“What, the peas will be stuck you think?” replied Maître Solonet.
“He needed no more than that tall stick,” said a young lady.
“Does it not strike you that Madame Evangelista is not best pleased?”
“Well, my dear, I have just been told that she has hardly twenty-five thousand francs a year, and what is that for her?”
“Beggary, my dear.”
“Yes, she has stripped herself for her daughter. Monsieur has been exacting—”
“Beyond conception!” said Solonet. “But he is to be a peer of France. The Maulincours and the Vidame de Pamiers will help him on; he belongs to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.”
“Oh, he visits there, that is all,” said a lady, who had wanted him for her son-in-law. “Mademoiselle Evangelista, a merchant’s daughter, will certainly not open the doors of the Chapter of Cologne to him.”
“She is grandniece to the Duc de Casa-Real.”
“On the female side!”
All this tittle-tattle was soon exhausted. The gamblers sat down to cards, the young people danced, supper was served, and the turmoil of festivity was not silenced till morning, when the first streaks of dawn shone pale through the windows.
After taking leave of Paul, who was the last to leave, Madame Evangelista went up to her daughter’s room, for her own had been demolished by the builder to enlarge the ballroom. Though Natalie and her mother were dying for sleep, they spoke a few words.
“Tell me, darling mother, what is the matter?”
“My dear, I discovered this evening how far a mother’s love may carry her. You know nothing of affairs, and you have no idea to what suspicions my honesty lies exposed. However, I have trodden my pride underfoot; your happiness and our honor was at stake.”
“As concerned the diamonds, you mean?—He wept over it, poor boy! He would not take them; I have them.”
“Well, go to sleep, dearest child. We will talk business when we wake; for we have business—and now there is a third to come between us,” and she sighed.
“Indeed, dear mother, Paul will never stand in the way of our happiness,” said Natalie, and she went to sleep.
“Poor child, she does not know that the man has ruined her!”
Madame Evangelista was now seized in the grip of the first promptings of that avarice to which old folks at last fall a prey. She was determined to replace, for her daughter’s benefit, the whole of the fortune left by her husband. She regarded her honor as pledged to this restitution. Her affection for Natalie made her in an instant as close a calculator in money matters as she had hitherto been a reckless spendthrift. She proposed to invest her capital in land after placing part of it in the State funds, purchasable at that time for about eighty francs.
A passion not unfrequently produces a complete change of character; the tattler turns diplomatic, the coward is suddenly brave. Hatred made the prodigal Madame Evangelista turn parsimonious. Money might help her in the schemes of revenge, as yet vague and ill-defined, which she proposed to elaborate. She went to sleep, saying to herself:
“Tomorrow!” And by an unexplained phenomenon, of which the effects are well known to philosophers, her brain during sleep worked out her idea, threw light on her plans, organized them, and hit on a way of ruling over Paul’s life, devising a scheme which she began to work out on the very next day.
Though the excitement of the evening had driven away certain anxious thoughts which had now and again invaded Paul, when he was alone once more and in bed they returned to torment him.
“It would seem,” said he to himself, “that, but for that worthy Mathias, my mother-in-law would have taken me in. Is it credible? What interest could she have had in cheating me? Are we not to unite our incomes and live together!—After all, what is there to be anxious about? In a few days Natalie will be my wife, our interests are clearly defined, nothing can sever us. On we go!—At the same time, I will be on my guard. If Mathias should prove to be right—well, I am not obliged to marry my mother-in-law.”
In this second contest, Paul’s future prospects had been entirely altered without his being aware of it. Of the two women he was marrying, far the cleverer had become his mortal enemy, and was bent on separating her own interests from his. Being incapable of appreciating the difference that the fact of her Creole birth made between his mother-in-law’s character and that of other women, he was still less able to measure her immense cleverness.
The Creole woman is a being apart, deriving her intellect from Europe, and from the Tropics her vehemently illogical passions, while she is Indian in the apathetic indifference with which she accepts good or evil as it comes; a gracious nature too, but dangerous, as a child is when it is not kept in order. Like a child, this woman must have everything she wishes for, and at once; like a child, she would set a house on fire to boil an egg. In her flaccid everyday mood she thinks of nothing; when she is in a passion she thinks of everything. There is in her nature some touch of the perfidy caught from the Negroes among whom she has lived from the cradle, but she is artless too, as they are. Like them, and like children, she can wish persistently for one thing with ever-growing intensity of desire, and brood over an idea till it hatches out. It is a nature strangely compounded of good and evil qualities; and in Madame Evangelista it was strengthened by the Spanish temper, over which French manners had laid the polish of their veneer.
This nature, which had lain dormant in happiness for sixteen years, and had since found occupation in the frivolities of fashion, had discovered
