M. Bourget stared at him.
“Now you are an ass, Leroux. Damme, if you don’t talk better sense when you have a case, it’s no wonder if you are unlucky. But you don’t understand.”
He put a bold face on it with his companions, and his nature was not sufficiently sensitive for him to suffer under slight; still, he was not pleased with Nathalie’s position. When she drove into the town, it was simply, and without a vestige of parade, when M. Bourget considered that a greater ceremony might have been observed. He would have liked rattle and cracking of whips, with every one looking round, and asking, “Who is that?” He questioned her closely, and found that she spent her time in her own room, or with her husband, and he got no hint of her sitting with her mother-in-law, or being admitted into pleasant companionship. He could not comprehend it. That the De Beaudrillarts should have no dealings with M. Bourget might be, and there was something really pathetic in the way in which he effaced himself, and kept away from Poissy when he was longing to be satisfied as to Fauvel’s work; but Nathalie was now a De Beaudrillart herself, and to humiliate her was, in his eyes, to humiliate the family. He still talked bigly, to be sure, to Leroux and his other companions, but in his heart there was a vexed dissatisfaction which poisoned his triumph until the late winter came. Then it broke out again, irrepressible and unbounded. For on a cold February day, when snow lay thick in the Place de l’Archevêché, and crumpled itself into the niches round the western porches, where no statues have replaced those broken effigies which once gazed down, M. Bourget was making his way sombrely back to his house, when he became aware of a messenger from Poissy standing at the door. The messenger brought good news—news which made M. Bourget come out again radiant, and present him with a whole piece of twenty sous.
“That,” he announced magnificently, so that the passers-by might hear—“that is for you to drink the health of the young Baron de Beaudrillart.”
Chapter Eight.
In the Rue du Bac.
The years that came and went at Poissy after the birth of this baby son were slowly drawing away the life of M. de Cadanet in that little Paris hotel, which yet to his shrunk interests seemed large and hollow. Even when Léon saw him he was small and bent, with his skin colourless; by this time he had grown absolutely dwarfish, wizened, elfish-looking, the extraordinary brightness of his eyes, shining out of their hollow caves, giving him a strange and weird appearance. His body had become extremely frail, but his will showed no symptoms of weakening, and one or two valets who had presumed on his apparent feebleness found themselves speedily undeceived and dismissed. Old friends had dropped off, smitten by death or illness; newspapers and politics absorbed his chief attention, but the absorption was gloomy, for to the old—recalling what seem better days—hope is difficult, and pessimism natural.
M. Charles had succeeded in his determination to make himself necessary to the old count, and it must be admitted that the task was difficult. It required to be carried out with the greatest care and circumspection, since M. de Cadanet was suspicious of the smallest premonitory shadow of coercion. More than once, more than half a dozen times, Charles’s fate had trembled in the balance, and given him some bad half-hours of disquiet. If he could have made a confidante of his wife, things might have been easier for him; as it was, he cursed his stars that even with her it was necessary to play a part, for she was an honest dull woman, who would have blurted out to M. de Cadanet what her husband most wished to conceal.