“Not improbably. He would find matters in a different train than when he left it.”
Claire put in, “But, after all, Léon has only done what Monsieur George’s always wished him to do. Léon is so changed!”
“And what has changed him! Realising what Monsieur Georges never had the energy to impress upon him. No. He is an incapable, as I have said from the first.”
“And did you see Monsieur Bourget!”
Félicie pursed her lips.
“Yes, there he was, the dreadful man, planted on the pavement and staring! I suppose he was surprised not to see Nathalie, for his eyes opened like round saucers. I told Francis to drive very quickly.”
It was true, as she divined, that M. Bourget was astonished to see the carriage without his daughter. But as the day for her weekly visit had not come round, he was not uneasy until this arrived and passed without tidings of her. Then, indeed, there was a wrangling match between indignation and anxiety. He vowed that she was neglecting him, as a means of keeping off the fretting fear that something had happened to Raoul. The photograph of Poissy, interrogated, looked gloomily suggestive; for the first time in his life he turned away from it angrily. At the café he browbeat the waiters, and sat so silent and sullen that his acquaintances did not venture to approach him, chafing him the more by holding aloof.
The slight cause he had for anxiety made him ashamed to admit it.
At last, one morning a letter from Nathalie gave an added fright, until he caught sight of the postmark Paris, and stared at it in grumbling bewilderment. What on earth had carried them there all of a sudden, and if the boy was gone, how came it that he had not been told? But opening the letter, its first sentences caught his breath away, and left him staring, a pallid image of himself. A rush of blood to the head followed. “What is the girl dreaming about?” Finally a laugh broke out, a hoarse foolish laugh, the sound of which amazed him. Was he mad? It was a more likely explanation than that the letter spoke truth.
But if he were mad, he was sane enough to perceive that he must come back to his senses, and that quickly. He took the letter and read it through, frowning. The same words stared at him. They were not the delusion of madness.