The Reverberator (1 volume, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888)/Chapter 7
VII.
It may as well be said at once that it was eventually carried out, and that in the course of a fortnight old Mr. Probert and his daughters alighted successively at the Hôtel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham. Francie's visit with her intended to Mme. de Brécourt bore exactly the fruit the young man had foreseen and was followed the very next day by a call from this lady. She took Francie out with her in her carriage and kept her the whole afternoon, driving her over half Paris, chattering with her, kissing her, delighting in her, telling her they were already sisters, paying her compliments which made the girl envy her art of beautiful expression. After she had carried her home the countess rushed off to her father's, reflecting with pleasure that at that hour she should probably find her sister Marguerite there. Mme. de Cliché was with the old man in fact (she had three days in the week for coming to the Cours la Reine); she sat near him in the firelight, telling him presumably her troubles; for Maxime de Cliché was not quite the pearl that they originally had supposed. Mme. de Brécourt knew what Marguerite did whenever she took that little ottoman and drew it close to her father's chair: she gave way to her favourite vice, that of dolefulness, which lengthened her long face more; it was unbecoming, if she only knew it. The family was intensely united, as we know; but that did not prevent Mme. de Brécourt's having a certain sympathy for Maxime: he too was one of themselves and she asked herself what she would have done if she had been a well-constituted man with a wife whose cheeks were like decks in a high sea. It was the twilight hour in the winter days, before the lamps, that especially brought her out; then she began her plaintive, complicated stories, to which her father listened with such angelic patience. Mme. de Brécourt liked his particular room in the old house in the Cours la Reine; it reminded her of her mother's life and her young days and her dead brother and the feelings connected with her first going into the world. Alphonse and she had had an apartment, by her father's kindness, under that familiar roof, so that she continued to pop in and out, full of her fresh impressions of society, just as she had done when she was a girl. She broke into her sister's confidences now; she announced her trouvaille and did battle for it bravely.
Five days later (there had been lively work in the meantime; Gaston turned so pale at moments that she feared it would all result in a mortal illness for him and Marguerite shed gallons of tears), Mr. Probert went to see the Dossons with his son. Mme. de Brécourt paid them another visit, a kind of official affair as she deemed it, accompanied by her husband; and the Baron de Douves and his wife, written to by Gaston, by his father and by Margaret and Susan, came up from the country full of tension and responsibility. M. de Douves was the person who took the family, all round, most seriously and most deprecated anything in the nature of crude and precipitate action. He was a very small black gentleman, with thick eyebrows and high heels (in the country, in the mud, he wore sabots with straw in them), who was suspected by his friends of believing that he looked like Louis XIV. It is perhaps a proof that something of the quality of this monarch was really recognised in him that no one had ever ventured to clear up this point by a question. "La famille c'est moi" appeared to be his tacit formula, and he carried his umbrella (he had very bad ones), with a kind of sceptral air. Mme. de Brécourt went so far as to believe that his wife, in confirmation of this, took herself in a manner for Mme. de Maintenon: she had lapsed into a provincial existence as she might have harked back to the seventeenth century; the world she lived in seemed about as far away. She was the largest, heaviest member of the family, and in the Vendée she was thought majestic, in spite of old clothes, of which she was fond and which added to her look of having come down from a remote past or reverted to it. She was at bottom an excellent woman, but she wrote roy and foy like her husband, and the action of her mind was wholly restricted to questions of relationship and alliance. She had an extraordinary patience of research and tenacity of grasp of a clue, and viewed people solely in the light projected upon them by others; that is, not as good or wicked, ugly or handsome, wise or foolish, but as grandsons, nephews, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters-in-law, cousins and second cousins. There was a certain expectation that she would leave memoirs. In Mme. de Brécourt's eyes this pair were very shabby, they did not payer de mine—they fairly smelt of their province; "but for the reality of the thing," she often said to herself, "they are worth all of us. We are diluted and they are pure, and any one with an eye would see it." "The thing" was the legitimist principle, the ancient faith and even, a little, the grand air.
The Marquis de Cliché did his duty with his wife, who mopped the decks, as Susan said, for the occasion, and was entertained in the red satin drawing-room by Mr. Dosson, Delia and Francie. Mr. Dosson wanted to go out when he heard of the approach of Gaston's relations, and the young man had to instruct him that this wouldn't do. The apartment in question had had a various experience, but it had probably never witnessed stranger doings than these laudable social efforts. Gaston was taught to feel that his family made a great sacrifice for him, but in a very few days he said to himself that he was safe, now they knew the worst. They made the sacrifice, they definitely agreed to it, but they judged it well that he should measure the full extent of it. "Gaston must never, never, never be allowed to forget what we have done for him:" Mme. de Brécourt told him that Marguerite de Cliché had expressed herself in that sense, at one of the family conclaves from which he had been absent. These high commissions sat, for several days, with great frequency, and the young man could feel that if there was help for him in discussion his case was promising. He flattered himself that he showed infinite patience and tact, and his expenditure of the latter quality in particular was in itself his only reward, for it was impossible he should tell Francie what arts he had to practise for her. He liked to think however that he practised them successfully; for he held that it was by such arts the civilised man is distinguished from the savage. What they cost him was made up simply in this—that his private irritation produced a kind of cheerful glow in regard to Mr. Dosson and Delia, whom he could not defend nor lucidly explain nor make people like, but whom he had ended, after so many days of familiar intercourse, by liking extremely himself. The way to get on with them—it was an immense simplification—was just to love them; one could do that even if one couldn't talk with them. He succeeded in making Mme. de Brécourt seize this nuance; she embraced the idea with her quick inflammability. "Yes," she said, "we must insist on their positive, not on their negative merits: their infinite generosity, their native delicacy. Their native delicacy, above all; we must work that!" And the brother and sister excited each other magnanimously to this undertaking. Sometimes, it must be added, they exchanged a glance which expressed a sudden slightly alarmed sense of the responsibility they had put on.
On the day Mr. Probert called at the Hôtel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham with his son, the pair walked away together, back to the Cours la Reine, without any immediate conversation. All that was said was some words of Mr. Probert's, with Gaston's rejoinder, as they crossed the Place de la Concorde.
"We should have to have them to dinner."
The young man noted his father's conditional, as if his acceptance of the Dossons were not yet complete; but he guessed all the same that the sight of them had not made a difference for the worse: they had let the old gentleman down more easily than was to have been feared. The call had not been noisy—a confusion of sounds; which was very happy, for Mr. Probert was particular in this—he could bear French noise but he could not bear American. As for English, he maintained that there was none. Mr. Dosson had scarcely spoken to him and yet had remained perfectly placid, which was exactly what Gaston would have chosen. Francie's lover knew moreover (though he was a little disappointed that no charmed exclamation should have been dropped as they quitted the hotel), that her spell had worked: it was impossible the old man should not have liked her.
"Ah, do ask them, and let it be very soon," he replied. "They'll like it so much."
"And whom can they meet—who can meet them?"
"Only the family—all of us: au complet. Other people we can have later."
"All of us, au complet—that makes eight. And the three of them," said Mr. Probert. Then he added, "Poor creatures!" This exclamation gave Gaston much pleasure; he passed his hand into his father's arm. It promised well; it denoted a sentiment of tenderness for the dear little Dossons, confronted with a row of fierce French critics, judged by standards that they had never even heard of. The meeting of the two parents had not made the problem of their commerce any more clear; but young Probert was reminded freshly by his father's ejaculation of that characteristic kindness which was really what he had built upon. The old gentleman, heaven knew, had prejudices, but if they were numerous, and some of thenouvery curious, they were not rigid. He had also such nice inconsistent feelings, such irrepressible indulgences, and they would ease everything off. He was in short an old darling, and with an old darling, in the long run, one was always safe. When they reached the house in the Cours la Reine Mr. Probert said: "I think you told me you are dining out."
"Yes, with our friends."
"'Our friends?' Comme vous y allez! Come in and see me, then, on your return; but not later than half-past ten."
From this the young man saw that he had swallowed the dose; if he had made up his mind that it wouldn't do he would have announced the circumstance without more delay. This reflection was most agreeable, for Gaston was perfectly aware of how little he himself would have enjoyed a struggle. He would have carried it through, but he could not bear to think of it, and the sense that he was spared it made him feel at peace with all the world. The dinner at the hotel became a little banquet in honour of this state of things, especially as Francie and Delia raved, as they said, about his papa.
"Well, I expected something nice, but he goes far beyond," Delia remarked. "That's my idea of a gentleman."
"Ah, for that———!" said Gaston.
"He's so sweet. I'm not a bit afraid of him," Francie declared.
"Why should you be?"
"Well, I am of you," the girl went on.
"Much you show it!" her lover exclaimed.
"Yes, I am," she insisted, "at the bottom of all."
"Well, that's what a lady should be—of her husband."
"Well, I don't know; I'm more afraid than that. You'll see."
"I wish you were afraid of talking nonsense," said Gaston Probert.
Mr. Dosson made no observation whatever about their honourable visitor; he listened in genial, unprejudiced silence. It is a sign of his prospective son-in-law's perfect comprehension of him that Gaston knew this silence not to be in any degree restrictive: it did not mean that he had not been pleased. Mr. Dosson had simply nothing to say; he had not, like Gaston, a sensitive plate in his brain, and the important events of his life had never been personal impressions. His mind had had absolutely no history of that sort, and Mr. Probert's appearance had not produced a revolution. If the young man had asked him how he liked his father he would have said, at the most, "Oh, I guess he's all right!" But what was more candid even than this, in Gaston's view (and it was quite touchingly so), was the attitude of the good gentleman and his daughters toward the others, Mesdames de Douves, de Brécourt and de Cliché and their husbands, who had now all filed before them. They believed that the ladies and the gentlemen alike had covered them with endearments, were candidly, gushingly glad to make their acquaintance. They had not in the least seen what was manner, the minimum of decent profession, and what the subtle resignation of old races who have known a long historical discipline and have conventional forms for their feelings—forms resembling singularly little the feelings themselves. Francie took people at their word when they told her that the whole manière d'être of her family inspired them with an irresistible sympathy: that was a speech of which Mme. de Cliché had been capable, speaking as if for all the Proberts and for the old noblesse of France. It would not have occurred to the girl that such things need have been said as a mere garniture. Her lover, whose life had been surrounded with garniture and who therefore might have been expected not to notice it, had a fresh sense of it now: he reflected that manner might be a very misleading symbol, might cover pitfalls and bottomless gulfs, when it had attained that perfection and corresponded so little to fact. What he had wanted was that his people should be very civil at the hotel; but with such a high standard of compliment where after all was sincerity? And without sincerity how could people get on together when it came to their settling down to common life? Then the Dossons might have surprises, and the surprises would be painful in proportion as their present innocence was great. As to the high standard itself there was no manner of doubt; it was magnificent in its way.