The Reverberator (15 page)

Francie remembered now (she had forgotten it) that Margaret de Cliché had told her she meant to come again. She hoped the marquise thought by this time that, on canvas at least, she looked a little more like a lady. Mme. de Cliché smiled at her at any rate and kissed her, as if in fact there could be no mistake. She smiled also at Mr. Flack, on Francie’s introducing him, and only looked grave when, after she had asked where the others were—the papa and the
grand
sœur—the girl replied that she hadn’t the least idea: her party consisted only of herself and Mr. Flack. Then Mme. de Cliché became very stern indeed—assumed an aspect that brought back Francie’s sense that she was the individual, among all Gaston’s belongings, who had pleased her least from the first. Mme. de Douves was superficially more formidable but with her the second impression was most comforting. It was just this second impression of the marquise that was not. There were perhaps others behind it but the girl had not yet arrived at them. Mr. Waterlow might not have been very fond of Mr. Flack, but he was none the less perfectly civil to him, and took much trouble to show him all the work that he had in hand, dragging out canvases, changing lights, taking him off to see things at the other end of the great room. While the two gentlemen were at a distance Mme. de Cliché expressed to Francie the confidence that she would allow her to see her home: on which Francie replied that she was not going home, she was going somewhere else with
Mr. Flack. And she explained, as if it simplified the matter, that this gentleman was an editor.

Her interlocutress echoed the term and Francie developed her explanation. He was not the only editor, but one of the many editors, of a great American paper. He was going to publish an article about her picture. Gaston knew him perfectly; it was Mr. Flack who had been the cause of Gaston’s being presented to her. Mme. de Cliché looked across at him as if the inadequacy of the cause projected an unfavourable light upon the effect; she inquired whether Francie thought Gaston would like her to drive about Paris alone with an editor. “I’m sure I don’t know. I never asked him!” said Francie. “He ought to want me to be polite to a person who did so much for us.” Soon after this Mme. de Cliché withdrew, without looking afresh at Mr. Flack, though he stood in her path as she approached the door. She did not kiss our young lady again, and the girl observed that her leave-taking consisted of the simple words, “Adieu, mademoiselle.” She had already perceived that in proportion as the Proberts became majestic they had recourse to French.

She and Mr. Flack remained in the studio but a short time longer; and when they were seated in the carriage again, at the door (they had come in Mr. Dosson’s open landau), her companion said, “And now where shall we go?” He spoke as if on their way from the hotel he had not touched upon the pleasant vision of a little turn in the Bois. He had insisted then that the day was made on purpose, the air full of spring. At present he seemed to wish to give himself the pleasure of making his companion choose that particular alternative. But she only answered, rather impatiently:

“Wherever you like, wherever you like.” And she sat there swaying her parasol, looking about her, giving no order.

“Au Bois,” said George Flack to the coachman, leaning back on the soft cushions. For a few moments after the carriage had taken its easy elastic start they were silent; but presently he went on, “Was that lady one of your relations?”

“Do you mean one of Mr. Probert’s? She is his sister.”

“Is there any particular reason in that why she shouldn’t say good-morning to me?”

“She didn’t want you to remain with me. She wanted to carry me off.”

“What has she got against me?” asked Mr. Flack.

Francie seemed to consider a little. “Oh, it’s these French ideas.”

“Some of them are very base,” said her companion.

The girl made no rejoinder; she only turned her eyes to right and left, admiring the splendid day, the shining city. The great architectural vista was fair: the tall houses, with their polished shop-fronts, their balconies, their signs with accented letters, seemed to make a glitter of gilt and crystal as they rose into the sunny air. The colour of everything was cool and pretty and the sound of everything gay; the sense of a costly spectacle was everywhere. “Well, I like Paris, anyway!” Francie exclaimed at last.

“It’s lucky for you, since you’ve got to live here.”

“I haven’t got to, there’s no obligation. We haven’t settled anything about that.”

“Hasn’t that lady settled it for you?”

“Yes, very likely she has,” said Francie, placidly. “I don’t like her so well as the others.”

“You like the others very much?”

“Of course I do. So would you if they had made so much of you.”

“That one at the studio didn’t make much of me, certainly.”

“Yes, she’s the most haughty,” said Francie.

“Well, what is it all about?” Mr. Flack inquired. “Who are they, anyway?”

“Oh, it would take me three hours to tell you,” the girl replied, laughing. “They go back a thousand years.”

“Well, we’ve got a thousand years—I mean three hours.” And George Flack settled himself more on his cushions and inhaled the pleasant air. “I do enjoy this drive, Miss Francie,” he went on. “It’s many a day since I’ve been to the Bois. I don’t fool round much among the trees.”

Francie replied candidly that for her too the occasion was very agreeable, and Mr. Flack pursued, looking round him with a smile, irrelevantly and cheerfully: “Yes, these French ideas! I don’t see how you can stand them. Those they have about young ladies are horrid.”

“Well, they tell me you like them better after you are married.”

“Why, after they are married they’re worse—I mean the ideas. Every one knows that.”

“Well, they can make you like anything, the way they talk,” Francie said.

“And do they talk a great deal?”

“Well, I should think so. They don’t do much else, and they talk about the queerest things—things I never heard of.”

“Ah, that I’ll engage!” George Flack exclaimed.

“Of course I have had most conversation with Mr. Probert.”

“The old gentleman?”

“No, very little with him. I mean with Gaston. But it’s not he that has told me most—it’s Mme. de Brécourt. She relates and relates—it’s very interesting. She has told me all their histories, all their troubles and complications.”

“Complications?”

“That’s what she calls them. It seems very different from America. It’s just like a story—they have such strange feelings. But there are things you can see—without being told.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well, like Mme. de Cliché’s—” But Francie paused, as if for a word.

“Do you mean her complications?”

“Yes, and her husband’s. She has terrible ones. That’s why one must forgive her if she is rather peculiar. She is very unhappy.”

“Do you mean through her husband?”

“Yes, he likes other ladies better. He flirts with Mme. de Brives.”

“Mme. de Brives?”

“Yes, she’s lovely,” said Francie. “She isn’t very young, but she’s fearfully attractive. And he used to go every day to have tea with Mme. de Villepreux. Mme. de Cliché can’t bear Mme. de Villepreux.”

“Lord, what a low character he must be!” George Flack exclaimed.

“Oh, his mother was very bad. That was one thing they had against the marriage.”

“Who had?—against what marriage?”

“When Maggie Probert became engaged.”

“Is that what they call her—Maggie?”

“Her brother does; but every one else calls her Margot. Old Mme. de Cliché had a horrid reputation. Every one hated her.”

“Except those, I suppose, who liked her too much. And who is Mme. de Villepreux?”

“She’s the daughter of Mme. de Marignac.”

“And who is Mme. de Marignac?”

“Oh, she’s dead,” said Francie. “She used to be a great friend of Mr. Probert—of Gaston’s father.”

“He used to go to tea with her?”

“Almost every day. Susan says he has never been the same since her death.”

“Ah, poor man! And who is Susan?”

“Why, Mme. de Brécourt. Mr. Probert just loved Mme. de Marignac. Mme. de Villepreux isn’t so nice as her mother. She was brought up with the Proberts, like a sister, and now she carries on with Maxime.”

“With Maxime?”

“That’s M. de Cliché.”

“Oh, I see—I see!” murmured George Flack, responsively. They had reached the top of the Champs Elysées and were passing below the wondrous arch to which that gentle eminence forms a pedestal and which looks down even on splendid Paris from its immensity and across at the vain mask of the Tuileries and the river-moated Louvre and the twin towers of Notre Dame, painted blue by the distance. The confluence of carriages—a sounding stream, in which our friends become engaged—rolled into the large avenue leading to the Bois de Boulogne. Mr. Flack evidently enjoyed the scene; he gazed about him
at their neighbours, at the villas and gardens on either hand; he took in the prospect of the far-stretching brown boskages and smooth alleys of the wood, of the hour that they had yet to spend there, of the rest of Francie’s artless prattle, of the place near the lake where they could alight and walk a little; even of the bench where they might sit down. “I see, I see,” he repeated with appreciation. “You make me feel quite as if I were in the
grand monde
.”

ONE DAY, AT NOON, SHORTLY BEFORE THE TIME for which Gaston had announced his return, a note was brought to Francie from Mme. de Brécourt. It caused her some agitation, though it contained a clause intended to guard her against vain fears. “Please come to me the moment you have received this—I have sent the carriage. I will explain when you get here what I want to see you about. Nothing has happened to Gaston. We are all here.” The coupé from the Place Beauvau was waiting at the door of the hotel and the girl had but a hurried conference with her father and sister; if conference it could be called in which vagueness on one side encountered blankness on the other. “It’s for something bad—something bad,” Francie said, while she tied her bonnet; though she was unable to think what it could be. Delia, who looked a good deal scared, offered to accompany her; upon which Mr. Dosson made the first remark of a practical character in which he had indulged in relation to his daughter’s alliance.

“No you won’t—no you won’t, my dear. They may whistle for Francie, but let them see that they can’t whistle for all of us.” It was the first sign he had given of being jealous of the dignity of the Dossons. That question had never troubled him.

“I know what it is,” said Delia, while she arranged her sister’s garments. “They want to talk about religion. They have got the priests; there’s some bishop, or perhaps some cardinal. They want to baptise you.”

“You’d better take a waterproof!” Francie’s father called after her as she flitted away.

She wondered, rolling toward the Place Beauvau, what they were all there for; that announcement balanced against the reassurance conveyed in the phrase about Gaston. She liked them individually but in their collective form they made her uneasy. In their family parties there was always something of the tribunal. Mme. de Brécourt came out to meet her in the vestibule, drawing her quickly into a small room (not the salon—Francie knew it as her hostess’s “own room,” a lovely boudoir), in which, considerably to the girl’s relief, the rest of the family were not assembled. Yet she guessed in a moment that they were near at hand—they were waiting. Susan looked flushed and strange; she had a queer smile; she kissed her as if she didn’t know that she was doing it. She laughed as she greeted her, but her laugh was nervous; she was different every way from anything Francie had hitherto seen. By the time our young lady had perceived these things she was sitting beside her on a sofa and Mme. de Brécourt had her hand, which she held so tight that it almost hurt her. Susan’s eyes were in their nature salient, but on this occasion they seemed to have started out of her head.

“We are upside down—terribly agitated. A bomb has fallen into the house.”

“What’s the matter—what’s the matter?” Francie asked, pale, with parted lips. She had a sudden wild idea that Gaston might have found out in America that her father
had no money, had lost it all; that it had been stolen during their long absence. But would he cast her off for that?

“You must understand the closeness of our union with you from our sending for you this way—the first, the only person—in a crisis. Our joys are your joys and our indignations are yours.”

“What
is
the matter,
please
?” the girl repeated. Their “indignations” opened up a gulf; it flashed upon her, with a shock of mortification that the idea had not come sooner, that something would have come out: a piece in the paper, from Mr. Flack, about her portrait and even (a little) about herself. But that was only more mystifying; for certainly Mr. Flack could only have published something pleasant—something to be proud of. Had he by some incredible perversity or treachery stated that the picture was bad, or even that
she
was? She grew dizzy, remembering how she had refused him and how little he had liked it, that day at Saint-Germain. But they had made that up over and over, especially when they sat so long on a bench together (the time they drove,) in the Bois de Boulogne.

“Oh, the most awful thing; a newspaper sent this morning from America to my father—containing two horrible columns of vulgar lies and scandal about our family, about all of us, about you, about your picture, about poor Marguerite, calling her ‘Margot,’ about Maxime and Léonie de Villepreux, saying he’s her lover, about all our affairs, about Gaston, about your marriage, about your sister and your dresses and your dimples, about our darling father, whose history it professes to relate, in the most ignoble, the most revolting terms. Papa’s in the most awful state!” said Mme. de Brécourt, panting to take breath. She had spoken with the volubility of horror and passion. “You
are outraged with us and you must suffer with us,” she went on. “But who has done it? Who has done it? Who has done it?”