Delia also reassured her; she said she’d see to it that poppa didn’t sneak round. She communicated to her indeed that he hadn’t the smallest doubt that Gaston, in a few days, would blow them up—all THEM down there—much higher than they had blown her, and that he was very sorry he had let her go down herself on that sort of summons. It was for her and the rest to come to Francie and to him, and if they had anything practical to say they’d arrive in a body yet. If Mr. Dosson had the sense of his daughter’s having been roughly handled he derived some of the consolation of amusement from his persistent humorous view of the Proberts as a “body.” If they were consistent with their character or with their complaint they would move en masse upon the hotel, and he hung about at home a good deal as if to wait for them. Delia intimated to her sister that this vision cheered them up as they sat, they two, in the red salon while Francie was in bed. Of course it didn’t exhilarate this young lady, and she even looked for no brighter side now. She knew almost nothing but her sharp little ache of suspense, her presentiment of Gaston’s horror, which grew all the while. Delia remarked to her once that he would have seen lots of society-papers over there, he would have become familiar; but this only suggested to the girl—she had at present strange new moments and impulses of quick reasoning—that they would only prepare him to be disgusted, not to be indifferent. His disgust would be colder than anything she had ever known and would complete her knowledge of him—make her understand him properly for the first time. She would just meet it as briefly as possible; it would wind up the business, close the incident, and all would be over.
He didn’t write; that proved it in advance; there had now been two or three mails without a letter. He had seen the paper in Boston or in New York and it had simply struck him dumb. It was very well for Delia to say that of course he didn’t write when he was on the ocean: how could they get his letters even if he did? There had been time before—before he sailed; though Delia represented that people never wrote then. They were ever so much too busy at the last and were going to see their correspondents in a few days anyway. The only missives that came to Francie were a copy of the Reverberator, addressed in Mr. Flack’s hand and with a great inkmark on the margin of the fatal letter, and three intense pages from Mme. de Brecourt, received forty-eight hours after the scene at her house. This lady expressed herself as follows:
MY DEAR FRANCIE—I felt very badly after you had gone yesterday morning, and I had twenty minds to go and see you. But we’ve talked it over conscientiously and it appears to us that we’ve no right to take any such step till Gaston arrives. The situation isn’t exclusively ours but belongs to him as well, and we feel we ought to make it over to him in as simple and compact a form as possible. Therefore, as we regard it, we had better not touch it (it’s so delicate, isn’t it, my poor child?) but leave it just as it is. They think I even exceed my powers in writing you these simple lines, and that once your participation has been constatee (which was the only advantage of that dreadful scene) EVERYTHING should stop. But I’ve liked you, Francie, I’ve believed in you, and I don’t wish you to be able to say that in spite of the thunderbolt you’ve drawn down on us I’ve not treated you with tenderness. It’s a thunderbolt indeed, my poor and innocent but disastrous little friend! We’re hearing more of it already—the horrible Republican papers here have (AS WE KNOW) already got hold of the unspeakable sheet and are preparing to reproduce the article: that is such parts of it as they may put forward (with innuendoes and sous-entendus to eke out the rest) without exposing themselves to a suit for defamation. Poor Leonie de Villepreux has been with us constantly and Jeanne and her husband have telegraphed that we may expect them day after to-morrow. They are evidently immensely emotionnes, for they almost never telegraph. They wish so to receive Gaston. We have determined all the same to be intensely QUIET, and that will be sure to be his view. Alphonse and Maxime now recognise that it’s best to leave Mr. Flack alone, hard as it is to keep one’s hands off him. Have you anything to lui faire dire—to my precious brother when he arrives? But it’s foolish of me to ask you that, for you had much better not answer this. You will no doubt have an opportunity to say to him—whatever, my dear Francie, you CAN say! It will matter comparatively little that you may never be able to say it to your friend with every allowance SUZANNE DE BRECOURT.
Francie looked at this letter and tossed it away without reading it. Delia picked it up, read it to her father, who didn’t understand it, and kept it in her possession, poring over it as Mr. Flack had seen her pore over the cards that were left while she was out or over the registers of American travellers. They knew of Gaston’s arrival by his telegraphing from Havre (he came back by the French line) and he mentioned the hour—“about dinner-time”—at which he should reach Paris. Delia, after dinner, made her father take her to the circus so that Francie should be left alone to receive her intended, who would be sure to hurry round in the course of the evening. The girl herself expressed no preference whatever on this point, and the idea was one of Delia’s masterly ones, her flashes of inspiration. There was never any difficulty about imposing such conceptions on poppa. But at half-past ten, when they returned, the young man had not appeared, and Francie remained only long enough to say “I told you so!” with a white face and march off to her room with her candle. She locked herself in and her sister couldn’t get at her that night. It was another of Delia’s inspirations not to try, after she had felt that the door was fast. She forbore, in the exercise of a great discretion, but she herself for the ensuing hours slept no wink. Nevertheless the next morning, as early as ten o’clock, she had the energy to drag her father out to the banker’s and to keep him out two hours. It would be inconceivable now that Gaston shouldn’t turn up before dejeuner. He did turn up; about eleven o’clock he came in and found Francie alone. She noticed, for strangeness, that he was very pale at the same time that he was sunburnt; also that he didn’t for an instant smile at her. It was very certain there was no bright flicker in her own face, and they had the most singular, the most unnatural meeting. He only said as he arrived: “I couldn’t come last evening; they made it impossible; they were all there and we were up till three o’clock this morning.” He looked as if he had been through terrible things, and it wasn’t simply the strain of his attention to so much business in America. What passed next she couldn’t remember afterwards; it seemed but a few seconds before he said to her slowly, holding her hand—before this he had pressed his lips to hers silently—“Is it true, Francie, what they say (and they swear to it!) that YOU told that blackguard those horrors; that that infamous letter’s only a report of YOUR talk?”
“I told him everything—it’s all me, ME, ME!” the girl replied exaltedly, without pretending to hesitate an instant as to what he might mean.
Gaston looked at her with deep eyes, then walked straight away to the window and remained there in silence. She herself said nothing more. At last the young man went on: “And I who insisted to them that there was no natural delicacy like yours!”
“Well, you’ll never need to insist about anything any more!” she cried. And with this she dashed out of the room by the nearest door. When Delia and Mr. Dosson returned the red salon was empty and Francie was again locked in her room. But this time her sister forced an entrance.
XIII
Mr. Dosson, as we know, was, almost more than anything else, loosely contemplative, and the present occasion could only minister to that side of his nature, especially as, so far at least as his observation of his daughters went, it had not urged him into uncontrollable movement. But the truth is that the intensity, or rather the continuity, of his meditations did engender an act not perceived by these young ladies, though its consequences presently became definite enough. While he waited for the Proberts to arrive in a phalanx and noted that they failed to do so he had plenty of time to ask himself—and also to ask Delia—questions about Mr. Flack. So far as they were addressed to his daughter they were promptly answered, for Delia had been ready from the first, as we have seen, to pronounce upon the conduct of the young journalist. Her view of it was clearer every hour; there was a difference however in the course of action which she judged this view to demand. At first he was to have been blown up sky-high for the mess he had got them into—profitless as the process might be and vain the satisfaction; he was to have been scourged with the sharpest lashes the sense of violated confidence could inflict. At present he was not to be touched with a ten-foot pole, but rather cut dead, cast off and ignored, let alone to his dying day: Delia quickly caught at this for the right grand way of showing displeasure. Such was the manner in which she characterised it in her frequent conversations with her father, if that can be called conversation which consisted of his serenely smoking while she poured forth arguments that kept repetition abreast of variety. The same cause will according to application produce effects without sameness: as a mark of which truth the catastrophe that made Delia express freely the hope she might never again see so much as the end of Mr. Flack’s nose had just the opposite action on her parent. The best balm for his mystification would have been to let his eyes sociably travel over his young friend’s whole person; this would have been to deal again with quantities and forces he could measure and in terms he could understand. If indeed the difference had been pushed further the girl would have kept the field, for she had the advantage of being able to motive her attitude, to which Mr. Dosson could have opposed but an indefensible, in fact an inarticulate, laxity. She had touched on her deepest conviction in saying to Francie that the correspondent of the Reverberator had played them that trick on purpose to get them into such trouble with the Proberts that he might see his own hopes bloom again in the heat of their disaster. This had many of the appearances of a strained interpretation, but that didn’t prevent Delia from placing it before her father several times an hour. It mattered little that he should remark in return that he didn’t see what good it could do Mr. Flack that Francie—and he and Delia, for all he could guess—should be disgusted with him: to Mr. Dosson’s mind that was such a queer way of reasoning. Delia maintained that she understood perfectly, though she couldn’t explain—and at any rate she didn’t want the manoeuvring creature to come flying back from Nice. She didn’t want him to know there had been a scandal, that they had a grievance against him, that any one had so much as heard of his article or cared what he published or didn’t publish; above all she didn’t want him to know that the Proberts had cooled off. She didn’t want him to dream he could have had such effects. Mixed up with this high rigour on Miss Dosson’s part was the oddest secret complacency of reflexion that in consequence of what Mr. Flack HAD published the great American community was in a position to know with what fine folks Francie and she were associated. She hoped that some of the people who used only to call when they were “off to-morrow” would take the lesson to heart.