The Reverberator (20 page)

“Do you know the view I take of the matter, according to what your father has told me?” Mr. Flack inquired. “I don’t mean that he suggested the interpretation, but my own knowledge of the world (as the world is constituted over here!) forces it upon my mind. They are scandalised, they are horrified. They never heard anything so dreadful. Miss Francie, that ain’t good enough! They know what’s in the papers every day of their lives and they know how it got there. They are simply making the thing a pretext to break—because they don’t think you’re fashionable enough. They’re delighted to strike a pretext they can work, and they’re all as merry together round there as a
lot of boys when school don’t keep. That’s my view of the business.”

“Oh—how can you say such a thing?” drawled Francie, with a tremor in her voice that struck her sister. Her eyes met Delia’s at the same moment, and this young woman’s heart bounded with the sense that she was safe. Mr. Flack’s indelicacy attempted to prove too much (though Miss Dosson had crude notions about the license of the press she felt, even as an untutored woman, what a false step he was now taking), and it seemed to her that Francie, who was revolted (the way she looked at her, in horror, showed that), could be trusted to check his advance.

“What does it matter what he says, my dear?” she cried. “Do make him drop the subject—he’s talking very wild. I’m going down to see what father means—I never heard of anything so flat!” At the door she paused a moment to add mutely, with a pressing glance, “Now just wipe him out—mind!” It was the same injunction she had launched at her from afar that day, a year before, they all dined at Saint-Germain, and she could remember how effective it had been then. The next moment she flirted out.

As soon as she had gone Mr. Flack moved nearer to Francie. “Now look here, you are not going back on me, are you?”

“Going back on you—what do you mean?”

“Ain’t we together in this thing? Surely we are.”

“Together—together?” Francie repeated, looking at him.

“Don’t you remember what I said to you—in the clearest terms—before we went to Waterlow’s, before our drive? I notified you that I should make use of the whole thing.”

“Oh, yes, I understood—it was all for that. I told them so. I never denied it.”

“You told them so?”

“When they were crying and going on. I told them I knew it—I told them I gave you the tip, as they say.”

She felt Mr. Flack’s eyes on her, strangely, as she spoke these words; then he was still nearer to her—he had taken her hand. “Ah, you’re too sweet!” She disengaged her hand and in the effort she sprang up; but he, rising too, seemed to press always nearer—she had a sense (it was disagreeable) that he was demonstrative—so that she retreated a little before him. “They were all there roaring and raging, trying to make you believe you have outraged them?”

“All but young Mr. Probert. Certainly they don’t like it.”

“The cowards!” said George Flack. “And where was young Mr. Probert?”

“He was away—I’ve told you—in America.”

“Ah, yes, your father told me. But now he has come back doesn’t he like it either?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Flack,” Francie replied, impatiently.

“Well, I do, then. He’s a coward too—he’ll do what his papa tells him—and the countess and the duchess and all the rest: he’ll just back down—he’ll give you up.”

“I can’t talk to you about that,” said Francie.

“Why not? why is he such a sacred subject, when we
are
, together? You can’t alter that. It was too lovely, your standing up for me—your not denying me!”

“You put in things I never said. It seems to me it was very different,” the girl remarked.

“Everything
is
different when it’s printed. What else would be the good of papers? Besides, it wasn’t I; it was
a lady who helps me here—you’ve heard me speak of her: Miss Topping. She wants so much to know you—she wants to talk with you.”

“And will she publish that?” Francie asked, gravely.

Mr. Flack stared a moment. “Lord, how they have worked on you! And do
you
think it’s bad?”

“Do I think what’s bad?”

“Why, the letter we are talking about.”

“Well—I don’t like it.”

“Do you think I was dishonourable?”

The girl made no answer to this, but after a moment she said, “Why do you come here this way—why do you ask me such questions?”

He hesitated; then he broke out: “Because I love you—don’t you know that?”

“Oh, please don’t!” she almost moaned, turning away.

“Why won’t you understand it—why won’t you understand the rest? Don’t you see how it has worked round—the heartless brutes they’ve turned into, and the way
our
life—yours and mine—is bound to be the same? Don’t you see the base way they treat you and that
I
only want to do anything in the world for you?”

Francie made no immediate response to this appeal, but after a moment she began: “Why did you ask me so many questions that day?”

“Because I always ask questions—it’s my business to ask them. Haven’t you always seen me ask you and ask every one all I could? Don’t you know they are the very foundation of my work? I thought you sympathised with my work so much—you used to tell me you did.”

“Well, I did,” said Francie.

“You put it in the past, I see. You don’t then any more.”

If this remark was on her visitor’s part the sign of a rare assurance the girl’s gentleness was still unruffled by it. She hesitated, she even smiled; then she replied, “Oh yes, I do—only not so much.”

“They
have
worked on you; but I should have thought they would have disgusted you. I don’t care—even a little sympathy will do—whatever you’ve got left.” He paused, looking at her, but she remained silent; so he went on: “There was no obligation for you to answer my questions—you might have shut me up, that day, with a word.”

“Really?” Francie asked, with all her sweet good faith in her face. “I thought I had to—for fear I should appear ungrateful.”

“Ungrateful?”

“Why to you—after what you had done. Don’t you remember that it was you that introduced us—?” And she paused, with a kind of weary delicacy.

“Not to those snobs that are screaming like frightened peacocks. I beg your pardon—I haven’t
that
on my conscience!”

“Well, you introduced us to Mr. Waterlow and he introduced us to—to his friends,” Francie explained, blushing, as if it were a fault, for the inexactness engendered by her magnanimity. “That’s why I thought I ought to tell you what you’d like.”

“Why, do you suppose if I’d known where that first visit of ours to Waterlow was going to bring you out I’d have taken you within fifty miles—” He stopped suddenly; then in another tone, “Lord, there’s no one like you! And you told them it was all
you
?”

“Never mind what I told them.”

“Miss Francie,” said George Flack, “if you’ll marry me I’ll never ask a question again. I’ll go into some other business.”

“Then you didn’t do it on purpose?” Francie asked.

“On purpose?”

“To get me into a quarrel with them—so that I might be free again.”

“Well, of all the ideas—!” the young man exclaimed, staring. “Your mind never produced that—it was your sister’s.”

“Wasn’t it natural it should occur to me, since if, as you say, you would never consciously have been the means—”

“Ah, but I
was
the means!” Mr. Flack interrupted. “We must go, after all, by what
did
happen.”

“Well, I thanked you when I drove with you and let you draw me out. So we’re square, aren’t we?” The term Francie used was a colloquialism generally associated with levity, but her face, as she spoke, was none the less deeply serious—serious even to pain.

“We’re square?” Mr. Flack repeated.

“I don’t think you ought to ask for anything more. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye? Never!” cried the young man.

He had an air of flushing with disappointment which really showed that he had come with a certain confidence of success.

Something in the way Francie repeated her “Goodbye!” indicated that she perceived this and that in the vision of such a confidence there was little to please her. “Do go away!” she broke out.

“Well, I’ll come back very soon,” said Mr. Flack, taking his hat.

“Please don’t—I don’t like it.” She had now contrived to put a wide space between them.

“Oh, you tormentress!” he groaned. He went toward the door, but before he reached it he turned round. “Will you tell me this, anyway?
Are
you going to marry Mr. Probert—after this?”

“Do you want to put that in the paper?”

“Of course I do—and say you said it!” Mr. Flack held up his head.

They stood looking at each other across the large room. “Well then—I ain’t. There!”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Flack, going out.

WHEN GASTON PROBERT CAME IN THAT EVENING he was received by Mr. Dosson and Delia, and when he asked where Francie was he was told by Delia that she would show herself half an hour later. Francie had instructed her sister that as Gaston would have, first of all, information to give their father about the business he had transacted in America he wouldn’t care for a lot of women in the room. When Delia made this speech before Mr. Dosson the old man protested that he was not in any hurry for the business; what he wanted to find out most was whether he had a good time—whether he liked it over there. Gaston might have liked it, but he did not look as if he had had a very good time. His face told of reverses, of suffering; and Delia declared to him that if she had not received his assurance to the contrary she would have believed he was right down sick. He confessed that he had been very sick at sea and was still feeling the effect of it, but insisted that there was nothing the matter with him now. He sat for some time with Mr. Dosson and Delia, and never once alluded to the cloud that hung over their relations. The girl had schooled her father to reticence on this point, and the manner in which she had descended upon him in the morning, after Mr. Flack had come up
stairs, was a lesson he was not likely soon to forget. It had been impressed upon him that she was indeed wiser than he could pretend to be, and he was now mindful that he must not speak of the “piece in the paper” unless young Probert should speak of it first. When Delia rushed down to him in the court she began by asking him categorically whom he had wished to do good to by sending Mr. Flack up to their parlour. To Francie or to her? Why, the way they felt then, they detested his very name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why, he had simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had ever got in his life.

“Well, hanged if I understand!” poor Mr. Dosson had said. “I thought you liked the piece—you think it’s so queer
they
don’t like it.” “They,” in the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but the Proberts in congress assembled.

“I don’t think anything is queer but you!” Delia had retorted; and she had let her father know that she had left Francie in the very act of “handling” Mr. Flack.

“Is that so?” the old gentleman had asked, helplessly.

Francie’s visitor came down a few minutes later and passed through the court and out of the hotel without looking at them. Mr. Dosson had been going to call after him, but Delia checked him with a violent pinch. The unsociable manner of the young journalist’s departure added to Mr. Dosson’s sense of the mystery of things. I think this may be said to have been the only incident in the whole business that gave him a personal pang. He remembered how many of his cigars he had smoked with Mr. Flack and how universal a participant he had made him. This struck him as the failure of friendship, and not the publication of details about the Proberts. Deep in Mr. Dosson’s spirit
was a sense that if these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn’t pity them, and if they hadn’t done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people knowing. It was therefore, in spite of the young man’s rough exit, still in the tone of American condonation that he had observed to Delia: “He says that’s what they like over there and that it stands to reason that if you start a paper you’ve got to give them what they like. If you want the people with you, you’ve got to be with the people.”

“Well, there are a good many people in the world. I don’t think the Proberts are with us much.”

“Oh, he doesn’t mean them,” said Mr. Dosson.

“Well, I do!” cried Delia.

At one of the ormolu tables, near a lamp with a pink shade, Gaston insisted on making at least a partial statement. He did not say that he might never have another chance, but Delia felt with despair that this idea was in his mind. He was very gentle, very polite, but distinctly cold, she thought; he was intensely depressed and for half an hour uttered not the least little pleasantry. There was no particular occasion for that when he talked about “preferred bonds “with her father. This was a language Delia could not translate, though she had heard it from childhood. He had a great many papers to show Mr. Dosson, records of the mission of which he had acquitted himself, but Mr. Dosson pushed them into the drawer of the ormolu table with the remark that he guessed they were all right. Now, after the fact, he appeared to attach but little importance to Gaston’s achievements—an attitude which Delia perceived to be slightly disconcerting to the young man. Delia understood it: she had an instinctive
sense that her father knew a great deal more than Gaston could tell him even about the work he had committed to him, and also that there was in such punctual settlements an eagerness, a literalism totally foreign to Mr. Dosson’s domestic habits. If Gaston had cooled off he wanted at least to be able to say that he had rendered them services in America; but now her father, for the moment at least, scarcely appeared to think his services worth speaking of: a circumstance that left him with more of the responsibility for his cooling. What Mr. Dosson wanted to know was how everything had struck him over there, especially the Pickett Building and the parlour-cars and Niagara and the hotels he had instructed him to go to, giving him an introduction in two or three cases to the gentleman in charge of the office. It was in relation to these themes that Gaston was guilty of a want of spring, as the girl phrased it to herself; that he evinced no superficial joy. He declared however, repeatedly, that it was a most extraordinary country—most extraordinary and far beyond anything he had had any conception of. “Of course I didn’t like
everything
,” he said, “any more than I like everything anywhere.”