When Marlow first encounters Flora de Barral, he is walking along a quarry and she is on a precipice above. He calls out to her. It turns out she was trying to kill herself, or at least thinking about it, and eventually Marlow realizes the crisis is being caused not merely by the hardship she’s experienced in the years since her father was imprisoned, but in the fact that he is about to be released. It’s Mr. Fyne, Marlow’s holiday-friend, who finally imparts this important fact at the end of Part I.
“‘But dash it all,’ he cried in hollow accents which at the same time had the tone of bitter irony—I had never before heard a sound so quaintly ugly and almost horrible—’You forget Mr. Smith.’
“‘What Mr. Smith?’ I asked innocently.
“Fyne made an extraordinary simiesque grimace. I believe it was quite involuntary, but you know that a grave, much-lined, shaven countenance when distorted in an unusual way is extremely apelike. It was a surprising sight, and rendered me not only speechless but stopped the progress of my thought completely. I must have presented a remarkably imbecile appearance.
…
“It is one of the advantages of that magnificent invention, the prison, that you may forget people which are put there as though they were dead. One needn’t worry about them. Nothing can happen to them that you can help. They can do nothing which might possibly matter to anybody. They come out of it, though, but that seems hardly an advantage to themselves or anyone else. I had completely forgotten the financier de Barral. The girl for me was an orphan, but now I perceived suddenly the force of Fyne’s qualifying statement, ‘to a certain extent.’ It would have been infinitely more kind all round for the law to have shot, beheaded, strangled, or otherwise destroyed this absurd de Barral, who was a danger to a moral world inhabited by a credulous multitude not fit to take care of itself.
The Great de Barral is, in other words, one for the Colonel Chabert files, someone back from the dead who everyone wishes would stay buried.
This isn’t exactly true. Flora does want him to come back, even if it almost drives her to jump off a cliff. She was only 15 when his empire collapsed and has a girl’s memory of a beloved father. The Great de Barral was never worth much as a father, of course (he left her with that governess, after all), and now that he’s full of bitterness over his downfall his presence is a poison.
Of the trial, Marlow’s unimaginative pressman friend “told me with a sourly derisive snigger that, after the sentence had been pronounced the fellow clung to the dock long enough to make a sort of protest. ‘You haven’t given me time. If I had been given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of them.’ And he had permitted himself his very first and last gesture in all these days, raising a hard-clenched first above his head.”
De Barral is also angry that Flora didn’t give him time before marrying. “Couldn’t you wait at least till I came out? You could have told me; asked me; consulted me! …You couldn’t wait—eh?”
Flora has spent the past year researching her father’s trial in the newspapers and shares his view that he was an innocent victim. She believes that if only he had been given time he might have ended by being made a peer. But she also knows that she couldn’t wait until he came out to act to save them both. And that he must be a bit mad for acting like she hadn’t done what was best for him.
The Great de Barral has, finally, the courtesy to remove himself from the scene, and they all live happily ever after. Not quite, but the climax that ends in his exit ushers in, like magic, love and happiness.
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