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 tomorrow” would take the lesson to heart.
While she glowed with this consolation as well as with the resentment for which it was required her father quietly addressed a few words by letter to their young friend in the south. This communication was not of a minatory order; it expressed on the contrary the loose sociability which was the essence of the good gentleman’s nature. He wanted to see Mr. Flack, to talk the whole thing over, and the desire to hold him to an account would play but a small part in the interview. It commended itself much more to him that the touchiness of the Proberts should be a sign of a family of cranks — so little did any experience of his own match it — than that a newspaper-man had misbehaved in trying to turn out an attractive piece. As the newspaper-man happened to be the person with whom he had most consorted for some time back he felt drawn to him in presence of a new problem, and somehow it didn’t seem to Mr. Dosson to disqualify him as a source of comfort that it was just he who had been the fountain of injury. The injury wouldn’t be there if the Proberts didn’t point to it with a thousand ringers. Moreover Mr. Dosson couldn’t turn his back at such short notice on a man who had smoked so many of his cigars, ordered so many of his dinners and helped him so handsomely to spend his money: such acts constituted a bond, and when there was a bond people gave it a little jerk in time of trouble. His letter to Nice was the little jerk.
The morning after Francie had passed with such an air from Gaston’s sight and left him planted in the salon — he had remained ten minutes, to see if she would reappear, and then had marched out of the hotel — she received by the first post a letter from him, written the evening before. It conveyed his deep regret that their meeting that day should have been of so painful, so unnatural a character, and the hope that she didn’t consider, as her strange behaviour had seemed to suggest, that SHE had anything to complain of. There was too much he wanted to say, and above all too much he wanted to ask, for him to consent to the indefinite postponement of a necessary interview. There were explanations, assurances, de part et d’autre, with which it was manifestly impossible that either of them should dispense. He would therefore propose that she should see him again, and not be wanting in patience to that end, late on the morrow. He didn’t propose an earlier moment because his hands were terribly full at home. Frankly speaking, the state of things there was of the worst. Jane and her husband had just arrived and had made him a violent, an unexpected scene. Two of the French newspapers had got hold of the article and had given the most perfidious extracts. His father hadn’t stirred out of the house, hadn’t put his foot inside a club, for more than a week. Marguerite and Maxime were immediately to start for England on an indefinite absence. They couldn’t face their life in Paris. For himself he was in the breach, fighting hard and making, on her behalf, asseverations it was impossible for him to believe, in spite of the dreadful defiant confession she had appeared to throw at him in the morning, that she wouldn’t virtually confirm. He would come in as soon after nine as possible; the day up to that time would be stiff in the Cours la Reine, and he begged her in the meantime not to doubt of his perfect tenderness. So far from her having caused it at all to shrink, he had never yet felt her to have, in his affection, such a treasure of indulgence to draw upon.
A couple of hours after the receipt of this manifesto Francie lay on one of the satin sofas with her eyes closed and her hand clinched upon it in her pocket. Delia sat hard by with a needle in her fingers, certain morsels of silk and ribbon in her lap, several pins in her mouth, and her attention turning constantly from her work to her sister’s face. The weather was now so completely vernal that Mr. Dosson was able to haunt the court, and he had lately resumed this practice, in which he was presumably at the present moment absorbed. Delia had lowered her needle and was making sure if her companion were awake — she had been perfectly still for so long — when her glance was drawn to the door, which she heard pushed open. Mr. Flack stood there, looking from one to the other of the young ladies as to see which would be most agreeably surprised by his visit.
“I saw your father downstairs — he says it’s all right,” said the journalist, advancing with a brave grin. “He told me to come straight up — I had quite a talk with him.”
“All right — ALL RIGHT?” Delia Dosson repeated, springing up. “Yes indeed — I should say so!” Then she checked herself, asking in another manner: “Is that so? poppa sent you up?” And then in still another: “Well, have you had a good time at Nice?”
“You’d better all come right down and see. It’s lovely down there. If you’ll come down I’ll go right back. I guess you want a change,” Mr. Flack went on. He spoke to Delia but he looked at Francie, who showed she had not been asleep by the quick consciousness with which she raised herself on her sofa. She gazed at the visitor with parted lips, but uttered no word. He barely faltered, coming toward her with his conscious grimace and his hand out. His knowing eyes were more knowing than ever, but had an odd appearance of being smaller, like penetrating points. “Your father has told me all about it. Did you ever hear of anything so cheap?”
“All about what? — all about what?” said Delia, whose attempt to represent happy ignorance was menaced by an intromission of ferocity. She might succeed in appearing ignorant, but could scarcely succeed in appearing kind. Francie had risen to her feet and had suffered Mr. Flack to possess himself for a moment of her hand, but neither of them had asked the young man to sit down. “I thought you were going to stay a month at Nice?” Delia continued.
“Well, I was, but your father’s letter started me up.”
“Father’s letter?”
“He wrote me about the row — didn’t you know it? Then I broke. You didn’t suppose I was going to stay down there when there were such times up here.”
“Gracious!” Delia panted.
“Is it pleasant at Nice? Is it very gay? Isn’t it very hot now?” Francie rather limply asked.
“Oh it’s all right. But I haven’t come up here to crow about Nice, have I?”
“Why not, if we want you to?”— Delia spoke up.
Mr. Flack looked at her for a moment very hard, in the whites of the eyes; then he replied, turning back to her sister: “Anything YOU like, Miss Francie. With you one subject’s as good as another. Can’t we sit down? Can’t we be comfortable?” he added.
“Comfortable? of course we can!” cried Delia, but she remained erect while Francie sank upon the sofa again and their companion took possession of the nearest chair.
“Do you remember what I told you once, that the people WILL have the plums?” George Flack asked with a hard buoyancy of the younger girl.
She looked an instant as if she were trying to recollect what he had told her; and then said, more remotely, “DID father write to you?”
“Of course he did. That’s why I’m here.”
“Poor father, sometimes he doesn’t know WHAT to do!” Delia threw in with violence.
“He told me the Reverberator has raised a breeze. I guessed that for myself when I saw the way the papers here were after it. That thing will go the rounds, you’ll see. What brought me was learning from him that they HAVE got their backs up.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Delia Dosson rang out.
Mr. Flack turned his eyes on her own as he had done a moment before; Francie sat there serious, looking hard at the carpet. “What game are you trying, Miss Delia? It ain’t true YOU care what I wrote, is it?” he pursued, addressing himself again to Francie.
After a moment she raised her eyes. “Did you write it yourself?”
“What do you care what he wrote — or what does any one care?” Delia again interposed.
“It has done the paper more good than anything — every one’s so interested,” said Mr. Flack in the tone of reasonable explanation. “And you don’t feel you’ve anything to complain of, do you?” he added to Francie kindly.
“Do you mean because I told you?”
“Why certainly. Didn’t it all spring out of that lovely drive and that walk up in the Bois we had — when you took me up to see your portrait? Didn’t you understand that I wanted you to know that the public would appreciate a column or two about Mr. Waterlow’s new picture, and about you as the subject of it, and about your being engaged to a member of the grand old monde, and about what was going on in the grand old monde, which would naturally attract attention through that? Why Miss Francie,” Mr. Flack ever so blandly pursued, “you regularly TALKED as if you did.”
“Did I talk a great deal?” asked Francie.
“Why most freely — it was too lovely. We had a real grand old jaw. Don’t you remember when we sat there in the Bois?”
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