Fire and wind of the South, you are irresistible!
CHAPTER III.
THE SEAMY SIDE OF A GREAT MAN (continued).
If ever people were unsuited for life side by side it was these two. Opposites by instinct, by education and temperament, thinking alike on no one subject, they were the North and the South face to face without the slightest chance of fusion. Love feeds on contrasts like this and laughs when they are pointed out, so powerful does it feel itself. But later, when everyday life sets in, during the monotony of days and nights passed beneath the same roof, that mist which constitutes love disappears; the veil is lifted; they begin to see each other, and, what is worse, to judge each other!
It was some time before the awakening came to these young people; at least with Rosalie the illusion lasted. Clear-sighted and clever on all other subjects, for a long while she remained blind to Numa’s faults and could not see how far in many ways she was his superior. It had not taken him long to relapse into his old self again. Passion in the South is short-lived because of its very violence. And then the Southerner is so perfectly assured of the inferiority of women that, once married and sure of his happiness, he installs himself like a bashaw in his home, receiving love as homage due and not of much importance; for, after all, it takes up a good deal of time to be loved, and Numa was much preoccupied just then arranging the new life which his marriage, his wealth and the high position in the law courts as son-in-law to M. Le Quesnoy necessitated.
The one hundred thousand francs given him by Aunt Portal sufficed to pay his debts to Malmus and the furnisher and to wipe out forever the dreary record of his straitened bachelor days. It was a delightful change from the humble frichti (lunch) at Malmus’s on the old sofa with its worn red velvet, in company of “every one’s old girl,” to the dining-room in his new house in the Rue Scribe where, opposite his dainty little Parisian wife, he presided over the sumptuous dinners that he offered to the magnates of the law and of music.
The Provençal loved a life of eating, luxury and display, but he liked it best in his own house, without any trouble or ceremony, where a certain looseness was possible over a cigar and risky stories might be told. Rosalie resigned herself to keeping open house, the table always set, ten or fifteen guests every evening, and never anybody but men, among whose black coats her evening dress made the only point of color. There she stayed until with the serving of the coffee and the opening of cigar boxes she would slip away, leaving them to their politics and the coarse roars of laughter that accompany the close of bachelor dinners.
Only the mistress of a house knows what domestic complications arise when such constant and unusual services are required every day of the servants. Rosalie struggled uncomplainingly with this problem and tried to bring some order out of chaos, carried away as she was by the whirlwind of her terrible genius of a husband, who did not spare her the turbulence of his own nature, yet between two storms had a smile of approbation for his little wife. Her only regret was that she never had him enough to herself. Even at breakfast, that hasty morning’s meal for a busy lawyer, there was always a guest between them, namely that male comrade without whom the man of the South could not exist, that inevitable some one to answer a bright remark and call forth a flash from his own wits, the arm on which condescendingly to lean, some henchman to catch his handkerchief as he sallied forth to the Palace of Justice!
Ah, how she longed to accompany him across the Seine, how glad she would have been to call for him on rainy days, wait, and bring him home in her carriage, nestled up to him behind the windows blurred with raindrops! She did not dare to suggest such things any more, so sure was she of some excuse, an appointment in the Lawyers’ Hall with some one of three hundred intimate friends of whom the Provençal would say with deep emotion:
“He adores me! He would go through fire and water for me!”
That was his idea of friendship. But in other respects, no selection whatever as to his friends! His easy good-nature and lively capriciousness caused him to throw himself into the arms of each man he met, but made him as easily drop him. Every week there was a new craze for someone whose name came up incessantly, a name which Rosalie wrote down conscientiously on the little menu card, but which presently disappeared as suddenly as if the new favorite’s personality had been as flimsy and as easily burned as the little colored card itself.