The Reverberator (22 page)

“That was your folly,” Waterlow remarked, painting away.

“My folly—to turn my back?”

“No, no—to guarantee.”

“My dear fellow—wouldn’t you?” Gaston asked, staring.

“Never in the world.”

“You would have thought her capable—?”

“
Capabilissima
! and I shouldn’t have cared.”

“Do you think her then capable of doing it again?”

“I don’t care if she is; that’s the least of all questions.”

“The least—?”

“Ah, don’t you see, wretched youth,” said Waterlow, pausing from his work and looking up—“don’t you see that the question of her possibilities is as nothing compared to that of yours? She’s the sweetest young thing I ever saw; but even if she happened not to be I should urge you to marry her, in simple self-preservation.”

“In self-preservation?”

“To rescue from destruction the last remnant of your independence. That’s a much more important matter even than not treating her shabbily. They are doing their best to kill you morally—to render you incapable of individual life.”

“They are—they are!” Gaston declared, with enthusiasm.

“Well then, if you believe it, for heaven’s sake go and marry her to-morrow!” Waterlow threw down his implements and added, “And come out of this—into the air.”

Gaston however was planted in his path on the way to the door. “And if she does break out again, in the same way?”

“In the same way?”

“In some other manifestation of that terrible order?”

“Well,” said Waterlow, “you will at least have got rid of your family.”

“Yes, if she does that I shall be glad they are not there!
They’re right,
pourtant
, they’re right,” Gaston went on, passing out of the studio with his friend.

“They’re right?”

“It was a dreadful thing.”

“Yes, thank heaven! It was the finger of providence, to give you your chance.” This was ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie’s lover—if lover he may in his most infirm aspect be called—looked as if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him however was his companion’s saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: “Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don’t you see that she’s really of the softest, finest material that breathes, that she’s a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and enchanting thing you yourself have the wit to conceive?”

“Ah, my dear friend!” Gaston Probert murmured, gratefully, panting.

“The limit will be yours, not hers,” Waterlow added.

“No, no, I have done with limits,” his companion rejoined, ecstatically.

That evening at ten o’clock Gaston went to the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham and requested the German waiter to introduce him into the dining-room attached to Mr. Dosson’s apartments and then go and tell Miss Francina he was awaiting her there.

“Oh, you’ll be better there than in the
zalon
—they have villed it with their luccatch,” said the man, who
always addressed him in an intention of English and was not ignorant of the tie that united the visitor to the amiable American family, or perhaps even of the modifications it had lately undergone.

“With their luggage?”

“They leave to-morrow morning—oh, I don’t think they themselves known for where, sir.”

“Please then say to Miss Francina that I have called on very urgent business—that I’m pressed, pressed!”

The eagerness of the sentiment which possessed Gaston at that moment is communicative, but perhaps the vividness with which the waiter placed it before the young lady is better explained by the fact that her lover slipped a five-franc piece into his hand. At any rate she entered the dining-room sooner than Gaston had ventured to hope, though she corrected this promptitude a little by stopping short, drawing back, when she saw how pale he was and how he looked as if he had been crying.

“I have chosen—I have chosen,” he said gently, smiling at her in contradiction to these indications.

“You have chosen?”

“I have had to give them up. But I like it so much better than having to give
you
up! I took you first with their assent. That was well enough—it was worth trying for. But now I take you without it. We can live that way too.”

“Ah, I’m not worth it. You give up too much!” cried the girl. “We’re going away—it’s all over.” She turned from him quickly, as if to carry out her meaning, but he caught her more quickly still and held her—held her fast and long. She had only freed herself when her father and sister broke in, from the salon, attracted apparently by the audible commotion.

“Oh, I thought you had at least knocked over the lamp!” Delia exclaimed.

“You must take me with you if you are going away, Mr. Dosson,” Gaston said. “I will start whenever you like.”

“All right—where shall we go?” the old man asked.

“Hadn’t you decided that?”

“Well, the girls said they would tell me.”

“We were going home,” said Francie.

“No we weren’t—not a bit!” Delia declared.

“Oh, not there,” Gaston murmured, pathetically, looking at Francie.

“Well, when you’ve fixed it you can take the tickets,” Mr. Dosson observed.

“To some place where there are no newspapers,” Gaston went on.

“I guess you’ll have hard work to find one.”

“Dear me, we needn’t read them! We wouldn’t have read that one if your family hadn’t forced us,” Delia said to her prospective brother-in-law.

“Well, I shall never be forced—I shall never again in my life look at one,” he replied.

“You’ll see—you’ll have to!” laughed Mr. Dosson.

“No, you’ll tell us enough.”

Francie had her eyes on the ground; they were all smiling but she. “Won’t they forgive me, ever?” she asked, looking up.

“Yes, perfectly, if you can persuade me not to marry you. But in that case what good will their forgiveness do you?”

“Well, perhaps it’s better to pay for it.”

“To pay for it?”

“By suffering something. For it
was
dreadful.”

“Oh, for all you’ll suffer—!” Gaston exclaimed, shining down at her.

“It was for you—only for you, as I told you,” the girl went on.

“Yes, don’t tell me again—I don’t like that explanation! I ought to let you know that my father now declines to do anything for me,” the young man added, to Mr. Dosson.

“To do anything for you?”

“To give me any money.”

“Well, that makes me feel better,” said Mr. Dosson.

“There’ll be enough for all—especially if we economise in newspapers,” Delia declared, jocosely.

“Well, I don’t know, after all—the
Reverberator
came for nothing,” her father went on, in the same spirit.

“Don’t you be afraid he’ll ever send it now!” cried the girl.

“I’m very sorry—because they were lovely,” Francie said to Gaston, with sad eyes.

“Let us wait to say that till they come back to us,” Gaston returned, somewhat sententiously. He really cared little at this moment whether his relatives were lovely or not.

“I’m sure you won’t have to wait long!” Delia remarked, with the same cheerfulness.

“ ‘Till they come back’?” Mr. Dosson repeated. “Ah, they can’t come back now. We won’t take them in!” The words fell from his lips with a mild unexpected austerity which imposed itself, producing a momentary silence, and it is a sign of Gaston’s complete emancipation that he did not in his heart resent this image of eventual favours denied to his race. The resentment was rather Delia’s, but she kept it to herself, for she was capable of reflecting with complacency that the key of the house would after all be
hers, so that she could open the door for the Proberts if they should knock. Now that her sister’s marriage was really to take place her consciousness that the American people would have been told so was still more agreeable. The party left the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham on the morrow, but it appeared to the German waiter, as he accepted another five-franc piece from the happy and now reckless Gaston, that they were even yet not at all clear as to where they were going.

THE END.

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