The Reverberator (21 page)

“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!”