“In the Bois?”
“That Marguerite hadn’t seen you—with that lying blackguard. That’s the image they can’t get over.”
Well, it was as if it had been the thing she had got herself most prepared for—so that she must speak accordingly. “I see you can’t either, Gaston. Anyhow I WAS there and I felt it all right. That’s all I can say. You must take me as I am,” said Francie Dosson.
“Don’t—don’t; you infuriate me!” he pleaded, frowning.
She had seemed to soften, but she was in a sudden flame again. “Of course I do, and I shall do it again. We’re too terribly 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!” the young man almost howled.
“Very well, go! Good-bye.” She had stepped quickly to the door and had already opened it, vanishing as she had done the other time.
“Francie, Francie!” he supplicated, following her into the passage. The door was not the one that led to the salon; it communicated with the other apartments. The girl had plunged into these—he already heard her push a sharp bolt. 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 one for Charles Waterlow, his work in the Avenue de Villiers being terribly interrupted. Gaston Probert invited himself to breakfast at noon and remained till the time at which the artist usually went out—an extravagance partly justified by the 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 vastly out and acted on his nerves, but this easy genius was patient with him by reason of much pity, feeling the occasion indeed more of a crisis in the history of the troubled youth than the settlement of one question would make it. Waterlow’s compassion was slightly tinged with contempt, for there was being settled above all, it seemed to him, and, alas, in the wrong sense, the question of his poor friend’s character. Gaston was in a fever; he broke out into passionate pleas—he relapsed into gloomy silences. He roamed about continually, his hands in his pockets and his hair in a tangle; he could take neither a decision nor a momentary rest. It struck his companion more than ever before that he was after all essentially a foreigner; he had the foreign sensibility, the sentimental candour, the need for sympathy, the communicative despair. A true young Anglo-Saxon would have buttoned himself up in his embarrassment and been dry and awkward and capable, and, however conscious of a pressure, unconscious of a drama; whereas Gaston was effusive and appealing and ridiculous and graceful—natural above all and egotistical. Indeed a true young Anglo-Saxon wouldn’t have known the particular acuteness of such a quandary, for he wouldn’t have parted to such an extent with his freedom of spirit. It was the fact of this surrender on his visitor’s part that excited Waterlow’s secret scorn: family feeling was all very well, but to see it triumph as a superstition calling for the blood-sacrifice made him feel he would as soon be a blackamoor on 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 hope of the Proberts must pull up the root, even if the operation should be terribly painful, should be 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. Now and again he broke out: “And if you should see her as she looks just now—she’s too lovely, too touching!—you’d see how right I was originally, when I found her such a revelation of that rare type, the French Renaissance, you know, the one we talked about.” But he reverted with at least equal frequency to the oppression he seemed unable to throw off, the idea of something done of cruel purpose and malice, with a refinement of outrage: such an accident to THEM, of all people on earth, the very last, the least thinkable, those who, he verily believed, would feel it more than any family in the world. When Waterlow asked what made them of so exceptionally fine a fibre he could only answer that they just happened to be—not enviably, if one would; it was his father’s influence and example, his very genius, the worship of privacy and good manners, a hatred of all the new familiarities and profanations. The artist sought to know further, at last and rather wearily, what in two words was the practical question his friend desired he should consider. Whether he should be justified in throwing the girl over—was that the issue?