“You mean you may not establish the libel! I don’t see how it is possible; because they don’t deny having made the claim, and as they can’t support it, it must surely upset them.”
“I wish you’d find out what your father thinks about it. Drive in to-morrow.”
One of his fits of uneasiness was on him, as she perceived, and, to soothe him, she made the promise.
“And get the boy a rod. Here, Raoul, tell your mother to go to Tours and buy you a proper fishing-rod.”
Raoul came with a rush, and fell on his father. “As big as yours?”
“Big enough for a black-eyed imp like you.”
A pommelling match followed, ending by Raoul snatching off his father’s straw hat and flinging it into the river, where it sailed slowly down, Raoul shrieking with delight, and Léon running along the edge to rescue it at last with difficulty from a clump of flags. He came back threatening his son, who by this time was worked into wild unruliness, so that Nathalie was obliged to hold him fast in spite of his struggles. He grew quiet in time, and they went across the bridge to one or two of the nearest vineyards, where preparations had already begun, and where the finest bunch was gathered and offered to the master. The cloud had lifted again, and Léon was at his kindliest, with a smile and a cheery word for everybody. Who could wonder that Nathalie was happy?
At the door of her father’s house she met Fanchon, who immediately fell to making mysterious signs with hand and head, implying cautious communications of importance. Nathalie, vaguely uneasy, inquired whether her father was ill.
“Mademoiselle ought to know that he is not himself,” whispered Fanchon. “He sits there,”—signalling with her thumb over her right shoulder—“thinking, thinking, though the saints only know what he has got to think about! Don’t I make him his bouillon, and his salad, and his coffee, just as he likes them, and leave him to find fault as much as it pleases him, since that gives him an appetite? But there! ever since that morning when he left me in the midst of an omelette, and dashed off to Poissy, hiring a carriage and all—he that I never thought to see in a hired carriage, unless it was to be taken to his grave—he’s never been the same man. And not once has he been out to the door to look for mademoiselle—for madame, I should say—and Monsieur Raoul, though on the days he expected them he was always popping in and out. Well, I dare say it will do him good to see mademoiselle, and I shall be back in five minutes to hear what she thinks, for I am only going to run round to Madame Boucher, and show her what sort of an egg she sold me this morning.”
M. Bourget, indeed, was unlike his usual turbulent self. He greeted his daughter without effusion, and did not even ask for Raoul, or show any disappointment at not seeing him. He was sitting near the window, a newspaper in his hand, but she fancied he had only just unfolded it to avoid the charge of idleness. He did not look ill, or she might have felt less uneasy; if it were possible to apply such a word to M. Bourget’s square personality, he looked crushed. Mme. Léon went quickly up to him and kissed him.