He caught away his hand with a sharp movement, unlike himself.
“Against! What do you mean?”
“They would scout me as an interloper; that is all that I mean,” she said, surprised. “Dear, I was not suggesting that I had committed a crime, or done anything to make them utterly ashamed of me.”
“No,” he returned, with an uneasy laugh. “And if we could know their histories, I dare say we should find that it was you who might be ashamed of their company.”
“And it’s well my father doesn’t hear you!” Nathalie cried, merrily. “He would not put up with a word against the Beaudrillarts.”
He did not, as usual, retort with a jest, and, indeed, for the rest of the day was silent and almost moody. His mother, always on the lookout for such signs, decided that his marriage began to bore him; and though the mood wore off, preserved the impression in her mind, and strengthened it, as soon as she could, with another of the same tendency. Nathalie, who had hoped that time would bring kinder feeling towards her, found that it only seemed to push them further apart; as much as possible her presence was ignored, the servants were tacitly shown that her wishes might be disregarded, and so far as any real authority in the house was concerned, she was a mere cipher. Yet she was not unhappy. She had come from a home where she had been thrown chiefly on her own resources, and this, if a harsh, is often a wholesome training. The hours she spent alone passed contentedly enough, sweetened, too, by those others when she and Léon were together, walking over the estate, seeing to planting, thinning, cutting down, settling which bits of the property he would buy back, watching the vintage, strolling by the side of the river. She never loved the river. An unconquerable dread had seized her ever since she heard the story of the death by drowning of Léon’s father, the Baron Bernard; but as Léon had a fancy for fishing, she kept her repugnance out of his sight. Neither Mme. de Beaudrillart nor her youngest daughter would consent to take advantage of the carriage. Félicie, however, was glad to be spared the long tramps which were formerly necessary before she could reach the outlying districts where her charitable errands carried her, and more than once had been driven in to some function in the cathedral at Tours, with the express understanding that she should not be called upon to encounter M. Bourget.
“Your father and I think so differently on all subjects!” she explained.
For the picture a compromise had been arrived at, owing to the fortunate circumstance that—to M. Bourget’s untold wrath—the painter whom Léon had chosen was too fully occupied to come to Poissy. M. Bourget, while storming at the artist’s stupidity, had suggested that her husband should take his wife to Paris, so that she might be painted there. Léon turned it off. He said he had a fancy that the picture should be done at Poissy, and the sentiment was too completely after M. Bourget’s own heart for him to resist. He only grumbled at the delay as a personal wrong done to him by the painter.
“Isn’t my money as good as another man’s, and better!” he demanded, wrathfully. “I’d like to know what the fellow means by declining to come?”
“Perhaps there are other Poissys in the world,” remarked Leroux, with malice, “and other families as important as the Beaudrillarts.”