White Lies Part 17

"Oh!" said Raynal, "for that matter, we soldiers are used to command one moment, and obey the next."

In a word, this military pedant was impracticable, and Rose gave him up in disgust, and began to call up a sulky look when the other two sang his praises. For the old lady p.r.o.nounced him charming, and Josephine said he was a man of crystal; never said a word he did not mean, and she wished she was like him. But the baroness thought this was going a little too far.

"No, thank you," said she hastily; "he is a man, a thorough man. He would make an intolerable woman. A fine life if one had a parcel of women about, all blurting out their real minds every moment, and never smoothing matters."

"Mamma, what a horrid picture!" chuckled Rose.

She then proposed that at his next visit they should all three make an earnest appeal to him to let them know what Edouard had decided.

But Josephine begged to be excused, feared it would be hardly delicate; and said languidly that for her part she felt they were in good hands, and prescribed patience. The baroness acquiesced, and poor Rose and her curiosity were baffled on every side.

At last, one fine day, her torments were relieved without any further exertion on her part. Jacintha bounced into the drawing-room with a notice that the commandant wanted to speak to Josephine a minute out in the Pleasaunce.

"How droll he is," said Rose; "fancy sending in for a young lady like that. Don't go, Josephine; how, he would stare."

"My dear, I no more dare disobey him than if I was one of his soldiers."

And she laid down her work, and rose quietly to do what she was bid.

"Well," said Rose, superciliously, "go to your commanding officer. And, O Josephine, if you are worth anything at all, do get out of him what that Edouard has settled."

Josephine kissed her, and promised to try. After the first salutation, there was a certain hesitation about Raynal which Josephine had never seen a trace of in him before; so, to put him at his ease, and at the same time keep her promise to Rose, she asked timidly if their mutual friend had been able to suggest anything.

"What! don't you know that I have been acting all along upon his instructions?" answered Raynal.

"No, indeed! and you have not told us what he advised."

"Told you? why, of course not; they were secret instructions. I have obeyed one set, and now I come to the other; and there is the difficulty, being a kind of warfare I know nothing about."

"It must be savage warfare, then," suggested the lady politely.

"Not a bit of it. Now, who would have thought I was such a coward?"

Josephine was mystified; however, she made a shrewd guess. "Do you fear a repulse from any one of us? Then, I suppose, you meditate some extravagant act of generosity."

"Not I."

"Of delicacy, then."

"Just the reverse. Confound the young dog! why is he not here to help me?"

"But, after all," suggested Josephine, "you have only to carry out his instructions."

"That is true! that is true! but when a fellow is a coward, a poltroon, and all that sort of thing."

This repeated a.s.sertion of cowardice on the part of the living Damascus blade that stood bolt-upright before her, struck Josephine as so funny that she laughed merrily, and bade him fancy it was only a fort he was attacking instead of the terrible Josephine; whom none but heroes feared, she a.s.sured him.

This encouragement, uttered in jest, was taken in earnest. The soldier thanked her, and rallied visibly at the comparison. "All right," said he, "as you say, it is only a fort--so--mademoiselle!"

"Monsieur!"

"Hum! will you lend me your hand for a moment?"

"My hand! what for? there," and she put it out an inch a minute. He took it, and inspected it closely.

"A charming hand; the hand of a virtuous woman?"

"Yes," said Josephine as cool as a cuc.u.mber, too sublimely and absurdly innocent even to blush.

"Is it your own?"

"Sir!" She blushed at that, I can tell you.

"Because if it was, I would ask you to give it me. (I've fired the first shot anyway.)"

Josephine whipped her hand off his palm, where it lay like cream spilt on a trencher.

"Ah! I see; you are not free: you have a lover."

"No, no!" cried Josephine in distress; "I love n.o.body but my mother and sister: I never shall."

"Your mother," cried Raynal; "that reminds me; he told me to ask her; by Jove, I think he told me to ask her first;" and Raynal up with his scabbard and was making off.

Josephine begged him to do nothing of the kind.

"I can save you the trouble," said she.

"Ah, but my instructions! my instructions!" cried the military pedant, and ran off into the house, and left Josephine "planted there," as they say in France.

Raynal demanded a private interview of the baroness so significantly and unceremoniously that Rose had no alternative but to retire, but not without a glance of defiance at the bear. She ran straight, without her bonnet, into the Pleasaunce to slake her curiosity at Josephine. That young lady was walking pensively, but turned at sight of Rose, and the sisters came together with a clash of tongues.

"O Rose! he has"--

"Oh!"

So nimbly does the female mind run on its little beaten tracks, that it took no more than those syllables for even these innocent young women to communicate that Raynal had popped.

Josephine apologized for this weakness in a hero. "It wasn't his fault,"

said she. "It is your Edouard who set him to do it."

"My Edouard? Don't talk in that horrid way: I have no Edouard. You said 'no' of course."

"Something of the kind."

"What, did you not say 'no' plump?"

"I did not say it brutally, dear."

"Josephine, you frighten me. I know you can't say 'no' to any one; and if you don't say 'no' plump to such a man as this, you might as well say 'yes.'"