Chapter Ten.
Restraint.
And Poissy?
After the child’s birth the years slipped swiftly, though not always smoothly, by. Léon, who easily forgot, had very nearly succeeded in forgetting that desperate act of his, and the old count’s threat of the future. There were still, however, moments when it flashed upon him, and brought with it a sudden cloud of depression which he attributed to physical ailments. His wife, sure he was not ill, laughed at these fancies, but his mother, perhaps out of opposition, treated them seriously until they generally ended in his laughing at himself. He spent a great deal of time out of doors, rising early, and going all over the estate, which, bit by bit, was being brought together again; coming in to the eleven o’clock breakfast, and then out again, shooting or fishing or loitering about with Nathalie. If a new idea, a new invention, a new arrangement, attracted him, he was possessed by it, and could think and speak of nothing else. His neighbours smiled at his enthusiasms, but liked and excused him; those who had blamed him in old days were vanquished by the sweetness of temper with which he had accepted his new life, and by the unsuspected strength he had shown in renouncing the extravagances of Paris.
His mother was almost content Léon was all she had believed him, Poissy stood in its old position in the neighbourhood, and there was little Raoul, as dear, or dearer, than his father. As for Nathalie, as much as possible she contrived to ignore her, and though M. Bourget was a terrible man, he had the grace seldom to inflict himself upon them.
It was Nathalie herself who was the most changed by the years of her married life, or who gave that impression, for her character had not really changed, although it had developed. She had lost, early, a certain frank open-heartedness; she was reserved—with her mother and sisters in law extremely reserved. She never battled for her rights, and the household had almost ceased to remember that she possessed any. But, in avoiding retorts, she had fallen into a habit of grave silence which did not belong to her years, and of which Léon sometimes laughingly complained.
“It doesn’t matter when we are alone,” he would say, “but with others—I saw Madame de la Ferraye looking at you this afternoon and expecting you to take your part in the discussion.”
She made a laughing excuse.
“Dear, how should I? It was better not to expose my ignorance.”