Then followed a conversation, to detail which might anticipate our story; suffice it to say, that Rose, coming into the room rather suddenly, found her sister weeping on Jacintha’s bosom, and Jacintha crying and sobbing over her.
She stood and stared in utter amazement.
Dr. Aubertin, on his arrival, was agreeably surprised at Madame Raynal’s appearance. He inquired after her appetite.
“Oh, as to her appetite,” cried the baroness, “that is immense.”
“Indeed!”
“It was,” explained Josephine, “just when I began to get better, but now it is as much as usual.” This answer had been arranged beforehand by Jacintha. She added, “The fact is, we wanted to see you, doctor, and my ridiculous ailments were a good excuse for tearing you from Paris.”—“And now we have succeeded,” said Rose, “let us throw off the mask, and talk of other things; above all, of Paris, and your eclat.”
“For all that,” persisted the baroness, “she was ill, when I first wrote, and very ill too.”
“Madame Raynal,” said the doctor solemnly, “your conduct has been irregular; once ill, and your illness announced to your medical adviser, etiquette forbade you to get well but by his prescriptions. Since, then, you have shown yourself unfit to conduct a malady, it becomes my painful duty to forbid you henceforth ever to be ill at all, without my permission first obtained in writing.”
This badinage was greatly relished by Rose, but not at all by the baroness, who was as humorless as a swan.
He stayed a month at Beaurepaire, then off to Paris again: and being now a rich man, and not too old to enjoy innocent pleasures, he got a habit of running backwards and forwards between the two places, spending a month or so at each alternately. So the days rolled on. Josephine fell into a state that almost defies description; her heart was full of deadly wounds, yet it seemed, by some mysterious, half-healing balm, to throb and ache, but bleed no more. Beams of strange, unreasonable complacency would shoot across her; the next moment reflection would come, she would droop her head, and sigh piteously. Then all would merge in a wild terror of detection. She seemed on the borders of a river of bliss, new, divine, and inexhaustible: and on the other bank mocking malignant fiends dared her to enter that heavenly stream. The past to her was full of regrets; the future full of terrors, and empty of hope. Yet she did not, could not succumb. Instead of the listlessness and languor of a few months back, she had now more energy than ever; at times it mounted to irritation. An activity possessed her: it broke out in many feminine ways. Among the rest she was seized with what we men call a cacoethes of the needle: “a raging desire” for work. Her fingers itched for work. She was at it all day. As devotees retire to pray, so she to stitch. On a wet day she would often slip into the kitchen, and ply the needle beside Jacintha: on a dry day she would hide in the old oak-tree, and sit like a mouse, and ply the tools of her craft, and make things of no mortal use to man or woman; and she tried little fringes of muslin upon her white hand, and held it up in front of her, and smiled, and then moaned. It was winter, and Rose used sometimes to bring her out a thick shawl, as she sat in the old oak-tree stitching, but Josephine nearly always declined it. SHE WAS NEARLY IMPERVIOUS TO COLD.