The Reverberator
Page 17
“It has made you more beautiful,” said Gaston Probert.
“I don’t care. Nothing will induce me to consent to any sacrifice.”
“Some sacrifice there must be. Give me time—give me time, I’ll manage it. I only wish they hadn’t seen you there in the Bois.”
“In the Bois?”
“That Marguerite hadn’t seen you—with that blackguard. That’s the image they can’t get over.”
“I see you can’t either, Gaston. Well, I was there and I was very happy. That’s all I can say. You must take me as I am.”
“Don’t—don’t; you infuriate me!” he pleaded, frowning.
Francie had seemed to soften, but she was in a sudden flame again. “Of course I do, and I shall do it again. We are too different. Everything makes you so. You can’t give them up—ever, ever. Good-bye—good-bye! That’s all I wanted to tell you.”
“I’ll go and throttle him!” Gaston said, lugubriously.
“Very well, go! Good-bye.” She had stepped quickly to the door and had already opened it, vanishing as she had done the last time.
“Francie, Francie!” he exclaimed, following her into the passage. The door was not the one that led into the salon; it communicated with the other apartments. The girl had plunged into these—he already heard her locking herself in. Presently he went away, without taking leave of Mr. Dosson and Delia.
“Why, he acts just like Mr. Flack,” said the old man, when they discovered that the interview in the dining-room had come to an end.
The next day was a bad day for Charles Waterlow; his work, in the Avenue de Villiers, was terribly interrupted. Gaston Probert invited himself to breakfast with him at noon and remained till the time at which the artist usually went out—an extravagance partly justified by a previous separation of several weeks. During these three or four hours Gaston walked up and down the studio, while Waterlow either sat or stood before his easel. He put his host out vastly and acted on his nerves, but Waterlow was patient with him because he was very sorry for him, feeling the occasion to be a great crisis. His compassion, it is true, was slightly tinged with contempt: nevertheless he looked at the case generously, perceived it to be one in which a friend should be a friend—in which he, in particular, might see the distracted fellow through. Gaston was in a fever; he broke out into passionate arguments which were succeeded by fits of gloomy silence. He roamed about continually, with his hands in his pockets and his hair in a tangle; he could take neither a decision nor a momentary rest. It struck Waterlow more than ever before that he was after all essentially a foreigner; he had the sensibility of one, the sentimental candour, the need for sympathy, the communicative despair. A real young Anglo-Saxon would have buttoned himself up in his embarrassment and been dry and awkward and capable and unconscious of a drama; but Gaston was effusive and appealing and ridiculous and graceful—natural, above all, and egotistical. Indeed, a real young Anglo-Saxon would not have had this particular embarrassment at all for he would not have parted to such an extent with his moral independence. It was this weakness that excited Waterlow’s secret scorn: family feeling was all very well, but to see it erected into a superstition affected him very much in the same way as the image of a blackamoor upon his knees before a fetish. He now measured for the first time the root it had taken in Gaston’s nature. To act like a man the poor fellow must pull up the root, but the operation was terribly painful—was attended with cries and tears and contortions, with baffling scruples and a sense of sacrilege, the sense of siding with strangers against his own flesh and blood. Every now and then he broke out—“And if you see her—as she looks just now (she’s too lovely—too touching!) you would see how right I was originally—when I found in her such a revelation of that type, the French Renaissance, you know, the one we talked about.” But he reverted with at least equal frequency to the idea that he seemed unable to throw off, that it was like something done on purpose, with a refinement of cruelty; such an accident to them, of all people on earth, the very last, the very last, those who he verily believed would feel it more than any family in the world. When Waterlow asked what made them so exceptionally ticklish he could only say that they just happened to be so; it was his father’s influence, his very genius, the worship of privacy and good manners, a hatred of all the new familiarities and profanations. The artist inquired further, at last, rather wearily, what in two words was the practical question his friend desired that he should consider. Whether he should be justified in throwing over Miss Francina—was that it?
“Oh heavens, no! For what sneak do you take me? She made a mistake, but any one might do that. It’s whether it strikes you that I should be justified in throwing them over.”
“It depends upon the sense you attach to justification.”
“I mean—should I be miserably unhappy—would it be in their power to make me so?”
“To try—certainly, if they are capable of anything so nasty. The only honourable conduct for them is to let you alone.”
“Ah, they won’t do that—they like me too much!” Gaston said, ingenuously.
“It’s an odd way of liking. The best way to show that would be to let you marry the girl you love.”
“Certainly—but they are profoundly convinced that she represents such dangers, such vulgarities, such possibilities of doing other things of the same sort, that it’s upon them my happiness would be shattered.”
“Well, if you yourself have no secret for persuading them of the contrary I’m afraid I can’t teach you one.”
“Yes, I ought to do it myself,” said Gaston, in the candour of his meditations. Then he went on, in his torment of inconsistency—“They never believed in her from the first. My father was perfectly definite about it. At heart they never accepted her; they only pretended to do so because I guaranteed that she was incapable of doing a thing that could ever displease them. Then no sooner was my back turned than she perpetrated that!”
“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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