When on coming home again this evening, meanwhile, he complied with his father’s request by returning to the room in which the old man habitually sat, Mr. Probert laid down his book and kept on his glasses. “Of course you’ll continue to live with me. You’ll understand that I don’t consent to your going away. You’ll have the rooms occupied at first by Susan and Alphonse.”
Gaston noted with pleasure the transition from the conditional to the future tense, and also the circumstance that his father had been lost in a book according to his now confirmed custom of evening ease. This proved him not too much off the hinge. He read a great deal, and very serious books; works about the origin of things — of man, of institutions, of speech, of religion. This habit he had taken up more particularly since the circle of his social life had contracted. He sat there alone, turning his pages softly, contentedly, with the lamplight shining on his refined old head and embroidered dressing-gown. He had used of old to be out every night in the week — Gaston was perfectly aware that to many dull people he must even have appeared a little frivolous. He was essentially a social creature and indeed — except perhaps poor Jane in her damp old castle in Brittany — they were all social creatures. That was doubtless part of the reason why the family had acclimatised itself in France. They had affinities with a society of conversation; they liked general talk and old high salons, slightly tarnished and dim, containing precious relics, where winged words flew about through a circle round the fire and some clever person, before the chimney-piece, held or challenged the others. That figure, Gaston knew, especially in the days before he could see for himself, had very often been his father, the lightest and most amiable specimen of the type that enjoyed easy possession of the hearth-rug. People left it to him; he was so transparent, like a glass screen, and he never triumphed in debate. His word on most subjects was not felt to be the last (it was usually not more conclusive than a shrugging inarticulate resignation, an “Ah you know, what will you have?”); but he had been none the less a part of the very prestige of some dozen good houses, most of them over the river, in the conservative faubourg, and several today profaned shrines, cold and desolate hearths. These had made up Mr. Probert’s pleasant world — a world not too small for him and yet not too large, though some of them supposed themselves great institutions. Gaston knew the succession of events that had helped to make a difference, the most salient of which were the death of his brother, the death of his mother, and above all perhaps the demise of Mme. de Marignac, to whom the old boy used still to go three or four evenings out of the seven and sometimes even in the morning besides. Gaston fully measured the place she had held in his father’s life and affection, and the terms on which they had grown up together — her people had been friends of his grandfather when that fine old Southern worthy came, a widower with a young son and several negroes, to take his pleasure in Paris in the time of Louis Philippe — and the devoted part she had played in marrying his sisters. He was quite aware that her friendship and all its exertions were often mentioned as explaining their position, so remarkable in a society in which they had begun after all as outsiders. But he would have guessed, even if he had not been told, what his father said to that. To offer the Proberts a position was to carry water to the fountain; they hadn’t left their own behind them in Carolina; it had been large enough to stretch across the sea. As to what it was in Carolina there was no need of being explicit. This adoptive Parisian was by nature presupposing, but he was admirably urbane — that was why they let him talk so before the fire; he was the oracle persuasive, the conciliatory voice — and after the death of his wife and of Mme. de Marignac, who had been her friend too, the young man’s mother’s, he was gentler, if more detached, than before. Gaston had already felt him to care in consequence less for everything — except indeed for the true faith, to which he drew still closer — and this increase of indifference doubtless helped to explain his present charming accommodation.
“We shall be thankful for any rooms you may give us,” his son said. “We shall fill out the house a little, and won’t that be rather an improvement, shrunken as you and I have become?”
“You’ll fill it out a good deal, I suppose, with Mr. Dosson and the other girl.”
“Ah Francie won’t give up her father and sister, certainly; and what should you think of her if she did? But they’re not intrusive; they’re essentially modest people; they won’t put themselves upon us. They have great natural discretion,” Gaston declared.
“Do you answer for that? Susan does; she’s always assuring one of it,” Mr. Probert said. “The father has so much that he wouldn’t even speak to me.”
“He didn’t, poor dear man, know what to say.”
“How then shall I know what to say to HIM?”
“Ah you always know!” Gaston smiled.
“How will that help us if he doesn’t know what to answer?”
“You’ll draw him out. He’s full of a funny little shade of bonhomie.”
“Well, I won’t quarrel with your bonhomme,” said Mr. Probert —“if he’s silent there are much worse faults; nor yet with the fat young lady, though she’s evidently vulgar — even if you call it perhaps too a funny little shade. It’s not for ourselves I’m afraid; it’s for them. They’ll be very unhappy.”
“Never, never!” said Gaston. “They’re too simple. They’ll remain so. They’re not morbid nor suspicious. And don’t you like Francie? You haven’t told me so,” he added in a moment.
“She talks about ‘Parus,’ my dear boy.”
“Ah to Susan too that seemed the great barrier. But she has got over it. I mean Susan has got over the barrier. We shall make her speak French; she has a real disposition for it; her French is already almost as good as her English.”
“That oughtn’t to be difficult. What will you have? Of course she’s very pretty and I’m sure she’s good. But I won’t tell you she is a marvel, because you must remember — you young fellows think your own point of view and your own experience everything — that I’ve seen beauties without number. I’ve known the most charming women of our time — women of an order to which Miss Francie, con rispetto parlando, will never begin to belong. I’m difficult about women — how can I help it? Therefore when you pick up a little American girl at an inn and bring her to us as a miracle, feel how standards alter. J’ai vu mieux que ca, mon cher. However, I accept everything today, as you know; when once one has lost one’s enthusiasm everything’s the same and one might as well perish by the sword as by famine.”
“I hoped she’d fascinate you on the spot,” Gaston rather ruefully remarked.
“‘Fascinate’— the language you fellows use! How many times in one’s life is one likely to be fascinated?”
“Well, she’ll charm you yet.”
“She’ll never know at least that she doesn’t: I’ll engage for that,” said Mr. Probert handsomely.
“Ah be sincere with her, father — she’s worth it!” his son broke out.
When the elder man took that tone, the tone of vast experience and a fastidiousness justified by ineffable recollections, our friend was more provoked than he could say, though he was also considerably amused, for he had a good while since, made up his mind about the element of rather stupid convention in it. It was fatuous to miss so little the fine perceptions one didn’t have: so far from its showing experience it showed a sad simplicity not to FEEL Francie Dosson. He thanked God she was just the sort of imponderable infinite quantity, such as there were no stupid terms for, that he did feel. He didn’t know what old frumps his father might have frequented — the style of 1830, with long curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and a corsage, in a point suggestive of twenty whalebones, coming down to the knees — but he could remember Mme. de Marignac’s Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays, with Sundays and other days thrown in, and the taste that prevailed in that milieu: the books they admired, the verses they read and recited, the pictures, great heaven! they thought good, and the three busts of the lady of the house in different corners (as a Diana, a Druidess and a Croyante: her shoulders were supposed to make up for her head), effigies the public ridicule attaching to which today would — even the least bad, Canova’s — make their authors burrow in holes for shame.
“And what else is she worth?” Mr. Probert asked after a momentary hesitation.
“How do you mean, what else?”
“Her immense prospects, that’s what Susan has been putting forward. Susan’s insistence on them was mainly what brought over Jane. Do you mind my speaking of them?”
Gaston was obliged to recognise privately the importance of Jane’s having been brought over, but he hated to hear it spoken of as if he were under an obligation to it. “To whom, sir?” he asked.
“Oh only to you.”
“You can’t do less than Mr. Dosson. As I told you, he waived the question of money and he was splendid. We can’t be more mercenary than he.”
“He waived the question of his own, you mean?” said Mr. Probert.
“Yes, and of yours. But it will be all right.” The young man flattered himself that this wa............