"How can I forget it if you come reminding me?""Dear Rose, now don't be so unkind, so cruel--I have not come back to tease you, sweet one.I come to know what I can do to please you; to make you love me again?" and he was about to kneel graciously on one knee.
"I'll tell you.Don't come near me for a month."Edouard started up, white as ashes with mortification and wounded love.
"This is how you treat me for humbling myself, when it is you that ought to ask forgiveness.""Why should I ask what I don't care about?""What DO you care about?--except that sister of yours? You have no heart.And on this cold-blooded creature I have wasted a love an empress might have been proud of inspiring.I pray Heaven some man may sport with your affections, you heartless creature, as you have played with mine, and make you suffer what I suffer now!"And with a burst of inarticulate grief and rage he flung out of the room.
Rose sank trembling on the sofa a little while: then with a mighty effort rose and went to comfort her sister.
Edouard came no more to Beaurepaire.
There is an old French proverb, and a wise one, "Rien n'est certain que l'imprevu;" it means you can make sure of nothing but this, that matters will not turn as you feel sure they will.And, even for this reason, you, who are thinking of suicide because trade is declining, speculation failing, bankruptcy impending, or your life going to be blighted forever by unrequited love--DON'T DO IT.
Whether you are English, American, French, or German, listen to a man that knows what is what, and DON'T DO IT.I tell you none of those horrors, when they really come, will affect you as you fancy they will.The joys we expect are not a quarter so bright, nor the troubles half so dark as we think they will be.Bankruptcy coming is one thing, come is quite another: and no heart or life was ever really blighted at twenty years of age.The love-sick girls that are picked out of the canal alive, all, without exception, marry another man, have brats, and get to screech with laughter when they think of sweetheart No.1, generally a blockhead, or else a blackguard, whom they were fools enough to wet their clothes for, let alone kill their souls.This happens INVARIABLY.The love-sick girls that are picked out of the canal dead have fled from a year's misery to eternal pain, from grief that time never failed to cure, to anguish incurable.In this world "Rien n'est certain que l'imprevu."Edouard and Rose were tender lovers, at a distance.How much happier and more loving they thought they should be beneath the same roof.They came together: their prominent faults of character rubbed: the secret that was in the house did its work: and altogether, they quarrelled.L'imprevu.
Dard had been saying to Jacintha for ever so long, "When granny dies, I will marry you."Granny died.Dard took possession of her little property.Up came a glittering official, and turned him out; he was not her heir.
Perrin, the notary, was.He had bought the inheritance of her two sons, long since dead.
Dard had not only looked on the cottage and cow, as his, but had spoken of them as such for years.The disappointment and the irony of comrades ate into him.
"I will leave this cursed place," said he.
Josephine instantly sent for him to Beaurepaire.He came, and was factotum with the novelty of a fixed salary.Jacintha accommodated him with a new little odd job or two.She set him to dance on the oak floors with a brush fastened to his right foot; and, after a rehearsal or two, she made him wait at table.Didn't he bang the things about: and when he brought a lady a dish, and she did not instantly attend, he gave her elbow a poke to attract attention:
then she squeaked; and he grinned at her double absurdity in minding a touch, and not minding the real business of the table.
But his wrongs rankled in him.He vented antique phrases such as, "I want a change;" "This village is the last place the Almighty made," etc.
Then he was attacked with a moral disease: affected the company of soldiers.He spent his weekly salary carousing with the military, a class of men so brilliant that they are not expected to pay for their share of the drink; they contribute the anecdotes and the familiar appeals to Heaven: and is not that enough?
Present at many recitals, the heroes of which lost nothing by being their own historians, Dard imbibed a taste for military adventure.
His very talk, which used to be so homely, began now to be tinselled with big swelling words of vanity imported from the army.I need hardly say these bombastical phrases did not elevate his general dialect: they lay fearfully distinct upon the surface, "like lumps of marl upon a barren soil, encumbering the ground they could not fertilize."Jacintha took leave to remind him of an incident connected with warfare--wounds.
