While she glowed with this consolation as well as with the resentment for which it was required her father quietly addressed a few words, by letter, to George Flack. This communication was not of a minatory order; it expressed on the contrary the loose sociability which was the essence of Mr. Dosson’s nature. He wanted to see Mr. Flack, to talk the whole thing over, and the desire to hold him to an account would play but a small part in the interview. It was much more definite to him that the soreness of the Proberts was a kind of unexpected insanity (so little did his experience match it), than that a newspaper-man had misbehaved in trying to turn out an attractive article. As the newspaper-man happened to be the person with whom he had most consorted for some time back he felt drawn to him in the presence of a new problem, and somehow it did not seem to Mr. Dosson to disqualify him as a source of comfort that it was just he who had been the fountain of injury. The injury was a sort of emanation of the crazy Proberts. Moreover Mr. Dosson could not dislike at such short notice, a man who had smoked so many of his cigars, ordered so many of his dinners and helped him so loyally to spend his money: such acts constituted a bond, and when there was a bond people gave it a little jerk in time of trouble. His letter to Nice was the little jerk.
The morning after Francie had turned her back on Gaston and left him planted in the salon (he had remained ten minutes, to see if she would reappear, and then had marched out of the hotel), she received by the first post a letter from him, written the evening before. It conveyed his deep regret that their meeting in the morning should have been of so painful, so unnatural a character, and the hope that she did not consider, as her strange behaviour had seemed to suggest, that she had anything to complain of. There was too much he wanted to say and above all too much he wanted to ask, for him to consent to the indefinite postponement of a necessary interview. There were explanations, assurances, de part et d’autre, with which it was manifestly impossible that either of them should dispense. He would therefore propose that she should see him, and not be wanting in patience to that end, on the following evening. He did not propose an earlier moment because his hands were terribly full at home. Frankly speaking, the state of things there was of the worst. Jane and her husband had just arrived and had made him a violent, an unexpected scene. Two of the French newspapers had got hold of the article and had given the most perfidious extracts. His father had not stirred out of the house, had not put his foot inside of a club, for more than a week. Marguerite and Maxime were immediately to start for England, for an indefinite stay. They couldn’t face their life in Paris. For himself, he was in the breach, fighting hard and making, on her behalf, asseverations which it was impossible for him to believe, in spite of the dreadful defiant confession she had appeared to throw at him in the morning, that she would not virtually confirm. He would come in as soon after nine as possible; the morrow, up to that time, would be severe in the Cours la Reine, and he begged her in the meantime not to doubt of his perfect tenderness. So far from his distress having made it less he had never yet felt so much that she had, in his affection, a treasure of indulgence to draw upon.
A couple of hours after this letter arrived Francie lay on one of the satin sofas with her eyes closed and her hand clinched upon it in her pocket. Delia sat near her with a needle in her fingers, certain morsels of silk and ribbon in her lap, several pins in her mouth, and her attention wandering constantly from her work to her sister’s face. The weather was now so completely vernal that Mr. Dosson was able to sit in the court, and he had lately resumed this practice, in which he was presumably at the present moment absorbed. Delia had lowered her needle and was watching Francie, to see if she were not asleep—she had been perfectly still for so long—when her glance was drawn to the door, which she heard pushed open. Mr. Flack stood there, looking from one to the other of the young ladies, as if to see which of them would be most agreeably surprised by his visit.
“I saw your father down stairs—he says it’s all right,” said the journalist, advancing and smiling. “He told me to come straight up—I had quite a talk with him.”
“All right—all right?” Delia Dosson repeated, springing up. “Yes, indeed, I should say so.” Then she checked herself, asking in another manner: “Is that so? father sent you up?” And then, in still another: “Well, have you had a good time at Nice?”
“You’d better all come down and see. It’s lovely down there. If you’ll come down I’ll go right back. I guess you want a change,” Mr. Flack went on. He spoke to Delia but he looked at Francie, who showed she had not been asleep by the quick consciousness with which she raised herself on her sofa. She gazed at the visitor with parted lips, but she said nothing. He hesitated a moment, then came toward her, smiling, with his hand out. His bright eyes were brighter than ever, but they had an odd appearance of being smaller, like penetrating points. “Your father has told me all about it. Did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous?”
“All about what?—all about what?” said Delia, whose attempt to represent happy ignorance seemed likely to be spoiled by an intromission of ferocity. She might succeed in appearing ignorant, but she could scarcely succeed in appearing happy. Francie had risen to her feet and had suffered Mr. Flack to possess himself for a moment of her hand, but neither of the girls had asked the young man to sit down. “I thought you were going to stay a month at Nice,” Delia continued.
“Well, I was, but your father’s letter started me up.”
“Father’s letter?”
“He wrote me about the row—didn’t you know it? Then I broke. You didn’t suppose I was going to stay down there when there were such times up here.”
“Gracious!” Delia exclaimed.
“Is it pleasant at Nice? Is it very gay? Isn’t it very hot now?” Francie asked.
“Oh, it’s all right. But I haven’t come up here to talk about Nice, have I?”
“Why not, if we want to?” Delia inquired.
Mr. Flack looked at her for a moment very hard, in the whites of the eyes; then he replied, turning back to her sister: “Anything you like, Miss Francie. With you one subject is as good as another. Can’t we sit down? Can’t we be comfortable?” he added.
“Comfortable? of course we can!” cried Delia, but she remained erect while Francie sank upon the sofa again and their companion took possession of the nearest chair.
“Do you remember what I told you once, that the people will have the plums?” George Flack asked of the younger girl.
She looked for an instant as if she were trying to recollect what he had told her; then she said, “Did father write to you?”
“Of course he did. That’s why I’m here.”
“Poor father, sometimes he doesn’t know what to do!” Delia remarked.
“He told me the Reverberator has made a sensation. I guessed that for myself, when I saw the way the papers here were after it. That thing will go the round you’ll see! What brought me was learning from him that they have got their backs up.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” cried Delia.
Mr. Flack turned his eyes on hers in the same way as a moment before; Francie sat there serious, looking hard at the carpet. “What game are you trying, Miss Delia? It ain’t true you care what I wrote, is it?” he pursued, addressing himself again to Francie.
She raised her eyes. “Did you write it yourself?”
“What do you care what he wrote—or what does any one care?” Delia broke in.
“It has done the paper more good than anything—every one is so interested,” said Mr. Flack, in the tone of reasonable explanation. “And you don’t feel that you have anything to complain of, do you?” he added, to Francie, kindly.
“Do you mean because I told you?”
“Why, certainly. Didn’t it all spring out of that lovely drive and that walk in the Bois that we had, when you took me to see your portrait? Didn’t you understand that I wanted you to know that the public would appreciate a column or two about Mr. Waterlow’s ne
w picture, and about you as the subject of it, and about your being engaged to a member of the grand monde, and about what was going on in the grand monde, which would naturally attract attention through that? Why, Miss Francie, you talked as if you did.”
“Did I talk a great deal?” asked Francie.
“Why, most freely—it was too lovely. Don’t you remember when we sat there in the Bois?”
“Oh, rubbish!” Delia ejaculated.
“Yes, and Mme. de Cliché passed.”
“And you told me she was scandalised. And we laughed—it struck us as idiotic. I said it was affected and pretentious. Your father tells me she is scandalised now—she and all the rest of them—at their names appearing in the Reverberator. I don’t hesitate to declare that that’s affected and pretentious too. It ain’t genuine—and if it is it doesn’t count. They pretend to be shocked because it looks exclusive, but in point of fact they like it firstrate.”
“Are you talking about that old piece in the paper? Mercy, wasn’t that dead and buried days and days ago?” Delia ejaculated. She hovered there in a fever of irritation, fidgeted by the revelation that her father had summoned Mr. Flack to Paris, which struck her almost like a treachery because it seemed to denote a plan. A plan, and an uncommunicated plan, on Mr. Dosson’s part was unnatural and alarming; and there was further provocation in his appearing to shirk the responsibility of it by not having come up, at such a moment, with Mr. Flack. Delia was impatient to know what he wanted anyway. Did he want to slide back to a common, though active, young man? Did he want to put Mr. Flack forward with a shallow extemporised optimism as a substitute for the alienated Gaston? If she had not been afraid that something still more complicating than anything that had happened yet might come to pass between her two companions in case of her leaving them together she would have darted down to the court to appease her conjectures, to challenge her father and tell him she should be very much obliged to him if he wouldn’t meddle. She felt liberated however, the next moment, for something occurred that struck her as a quick indication of her sister’s present emotion.
“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?”