she made no reply, thinking to herself:
“How often I shall repeat that name!”
When the feast was over, the courtyard was given up to the sailors, and the others went over to the other side of the château. The baroness began to take her exercise, leaning on the arm of the baron and accompanied by the two priests. Jeanne and Julien went toward the wood and walked along one of the mossy paths. Suddenly seizing her hands, the vicomte said:
“Tell me, will you be my wife?”
She lowered her head, and as he stammered: “Answer me, I implore you!” she raised her eyes to his timidly, and he read his answer there.
French
IV
The baron, one morning, entered Jeanne’s room before she was up, and sitting down at the foot of her bed, said:
“M. le Vicomte de Lamare has asked us for your hand in marriage.”
She wanted to hide her face under the sheets.
Her father continued:
“We have postponed our answer for the present.”
She gasped, choking with emotion. At the end of a minute the baron, smiling, added:
“We did not wish to do anything without consulting you. Your mother and I are not opposed to this marriage, but we would not seek to influence you. You are much richer than he is; but, when it is a question of the happiness of a life, one should not think too much about money. He has no relations left. If you marry him, then, it would be as if a son should come into our family; if it were anyone else, it would be you, our daughter, who would go among strangers. The young fellow pleases us. Would he please you?”
She stammered, blushing up to the roots of her hair:
“I am willing, papa.”
And the father, looking into her eyes and still smiling, murmured:
“I half suspected it, young lady.”
She lived till evening in a condition of exhilaration, not knowing what she was doing, mechanically thinking of one thing by mistake for another, and with a feeling of weariness, although she had not walked at all.
Toward six o’clock, as she was sitting with her mother under the plane tree, the vicomte appeared.
Jeanne’s heart began to throb wildly. The young man approached them apparently without any emotion. When he was close beside them, he took the baroness’ hand and kissed her fingers, then raising to his lips the trembling hand of the young girl, he imprinted upon it a long, tender and grateful kiss.
And the radiant season of betrothal commenced. They would chat together alone in the corner of the parlor, or else seated on the moss at the end of the wood overlooking the plain. Sometimes they walked in Little Mother’s Avenue; he, talking of the future, she, with her eyes cast down, looking at the dusty footprints of the baroness.
Once the matter was decided, they desired to waste no time in preliminaries. It was, therefore, decided that the ceremony should take place in six weeks, on the fifteenth of August; and that the bride and groom should set out immediately on their wedding journey. Jeanne, on being consulted as to which country she would like to visit, decided on Corsica where they could be more alone than in the cities of Italy.
They awaited the moment appointed for their marriage without too great impatience, but enfolded, lost in a delicious affection, expressed in the exquisite charm of insignificant caresses, pressure of hands, long passionate glances in which their souls seemed to blend; and, vaguely tortured by an uncertain longing for they knew not what.
They decided to invite no one to the wedding except Aunt Lison, the baron’s sister, who boarded in a convent at Versailles. After the death of their father, the baroness wished to keep her sister with her. But the old maid, possessed by the idea that she was in every one’s way, was useless, and a nuisance, retired into one of those religious houses that rent apartments to people that live a sad and lonely existence. She came from time to time to pass a month or two with her family.
She was a little woman of few words, who always kept in the background, appeared only at mealtimes, and then retired to her room where she remained shut in.
She looked like a kind old lady, though she was only forty-two, and had a sad, gentle expression. She was never made much of by her family as a child, being neither pretty nor boisterous, she was never petted, and she would stay quietly and gently in a corner. She had been neglected ever since. As a young girl nobody paid any attention to her. She was something like a shadow, or a familiar object, a living piece of furniture that one is accustomed to see every day, but about which one does not trouble oneself.
Her sister, from long habit, looked upon her as a failure, an altogether insignificant being. They treated her with careless familiarity which concealed a sort of contemptuous kindness. She called herself Lise, and seemed embarrassed at this frivolous youthful name. When they saw that she probably would not marry, they changed it from Lise to Lison, and since Jeanne’s birth, she had become “Aunt Lison,” a poor relation, very neat, frightfully timid, even with her sister and her brother-in-law, who loved her, but with an uncertain affection verging on indifference, with an unconscious compassion and a natural benevolence.
Sometimes, when the baroness talked of far away things that happened in her youth, she would say, in order to fix a date: “It was the time that Lison had that attack.”
They never said more than that; and this “attack” remained shrouded, as in a mist.
One evening, Lise, who was then twenty, had thrown herself into the water, no one knew why. Nothing in her life, her manner, gave any intimation of this seizure. They fished her out half dead, and her parents, raising their hands in horror, instead of seeking the mysterious cause of this action, had contented themselves with calling it “that attack,” as if they were talking of the accident that happened to the horse “Coco,” who had broken his leg a short time before in a ditch, and whom they had been obliged to kill.
From that time Lise, presently Lison, was considered feeble-minded. The gentle contempt which she inspired in her relations gradually made its way into the minds of all those who surrounded her. Little Jeanne herself, with the natural instinct of children, took no notice of her, never went up to kiss her goodnight, never went into her room. Good Rosalie, alone, who gave the room all the necessary attention, seemed to know where it was situated.
When Aunt Lison entered the diningroom for breakfast, the little one would go up to her from habit and hold up her forehead to be kissed; that was all.
If anyone wished to speak to her, they sent a servant to call her, and if she was not there, they did not bother about her, never thought of her, never thought of troubling themselves so much as to say: “Why, I have not seen Aunt Lison this morning!”
When they said “Aunt Lison,” these two words awakened no feeling of affection in anyone’s mind. It was as if one had said: “The coffee pot, or the sugar bowl.”
She
