The Reverberator (1 volume, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888)/Chapter 14
XIV.
When Gaston Probert came in that evening he was received by Mr. Dosson and Delia, and when he asked where Francie was he was told by Delia that she would show herself half an hour later. Francie had instructed her sister that as Gaston would have, first of all, information to give their father about the business he had transacted in America he wouldn't care for a lot of women in the room. When Delia made this speech before Mr. Dosson the old man protested that he was not in any hurry for the business; what he wanted to find out most was whether he had a good time—whether he liked it over there. Gaston might have liked it, but he did not look as if he had had a very good time. His face told of reverses, of suffering; and Delia declared to him that if she had not received his assurance to the contrary she would have believed he was right down sick. He confessed that he had been very sick at sea and was still feeling the effect of it, but insisted that there was nothing the matter with him now. He sat for some time with Mr. Dosson and Delia, and never once alluded to the cloud that hung over their relations. The girl had schooled her father to reticence on this point, and the manner in which she had descended upon him in the morning, after Mr. Flack had come up stairs, was a lesson he was not likely soon to forget. It had been impressed upon him that she was indeed wiser than he could pretend to be, and he was now mindful that he must not speak of the "piece in the paper" unless young Probert should speak of it first. When Delia rushed down to him in the court she began by asking him categorically whom he had wished to do good to by sending Mr. Flack up to their parlour. To Francie or to her? Why, the way they felt then, they detested his very name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why, he had simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had ever got in his life.
"Well, hanged if I understand!" poor Mr. Dosson had said. "I thought you liked the piece—you think it's so queer they don't like it." "They," in the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but the Proberts in congress assembled.
"I don't think anything is queer but you!" Delia had retorted; and she had let her father know that she had left Francie in the very act of "handling" Mr. Flack.
"Is that so?" the old gentleman had asked, helplessly.
Francie's visitor came down a few minutes later and passed through the court and out of the hotel without looking at them. Mr. Dosson had been going to call after him, but Delia checked him with a violent pinch. The unsociable manner of the young journalist's departure added to Mr. Dosson's sense of the mystery of things. I think this may be said to have been the only incident in the whole business that gave him a personal pang. He remembered how many of his cigars he had smoked with Mr. Flack and how universal a participant he had made him. This struck him as the failure of friendship, and not the publication of details about the Proberts. Deep in Mr. Dosson's spirit was a sense that if these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn't pity them, and if they hadn't done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing. It was therefore, in spite of the young man's rough exit, still in the tone of American condonation that he had observed to Delia: "He says that's what they like over there and that it stands to reason that if you start a paper you've got to give them what they like. If you want the people with you, you've got to be with the people."
"Well, there are a good many people in the world. I don't think the Proberts are with us much."
"Oh, he doesn't mean them," said Mr. Dosson.
"Well, I do!" cried Delia.
At one of the ormolu tables, near a lamp with a pink shade, Gaston insisted on making at least a partial statement. He did not say that he might never have another chance, but Delia felt with despair that this idea was in his mind. He was very gentle, very polite, but distinctly cold, she thought; he was intensely depressed and for half an hour uttered not the least little pleasantry. There was no particular occasion for that when he talked about "preferred bonds" with her father. This was a language Delia could not translate, though she had heard it from childhood. He had a great many papers to show Mr. Dosson, records of the mission of which he had acquitted himself, but Mr. Dosson pushed them into the drawer of the ormolu table with the remark that he guessed they were all right. Now, after the fact, he appeared to attach but little importance to Gaston's achievements—an attitude which Delia perceived to be slightly disconcerting to the young man. Delia understood it: she had an instinctive sense that her father knew a great deal more than Gaston could tell him even about the work he had committed to him, and also that there was in such punctual settlements an eagerness, a literalism totally foreign to Mr. Dosson's domestic habits. If Gaston had cooled off he wanted at least to be able to say that he had rendered them services in America; but now her father, for the moment at least, scarcely appeared to think his services worth speaking of: a circumstance that left him with more of the responsibility for his cooling. What Mr. Dosson wanted to know was how everything had struck him over there, especially the Pickett Building and the parlour-cars and Niagara and the hotels he had instructed him to go to, giving him an introduction in two or three cases to the gentleman in charge of the office. It was in relation to these themes that Gaston was guilty of a want of spring, as the girl phrased it to herself; that he evinced no superficial joy. He declared however, repeatedly, that it was a most extraordinary country—most extraordinary and far beyond anything he had had any conception of. "Of coarse I didn't like everything" he said, "any more than I like everything anywhere."
"Well, what didn't you like?" Mr. Dosson genially inquired.
Gaston Probert hesitated. "Well, the light for instance."
"The light—the electric?"
"No, the solar! I thought it rather hard, too much like the scratching of a slate-pencil." As Mr. Dosson looked vague at this, as if the reference were to some enterprise (a great lamp-company) of which he had not heard—conveying a suggestion that he was perhaps staying away too long, Gaston immediately added: "I really think Francie might come in. I wrote to her that I wanted particularly to see her."
"I will go and call her—I'll make her come," said Delia, going out. She left her companions together and Gaston returned to the subject of Mr. Munster, Mr. Dosson's former partner, to whom he had taken a letter and who had shown him every sort of civility. Mr. Dosson was pleased at this; nevertheless he broke out, suddenly—
"Look here, you know; if you've got anything to say that you don't think very acceptable you had better say it to me." Gaston coloured, but his reply was checked by Delia's quick return. She announced that her sister would be obliged if he would go into the little dining-room—he would find her there. She had something to communicate to him that she could mention only in private. It was very comfortable; there was a lamp and a fire. "Well, I guess she can take care of herself!" Mr. Dosson, at this, commented, laughing. "What does she want to say to him? " he demanded, when Gaston had passed out.
"Gracious knows! She won't tell me. But it's too flat, at his age, to live in such terror."
"In such terror?"
"Why, of your father. You've got to choose."
"How, to choose?"
"Why, if there's a person you like and he doesn't like."
"You mean you can't choose your father," said Mr. Dosson, thoughtfully.
"Of course you can't."
"Well then, please don't like any one. But perhaps I should like him," added Mr. Dosson, faithful to his cheerful tradition.
"I guess you'd have to!" said Delia.
In the small salle-à-manger, when Gaston went in, Francie was standing by the empty table, and as soon as she saw him she said—"You can't say I didn't tell you that I should do something. I did nothing else, from the first. So you were warned again and again; you knew what to expect."
"Ah, don't say that again; if you knew how it acts on my nerves!" the young man groaned. "You speak as if you had done it on purpose—to carry out your absurd threat."
"Well, what does it matter, when it's all over?"
"It's not all over. Would to God it were!"
The girl stared. "Don't you know what I sent for you to come in here for? To bid you good-bye."
"Francie, what has got into you?" he said. "What deviltry, what poison?" It would have been a singular sight to an observer, the opposition of these young figures, so fresh, so candid, so meant for confidence, but now standing apart and looking at each other in a wan defiance which hardened their faces.
"Don't they despise me—don't they hate me? You do yourself! Certainly you'll be glad for me to break off and spare you such a difficulty, such a responsibility."
"I don't understand; it's like some hideous dream!" Gaston Probert cried. "You act as if you were doing something for a wager, and you talk so. I don't believe it—I don't believe a word of it."
"What don't you believe?"
"That you told him—that you told him knowingly. If you'll take that back (it's too monstrous!) if you'll deny it and declare you were practised upon and surprised, everything can still be arranged."
"Do you want me to lie?" asked Francie Dosson. "I thought you would like it."
"Oh, Francie, Francie!" moaned the wretched youth, with tears in his eyes.
"What can be arranged? What do you mean by everything?" she went on.
"Why, they'll accept it; they'll ask for nothing more. It's your participation they can't forgive."
"They can't? Why do you talk to me about them? I'm not engaged to them."
"Oh, Francie, I am! And it's they who are buried beneath that filthy rubbish!"
She flushed at this characterisation of Mr. Flack's epistle; then she said, in a softer voice: "I'm very sorry—very sorry indeed. But evidently I'm not delicate."
He looked at her, helpless and bitter. "It's not the newspapers, in your country, that would have made you so. Lord, they're too incredible! And the ladies have them on their tables."
"You told me we couldn't here—that the Paris ones are too bad," said Francie.
"Bad they are, God knows; but they have never published anything like that—poured forth such a flood of impudence on decent, quiet people who only want to be left alone."
Francie sank into a chair by the table, as if she were too tired to stand longer, and with her arms spread out on the lamp-lit plush she looked up at him. "Was it there you saw it?"
"Yes, a few days before I sailed. I hated them from the moment I got there—I looked at them very little. But that was a chance. I opened the paper in the hall of an hotel (there was a big marble floor and spittoons!) and my eyes fell upon that horror. It made me ill."
"Did you think it was me?"
"About as soon as I supposed it was my father. But I was too mystified, too tormented."
"Then why didn't you write to me, if you didn't think it was me?"
"Write to you? I wrote to you every three days."
"Not after that."
"Well, I may have omitted a post at the last.—I thought it might be Delia," Gaston added in a moment.
"Oh, she didn't want me to do it—the day I went with him, the day I told him. She tried to prevent me."
"Would to God then she had!"
"Haven't you told them she's delicate too?" Francie asked, in her strange tone.
Gaston made no answer to this; but he broke out—"What power, in heaven's name, has he got over you? What spell has he worked? "
"He's an old friend—he helped us ever so much when we were first in Paris."
"But, my dearest child, what friends—what a man to know!"
"If we hadn't known him we shouldn't have known you. Remember that it was Mr. Flack who brought us that day to Mr. Waterlow's."
"Oh, you would have come some other way," said Gaston.
"Not in the least. We knew nothing about any other way. He helped us in everything—he showed us everything. That was why I told him—when he asked me. I liked him for what he had done."
Gaston, who had now also seated himself, listened to this attentively. "I see. It was a kind of delicacy."
"Oh, a kind!" She smiled.
He remained a little with his eyes on her face. "Was it for me?"
"Of course it was for you."
"Ah, how strange you are!" he exclaimed, tenderly. "Such contradictions—on s'y perd. I wish you would say that to them, that way. Everything would be right."
"Never, never!" said the girl. "I have wronged them, and nothing will ever be the same again. It was fatal. If I felt as they do I too would loathe the person who should have done such a thing. It doesn't seem to me so bad—the thing in the paper; but you know best. You must go back to them. You know best," she repeated.
"They were the last, the last people in France, to do it to. The sense of excruciation—of pollution," Gaston rejoined, making his reflections audibly.
"Oh, you needn't tell me—I saw them all there!" Francie exclaimed.
"It must have been a dreadful scene. But you didn't brave them, did you?"
"Brave them—what are you talking about? To you that idea is incredible!"
"No, it isn't," he said, gently.
"Well, go back to them—go back," she repeated. At this he half threw himself across the table, to seize her hands; but she drew away and, as he came nearer, pushed her chair back, springing up. "You know you didn't come here to tell me you are ready to give them up."
He rose to his feet, slowly. "To give them up? I have been battling with them till I'm ready to drop. You don't know how they feel—how they must feel."
"Oh yes, I do. All this has made me older, every hour."
"It has made you more beautiful," said Gaston Probert.
"I don't care. Nothing will induce me to consent to any sacrifice."
"Some sacrifice there must be. Give me time—give me time, I'll manage it. I only wish they hadn't seen you there in the Bois."
"In the Bois?"
"That Marguerite hadn't seen you—with that blackguard. That's the image they can't get over."
"I see you can't either, Gaston. Well, I was there and I was very happy. That's all I can say. You must take me as I am."
"Don't—don't; you infuriate me!" he pleaded, frowning.
Francie had seemed to soften, but she was in a sudden flame again. "Of course I do, and I shall do it again. We are too different. Everything makes you so. You can't give them up—ever, ever. Good-bye—good-bye! That's all I wanted to tell you."
"I'll go and throttle him!" Gaston said, lugubriously.
"Very well, go! Good-bye." She had stepped quickly to the door and had already opened it, vanishing as she had done the last time.
"Francie, Francie!" he exclaimed, following her into the passage. The door was not the one that led into the salon; it communicated with the other apartments. The girl had plunged into these—he already heard her locking herself in. Presently he went away, without taking leave of Mr. Dosson and Delia.
"Why, he acts just like Mr. Flack," said the old man, when they discovered that the interview in the dining-room had come to an end.
The next day was a bad day for Charles Waterlow; his work, in the Avenue de Villiers, was terribly interrupted. Gaston Probert invited himself to breakfast with him at noon and remained till the time at which the artist usually went out—an extravagance partly justified by a previous separation of several weeks. During these three or four hours Gaston walked up and down the studio, while Waterlow either sat or stood before his easel. He put his host out vastly and acted on his nerves, but Waterlow was patient with him because he was very sorry for him, feeling the occasion to be a great crisis. His compassion, it is true, was slightly tinged with contempt: nevertheless he looked at the case generously, perceived it to be one in which a friend should be a friend—in which he, in particular, might see the distracted fellow through. Gaston was in a fever; he broke out into passionate arguments which were succeeded by fits of gloomy silence. He roamed about continually, with his hands in his pockets and his hair in a tangle; he could take neither a decision nor a momentary rest. It struck Waterlow more than ever before that he was after all essentially a foreigner; he had the sensibility of one, the sentimental candour, the need for sympathy, the communicative despair. A real young Anglo-Saxon would have buttoned himself up in his embarrassment and been dry and awkward and capable and unconscious of a drama; but Gaston was effusive and appealing and ridiculous and graceful—natural, above all, and egotistical. Indeed, a real young Anglo-Saxon would not have had this particular embarrassment at all for he would not have parted to such an extent with his moral independence. It was this weakness that excited Waterlow's secret scorn: family feeling was all very well, but to see it erected into a superstition affected him very much in the same way as the image of a blackamoor upon his knees before a fetish. He now measured for the first time the root it had taken in Gaston's nature. To act like a man the poor fellow must pull up the root, but the operation was terribly painful—was attended with cries and tears and contortions, with baffling scruples and a sense of sacrilege, the sense of siding with strangers against his own flesh and blood. Every now and then he broke out—"And if you see her—as she looks just now (she's too lovely—too touching!) you would see how right I was originally—when I found in her such a revelation of that type, the French Renaissance, you know, the one we talked about." But he reverted with at least equal frequency to the idea that he seemed unable to throw off, that it was like something done on purpose, with a refinement of cruelty; such an accident to them, of all people on earth, the very last, the very last, those who he verily believed would feel it more than any family in the world. When Waterlow asked what made them so exceptionally ticklish he could only say that they just happened to be so; it was his father's influence, his very genius, the worship of privacy and good manners, a hatred of all the new familiarities and profanations. The artist inquired further, at last, rather wearily, what in two words was the practical question his friend desired that he should consider. Whether he should be justified in throwing over Miss Francina—was that it?
"Oh heavens, no! For what sneak do you take me? She made a mistake, but any one might do that. It's whether it strikes you that I should be justified in throwing them over."
"It depends upon the sense you attach to justification."
"I mean—should I be miserably unhappy—would it be in their power to make me so?"
"To try—certainly, if they are capable of anything so nasty. The only honourable conduct for them is to let you alone."
"Ah, they won't do that—they like me too much!" Gaston said, ingenuously.
"It's an odd way of liking. The best way to show that would be to let you marry the girl you love."
"Certainly—but they are profoundly convinced that she represents such dangers, such vulgarities, such possibilities of doing other things of the same sort, that it's upon them my happiness would be shattered."
"Well, if you yourself have no secret for persuading them of the contrary I'm afraid I can't teach you one."
"Yes, I ought to do it myself," said Gaston, in the candour of his meditations. Then he went on, in his torment of inconsistency—"They never believed in her from the first. My father was perfectly definite about it. At heart they never accepted her; they only pretended to do so because I guaranteed that she was incapable of doing a thing that could ever displease them. Then no sooner was my back turned than she perpetrated that!"
"That was your folly," Waterlow remarked, painting away.
"My folly—to turn my back?"
"No, no—to guarantee."
"My dear fellow—wouldn't you?" Gaston asked, staring.
"Never in the world."
"You would have thought her capable———?"
"Capoabilissima! and I shouldn't have cared."
"Do you think her then capable of doing it again?"
"I don't care if she is; that's the least of all questions."
"The least———?"
"Ah, don't you see, wretched youth," said Waterlow, pausing from his work and looking up—"don't you see that the question of her possibilities is as nothing compared to that of yours? She's the sweetest young thing I ever saw; but even if she happened not to be I should urge you to marry her, in simple self-preservation."
"In self-preservation?"
"To rescue from destruction the last remnant of your independence. That's a much more important matter even than not treating her shabbily. They are doing their best to kill you morally—to render you incapable of individual life."
"They are—they are!" Gaston declared, with enthusiasm.
"Well then, if you believe it, for heaven's sake go and marry her to-morrow!" Waterlow threw down his implements and added, "And come out of this—into the air."
Gaston however was planted in his path on the way to the door. "And if she does break out again, in the same way?"
"In the same way?"
"In some other manifestation of that terrible order?"
"Well," said Waterlow, "you will at least have got rid of your family."
"Yes, if she does that I shall be glad they are not there! They're right, pourtant, they're right," Gaston went on, passing out of the studio with his friend.
"They're right?"
"It was a dreadful thing."
"Yes, thank heaven! It was the finger of providence, to give you your chance." This was ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie's lover—if lover he may in his most infirm aspect be called—looked as if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him however was his companion's saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: "Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don't you see that she's really of the softest, finest material that breathes, that she's a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you yourself have the wit to conceive?"
"Ah, my dear friend!" Gaston Probert murmured, gratefully, panting.
"The limit will be yours, not hers," Waterlow added.
"No, no, I have done with limits," his companion rejoined, ecstatically.
That evening at ten o'clock Gaston went to the Hôtel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham and requested the German waiter to introduce him into the dining-room attached to Mr. Dosson's apartments and then go and tell Miss Francina he was awaiting her there.
"Oh, you'll be better there than in the zalon—they have villed it with their luccatch," said the man, who always addressed him in an intention of English and was not ignorant of the tie that united the visitor to the amiable American family, or perhaps even of the modifications it had lately undergone.
"With their luggage?"
"They leave to-morrow morning—oh, I don't think they themselves known for where, sir."
"Please then say to Miss Francina that I have called on very urgent business—that I'm pressed, pressed!"
The eagerness of the sentiment which possessed Gaston at that moment is communicative, but perhaps the vividness with which the waiter placed it before the young lady is better explained by the fact that her lover slipped a five-franc piece into his hand. At any rate she entered the dining-room sooner than Gaston had ventured to hope, though she corrected this promptitude a little by stopping short, drawing back, when she saw how pale he was and how he looked as if he had been crying.
"I have chosen—I have chosen," he said gently, smiling at her in contradiction to these indications.
"You have chosen?"
"I have had to give them up. But I like it so much better than having to give you up! I took you first with their assent. That was well enough—it was worth trying for. But now I take you without it. We can live that way too."
"Ah, I'm not worth it. You give up too much!" cried the girl. "We're going away—it's all over." She turned from him quickly, as if to carry out her meaning, but he caught her more quickly still and held her—held her fast and long. She had only freed herself when her father and sister broke in, from the salon, attracted apparently by the audible commotion.
"Oh, I thought you had at least knocked over the lamp!" Delia exclaimed.
"You must take me with you if you are going away, Mr. Dosson," Gaston said. "I will start whenever you like."
"All right—where shall we go?" the old man asked.
"Hadn't you decided that?"
"Well, the girls said they would tell me."
"We were going home," said Francie.
"No we weren't—not a bit!" Delia declared.
"Oh, not there," Gaston murmured, pathetically, looking at Francie.
"Well, when you've fixed it you can take the tickets," Mr. Dosson observed.
"To some place where there are no newspapers," Gaston went on.
"I guess you'll have hard work to find one."
"Dear me, we needn't read them! We wouldn't have read that one if your family hadn't forced us," Delia said to her prospective brother-in-law.
"Well, I shall never be forced—I shall never again in my life look at one," he replied.
"You'll see—you'll have to!" laughed Mr. Dosson.
"No, you'll tell us enough."
Francie had her eyes on the ground; they were all smiling but she. "Won't they forgive me, ever?" she asked, looking up.
"Yes, perfectly, if you can persuade me not to marry you. But in that case what good will their forgiveness do you?"
"Well, perhaps it's better to pay for it."
"To pay for it?"
"By suffering something. For it was dreadful."
"Oh, for all you'll suffer———!" Gaston exclaimed, shining down at her.
"It was for you—only for you, as I told you," the girl went on.
"Yes, don't tell me again—I don't like that explanation! I ought to let you know that my father now declines to do anything for me," the young man added, to Mr. Dosson.
"To do anything for you?"
"To give me any money."
"Well, that makes me feel better," said Mr. Dosson.
"There'll be enough for all—especially if we economise in newspapers," Delia declared, jocosely.
"Well, I don't know, after all the Reverberator came for nothing," her father went on, in the same spirit.
"Don't you be afraid hell ever send it now!" cried the girl.
"I'm very sorry—because they were lovely," Francie said to Gaston, with sad eyes.
"Let us wait to say that till they come back to us," Gaston returned, somewhat sententiously. He really cared little at this moment whether his relatives were lovely or not.
"I'm sure you won't have to wait long!" Delia remarked, with the same cheerfulness.
"'Till they come back'?" Mr. Dosson repeated. "Ah, they can't come back now. We won't take them in!" The words fell from his lips with a mild unexpected austerity which imposed itself, producing a momentary silence, and it is a sign of Gaston's complete emancipation that he did not in his heart resent this image of eventual favours denied to his race. The resentment was rather Delia's, but she kept it to herself, for she was capable of reflecting with complacency that the key of the house would after all be hers, so that she could open the door for the Proberts if they should knock. Now that her sister's marriage was really to take place her consciousness that the American people would have been told so was still more agreeable. The party left the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham on the morrow, but it appeared to the German waiter, as he accepted another five-franc piece from the happy and now reckless Gaston, that they were even yet not at all clear as to where they were going.
THE END.