France -- History -- Wars of the Vendée, 1793-1832 -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction
He became moody, sad, and disconsolate: and as Josephine shunned him, so
he avoided all the others, and wandered for hours by himself, perplexed
and miserable. After awhile, he became conscious that he was under a
sort of surveillance. Rose de Beaurepaire, who had been so kind to him
when he was confined to his own room, but had taken little notice of him
since he came down, now resumed her care of him, and evidently made it
her business to keep up his heart. She used to meet him out walking in
a mysterious way, and in short, be always falling in with him and trying
to cheer him up: with tolerable success.
Such was the state of affairs when the party was swelled and matters
complicated by the arrival of one we have lost sight of.
Edouard Riviere retarded his cure by an impatient spirit: but he got
well at last, and his uncle drove him in the cabriolet to his own
quarters. The news of the house had been told him by letter, but, of
course, in so vague and general a way that, thinking he knew all, in
reality he knew nothing.
Josephine had married Raynal. The marriage was sudden, but no doubt
there was an attachment: he had some reason to believe in sudden
attachments. Colonel Dujardin, an old acquaintance, had come back
to France wounded, and the good doctor had undertaken his cure: this
incident appeared neither strange nor any way important. What affected
him most deeply was the death of Raynal, his personal friend and patron.
But when his tyrants, as he called the surgeon and his uncle, gave him
leave to go home, all feelings were overpowered by his great joy at the
prospect of seeing Rose. He walked over to Beaurepaire, his arm in a
sling, his heart beating. He was coming to receive the reward of all he
had done, and all he had attempted. “I will surprise them,” thought he.
“I will see her face when I come in at the door: oh, happy hour! this
pays for all.” He entered the house without announcing himself; he went
softly up to the saloon; to his great disappointment he found no one
but the baroness: she received him kindly, but not with the warmth he
expected. She was absorbed in her new grief. He asked timidly after her
daughters. “Madame Raynal bears up, for the sake of others. You will
not, however, see her: she keeps her room. My daughter Rose is taking
a walk, I believe.” After some polite inquiries, and sympathy with his
accident, the baroness retired to indulge her grief, and Edouard thus
liberated ran in search of his beloved.
He met her at the gate of the Pleasaunce, but not alone. She was walking
with an officer, a handsome, commanding, haughty, brilliant officer. She
was walking by his side, talking earnestly to him.
An arrow of ice shot through young Riviere; and then came a feeling of
death at his heart, a new symptom in his young life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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