Chapter Four.
Nathalie.
Young M. de Beaudrillart was as good as his word. In her wildest dreams even his mother—whose hopes had undergone many deaths and many resurrections—had not ventured to picture him so content to remain in the quiet of the provinces as he proved himself. Whatever distaste he felt, very few outward signs betrayed it. An easy temper came to his help, and carried him lightly over rough places. He applied himself to looking into his affairs, a work which the unlucky M. Georges had long and vainly urged, and he showed a somewhat unexpected aptitude for business matters. He made no protests—beyond an occasionally wry face—against the strict economies of the household, and, to Félicie’s unbounded delight, not only refrained from mocking her pious works, but more than once gave her unexpected assistance. To the women it appeared as if golden days had begun, only Claire felt that here was the fruit of M. Georges’ prudent counsels, and thought it hard that M. Georges himself should remain under undeserved obloquy. Perhaps these few months were the happiest Mme. de Beaudrillart had ever known. Her belief in her son was justified—more than justified—and she looked the world proudly in the face.
Then Léon made another step in the path of surprises, and fell in love. As has been already remarked, a rich marriage had seemed the easiest way out of his difficulties, and again and again had been suggested to him, not only by his mother, but by his boon companions. Fortunes were dangled temptingly before his eyes, and he would none of them. Some strange scruple—strange, at least, in the man—some mastering sentiment, had rooted itself so deeply in his heart that it was not to be disposed of. It was the noblest thing there, and it was sighed over and laughed at, as first one, then another, tried their hand at eradication. Léon would not give it up. He declined to marry for anything short of love, and he had persuaded himself that he should never know what that meant, when he accidentally caught sight of a tall, fair, innocent-faced girl, with red-brown hair, and, once seen, would not rest until he had contrived to hear her speak and to learn her name. Then he went home and implored his mother to make the necessary advances.
Mme. de Beaudrillart yielded with scarcely a word, and yet the pang to her was great. She had been prepared for, had even urged upon her son, a sacrifice to mammon in the shape of a wife of inferior birth and large wealth. If such a one had been chosen in Paris she would hardly have sighed; but it was a different matter to be asked to accept a roturière at their very doors. The wrong to the De Beaudrillarts became infinitely more insulting, and though, as has been said, strong common-sense led her immediately to grasp the advantage and to yield, it was tolerably certain that she would never forgive the offender.
She spoke of it, however, to her daughters calmly one morning as they were walking home from mass.—Félicie anxiously inquired for her brother, who occasionally, though rarely, accompanied them, and was told that he had driven that morning into Tours.
“To Tours? And so early!”
“He finds himself very often in Tours of late,” remarked Claire, significantly.
“He will have been at mass at the cathedral.”
“There is some one, then, whom he wishes to see?” Claire continued. “Does he think of marrying?”
Félicie cried out: “Claire, how you talk!”
“Your brother has different notions from other young men,” said Mme. de Beaudrillart, speaking, as her younger daughter detected, with an effort. “You are correct in supposing that he has an idea of marriage, and I am sure he is right. Good-morning, Martine. I did not see your eldest son at mass.”
“No, madame,” said the old woman, sadly; “he has come back from his soldiering saying things which would have made his father’s hair stand on end; and though I tell him that, even if matters are as his clever friends tell him, there’s always a chance that he will find Monsieur Abbé right after all, and then he will wish he had taken the precaution of going to mass, he won’t listen.”
“That is very bad,” said Mme. de Beaudrillart, gravely. “You should not have him at home with the others, Martine.”
“Ah, madame, he is my son, and the good God gave him to me!”
“That is true; but I am afraid you are weak with him. Well, I will speak to Monsieur Nisard, and he will talk to Jacques.”
She moved on, and Claire cried, eagerly: “Mamma, I am dying of impatience! Of whom is Léon thinking?”
“The young lady is Mademoiselle Bourget.”
“Mademoiselle Bourget!” exclaimed Claire, stupefied. “But—you do not mean the daughter of Monsieur Bourget, at Tours?”
“Precisely.”
“Léon! A Beaudrillart marry a Tours bourgeoise!”
“Is the idea so new to you?” demanded her mother, coldly. “For myself, I am satisfied. Poor Léon’s misfortunes have brought him many trials. With this marriage he will be able to pay off debts which otherwise would have hung round his neck for years, and be relieved from some of the privations which he has borne so nobly. Reflect whether it is not so.” Mlle. Claire marched towards the bridge, upright and frowning. It was Félicie who broke into gasping protestations.
“But you do not mean that terrible radical of a man who opposes all that is good and holy in the neighbourhood! Mamma, impossible! Say that it is impossible!”
“I believe that he is a radical.”
“An enemy of the Church.”
“That is not inconceivable. Hush, Félicie, and submit yourself to the inevitable. If Léon has resolved to marry the girl, he will do it.”
“Oh,” moaned her daughter, “why was any one so cruel as to mention her to him?”
Mme. de Beaudrillart was silent. To have told Félicie that Nathalie was Léon’s own choice would have shocked her further; and while detesting the proposed marriage more than either of her daughters, the task of reconciling them to it caused her sharp impatience. Nor were her prejudices without excuse.
M. Bourget was a retired builder, who, by dint of extreme sagacity and small economies, had contrived to amass a large fortune. It should be said at once that no suspicion of dishonesty had touched his name. It was popularly believed that he had never been known to forego an advantage or to condone a debt; but this reputation did him no harm in the eyes of those who had not felt his grasp, and the town was inclined to be proud of its shrewd citizen, the more so as he was never so happy as when he was in the thick of battle, where it is but doing him bare justice to allow that he seldom permitted himself to be beaten. He fought municipal authorities, he fought the arrondissement, he fought deputies and bishops, with equal delight and success, until his name had become in certain quarters a thing of terror. Radical and republican, it was considered extremely probable that he would put himself forward as a candidate for the Conseil-Général, and if he did, it was owned with a shudder that he would certainly carry his election. Perhaps, had Léon known from the first that the girl he one day noticed on her way from the cathedral was the daughter of old Bourget, he would have shut his heart to her image; but by the time he made the discovery it was installed.
The incident of their meeting was of the slightest. A little child had fallen down, and Nathalie, walking swiftly and firmly across the open space in front of the great church, an old woman for her companion, ran to pick him up. Struck by something frank and noble in her bearing, Léon pleased himself by stopping to assist her. At first Nathalie, whose thoughts were concentrated upon the child, scarcely glanced at him, but when the small victim was found to be practically unhurt, she looked full in his face with a smile and a frank directness which delighted him. He was not a bad judge of expression, and in hers he read certain qualities which he might not have been expected to appreciate, but which attracted him as much as if he had been a better man. He did not rest until he had found out all about her, and contriving more than once to get sight of her, commissioned a friend to make the necessary advances.
His suit was not so certain to be successful as he and Mme. de Beaudrillart supposed. But for one point in the old builder’s character, it might even have been violently rejected. The point was one which he shared with a large number of mercantile Frenchmen, republican or not, and it consisted in an inordinate craving to see his family become noble. He would not follow the example of many of his neighbours: adopt the de, and trust to time and custom riveting the distinction; but he desired it for his child with an intensity which became all the stronger because he was ashamed to admit it openly. When overtures reached him from Léon de Beaudrillart, he hesitated, knowing that rumour had been unpleasantly busy with his name. But—a De Beaudrillart! The temptation was irresistible. His affection for his daughter had woven itself into the strongest resolution of his life—a determination that she should be received into an aristocracy which he ran down in word and worshipped in heart. It was the strongest and the most difficult; the more reason for his stubborn will to carry it.
For many years it had been a bitter disappointment to him that he had no son, but by the time his wife died all his affections and all his ambitions had become centred in Nathalie, and he felt that if he could but see her married as he desired, the struggles and privations of his life would be amply repaid. For this end, as for his other ends, he worked shrewdly. From the first, and while still pinching himself in many ways, he had given her an excellent education at a convent. Nothing so much irritated him as extravagance, but he was almost displeased with Nathalie when she showed a shrinking from expenditure. He himself marched about Tours in the rustiest of coats, yet the girl’s dress must be as dainty as the best milliner could produce. His neighbours were amazed at such inconsistencies; they did not understand that they were part of a carefully-thought-out, well-organised intention. In his treatment of his daughter he was influenced not so much, perhaps not at all, by the impulse to indulge her with which they credited him—for her tastes were, in truth, provokingly simple—as by a clearly-formed design to fit her for another class than that in which she was born.
Perhaps, however, his ambitions and his methods would have been equally in vain had it not been for the fact that Nathalie was charmingly pretty. She was tall, slender, with hazel eyes, and as unlike as possible to M. Bourget himself. Moreover, she had the grace of simplicity, and appeared to be indifferent to her own beauty. This simplicity it was which, joined to a certain sweet dignity, first attracted Léon.
And then began M. Bourget’s struggle. He required no enlightenment. M. de Beaudrillart’s extravagances, M. de Beaudrillart’s follies, were well known in Tours and its neighbourhood. Over against them in the scale had to be placed Poissy and M. Bourget’s ambition. He knew very well that he would have to give, not only his daughter, but a great deal of money, and, to do him justice, he thought more of his daughter than of his money. But Poissy, Poissy! Poissy for years had been the safety-valve of his imagination, a quality the stronger for being unsuspected. It appeared to him that nothing which could befall Nathalie could quench the glory of becoming merged in that ancient family. When, therefore, the question arose of her being mistress, it will be perceived what a strong advocate was presented for Léon.
Moreover, sops for his better judgment were not wanting. If Léon’s conduct had exposed him to criticism, there always remained the strange change in his life, in his disposition, apparently in his fortunes. At a time when rumour had been most busy, and when misfortune appeared to hang most threateningly over the heads of the De Beaudrillarts, rumour had been checkmated. Money had been forthcoming, debts had been paid, and Léon, wrenching himself from life in Paris, had come back to work in a way which M. Bourget could appreciate and respect, and had saved Poissy. It is true that, during the time when talk had declared its fate to be imminent, M. Bourget had a hundred times turned over the possibility of stepping in himself and buying up the mortgages, but it is doubtful whether he would ever have been able to make up his mind to such an act; for while to his little world he delighted in breathing out all manner of ferociously republican sentiments, in heart he was an abject adorer of the ancien régime—at all events, so far as Poissy was concerned. It would have given him no real pleasure to become its owner; it is doubtful whether he would not have been the first to consider himself a sacrilegious dispossessor of the old family. It was not the bare possession which he coveted; for the De Beaudrillarts to go out and the Bourgets to come in was as unsuitable, as horrible in his eyes, as it could have been in their own. But for his family to become merged in theirs, his child to be actually one of them, that—that was indeed to satisfy the deeper subtleties of his ambition.
As he marched with short, determined steps through the streets of Tours, M. Bourget flung back his head, advanced an aggressive chest, swelled, and assumed what he felt to be the grand air. Passing in front of a photographer’s shop, it seemed like a response to behold Poissy in all its delicate beauty looking serenely at him from out of a collection of Touraine châteaux.
“Aha, see there!” he cried, rubbing his hands in delighted apostrophe. “And to think that the day is come when Nathalie may, if I but say the word, step into its walls, and hold up her head with the proudest of them. She shall be painted, too, and by the best painter in France, so as to hang with the others in the picture-gallery—Nathalie de Beaudrillart, née Bourget, my child.”
The man’s whole figure was transformed, his round red face, garnished with thick iron-grey eyebrows, gleamed with pride and exultation, and at this moment, although it pleased him to profess that the overture he had received was still under consideration, worse sins than any which he had heard laid to the charge of Léon de Beaudrillart would assuredly have been condoned.
The matter, therefore, went on apace. To the elder people the preliminaries were the most important part, and Mme. de Beaudrillart, although she found it a bitter draught to swallow, had long desired that her son’s romantic notions should give way to what she called reason. Here was reason, plain, bourgeois, moneyed reason, and there was no excuse for falling foul of it. Such a dowry as Nathalie would bring was sufficient to wipe off the debt to M. de Cadanet, and to replace the owner of Poissy in his old position. And, after all, when a man marries a woman, Mme. de Beaudrillart argued, it is she who is raised, not he who is dragged down. King Cophetua’s beggar-girl became a queen, and the Bourget would be merged in the De Beaudrillarts.
She said this to her son, and he smiled.
“With all my heart, though you may find it difficult to efface my future father-in-law.”
Mme. de Beaudrillart shuddered.
“I imagine that he can be made to understand the situation.”
“He would tell you that he understood it perfectly. If you could look into his ledger, I am convinced that you would find on one page an entry of value received, title, position, what you like, and on the opposite the purchase-money, so many hundred thousand francs. But he will see that he gets what he pays for.”
“You mean he will expect to come here!”
“Is that unreasonable?”
Mme. de Beaudrillart flung back her head.
“I think so. If he regards the matter in the light of a bargain, I do not see where he comes in.”
“I imagine his daughter will think otherwise,” said Léon, caressing a kitten which had sprung on his knee.
Mme. de Beaudrillart replied, with perhaps unintentional bitterness:
“She, at any rate, may be satisfied with what she has got.”
“As to that,” returned her son, a little less lazily than he had hitherto spoken, “she has not yet consented.”
His mother folded her hands on the table before her, and looked steadily at him.
“Do me the favour, Léon, to explain.”
“It is perfectly simple. I do not think that I am repugnant to her; but she says that she must know me better, and judge for herself before deciding.”
Mme. de Beaudrillart shut her thin lips and remained silent. When she spoke at last, it was to say, in a hushed voice:
“Do not repeat this to your sisters, Léon, unless you wish to degrade your future wife in their eyes. It is all unspeakably bourgeoise.”
“It is charming, whatever it is,” he replied, good-humouredly. “The world goes on, mother, even at Poissy. My great-great-grandfather stormed a castle and killed half a dozen gentlemen to gain a bride; I, his descendant, am—”
“Bidden to a builder’s back parlour to see whether you are approved of! The first was infinitely the more respectable. The world goes fast, as you say, because it is easy enough to go downhill. Even the crimes of the present day are petty and sordid. In old times men smote and slew; now they cheat and steal.”
With a sudden movement Léon turned on his chair and dislodged the kitten, which sprang to the ground and mewed protestingly. The change which every now and then altered his face, and robbed it of its youth, was there now, and it startled his mother.
“My Léon, what is it? You are ill!” she exclaimed, anxiously.
“It is past,” he said, with an effort.
“But what was it!”
“A spasm.”
“My poor boy! I know how it is. You work too hard, and fret yourself over that debt. As if Monsieur de Cadanet would not be happy enough to wait your convenience! Well, there is this to be said for Mademoiselle Bourget: although I know you are indifferent to her dowry, it will free you from worry on that score.” While she spoke she went to a small cupboard, unlocked it, took out a glass and bottle, each of rare design and workmanship, and came back. “There,” she said, pouring a few drops into a glass, and putting it to his lips, “drink. It is an old cordial, which agrees with the Beaudrillart blood. You are better!”
“Well,” said Léon, smiling again. “I know that stuff of old. It is magical.”
“For your family, yes.”
“You think it would not cure Monsieur Bourget!”
“It will not have the chance,” said Mme. de Beaudrillart, quietly. She was replacing the glass and bottle in the cupboard when a thought struck her. “By-the-way, Léon—”
“Yes.”
“You have never given me Monsieur de Cadanet’s acknowledgment of the five hundred francs you forwarded; and as I keep all the receipts together, I should be glad to have it.” There was a short silence. Then Léon stretched himself, got up, and went to the window, the kitten in his arms.
“Ah,” he said, “he has not sent any.”
“Not sent any! But why?”
“Who can tell? Monsieur de Cadanet appeared to me to be an eccentric. Perhaps he thinks the sum too trifling. Perhaps he is conveniently forgetful—perhaps—oh, we need not worry. He has received it, without doubt.”
“I do not like it,” said Mme. de Beaudrillart, frowning.
“No, it is unbusinesslike, is it not? Console yourself, mother. When you pay anything to Monsieur Bourget, you will have your acknowledgment executed with every formality and the most scrupulous exactitude.”
If he hoped by this counter-irritation to turn her thoughts, he apparently succeeded. The idea of M. Bourget’s tradesmanlike qualities produced its desired effect as a foil to M. de Cadanet’s carelessness. But that she was not absolutely satisfied was evident from her calling after Léon, as he left the room:
“All the same, would it not be well for me to write and ascertain whether the money has reached him safely? The post is not absolutely safe, and it would be extremely annoying to find there had been any failure in delivery.”
Léon came back hurriedly.
“Mother, I must entreat you, leave the matter with me. Do not on any account, now or at a future time, interfere between me and Monsieur de Cadanet. You might do me incalculable harm.”
He spoke with sharp excitement, altogether unlike himself, and Mme. de Beaudrillart stared amazedly. If either of her other children had addressed her in such a tone, the offence would have been grievous; as it was, it was Léon, and Léon, as she immediately reflected, not quite himself, so that she contented herself with saying, stiffly:
“Calm yourself, Léon; you should be well aware that I am not likely to act in a manner to endanger either your interests or your honour with Monsieur de Cadanet or any other person.”
He turned from her, came back, and kissed her impulsively. But what he said had apparently nothing to do with what had passed.
“Poor mother! You are glad that we kept Poissy?”
“If we had lost it, I think it would have killed me.”
She had never admitted so much.
“Come, courage, then!” he exclaimed; “it appears now as if it would be tolerably safe; and with you and Nathalie—if I can win her—by my side, one may defy even—”
“Who!” demanded his mother, anxiously.
“Oh, Monsieur Bourget, to be sure!” he cried, with a laugh, as he shut the door.
It was true, although Mme. de Beaudrillart would not believe it, and although M. de Bourget growled at the girl’s whims, that Nathalie hesitated whether or not she should accept M. de Beaudrillart. For her neither Poissy nor alliance with an ancient family offered attractions; on the contrary, she thought of both with dread and shrinking, foreseeing trials which might prove almost unendurable. If the course of wooing had been such as Mme. de Beaudrillart’s etiquette exacted, and all the advances had been made by deputy, it is very certain that Nathalie would have rejected her honours, in spite of her terrible father’s displeasure. But a nameless something had attracted her to Léon on the day when they first met before the cathedral, and each of the two interviews which followed deepened the attraction. There was an open, easy charm about the young man difficult to resist. She knew that he had been extravagant, and the knowledge caused her some disquiet, but would not have shaken her determination; indeed, disgraceful as it would have seemed to Mme. de Beaudrillart, when they had seen each other but three times, she was hopelessly and irretrievably in love.
Then, one day, in an old carriage, as old as the hills, drawn by two borrowed horses, and driven by Jean Charpentier’s brother, Mme. de Beaudrillart rolled into Tours, and solemnly demanded the hand of Mlle. Nathalie Bourget for her son, M. Léon de Beaudrillart.
To her son, even, his mother never related the details of that interview. M. Bourget, not so reticent, repeated over and over again with glee the speeches he had made, the answers he had received. While he took care to preserve to himself the honours of the encounter, he delighted in accentuating Mme. de Beaudrillart’s pride, that those who listened to him might not fail to understand what sort of family this was into which Nathalie was about to marry. It was true that some of her fine sarcasms, her scarcely-veiled contempt, were as little felt by him as the sting of a gnat upon the hide of a rhinoceros; but he was acute enough to understand that she wished to humiliate him as a revenge for the humiliation she was enduring herself, and appreciated the desire as fitting on the part of the owners of Poissy. She had said to him:
“I cannot attempt to conceal from you, Monsieur Bourget, that my son’s choice has caused me profound astonishment. With his person and his position, he might have married into any of the great families of France, and I am certain you are too sensible a man to take offence when I say that such a marriage would have appeared to me far more appropriate.”
“Perhaps Monsieur de Beaudrillart reflects that when one marries one must live,” remarked M. Bourget, dryly.
But so far was he from taking offence that he repeated the speech with real enjoyment to a small lawyer of his acquaintance, a red republican like himself.
“And you endured such insolence!” cried M. Leroux, bounding on his chair.
“Endured? I can tell you that I admired it. I did not let her see it, it is true, for one must keep such people in their places; but, after all, she is right, for a De Beaudrillart may marry where he pleases.” And M. Bourget, radiant with delight, brought his hand heavily down on the table, and leaned forward to give his words more effect: “He marries my daughter.”
It was the crowning point of his life. No other moment in his career—and he had had his triumphs—had caused him such unmitigated satisfaction. Tours rang with the news, the very walls seemed to whisper it in his ears as he walked along the narrow streets, and he never failed to pass by the photographer’s, and to fling a glance of recognition at Poissy—Poissy, with its delicate grace, its exquisite lines—as who should say, “Tiens, ma belle, thou and I are no longer strangers; we belong to each other.”
With M. Bourget in this amiable mood, all went smoothly.
Léon, who was well aware of the accepted opinion of his father-in-law and his rigid economies, was amazed by the liberality of his proposals. He had expected carpings, opposition, cutting down, and he found, to his astonishment, that M. Bourget’s principal care was that the estate should pass unencumbered to Nathalie’s children. One day he said, frankly:
“See here, Monsieur de Beaudrillart,”—he never called his future son-in-law by any other name—“I am perfectly aware that you have committed innumerable follies, and that it has even been touch and go whether you could keep Poissy. At one time, unless rumour lies even more than is usual with her, I might have got possession of it myself. But that, I at once admit, would not have suited me. Poissy without the De Beaudrillarts would be like a body without a soul; you two have to keep together, if you are to hold your position in the world; and now that Nathalie is to become one of you, it is my business to see that you do keep together. You comprehend! For what is past I care nothing; I put no inquiries, it is over. It is what is to come which is my affair. There must be no more follies, no more extravagances. My part of the bargain is to see that when you start you stand on your legs. Well and good. I accept it. I will give my daughter a sum which should be sufficient to set you free from every entanglement—for hampered you must be, and heavily—and enable you with care to regain your proper position; and I tell you, without hesitation, that I do this because I have always resolved that Nathalie should marry above her station. What will you? It is perhaps a folly, a weakness, but—it pleases me. I wish to see her where I have no inclination to be myself, and, like other things in this world, what we want we must pay for. There, Monsieur de Beaudrillart, you have the situation, and my motive.”
Léon had listened to this harangue with an inscrutable face. When M. Bourget paused—rather scant of breath—he looked up and said, pleasantly:
“Mine is simpler. I love Nathalie.”