The great drawing-room into which he was shown, with its lofty ceiling reaching down to the doors to meet the delicate paintings of its piers, the straight hangings with stripes in brown and gold-colored Chinese silk framing the long windows that opened upon an antique balcony, and also on one of the rose-colored corners of brick buildings on the square—all this was not calculated to change his first impressions.
But the welcome given him by Mme. Le Quesnoy soon put him at his ease.
This fragile little woman with her sad sweet smile, wrapped in many shawls and crippled by rheumatism, from which she had suffered ever since she came to live in Paris, still preserved the accent and habits of her dear South, and she loved anything that reminded her of it. She invited Numa to sit down by her side, and looking affectionately at him in the dim light, she murmured: “The very picture of Evelina!” This pet name of his aunt, so long unheard by him, touched his quick sensibility like an echo of his childhood. It appeared that Mme. Le Quesnoy had long wished to know the nephew of her old friend, but her house had been so mournful since her son’s death, and they had been so entirely out of the world, that she had never sought him out. Now they had decided to entertain a little, not because their sorrow was less keen, but on account of their two daughters, the eldest of whom was almost twenty years old; and turning toward the balcony whence they could hear peals of girlish laughter, she called, “Rosalie, Hortense, come in—here is Monsieur Roumestan!”
Ten years after that visit Numa remembered the calm and smiling picture that appeared, framed by the long window in the tender light of the sunset, of that beautiful young girl, and the absence of all affected embarrassment as she came towards him, smoothing the bands of her hair that her little sister’s play had ruffled—her clear eyes and direct gaze.
He felt an instant confidence in and sympathy with her.
Once or twice during dinner, nevertheless, when he was in the full flow of animated conversation he was conscious that a ripple as of disdain passed over the clear-cut profile and pure complexion of the face beside him—without question that “cool and haughty” air which Aunt Portal had mentioned, and which Rosalie got through her striking resemblance to her father. But the little grimace of her pretty mouth and the cold blue of her look softened quickly to a kindly attention, and she was again under the charm of a surprise she did not try to conceal. Born and brought up in Paris, Rosalie had always felt a fixed aversion to the South; its accent, its manners, even the country itself as she saw it in the vacations she occasionally spent at Aps—everything was antipathetic to her. It seemed to be an instinct of race, and was the cause of many gentle disputes with her mother.
“Nothing would induce me to marry a Southerner,” Rosalie had laughingly declared, and she arranged in her own mind a type—a coarse, noisy, vacant fellow, combining an opera tenor and a drummer for Bordeaux wines, but with a fine head and well-cut features. Roumestan came pretty near to this clear-cut vision of the mocking little Parisian, but his ardent musical speech, taking on that evening an irresistible force by reason of the sympathy of those around him, inspired and aroused him, seeming even to make his face more refined. After the usual talk in low voices between neighbors at the table, those hors-d’œuvres of conversation that circulate with caviar and anchovy, the Emperor’s hunting parties at Compiègne became the general topic of conversation; those hunts in costume at which the invited guests appeared as grandees and grand ladies of the Court of Louis XV. Knowing M. Le Quesnoy to be a Liberal, Numa launched forth into a magnificent diatribe, almost a prophetic one. He drew a picture of the Court as a set of circus riders, women performers, grooms and jockeys riding hard under a threatening sky, pursuing the stag to its death to the accompaniment of lightning-flash and distant claps of thunder, and then—in the midst of all this revelry—the deluge, the hunting horns drowned, all this monarchical harlequinade ending in a morass of blood and mire!
Perhaps this piece was not entirely impromptu; probably he had got it off before at the committee meeting; but never before had his brilliant speech and tone of candor in revolt roused anywhere such enthusiasm and sympathy as he suddenly saw reflected in one sweet, serious countenance, that he felt turning toward him, while the gentle face of Mme. Le Quesnoy lit up with a ray of fun and seemed to ask her daughter: “Well, how do you like my Southerner now?”
Rosalie was captivated. Deep in her inmost heart she bowed to the power of that voice and to generous thoughts that accorded so well with all her youthful enthusiasms, her passion for liberty and justice. As women at a play will confound the singer with his song, the actor with his rôle, so she forgot to make allowances for the artist’s imagination. Oh, if she could but have known what an abyss of nothing lay below these professional phrases, how little he troubled himself about the hunting-parties at Compiègne! She did not know that he merely needed an invitation with the imperial crest on it, and he would have joined these self-same parties, in which his vanity, his tastes as actor and pleasure-seeker, would have found complete satisfaction. But she was under the charm. As he talked, it seemed to her the table grew larger, the dull, sleepy faces of the few guests, a certain President of the Chamber and an old physician, were transfigured; and when they returned to the drawing-room, the chandelier, lighted for the first time since her brother’s death, had almost the dazzling effect upon her of the sun itself.
The sun was Roumestan.