by Henry James
“Au Bois,” said George Flack to the coachman, leaning back on the soft cushions. For a few moments after the carriage had taken its easy elastic start they were silent; but presently he went on, “Was that lady one of your relations?”
“Do you mean one of Mr. Probert’s? She is his sister.”
“Is there any particular reason in that why she shouldn’t say good-morning to me?”
“She didn’t want you to remain with me. She wanted to carry me off.”
“What has she got against me?” asked Mr. Flack.
Francie seemed to consider a little. “Oh, it’s these French ideas.”
“Some of them are very base,” said her companion.
The girl made no rejoinder; she only turned her eyes to right and left, admiring the splendid day, the shining city. The great architectural vista was fair: the tall houses, with their polished shop-fronts, their balconies, their signs with accented letters, seemed to make a glitter of gilt and crystal as they rose into the sunny air. The colour of everything was cool and pretty and the sound of everything gay; the sense of a costly spectacle was everywhere. “Well, I like Paris, anyway!” Francie exclaimed at last.
“It’s lucky for you, since you’ve got to live here.”
“I haven’t got to, there’s no obligation. We haven’t settled anything about that.”
“Hasn’t that lady settled it for you?”
“Yes, very likely she has,” said Francie, placidly. “I don’t like her so well as the others.”
“You like the others very much?”
“Of course I do. So would you if they had made so much of you.”
“That one at the studio didn’t make much of me, certainly.”
“Yes, she’s the most haughty,” said Francie.
“Well, what is it all about?” Mr. Flack inquired. “Who are they, anyway?”
“Oh, it would take me three hours to tell you,” the girl replied, laughing. “They go back a thousand years.”
“Well, we’ve got a thousand years—I mean three hours.” And George Flack settled himself more on his cushions and inhaled the pleasant air. “I do enjoy this drive, Miss Francie,” he went on. “It’s many a day since I’ve been to the Bois. I don’t fool round much among the trees.”
Francie replied candidly that for her too the occasion was very agreeable, and Mr. Flack pursued, looking round him with a smile, irrelevantly and cheerfully: “Yes, these French ideas! I don’t see how you can stand them. Those they have about young ladies are horrid.”
“Well, they tell me you like them better after you are married.”
“Why, after they are married they’re worse—I mean the ideas. Every one knows that.”
“Well, they can make you like anything, the way they talk,” Francie said.
“And do they talk a great deal?”
“Well, I should think so. They don’t do much else, and they talk about the queerest things—things I never heard of.”
“Ah, that I’ll engage!” George Flack exclaimed.
“Of course I have had most conversation with Mr. Probert.”
“The old gentleman?”
“No, very little with him. I mean with Gaston. But it’s not he that has told me most—it’s Mme. de Brécourt. She relates and relates—it’s very interesting. She has told me all their histories, all their troubles and complications.”
“Complications?”
“That’s what she calls them. It seems very different from America. It’s just like a story—they have such strange feelings. But there are things you can see—without being told.”
“What sort of things?”
“Well, like Mme. de Cliché’s—” But Francie paused, as if for a word.
“Do you mean her complications?”
“Yes, and her husband’s. She has terrible ones. That’s why one must forgive her if she is rather peculiar. She is very unhappy.”
“Do you mean through her husband?”
“Yes, he likes other ladies better. He flirts with Mme. de Brives.”
“Mme. de Brives?”
“Yes, she’s lovely,” said Francie. “She isn’t very young, but she’s fearfully attractive. And he used to go every day to have tea with Mme. de Villepreux. Mme. de Cliché can’t bear Mme. de Villepreux.”
“Lord, what a low character he must be!” George Flack exclaimed.
“Oh, his mother was very bad. That was one thing they had against the marriage.”
“Who had?—against what marriage?”
“When Maggie Probert became engaged.”
“Is that what they call her—Maggie?”
“Her brother does; but every one else calls her Margot. Old Mme. de Cliché had a horrid reputation. Every one hated her.”
“Except those, I suppose, who liked her too much. And who is Mme. de Villepreux?”
“She’s the daughter of Mme. de Marignac.”
“And who is Mme. de Marignac?”
“Oh, she’s dead,” said Francie. “She used to be a great friend of Mr. Probert—of Gaston’s father.”
“He used to go to tea with her?”
“Almost every day. Susan says he has never been the same since her death.”
“Ah, poor man! And who is Susan?”
“Why, Mme. de Brécourt. Mr. Probert just loved Mme. de Marignac. Mme. de Villepreux isn’t so nice as her mother. She was brought up with the Proberts, like a sister, and now she carries on with Maxime.”
“With Maxime?”
“That’s M. de Cliché.”
“Oh, I see—I see!” murmured George Flack, responsively. They had reached the top of the Champs Elysées and were passing below the wondrous arch to which that gentle eminence forms a pedestal and which looks down even on splendid Paris from its immensity and across at the vain mask of the Tuileries and the river-moated Louvre and the twin towers of Notre Dame, painted blue by the distance. The confluence of carriages—a sounding stream, in which our friends become engaged—rolled into the large avenue leading to the Bois de Boulogne. Mr. Flack evidently enjoyed the scene; he gazed about him at their neighbours, at the villas and gardens on either hand; he took in the prospect of the far-stretching brown boskages and smooth alleys of the wood, of the hour that they had yet to spend there, of the rest of Francie’s artless prattle, of the place near the lake where they could alight and walk a little; even of the bench where they might sit down. “I see, I see,” he repeated with appreciation. “You make me feel quite as if I were in the grand monde.”
XI
ONE DAY, AT NOON, SHORTLY BEFORE THE TIME for which Gaston had announced his return, a note was brought to Francie from Mme. de Brécourt. It caused her some agitation, though it contained a clause intended to guard her against vain fears. “Please come to me the moment you have received this—I have sent the carriage. I will explain when you get here what I want to see you about. Nothing has happened to Gaston. We are all here.” The coupé from the Place Beauvau was waiting at the door of the hotel and the girl had but a hurried conference with her father and sister; if conference it could be called in which vagueness on one side encountered blankness on the other. “It’s for something bad—something bad,” Francie said, while she tied her bonnet; though she was unable to think what it could be. Delia, who looked a good deal scared, offered to accompany her; upon which Mr. Dosson made the first remark of a practical character in which he had indulged in relation to his daughter’s alliance.
“No you won’t—no you won’t, my dear. They may whistle for Francie, but let them see that they can’t whistle for all of us.” It was the first sign he had given of being jealous of the dignity of the Dossons. That question had never troubled him.
“I know what it is,” said Delia, while she arranged her sister’s garments. “They want to talk about religion. They have got the priests; there’s some bishop, or perhaps some cardinal. They want to baptise you.”
“You’d better take a waterproof!” Francie’s father c
alled after her as she flitted away.
She wondered, rolling toward the Place Beauvau, what they were all there for; that announcement balanced against the reassurance conveyed in the phrase about Gaston. She liked them individually but in their collective form they made her uneasy. In their family parties there was always something of the tribunal. Mme. de Brécourt came out to meet her in the vestibule, drawing her quickly into a small room (not the salon—Francie knew it as her hostess’s “own room,” a lovely boudoir), in which, considerably to the girl’s relief, the rest of the family were not assembled. Yet she guessed in a moment that they were near at hand—they were waiting. Susan looked flushed and strange; she had a queer smile; she kissed her as if she didn’t know that she was doing it. She laughed as she greeted her, but her laugh was nervous; she was different every way from anything Francie had hitherto seen. By the time our young lady had perceived these things she was sitting beside her on a sofa and Mme. de Brécourt had her hand, which she held so tight that it almost hurt her. Susan’s eyes were in their nature salient, but on this occasion they seemed to have started out of her head.
“We are upside down—terribly agitated. A bomb has fallen into the house.”
“What’s the matter—what’s the matter?” Francie asked, pale, with parted lips. She had a sudden wild idea that Gaston might have found out in America that her father had no money, had lost it all; that it had been stolen during their long absence. But would he cast her off for that?
“You must understand the closeness of our union with you from our sending for you this way—the first, the only person—in a crisis. Our joys are your joys and our indignations are yours.”
“What is the matter, please?” the girl repeated. Their “indignations” opened up a gulf; it flashed upon her, with a shock of mortification that the idea had not come sooner, that something would have come out: a piece in the paper, from Mr. Flack, about her portrait and even (a little) about herself. But that was only more mystifying; for certainly Mr. Flack could only have published something pleasant—something to be proud of. Had he by some incredible perversity or treachery stated that the picture was bad, or even that she was? She grew dizzy, remembering how she had refused him and how little he had liked it, that day at Saint-Germain. But they had made that up over and over, especially when they sat so long on a bench together (the time they drove,) in the Bois de Boulogne.
“Oh, the most awful thing; a newspaper sent this morning from America to my father—containing two horrible columns of vulgar lies and scandal about our family, about all of us, about you, about your picture, about poor Marguerite, calling her ‘Margot,’ about Maxime and Léonie de Villepreux, saying he’s her lover, about all our affairs, about Gaston, about your marriage, about your sister and your dresses and your dimples, about our darling father, whose history it professes to relate, in the most ignoble, the most revolting terms. Papa’s in the most awful state!” said Mme. de Brécourt, panting to take breath. She had spoken with the volubility of horror and passion. “You are outraged with us and you must suffer with us,” she went on. “But who has done it? Who has done it? Who has done it?”
“Why, Mr. Flack—Mr. Flack!” Francie quickly replied. She was appalled, overwhelmed; but her foremost feeling was the wish not to appear to disavow her knowledge.
“Mr. Flack? do you mean that awful person—? He ought to be shot, he ought to be burnt alive. Maxime will kill him, Maxime is in an unspeakable rage. Everything is at end, we have been served up to the rabble, we shall have to leave Paris. How could he know such things? and they are all too infamously false!” The poor woman poured forth her trouble in questions and contradictions and groans; she knew not what to ask first, against what to protest. “Do you mean that person Marguerite saw you with at Mr. Waterlow’s? Oh, Francie, what has happened? She had a feeling then, a dreadful foreboding. She saw you afterwards—walking with him—in the Bois.”
“Well, I didn’t see her,” the girl said.
“You were talking with him—you were too absorbed: that’s what Margot says. Oh, Francie, Francie!” cried Mme. de Brécourt, catching her breath.
“She tried to interfere at the studio, but I wouldn’t let her. He’s an old friend—a friend of my father’s, and I like him very much. What my father allows, that’s not for others to criticise!” Francie continued. She was frightened, extremely frightened, at her companion’s air of tragedy and at the dreadful consequences she alluded to, consequences of an act she herself did not know, could not comprehend nor measure yet. But there was an instinct of bravery in her which threw her into defence—defence even of George Flack, though it was a part of her consternation that on her too he should have practised a surprise, a sort of selfish deception.
“Oh, how can you bear with such wretches—how can your father—? What devil has he paid to tattle to him?”
“You scare me awfully—you terrify me,” said the girl. “I don’t know what you are talking about. I haven’t seen it, I don’t understand it. Of course I have talked to Mr. Flack.”
“Oh, Francie, don’t say it—don’t say it! Dear child, you haven’t talked to him in that fashion: vulgar horrors, and such a language!” Mme. de Brécourt came nearer, took both her hands now, drew her closer, seemed to plead with her. “You shall see the paper; they have got it in the other room—the most disgusting sheet. Margot is reading it to her husband; he can’t read English, if you can call it English: such a style! Papa tried to translate it to Maxime, but he couldn’t, he was too sick. There is a quantity about Mme. de Marignac—imagine only! And a quantity about Jeanne and Raoul and their economies in the country. When they see it in Brittany—heaven preserve us!”
Francie had turned very white; she looked for a minute at the carpet. “And what does it say about me?”
“Some trash about your being the great American beauty, with the most odious details, and your having made a match among the ‘rare old exclusives.’ And the strangest stuff about your father—his having gone into a ‘store’ at the age of twelve. And something about your poor sister—heaven help us! And a sketch of our career in Paris, as they call it, and the way that we have got on and our great pretensions. And a passage about Blanche de Douves, Raoul’s sister, who had that disease—what do they call it?—that she used to steal things in shops: do you see them reading that? And how did he know such a thing? it’s ages ago—it’s dead and buried!”
“You told me, you told me yourself,” said Francie, quickly. She turned red the instant she had spoken.
“Don’t say it’s you—don’t, don’t, my darling!” cried Mme. de Brécourt, who had stared at her a moment. “That’s what I want, that’s what you must do, that’s what I see you this way for, first, alone. I’ve answered for you, you know; you must repudiate every responsibility. Margot suspects you—she has got that idea—she has given it to the others. I have told them they ought to be ashamed, that it’s an outrage to you. I have done everything, for the last hour, to protect you. I’m your godmother, you know, and you mustn’t disappoint me. You’re incapable, and you must say so, face to face, to my father. Think of Gaston, cherie; he will have seen it over there, alone, far from us all. Think of his horror and of his faith, of what he would expect of you.” Mme. de Brécourt hurried on, and her companion’s bewilderment deepened on seeing that the tears had risen to her eyes and were pouring down her cheeks. “You must say to my father, face to face that you are incapable—you are stainless.”
“Stainless?” Francie repeated. “Of course I knew he wanted to write a piece about the picture—and about my marriage.”
“About your marriage—of course you knew. Then, wretched girl, you are at the bottom of all!” wailed Mme. de Brécourt, flinging herself away from her, falling back on the sofa, covering her face with her hands.
“He told me—he told me when I went with him to the studio!” Francie declared, passionately. “But he has printed more.”
“More? I should think so!” And Mm
e. de Brécourt sprang up, standing before her. “And you let him—about yourself? You gave him facts?”
“I told him—I told him—I don’t know what. It was for his paper—he wants everything. It’s a very fine paper.”
“A very fine paper?” Mme. de Brécourt stared, with parted lips. “Have you seen, have you touched the hideous sheet? Ah, my brother, my brother!” she wailed again, turning away.
“If your brother were here you wouldn’t talk to me this way—he would protect me!” cried Francie, on her feet, seizing her little muff and moving to the door.
“Go away, go away or they’ll kill you!” Mme. de Brécourt went on, excitedly. “After all I have done for you—after the way I have lied for you!” And she sobbed, trying to repress her sobs.
Francie, at this, broke out into a torrent of tears. “I’ll go home. Father, father!” she almost shrieked, reaching the door.
“Oh, your father—he has been a nice father, bringing you up in such ideas!” These words followed her with infinite scorn, but almost as Mme. de Brécourt uttered them, struck by a sound, she sprang after the girl, seized her, drew her back and held her a moment, listening, before she could pass out. “Hush—hush—they are coming in here, they are too anxious! Deny—deny it—say you know nothing! Your sister must have said things—and such things: say it all comes from her!”
“Oh, you dreadful—is that what you do?” cried Francie, shaking herself free. The door opened as she spoke and Mme. de Brécourt walked quickly to the window, turning her back. Mme. de Cliché was there and Mr. Probert and M. de Brécourt and M. de Cliché. They entered in silence and M. de Brécourt, coming last, closed the door softly behind him. Francie had never been in a court of justice, but if she had had that experience these four persons would have reminded her of the jury filing back into their box with their verdict. They all looked at her hard as she stood in the middle of the room; Mme. de Brécourt gazed out of the window, wiping her eyes; Mme. de Cliché grasped a newspaper, crumpled and partly folded. Francie got a quick impression, moving her eyes from one face to another, that old Mr. Probert was the worst; his mild, ravaged expression was terrible. He was the one who looked at her least; he went to the fireplace and leaned on the mantel, with his head in his hands. He seemed ten years older.