"Your eyes are red, yet your little face is full of joy.There, you smile.""I can't help that; I am so happy."
"I am glad of it.Are you coming to bed?""Not yet.I invite you to take a little walk with me first.Come!"and she led the way slowly, looking back with infinite archness and tenderness.
"You almost frighten me," said Josephine; "it is not like you to be all joy when I am sad.Three whole weeks more!""That is it.Why are you sad? because the doctor would not let you go to Frejus.And why am I not sad? because I had already thought of a way to let you see Edouard without going so far.""Rose! O Rose! O Rose!"
"This way--come!" and she smiled and beckoned with her finger, while Josephine followed like one under a spell, her bosom heaving, her eye glancing on every side, hoping some strange joy, yet scarce daring to hope.
Rose drew back the screen, and there was a sweet little berceau that had once been Josephine's own, and in it, sunk deep in snow-white lawn, was a sleeping child, that lay there looking as a rose might look could it fall upon new-fallen snow.
At sight of it Josephine uttered a little cry, not loud but deep--ay, a cry to bring tears into the eye of the hearer, and she stood trembling from head to foot, her hands clasped, and her eye fascinated and fixed on the cradle.
"My child under this roof! What have you done?" but her eye, fascinated and fixed, never left the cradle.
"I saw you languishing, dying, for want of him.""Oh, if anybody should come?" But her eye never stirred an inch from the cradle.
"No, no, no! the door is locked.Jacintha watches below; there is no dan-- Ah, oh, poor sister!"For, as Rose was speaking, the young mother sprang silently upon her child.You would have thought she was going to kill him; her head reared itself again and again like a crested snake's, and again and again and again and again plunged down upon the child, and she kissed his little body from head to foot with soft violence, and murmured, through her streaming tears, "My child! my darling! my angel! oh, my poor boy! my child! my child!"I will ask my female readers of every degree to tell their brothers and husbands all the young noble did: how she sat on the floor, and had her child on her bosom; how she smiled over it through her tears; how she purred over it; how she, the stately one, lisped and prattled over it; and how life came pouring into her heart from it.
Before she had had it in her arms five minutes, her pale cheek was as red as a rose, and her eyes brighter than diamonds.
"Bless you, Rose! bless you! bless you! in one moment you have made me forget all I ever suffered in my life.""There is a cold draught," cried she presently, with maternal anxiety; "close the panel, Rose.""No, dear; or I could not call to Jacintha, or she to me; but I will shift the screen round between him and the draught.There, now, come to his aunt--a darling!"Then Rose sat on the floor too, and Josephine put her boy on aunt's lap, and took a distant view of him.But she could not bear so vast a separation long.She must have him to her bosom again.
Presently my lord, finding himself hugged, opened his eyes, and, as a natural consequence, his mouth.
"Oh, that will never do," cried Rose, and they put him back in the cradle with all expedition, and began to rock it.Young master was not to be altogether appeased even by that.So Rose began singing an old-fashioned Breton chant or lullaby.
