Her child!
He was suffering too and he was calling to his mother with all the power of a life which is struggling to exist. Oh, my God, if he also, if he was going to die like the other one at the same age, and under exactly similar conditions! Destiny, which people call blind, has sometimes savage combinations, and she began to reason with herself in half-broken words and tender exclamations. “Dear little fellow!—poor little fellow!—” and attempted to look upon everything coldly as it exists, in order to conduct herself in a dignified way and above all not to destroy that solitary good thing which remained to her. She even took in hand some work, that embroidery of Penelope which the Parisian woman keeps about her, being always in action; for it was necessary to wait for Numa’s return and have an explanation with him, or rather to discover in his attitude a conviction of his crime, before it came to the irremediable scandal of a separation.
O, those brilliant wools and that regular and colorless canvas—what confidences may they not receive, what regrets, joys and desires form the complicated and knotted reverse of the canvas full of broken threads in these feminine products, with their flowers peacefully interwoven!
Coming back from the Chamber of Deputies, Numa Roumestan found his wife embroidering beneath the narrow gleam of a single lighted lamp, and this quiet picture, her lovely profile softened by her chestnut-colored hair, in that luxurious shade of cushioned furniture where the lacquer screens and old bronzes, the ivories and potteries, caught the warm and shooting rays from a wood fire, overcame him by contrast with the noise of the Assembly, where the brilliantly lighted ceilings are swathed in a dust full of movement that floats above the hall of debate like the smoke from powder above a field where military are manœuvring.
“How do you do, Mamma; it’s pleasant here with you.”
The day’s meeting had been a hot one; always that wretched appropriation bill, and the Left fastened for five hours on the coat tails of that poor General d’Espaillon, who didn’t know enough to put two ideas together when he wasn’t saying g—d—, etc., etc. Well, anyhow, the Cabinet would get through this time; but after the vacation at New Year’s, when the Assembly would reach the question of the Fine Arts—then was the time to look out!
“They are counting very much on the Cadaillac business to upset me!... Rougeot is the one who will talk.... He’s no chicken, that Rougeot; he has a backbone!”
Then with his famous jerk of the shoulder: “Rougeot against Roumestan—the North against the South—all the better! It will amuse me. It will be a hand-to-hand fight.”
Excited by his political matters, he talked on in a monologue without noticing how silent Rosalie was. Then he approached her and, sitting very near her on a footstool, made her stop her work by trying to kiss her hand.
“You seem to be in a terrible hurry with what you are embroidering. Is it for my New Year’s present? I have bought yours. Just guess what it is!”