The Reverberator

by Henry James

  “To your not finding out—to your not asking for settlements—comme cela se fait.”

  “Excuse me, papa will find out for himself; and he will know perfectly whether to ask or whether to leave it alone. That’s the sort of thing he does know. And he also knows perfectly that I am very difficult to place.”

  “To place?”

  “To find a wife for. I’m neither fish nor flesh. I have no country, no career, no future; I offer nothing; I bring nothing. What position under the sun do I confer? There’s a fatuity in our talking as if we could make grand terms. You and the others are well enough: qui prend mari prend pays, and you have names which (at least so your husbands say) are tremendously illustrious. But papa and I—I ask you!”

  “As a family nous sommes très-bien,” said Mme. de Brécourt. “You know what we are—it doesn’t need any explanation. We are as good as anything there is and have always been thought so. You might do anything you like.”

  “Well, I shall never take to marry a Frenchwoman.”

  “Thank you, my dear!” Mme. de Brécourt exclaimed.

  “No sister of mine is really French,” returned the young man.

  “No brother of mine is really mad. Marry whomever you like,” Susan went on; “only let her be the best of her kind. Let her be a lady. Trust me, I’ve studied life. That’s the only thing that’s safe.”

  “Francie is the equal of the first lady in the land.”

  “With that sister—with that hat? Never—never!”

  “What’s the matter with her hat?”

  “The sister’s told a story. It was a document—it described them, it classed them. And such a dialect as they speak!”

  “My dear, her English is quite as good as yours. You don’t even know how bad yours is,” said Gaston Probert.

  “Well, I don’t say ‘Parus’ and I never asked an Englishman to marry me. You know what our feelings are,” his companion pursued; “our convictions, our susceptibilities. We may be wrong—we may be hollow—we may be pretentious; we may not be able to say on what it all rests; but there we are, and the fact is insurmountable. It is simply impossible for us to live with vulgar people. It’s a defect, no doubt; it’s an immense inconvenience, and in the days we live in it’s sadly against one’s interest. But we are made like that and we must understand ourselves. It’s of the very essence of our nature, and of yours exactly as much as of mine or of that of the others. Don’t make a mistake about it—you’ll prepare for yourself a bitter future. I know what becomes of us. We suffer, we go through tortures, we die!”

  The accent of passionate prophecy was in Mme. de Brécourt’s voice, but her brother made her no immediate answer, only indulging restlessly in several turns about the room. At last he observed, taking up his hat: “I shall come to an understanding with her to-morrow, and the next day, about this hour, I shall bring her to see you. Meanwhile please say nothing to any one.”

  Mme. de Brécourt looked at him a moment; he had his hand on the knob of the door. “What do you mean by her father’s appearing rich? That’s such a vague term. What do you suppose his means to be?”

  “Ah, that’s a question she would never ask!” cried the young man, passing out.

  VI

  THE NEXT MORNING HE FOUND HIMSELF SITTING on one of the red satin sofas beside Mr. Dosson, in this gentleman’s private room at the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham. Delia and Francie had established their father in the old quarters; they expected to spend the winter in Paris but they had not taken independent apartments, for they had an idea that when you lived that way it was grand but lonely—you didn’t meet people on the staircase. The temperature was now such as to deprive the good gentleman of his usual resource of sitting in the court, and he had not yet discovered an effective substitute for this recreation. Without Mr. Flack, at the cafés, he felt too much like a non-consumer. But he was patient and ruminant; Gaston Probert grew to like him and tried to invent amusements for him; took him to see the great markets, the sewers and the Bank of France, and put him in the way of acquiring a beautiful pair of horses (it is perhaps not superfluous to say that this was a perfectly straight proceeding on the young man’s part), which Mr. Dosson, little as he resembled a sporting character, found it a welcome pastime on fine afternoons to drive, with a highly scientific hand, from a smart Américaine, in the Bois de Boulogne. There was a reading-room at the banker’s, where he spent hours engaged in a manner best known to himself, and he shared the great interest, the constant topic of his daughters—the portrait that was going forward in the Avenue de Villiers. This was the subject round which the thoughts of these young ladies clustered and their activity revolved; it gave a large scope to their faculty for endless repetition, for monotonous insistence, for vague and aimless discussion. On leaving Mme. de Brécourt Francie’s lover had written to Delia that he desired half an hour’s private conversation with her father on the morrow at half-past eleven; his impatience forbade him to wait for a more canonical hour. He asked her to be so good as to arrange that Mr. Dosson should be there to receive him and to keep Francie out of the way. Delia acquitted herself to the letter.

  “Well, sir, what have you got to show?” asked Francie’s father, leaning far back on the sofa and moving nothing but his head, and that very little, toward his interlocutor. Probert was placed sidewise, a hand on each knee, almost facing him, on the edge of the seat.

  “To show, sir—what do you mean?”

  “What do you do for a living? How do you subsist?”

  “Oh, comfortably enough. Of course it would be criminal in you not to satisfy yourself on that point. My income is derived from three sources. First, some property left me by my dear mother. Second, a legacy from my poor brother, who had inherited a small fortune from an old relation of ours who took a great fancy to him (he went to America to see her), and which he divided among the four of us in the will he made at the time of the war.”

  “The war—what war?” asked Mr. Dosson.

  “Why the Franco-German—”

  “Oh, that old war!” And Mr. Dosson almost laughed. “Well?” he softly continued.

  “Then my father is so good as to make me a little allowance; and some day I shall have more—from him.”

  Mr. Dosson was silent a moment; then he observed, “Why, you seem to have fixed it so you live mostly on other folks.”

  “I shall never attempt to live on you, sir!” This was spoken with some vivacity by our young man; he felt the next moment that he had said something that might provoke a retort. But his companion only rejoined, mildly, impersonally:

  “Well, I guess there won’t be any trouble about that. And what does my daughter say?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her yet.”

  “Haven’t spoken to her?”

  “I thought it more orthodox to break ground with you first.”

  “Well, when I was after Mrs. Dosson I guess I spoke to her quick enough,” Francie’s father said, humorously. There was an element of reproach in this and Gaston Probert was mystified, for the inquiry about his means a moment before had been in the nature of a challenge. “How will you feel if she won’t have you, after you have exposed yourself this way to me?” the old gentleman went on.

  “Well, I have a sort of confidence. It may be vain, but God grant not! I think she likes me personally, but what I am afraid of is that she may consider that she knows too little about me. She has never seen my people—she doesn’t know what may be before her.”

  “Do you mean your family—the folks at home?” said Mr. Dosson. “Don’t you believe that. Delia has moused around—she has found out. Delia’s thorough!”

  “Well, we are very simple, kindly, respectable people, as you will see in a day or two for yourself. My father and sisters will do themselves the honour to wait upon you,” the young man declared, with a temerity the sense of which made his voice tremble.

  “We shall be very happy to see them, sir,” Mr. Dosson returned, cheerfully. “Well
now, let’s see,” he added, musing sociably. “Don’t you expect to embrace any regular occupation?”

  Probert looked at him, smiling. “Have you anything of that sort, sir?”

  “Well, you have me there!” Mr. Dosson admitted, with a comprehensive sigh. “It doesn’t seem as if I required anything, I’m looked after so well. The fact is the girls support me.”

  “I shall not expect Miss Francie to support me,” said Gaston Probert.

  “You’re prepared to enable her to live in the style to which she’s accustomed?” And Mr. Dosson turned a speculative eye upon him.

  “Well, I don’t think she will miss anything, That is, if she does she will find other things instead.”

  “I presume she’ll miss Delia, and even me, a little.”

  “Oh, it’s easy to prevent that,” said Gaston Probert.

  “Well, of course we shall be on hand. Continue to reside in Paris?” Mr. Dosson went on.

  “I will live anywhere in the world she likes. Of course my people are here—that’s a great tie. I am not without hope that it may—with time—become a reason for your daughter.”

  “Oh, any reason’ll do where Paris is concerned. Take some lunch?” Mr. Dosson added, looking at his watch.

  They rose to their feet, but before they had gone many steps (the meals of this amiable family were now served in an adjoining room), the young man stopped his companion. “I can’t tell you how kind I think it—the way you treat me, and how I am touched by your confidence. You take me just as I am, with no recommendation beyond my own word.”

  “Well, Mr. Probert, if we didn’t like you we wouldn’t smile on you. Recommendations in that case wouldn’t be any good. And since we do like you there ain’t any call for them either. I trust my daughters; if I didn’t I’d have stayed at home. And if I trust them, and they trust you, it’s the same as if I trusted you, ain’t it?”

  “I guess it is!” said Gaston, smiling.

  His companion laid his hand on the door but he paused a moment. “Now are you very sure?”

  “I thought I was, but you make me nervous.”

  “Because there was a gentleman here last year—I’d have put my money on him.”

  “A gentleman—last year?”

  “Mr. Flack. You met him surely. A very fine man. I thought she favoured him.”

  “Seigneur Dieu!” Gaston Probert murmured, under his breath.

  Mr. Dosson had opened the door, he made his companion pass into the little dining-room, where the table was spread for the noon-day breakfast. “Where are the chickens?” he inquired, disappointedly. Gaston thought at first that he missed a dish from the board, but he recognised the next moment the old man’s usual designation of his daughters. These young ladies presently came in, but Francie looked away from Mr. Probert. The suggestion just dropped by her father had given him a shock (the idea of the girl’s “favouring” the newspaper-man was inconceivable), but the charming way she avoided his eye convinced him that he had nothing to fear from Mr. Flack.

  That night (it had been an exciting day), Delia remarked to her sister that of course she could draw back: upon which Francie repeated the expression, interrogatively, not understanding it. “You can send him a note, saying you won’t,” Delia explained.

  “Won’t marry him?”

  “Gracious, no! Won’t go to see his sister. You can tell him it’s her place to come to see you first.”

  “Oh, I don’t care,” said Francie, wearily. Delia looked at her a moment very gravely. “Is that the way you answered him when he asked you?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. He could tell you best.”

  “If you were to speak to me that way I should have said, ‘Oh, well, if you don’t want it any more than that!’ ”

  “Well, I wish it was you,” said Francie.

  “That Mr. Probert was me?”

  “No; that you were the one he liked.”

  “Francie Dosson, are you thinking of Mr. Flack?” her sister broke out, suddenly.

  “No, not much.”

  “Well then, what’s the matter?”

  “You have ideas and opinions; you know whose place it is and what’s due and what isn’t. You could meet them all.”

  “Why, how can you say, when that’s just what I’m trying to find out!”

  “It doesn’t matter any way; it will never come off,” said Francie.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “He’ll give me up in a few weeks. I shall do something.”

  “If you say that again I shall think you do it on purpose!” Delia declared. “Are you thinking of George Flack?” she repeated in a moment.

  “Oh, do leave him alone!” Francie replied, in one of her rare impatiences.

  “Then why are you so queer?”

  “Oh, I’m tired!” said Francie, turning away. And this was the simple truth; she was tired of the consideration her sister saw fit to devote to the question of Mr. Probert’s not having, since their return to Paris, brought his belongings to see them. She was overdone with Delia’s theories on this subject, which varied from day to day, from the assertion that he was keeping his intercourse with his American friends hidden from them because they were uncompromising, in their grandeur, to the doctrine that that grandeur would descend some day upon the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham and carry Francie away in a blaze of glory. Sometimes Delia put forth the view that they ought to make certain of Gaston’s omissions the ground of a challenge; at other times she opined that they ought to take no notice of them. Francie, in this connection, had no theories, no impulses of her own; and now she was all at once happy and freshly glad and in love and sceptical and frightened and indifferent. Her lover had talked to her but little about his kinsfolk, and she had noticed this circumstance the more because of a remark dropped by Charles Waterlow to the effect that he and his father were great friends: the word seemed to her odd in that application. She knew Gaston saw that gentleman, and the exalted ladies Mr. Probert’s daughters, very often, and she therefore took for granted that they knew he saw her. But the most he had done was to say they would come and see her like a shot if once they should believe they could trust her. She had wished to know what he meant by their trusting her, and he had explained that it would appear to them too good to be true—that she should be kind to him: something exactly of that sort was what they dreamed of for him. But they had dreamed before and been disappointed, and now they were on their guard. From the moment they should feel they were on solid ground they would join hands and dance round her. Francie’s answer to this fanciful statement was that she didn’t know what the young man was talking about, and he indulged in no attempt on that occasion to render his meaning more clear; the consequence of which was that he felt he made a poor appearance. His uneasiness had not passed away, for many things in truth were dark to him. He could not see his father fraternising with Mr. Dosson, he could not see Margaret and Jane recognising an alliance in which Delia was one of the allies. He had answered for them because that was the only thing to do; and this only just failed to be criminally reckless. What saved it was the hope he founded upon Mme. de Brécourt and the sense of how well he could answer to the others for Francie. He considered that Susan had, in her first judgment of this young lady, committed herself; she had really comprehended her, and her subsequent protest when she found what was in his heart had been a retractation which he would make her in turn retract. The girl had been revealed to her, and she would come round. A simple interview with Francie would suffice for this result: he promised himself that at the end of half an hour she should be an enthusiastic convert. At the end of an hour she would believe that she herself had invented the match—had discovered the damsel. He would pack her off to the others as the author of the project; she would take it all upon herself, would represent her brother even as a little tepid. She would show nothing of that sort, but boast of her wisdom and energy; and she would enjoy the comedy so that she would forget she had opp
osed him even for a moment. Gaston Probert was a very honourable young man, but his programme involved a good many fibs.

  VII

  IT MAY AS WELL BE SAID AT ONCE THAT IT WAS eventually carried out, and that in the course of a fortnight old Mr. Probert and his daughters alighted successively at the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham. Francie’s visit with her intended to Mme. de Brécourt bore exactly the fruit the young man had foreseen and was followed the very next day by a call from this lady. She took Francie out with her in her carriage and kept her the whole afternoon, driving her over half Paris, chattering with her, kissing her, delighting in her, telling her they were already sisters, paying her compliments which made the girl envy her art of beautiful expression. After she had carried her home the countess rushed off to her father’s, reflecting with pleasure that at that hour she should probably find her sister Marguerite there. Mme. de Cliché was with the old man in fact (she had three days in the week for coming to the Cours la Reine); she sat near him in the firelight, telling him presumably her troubles; for Maxime de Cliché was not quite the pearl that they originally had supposed. Mme. de Brécourt knew what Marguerite did whenever she took that little ottoman and drew it close to her father’s chair: she gave way to her favourite vice, that of dolefulness, which lengthened her long face more; it was unbecoming, if she only knew it. The family was intensely united, as we know; but that did not prevent Mme. de Brécourt’s having a certain sympathy for Maxime: he too was one of themselves and she asked herself what she would have done if she had been a well-constituted man with a wife whose cheeks were like decks in a high sea. It was the twilight hour in the winter days, before the lamps, that especially brought her out; then she began her plaintive, complicated stories, to which her father listened with such angelic patience. Mme. de Brécourt liked his particular room in the old house in the Cours la Reine; it reminded her of her mother’s life and her young days and her dead brother and the feelings connected with her first going into the world. Alphonse and she had had an apartment, by her father’s kindness, under that familiar roof, so that she continued to pop in and out, full of her fresh impressions of society, just as she had done when she was a girl. She broke into her sister’s confidences now; she announced her trouvaille and did battle for it bravely.