An Interloper

by Frances Mary Peard

“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.