The Reverberator (18 page)

“It will be very simple—he will give me up.”

“Then he’ll be a low wretch.”

“Not in the least—he’ll give me up as he took me. He would never have asked me to marry him if he hadn’t been able to get
them
to accept me: he thinks everything in life of
them
. If they cast me off now he’ll do just the
same. He’ll have to choose between us, and when it comes to that he’ll never choose me.”

“He’ll never choose Mr. Flack, if that’s what you mean—if you are going to identify yourself so with him!”

“Oh, I wish he’d never been born!” Francie suddenly shivered. And then she added that she was sick—she was going to bed, and her sister took her off to her room.

Mr. Dosson, that afternoon, sitting by Francie’s bedside, read out from the copy of the
Reverberator
which he had purchased on the boulevard the dreadful “piece” to his two daughters. It is a remarkable fact that as a family they were rather disappointed in this composition, in which their curiosity found less to repay it than it had expected, their resentment against Mr. Flack less to stimulate it, their imaginative effort to take the point of view of the Proberts less to sustain it, and their acceptance of the promulgation of Francie’s innocent remarks as a natural incident of the life of the day less to make them reconsider it. The letter from Paris appeared lively, “chatty,” even brilliant, and so far as the personalities contained in it were concerned Mr. Dosson wanted to know if they were not aware over here of the charges brought every day against the most prominent men in Boston. “If there was anything in that style they might talk,” he said; and he scanned the effusion afresh with a certain surprise at not finding in it some imputation of pecuniary malversation. The effect of an acquaintance with the text was to depress Delia, who did not exactly see what there was in it to take back or explain away. However, she was aware there were some points they didn’t understand, and doubtless these were the scandalous places—the things that had thrown the Proberts into a state. But why should they be in a state if
other people didn’t understand the allusions—they were peculiar, but peculiarly incomprehensible—any better than she did? The whole thing struck Francie as infinitely less lurid than Mme. de Brécourt’s account of it, and the part about herself and her portrait seemed to make even less of the subject than it easily might have done. It was scanty, it was “skimpy,” and if Mr. Waterlow was offended it would not be because they had published too much about him. If was nevertheless clear to her that there were a lot of things that
she
had not told Mr. Flack, as well as a great many that she had: perhaps these were the things that that lady had put in—Florine or Dorine—the one she had mentioned at Mme. de Brécourt’s.

All the same, if the communication in the
Reverberator
gave them at the hotel less of a sensation than had been announced and bristled so much less than was to have been feared with explanations of the anguish of the Proberts, this did not diminish the girl’s sense of responsibility nor make the case a whit less grave. It only showed how sensitive and fastidious the Proberts were and therefore with what difficulty they could forgive. Moreover Francie made another reflection as she lay there—for Delia kept her in bed nearly three days, feeling that for the moment at any rate that was an effectual reply to the wish she had signified that they should leave Paris. Perhaps they had got coarse and callous, Francie said to herself; perhaps they had read so many articles like that that they had lost their delicacy, the sense of certain differences and decencies. Then, very weak and vague and passive as she was now, in the bedimmed room, in the soft Parisian bed, and with Delia treating her as much as possible like a sick person, she thought of the lively and chatty letters that they had
always seen in the papers and wondered whether they
all
meant a violation of sanctities, a convulsion of homes, a burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls’ engagements. It was present to her as an agreeable negative, I must add, that her father and sister took no strenuous view of her responsibility or of their own: they neither brought the matter up to her as a crime nor made her worse through her feeling that they hovered about in tacit disapproval. There was a pleasant, cheerful helplessness in her father in regard to this as in regard to everything else. There could be no more discussion among them on such a question than there had ever been, for none was needed to illustrate the fact that for these candid minds the newspapers and all they contained were a part of the general fatality of things, of the recurrent freshness of the universe, coming out like the sun in the morning or the stars at night. The thing that worried Francie most while Delia kept her in bed was the apprehension of what her father might do: but this was not a fear of what he might do to Mr. Flack. He would go round perhaps to Mr. Probert’s or to Mme. de Brécourt’s to reprimand them for having made things so rough for his “chicken.” It was true she had scarcely ever seen him reprimand any one for anything; but on the other hand nothing like that had ever happened before to her or to Delia. They had made each other cry once or twice but no one else had ever made them, and no one had ever broken out on them that way and frightened them half to death. Francie wanted her father not to go round; she had a sense that those other people had somehow stores of censure, of superiority in any discussion, which he could not command. She wanted nothing done and no communication to pass—only a proud, unbickering silence on the part of
the Dossons. If the Proberts made a noise and they made none it would be they who would have the best appearance. Moreover, now, with each elapsing day she felt that she
did
wish to see Gaston about it. Her desire was to wait, counting the hours, so that she might just explain, saying two or three things. Perhaps these things would not make it better—very likely they would not; but at any rate nothing would have been done in the interval, at least on, her part and her father’s and Delia’s, to make it worse. She told her father that she should not like him to go round, and she was in some degree relieved at perceiving that he did not seem very clear as to what it was open to him to say to the Proberts. He was not afraid but he was vague. His relation to almost everything that had happened to them as a family for a good while back was a sense of the absence of precedents, and precedents were particularly absent now, for he had never before seen a lot of people in a rage about a piece in the paper. Delia also reassured her; she said she would see to it that their father didn’t dash off. She communicated to her indeed that he had not the smallest doubt that Gaston, in a few days, would blow them all up much higher than they had blown her and that he was very sorry he had let her go round on that sort of summons to Mme. de Brécourt’s. It was for her and the rest to come to Francie and to him, and if they had anything practical to say they would arrive in a body yet. If Mr. Dosson had the sense of his daughter’s having been roughly handled he derived some of the consolation of amusement from his persistent humorous view of the Proberts as a “body.” If they were consistent with their character or with their complaint they would move
en masse
upon the hotel, and he stayed at home a good deal,
as if he were waiting for them. Delia intimated to her sister that this vision cheered them up as they sat, they two, in the red salon while Francie was in bed. Of course it did not exhilarate this young lady, and she even looked for no brighter side now. She knew almost nothing but her sharp little ache of suspense, her presentiment of Gaston’s horror, which grew all the while. Delia remarked to her once that he would have seen lots of society-papers over there, he would have become familiar; but this only suggested to the girl (she had strange new moments of quick reasoning at present,) that that really would only prepare him to be disgusted, not to be indifferent. His disgust would be colder than anything she had ever known and would complete her knowledge of him—make her understand him properly for the first time. She would just meet it as briefly as possible; it would finish the business, wind up the episode, and all would be over.

He did not write; that proved it in advance; there had now been two or three posts without a letter. He had seen the paper in Boston or in New York and it had struck him dumb. It was very well for Delia to say that of course he didn’t write when he was on the sea: how could they get his letters even if he did? There had been time before—before he sailed; though Delia represented that people never wrote then. They were ever so much too busy at the last and they were going to see their correspondents in a few days anyway. The only missives that came to Francie were a copy of the
Reverberator
, addressed in Mr. Flack’s hand and with a great inkmark on the margin of the fatal letter, and a long note from Mme. de Brécourt, received forty-eight hours after the scene at her house. This lady expressed herself as follows:

Francie looked at this letter and tossed it away without reading it. Delia picked it up, read it to her father, who didn’t understand it, and kept it in her possession, poring over it as Mr. Flack had seen her pore over the cards that were left while she was out or over the registers of American travellers. They knew of Gaston’s arrival by his telegraphing from Havre (he came back by the French line), and he mentioned the hour—“about dinner-time”—at which he should reach Paris. Delia, after dinner, made her father take her to the circus, so that Francie should be left alone to receive her intended, who would be sure to hurry round in the course of the evening. The girl herself expressed no preference whatever on this point, and the idea was one of Delia’s masterly ones, her flashes of inspiration. There was never any difficulty about imposing such conceptions on her father. But at half-past ten, when they returned, the young man had not appeared, and Francie remained only long enough to say, “I told you so!” with a white face and to march off to her room with her candle. She locked herself in and her sister could not get at her that night. It was another of Delia’s inspirations not to try, after she had felt that the door was fast.
She forbore, in the exercise of a great discretion, but she herself in the ensuing hours slept not a wink. Nevertheless, the next morning, as early as ten o’clock, she had the energy to drag her father out to the banker’s and to keep him out two hours. It would be inconceivable now that Gaston should not turn up before the
déjéuner
. He did turn up; about eleven o’clock he came in and found Francie alone. She perceived, in the strangest way, that he was very pale, at the same time that he was sunburnt; and not for an instant did he smile at her. It was very certain that there was no bright flicker in her own face, and they had the most singular, the most unnatural meeting. As he entered the room he said—“I could not come last evening; they made it impossible; they were all there and we were up till three o’clock this morning.” He looked as if he had been through terrible things, and it was not simply the strain of his attention to so much business in America. What passed next she could not remember afterwards; it seemed only a few seconds before he said to her, slowly, holding her hand (before this he had pressed his lips to hers, silently), “Is it true, Francie, what they say (and they swear to it!) that
you
told that blackguard those horrors—that that infamous letter is only a report of
your
talk?”

“I told him everything—it’s all me,
me
,
ME
!” the girl replied, exaltedly, without pretending to hesitate an instant as to what he might mean.

Gaston looked at her with deep eyes; then he walked straight away to the window and remained there in silence. Francie said nothing more. At last the young man went on, “And I who insisted to them that there was no natural delicacy like yours!”