The Reverberator

“It’s not all over. Would to God it were!”

The girl stared. “Don’t you know what I sent for you to come in here for? To bid you good-bye.”

He held her an instant as if in unbelievable view, and then “Francie, what on earth has got into you?” he broke out. “What deviltry, what poison?” It would have been strange and sad to an observer, the opposition of these young figures, so fresh, so candid, so meant for confidence, but now standing apart and looking at each other in a wan defiance that hardened their faces.

“Don’t they despise me—don’t they hate me? You do yourself! Certainly you’ll be glad for me to break off and spare you decisions and troubles impossible to you.”

“I don’t understand; it’s like some hideous dream!” Gaston Probert cried. “You act as if you were doing something for a wager, and you make it worse by your talk. I don’t believe it—I don’t believe a word of it.”

“What don’t you believe?” she asked.

“That you told him—that you told him knowingly. If you’ll take that back (it’s too monstrous!) if you’ll deny it and give me your assurance that you were practised upon and surprised, everything can still be arranged.”

“Do you want me to lie?” asked Francie Dosson. “I thought you’d like pleasant words.”

“Oh Francie, Francie!” moaned the wretched youth with tears in his eyes.

“What can be arranged? What do you mean by everything?” she went on.

“Why they’ll accept it; they’ll ask for nothing more. It’s your participation they can’t forgive.”

“THEY can’t? Why do you talk to me of ‘them’? I’m not engaged to ‘them’!” she said with a shrill little laugh.

“Oh Francie I am! And it’s they who are buried beneath that filthy rubbish!”

She flushed at this characterisation of Mr. Flack’s epistle, but returned as with more gravity: “I’m very sorry—very sorry indeed. But evidently I’m not delicate.”

He looked at her, helpless and bitter. “It’s not the newspapers in your country that would have made you so. Lord, they’re too incredible! And the ladies have them on their tables.”

“You told me we couldn’t here—that the Paris ones are too bad,” said Francie.

“Bad they are, God knows; but they’ve never published anything like that—poured forth such a flood of impudence on decent quiet people who only want to be left alone.”

Francie sank to a chair by the table as if she were too tired to stand longer, and with her arms spread out on the lamplit plush she looked up at him. “Was it there you saw it?”

He was on his feet opposite, and she made at this moment the odd reflexion that she had never “realised” he had such fine lovely uplifted eyebrows. “Yes, a few days before I sailed. I hated them from the moment I got there—I looked at them very little. But that was a chance. I opened the paper in the hall of an hotel—there was a big marble floor and spittoons!—and my eyes fell on that horror. It made me ill.”

“Did you think it was me?” she patiently gaped.

“About as soon as I supposed it was my father. But I was too mystified, too tormented.”

“Then why didn’t you write to me, if you didn’t think it was me?”

“Write to you? I wrote to you every three days,” he cried.

“Not after that.”

“Well, I may have omitted a post at the last—I thought it might be Delia,” Gaston added in a moment.

“Oh she didn’t want me to do it—the day I went with him, the day I told him. She tried to prevent me,” Francie insisted.

“Would to God then she had!” he wailed.

“Haven’t you told them she’s delicate too?” she asked in her strange tone.

He made no answer to this; he only continued: “What power, in heaven’s name, has he got over you? What spell has he worked?”

“He’s a gay old friend—he helped us ever so much when we were first in Paris.”

“But, my dearest child, what ‘gaieties,’ what friends—what a man to know!”

“If we hadn’t known him we shouldn’t have known YOU. Remember it was Mr. Flack who brought us that day to Mr. Waterlow’s.”

“Oh you’d have come some other way,” said Gaston, who made nothing of that.

“Not in the least. We knew nothing about any other way. He helped us in everything—he showed us everything. That was why I told him—when he asked me. I liked him for what he had done.”

Gaston, who had now also seated himself, listened to this attentively. “I see. It was a kind of delicacy.”

“Oh a ‘kind’!” She desperately smiled.

He remained a little with his eyes on her face. “Was it for me?”

“Of course it was for you.”

“Ah how strange you are!” he cried with tenderness. “Such contradictions—on s’y perd. I wish you’d say that to THEM, that way. Everything would be right.”

“Never, never!” said the girl. “I’ve wronged them, and nothing will ever be the same again. It was fatal. If I felt as they do I too would loathe the person who should have done such a thing. It doesn’t seem to me so bad—the thing in the paper; but you know best. You must go back to them. You know best,” she repeated.

“They were the last, the last people in France, to do it to. The sense of desecration, of pollution, you see”—he explained as if for conscience.

“Oh you needn’t tell me—I saw them all there!” she answered.

“It must have been a dreadful scene. But you DIDN’T brave them, did you?”

“Brave them—what are you talking about? To you that idea’s incredible!” she then hopelessly sighed.

But he wouldn’t have this. “No, no—I can imagine cases.” He clearly had SOME vision of independence, though he looked awful about it.

“But this isn’t a case, hey?” she demanded. “Well then go back to them—go back,” she repeated. At this he half-threw himself across the table to seize her hands, but she drew away and, as he came nearer, pushed her chair back, springing up. “You know you didn’t come here to tell me you’re ready to give them up.”

“To give them up?” He only echoed it with all his woe at first. “I’ve been battling with them till I’m ready to drop. You don’t know how they feel—how they MUST feel.”

“Oh yes I do. All this has made me older, every hour.”

“It has made you—so extraordinarily!—more beautiful,” said Gaston Probert.

“I don’t care. Nothing will induce me to consent to any sacrifice.”