raynal, after Josephine’s warning, was
a little at a loss how to make him available; and even that short delay
gave the notary’s one foible time to lead him into temptation. “Our
foibles are our manias.”

“So,” said he, “you have taken possession, commandant. These military
men are prompt, are they not, mademoiselle?”

“Do not address yourself to me, sir, I beg,” said Josephine quietly.

Perrin kept his self-command. “It is only as Commandant Raynal’s agent
I presume to address so distinguished a lady: in that character I must
inform you that whatever movables you have removed are yours: those we
find in the house on entering we keep.”

“Come, come, not so fast,” cried Raynal; “bother the chairs and tables!
that is not the point.”

“Commandant,” said the notary with dignity, “have I done anything to
merit this? have I served your interests so ill that you withdraw your
confidence from me?”

“No, no, my good fellow; but you exceed your powers. Just now I want you
to take orders, not give them.”

“That is only just,” said Perrin, “and I recall my hasty remark: excuse
the susceptibility of a professional man, who is honored with the esteem
of his clients; and favor me with your wishes.”

“All right,” said Raynal heartily. “Well, then--I want mademoiselle
and her family to stay here while I go to Egypt with the First Consul.
Mademoiselle makes difficulties; it offends her delicacy.”

“Comedy!” said the notary contemptuously.

“Though her mother’s life depends on her staying here.”

“Comedy!” said Perrin. Raynal frowned.

“Her pride (begging her pardon) is greater than her affection.”

“Farce!”

“I have pitched upon you to reconcile the two.”

“Then you have pitched upon the wrong man,” said Perrin bluntly. He
added obsequiously, “I am too much your friend. She has been talking you
over, no doubt; but you have a friend, an Ulysses, who is deaf to the
siren’s voice. I will be no party to such a transaction. I will not
co-operate to humbug my friend and rob him of his rights.”

If Josephine was inferior to the notary in petty sharpness, she was
his superior in the higher kinds of sagacity; and particularly in
instinctive perception of character. Her eye flashed with delight at the
line Perrin was now taking with Raynal. The latter speedily justified
her expectations: he just told Perrin to be off, and send him a more
accommodating notary.

“A more accommodating notary!” screamed Perrin, stung to madness by
this reproach. “There is not a more accommodating notary in Europe.
Ungrateful man! is this the return for all my zeal, my integrity, my
unselfishness? Is there another agent in the world who would have let
such a bargain as Beaurepaire fall into your hands? It serves me right
for deviating from the rules of business. Send me another agent--oh!”

The honest soldier was confused. The lawyer’s eloquence overpowered
him. He felt guilty. Josephine saw his simplicity, and made a cut with
a woman’s two-edged sword. “Sir,” said she coolly, “do you not see it is
an affair of money? This is his way of saying, Pay me handsomely for so
unusual a commission.”

“And I’ll pay him double,” cried Raynal, catching the idea; “don’t be
alarmed, I’ll pay you for it.”

“And my zeal, my devotion?”

“Put ‘em in figures.”

“And my prob--?”

“Add it up.”

“And my integ--?”

“Add them together: and don’t bother me.”

“I see! I see! my poor soldier. You are no match for a woman’s tongue.”

“Nor, for a notary’s. Go to h---, and send in your bill!” roared the
soldier in a fury. “Well, will you go?” and he marched at him.

The notary scuttled out, with something between a snarl and a squeak.

Josephine hid her face in her hands.

“What is the matter with you?” inquired Raynal. “Not crying again,
surely!”

“Me! I never cry--hardly. I hid my face because I could not help
laughing. You frightened me, sir,” said she: then very demurely, “I was
afraid you were going to beat him.”

“No, no; a good soldier never leathers a civilian if he can possibly
help it; it looks so bad; and before a lady!”

“Oh, I would have forgiven you, monsieur,” said Josephine benignly, and
something like a little sun danced in her eye.

“Now, mademoiselle, since my referee has proved a pig, it is your turn.
Choose you a mutual friend.”

Josephine hesitated. “Ours is so young. You know him very well. You
are doubtless the commandant of whom I once heard him speak with such
admiration: his name is Riviere, Edouard Riviere.”

“Know him? he is my best officer, out and out.” And without a moment’s
hesitation he took Edouard’s present address, and accepted that youthful
Daniel as their referee; then looked at his watch and marched off to his
public duties with sabre clanking at his heels.

The notary went home gnashing his teeth. His sweet revenge was turned to
wormwood this day. Raynal’s parting commissions rang in his ear; in his
bitter mood the want of logical sequence in the two orders disgusted
him.

So he inverted them.

He sent in a thundering bill the very next morning, but postponed the
other commission till his dying day.

As for Josephine, she came into the drawing-room beaming with love
and happiness, and after kissing both her mother and Rose with gentle
violence, she let them know the strange turn things had taken.

And she whispered to Rose, “Only think, YOUR Edouard to be OUR referee!”

Rose blushed and bent over her work; and wondered how Edouard would
discharge so grave an office.

The matter approached a climax; for, as the reader is aware, Edouard was
hourly expected at Beaurepaire.

He did not come; but it was not his fault. On receiving Rose’s letter he
declined to stay another hour at his uncle’s.

He flung himself on his horse; and, before he was well settled on the
stirrups, the animal shied violently at a wheelbarrow some fool had left
there; and threw Edouard on the stones of the courtyard. He jumped up in
a moment and laughed at Marthe’s terror; meantime a farm-servant caught
the nag and brought him back to his work.

But when Edouard went to put his hand on the saddle, he found it would
not obey him. “Wait a minute,” said he; “my arm is benumbed.”

“Let me see!” said the farmer, and examined the limb himself; “benumbed?
yes; and no wonder. Jacques, get on the brute and ride for the surgeon.”

“Are you mad, uncle?” cried Edouard. “I can’t spare my horse, and I want
no surgeon; it will be well directly.”

“It will be worse before it is better.”

“I don’t know what you mean, uncle; it is only numbed, ah! it hurts when
I rub it.”

“It is worse than numbed, boy; it is broken.”

“Broken? nonsense:” and he looked at it in piteous bewilderment: “how
can it be broken? it does not hurt except when I touch it.”

“It WILL hurt: I know all about it. I broke mine fifteen years ago: fell
off a haystack.”

“Oh, how unfortunate I am!” cried Edouard, piteously. “But I will go to
Beaurepaire all the same. I can have the thing mended there, as well as
here.”

“You will go to bed,” said the old man, quietly; “that is where YOU’LL
go.”

“I’ll go to blazes sooner,” yelled the young one.

The old man made a signal to his myrmidons, whom Marthe’s cries had
brought around, and four stout fellows took hold of Edouard by the legs
and the left shoulder and carried him up-stairs raging and kicking; and
deposited him on a bed.

Presently he began to feel faint, and so more reasonable. They cut his
coat off, and put him in a loose wrapper, and after considerable delay
the surgeon came, and set his arm skilfully, and behold this ardent
spirit caged. He chafed and fretted sadly. Fortitude was not his forte.

It was two days after his accident. He was lying on his back, environed
by slops and cursing his evil fate, and fretting his soul out of its
fleshly prison, when suddenly he heard a cheerful trombone saying three
words to Marthe, then came a clink-clank, and Marthe ushered into the
sickroom the Commandant Raynal. The sick man raised himself in bed, with
great surprise and joy.

“O commandant! this is kind to come and see your poor officer in
purgatory.”

“Ah,” cried Raynal, “you see I know what it is. I have been chained down
by the arm, and the leg, and all: it is deadly tiresome.”

“Tiresome! it is--it is--oh, dear commandant, Heaven bless you for
coming!”

“Ta! ta! ta! I am come on my own business.”

“All the better. I have nothing to do; that is what kills me. I’m eating
my own heart.”

“Cannibal! Well, my lad, since you are in that humor, cheer up, for I
bring you a job, and a tough one; it has puzzled me.”

“What is it, commandant? What is it?”

“Well, do you know a house and a family called Beaurepaire?”

“Do I know Beaurepaire?”

And the pale youth turned very red; and stared with awe at this wizard
of a commandant. He thought he was going to be called over the coals for
frequenting a disaffected family. “Well,” said Raynal, “I have been and
bought this Beaurepaire.”

Edouard uttered a loud exclamation. “It was YOU bought it! she never
told me that.”

“Yes,” said Raynal, “I am the culprit; and we have fixed on you to undo
my work without hurting their pride too much, poor souls; but let us
begin with the facts.”

Then Raynal told him my story after his fashion. Of course I shall not
go and print his version; you might like his concise way better than my
verbose; and I’m not here to hold up any man’s coat-tails. Short as he
made it, Edouard’s eyes were moist more than once; and at the end he
caught Raynal’s hand and kissed it. Then he asked time to reflect;
“for,” said he, “I must try and be just.”

“I’ll give you an hour,” said Raynal, with an air of grand munificence.
The only treasure he valued was time.

In less than an hour Edouard had solved the knot, to his entire
satisfaction; he even gave the commandant particular instructions for
carrying out his sovereign decree. Raynal received these orders from
his subordinate with that simplicity which formed part of his amazing
character, and rode home relieved of all responsibility in the matter.


COMMANDANT RAYNAL TO MADEMOISELLE DE BEAUREPAIRE.

Mademoiselle,--Before I could find time to write to our referee, news
came in that he had just broken his arm;--

“Oh! oh, dear! our poor Edouard!”

And if poor Edouard had seen the pale faces, and heard the faltering
accents, it would have reconciled him to his broken arm almost. This
hand-grenade the commandant had dropped so coolly among them, it was a
long while ere they could recover from it enough to read the rest of the
letter,--

So I rode over to him, and found him on his back, fretting for want of
something to do. I told him the whole story. He undertook the business.
I have received his instructions, and next week shall be at his quarters
to clear off his arrears of business, and make acquaintance with all
your family, if they permit.

RAYNAL.


As the latter part of this letter seemed to require a reply, the
baroness wrote a polite note, and Jacintha sent Dard to leave it for the
commandant at Riviere’s lodgings. But first they all sat down and wrote
kind and pitying and soothing letters to Edouard. Need I say these
letters fell upon him like balm?

They all inquired carelessly in their postscripts what he had decided
as their referee. He replied mysteriously that they would know that in
a week or two. Meantime, all he thought it prudent to tell them was that
he had endeavored to be just to both parties.

“Little solemn puppy,” said Rose, and was racked with curiosity.

Next week Raynal called on the baroness. She received him alone. They
talked about Madame Raynal. The next day he dined with the whole party,
and the commandant’s manners were the opposite of what the baroness
had inculcated. But she had a strong prejudice in his favor. Had her
feelings been the other way his brusquerie would have shocked her. It
amused her. If people’s hearts are with you, THAT for their heads!

He came every day for a week, chatted with the baroness, walked with the
young ladies; and when after work he came over in the evening, Rose
used to cross-examine him, and out came such descriptions of battles and
sieges, such heroism and such simplicity mixed, as made the evening pass
delightfully. On these occasions the young ladies fixed their glowing
eyes on him, and drank in his character as well as his narrative, in
which were fewer “I’s” than in anything of the sort you ever read or
heard.

At length Rose contrived to draw him aside, and, hiding her curiosity
under feigned nonchalance, asked him what the referee had decided. He
told her that was a secret for the present.

“Well, but,” said Rose, “not from me. Edouard and I have no secrets.”

“Come, that’s good,” said Raynal. “Why, you are the very one he warned
me against the most; said you were as curious as Mother Eve, and as
sharp as her needle.”

“Then he is a little scurrilous traitor,” cried Rose, turning very red.
“So that is how he talks of me behind my back, and calls me an angel to
my face; I’ll pay him for this. Do tell me, commandant; never mind what
HE says.”

“What! disobey orders?”

“Orders? to you from that boy!”

“Oh!” said Raynal, “for that matter, we soldiers are used to command one
moment, and obey the next.”

In a word, this military pedant was impracticable, and Rose gave him up
in disgust, and began to call up a sulky look when the other two sang
his praises. For the old lady pronounced him charming, and Josephine
said he was a man of crystal; never said a word he did not mean, and
she wished she was like him. But the baroness thought this was going a
little too far.

“No, thank you,” said she hastily; “he is a man, a thorough man. He
would make an intolerable woman. A fine life if one had a parcel of
women about, all blurting out their real minds every moment, and never
smoothing matters.”

“Mamma, what a horrid picture!” chuckled Rose.

She then proposed that at his next visit they should all three make an
earnest appeal to him to let them know what Edouard had decided.

But Josephine begged to be excused, feared it would be hardly delicate;
and said languidly that for her part she felt they were in good hands,
and prescribed patience. The baroness acquiesced, and poor Rose and her
curiosity were baffled on every side.

At last, one fine day, her torments were relieved without any further
exertion on her part. Jacintha bounced into the drawing-room with a
notice that the commandant wanted to speak to Josephine a minute out in
the Pleasaunce.

“How droll he is,” said Rose; “fancy sending in for a young lady like
that. Don’t go, Josephine; how, he would stare.”

“My dear, I no more dare disobey him than if I was one of his soldiers.”
 And she laid down her work, and rose quietly to do what she was bid.

“Well,” said Rose, superciliously, “go to your commanding officer. And,
O Josephine, if you are worth anything at all, do get out of him what
that Edouard has settled.”

Josephine kissed her, and promised to try. After the first salutation,
there was a certain hesitation about Raynal which Josephine had never
seen a trace of in him before; so, to put him at his ease, and at the
same time keep her promise to Rose, she asked timidly if their mutual
friend had been able to suggest anything.

“What! don’t you know that I have been acting all along upon his
instructions?” answered Raynal.

“No, indeed! and you have not told us what he advised.”

“Told you? why, of course not; they were secret instructions. I
have obeyed one set, and now I come to the other; and there is the
difficulty, being a kind of warfare I know nothing about.”

“It must be savage warfare, then,” suggested the lady politely.

“Not a bit of it. Now, who would have thought I was such a coward?”

Josephine was mystified; however, she made a shrewd guess. “Do you
fear a repulse from any one of us? Then, I suppose, you meditate some
extravagant act of generosity.”

“Not I.”

“Of delicacy, then.”

“Just the reverse. Confound the young dog! why is he not here to help
me?”

“But, after all,” suggested Josephine, “you have only to carry out his
instructions.”

“That is true! that is true! but when a fellow is a coward, a poltroon,
and all that sort of thing.”

This repeated assertion of cowardice on the part of the living Damascus
blade that stood bolt-upright before her, struck Josephine as so funny
that she laughed merrily, and bade him fancy it was only a fort he
was attacking instead of the terrible Josephine; whom none but heroes
feared, she assured him.

This encouragement, uttered in jest, was taken in earnest. The soldier
thanked her, and rallied visibly at the comparison. “All right,” said
he, “as you say, it is only a fort--so--mademoiselle!”

“Monsieur!”

“Hum! will you lend me your hand for a moment?”

“My hand! what for? there,” and she put it out an inch a minute. He took
it, and inspected it closely.

“A charming hand; the hand of a virtuous woman?”

“Yes,” said Josephine as cool as a cucumber, too sublimely and absurdly
innocent even to blush.

“Is it your own?”

“Sir!” She blushed at that, I can tell you.

“Because if it was, I would ask you to give it me. (I’ve fired the first
shot anyway.)”

Josephine whipped her hand off his palm, where it lay like cream spilt
on a trencher.

“Ah! I see; you are not free: you have a lover.”

“No, no!” cried Josephine in distress; “I love nobody but my mother and
sister: I never shall.”

“Your mother,” cried Raynal; “that reminds me; he told me to ask her;
by Jove, I think he told me to ask her first;” and Raynal up with his
scabbard and was making off.

Josephine begged him to do nothing of the kind.

“I can save you the trouble,” said she.

“Ah, but my instructions! my instructions!” cried the military pedant,
and ran off into the house, and left Josephine “planted there,” as they
say in France.

Raynal demanded a private interview of the baroness so significantly
and unceremoniously that Rose had no alternative but to retire, but not
without a glance of defiance at the bear. She ran straight, without her
bonnet, into the Pleasaunce to slake her curiosity at Josephine. That
young lady was walking pensively, but turned at sight of Rose, and the
sisters came together with a clash of tongues.

“O Rose! he has”--

“Oh!”

So nimbly does the female mind run on its little beaten tracks, that it
took no more than those syllables for even these innocent young women to
communicate that Raynal had popped.

Josephine apologized for this weakness in a hero. “It wasn’t his fault,”
 said she. “It is your Edouard who set him to do it.”

“My Edouard? Don’t talk in that horrid way: I have no Edouard. You said
‘no’ of course.”

“Something of the kind.”

“What, did you not say ‘no’ plump?”

“I did not say it brutally, dear.”

“Josephine, you frighten me. I know you can’t say ‘no’ to any one; and
if you don’t say ‘no’ plump to such a man as this, you might as well say
‘yes.’”

“Well, love,” said Josephine, “you know our mother will relieve me of
this; what a comfort to have a mother!”

They waited for Raynal’s departure, to go to the baroness. They had
to wait a long time. Moreover, when he did leave the chateau he came
straight into the Pleasaunce. At sight of him Rose seized Josephine
tight and bade her hold her tongue, as she could not say “no” plump
to any one. Josephine was far from raising any objection to the
arrangement.

“Monsieur,” said Rose, before he could get a word out, “even if she had
not declined, I could not consent.”

Raynal tapped his forehead reflectively, and drew forth from memory that
he had no instructions whatever to ask HER consent.

She colored high, but returned to the charge.

“Is her own consent to be dispensed with too? She declined the honor,
did she not?”

“Of course she did; but this was anticipated in my instructions. I am to
be sure and not take the first two or three refusals.”

“O Josephine, look at that insolent boy: he has found you out.”

“Insolent boy!” cried Raynal; “why, it is the referee of your own
choosing, and as well behaved a lad as ever I saw, and a zealous
officer.”

“My kind friends,” put in Josephine with a sweet languor, “I cannot let
you quarrel about a straw.”

“It is not about a straw,” said Raynal, “it is about you.”

“The distinction involves a compliment, sir,” said Josephine; then she
turned to Rose, “Is it possible you do not see Monsieur Raynal’s strange
proposal in its true light? and you so shrewd in general. He has no
personal feeling whatever in this eccentric proceeding: he wants to make
us all happy, especially my mother, without seeming to lay us under too
great an obligation. Surely good-nature was never carried so far before;
ha, ha! Monsieur, I will encumber you with my friendship forever, if you
permit me, but farther than that I will not abuse your generosity.”

“Now look here, mademoiselle,” began Raynal bluntly, “I did start with
a good motive at first, that there’s no denying. But, since I have been
every day in your company, and seen how good and kind you are to all
about you, I have turned selfish; and I say to myself, what a comfort
such a wife as you would be to a soldier! Why, only to have you to
write letters home to, would be worth half a fellow’s pay. Do you know
sometimes when I see the fellows writing their letters it gives me a
knock here to think I have no one at all to write to.”

Josephine sighed.

“So you see I am not so mighty disinterested. Now, mademoiselle, you
speak so charmingly, I can’t tell what you mean: can’t tell whether
you say ‘no’ because you could never like me, or whether it is out of
delicacy, and you only want pressing. So I say no more at present: it is
a standing offer. Take a day to consider. Take two if you like. I must
go to the barracks; good-day.”

“Oh! this must be put an end to at once,” said Rose.

“With all my heart,” replied Josephine; “but how?”

“Come to our mother, and settle that,” said the impetuous sister, and
nearly dragged the languid one into the drawing-room.

To their surprise they found the baroness walking up and down the room
with unusual alacrity for a person of her years. She no sooner caught
sight of Josephine than she threw her arms open to her with joyful
vivacity, and kissed her warmly. “My love, you have saved us. I am a
happy old woman. If I had all France to pick from I could not have found
a man so worthy of my Josephine. He is brave, he is handsome, he is
young, he is a rising man, he is a good son, and good sons make good
husbands--and--I shall die at Beaurepaire, shall I not, Madame the
Commandante?”

Josephine held her mother round the neck, but never spoke. After a
silence she held her tighter, and cried a little.

“What is it?” asked the baroness confidentially of Rose, but without
showing any very profound concern.

“Mamma! mamma! she does not love him.”

“Love him? She would be no daughter of mine if she loved a man at sight.
A modest woman loves her husband only.”

“But she scarcely knows Monsieur Raynal.”

“She knows more of him than I knew of your father when I married him.
She knows his virtues and appreciates them. I have heard her, have
I not, love? Esteem soon ripens into love when they are once fairly
married.”

“Mother, does her silence then tell you nothing? Her tears--are they
nothing to you?”

“Silly child! These are tears that do not scald. The sweet soul weeps
because she now for the first time sees she will have to leave her
mother. Alas! my eldest, it is inevitable. Mothers are not immortal.
While they are here it is their duty to choose good husbands for their
daughters. My youngest, I believe, has chosen for herself--like the
nation. But for my eldest I choose. We shall see which chooses the best.
Meantime we stay at Beaurepaire, thanks to my treasure here.”

“Josephine! Josephine! you don’t say one word,” cried Rose in dismay.

“What CAN I say? I love my mother and I love you. You draw me different
ways. I want you to be both happy.”

“Then if you will not speak out I must. Mother, do not deceive yourself:
it is duty alone that keeps her silent: this match is odious to her.”

“Then we are ruined. Josephine, is this match odious to you?”

“Not exactly odious: but I am very, very indifferent.”

“There!” cried Rose triumphantly.

“There!” cried the baroness in the same breath, triumphantly. “She
esteems his character; but his person is indifferent to her: in other
words, she is a modest girl, and my daughter; and let me tell you, Rose,
that but for the misfortunes of our house, both my daughters would be
married as I was, without knowing half as much of their husbands as
Josephine knows of this brave, honest, generous, filial gentleman.”

“Well, then, since she will not speak out, I will. Pity me: I love her
so. If this stranger, whom she does not love, takes her away from us, he
will kill me. I shall die; oh!”

Josephine left her mother and went to console Rose.

The baroness lost her temper at this last stroke of opposition. “Now
the truth comes out, Rose; this is selfishness. Do not deceive
YOURself--selfishness!”

“Mamma!”

“You are only waiting to leave me yourself. Yet your eldest sister,
forsooth, must be kept here for you,--till then.” She added more gently,
“Let me advise you to retire to your own room, and examine your heart
fairly. You will find there is a strong dash of egoism in all this.”

“If I do”--

“You will retract your opposition.”

“My heart won’t let me; but I will despise myself, and be silent.”

And the young lady, who had dried her eyes the moment she was accused
of selfishness, walked, head erect, from the room. Josephine cast a
deprecating glance at her mother. “Yes, my angel!” said the latter, “I
was harsh. But we are no longer of one mind, and I suppose never shall
be again.”

“Oh, yes, we shall. Be patient! Mother--you shall not leave
Beaurepaire.”

The baroness colored faintly at these four last words of her daughter,
and hung her head.

Josephine saw that, and darted to her and covered her with kisses.

That day the doctor scolded them both. “You have put your mother into
a high fever,” said he; “here’s a pulse; I do wish you would be more
considerate.”

The commandant did not come to dinner as usual. The evening passed
heavily; their hearts were full of uncertainty.

“We miss our merry, spirited companion,” said the baroness with a grim
look at Rose. Both young ladies assented with ludicrous eagerness.

That night Rose came and slept with Josephine, and more than once she
awoke with a start and seized Josephine convulsively and held her tight.

Accused of egoism! at first her whole nature rose in arms against the
charge: but, after a while, coming as it did from so revered a person,
it forced her to serious self-examination. The poor girl said to
herself, “Mamma is a shrewd woman. Am I after all deceiving myself?
Would she be happy, and am I standing in the way?” In the morning she
begged her sister to walk with her in the park, so that they might be
safe from interruption.

There, she said sadly, she could not understand her own sister. “Why are
you so calm and cold, while am I in tortures of anxiety? Have you made
some resolve and not confided it to your Rose?”

“No, love,” was the reply; “I am scarce capable of a resolution; I am a
mere thing that drifts.”

“Let me put it in other words, then. How will this end?”

“I hardly know.”

“Do you mean to marry Monsieur Raynal, then? answer me that.”

“No; but I should not wonder if he were to marry ME.”

“But you said ‘no.’”

“Yes, I said ‘no’ once.”

“And don’t you mean to say it again, and again, and again, till kingdom
come?”

“What is the use? you heard him say he would not desist any the
more, and I care too little about the matter to go on persisting, and
persisting, and persisting.”

“Why not, if he goes on pestering, and pestering, and pestering?”

“Ah, he is like you, all energy, at all hours; but I have so little
where my heart is unconcerned: he seems, too, to have a wish! I have
none either way, and my conscience says ‘marry him!’”

“Your conscience say marry one man when you love another?”

“Heaven forbid! Rose, I love no one: I HAVE loved; but now my heart is
dead and silent; only my conscience says, ‘You are the cause of all your
mother’s trouble; you are the cause that Beaurepaire was sold. Now you
can repair that mischief, and at the same time make a brave man happy,
our benefactor happy.’ It is a great temptation: I hardly know why I
said ‘no’ at all; surprise, perhaps--or to please you, pretty one.”

Rose groaned: “Are you then worth so little that you would throw
yourself away on a man who does not love you, nor want you, and is quite
as happy single?”

“No; not happy; he is only stout-hearted and good, and therefore
content; and he is a character that it would be easy--in short, I feel
my power here: I could make that man happy; he has nobody to write to
even, when he is away--poor fellow!”

“I shall lose all patience,” cried Rose; “you are at your old trick,
thinking of everybody but yourself: I let you do it in trifles, but I
love you too well to permit it when the happiness of your whole life is
at stake. I must be satisfied on one point, or else this marriage shall
never take place: just answer me this; if Camille Dujardin stood on one
side, and Monsieur Raynal on the other, and both asked your hand, which
would you take?”

“That will never be. Whose? Not his whom I despise. Esteem might ripen
into love, but what must contempt end in?”

This reply gave Rose great satisfaction. To exhaust all awkward
contingencies, she said, “One question more, and I have done. Suppose
Camille should turn out--be not quite--what shall I say--inexcusable?”

At this unlucky gush, Josephine turned pale, then red, then pale again,
and cried eagerly, “Then all the world should not part us. Why torture
me with such a question? Ah! you have heard something.” And in a moment
the lava of passion burst wildly through its thin sheet of ice. “I was
blind. This is why you would save me from this unnatural marriage.
You are breaking the good news to me by degrees. There is no need.
Quick--quick--let me have it. I have waited three years; I am sick of
waiting. Why don’t you speak? Why don’t you tell me? Then I will tell
YOU. He is alive--he is well--he is coming. It was not he those soldiers
saw; they were so far off. How could they tell? They saw a uniform but
not a face. Perhaps he has been a prisoner, and so could not write;
could not come: but he is coming now. Why do you groan? why do you turn
pale? ah! I see; I have once more deceived myself. I was mad. He I love
is still a traitor to France and me, and I am wretched forever. Oh! that
I were dead! oh! that I were dead! No; don’t speak to me: never mind me;
this madness will pass as it has before, and leave me a dead thing
among the living. Ah! sister, why did you wake me from my dream? I was
drifting so calmly, so peacefully, so dead, and painless, drifting over
the dead sea of the heart towards the living waters of gratitude and
duty. I was going to make more than one worthy soul happy; and seeing
them happy, I should have been content and useful--what am I now?--and
comforted other hearts, and died joyful--and young. For God is good; he
releases the meek and patient from their burdens.”

With this came a flood of tears; and she leaned against a bough with her
forehead on her arm, bowed like a wounded lily.

“Accursed be that man’s nam

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