XIV
When Gaston Probert came that evening he was received by Dosson and Delia, and when he asked where Francie might be was told by the latter that she would show herself in half an hour. Francie had instructed her sister that as their friend would have, first of all, information to give their father about the business he had transacted in America he wouldn’t care for a lot of women in the room. When Delia reported this speech to Mr. Dosson that gentleman protested that he wasn’t in any hurry for the business; what he wanted to find out most was whether Mr. Probert had a good time—whether he had liked it over there. Gaston might have liked it, but he didn’t look as if he had had a very good time. His face told of reverses, of suffering; and Delia declared to him that if she hadn’t received his assurance to the contrary she would have believed he was right down sick. He allowed that he had been very sick at sea and was still feeling the effect of it, but insisted that there was nothing the matter with him now. He sat for some time with Mr. Dosson and Delia, and never once alluded to the cloud that hung over their relations. The girl had schooled her father to a waiting attitude on this point, and the manner in which she had descended on him in the morning, after Mr. Flack had come upstairs, was a lesson he wasn’t likely soon to forget. It had been impressed on him that she was indeed wiser than he could pretend to be, and he was now mindful that he mustn’t speak of the “piece in the paper” unless young Probert should speak of it first. When Delia rushed down to him in the court she began by asking him categorically whom he had wished to do good to by sending Mr. Flack up to their parlour. To Francie or to her? Why the way they felt then, they detested his very name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why he had simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had ever got in his life.
“Well, hanged if I understand!” poor Mr. Dosson had said. “I thought you liked the piece—you think it’s so queer THEY don’t like it.” “They,” in the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but the Proberts in congress assembled.
“I don’t think anything’s queer but you!” Delia had retorted; and she had let her father know that she had left Francie in the very act of “handling” Mr. Flack.
“Is that so?” the old gentleman had quavered in an impotence that made him wince with a sense of meanness—meanness to his bold initiator of so many Parisian hours.
Francie’s visitor came down a few minutes later and passed through the court and out of the hotel without looking at them. Mr. Dosson had been going to call after him, but Delia checked him with a violent pinch. The unsociable manner of the young journalist’s departure deepened Mr. Dosson’s dull ache over the mystery of things. I think this may be said to have been the only incident in the whole business that gave him a personal pang. He remembered how many of his cigars he had smoked with Mr. Flack and how universal a participant he had made him. This haughtiness struck him as the failure of friendship—not the publication of details about the Proberts. Interwoven with Mr. Dosson’s nature was the view that if these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn’t pity them, and that if they hadn’t done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people’s knowing. It was therefore, in spite of the young man’s rough exit, still in the tone of American condonation that he had observed to Delia: “He says that’s what they like over there and that it stands to reason that if you start a paper you’ve got to give them what they like. If you want the people with you, you’ve got to be with the people.”
“Well, there are a good many people in the world. I don’t think the Proberts are with us much.”
“Oh he doesn’t mean them,” said Mr. Dosson.
“Well, I do!” cried Delia.
At one of the ormolu tables, near a lamp with a pink shade, Gaston insisted on making at least a partial statement. He didn’t say that he might never have another chance, but Delia felt with despair that this idea was in his mind. He was very gentle, very polite, but distinctly cold, she thought; he was intensely depressed and for half an hour uttered not the least little pleasantry. There was no particular occasion for that when he talked about “preferred bonds” with her father. This was a language Delia couldn’t translate, though she had heard it from childhood. He had a great many papers to show Mr. Dosson, records of the mission of which he had acquitted himself, but Mr. Dosson pushed them into the drawer of the ormolu table with the remark that he guessed they were all right. Now, after the fact, he appeared to attach but little importance to Gaston’s achievements—an attitude which Delia perceived to be slightly disconcerting to their visitor. Delia understood it: she had an instinctive sense that her father knew a great deal more than Gaston could tell him even about the work he had committed to him, and also that there was in such punctual settlements an eagerness, a literalism, totally foreign to Mr. Dosson’s domestic habits and to which he would even have imputed a certain pettifogging provinciality—treatable however with dry humour. If Gaston had cooled off he wanted at least to be able to say that he had rendered them services in America; but now her father, for the moment at least, scarcely appeared to think his services worth speaking of: an incident that left him with more of the responsibility for his cooling. What Mr. Dosson wanted to know was how everything had struck him over there, especially the Pickett Building and the parlour-cars and Niagara and the hotels he had instructed him to go to, giving him an introduction in two or three cases to the gentleman in charge of the office. It was in relation to these themes that Gaston was guilty of a want of spring, as the girl phrased it to herself; that he could produce no appreciative expression. He declared however, repeatedly, that it was a most extraordinary country—most extraordinary and far beyond anything he had had any conception of. “Of course I didn’t like EVERYTHING,” he said, “any more than I like everything anywhere.”