The Reverberator (12 page)

“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 dêtre
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.

WHEN, ON COMING HOME THE EVENING AFTER his father had made the acquaintance of the Dossons, Gaston went into the room in which the old man habitually sat, Mr. Probert said, laying down his book and keeping on his glasses: “Of course you will go on living with me. You must understand that I don’t consent to your going away. You will have to occupy the rooms that Susan and Alphonse had.”

Gaston observed with pleasure the transition from the conditional to the future and also the circumstance that his father was quietly reading, according to his custom when he sat at home of an evening. This proved he was not too much off the hinge. He read a great deal, and very serious books; works about the origin of things—of man, of institutions, of speech, of religion. This habit he had taken up more particularly since the circle of his social life had grown so much smaller. He sat there alone, turning his pages softly, contentedly, with the lamp-light shining on his refined old head and embroidered dressing-gown. Formerly he was out every night in the week—Gaston was perfectly aware that to many dull people he must even have appeared a little frivolous. He was essentially a social animal, and indeed—except perhaps poor Jane, in her damp old castle in Brittany—they were all social animals.
That was doubtless part of the reason why the family had acclimatised itself in France. They had affinities with a society of conversation; they liked general talk and old high
salons
, slightly tarnished and dim, containing precious relics, where there was a circle round the fire and winged words flew about and there was always some clever person before the chimneypiece, holding or challenging the rest. That figure, Gaston knew, especially in the days before he could see for himself, had very often been his father, the lightest and most amiable specimen of the type that liked to take possession of the hearthrug. People left it to him; he was so transparent, like a glass screen, and he never triumphed in argument. His word on most subjects was not felt to be the last (it was usually not more conclusive than a shrugging, inarticulate resignation, an “Ah, you know, what will you have?”); but he had been none the less a part of the essence of some dozen good houses, most of them over the river, in the conservative
faubourg
, and several to-day emptied receptacles, extinguished fires. They made up Mr. Probert’s world—a world not too small for him and yet not too large, though some of them supposed themselves to be very great institutions. Gaston knew the succession of events that had helped to make a difference, the most salient of which were the death of his brother, the death of his mother and above all perhaps the extinction of Mme. de Marignac, to whom the old gentleman used still to go three or four evenings out of the seven and sometimes even in the morning besides. Gaston was well aware what a place she had held in his father’s life and affection, how they had grown up together (her people had been friends of his grandfather when that fine old Southern worthy came, a widower with a young
son and several negroes, to take his pleasure in Paris in the time of Louis Philippe), and how much she had had to do with marrying his sisters. He was not ignorant that her friendship and all its exertions were often mentioned as explaining their position, so remarkable in a society in which they had begun after all as outsiders. But he would have guessed, even if he had not been told, what his father said to that. To offer the Proberts a position was to carry water to the fountain; they had not left their own behind them in Carolina; it had been large enough to stretch across the sea. As to what it was in Carolina there was no need of being explicit. This adoptive Parisian was by nature presupposing, but he was admirably gentle (that was why they let him talk to them before the fire—he was such a sympathising oracle), and after the death of his wife and of Mme. de Marignac, who had been
her
friend too, he was gentler than before. Gaston had been able to see that it made him care less for everything (except indeed the true faith, to which he drew still closer), and this increase of indifference doubtless helped to explain his collapse in relation to common Americans.

“We shall be thankful for any rooms you will give us,” the young man said. “We shall fill out the house a little, and won’t that be rather an improvement, shrunken as you and I have become?”

“You will fill it out a good deal, I suppose, with Mr. Dosson and the other girl.”

“Ah, Francie won’t give up her father and sister, certainly; and what should you think of her if she did? But they are not intrusive; they are essentially modest people; they won’t put themselves upon us. They have great natural discretion.”

“Do you answer for that? Susan does; she is always assuring one of it,” Mr. Probert said. “The father has so much that he wouldn’t even speak to me.”

“He didn’t know what to say to you.”

“How then shall I know what to say to him?”

“Ah, you always know!” Gaston exclaimed.

“How will that help us if he doesn’t know what to answer?”

“You will draw him out—he is full of
bonhomie
.”

“Well, I won’t quarrel with your
bonhomme
(if he’s silent—there are much worse faults), nor even with the fat young lady, though she is evidently vulgar. It is not for ourselves I am afraid; it’s for them. They will be very unhappy.”

“Never, never!” said Gaston. “They are too simple. They are not morbid. And don’t you like Francie? You haven’t told me so,” he added in a moment.

“She says ‘Parus,’ my dear boy.”

“Ah, to Susan too that seemed the principal obstacle. But she has got over it. I mean Susan has got over the obstacle. We shall make her speak French; she has a capital disposition for it; her French is already almost as good as her English.”

“That oughtn’t to be difficult. What will you have? Of course she is very pretty and I’m sure she is good. But I won’t tell you she is a marvel, because you must remember (you young fellows think your own point of view and your own experience everything), that I have seen beauties without number. I have known the most charming women of our time—women of an order to which Miss Francie,
con rispetto parlando
, will never begin to belong. I’m difficult about women—how can I help it? Therefore
when you pick up a little American girl at an inn and bring her to us as a miracle, I feel how standards alter.
J’ai vu mieux que ça
,
mon cher
. However, I accept everything to-day, as you know; when once one has lost one’s enthusiasm everything is the same, and one might as well perish by the sword as by famine.”

“I hoped she would fascinate you on the spot,” Gaston remarked, rather ruefully.

“ ‘Fascinate’—the language you fellows use!”

“Well, she will yet.”

“She will never know at least that she doesn’t: I will promise you that,” said Mr. Probert.

“Ah, be sincere with her, father—she’s worth it!” his son broke out.

When the old gentleman took that tone, the tone of vast experience and a fastidiousness justified by ineffable recollections, Gaston was more provoked than he could say, though he was also considerably amused, for he had a good while since made up his mind that there was an element of stupidity in it. It was fatuous to square one’s self so serenely in the absence of a sense: so far from being fine it was gross not to
feel
Francie Dosson. He thanked God
he
did. He didn’t know what old frumps his father might have frequented (the style of 1830, with long curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and a body, in a point suggestive of twenty whalebones, coming down to the knees), but he could remember Mme. de Marignac’s Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays, with Sundays and other days thrown in, and the taste that prevailed in that
milieu
: the books they admired, the verses they read and recited, the pictures, great heaven! they thought good, and the three busts of the lady of the house, in different corners
(as a Diana, a Druidess and a
Croyante
: her shoulders were supposed to make up for her head), effigies which to-day—even the least bad, Canova’s—would draw down a public castigation upon their authors.

“And what else is she worth?” Mr. Probert asked, after a momentary hesitation.

“How do you mean, what else?”

“Her immense prospects, that’s what Susan has been putting forward. Susan’s insistence on them was mainly what brought over Jane. Do you mind my speaking of them?”

Gaston was obliged to recognise, privately, the importance of Jane’s having been brought over, but he hated to hear it spoken of as if he were under an obligation to it. “To whom, sir?” he asked.

“Oh, only to you.”

“You can’t do less than Mr. Dosson. As I told you, he waived the question of money and he was superb. We can’t be more mercenary than he.”

“He waived the question of his own, you mean?” said Mr. Probert.

“Yes, and of yours. But it will be all right.” The young man flattered himself that that was as far as he was willing to go, in the way of bribery.

“Well, it’s your affair—or your sisters’,” his father returned. “It’s their idea that it will be all right.”

“I should think they would be weary of chattering!” Gaston exclaimed, impatiently.

Mr. Probert looked at him a moment with a vague surprise, but he only said, “I think they are. But the period of discussion is over. We have taken the jump.” He added, in a moment, as if from the desire to say something more
conciliatory: “Alphonse and Maxime are quite of your opinion.”

“Of my opinion?”

“That she is charming.”

“Confound them, then, I’m not of theirs!” The form of this rejoinder was childishly perverse, and it made Mr. Probert stare again; but it belonged to one of the reasons for which his children regarded him as an old darling that Gaston could feel after an instant that he comprehended it. The old man said nothing, but took up his book, and his son, who had been standing before the fire, went out of the room. His abstention from protest at Gaston’s petulance was the more commendable as he was capable, for his part, of thinking it important that
ces messieurs
should like the little girl at the hotel. Gaston was not, and it would have seemed to him a proof that he was in servitude indeed if he had accepted such an assurance as that as if it mattered. This was especially the case as his father’s mention of the approval of two of his brothers-in-law appeared to point to a possible disapproval on the part of the third. Francie’s lover cared as little whether she displeased M. de Brécourt as he cared whether she displeased Maxime and Raoul. The old gentleman continued to read, and in a few moments Gaston came back. He had expressed surprise, just before, that his sisters should have found so much to discuss in the idea of his marriage, but he looked at his father now with an air of having more to say—an intimation that the subject must not be considered as exhausted. “It seems rather odd to me that you should all appear to accept the step I am about to take as a sort of disagreeable necessity, when I myself hold that I have been so exceedingly fortunate.”