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.