The Reverberator

“Please then say to Miss Francina that I’ve called on the most urgent business and am extraordinarily pressed.”

The special ardour possessing Gaston at that moment belonged to the order of the communicative, but perhaps the vividness with which the waiter placed this exhibition of it before the young lady is better explained by the fact that her lover slipped a five-franc piece into his hand. She at any rate entered his place of patience sooner than Gaston had ventured to hope, though she corrected her promptitude a little by stopping short and drawing back when she saw how pale he was and how he looked as if he had been crying.

“I’ve chosen—I’ve chosen,” he said expressively, smiling at her in denial of these indications.

“You’ve chosen?”

“I’ve had to give them up. But I like it so 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!” Francie returned. “We’re going away—it’s all over.” She averted herself 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’re going away, Mr. Dosson,” Gaston said. “I’ll start whenever you like.”

“All right—where shall we go?” that amiable man asked.

“Hadn’t you decided that?”

“Well, the girls said they’d tell me.”

“We were going home,” Francie brought out.

“No we weren’t—not a wee mite!” Delia professed.

“Oh not THERE” Gaston murmured, with a look of anguish at Francie.

“Well, when you’ve fixed it you can take the tickets,” Mr. Dosson observed with detachment.

“To some place where there are no newspapers, darling,” Gaston went on.

“I guess you’ll have hard work to find one,” Mr. Dosson pursued.

“Dear me, we needn’t read them any more. 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 very gravely declared.

“You’ll see, sir,—you’ll have to!” Mr. Dosson cheerfully persisted.

“No, you’ll tell us enough.”

Francie had kept her eyes on the ground; the others were all now rather unnaturally smiling. “Won’t they forgive me ever?” she asked, looking up.

“Yes, perfectly, if you can persuade me not to stick to you. But in that case what good will their forgiveness do you?”

“Well, perhaps it’s better to pay for it,” the girl went on.

“To pay for it?”

“By suffering something. For it WAS dreadful,” she solemnly gloomily said.

“Oh for all you’ll suffer—!” Gaston protested, shining down on her.

“It was for you—only for you, as I told you,” Francie returned.

“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 make me any allowance.”

“Well, that makes me feel better. We don’t want your father’s money, you know,” this more soothable parent said with his mild sturdiness.

“There’ll be enough for all; especially if we economise in newspapers”—Delia carried it elegantly off.

“Well, I don’t know, after all—the Reverberator came for nothing,” her father as gaily returned.

“Don’t you be afraid he’ll ever send it now!” she shouted in her return of confidence.

“I’m very sorry—because they were all lovely,” Francie went on to Gaston with sad eyes.

“Let us wait to say that till they come back to us,” he answered 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, sir. We won’t take them in!” The words fell from his lips with a fine unexpected austerity which imposed itself, producing a momentary silence, and it is a sign of Gaston’s complete emancipation that he didn’t in his heart resent this image of eventual favours denied 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 the Proberts should knock. Now that her sister’s marriage was really to take place her consciousness that the American people would have been resoundingly told so was still more agreeable. The party left the Hotel 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.