CHAPTER I

The

Little French Girl

BY

ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

(Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt)

_Author of “Adrienne Toner,” “Christmas Roses, and Other Stories”_

_“Tante,” etc._

Boston and New York

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ANNE DOUGLAS DE SÉLINCOURT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SECOND IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1924

THIRD IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924

FOURTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

The Little French Girl

PART I

CHAPTER I

A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. The strokes, Alix

thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to fall through the fog

and tumult of the station, and, counting them as they emerged, they were

so slow and heavy that they made her think of tawny drones pushing their

way forth from among the thickets of hot thyme in the _jardin potager_

at Montarel. Sitting straightly in her corner of the Victoria

waiting-room, the little French girl fixed her mind upon the picture

thus evoked so that she should not feel too sharply the alarming meaning

of the hour, and seemed again to watch the blunt, sagacious faces of the

drones as they paused in sulky deliberation on the tip of a spray before

launching themselves into the sunlight. What could be more unlike

Montarel than this cold and paltry scene? What more unlike that air,

tranced with sunlight and silence, than this dense atmosphere? Yet the

heavy, gliding notes brought back the drones so vividly that she found

herself again in the high-terraced garden under the sun-baked old

château. The magnolia-trees ate into the crumbling walls and opened

lemon-scented cups beneath her as she leaned her arms on the hot stone

and looked across the visionary plains to the Alps on the horizon, blue,

impalpable, less substantial to the sight than the clouds that sailed in

grandiose snowy fleets above them. Alix had always felt that it was like

taking great breaths to see the plains and like spreading immense wings

to see the mountains, and something of invulnerable dignity, of

inaccessible remoteness in her demeanour as she sat there might well

have been derived from generations who had lived and died in the

presence of natural sublimities. Her brows were contemplative, her lips

proud. She was evidently a foreigner, a creature nurtured in climes

golden yet austere and springing from an aromatic, rocky soil. The

pallor of her extreme fatigue could not efface the sunny tones of her

skin; her hair was the blacker for its bronzed lights, and if her eyes

were blue, it was not the English blue of a water-side forget-me-not,

but the dense, impalpable blue of the Alps seen across great distances.

Two women, pausing on their way out to look at her, drew her mind back

from Montarel. She knew that she might look younger than her years. Her

bobbed hair was cut straight across her forehead and her skirt displayed

a childish length of leg. It was no wonder that, seeing her there,

alone, they should speak of her with curiosity, perhaps with solicitude;

for there was kindness in their eyes. But she did not like pity, and,

drawing herself up more straightly, wrapping her arms in the scarf that

muffled her shoulders, she fixed her eyes blankly above their heads

until they had passed on. They were kind women; but very ugly. Like

jugs. All the people that she had seen since landing on this day of grey

and purple flesh-tones had made her think of the earthenware jugs that

old Marthe used to range along her upper shelves in the little dark shop

that stood on the turn of the road leading down from the château to the

village. Their eyes were joyless yet untragic. Their clothes expressed

no enterprise. She did not think that they could feel ecstasy, ever, or

despair. Yet they were the people of Captain Owen, and she could not be

really forgotten, for Captain Owen’s family were to come for her. It was

only some mistake; but more than the strokes of the clock the women’s

eyes had made her feel how late it was, how young she was, and how

hungry.

Maman’s _déjeuner_, the long buttered _petits pains_ with ham in them,

she had eaten on the boat; and, far away, seen across the leaden waters

of the November channel, was the bright _petit déjeuner_, in Paris that

morning, and Maman before the wood fire, her beauty still clouded by

sleep, sweet, sombre, and gay as only she could be, her russet locks

tossed back and her white arms bare in the white woollen _peignoir_.

“They will, I know, be good to my darling,” Maman had said, buttering

her roll while Albertine brought in the coffee, “and keep her warm and

well-fed through this hard winter.” Firmness and resource breathed from

Maman. She knew what she was doing and Alix saw herself powerless in her

hands. Yet she could read her, too. Even though she could not always

interpret the words, she could always read Maman, and the meaning, as it

were, of the sentence would come to her in a feeling rather than in an

idea. She had felt that morning that Maman’s heart was not at ease. It

was true that the Armistice had been signed but the other day, that the

war was hardly over, and that everything would be more expensive than

ever. It was true that she was going to friends, though to unknown

friends; to the family of their dear Captain Owen, killed in battle only

nine months ago. He had so often said that they must know his family,

and it had been his mother who had written so kindly to say that Giles

would meet her. But if all this were so natural, why had she felt that

touch of artifice in Maman’s manner, that resource in her so many

reasons? Perhaps they did not really want her. And perhaps there was

some mistake and they did not expect her to-night. If no one came, what

was she to do? She had only five shillings in her purse. The porter had

placed her little box and her dressing-case on the seat beside her, and

if no one came was she to sit on here all night, in the waiting-room,

this horrid feeling, half hunger, half fear, gnawing at the pit of her

stomach? “_Dieu, que j’ai faim!_” she thought; and as she now leaned

back her head and closed her eyes, the sadness that flowed into her

carried her far back to Montarel again and it was Grand-père that she

saw, passing under the pollarded lime-trees with his dragging footsteps

and looking down on the ground as he went, with no eyes for the climbing

vineyards, no eyes for the plains, the river, the Alps; his short white

beard and jutting nose giving him still the air of a _commandant_, high

on his fortress; but so old, so ill, so poor and so despairing.

The dappled shadows of the limes lay brightly blue at his feet. His

bleached hands were clasped behind him on his stick. He wore a black

silk skull-cap and a white silk handkerchief was knotted around his

neck. It had always frightened her a little to see Grand-père, and it

frightened her now to remember him, the _commandant_, defeated, broken;

yet still with that sombre fire smouldering in his eyes. “_Tout-à-fait

une tête de Port-Royal_,” she had heard someone say of him once; and so

a devout noble of the time of Louis Quatorze might have looked. Only she

did not see Grand-père as appeased, withdrawn from the world and its

illusions; he brooded, rather, in bitterness upon them. He minded

everything so terribly.

She remembered as if it were yesterday the dreadful summer afternoon

when the bell had clanged hoarsely in the courtyard, and Mélanie, wiping

her steaming arms on her apron, had come clapping in her _savates_

across the paving-stones to let in the opulent gentleman who had arrived

in his motor to take away the Clouets. That was the day that had

revealed to her what Grand-père’s poverty must be. He had sold the

Clouets at last; after selling so many things. The great gaunt salles,

the little panelled salons, the rows of incommodious bedrooms, looking,

from high up, over the plains, all were empty; and the Clouets now were

to go.

With a child’s awed heart, half comprehending, Alix had followed Mélanie

and the stranger, up the winding staircase in the turret—Mélanie took

him by that circuitous route so that Grand-père should catch no glimpse

of him; along the chill stone passages, to the little room where she and

Grand-père sat and read in the evenings. The _lit de repos_ stood there,

draped in its tattered brocades, dignified and irrelevant, for no one

ever thought of lying down on it; and Grand-père’s old _bergère_, and

her _tabouret_ drawn up to the table before her histories. And there,

upon the sea-green panelled walls, the silvery Clouets hung, Mouverays

among them; frigidly smiling in their ruffs.

Mélanie, mute, grim, inscrutable, helped the gentleman from Paris to

take them down, one by one, and wrap them up and carry them across the

courtyard to the waiting car: and Alix had watched it all, knowing that

a final disaster had fallen upon her house.

But poverty had not been the only reason for Grand-père’s bitterness.

Even when he sat to watch her and Marie-Jeanne, his hands folded on his

stick, quiet and at peace in the evening air as it might have seemed,

she was aware of the bitterness brooding there, unappeased, at the

bottom of the deep, considering look bent upon them. There had been no

time to think about it while she played with Marie-Jeanne. Marie-Jeanne

was the blacksmith’s daughter and there had been many happy days with

her at Montarel. Marie-Jeanne had black eyes and her pig-tails were tied

together with red tape and plaited so tightly that they surrounded her

shrewd little face with a wiry circle. They brought up a family of dolls

in a corner of the _jardin potager_; Alix was the father, for she had

never cared fosteringly for dolls, and Marie-Jeanne the mother. They

whipped their tops in the courtyard where the tall blue lilies stood in

the damp about the well. The Renaissance wrought-iron windlass was all

rusted and broken; and the lilies had thrust their cord-like roots

through the cracked earthenware of their great pots. Looking out of the

door in the courtyard, one might see the cheerful _matelassière_ sitting

in the shade of the enormous horse-chestnut-tree on the wayside grass.

The heaped wool seemed to curdle and foam about her like a turbulent yet

cosy sea. She combed it out on her loom and smiled and nodded at Alix.

“_Bonjour, la jolie petite demoiselle_,” she would say. Mélanie grumbled

at the _matelassière_ and said she was a thief; but she gave Alix a bowl

of _café au lait_ to carry out to her when she remade their mattresses,

and Alix felt a pleasing sense of complicity in lawlessness when the

_matelassière_, bending her lips to the steaming coffee, would close one

eye at her in a long wink. She seemed a very happy person.

The road led down to the village, stony, steep, and golden with the

vineyards on either hand. The little houses were washed with pink and

fawn and cream and their roofs were the colour of the underside of an

old mushroom. Strings of onions hung from their eaves, and milk cheeses

in flat wicker baskets. After the village came the river and the old

stone bridge that led across to the forest, tall and dark, marching up

the mountain and haunted by legends of ghosts and knights and fairies.

Mélanie, when she was in a good humour, would tell of these, seated in

the evening on her own particular little terrace where she kept the

fowls and picked over the herbs that were to be dried for _tisane_. But

old Mère Gavrault was the best story-teller, and Alix was sometimes

allowed to go to the forest with her and find _cêpes_ and help her to

gather faggots for her winter store. Mère Gavrault told stories of

goblins and headless riders. They would have been blood-curdling

stories, had she not told them with such an unmoved, smiling face. It

was difficult to think that Mère Gavrault would find anything

blood-curdling. She had lost so many children and grandchildren and her

husband had been drowned in the river. She had lived through everything,

and only wanted faggots to keep her warm in winter. Her face in its

close, clean cap of coarse linen was hard and brown and wrinkled. Yet

she was only sixty-five years old; the age of madame Gérardin, one of

Maman’s friends in Paris, whom Alix did not like. Clean, clean, old Mère

Gavrault, and she had lived through everything and only wanted faggots;

while madame Gérardin wanted innumerable things—cigarettes all day, for

one of them; and if one were to wash her bright countenance, what

strange colours would stain the water, what thick, pale sediments sink!

Almost passionately Alix felt her preference for Mère Gavrault, who

smelt of dew and smoke and who was as clean as a stone or an apple.

Madame Gérardin was as much Paris as Mère Gavrault was Montarel. Yet

Maman was Paris, too, and there was nothing in the world Alix loved as

she did her mother. She had always loved her, and longed for her,

through all those mysterious yearly separations that took her away from

her to set her down at distant Montarel. And Grand-père must have known

that she longed for her. Was it not here that the deepest reason for the

bitterness lay? He had never spoken to her of her mother. Never; never.

Not once through all the years that she had gone to him. They had not

been unhappy, those days of childhood with Marie-Jeanne at Montarel;

even without Maman they had known a childish gladness. But it was as if,

from the earliest age, she had had, as it were, to be happy round the

corner. One’s heart was there, aching, if one looked at it; and one

tiptoed away cautiously and, at a safe distance, raced off to join

Marie-Jeanne. But at night, when she could no longer hide from her

heart, all the sadness of Grand-père’s eyes would flow into her and she

would lie, for hours, awake, thinking of him and of Maman.

It was because of Maman that his footsteps had dragged and his eyes had

fixed themselves so obstinately on the ground; perhaps it was because of

her that the Clouets had been sold;—Maman who was his daughter-in-law

and who did not bear his name. “_La belle madame Vervier; divorcée, vous

savez._”—The phrase came back to her, with its knife-like cut, as she

had first heard it whispered. It conjured up a vision of harsh, cruel

repudiation, of Maman driven forth from Montarel, running out at the

courtyard door, down the steep road, like one of the hapless princesses

in the fairy-tales;—crying, flying, stumbling on the stones. Grand-père

and her father had driven her out. So it must have been. Because of some

fault; some disastrous fault. Yet they had been cruel. Her father’s

portrait hung in the dining-room at Montarel. He was in uniform; young,

though grey-haired; with stern lips and cold blue eyes; like

Grand-père’s; like her own. She was a Mouveray in every tint and

feature; yet how unlike them. For though, by chance currents, such other

aspects of the story as a child may apprehend came drifting to her, the

first picture of harsh repudiation made a background to the later

knowledge, and she saw Maman as a delicate flower or fruit crushed and

broken between stony hands. Passionately she was Maman’s child;

passionately she repelled their harshness. Yet her heart ached for

Grand-père, and his sadness flowed into her as she sat with closed eyes

thinking of him, of Marie-Jeanne, of Mère Gavrault and Montarel;

Grand-père dead and the château sold; the solitary, sunny old château on

the hill that she would never see again.

CHAPTER II

Alix opened her eyes. Someone was standing still before her. Of all the

footsteps that came and went, these had stopped. For a moment, so deeply

was she sunk in the vision of the past, she stared bewildered at the

young man in khaki, forgetting where she was and how she had come there.

Then a jostling, irrelevant crowd of recent memories pressed

forward:—“They will be glad to see my darling”; the grey Channel; the

faces like earthenware jugs. And, even before she had identified him as

monsieur Giles, a suffocating relief rose in her at the sight of him,

while, strangely, one more memory seemed, on the threshold of the new

life, to offer itself with a special significance, a special

interpretation of what she was to find;—the memory of Maman, herself,

and Captain Owen standing together in the Place de la Concorde and of

Maman’s voice saying to him, as they looked at the spot where the

guillotine had been, at Strasbourg, still in her crêpe, and up the

Champs Élysées, while splendid clouds sailed in the blue above

them:—“We are not like you, _mon ami_. Tocsins, tumbrils, trumpets are

in our blood;—Saint Bartholomew; the Revolution; Napoleon. Your history

knows no rivers of blood and no arcs of triumph.”

It was monsieur Giles, of course, and he was like Captain Owen, only _en

laid_. He was tall and young and grave with round, solemn eyes, staring

at her, and a big mouth. And he was very good; she saw that at once; and

then she saw that he was deeply troubled. “I’m so horribly sorry,” was

what he said. But it was more than embarrassment at the miscarriage of

their meeting and dismay at her plight, though the echo of her own

distressful state came to her from his face. She, who from the earliest

age seemed to have been fashioned by life to read the signs of

discomfort and restraint in the faces of those about her, knew now

unerringly that this good young man, who had no tocsins or tumbrils or

trumpets in his blood, was deeply troubled at seeing her. “I’m so

horribly sorry,” he repeated, and he seized her dressing-case, Maman’s

old discarded one with the tarnished monogram “H. de M.,” from which the

crest had fallen away. “You’ve been here for hours,” he said. “Your

mother’s letter did not give the day. Her wire only came this afternoon,

late. We are a good way from London and trains are bad.” He was not

trying to throw the blame on anybody. His voice accepted it all for

himself; but she knew that the mistake had been Maman’s, Maman so

forceful, so practical, yet so careless, too. Maman had taken it for

granted that they lived quite near London; she had taken it for granted

that the wire would arrive in good time.

“Have you had anything to eat?” monsieur Giles almost shouted at her.

“Where’s your box? Is this all? I’m so horribly sorry.”

“Yes, this is all. It has not been so long, really. I have not eaten. I

was afraid to go to the restaurant lest I should miss you.”

Her English was so good that she saw him at once a little reassured. He

had shouted like that partly from embarrassment and partly because he

thought she might only understand if he talked loud. His face, as he

seized her box in his other hand, echoed her smile as it had echoed her

distress. It was a kind face. It echoed people’s feelings easily.

“Let me take the bag; you cannot carry all,” said Alix.

But he shoved himself sideways through the door and then held it open

while she passed out, commenting as he did so, “But, I say, you’re not a

child!”

“A year makes a great difference,” said Alix. “And I was not really so

young; already fifteen, when Captain Owen first saw me, last October, in

Cannes.”

Monsieur Giles said nothing to this, and she wondered what Captain Owen

had written of her and Maman after that first meeting.

Now they were sitting opposite each other at a little table that seemed

to have a great many cruets and salt-cellars upon it. It was a very

bright and very ugly room, and through the doors, opening and shutting

incessantly, came the muffled roar of incoming trains; but after the

waiting-room it was homelike. She was safe with monsieur Giles. He was a

person who made you feel safe. Soup was put before them, all substance

and no savour, but she ate it eagerly, and said that, yes, please, she

would like fish.

“And then the beef,” said Giles to the waiter, who had a pallid face and

looked, Alix thought, detached and meditative as he was, like a

_littérateur_.

“I don’t advise the beef, Sir,” he said in a low, impassive voice. “It’s

specially tough to-day, Sir. You’d do better with the mutton.”

“Mutton, then, by all means!” said Giles, laughing. “Rather nice, that,

what?” he asked, smiling at Alix across the table when the waiter was

gone.

He showed beautiful white teeth when he smiled. They were his only

beauty; though she liked his golden-green eyes, fig-coloured. His face

was vehement, almost violent in structure with a prominent nose and so

high a top to his head that it seemed to be boiling over. Though he

looked so kind, he looked also as if he could get angry rather easily,

with a steady, reasonable anger, and the more she observed him the less

she found him like his brother. Captain Owen’s lips, though broad, had

been delicately curved, and his nut-shaped eyes had always seemed to

smile a little lazily. Sweetness rather than strength had been in his

face and an air of taking everything lightly. She had always felt of him

that he would fight just as if he were playing tennis; whereas when

Giles fought, she felt sure, he would clench his teeth and look fierce

and sick. And though he was younger than Captain Owen, he was far more

worn, strangely worn for one so young; and he was not at all _homme du

monde_.

Captain Owen had always struck them as _homme du monde_. But even Maman

could not have been sure about that, since she had so emphatically

impressed upon Alix that she was to define for her with exactitude the

social status of the Bradleys. Maman was sure that they were not

_noblesse_; but Alix was to tell her whether they were _petite noblesse_

or _haute bourgeoisie_, or, _tout simplement, commerçants_.

“Not that, I think,” said Maman thoughtfully; “but with another race it

is difficult to tell.”

“And since Captain Owen was so much our friend, what interest can it

have for us?” Alix had inquired, with the dryness she could sometimes

show towards Maman.

Maman had replied that it made no difference at all as far as an

individual, at large, as it were, unattached and irresponsible in a

foreign country, was concerned; but that it did make a difference, all

the difference, when it came to the family itself and its _milieu_. “At

all events, they are rich, I am sure of that,” said Maman; but Alix, as

she ate her fish and looked across at monsieur Giles, was not so sure.

He was rather shabby; even for an old uniform.

“You know,” he said, “I’m not going to take you to Sussex to-night. It’s

too late and you’re too tired. Don’t try to eat that nasty sauce; scrape

it off and leave it. I apologize for our sauces, Mademoiselle.—I’m

going to take you to my aunt’s. She’ll be able to put us up and I’ll

telephone to her now. Don’t run away in disgust with us and our sauces,

while I’m gone.”

There was no danger of that. Even when he was not there, Alix felt

herself safe in the hands of monsieur Giles, and the waiter when he

brought the mutton helped her very considerately, as though he

recognized her as young and tired and a foreigner, and placed before

her, almost with a paternal air, a dish half of which was devoted to

_pommes de terre à l’eau_ and half to a slab of dark green cabbage

strangely struck into squares.

“I’ve wired to Mummy, too,” said Giles, when he came back, “and told her

we’ll turn up to-morrow morning; so that’s all right.” And now he asked

her questions. What did she read? Did she care for pictures and music?

How had she learned to speak such admirable English?

Alix told him that she and Maman had often spoken English together and

that she had had English governesses. “I always liked your books, too.

That made it easier. ‘Alice’ and the rabbit and ‘Pride and Prejudice’

and ‘Dombey and Son.’ Have you read those?”

He said he had. “There are no books in France for girls to read as far

as I can make out,” he added; and Alix, suspecting a hint of detraction,

replied: “Our _chefs d’œuvre_ are for later in life. Perhaps great books

cannot be written for girls.”

“I question that!” said Giles, smiling at her. “Great books should be

written for everybody.”

“We can read Racine and Corneille and Lamartine,” said Alix.

“And Bossuet,” said Giles, grinning, “and ‘Les Pensées de Pascal.’

Awfully jolly, isn’t it! Unfortunate child;—or, rather, fortunate,

since you _can_ read us.”

Alix reflected, a little vexed.

“Here’s another kind of sauce,” said Giles, as a portion of apricot tart

was placed before each of them surrounded by a yellow glutinous

substance. “I’ll grant you your cooking if you’ll grant me the best

books for everybody.—Anyhow, I see you’re too tired to argue. We’ll

fight it out some other time.”

“But how did you come to appreciate our cooking so well?” Alix asked.

“It is made with flour, this sauce, not properly cooked;—that is the

trouble.”

“The trouble is that it’s the same sauce as the one that went with the

fish, only coloured to look different.—I travelled in France when I was

a boy, you see. And I’m just back from nine months there. I was in the

East before that, for the first years of the war.”

“In France for nine months? Why did you not come to see us?” Alix asked.

She asked it without stopping to think, for it was so strange that they

should not have seen Captain Owen’s brother.

“I was at the front, and wanted all my leaves at home,” said Giles, and

he smiled very brightly at her. He did not look at all embarrassed now;

yet she had a surmise. He stopped himself from showing embarrassment.

Surely he could have come? Had he not wanted to come? And he was going

on talking, while he paid the bill, as if he felt she might be asking

herself that question: “My aunt lives in a part of London called

Chelsea. At the time ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was written, it was all

gardens there; it’s mostly flats now. We’ve changed very much, in all

sorts of ways from the England of ‘Pride and Prejudice’; just as you

have from the France of Lamartine.”

Everything was dimmed with fog as they drove through the streets and she

was suddenly very sleepy, yet she kept on thinking, as she looked out,

of those nine months that monsieur Giles had been in France. He must

have been there, then, when Captain Owen was killed. How strange that he

had never come, and that Captain Owen had never spoken of him. She was

too sleepy, however, to think of it very carefully and, when they

stopped at the brightly lighted door of a large building, she stumbled

in alighting so that Giles, with a steadying “Hello, hello,” put a hand

under her elbow and guided her into a lift; and, still so sustained, she

was presented a moment later to a stout, rosy lady with _pince-nez_ and

smooth grey hair who herself opened the door of a white and green

_appartement_ and said: “Poor child, she must be put to bed at once.”

From Giles she passed to Aunt Bella, who smelt of toilet vinegar and had

a seal ring on her small glazed-looking hand.

After that Alix was only drowsily aware of a little pink bedroom where a

row of pink, blue and green water-colours framed in gilt hung upon the

walls. Her head sank into a pillow and all the troubled thoughts into

sleep; but, just before she was quite oblivious, a little tap came to

the door; it opened softly and a tall head, silhouetted on the lighted

hall, looked in, and Giles said, “Good-night, Alix.”

It was treating her as a child and it made her feel very safe.

CHAPTER III

For many hours the little French girl slept on dreamlessly, and when she

woke it was as if an abyss of space and time lay between her and

yesterday morning. As she gazed up at the dim ceiling, only the most

recent memories wove themselves softly into her returning sense of

identity: the yellow sauce that Giles had told her to scrape off; his

faded khaki necktie; Aunt Bella’s small, glazed hands. Kindness,

security, lay behind these appearances, and an apprehension of pain

seemed at first substanceless and irrational. Then, with a gathering

effort, it shaped itself: France; Maman; what was she doing and was she

happy?—She had not been really happy yesterday morning. Why had

monsieur Giles been so troubled when they met? And why had he never come

to see them in all the nine months he had been in France?

There was a tap at the door and an elderly maid came in, neatly capped,

bearing a brass hot-water-can, which she stood in the basin. Then she

drew the curtains and turned up the electric light and placed by the

bedside a very amusing little tea-set on a tray. It was Alix’s

initiation into early-morning tea, and for a moment, as she gazed at it,

she feared it was to be all her breakfast until the maid, withdrawing,

said, very distinctly, as though she might be deaf: “Breakfast at nine,

Miss; and the bathroom is opposite.”

That was all right, then. Alix lifted the lid of the little pot and

sniffed at the tea and decided that the afternoon was the only time at

which she felt drawn to it. And as for the two slices of bread and

butter, they were very thin, but she would rather save her appetite.

Meanwhile there was a real _brouillard de Londres_ pressing close

against the window, so close that one could see nothing—Alix had jumped

up to look—except the spectral top of a tree below the window and,

below the tree, a blurred street-lamp. It was interesting, exciting, to

get up like this as if it were after dinner instead of before breakfast,

for there were lights in the hall and bathroom and one’s morning face

had such a curious look as one combed one’s hair under an electric bulb.

She forgot her waking apprehensions as she dressed, and when she went

into the dining-room and found Giles there, the day seemed to have

started really well.

Giles was reading a newspaper, standing under the light. The room was

small and he looked very large in it; so did a pink, frilled ham on the

sideboard and an engraving hanging over the mantelpiece of an old, erect

gentleman, _en favoris_, his hands on a book and with a very high

collar. When Aunt Bella came in a moment later, they all seemed quite

crowded between the fog outside and the steam from the shining kettle on

the table, and it was rather, Alix thought, as though they were floating

in a little boat on a misty sea or suspended—this was a more exciting

comparison—high in the air in an aeroplane.

She was seated opposite the mantelpiece, Giles under it, and, following

her eyes, Aunt Bella said: “That is our great Mr. Gladstone, Alix.

You’ve heard of Mr. Gladstone.”

Alix had to confess that she had not.

“Well, you’ll have heard of George Washington, then,” said Aunt Bella.

“There he is, behind you.” And Alix turned round to look up at the

austere face in powdered hair.

“He was an American, was he not, and your enemy?” she inquired.

“He was the enemy of one of our foolish kings,” said Aunt Bella, “but an

Englishman, and one we are all proud of. And that’s Cobden.” She

completed her educational round with the third large engraving that hung

near the window.

“And now, perhaps,” said Giles, “you’ll like to hear what they all did

and why Aunt Bella has them hanging here. By the time you do that you’ll

have quite a good idea of modern English history.”

Alix for a moment was afraid that Aunt Bella might really be going to

instruct her, and she had not the least wish to know anything about any

of the respectable gentlemen who presided over the breakfast-table.

But Giles was going on, with his bantering smile. “If you go to Aunt

Bella, you’ll get a one-sided impression, perhaps. She’s a great

Liberal. We are all Liberals in my family. What you’d call

Republicans.—Aunt Bella, you’re not asking this helpless French child

to drink tea for her breakfast!”

“Doesn’t she have tea?” Aunt Bella asked, and though Alix insisted that

she did not mind it at all, there was much concerned conversation, and

the elderly maid was summoned and told to ask cook to make some cocoa

for the young lady.

“You hate tea, I suppose,” said Giles, and Alix replied that she liked

it very much at five o’clock, and Giles went on: “Whereas Aunt Bella

likes it at all hours of the day and night; and Indian tea, I’m grieved

to say; it’s the only rift within our lute, Aunt Bella’s Indian

tea;—since we do agree about Gladstone. Now you’re a Royalist, I

suppose, Alix?”

“But surely no rational person in France is a Royalist any longer,” said

Aunt Bella.

“Grand-père did not love the Republic,” said Alix, “but Maman admires

Napoleon and the Revolution.”

“I sometimes think we shall get both a revolution and a Napoleon in this

country,” said Aunt Bella, “at the rate things seem to be going.”

“There’ll never be a revolution in England,” said Giles. “People who

drink Indian tea could never make a revolution, could they, Alix?”

“I do not think so,” Alix smiled. “Nor in a country with such fogs.”

“That’s a good idea! Eh, Aunt Bella? People must see each other clearly

in order to hate each other sufficiently.—What?”

“That is just it,” Alix nodded, laughing. “And you are all so kind.

Kinder, I am sure, than we are.”

She and Giles understood each other. He treated her like a child, yet

they understood each other, really, better than he and Aunt Bella, for

she looked a little cautious when Giles embarked on his sallies, as if

she did not quite know in what admission he might not involve her unless

she were careful. She took things _au pied de la lettre_, Aunt Bella,

as, after all, an elderly lady would do who sat down to breakfast every

morning with such cold comfort on her walls as Messieurs Gladstone,

Cobden, and Washington. A row of smiling Watteau engravings hung round

Maman’s little dining-room in the rue de Penthièvre. Alix did not think

that Gladstone, Cobden, or Washington would look with an eye of approval

at _Le Départ pour Cythère_ or the _Assemblée Galante_. Though

Washington might. She liked him far the best of the three.

“And does your grandfather really expect to get the Bourbons back?” Aunt

Bella inquired. “You are a Roman, I suppose, my dear child.”

“A Roman?” Alix, for all her English, was perplexed. “I have no Italian

blood.”

“She means your church,” said Giles. “And Catholics, in France, do

really all want back a king, don’t they?”

“I am a Catholic,” said Alix, “and so, of course, was Grand-père, and he

certainly did not like the Republic. We had a very unscrupulous,

intriguing mayor at Montarel and perhaps that was one reason. But I do

not think that Grand-père expected anything any more or thought at all

about kings.”

“A very strange people, the French,” Aunt Bella remarked, as if the fact

were so patent that one of them, being present, could not object to its

statement. “A very strange people, indeed. And where do you say your

grandfather lives, my dear?”

“He is dead,” said Alix. “It was at Montarel he lived; near the Alps.”

“You may have noticed the water-colours of Avignon that I did some years

ago, hanging in your bedroom,” said Aunt Bella. “Parts of France are

very picturesque. But I prefer our scenery.”

“And now,” said Giles, looking at his watch, “we must be thinking about

our train. Are you packed up, Alix?”

“Tell your mother,” said Aunt Bella, “that I expect her on Thursday for

the two committees. She’ll spend the night, of course.” And when Alix’s

box and bag had been brought and a taxi summoned, Aunt Bella said to her

very kindly, as they stood for farewells in the hall: “You must come

again and see me, my dear, when you are in London. I could take you to

the National Gallery and Westminster Abbey, and, if you care about

Social Work, you might be interested in my Infant Welfare Centre and

Working Girls’ Gymnasium.”

“Is she an official, your aunt?” Alix inquired as she and Giles drove

off to the station.

“An unofficial official,” Giles explained. “She runs more things than

most officials. She sits on councils and governs hospitals and makes

speeches. There can’t be a busier woman in London and she’s a splendid

old girl;—though I do enjoy pulling her leg.” And then, since Alix was

startled by this expression, also new to her, he had again to explain.

CHAPTER IV

The third-class carriage was not foul and wooden as it would have been

in France, and they had it to themselves; but the cushions smelt of fog,

and Alix thought she had never seen anything so ugly as the view from

the window. It had been too dark to see the suburbs of London the night

before, on the way up from Newhaven; but they lay all mean and low and

toad-coloured this morning, wet under the lifted fog, and for as far as

the eye could follow there was nothing to be seen but squatting roofs

and gaunt factory chimneys.

“Bad, isn’t it?” said Giles. He sat opposite her, looking out with his

face so young and so worn. She liked him so much and felt so safe with

him, and yet it frightened her a little to look at him, just—strange

association—as it had frightened her to look at Grand-père. Only Giles

was kinder, far, than Grand-père. “But worse, do you think,” he went on,

“than the suburbs of Paris?”

Alix did not quite like to say how much worse she thought it; it did not

seem polite. “There, at least, one has the sky to look at,” she

suggested. “It is happier, I think.”

“We’re not always in a fog, you know,” said Giles. “And Aunt Bella is

very keen on Smoke Abatement. Perhaps we’ll look happier some day.”

“I am very glad your family does not live in London,” said Alix. She

felt more shy of Giles this morning, shut up with him in the intimacy of

the chill, smoky carriage, than she had last night in the station

dining-room. And it was as if she felt him more shy, too. They were

making talk a little.

“Wouldn’t you have come, if we’d lived in London?” he inquired.

“Maman would have sent me just the same, I think,” said Alix. “She

wanted me to know England. And your family, specially, of course.

Captain Owen always said I must know his family.”

“Oh, yes. Of course,” said Giles. He got up then and looked at the heat

regulator and said it was cold, did she mind? There seemed no heat. Then

he sat down again and fell into a silence, his arms folded, his long

legs stretched as best they could, before him, and they both, again,

looked out of the window.

On it went, the dreadful city; but at last furtive squares and triangles

of green were stealing into it and sparsely placed trees edged streets

that adventured forth, at random, it seemed, to end, almost with a stare

of forlorn astonishment, in fields ravaged of every trace of beauty. But

the green spread and widened like a kindly tide, and though the brick

and slate was encrusted at intervals, like an eruption, upon the land,

there were copses and rises of meditative meadow and the white sky was

melting here and there to a timid blue above little hamlets that seemed

to have a heart and to be breathing with a life of their own. Beside a

brook a girl was strolling with scarf and stick, two joyous dogs racing

ahead of her; a cock-pheasant ran, startled, through a wood sprinkled

with gold and russet, and presently there was a deeper echo of the blue

overhead in the blue of quiet hills on the horizon.

“This is better, isn’t it?” said Giles, bringing his eyes to her at

last. “Don’t you call this pretty?”

“Very pretty,” said Alix. And it was pretty, though to her eyes it was

also insignificant and confused, its lack of design or purpose teasing

her mind with its contradiction of the instinct for order and

shapeliness that dwelt there. “Is it because of the season and your

mistiness that everything seems very near one? The horizon is so near,

and even the sky comes quite close down.”

“Like nice, kind arms, I always think,” said Giles. “No, even in the

Lake Country, even in Scotland, we don’t get your splendid distances; or

very rarely.”

“But it is very pretty,” Alix repeated. “I like the woods. Did you see

the girl and the dogs a little while ago? I imagine that your sisters

look like that.”

“Our dogs look like that. Ruth and Rosemary aren’t quite so grown up. We

have three dogs. Are you fond of them?”

“Oh, very fond; though I have never had a dog of my own. Maman thinks

them too much trouble for a little _appartement_ in Paris. But I had a

cat at Montarel. A yellow cat with blue eyes. Have you ever seen one

like that? He was so affectionate and intelligent and remembered me

perfectly from year to year. He used to put his paws on my breast and

rub against my face. The thought of seeing him again made it easier to

bear leaving Maman when my half-year at Montarel came round.”

“Your half-year at Montarel?” Giles asked the question, but she saw that

it was after a hesitation. She wondered how much Captain Owen had told

them. She felt suddenly that she wanted to tell Giles everything there

was to tell.

“I spent half the year with Grand-père at Montarel and half with Maman

in Paris. Did you not know?” she said, looking him in the eyes. “My

father and mother were parted. They were divorced. But it could not have

been more Maman’s error since the judge allowed her to have me for half

the time. It is arranged like that, you know, as fairer. And since my

father died when I was hardly more than a baby, it was Grand-père who

had me for that side of the family.—I tell it to you as I imagine it to

have been, for Maman has never spoken to me of it.”

Giles was making it easy. He was looking at her with no sign of

discomfort, looking, indeed, as if he knew it already. “Oh, yes,” he

said. And then he added: “And when your grandfather died? Was there no

one else on his side of the family? Don’t you go to Montarel any more?”

“No one at all,” said Alix, shaking her head. “I am the last of the

Mouverays. That was why the château was sold and why Maman has me now

entirely. But though it was sad to lose my grandfather, I love my mother

best of course.”

“I hope you won’t miss her too much,” said Giles after a moment and in a

kind voice. “We’ll try to give you a happy life, you know.”

“I am sure you will. But one must always miss one’s mother and one’s

country. And then I always wonder if she is happy. Though I am only a

child, she depends on me.”

“You have the comfort of knowing that Paris is only a few hours away,”

said Giles, smiling.

“Ah, but Cannes isn’t. She is to be at Cannes this winter.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. She spends the winters at Cannes.”

“She enjoys her life there. She plays tennis beautifully and has so many

friends, as perhaps Captain Owen told you. But I know that she misses

me. I have always been with her there before. I was with her, you know,

when Captain Owen met us.”

“I should rather say I did know,” said Giles. “We heard all about your

kindness to him, you may be sure. You may be sure we are a very grateful

family.” Giles spoke with heartiness, and though she felt something a

little forced in it there was nothing forced in his evident kindness

towards herself. They were talking happily. As they had talked last

night at dinner.

“And you may be sure we heard all about you,” said Alix, smiling across

at him. “All about Ruth and Rosemary and Francis and Jack. What a large

family you are. It must be very happy being so many.”

“I say!” laughed Giles, “you have a good memory! To get us in our order,

too.”

“But how could I forget when he told us so much! We saw all your

photographs so often. Only one does not get so clear an idea from

photographs. I would not have known you from yours. And there was

Toppie. After your mother, he talked most of all about Toppie. I shall

see her, too, shall I not?”

It was as if she had struck him. The violent red that mounted to his

face was echoed in Alix’s cheeks. It was as if, with her innocent words,

she had struck him, and in the silence that followed them, while he

gazed at her, and she, helplessly, gazed back, she saw that what had

underlain the confusion of yesterday had simply been suffering. She had

laid it bare. She was looking at it now.

He tried to master it; to conceal it; in a moment he stammered: “Oh, he

talked most about Toppie, did he?”

“Was she not his betrothed?” asked Alix in a feeble voice. She felt

exhausted. He had struck her, too.

“Of course she was,” said Giles, and his eyes now lifted from her face

and fixed themselves over her head on Maman’s dressing-case.

“And—is she not still living?”

“Toppie? Living?” His eyes came back to her. “I should rather say so.

You see,” he went on at once, though Alix could not see the relevance,

“she was so horribly cut up by his death.”

“Of course,” Alix murmured. “I am so sorry. I should not have spoken of

him at all, when you have lost him. I did not mean to be stupid;

unfeeling.”

“But, good Heavens! you’re not stupid! Not a bit unfeeling!” cried

Giles, and seeing her distress, his eyes actually filled with tears.

“It’s not Owen at all. We often speak of him. It’s Toppie. And it’s I

who am such a dunderhead. You see, she’s all that’s left of him. I mean,

all that’s loveliest; most sacred. She cared for him so much. She’s like

something in a shrine, to us all.”

“Yes. Yes. I see. I understand,” said Alix; though, still, she could not

see. “I spoke lightly. I do not forgive myself.”

“But it’s nothing to do with you,” Giles almost shouted as he had

shouted at her last night. “I always get like that when she’s talked

about, with him. You poor, dear child, it’s nothing on earth to do with

you. It’s absolutely my stupidity,” Giles assured her, their suffusion

giving his eyes a strange heaviness.

It must be left at that. There was nothing for her to say. He was

suffering and he tried to conceal from her how much; but she had seen it

too plainly. All unwittingly she had blundered, blundered horribly, in

speaking of Captain Owen and his betrothed, and a sense of depression,

dark, like the London fog, penetrating and bitter like the London smoke,

settled upon her.

“Here’s the station! There’s Mummy!” cried Giles. They had sat silent,

and now he sprang up as if with great gaiety. He was doing his best. He

was trying to make her forget; it was a little stupid of him if he

thought he could succeed, Alix felt; but she summoned a responsive smile

with which to greet Giles’s mother.

She recognized her at once as the train slid into the little station.

She stood there, tall and slender, wistful and intent, with her spare

grey skirt and black hat and scarf, and hair straying about her ears, as

shy, as gentle as a girl. In her photograph, seen at Cannes, it had

seemed incredible that she should be Captain Owen’s mother, and though

her face showed as faded and worn in the morning light, it was even more

incredibly young. She must be fifty, yet Maman, unflawed and radiant in

her thirty-seven summers, had a greater maturity of aspect. “She is so

innocent,” thought Alix; not clearly seeing, yet deeply feeling the

meaning of the word.

She was walking beside the train, smiling up at them, her hand laid on

the window of their carriage, and Giles did not wait for it to stop

before he sprang out beside her and kissed her, doffing his cap. There

was no confusion, no trouble, in the eyes of Giles’s mother; they had

nothing to hide; this was the next thought that came to Alix; they were

only shy and sweet and sad. She did not speak at first. She took Alix by

the hand and stood so holding her while Giles got out the dressing-case,

and then led her along beside them, glancing down at her as they went;

and Alix saw that with all the memories her own presence recalled, words

were too difficult.

Giles was telling of the Victoria disaster. “I missed that first train,

Mummy. I didn’t get to Victoria till nearly two hours after hers had

come in. But she’s forgiven us. She’s a most forgiving disposition,”

said Giles, “I’ve discovered that. She won’t resent any of the wrongs we

put upon her.”

“Two hours! How dreadful! Oh, how dreadful!” Mrs. Bradley was

exclaiming, “What must you have thought of us, Alix!”

“But it wasn’t your wrong, at all,” said Alix; “it was Maman’s mistake.

I think telegrams take very long now from France to England.”

“There always _are_ mistakes about meetings,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“Dreadful things always _do_ seem to happen.—Shall I drive, Giles,

dear? or sit behind with Alix so that we can talk? That will be best, I

think.”

They drove over commons and along woodland roads. The air was white and

chill yet dimly transfused with sunlight, and there was a smell of wet

pine-trees and wet withered heather. Alix’s spirits lifted a little with

the scent and swiftness, and they lifted still further, seeming, like

the sky, to show a rift of blue, when in her gentle, slightly hoarse

voice, Mrs. Bradley said: “Is your mother well, dear? How did you leave

her?” This was the first inquiry about Maman she had heard, the first

interest she had seen displayed. Giles, she remembered it now, had

volunteered not a remark or question.

“She wrote so kindly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “She understood, I know, how

much we hoped to see you here, how much pleasure it would give us. I

wish she could have come, too. Owen so often wrote about you both, from

Cannes. He said you made him think of Jeanne d’Arc, and your mother of

Madame Récamier.—I’m glad you still do your hair like that,” said Mrs.

Bradley, smiling shyly, and Alix saw that she had forgotten nothing and

that all the links that Giles had ignored were cherished by her.

There were links, however, that she would not see. That must be, Alix

reflected, what she had felt as her innocence. The pleasure that her

coming might give to the Bradleys had never been part of Maman’s motive.

She had taken it for granted, but it had not counted. Maman had sent her

because she had conceived of the winter in England as an advantage for

her child and because—Alix saw further into these motives than Maman

intended her to do—it had not been convenient to take her to Cannes.

But there were few of Maman’s motives, Alix felt, as she listened to the

gentle, hesitating voice, that Mrs. Bradley would divine. Perhaps it was

that that made Maman seem so much the older. Yet Maman, too, might have

blindnesses. She would have been blind, for instance, in saying of Mrs.

Bradley—and Alix could hear her saying it: “_Un peu bê-bête, n’est-ce

pas, ma chérie?_” Mrs. Bradley was simple, very simple; but she was not

_bête_. Alix felt that she understood Mrs. Bradley as Maman would not

understand her, and it was perhaps because of this that Mrs. Bradley

spoke presently about her dead son, for to any one who did not

understand her she could not have spoken. She would never be _bête_

about things like that. She was longing to speak about him, Alix saw; to

ask questions, to reënforce her store of precious memories by such

fragments as the little French girl could offer her. Alix told her of

their walks above the sea at Cannes, of the concerts he had so loved,

and of how much he had had to tell and teach them of flowers and birds.

“Oh, yes, the birds; he loved them,” said Mrs. Bradley, turning away her

eyes that were full of tears. She was like this November day, with its

suffused sunlight, and fresh, sad fragrance; there were no tocsins or

trumpets in her blood, either; yet all the same she knew what suffering

was as well as Maman. The hoarseness of her voice had come, perhaps, in

part from crying; something scared, that one caught in her glance at

moments, had not been there, Alix felt sure, before the war; before the

news of her son’s death had been brought to her. And as Alix thought of

Captain Owen’s death and of what his mother must have felt, there rose

in her memory a picture of a Spring morning in Paris, the wild, wet day,

with shafts of sunlight slanting through the rain and striking great

spaces on the pavements to azure. She had been standing at the window of

their salon, looking at the rain and sunlight, and at the flower-woman

on the corner opposite, her basket heaped with pink and white tulips,

and she had heard Maman, suddenly, behind her, saying, as if she had

forgotten that Alix was there: “_Dieu!—Dieu!—Dieu!_” And, looking

round she had seen her with the letter in her lap and had read the

catastrophe in her white face and horror-filled eyes. So many of their

friends had fallen in the war, but for none of them had Maman mourned as

she had for Captain Owen.

The car turned, now, with careful swiftness, into an entrance gate which

opened against a well-clipped hedge. A curve among the trees brought

them to the front of a large house, red brick below, gables above, with

beams and plaster. A great many gables, a great many creepers, large

windows open to the air. A kind, capacious house, promising comfort; but

how ugly, thought Alix, as they alighted; “_Combien peu intéressante._”

It was difficult to believe that from its cosy portals Captain Owen and

Giles had gone forth to tragedy.

Two girls, at the sound of the car, had burst out upon the steps, and

three dogs; an Irish terrier, a fox terrier, and a West Highland

terrier;—“I like him best”—thought Alix of the last;—and they bounded

in the air while the girls shouted:

“I say, Giles, you did serve us a turn last night! Your wire never got

here until this morning! We sat up till eleven!”

They wore knitted jumpers and had corn-coloured hair and pink faces.

They were delighted to see their brother back after his misadventures;

the dogs were delighted to see him; only the dogs did not shout, which

was an advantage. Alix had never heard such a noise.

“And here is Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, who had stopped to take the

appealing fox terrier in her arms; the fox terrier was a lady, no longer

young, and the uproar affected her too much; Mrs. Bradley soothed and

reassured her.

Ruth and Rosemary, as though aware for the first time of Alix’s

presence, turned their attention to her and cried “Hello” heartily,

while they shook her by the hand. They were like Aunt Bella in their

rosiness, robustness, their air of doing things all the time with

absorption and energy; and like Aunt Bella and the house they were “_peu

intéressantes_.”

“Did you have a good crossing? Are you a good sailor?” asked Rosemary;

while Ruth said: “Let me carry up her bag.—Do you play

hockey?—_Jouissez-vous le hockey?_”

“She speaks English better than you do,” said Giles, pulling his

sister’s rope of hair; “and your French is a disgrace to your family.”

They all went into a hall that had wide windows in unexpected places and

an important oak staircase winding up from it, also in an unexpected

place. Alix was dimly aware of earnest, cheerful attempts at originality

in its design; but the originality did not go beyond the windows and

staircases, the high wainscotting and oaken pillars. Everything else,

from the brasses of the big chimney-place to the florid crétonnes on the

window-seats, followed a bright household formula. The brightness would

have been a little oppressive had it not lapsed to a benign shabbiness,

and the two good-tempered maids who followed with Alix’s box belonged to

it all, ornamental in their crisp pink print dresses, yet a little

dishevelled; their caps perched far back on large protuberances of hair

and fashionable whiskers of curl coming forward on their cheeks.

Alix felt all sorts of things about the hall and about the crétonnes and

about the maids as Ruth and Rosemary and the dogs hustled her along.

What it amounted to she did not clearly know, except that Giles did not

really go with the hall, while his sisters did, and that Mrs. Bradley

did not like the caps and the whiskers, but that she would always

sacrifice her own tastes—hardly aware that she had them—to other

people’s cheerfulness.

“Oh, well, of course you play tennis,” Ruth was saying. “Everybody plays

tennis. But you must learn hockey at once. It’s the great game at our

school and you’re nowhere unless you play it.—Down Bobby, down! He’s

made friends with you already.—The mud will come off all right.—One

can’t mind mud if one has dogs, can one? Down, you silly duffer!”

“Never mind. Let him jump. I am fond of dogs,” said Alix, patting the

ardent head of the Irish terrier. “What is the name of the little, low,

white one? He is quieter, but I think he likes me too.”

“His name is Jock, and Mummy’s fox terrier is Amy. Oh, they’ll all like

you, all right; they’re as friendly as possible—though Amy can be a bit

peevish at moments; Mummy spoils her.—Here’s your room,” said Rosemary,

ushering her in. “It’s a jolly room, isn’t it? Mummy thought you’d like

the one with the view best. The other spare-room looks over the

kitchen-garden. It’s a jolly view, isn’t it? One doesn’t often get a

view like that. Put the box here, Edie.—Oh, the bathroom is on the

landing, that door, you see. We have our baths in the morning and the

water doesn’t run very hot for more than two. So will you have yours at

night? Mummy does. Ruth and I like it best in the morning, and Giles

doesn’t mind if his is cold.—French people don’t care about baths,

anyway, do they?—Lunch will be ready in twenty minutes. Can you find

your way down?” Rosemary added rapidly, her eye on the staircase where

Giles was descending, “I want to speak to Giles.”

“No, you don’t! It’s my place to tell him first!” screamed Ruth.

“It’s about the football, Giles!”

“Oh, shut up!” shouted Giles affectionately. “What a frightful row

you’re making!”

And Alix at last heard them all hurtling down the stairs together.

Jock, who was old and a little melancholy, remained with her, seating

himself on the hearth rug and surveying her with kindly but disenchanted

eyes.

“_Dieu! Quel bruit!_” Alix addressed him. She felt that Jock agreed with

her about the noise and in finding Ruth and Rosemary, as well as Bobby,

too turbulent. She listened at the door to be sure that they were safely

gone. Then she tiptoed softly down and peeped in at the bathroom. It was

large and untidy. She, too, preferred her bath hot and in the morning.

Ruth and Rosemary were kind, but your preferences would never stand in

the way of theirs. No, never would she find them interesting. But they

did not ask it of you, Alix reflected, going back to her room. All they

asked of you was to let them bathe at the time that best pleased them,

play hockey with them, and admire their view. She went to look at the

view. A pleasant, heathery common dipping at its further edge to a

birch-wood. That was all. And another gabled roof rose among pines on a

near hillside. All comfort; no beauty, thought Alix, and the sky came so

closely down that it made her feel suffocated. And as she leaned looking

out she thought of the roll of the mighty Juras, and the plain, and the

river shining across it. How tame this was, a piping, perching little

bird beside an eagle of great flights and soarings. Why had Maman sent

her here? She could never be happy; never, never, under this low sky,

among these noisy girls. And wave after wave there mounted in her an

old, well-remembered homesickness for Maman and a new homesickness for

France.

CHAPTER V

She was not to escape Ruth and Rosemary for long. Already, at lunch, she

felt that Giles, talking gravely with his mother of treaties and leagues

and such dull matters, seemed to have relegated her to their category.

Over the dining-room mantelpiece hung a portrait of the late Mr.

Bradley; she knew it must be he from his likeness to Aunt Bella and Ruth

and Rosemary, and Alix felt sure, as she looked up at his pink and

yellow, his tweeds and watch-chain and good, shrewd eyes, that Mrs.

Bradley’s sons must always have interested her more than their father.

But she would never have known this, just as she did not know, nor did

they, that she was fonder of her boys than of Ruth and Rosemary. “But I

believe that in this country everybody is fonder of sons,” thought Alix,

marvelling at the reappearance of the strange cabbage cut into squares

and recalling impressions of English literature where, despite romantic

surfaces, it was apparent to the discerning eye that men always counted

for more than women.

Mrs. Bradley carved. It was a well-roasted leg of mutton, that made Alix

think of the mutton in “Alice.” The potatoes, too, were roasted and the

_entremets_ a bread-and-butter pudding. Mr. Bradley had been nourished

on such meals. They would produce Mr. Bradleys.

“Now we will show you everything,” said Ruth when luncheon was over. The

implication seemed to be that a specially fortunate experience was in

store for her. A fond complacency breathed from both girls. “And it is

natural that one should love one’s home,” thought Alix, the tolerance of

her comprehension giving her childish face a maturity beyond its years.

So she was led from the lawn to the shrubberies; shown the summer-house

where in summer they had tea and the herbaceous border, neatly disposed

for its winter sleep. The kitchen-garden was displayed, and at its far

end they passed through a door to a little path, bordered by

gorse-bushes, that ran beneath the garden-wall and then turned aside

over the common. It was a sheltered, solitary little path, the branches

of the garden fruit-trees hanging over it, and Alix felt that it might

often be a refuge for her. It was a pretty path and had a character of

its own. To Ruth and Rosemary its meaning lay in leading somewhere else,

and they crossed the common and rambled in the birch-wood, inciting each

other to long jumps over a sluggish little stream, half ditch, half

brook, that flowed through it, and encouraging the dogs with loud cries

to chase the scurrying rabbits on the further hillside.

“There’s the jolliest walk along the top,” said Ruth, “among the

junipers. But perhaps you are tired. French girls aren’t much good at

walking, are they?”

“I walk a good deal in the country,” said Alix, “but I think I will

unpack my box now.”

“Edie will have unpacked it for you,” said Ruth, “so we’ll go on; only

say if you are tired. You wear sensible shoes, I must say. I thought all

French girls pinched their toes.”

So they continued to walk, talking as they went, asking her for none of

her information, only imparting theirs, as if it must, self-evidently,

have superior value. Alix heard them with interest when they told of

Giles and of his scholastic feats at Oxford, feats interrupted by his

departure for the war, but now to be resumed. Philosophy was Giles’s

special branch, and they told her that he was going to teach philosophy,

at Oxford probably, and write it some day.

“_Tiens!_” said Alix, relapsing, as was her wont when surprised, into

French. She knew nothing of philosophers and the word only conjured up a

picture of someone aged and bearded who drank hemlock.

“Yes,” said Ruth, accepting the ejaculation as a tribute, “he’ll be a

great man, all right, Giles.”

And Alix also learned that Ruth and Rosemary both intended following

professional careers and that their father had come from the north and

had built Heathside and that their mother was a Londoner and that her

father had been the editor of an important London paper. “What! Never

heard of ‘The Liberal’!” Ruth exclaimed. Ruth, as eldest, did most of

the talking, subjected to frequent interruptions from Rosemary. “I

should have thought even French people would have heard of ‘The

Liberal.’ Oh, yes, he was a great swell, our grandfather.”

Alix did not think she would have found him so. France, she saw, mainly

existed for Ruth and Rosemary as a place where one’s brothers had gone

to fight and one’s friends to nurse.

“And what is the pleasant house?” she inquired of them, when, after

their walk along the hilltop, they had crossed the wood and emerged

again upon the common.

It stood, with an air of serenity and detachment, half a mile away, a

tall house of pale, eighteenth-century brick with a white door and white

window-sills, a formal garden before it and a neat hedge dividing it

from the road. One felt that the woods had grown up around it and that

it preserved a tranquil personality of its own, unmoved by the haphazard

accretions of a century.

“Oh, that’s the Rectory; where Toppie lives,” said Ruth. “You can see

the church spire just above the trees to the right. Pleasant, do you

call it? I think it’s rather dismal; so bare and square. It needs lots

of creepers and shrubberies to make it cheerful; but old Mr. Westmacott

doesn’t like them.”

“Creepers would not be in the character of that house, I feel,” said

Alix; “and they would hide the pretty colour of the brick. There are a

few roses, too, are there not?”

“Yes; a few. Toppie would have her roses. I hate a house without

creepers.”

“Shall I soon see Toppie, do you think?”

“Oh, you’ll see her soon, all right,” said Ruth. “She’ll be coming in to

tea to-day, probably.”

“I know she’s coming,” said Rosemary. “She asked me yesterday if Alix

would be here, and when I told her we’d had the wire, she said she’d

come. I think she’s rather keen on seeing you, Alix. Owen wrote a lot

about you, you see.”

They spoke without any emotion of Toppie. They took her for granted. She

was not, to them, a shrine. But even before the scene in the train with

Giles, Alix had had a special feeling about Toppie herself, and as she

walked on with the chattering girls her mind went back to the day at

Cannes when Captain Owen had first showed her and Maman Toppie’s

photograph. He carried the little leather case in his breast-pocket, his

mother’s picture on one side and hers on the other, and Maman had said,

as she took the case from him and looked: “_Elle est tout-à-fait

ravissante._”

“You don’t see very much of her in that,” said Captain Owen, wagging his

foot a little, and Alix guessed that he was moved in speaking of his

_fiancée_. “But it does show something. Lovely the shape of her face,

isn’t it? She’s not exactly beautiful.”

“Oh! ‘exactly’! Who would care to be ‘exactly’ beautiful!” said Maman.

He had told them that Miss Westmacott—Toppie’s real name was Enid

Westmacott—had come with her father to live near them when she was only

fifteen. Mr. Westmacott was the Rector of their parish and he had to

explain to them—for Maman said that with all her English she could

never get it quite clear—what rectors were and how they came to have

daughters; and when Maman said, as though rectors must make up for

having daughters by having devout ones, “_Elle est très dévote?_”

Captain Owen, with his charming smile, rejoined, “Oh, much better than

that!”

Later on, when they were alone, Maman had remarked to her: “She is

pretty; but nothing more. _Elle est nulle, cette Toppie; très, très

nulle._” But Alix had not agreed. Often she did not agree with Maman.

The little photograph had not said much, but it had said something

definite. “She is like someone in a tower.” So she tried to fix her

feeling.

“Even in a tower one may oneself be insignificant,” said Maman, and to

this Alix had replied: “Not if one _is_ the tower oneself.”

Toppie was there when they got in. A fire had been lighted for tea in

the drawing-room, a long room with roses on the chairs and sofas and a

high wainscotting of dark woodwork, and above that blue paper with

old-fashioned crayon portraits and large photographs from famous

pictures. A tall grey figure stood at the further end, and Alix knew at

once that it was Toppie who turned her head to look at her like that.

She was helping Mrs. Bradley arrange flowers, Michaelmas daisies, oak

leaves, and sprays of golden larch. She held a large bronze vase and

wore a grey tweed skirt and a grey woollen jumper and grey shoes

strapping across the instep with a buckle. Her hair was as fair as

primroses and was ruffled up a little above the black ribbon that bound

it.

“This is Alix, Toppie, dear,” said Mrs. Bradley in a gentle voice, and

she came forward and passed her arm in Toppie’s as if she knew that it

must mean something very special to her to see the little French girl.

“I’m so glad,” said Toppie. She gazed at Alix for a long moment, as

though forgetting that she held the vase; then, looking round her, vague

in her absorption, she set it down on a table and held out her hand.

The water from the vase had spilled over it, and as it closed on Alix’s

it made her think of the hand of a dryad, a naiad, or some chill,

unearthly creature. “Yes; in towers,” she thought, as Toppie’s eyes

dwelt on her. “And how much she loved him!”

She saw then that Giles was there. He was stretched out in a deep chair

on one side of the fire, his hands clasped behind his head, and he was

watching Toppie; her meeting with Toppie.

“And how much Giles loves her!” came the further thought, sharp with its

sense of sudden elucidation. If he sat there, in that rather mannerless

fashion, not helping with the water-cans, the baskets of flowers, the

scissors, it was because he loved her and wanted to watch her.

Toppie, still with her absorption, had picked up the vase again and

carried it to a far table.

“There; that’s the best we can do with the garden just now,” said Mrs.

Bradley, smiling at her. “And without you, Toppie, I’d never have made

the effort. Toppie thinks a room without flowers so sad. She made me

come out with her and pick all these. It’s astonishing, really, what one

can still find in a November garden.”

“They look awfully nice,” said Giles.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” said Ruth—Alix had already noted of her

that, on all occasions, she gave her opinion without being asked—“they

look to me rather dingy and frost-bitten. Rather a waste of time, I

think, all this messing about to arrange flowers that don’t exist!”—and

Ruth laughed, pleased with her own good sense, and went to seat herself

on the arm of Giles’s chair.

“She bores him; but he would not like to say it,” thought Alix, seeing

Giles’s kind but unwelcoming look. She had a feeling of excitement, yet

of oppression. Toppie, she knew, was thinking of nothing but her.

The tea-table stood before the sofa on the other side of the fire from

Giles, and Mrs. Bradley sat down to it and Toppie came beside her, and

then, looking up at Alix, laying her hand on the place still vacant,

said “Come here, Alix.”

“There’s room for me, too,” cried Rosemary, plunging down between them.

“My place is always near the cake!”

But Toppie looked at her quite coldly and said: “There’s not room for

you, Rosemary. Somewhere else, please. You make us all uncomfortable.”

She was very fair, with a skin that would have been of a milky whiteness

had it not been thickly freckled. Her lips were small and pale, her chin

long and narrow; all her head, bound round with the black ribbon, was

singularly narrow, and that, perhaps, was why her grey eyes seemed to

look out from towers. “And how she has suffered!” thought Alix.

Nights; how many nights of sleepless suffering had not Toppie known. The

tears had run down as she had lain in the long darknesses, remembering;

always remembering, seeing his face before her always. Tears; vigils;

remembrance;—all were in Toppie’s eyes. “Oh, no, Maman; not _nulle_;

anything but _nulle_,” Alix thought, while, with a great wave of

depression, the meaning of the war, of all its lonely suffering, swept

over her. Was Captain Owen worth so much suffering? His personality

lived most for Alix in the memory of his smile and his worth seemed to

live in that, too. He had been charming; and there was worth in charm.

Tea was made and they were all talking of the things they did and the

people they did them with. Alix heard of a Women’s Institute, of Boy

Scouts and Girl Guides, and a village Choral Society that Mrs. Bradley

conducted. Giles sang in it, and the girls and Jack and Francis when

they were at home. “And you must sing with us, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley,

and they asked her about her piano lessons and the singing at the Lycée,

and she had to confess that she had never heard “The Messiah,” at which

there was a shout of good-natured protest from Ruth and Rosemary. “But

you’re not a musical nation, are you?” said Ruth; and disposed of France

as a musical nation.

The talk made Alix think of the thick slices of bread-and-butter that

Ruth and Rosemary and Giles were eating, it was so kindly and useful.

Very different from the talk to which she was accustomed in Maman’s

salon; and Maman’s salon itself was as different from this as the talk.

It was small, yet it was stately. She and Maman had done their best for

the “_petit trou_” of an _appartement_ in the rue de Penthièvre, and

Maman’s russet head, as she sat with her cigarette at the tea-table, had

melted and shone against the old tapestry, grey and green and citron,

and her lovely face had seemed to belong to the Empire sconces and the

carnations in their tall crystal vases that made light constellations on

the mantelpiece. Maman’s salon, though stately, was dense and rich and

sweet, and the talk that passed, soft and shining, was like a beautiful,

iridescent soap-bubble tossed so lightly from one to the other; from

monsieur de Villanelle, with his pointed red beard and sad blue eyes and

long Flemish nose like a Memling saint; to mademoiselle Blanche

Fontaine; and from her to monsieur de Maubert, with his Jovian head; and

from him to monsieur Jules, dark and gloomy, who sometimes let it drop

in his abstraction, unless Maman gave it a little puff that carried it

on to madame Gérardin, who received it with shrill little outcries,

prettily playing with it—Alix had to own that she played prettily with

talk—until it was safely back in Maman’s hands again. And then another

was blown. How Maman smiled; how she lifted gay yet sombre brows; how

lovely they all thought her. And though one might see talk so light only

as a soap-bubble, Alix dimly apprehended that it was fertile, creative;

that it spread, like a sweet fragrance; that it floated like a winged

seed on the breeze, out from Maman’s salon to permeate, alter the world.

It made a difference to the world what monsieur Villanelle thought about

the last book and poem; what monsieur Jules thought about the last

painter, mademoiselle Blanche about the last play, and monsieur de

Maubert about the latest feat of Léon Daudet or Charles Maurras. And

since, to all of them, it was in Maman’s reception of their ideas that

the final verdict lay, Maman, to the world at large, made the greatest

difference of all.

“You’ll see what a jolly life you’ll have here, my dear kid,” Rosemary

remarked to her; Rosemary, undismayed by her rebuff, had worked through

the bread-and-butter and was now eating quantities of cake. She was only

six months older than Alix, but she assumed protecting airs towards her.

“Girls in France have a beastly mewed-up time, haven’t they?”

“Have you been much in France?” Alix asked her. She felt no call to

combat Rosemary’s conceptions. She was, indeed, completely indifferent

to what they might be. She asked her question from mere politeness.

“Not much; but Ruth and I stayed with a French family once. My word!

they were quaint! They thought the Bible improper reading for _jeunes

filles_ and picked their teeth at the table and I don’t believe they

ever took a bath. They almost had apoplexy when we said we had to have

one every day; thought it would be sure to give us _des rhumatismes_.”

“Many of us are quite clean,” Alix remarked, and at this Giles laughed

loudly.

“There’s one for you, you young savage,” he commented, whereupon

Rosemary bounded at him and grappled with his hair.

“Help, Ruth! He’s choking me!” she screamed, and Alix, with some

astonishment, watched the uncouth game that followed, Giles throwing off

his sisters alternately until they tumbled on the floor and sat,

dishevelled and delighted, getting their breath and smoothing back their

loosened hair.

“Not quite so much noise, dears,” Mrs. Bradley remarked once or twice,

but she continued calmly to converse with Toppie who glanced at the

_mêlée_, Alix thought, with a remote, repudiating eye, while she said:

“I find him a thoroughly bad boy. There’s something fundamentally wrong

with him.”

“Oh, poor little fellow!” Mrs. Bradley sighed. “His home and heredity

are great handicaps, aren’t they?”

“I don’t see why they should be,” said Toppie. “Mrs. Brown is a patient

hard-working woman and, though the father drinks, I don’t think he is

dishonest. Whereas Percy is a sneak and a liar. He does mean things and

then is too much of a coward to confess them.”

It was strange, thought Alix, listening, though not in the least

interested in Percy Brown’s heredity, that with a face so sweet Toppie

should have so cold a voice. She would be sorry for Percy Brown, she

felt sure, if she were to see him confronting Toppie.

“It’s very difficult to confess when one has done a mean thing,” Mrs.

Bradley mused—and Alix almost had to laugh at hearing her, so

impossible was it to imagine Mrs. Bradley involved in such a dilemma.

“The cowardice and the meanness go together, don’t they, and Percy is so

young that they are not worse, really, than weakness and timidity. He

may outgrow it.”

“I don’t think he will. I think he is fundamentally bad,” said Toppie,

but now with more sadness than severity, and, turning to Alix she said:

“Will you come and have tea with me to-morrow? We could have a little

walk first, and then you could come back to tea with me and my father.”

“But she’s going to school with us, Toppie! We have to teach her

hockey!” cried Ruth.

“Not to-morrow. She need not begin till Monday, need you, Alix?” Alix

thought not, and though Ruth declared, “You can’t begin a day too soon

for hockey,” Alix and Toppie had decided the question between them.

CHAPTER VI

“Tell me everything; everything you remember,” said Toppie. She was

striding along over the heather, a grey woollen scarf tossed over her

shoulder, a knitted cap drawn down closely over her ears, and she made

Alix feel shy. She had seen that Toppie liked her and she had foreseen

that she would question her. But as she felt the pressure of her longing

she knew how little she could satisfy it.

“I think I remember him best of all as I first saw him,” she said,

searching her thoughts.

“Yes. As you first saw him. Tell me about it. How did you first see him?

He wrote to me, often, from Cannes; so much about your mother; so much

about you. He said you were the dearest little girl. I understand why he

said it—if you don’t mind my saying so.—But he couldn’t tell me what I

most wanted to know, could he? How he himself looked to you.—What he

said to you.—How he seemed.—You understand, I know, though you are so

young, how one longs for everything that remains on earth of anyone one

loves. People’s memories; they are precious. You understand that,” said

Toppie. And Alix felt that only by the pressure of her longing was she

thus lifted above her natural reticence. The very words she used were

not habitual to her; she would have been shy of using such words

ordinarily.

“Yes; I understand,” said Alix. “We saw him first on the great road that

runs above the sea. Maman and I were going up and he was coming down, so

that we saw him tall against the sky; limping a little as he came. He

looked at us, and we looked at him;—it is almost as if one recognized

the people who are destined to be our friends, is it not,

Mademoiselle?—and when we had passed, I looked back at him and he was

looking round at us. It had been a mutual impression. We talked of it

afterwards. We saw him against the sky and he saw us against the sea; as

if we had risen from it, like people in a fairy-tale, he told us; and

Maman laughed and said that people didn’t rise from the sea carrying

parasols. I remember so well the expression of his eyes”—Alix felt

still shyer, but she forced herself through the shyness—“gay and

searching like a dog’s; out-of-door eyes. He had field-glasses in his

hand. And that very evening, at the Casino, a friend of Maman’s brought

him and introduced him to her. So it all began.”

“Tall against the sky. Out-of-door eyes. Yes, I can see him.—Don’t call

me mademoiselle, Alix; call me Toppie.—And with his bird-glasses. He

would have been watching birds. I see it all,” said Toppie, her eyes

before her. “And then?”

“Then he came to see us every day. It was of birds we talked on the

first day that he and I and Maman went for a walk. I knew them a little;

not their names; but their songs and their habits, from having been so

much in the country; whereas Maman is so much the _parisienne_ that she

was very ignorant and she laughed at us and said they were all much

alike; small, grey silhouettes in the leaves. And he used to say that I

was like a black-cap and she like a nightingale; though we did not see

those birds at Cannes.”

“And then?” Toppie repeated as Alix paused.

“He was still very lame,” said Alix, “so that he could not play tennis,

but he used to come with us and watch Maman play; she is one of the

finest players at Cannes; did he tell you? It is beautiful to watch her;

she is perhaps at her best when playing tennis. And he used to write his

letters in the garden of our little villa;—it was lent us, that Autumn,

by friends; a charming little place; he will have told you of it. He

must often have written you letters from the garden. And he and Maman

sat there and read. He would read to her and she would correct his

French, and she would read to him so that his ear might become

accustomed to the correct accent. And sometimes it was I who read while

he held, I remember, a skein of silk on his hands for Maman to wind to

balls; lemon-coloured silk for a little jacket she was knitting me. She

is so clever with her fingers.”

“Oh, she was so good to him! I know!” Toppie exclaimed, her eyes still

fixed on the distance. “I don’t know what he would have done with

himself if it hadn’t been for her kindness. He had been so frightfully

lonely there at Cannes. He found it such a dismal place until you came;

perhaps because it is supposed to be so gay; and that, in war-time, must

have been dreadful. No shade, I remember he said; only sun and shadows.”

“Yes; I remember that he found so much sun depressing, and that seemed

very strange to us, for we so love the sun. But there was real shade in

our garden under the trees. The fuchsias, too, were in bloom everywhere,

I remember, and I associate them so much with him; gay, delicate

flowers.”

“Fuchsias?” said Toppie. “But that’s a soulless flower. How strange that

he should have been associated with them in anyone’s

mind.—Fuchsias”—she seemed to be forcing herself to see them, too.

“They grow so much in the Riviera, of course. But I always think of Owen

with daffodils. Our woods are full of them here in Spring. Fuchsias.

Yes? What else? You all laughed together? Your mother is so gay. He was

happy?”

“Very happy, I think. We all laughed a great deal. Maman is not what one

would call a gay person; but she can make gaiety. He teased me a great

deal. I have never cared for dolls and he teased me about them. He said

a girl must be made to care about dolls, and he bought dreadful little

ones with small feet in painted boots and hid them in my napkin at

dinner or even under my pillow, where I found them at night. I used to

fling them at him—rush down to the salon where he and Maman sat, and

fling them at him.—For I was already fifteen, and at that age one is

not supposed to care about dolls, in any case. We had great games, it

was a happy time, in spite of all the sadness. He was a happy person.”

“Happy. Yes. A happy person,” Toppie repeated. She turned her strange

shining eyes on Alix. “He is happy now. He is here, you know. We are not

parted. I feel him every day; always; near me. His happiness shines

round me.”

Alix was struck to dumbness. She felt afraid. Such thoughts were so

alien to her that she even wondered if Toppie were quite sane.

Toppie went on. “You believe that, too, in your church, don’t you?—that

the dead are near us; not far away; not shut into a hard golden heaven

we can’t reach; but quite near and caring.”

“We have purgatory. I do not understand all these doctrines. But I am

not _dévote_,” said Alix after a moment.

“Purgatory? That’s only a name. That’s only a symbol, like the golden

heaven. And those who have died, giving their lives for us, will not

have to pass through such an intermediary state.—You are too young. You

have never lost anyone you loved.”

“No one except my poor grandfather. I always pray for the repose of his

soul. That is what we do in my church. Is it different in yours? And if

they are reposing, how can they be near us?” Indeed, the thought of

Grand-père as near, in his new, unimaginable state, was even more

disquieting than Toppie herself.

Toppie seemed to feel that she had drawn her young companion beyond her

depth. She was silent for a moment, gathering back her thoughts from

their search for sympathy, and she asked, then: “Why do you say your

poor grandfather? Was he unhappy?”

“I am afraid he was. Very unhappy.”

“Oh, I am so sorry. You felt and shared it. I saw in your face at once,

dear little Alix, that you had shared unhappiness.—You are so young;

younger than your age in one way; yet in another you are so grown up; it

is strange.” Toppie’s eyes mused on her for a moment. “Why was he

unhappy?” she added gently. “Though, indeed, most people are.”

“He was ruined. He had lost everything,” said Alix. “Montarel, where the

Mouverays have always lived, is sold now, and he knew before he died

that it would be so. And he had lost everyone he loved, except me.”

“Your mother is not his daughter, then?”

“No; my father was his son; his only child.”

“But you and your mother were often with him?”

“Only I. He liked having me alone.” Alix did not require consideration

to find an answer. To Giles, in the train, frankness had been possible;

but it was difficult to repeat such frankness. And Toppie, Alix felt,

was so different from Giles. She would not understand Maman being

divorced as he had. So she evaded her question.

They had reached the Rectory now, and she was glad not only that they

had passed away from Grand-père and his causes for unhappiness, but from

Captain Owen, too. She would have been sorry to have had to answer

questions about the Paris days when so much of the brightness had

dropped from him. Her memories of Captain Owen in Paris were all tinged

with sadness; perhaps because the war was so much nearer in Paris and

Captain Owen’s return to it so imminent. It was as if, in seeing him

there with them for his short leaves, they had seen death always beside

him.

“I hope you will be here when our roses are out,” said Toppie, in the

Rectory garden. “Father and I are proud of our roses.”

Alix counted on being back with Maman long before the time of roses, but

she said that she hoped so, too, and as they passed a window she caught

a glimpse of a tall, bleached man sitting at a writing-table, very

erect, austere, and absorbed; like an old eighteenth-century print of

d’Alembert, Diderot, or some such erudite wigged gentleman.

“Yes; it’s my father,” said Toppie. “You’ll see him directly; at tea.”

Alix stood still for a moment as they entered the drawing-room. It had

everything of charm that the Bradleys’ drawing-room lacked, except the

charm of cheerfulness, for it was, though so serenely beautiful, perhaps

a little sad. The eighteenth-century panelling was painted in dim green,

and three tall windows at one side looked out at the garden while, at

the other, was a beautiful fireplace. In the walls were deep niches

filled with rows of old china, and sedate chairs with backs and seats

embroidered in green and dove-colour were ranged along the wall.

“And look at my china roses,” said Toppie, pleased, Alix saw, by her

involuntary pause of pleasure. “Aren’t they rather wonderful for

November? Only smell how sweet.” And Alix bent over the bowl filled with

the little deep pink roses.

There was a sedate sofa to match the chairs, with the tea-table placed

as at the Bradleys’; but how different was this tea. No thick

bread-and-butter; no loaves of cake. Only a plate of little dry

biscuits, that Alix liked, however, and another of bread-and-butter cut

to a wafer-like thinness. And instead of the affectionate turmoil of

Heathside was Toppie’s sweet, chill voice and Mr. Westmacott’s silence.

He drank his tea, looking, with his crossed legs, which should have been

in buckled knee-breeches, more than ever like d’Alembert; addressed a

courteous question to Alix about her journey and her mother’s health,

and soon went away, back to his writing-table; but not, Alix felt, to do

much of significance there. He had a tall head and a meditative eye; but

there was something of the sheep in his appearance, too. If he had had

the close curled wig, that went with his type he would, Alix thought,

have looked very like a silent, dignified sheep that may, in the meadow,

as it looks at you, emit once or twice a formal baa.

Toppie told her that her father was writing a book on the Stoics. “He

has, fortunately, a great deal of time. It’s a tiny parish; just right

for a scholar like my father; more a scholar than a priest, I sometimes

think. He is rather shy with people and his life here suits him

perfectly.”

“Are not Stoics the people who do not mind the things other people

mind?” Alix inquired.

“They cared, perhaps, so much for some things that other things did not

hurt,” said Toppie, smiling. “I don’t know much about them, myself,

though; I’m not at all learned. I’ve never been to school.”

“I am glad you are not learned. One may go to school and yet not be

learned; as you can see from me,” Alix smiled back. “But I can’t imagine

what those things can be that keep us from being hurt; can you?”

Toppie looked at her meditatively for a moment. “You said you were not

_dévote_; but doesn’t your religion tell you what things they are?” she

asked.

“_Le bon Dieu_, do you mean?” Alix inquired doubtfully. “_La Sainte

Vierge?_ One’s Guardian Angel?”

“Yes. When you go to church, to confession, aren’t you told?”

“We are told a great deal; but I am afraid I have never paid much

attention. I only go to confession once a year. Maman insists on it. I

do not like it,” said Alix. “Had the Stoics a _bon Dieu_ and a _Sainte

Vierge_ to console them, then?”

“Oh, no! no!—you very ignorant child!” Toppie was perforce smiling

again, though Alix saw that she was distressed. “They lived very nobly

without our faith to help them.—In my church we do not have your

beautiful _Sainte Vierge_ to look to, you know.”

“I know,” said Alix. “And I do not understand why you should leave her

out. I like her better than _le bon Dieu_, I must confess. But then

rectors could not feel as we do about a _Sainte Vierge_, could they?”

“And why not?”

“Could one feel like that and be married?”

“Oh, you funny child!” Toppie was really laughing, and Alix, seeing how

she amused her, laughed, too. This was so much better than talking about

the dead.—“You mean a priest could not? We are quite different about

that, too. But I see what you mean”—Toppie’s eyes dwelt on her—“and

sometimes I think that you are right. I think, perhaps”—Toppie was

grave now—“that the best life could be lived if one were quite free;

with no close human ties. One could live better for God, and for

humanity, then. And we have nuns in our church, too, Alix.”

“Oh, but it is dreadful to be a nun!” Alix exclaimed. “I had an old

great-aunt who was a nun. Grand-père’s sister. I was always taken to see

her in her convent in Lyon. She came to a _grille_ and blessed me

through it. She was like a sad old fish in an aquarium. One felt that

her flesh must be cold. It would be death to me, such a life. And you?

Can you really imagine it?”

“Perhaps not an order like that, that shuts one quite away,” said

Toppie; “but there are nursing and teaching orders. Yes, I can imagine

it. Not while I have my father; but if I were alone.”

“No, no! Do not imagine it!” Alix exclaimed, and there rose before her

the memory of Giles’s face as he had watched Toppie yesterday evening.

“Do not even imagine it. It is too dreadful. I am sorry that in your

church you have nuns, too. That is foolish of you, I think, when you

need not have them. It is different for priests. They have to administer

the sacraments. But for a woman it is dreadful. Far, far better marry

and be out in the world.”

“Perhaps.” Toppie was smiling sadly at her, seeing her, it was evident,

as quite a child, yet touched by her feeling. “But if all question of

marrying is over, the situation alters. You could not understand while

you are so young.—See, Alix, I want you to look at this.” She moved

forward a fire-screen, a square of satin on a mahogany stand. “Are you

interested in needlework? French girls do it so beautifully, I know. My

mother embroidered this. She copied it from those old chairbacks. Do

look at them. Her grandmother did those.”

The screen, on a background of pearly satin, had two doves in a basket,

entwined with laurel; and the chairs, in a softer, sadder key, repeated

them.

“They are beautiful,” said Alix. It seemed to her, as she looked at the

gentle doves, that the dead, in Toppie’s drawing-room, joined pale hands

around her and whispered: “We are here.” But it was so sad. The doves

nestling side by side, so confident of love, made her think of all the

partings of the world.

“My great-grandmother was married to a soldier,” said Toppie, “and went

out to India and died there when my grandfather was born. She did all

those chairs while she was waiting for his birth. She was only

twenty-one. I often think of her; so young; stitching her thoughts of

home, her hopes for her baby—the past and the future—into the

embroidery. And one feels how happy she must have been in her marriage

to have chosen that design. My poor great-grandfather brought all her

things back to England, with his little boy.—That funny little

water-colour sketch is of him, in his frilled cap; with his ayah.—And

he grew up to be a soldier, too, and was killed, out in India, fighting

a frontier tribe. My mother was his only child. I was fourteen when she

died. How happy you are to have your mother, Alix. She makes beautiful

things, too. I shan’t forget the little lemon silk jacket.”

Alix’s sense of sadness had deepened while Toppie spoke. So different

Toppie’s past; so different Toppie’s mother, she felt sure: and the

sense of sadness was in the difference. An abyss seemed to lie between

her and Toppie, an abyss that Toppie did not see and could not, perhaps,

even imagine. She could not place Toppie against any of the backgrounds

familiar to her. She could not see her in Maman’s salon, unless as one

of those dim evasive figures, the “Misses” of her childhood, someone

dressed differently, hovering diffidently and helping with the tea and

cakes. She could see Toppie in Maman’s salon as her governess, but in no

other capacity. Toppie would not understand anything said there, or

would not care to understand. She would draw away from the shining

soap-bubble. She would look with cold dismay at madame Gérardin and

mademoiselle Fontaine. It was sad to feel fond of someone and to feel

them fond of you, and yet to see that only here, among her doves, could

their worlds touch at all.

It was growing dark, and Toppie said that she would take her home, and,

in the hall, lighted a little lantern for the walk across the common.

They had gone halfway when they saw, in the distance, another lantern

advancing towards them.

“It is Giles,” said Toppie, pausing. “He has come for you. So I will go

back. I have some letters to finish for the post.”

“But come to meet him. He will, I am sure, be glad of a word with you,”

said Alix. She felt sure that it had been in the hope of a word with

Toppie rather than to fetch herself that Giles had come.

“Oh, we have so many words; every day; all our lives long,” said Toppie,

and, though she continued to advance, Alix felt a slight constraint in

her voice. “He is a dear, is he not, Giles?” she added, as if

irrelevantly.

“Oh, a dear!” said Alix. “I felt him that at once. And so good; and so

intelligent.”—“More intelligent than Captain Owen; more good,” was in

her mind. But that made, she knew, no difference. People were not loved

for their intelligence, or their goodness, either.

“A great dear, Giles,” Toppie repeated, but with no intention,

evidently, of being urged by her young companion’s warmth beyond her own

sense of due commendation. “Owen loved him devotedly. After his mother

it was Giles he loved best of all his family.”

“They were all three of the same _pâte_, were they not.”

“_Pâte?_” Toppie questioned. Her French was not quite so good as

Giles’s.

“The paste, you know, of which earthenware or porcelain is made.”

“I see. Yes. And Owen was porcelain; and Giles is earthenware; and dear

Mrs. Bradley is both together.” Toppie mused on the simile with

satisfaction.

But it did not satisfy Alix. “Some earthenware is very rare and

precious; tough and fine at once. And it wears and wears.”

“But it never has the beauty,” said Toppie.

Giles was now within speaking distance, and by the light of their

lantern Alix saw that his eyes were fixed upon Toppie with an

indefinable expression; not alarm; not inquiry; but a steady

watchfulness that, to her perception, controlled these feelings.

“I was afraid you’d run away with our young guest and came out to look

for you,” he said. “It’s six o’clock.” While Alix, feeling a soft touch

on her glove, looked down to see the earnest, illumined eyes of Jock.

“I didn’t realize it was so late,” said Toppie, and to Alix’s ear the

tone of her voice was altered. Toppie, for all her familiarity, would

never, she felt, have talked with any of the Bradleys as she had with

her this afternoon. “We’ve talked and talked; haven’t we, Alix. I must

fly!”

“Come in for a little. Mother’s just back. She’d love to see you,” said

Giles.

“No, indeed, I can’t. Give her my love. I’ll drop in upon her to-morrow

afternoon, after my class.”

“Well, we’ll go back with you, then. It’s late for you to be out alone.”

“For me! On the common! How absurd you are, Giles! Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Giles. He showed no grievance; some shade, rather,

seemed lifted from him, and in a moment, as he and she walked on

together, Alix divined that his anxiety had been lest she had said

anything to hurt Toppie or revived memories that cut too deep. It had

not been so much to see Toppie as to watch over her that he had come.

The lantern made a soft round of light into which they advanced and the

November air was pleasant. “And what have you talked and talked about?”

Giles asked.

“All sorts of things,” said Alix. She was glad to feel that she could

give him fuller relief. “Her great-grandmother’s embroideries and the

Stoics and _la Sainte Vierge_.”

“_La Sainte Vierge!_” said Giles, and he laughed. Yes, actually, he was

speaking with her of the enshrined Toppie and she had made him laugh.

“What did you have to say about _la Sainte Vierge_, pray?”

“Well,” Alix paused. She saw that she had perhaps taken a wrong turn,

but it was best to go on as though she did not think so. “It was of

religion and _le Paradis_, you see; and whether the dead are with us

here. Do you, too, think that they are, Giles?”

“The dead! With us here!—Oh. Yes, I see.” Giles, after his exclamations

of surprise, lapsed for a moment into silence. “She must like you very

much, Alix, to talk to you about that,” he said presently.

“I think she does like me. He liked me. It would always be that for

Toppie, wouldn’t it? And then I can give her more about him. We talked

of that, too. Things she didn’t know.”

She felt Giles’s eyes turn down towards her. He contemplated her as they

walked forward. “What sort of things?”

“How we met him. How he looked. What we all did together. She loved

hearing; but especially that he was happy. And it is that she feels.

That he is with her now; and happy. Do you believe it, too?”

Giles walked on beside her in the darkness that was not yet quite dark,

the light melted into it so softly and went so far. Alix could see Bobby

racing on ahead. Jock went just before them, and Amy followed meekly,

her nose at Giles’s heels. It was easy to talk together in the melting

darkness, and she must have given Giles a great deal to think about, for

he said nothing for a long time. Then, as if he brought his thoughts

back to her and her question with an effort, he said: “It doesn’t

follow, because we’re dead, that we’re happy.”

“No; we are not happy in purgatory; and according to the church we must

all go to purgatory, unless we have been great saints. She asked me

about my religion. And we have purgatory, you see.”

“I hope you didn’t say anything about it that may have troubled her.”

“Oh, I said nothing at all that troubled her,” Alix assured him. “She

did not take purgatory at all seriously.”

“Do you?” Giles was smiling a little. How much relief she had given him!

“I am afraid not,” Alix owned. “I am afraid I do not take heaven

seriously either. But I did not tell her that. It might have grieved

her. It always seems to me that we must go out like blown candles, when

we are dead. I do not like to think it; but it seems so to me. Does it

not to you?”

“No; it doesn’t. You are a little pagan, Alix.”

“A pagan! Not at all! I am a Catholic. I go to confession once a year.”

Giles now laughed out. So much had she relieved him that her unspiritual

state roused only mirth in him. “Doesn’t your confessor give you any

penances?”

“Yes. I have penances. I do them as I am told. The _Chemin de la

Croix_—all round the church.—It is very tiring—dragging my _prie

dieu_.”

Giles went on laughing;—“Is it? By Jove! And your first communion?

Weren’t you prepared for that?”

“Yes. But that was five years ago. I was only a child then. I have

altered my opinion of many things since then.”

How much Giles found her still a child she heard in his laughter as he

asked on: “But what right have you to say you aren’t a pagan? What right

have you to call yourself a Catholic?”

“I have been baptized,” said Alix. “I have been confirmed. I go to

confession, and to Mass, at least at Easter. Most certainly I am a

Catholic. You might as well say I was not French because I did not

believe in the Republic as to say I am not a Catholic because I don’t

believe in heaven. One is, or one is not. It is a question of being born

so.”

“I see. I see.” Giles was looking down at her, so amused, yet also, she

felt, touched by what she said. They entered the little door in the

garden-wall. “There’s something to be said for that way of looking at

it,” he owned. “It puts it neatly. It explains all sorts of things, in

Catholicism and in France. You are a wonderful people, Alix.”

CHAPTER VII

Of all her new experiences Alix most enjoyed “The Messiah.”

The village choir was a feeble enough little affair, its energy

concentrated in Giles’s disciplined, sustaining baritone and the robust

sopranos of Ruth, Rosemary, and the postmistress. The tenors were almost

non-existent, and the altos, among whom Alix was placed at once,

terribly weak. But the doctor’s daughter, at the piano, accompanied so

accurately, Mrs. Bradley, gentle and absorbed, with her wand, conducted

so carefully, that it was a pleasure to sing, and the grave exultant

music wove itself deeply into Alix’s impressions of the new life. It

made her think of Giles and of his mother, and of Toppie, too. It seemed

to go with them; just as it seemed to go with the walk home by

lantern-light, and even with the cheerful family supper afterwards where

Giles boiled eggs over the fire, and Mrs. Bradley made cocoa on a

spirit-lamp.

The High School, to which she and Ruth and Rosemary bicycled every day,

was at once familiar and alien. It was like the _Lycée_, in shape, as it

were; but not in texture. Hockey could not give it the flavour that it

lacked. The girls, all of them, were too much like Ruth and Rosemary.

They lived, she felt, in what they did, not in what they thought. They

had a sense of fun, but no sense of irony, and with their sharp-cut

edges, their hardy colour, they seemed to repel any suggestion of

mystery, in life or in themselves. They accepted her at once. They

seemed to like her, just as Ruth and Rosemary did. But she felt that

anybody else who could hold a hockey stick and tell the truth would have

done just as well.

With the Christmas holidays Jack and Francis came home from school.

Heathside seethed with noise, pets and handicrafts. Giles, now

demobilized, was preparing for his return to Oxford after Christmas. He

went up and down to London a good deal and she had the sensation of

having lost him; of being relegated by him to the family group. One day,

however, he came into the dining-room while she was trying to write a

letter on a corner of the table. It was only in the dining-room that a

fire was lighted in the mornings, and Jack and Francis were carpentering

at one end, while Ruth cut out blouses in the middle. It was difficult

to try to tell Maman about “The Messiah” in such surroundings, and

though she liked Jack and Francis so much she could not bring herself to

like the white rat that ambled heavily about among the tools and _crêpe

de Chine_.

“I say, that’s not much of a place for letter-writing,” Giles remarked.

“Come to my study, Alix. I’m a favoured person and have a gas-fire going

all morning.”

“But she’s going out with us directly, to see our ferrets!” shouted Jack

and Francis. They were dear little boys; Francis brown, like Giles, and

Jack fair like his sisters. Oddly, enough, with all their uproar, Alix

felt them gentler, more respectful of one’s identity, than Ruth and

Rosemary.

“Do you want to see the ferrets, Alix?” Giles inquired. “Are you fond of

ferrets?”

“I do not like what I hear of them,” said Alix. “But cats, too, do

dreadful things; and one loves cats.”

“I’ll defy anyone to love a ferret.”

“We’re not going to let her see the rabbiting. She says she doesn’t want

to, though she misses a lot. It’s far kinder than traps. Bobby kills

them in a minute.”

“No; I do not want to see that. But will after lunch do for ferrets? I

would rather finish my letters now,” Alix owned. And though she was

sorry to disappoint Jack and Francis, it was with a sense of escape that

she followed Giles out of the dining-room.

The study was small, warm, and untidy. Under an ugly mantelpiece of

carved oak was a bright little gas-fire, looking like incandescent dried

apples, and on the mantelpiece were ranged pipes, family photographs,

and quite a menagerie of small animal ornaments which Alix guessed to be

family presents. There was a small metal bear on his hind legs holding

spills in his arms, a horrible china cow, yellow with red spots and a

place in her back for matches, and a foolish puppy in black velvet with

a red flannel tongue and one ear that went up and one that went down. A

very grubby and irrelevant statuette of Venus de Milo stood among them

and Alix felt sorry for her.

“Behold my jewels!” said Giles with a grin. “Francis gave me that

monster when he was three; that’s from Jack and that from Rosemary. The

Venus is an effort of Ruth’s; brought to me from Paris. Everything you

see there is either Christmas or birthdays.”

“You are very faithful to your anniversaries,” said Alix, smiling. “What

a nice photograph of your mother.”

“Isn’t it?” said Giles, pleased. “You like my mother, don’t you?”

“I like all your family,” said Alix politely.

“Well, of course, in a way, you’d like them all,” said Giles. “But I am

afraid they rather wear you out. There are so many of them and they are

so young and vigorous. You must take refuge here when they dash over you

too much. I’ll do my reading, and you can read or write or meditate, as

you like. I shan’t speak to you and you mustn’t speak to me. I’ve

noticed you are a kid who can keep still. We shall get on capitally.”

So it was arranged, and as Alix took her place at the little

writing-table he pulled forward for her, she noticed that there were

many books along two sides of the room and along the other a row of

large framed photographs of Greek and Sicilian temples that more than

atoned for the mantelpiece. When she did not feel like reading or

writing, she would look at those. They made her think, in the sense of

space and tranquillity and splendour they gave her, of Montarel.

For the first mornings of her withdrawal there mingled with her sense of

security an apprehension of the unsaid things that lay between her and

Giles and that might still have to be said; but this grew less with

every day. It became quite evident that Giles was going to say nothing.

Perhaps, indeed, she had imagined something of the trouble and confusion

she had felt in him at their first meeting. Perhaps in some odd, twisted

way, it had all been because of Toppie; because the sight of her brought

back so vividly the memory of the dead brother and of Toppie’s loss.

Whatever it had been, she did not think he would ever show it to her

again.

She owed more than the peaceful mornings to him. He seemed to restore

Maman to her. Now, at last, she could really tell Maman, with a mind

composed, how surprised Mrs. Bradley had been at hearing that she wore a

linen chemise next her skin and felt no need of wool; how like a

dignified sheep was Toppie’s father; how strange the sense of growing

strength the choruses of “The Messiah” gave one, like a sort of

calisthenic. And how Mrs. Bradley had taken her up to London to choose a

delightful winter outfit; woollen jumpers, ribbed stockings, and a

winter coat and hat. Alix told Maman all about this and about the fat,

jovial old lady with short grey hair with whom they had had tea in

Kensington, a friend of Mrs. Bradley’s father and a public speaker. Some

things, however, she did not tell her. She gave no account of Toppie’s

beliefs in regard to Captain Owen, and, a lesser matter, yet

significant, she had never yet satisfied Maman as to the social status

of her new friends.

Perhaps it was because Giles sat there, his pipe between his teeth, his

feet propped up against the mantelpiece, his hand, as he perused the

tome upon his knees, raised now and then to rub his hair on end, that it

seemed so irrelevant to write about such things. After all what business

was it of Maman’s? She had had no further use for them than that they

should warm and feed her child during a hard winter; what difference did

their status make to her? It was true that she and Maman had always

shared impressions to the last crumb of analysis, and it was with a

slight sense of _malice_ that she thus withheld from her the crumb for

which she asked more than once. “Who are they? What are they, _ma

chérie_?” Maman, from Cannes, inquired. “The _train de vie_ you

described seems that of the true _confort anglais_; but, apparently,

there is no elegance. What are their _relations_? Do they go at all

_dans le monde_? Is there a _vie de château_ in the neighbourhood? I am

interested in all you have to tell me of these excellent people.”

Naturally. But though Alix might not have felt it unmeet, a month ago,

to tell Maman all this, she would have felt it unmeet now. How funny

Giles would have thought it if he had known that she sat there informing

Maman that his family did not go _dans le monde_ at all, in the sense

that Maman meant by _le monde_; and that they were decidedly of the

_bourgeoisie_. It was not that Maman was wrong in wanting to know, or

that Giles would have been right in thinking that _le monde_ didn’t

matter. It was simply that she did not care to write in that way to

Maman about him and his family.

Maman, meanwhile, was evidently enjoying many _relations_; dancing,

dining, playing tennis, entertaining her friends. There were important

names in her letters and Alix sometimes meditated a little over them.

When she did not write or read, she meditated Giles’s Greek temples and

Maman’s _relations_. The important names, in the world of art and

letters—but that was not the world Maman meant in asking about the

Bradleys—were male and female; in the world of fashion, male only. It

was the marquis and the prince; but never the marquise and the

princesse. Why? Alix wondered. Did Maman find the wives of fashion dull?

But if one didn’t know them, too, could one be said to be _dans le vrai

grand monde_? She knew how Maman’s gay, sombre eyes would meet the

question (not that it was one that Alix would ever dream of putting to

her): “_Je suis du monde qui me plaît, ma chérie._” But Alix was not

quite sure that this was true. She was not sure that Maman’s

indifference was as securely grounded as Giles’s. Perhaps real

indifference only came from reading so much Plato and Aristotle. Yet she

herself, who did not read Plato, was indifferent. It was only in regard

to Maman that she was not indifferent, and perhaps it was true that it

was only in regard to herself that Maman was not. Poor, beloved,

beautiful Maman; and wronged; deeply wronged, Alix felt sure. Always,

when she thought of her, her heart expanded in love and then contracted

in anxiety. She saw her as a wild, lovely creature caught in a trap and

only escaping maimed for life. She could not range as far and as freely

as the unmaimed creatures; dimly Alix saw that, as the explanation of

what was ambiguous in her position. She had lost the full liberty hers

by birth and instinct. Yet, despite the limitations of her misfortune,

she had every right to her own standards.

Judged by Maman’s standards Alix could not conceal from herself that the

Bradleys were very undistinguished. Maman would have hated the

bounteous, graceless meals; Mrs. Bradley sitting at breakfast among the

noise and porridge and kippers, heaped round with letters and circulars,

reading an appeal for crippled babies while she poured out the tea and

coffee and oftener than not slopping it into the saucer. “Oh, I’m _so_

sorry, dear,” she would exclaim; but Maman would have commented, dryly,

that a woman so much occupied had better breakfast in bed and get

through her correspondence out of sight. Maman could be terribly dry

about disorder and gracelessness. Alix had never forgotten the terse and

accurate reproofs that her own lapses in these respects had called down

upon her in her childhood. As for the uproarious children, “_Ces

marmots-là ne sonts pas appétissants_,” was what Maman would have said

of Ruth and Rosemary, taking their ease during the holidays and padding

from sideboard to table in shabby bedroom slippers, while Jack and

Francis had already got their hands dirty. Alix could not see Maman at

that breakfast-table; but then there was no need to try to. She would

never have come down at all to breakfast, and Alix could not really

think of anything later in the day that she would have thought it worth

while to come down to. A drive with Giles in the car, perhaps. She would

have liked Giles. She would have liked him, perhaps, as much as she had

liked Captain Owen. But as for the rest of the family, she would have

found them only fit for the happy task of warming, feeding, and clothing

her child. “_Trop honorée_,” Maman might even remark, in the mood of

mirthful impertinence she could display. Maman’s impertinencies usually

amused Alix; but she did not want to see them evoked, ever, by the

Bradleys. It hurt her to think of it. Already she was too fond of them.

Maman must never come to Heathside.

Christmas was now close upon them, and the house, like a mysterious

boiling pot, bubbled with happy secrets. Francis came to lunch unaware

of the strip of gold paper gummed to his nose; Ruth and Rosemary sat

hunched in corners working surreptitiously at belated pieces of

knitting. Giles went up to London with his mother for a day’s shopping

and came back in the evening with parcels hanging from every finger, and

she and Toppie had a wonderful day there, for Mrs. Bradley had given her

pocket-money to spend on presents and some had come from Maman, too, so

that there was a real meaning for her in the long indecisions over

crowded counters.

Alix usually went over to the Rectory to work at her presents with

Toppie. She was making a tea-cloth for Mrs. Bradley and embroidering

monograms, that elicited Toppie’s admiration, on fine handkerchiefs for

Ruth and Rosemary; and she had found the right books for the boys and a

silver pencil for Giles. Toppie had a beautiful cushion for his chair at

Oxford, and Toppie, too, had thought of Maman. Alix almost felt the

tears rise to her eyes when she showed her the little frame of blue and

silver she had embroidered enclosing a snapshot of Alix herself,

standing at the edge of the wood with the dogs about her. She had not

expected anyone to think of Maman. Maman, she knew, would not think of

them. And then Christmas was different in France.

But Maman, all the same, remembered that it was specially kept in

England. It was on Christmas Day itself, and not on the _Nouvel An_ as

Alix had expected, that the long parcel, brought over by a friend of

Maman’s, arrived for her from Cannes. Already she had had more presents

than ever before in her life. A toilet-set from Mrs. Bradley; a

writing-case from Giles; a scarf from Ruth, and a pair of stockings from

Rosemary; from Jack a neat penknife, and from Francis a box of small

brightly coloured handkerchiefs that were obviously what a little boy

would admire. All the distributions took place at the breakfast-table,

and Maman’s parcel had not yet arrived when Alix unrolled from its

tissue-paper Toppie’s gift, and saw, in a tiny box of faded leather, the

beautiful little old brooch, an emerald surrounded by pearls. It made

her think at once of the doves and the laurel wreath and of Toppie’s

great-grandmother; of the past, brooded upon; never forgotten. She gazed

at it in astonishment.

“I _say_!” Ruth exclaimed. They had all crowded round her to look. “She

used to wear that. It belonged to some ancestress. She must be most

awfully fond of you to give it to you, Alix.”

Alix met Giles’s eyes looking down at the brooch over their heads. She

felt that she had gained in value for him from Toppie’s fondness.

And it was after all this excitement that the post brought Maman’s box

and that the many wrappings of tissue-paper disclosed the most exquisite

of evening dresses; white taffeta; crisp, supple, silvery; girdled with

small white roses and their green leaves. The little card pinned to the

breast said: “_A ma chérie lointaine_.”

“I never saw anything so lovely!” said Rosemary, and Alix felt a wave of

warmth for Rosemary go through her.

“It’s too beautiful,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“She made it herself, I am sure,” said Alix. “It is wonderful how she

makes these lovely things.”

Giles was looking at her again. His look was different. It was as if her

pride in Maman touched him as much as Toppie’s brooch had done.

“It’s so much too pretty for anything you do here, isn’t it, dear,” said

Mrs. Bradley. “I think we must have a little dance when Giles comes home

for the Easter holidays, so that you can wear it.”

“Oh, Mummy!” cried Ruth and Rosemary. Rosemary had never yet been to a

real dance.

“We’ll have new dresses then, too,” said Ruth. “Pink’s my colour, and

blue’s Rosemary’s.”

“But can’t I wear pink, too? Toppie wears blue in the evenings,”

Rosemary objected.

“Well, why shouldn’t you both wear blue? I don’t like to see sisters

dressed alike. Besides, will Toppie come?” Ruth wondered.

“I believe she will, for Alix’s sake,” said Mrs. Bradley. “This will be

Alix’s dance.”

“Blue will be much more becoming to you, really, Rosemary, with your

golden hair,” Alix assured her younger friend, who was looking a little

sulky.

“And you must go and see if you can persuade Toppie to say she’ll come,

Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley.

Alix saw how much Mrs. Bradley hoped that Toppie would consent, and

Giles, his hands in his pockets, walked away to the window and looked

out. “And how happy it would make Giles to see her in blue again,” she

thought.

They were all going for tea to the Rectory next day, but though it was

stormy Alix put on her raincoat and made her way across the common that

very afternoon. So familiar was that path now, so familiar the old

gardener, in holiday attire to-day, touching his hat and wishing her a

happy Christmas, and then Toppie’s face of welcome at the door, for,

seeing her from above, Toppie herself ran down to open to her.

“How sweet of you to come! There’s just time to see you between

services. Come in. Happy Christmas, dear child!” said Toppie.

“Oh, Toppie—the emerald! Never have I had so beautiful an ornament!”

Alix exclaimed while Toppie helped her strip off the streaming coat.

“And never have I seen a little box as beautiful as yours,” said Toppie,

leading her into the drawing-room. Alix had made for Toppie a little

satin box and had carefully copied the doves in the laurel-wreathed

basket upon it. “It’s too beautifully done,” said Toppie. “How did you

manage from memory?”

“I drew the doves one day, quickly, when you went out, and the colours

are easy to carry in one’s head. I am glad you like it. I am so fond of

little boxes.”

“So am I. I love them. I never can have too many of them.”

The fire was lighted in the drawing-room, and in the soft obscurity

Toppie with her high golden head looked like a tall white lighted

_cierge_; a Christmas _cierge_ in a votive chapel of a great cathedral;

for though so sweet, so almost gay, the background to Toppie’s gaiety

was something dedicated and remote.

“Mine are not very exact. They are too big for the basket,” said Alix,

looking at the doves.

“I like them the more for that. I love the way they overflow,” said

Toppie. “Alix, can you guess what I have put in your box?”

They were sitting on the sofa, side by side, and Toppie’s eyes, sweet,

austere, were on her. “His letters from France. All the letters about

you and your mother.” Alix had not needed to be told. She had guessed

from Toppie’s look. “They just fit it,” said Toppie. “As if it had been

made for them.” And, leaning forward, she kissed Alix lightly on the

forehead. It felt a little to Alix as though the Virgin in the votive

chapel had stooped down from her altar to kiss one. It was sweet; and it

was also a little frightening. There was always something about Toppie

that almost frightened her.

“Now, Toppie,” she said presently. “I have come about something very

important. I had from Maman this morning the very dress to go with your

brooch; green and white; the loveliest dress. And Mrs. Bradley says they

will have a dance at Easter so that I can wear it. And what we all hope

is that you will be there. You will come, will you not, Toppie?”

Toppie was looking at her with her cold sweet look and it did not alter

as she smiled and said: “Of course I’ll come; and sit with Mrs. Bradley

and look at you all.”

“But you would dance, Toppie? And wear pale blue? It is your colour they

say, and I have only seen you in grey. You must be very lovely in blue.”

“Must I?” Toppie still smiled, and Alix had long since divined her to be

invulnerable to praise. She wore her grey to-day; her Sunday grey; and

her white neck and throat, unfreckled, were so fair that, imagining her

in blue, Alix saw her as a birch-tree against the pale spring sky. But

with the cold yet loving look she shook her head and said: “No; I won’t

dance.”

“Oh, Toppie—No? Do you mean never?”

“Never,” said Toppie.

“You can say that? When you are so young?”

“It doesn’t need a promise, you know,” said Toppie. “I don’t have to

take a pledge. Some things are for one time and some things for another.

That time is past. But I’ll come to the dance, of course, and love

seeing you all; and grey, really, has always been my colour more than

blue. I’ve always worn grey,” said Toppie, smiling; and she went on,

leaving that subject very definitely disposed of: “Tell me what you have

all been doing since I saw you. Tying up parcels? Your box was so

prettily tied.”

“I like ribbons on _étrennes_. And green ribbon seems to go with

Christmas and snow and fir-trees.”

“Ruth and Rosemary had old knotted string round their parcels, poor

dears, and brown paper,” Toppie remarked. She always showed a certain

kindly ruthlessness in her allusions to the Bradley sisters and Alix

sometimes wondered what, if she had married their brother, their

relations with their gentle but inflexible sister-in-law would have

been. They admired Toppie; they feared her, a very little, for they were

not of a nature to feel fear easily; but they did not love her. Already,

strange though that was, they were far fonder of herself than of Toppie,

and took her for granted as part of the family pack.

“It was a desperation at the end—for string! And all the shops shut,”

said Alix. “I bought my ribbon long ago. I had such nice presents from

Ruth and Rosemary. Such patience it must take, to go down two whole

stockings.”

“Good girls,” said Toppie. “And Giles gave you the writing-case.” Her

voice in speaking of Giles was so much kinder than when he was there—to

be kept away. Alix always felt a little rise of indignation on Giles’s

account when she heard it. It was not as if Giles ever tried to draw

near.

“Yes; a delightful writing-case. I keep finding new wonderful flaps and

pockets in it. Everything is remembered. And a fountain pen, too. I have

never had one before. It makes one’s thoughts come so much more easily

if one does not have to dip in the middle of them. I wrote to Maman with

it this morning, when they were all at church. It is very happy for me,

being there with Giles in his study.”

“He told me that you were one of the very few people he could imagine

having who wouldn’t disturb him,” said Toppie. “He said you were the

most peaceful person.”

“Did he? I am so glad. I like so very much being there— Toppie,” she

found herself saying quite suddenly, “Giles is the kindest person in the

world.”

Toppie looked at her. “Have you only just found that out?”

“No, I knew it the first time I saw him, I think. But he is more than

that,” said Alix, feeling the inadequacy of the word. “He is good.

Because he understands. Some people are only good because they do not

understand. You know what I mean?”

“Perfectly,” Toppie nodded, grave and gentle. “You see things more

clearly than most people, Alix. That is one of the reasons I am so fond

of you.”

“I don’t see them as clearly as Giles does. Giles would see everything

and never fail. It is his courage. The more there was to see, the more

there was to bear, the more he would be standing there beside you.” It

was strange to her, as she spoke, to feel how deeply she knew all this

about Giles, though she had never before formulated it to herself. And

she added: “And never would he ask for anything for himself, Toppie.”

Toppie considered her, arrested, it was evident; perhaps a little

surprised. “Have you and Giles talked a great deal? Dear Giles. All that

you say is true.”

“No; we have talked very little.”

Toppie continued to observe her. “You can’t talk too much with him,” she

said after a little silence. “You can’t see too much of him. He’s a

rock, Alix, and you can build on him.”

“You, too, can build on him, Toppie,” said Alix at this. Something

changed in Toppie’s look at that. It was withdrawal rather than reproof

that Alix felt as Toppie said: “I have built on Giles for years. We have

known each other for a very long time, you see, Alix.”

CHAPTER VIII

It was only a few days after Christmas that a dreadful thing happened to

Alix; the most dreadful thing that had ever happened to her.

They were all in the drawing-room after dinner—all except Francis and

Jack who had gone to bed;—Ruth writing, Rosemary altering a blouse and

Giles reading in his accustomed place. Alix sat beside Mrs. Bradley on

the sofa, turned sideways while she held a skein of wool for her to

wind, and she was never to forget the look of that heather-coloured

wool.

“Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley suddenly, “how was it that Owen didn’t see you

when he went to Paris on leave?—that one leave he had; in February last

winter. You must have been away, I think, for he said nothing of you.”

Alix sat there, holding up the wool, and, even as she faced Mrs. Bradley

thus, steadying eyes and lips and hands, she was aware, though she could

only see him as a blurred form, that Giles, suddenly, was watching her.

Captain Owen’s leave! His one leave! He had come to Paris three times in

that last winter, and the last had been in April only a fortnight before

his death. And he had never told his family! Why had he not told them?

Why! Why! The clamour of her thoughts seemed so to fill her ears that it

was like sinking in the sea. She had the sensation of drowning, yet of

keeping calm while she drowned, resourceful, even as she measured her

calamity, and she heard her own voice speaking from far above her it

seemed—while beneath Mrs. Bradley’s eyes, beneath Giles’s, her thoughts

raced swiftly, swiftly;—“Yes; we should, of course, have seen him, but

we were away; we were away in the country at that time.”

“At Cannes, I suppose,” said Mrs. Bradley. “What a pity for Owen. How

lonely he must have been. He hadn’t time to come home, you see; only the

two days. And he knew nobody in Paris except the old professor’s family,

where Ruth and Rosemary stayed before the war.”

“No; we were not at Cannes; we had gone to the sea in Normandy,” said

Alix. It was in her tradition, that an emergency should find one

resourceful, yet, had she had time for the reflection, her own swiftness

in resource might now have surprised herself. “Maman has a little house

on the coast that we sometimes go to, but that she usually lets. We

depend very much on letting it every summer. We went that time in

February to put it in order for the spring. It could not be helped;

tenants were coming early,” said Alix.

“What a pity,” Mrs. Bradley repeated sadly. “Or if only he could have

managed to go to you there.”

“You may be sure that we wired at once and suggested it; but the time

was too short,” said Alix.

Now she was able, since Mrs. Bradley said no more, to come to the

surface, alive and apparently uninjured, but to her own consciousness

floating like a helpless, battered object. Something dreadful had

happened to her; she knew that; and to Maman; and to them all. But she

could not see it clearly. Only by degrees, as Mrs. Bradley wound her

last loops of wool and said, “Thank you, dear,” and her hands could fold

again in her lap, did it come to her that the dreadful thing was

something that Captain Owen had done; and most of all to Maman.

He had been with them; staying with them; three times; the cherished

friend; and he had never told his family. She sat there, very still, and

tried to think why it could have been, and the picture that came to her

was of Captain Owen sitting on one side of the fire in the little salon

of the rue de Penthièvre; sitting as Giles now sat; looking across at

Maman who, her finger in the pages of a half-closed book, returned his

gaze with a strange sadness. And from this picture, lifting her eyes,

she met Giles’s fixed upon her and saw that Giles knew, too.

She looked back at him. All she could do was to look. To pretend not to

see that he knew, to look away while she pretended, would only be to

reveal more glaringly to him her sense of their mutual misfortune.

Giles, too, knew that Captain Owen had been with them in Paris; he would

not have looked at her like that if he had not known; with that dark and

heavy look.

“Oh, I say!” groaned Rosemary, stretching herself out in her chair with

a wide yawn of fatigue, “why was I such a fool as to take out this

sleeve! It was well enough long, and I’ll never get it in properly

again.”

“I told you to cut it kimono shape; you’d have had no trouble then,”

said Ruth. “Where’s your house in Normandy, Alix? We were in Houlegate,

years ago, when we were kids. I never thought of you in Normandy

somehow. Only in Cannes, among the orange-trees you know, romantic

child.”

“It is at Vaudettes-sur-Mer,” said Alix. “I like Normandy better than

the Riviera.”

“I never heard of Vaudettes-sur-Mer,” said Ruth. “Is it pretty? Has it

got a sandy beach?”

“No; it is _galets_, not sand; not until the tide is low; and Vaudettes

is up on the cliff so that one has a long climb down to get to it. But

the village is very pretty.”

“Most French seaside villas are such hideous gimcrack things; worse than

ours, I always think. Is your house an old one?”

“Yes; quite old; quite unspoiled. There are no modern villas yet at

Vaudettes.”

Giles got up.

“Are you going to bed, dear?” Mrs. Bradley asked.

“No; I’m going to read in my room.”

“Do we make too much noise?”

“A little too much. Good-night everybody,” said Giles.

“How tired Giles looks,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“He’s grinding too hard at his work,” said Ruth.

Alix felt that it was not his work. Giles, too, had had a blow; and he

was angry with her; darkly, heavily angry; why she could not tell. Only

her heart swelled with a suffocating sense of resentment and of tears.

She did not go to the study next morning. She had thought and thought in

the night, and she saw now that if Giles knew something that she knew,

he also knew something she did not know. She was afraid of Giles and his

knowledge; afraid of what they might have to say to each other. And she

was angry with him, too, for making her afraid. Pain, dark and

mysterious, pain that seemed to have come to her from his eyes, pressed

upon her. And it made her think of the suffering that Grand-père’s eyes

had conveyed; and of Maman. What she feared was that he would speak to

her of Maman.

She did not go; but Giles came to her. She was curled up in her scarf on

the sofa in the cold drawing-room, and it made her think of the time

that she had waited at Victoria and Giles had been so late. He was not

late now; he was early; and he said at once, making no pretence about

it: “Come, please, I want to talk to you.”

She had felt herself angry with Giles, because of the injustice of his

anger towards herself; but as she faced him in the study, the grey

January morning outside the window, the gas-fire creaking in its dismal

mirth in the grate, her anger went down. She felt pity for him. He, too,

had not slept; he, too, had had a horrible night; and if he looked at

her thus sternly it was, she saw, more because he was suffering than

because he was angry. He stood before her, his hands thrust deeply in

his pockets, and what he said was: “Look here, Alix, were you lying last

night?”

Astonishment almost bereft her of breath. Lying? Could he have thought

it possible that she was not lying? Could he have thought it

possible—turning it over and over in his mind during the night—that

she did not know about Captain Owen’s leaves? It flashed across her

that, if she could find another lie, now, for him, and say that she had

not been lying, he might believe her. He would have no knowledge with

which to contradict that lie. But, while she looked at him, feeling her

face getting whiter and whiter, what strangely came to her was that she

could not lie to Giles. It was better to share whatever pain there was

to be shared with him than to be shut out, with her lie, in loneliness,

if in safety. So, keeping her eyes on him, in a steady voice she said:

“Yes. I was lying.”

Giles at this contemplated her for a long time and it seemed to be with

deep thoughtfulness rather than with any other feeling.

“Why?” he said at last.

“How could I not?” asked Alix.

“How could you not?—You can invent such a story, in every detail, and

then come and ask me how not? What in Heaven’s name do you mean?” said

Giles. “Have you no sense of truth?”

“Your mother did not know. Captain Owen never told your mother.” Alix’s

voice was trembling, for she heard the emotion in his. “Would you have

had me say to her, after he had kept silence, that he had been with us

three times in Paris?”

Giles’s expression altered. “Three times?”

“Yes. Three. Not the once she thought. That time in February was the

first. He came twice afterwards. You did not know?”

“No,” said Giles, “I didn’t know that. I thought it was only the once.”

He stopped. He stopped for a long time after saying this and suddenly

she saw the blood mounting to his face. He became, slowly, crimson. He

did not know what to say. Oh, poor Giles, what was this horrible

perplexity that so darkened his good face when all that he had to tell

her, when it finally came, was so simple? “I wasn’t in the same part of

the front as he was. I didn’t follow what he did. It was by chance that

I saw him in Paris, that time in February. I had a leave, too. And I saw

him there, walking in the Bois with your mother.”

Giles had seen Maman! Alix felt herself grow dim with perplexity. She

looked about her and sank down on a chair before her little

writing-table. “Did you not speak to them?”

“No, I didn’t speak to them.” Giles stood there, in his helplessness,

before her. “I thought they wanted to be alone.”

“But Maman would so have wished to know you. I do not see why you did

not speak. Yes. I remember that they went to the Bois. He was with us

all the time, you see. He stayed with us,” said Alix.

Poor Giles. How overwhelming was his plight! Could shame for his

brother’s inexplicable duplicity, shame for his own strange silence,

that day in the Bois, account for such confusion? “Yes. I was afraid you

were lying,” was all he found to mutter.

“But you knew. You knew, and yet you kept it from your mother. It was

for her sake that you kept it from her. It was for her sake I lied. What

else could I do?” said Alix.

“Do you often lie like that? I mean—the house on the cliff;—the

_galet_ beach; the wire you sent him to come to you in Normandy;—were

they all invented?” Giles ignored the question of his complicity.

“Some were invented and some not.” Alix tried to steady her thoughts so

that she might satisfy Giles as to this point—so irrelevant a point it

seemed to her. “I do not think I could have invented it all so quickly.

We have the little house at Vaudettes. We often go there. But of course

we were not there then. I do not think I often lie. Only when it is

necessary; like this.”

Giles’s eyes studied her. “And if you had spoken the truth last

night—the whole truth—as you know it—what would you have said?”

“But what I have said to you, Giles. That he was with us three times.

That all his leaves were with us;—the last a fortnight before he was

killed. Was it not better that I should lie to her than that she should

know her son had been disloyal to her—as well as to my mother?”

Giles, while she spoke, had put up his hand to rub in perplexity through

his hair; now it paused. “To your mother?”

“Was it not a great wrong he did her, too?”

“How do you mean?” Giles’s voice was short and sharp.

It came over her with a wave of old bitterness that this was an aspect

of the question he had too much ignored. “Does my mother’s dignity not

count? It was as if he had something to hide in their friendship; as if

he were ashamed. That was to do her a great wrong. He owed Maman so

much. She had been home to him.”

The memory of all that he owed Maman, the lonely young soldier; fireside

talks; happy walks; plays, pictures, people; the lavishing of all she

had to give;—the best, was it not, that life had to show?—struck too

deeply at her, and suddenly she felt her eyes fill with tears. For

Giles, too, made part of the wrong to Maman. His silence had had its

complicity. It was as if he, too, tacitly, had helped Captain Owen to

hide something of which he, too, was ashamed.

“I know, I know,” Giles muttered. He saw her tears and he was dreadfully

troubled. “Of course she was most awfully good to him.—I mean—I can’t

imagine why he said nothing—I can’t imagine why.”

But wasn’t he lying now? He who had not spoken to his brother and to

Maman in the Bois? The sharp tangle of her thoughts hurt her. She leaned

her elbows on the table and her forehead on her hands. “I don’t

understand,” she said, keeping herself from crying.

“Poor little kid! Poor little kid!” broke as if irresistibly from Giles.

He was almost crying, too. He walked up and down behind her. She felt

that he would have liked to kiss and comfort her as if she had been Ruth

or Rosemary. But, turning away at last, he dropped into his chair before

the fire and for a long time they were both silent.

“Look here, Alix,” he said suddenly at last. He had, it was evident,

been thinking things out to quite new conclusions. “I wasn’t quite

straight with you just now, and I want to be straight with you. I want

you to be straight with me. Will you promise me to? Will you promise not

to lie to me, ever?”

“Ever? How can I tell?” said Alix from between her hands. “It is

sometimes necessary; if someone one loves is concerned.”

“Well,” Giles reflected on her proviso and, apparently, accepted it, “I

can know you’ll _want_ to tell me the truth, can’t I?”

“Yes. Oh, yes, Giles.”

“Good. I believe you’ll come to see it’s always better. Even in a

hateful puzzle like this, perhaps. Well, then, I’ll begin. I wasn’t

straight just now. I _can_ imagine why Owen didn’t tell us about those

Paris leaves. And I think it best you should be able to imagine it, too.

It was because of Toppie.”

“Toppie?” Alix echoed faintly.

Giles’s back was turned to her as he sat before the fire. She could not

see his face as he went on: “Yes, Toppie. They were engaged. They loved

each other. You’ve seen what Toppie feels about him now. He is her past

and he is her present; and her future, too. There’s nobody in the world

for her but him. Well. That’s it. Can you imagine Toppie, while he was

away in France, seeing as much of another man as Owen saw of your

mother?”

Alix sat staring at the back of Giles’s head. “She was not alone; in a

strange country. Why should he not find a little peace and happiness

with a friend?”

“Yes, I know. That seems all right. But why didn’t he come home and see

Toppie? He could have managed to get one leave for England, instead of

three for Paris; almost certainly, if he’d wanted to. And put all that

aside. The worst thing of all, the thing that would shatter Toppie’s

life if she could know it, is that he kept quiet about the last two

leaves, and never wrote to any of us that he’d been with you and your

mother for the first. What would Toppie feel if she could know that? I

ask you.”

“You mean,” said Alix, pressing her forehead on her hands and staring,

now, down at the table, “that he cared most for Maman?”

“Doesn’t it look like it?”

She tried to think. “He would have come back to Toppie after the war. It

was perhaps because of the war. He did not know, those times he came to

us, that it was the end.” The new, strange shapes of things Giles had

set before her were mingling irrefutably with all her memories, and the

memory of last night returned to her. Captain Owen and Maman on either

side of the fire. Captain Owen’s dwelling eyes. How much he had cared

for Maman! Oh, how much! And, trying to answer her own thoughts, she

went on: “Maman did not care most for him. I do not think so. She cared

very much. His death was a great blow. But so many people care for

Maman. He could have come back to Toppie; Maman would not have kept

him.”

When she had said this, it was as if the silence between her and Giles

was altered in its quality. He said nothing for so long a time that the

echoes of her own words began to sing in her head like brazen bells.

They were true words. Yet they did not ring true. Long before Giles

spoke, she wished she had not said them.

“And you think,” he said, “that Toppie would have cared to marry a man

who hadn’t been kept from marrying her?” How dreadful was Giles’s voice.

Dark and heavy, as his eyes had been last night.

“No; no, Giles. I do not mean that. I am sorry. Not that. It was of

Maman I was thinking. You think of Toppie and I think of Maman; the ones

we love most. No; I see that she would not have married him.”

“You _do_ see, Alix. That’s all I wanted. You see why he didn’t tell us.

And that’s all we need say about it. He was my brother, and I was

awfully fond of him. But he was very wrong. He did a great wrong. And

you have lied for our sakes, and we’ve profited by it; if it is profit.

All I pray is that you’ll never feel you have to lie, for anyone’s sake,

again. There. That’s over. We’ll get to work. Have you everything you

want?” Giles got up and took his pipe from the mantelpiece and his

tobacco-pouch from his pocket. “And don’t let me ever see you afraid to

come in here in the morning. It made me feel quite queer to find you

crouched away in the cold as if I’d been an ogre.”

“I thought you were angry with me, Giles; and I thought I was angry with

you. It makes me angry, always, at once, if I think people are

displeased with me unfairly. I am like that.”

“Jolly well it may have made you angry. Of course I was fairly sick

about your lying; and the house on the cliff; and the wire to Owen; on

the top of everything else.”

“And even the house might have been a lie, you know,” said Alix, looking

up at him. “If it had needed to be invented, and if I could have

invented it in time.”

“I’m afraid it could. Yes; that’s what I thought. And it made me feel

sick. But you’ve promised me about lies, haven’t you; and you must

promise me, besides, that if you’re ever angry you’ll come and tell me

so. To work, then,” said Giles, and he dropped into his chair and took

up Bergson.

Alix did not take up her pen. She sat above her paper, but she knew that

the last thing she could think of doing that morning was to write to

Maman. She might be able to read the book about birds, by Hudson, that

Giles had given her, and she drew it towards her and opened it; but soon

found she could not read. Her heart seemed to be trembling and her blood

trembling. All her mind was shaken; and the picture that flashed,

disappeared, and flashed again, was always that memory of Captain Owen’s

eyes as he gazed across at Maman from his place before the fire. It was

not Maman’s fault. How could she have averted, how could she have

avoided such a devotion? A sense of intolerable grief broke down her

silence.

“Giles,” she said suddenly.

“What?” He put down his book at once. He, too, was not really reading.

Perhaps his heart was trembling, too.

“May I say one thing more?”

“All right.”

“It is Maman, Giles. It is what you think of her. Perhaps I am always

angry with you, because of what you think of her. Let me say it now,

then. He cared for her most. But if you knew her you would understand;

you would not blame her; perhaps you would not blame him so much.”

Giles had turned in his chair and was looking at her over his shoulder,

in deep astonishment. “I’ve never said a word against your mother,

Alix,” he said in a low voice.

“It is worse than words, Giles. I am not so stupid. You put her out. You

will not look at her. But if you could see her you would understand.

Maman never asks for anything. Why should she? She only gives.”

“I have seen her, you know,” said Giles. In sudden, intense uneasiness,

distress, even, he got up and walked away to the window and stood there,

his back to her, looking out.

“Did that explain nothing?” said Alix.

“She is very beautiful,” said Giles. “I never saw anyone so beautiful.”

“Oh, more, much more than that. How could he help caring for her? How

can one govern one’s love for people? I do not mean that he was right.

But he had always known Toppie, had he not? While Maman was something

quite strange to him. And one thinks most, perhaps, of what is strange.

Oh, I do not forget Toppie. But it would not have been to keep him true

to Toppie, if she had sent him away.”

“She is very beautiful,” Giles repeated, almost dully; as if that were

all he could find to say.

“Oh, Giles, if you could only know her!” said Alix. It was possible to

speak like this to him now. And his back was turned to her and that made

it easier. She leaned her forehead on her hands and looked down at the

table while she went on: “Let me tell you what Maman makes me think of

always. A mountain torrent. We have them in the mountains near Montarel.

So swift, and dark, and clear, with such deep pools among the rocks; and

such great leaps. Oh, more than beautiful! I saw an eagle once when I

was kneeling by a pool. As I looked down into the water, it was as if I

looked down into the sky and there was an eagle, wheeling in the

blue—far, far below me. It gave me the strangest feeling; like Maman

sometimes. And her lovely, small things; like the little pinks and

campanulas that grow along the banks; so sweet and tiny; and little

_mésanges_ with bright blue heads, hanging upside down in the birches.

There is no one like her. Everyone else is still and dull beside her.

Who could help loving her? Toppie would love her, I am sure. You would

love her, too, Giles, if you knew her.”

He had turned, while she spoke, and was looking at her and, lifting her

head, she met his eyes and saw how deeply she had touched him. Deeply

touched, deeply troubled, Giles looked across at her; but she saw that

he was thinking of her and not of Maman. It was as if he were so sorry

for her, and so fond of her, that he hardly knew what to say. And what

he did say at last was: “You are rather like a mountain torrent

yourself; eagles and campanulas and all!”

“I? Oh, no.” She was glad that Giles should think that of her, but it

was of Maman she wanted him to think. “I am one of the still ones; one

of the dull ones, beside Maman. And I never have great shattering

leaps.” She looked away from Giles as she saw further into her simile,

saw things she wanted him—oh! so wanted him—to see and understand.

“Let me tell you, Giles. When one loves her, that is what one fears for

her—those great leaps down from the rocks. So splendid; so bright and

splendid; but so dangerous. There is danger for her always. When one

loves her, that is what one fears.”

He said nothing. He stood there, leaning back against the window. Never

in her life had she so spoken to anybody. For no one but this young

Englishman, so lately a stranger, could she have found such words. They

rose up from her heart unbidden, and the impulse beneath them was the

deepest impulse of her life. More than the child’s love for its mother.

There was in it a maternal love, watchful and succouring, for a creature

cherished and in peril.

She had not looked back at Giles, and he came presently to her table and

stood above her, moving the objects upon it here and there, as if he

could not find the words to use. And at last he said: “You are right to

love your mother. Never think I don’t understand that.”

“Perhaps we both love in the same way, Giles,” said Alix, still not

looking at him. “You think of Toppie—and I think of Maman—perhaps in

the same way.”

Giles stood very still. Then he said gently: “Perhaps we do. I feel

Toppie in danger; in dreadful danger of being hurt; if that’s what you

mean.”

“Yes, that is what I mean. And I can help you with Toppie. I can help

you to keep the things that would hurt her from her. And perhaps, some

day, if the time came, you would help me with Maman.”

Giles had ceased to move the inkstand and candle-sticks. He put his

hands in his pockets. “What do you think of as her danger, Alix?” he

brought out.

Alix had to think; it was not a new wonder; but she seemed to feel it

newly, now that Giles was there to help her with it. “Perhaps you see

it, Giles,” she suggested. “Is it something in her nature? Is it because

she left my father? Perhaps you see the danger I can only fear. You give

me that feeling sometimes. I am so much younger than you. There are

things I do not understand.”

“Yes. I see. Yes.” Giles stood there. “You trust me with it all, then.”

“I trust you with everything, Giles.”

“You help me, and I’ll help you if ever I get the chance. I’ll not

forget, Alix.” He put out his hand as he said these words and Alix felt

that their clasp was on a pact. Yet, as he turned from her and went back

to his chair, she had still the feeling that it was of her, not of

Maman, that he was thinking. It was as if he saw _her_ in danger.

CHAPTER IX

It was evident to Alix, thinking and thinking of it in the day and night

that followed her talk with Giles, that the best way of helping him was

not to be there at all. The greater the distance between her and Maman’s

life and Toppie’s life, the safer would Toppie be. She should never, oh,

never, have come at all, and Maman would never have let her could she

have known that Captain Owen had kept that inculpating silence. But she

could not tell Maman of that now. If Toppie must not be hurt, neither

must Maman. It would hurt her, terribly, even if she, like Giles, saw at

once the reason for it. But she wrote to Maman the next morning, sitting

there behind Giles, and begged that she might come home.

She had been long enough in England, she said. It was not that she was

unhappy; they were all too kind for that. But it was not her life. She

was a sea-fish—Alix found the simile, feeling that it would be helpful

with Maman—and they were river-fishes, and she was not comfortable in

their water. _Je vous supplie, Maman chérie, laissez-moi revenir._

Eight days passed before Maman’s answer arrived. It was decisive. She

could not think of having Alix back till Spring. It was everything to

her to know that her darling was benefiting by all the advantages of

Heathside. Even had there not been the wretched question of money, she

would have chosen to have her there and Alix must not fret; how far less

trying it was for her to be at Heathside with such good friends than if,

like so many _jeunes filles de son âge_, she had been in a convent. As

for herself, she was starting in a few days with friends for a little

trip to Italy and would not be back in Paris till April or May. Maman

was evidently preoccupied, yet determined. There was nothing for it but

to submit.

A few days after this, Alix and Giles and Mrs. Bradley motored to

Oxford. She did not enjoy the drive. It was sad to be losing Giles. She

did not know how she would find Heathside without him. The cold, grey

day matched her mood, and as they entered the mean, modern streets of

Oxford, at dusk, she thought that she had never seen so _triste_ a town

and wondered that it could harbour beauty and antiquity.

Giles’s rooms, however, were amusing. They belonged to another world.

One went through old courtyards where the stone was peeling in great

flakes from the walls, up narrow stone staircases, winding and winding,

with names on the doors one passed, and found oneself at last, high up,

overlooking a quadrangle of green, in a solid, pleasant room which might

have been waiting for Giles during the years of his absence, so

expressive of his personality were the blazing fire, the deep chairs,

even the blue-and-white tea-cups that waited on the central table.

The books and pictures were to go up next day; but even so the room was

cheerful, and a wise, middle-aged man, whom Alix at first, in some

bewilderment, took to be a professor lending himself to friendly

offices, perhaps in some English ritual of self-effacement, brought in

an excellent tea.

“He’s what we call a scout,” Giles, smiling, explained to her.

“Not a Boy Scout!” Alix exclaimed. It was very confusing, and Giles had

to explain it further.

She and Mrs. Bradley slept that night at lodgings in the town and Alix

made her first acquaintance with the English lodging-house bed. There

was no _sommier_ and the mattress seemed to be filled with potatoes. One

wound oneself among the lumps and contrived at last to sleep.

They helped Giles with his books and pictures next morning, and in the

afternoon he said he must show her Oxford while his mother shopped. It

was raining. Giles had on a raincoat turned up about his ears, and so

had she. She had never seen so many bicycles, and from under a dripping

umbrella, after one had dodged them, she found the Gothic quadrangles

and deep emerald gardens, the meditative swans gliding, at Worcester, on

the water, and the mist-washed vistas of the High, all _triste_. She was

depressed at the thought of leaving Giles behind in such a damp,

crumbling place where it was, indeed, natural to think of philosophers

drinking hemlock, and where only in the refuge of one’s own room with

the wise scout to take care of one, might one find a sense of warmth and

cheerfulness.

“You can’t very well imagine how jolly all this is on a fine day,” said

Giles: “when the sun comes out, you know, and the distances are blue,

and the stone golden, and the gardens full of flowers.”

He was sad, too, Alix felt, though he tried to speak cheerfully and the

day was unbecoming to him as to everything else. He looked a gaunt,

uncouth student, his nose projecting under his cap and his eyes making

Alix think, in their meditative melancholy, of the swans. He would, of

course, be missing Toppie.

“All the women wear velour hats of the same shape,” she observed as they

made their way along the High. “All turn up behind and down in front.

Now I would turn mine down behind and up in front—with a very slight

curve to the side; the line is better. And for _costumes tailleurs_ it

is so needful that the skirt should hang evenly.”

“Is it?” said Giles with a gloomy grin. “I’m showing you the

architecture, not the clothes of Oxford.”

“Are they all the wives of philosophers?” Alix inquired, and the

question indubitably interested her more than the architecture.

“A good many of them are, no doubt,” laughed Giles. “Do you wonder if my

wife will look like that?”

Alix had a sudden vision of Toppie in the rainy High Street. Yes, even

dear Toppie would sink, she felt, into the fatal sameness, embody the

type. She could see her, slender, in her wet grey tweed, speeding on a

bicycle in just such a velour hat. They, too, were perhaps Toppies if

one could have a careful look at them.

“Do you intend to live in Oxford, Giles?” she inquired.

“I’d like to.—Here is Magdalen and the tower. Let’s cross the bridge so

that you can see the tower.—It’s where I want to live.”

They crossed the bridge and he told her about the tower and the May

morning ceremony.

“It must be very charming, very gay,” said Alix. “And would you care to

marry soon?” The question, she knew, was academic, merely. There could

be no hope of marriage for Giles as long as Toppie thought only of

Captain Owen. But they could both pretend.

“I couldn’t marry soon.” Giles was still laughing, though evidently a

little disconcerted by her lack of appreciation. “I’ve no money.” He led

her off to Christ Church meadows.

“None at all, Giles?”

“Well, only enough to have a very dowdy wife. To buy her a better hat

and a smarter _costume tailleur_ I’d need a great deal more.”

“But Captain Owen was to marry.” Alix ventured it. It was all so remote.

Giles felt it so. He elucidated the financial differences of the family.

“We’ve all got a little. He went into the city, into stock-broking, and

was making a very good thing of it. He could very well afford to marry.”

“And do you not care for stock-broking?”

“No; I care for philosophy. Unlucky for my wife, isn’t it, Alix?”

“I do not know. Perhaps not if she had taste. One can do so much with

very little money if one has taste. But would they know—the others—if

she had to live in Oxford, that her hats and dresses were different?”

“Oh—I expect women always know that—even the wives of philosophers!”

laughed Giles.

In spite of her æsthetic deficiencies, she felt that she kept up his

spirits.

For tea they went to a professor friend—a real professor this time—who

had known Mrs. Bradley’s father. Everybody seemed to have known Mrs.

Bradley’s father. He lived in the Banbury Road with two unmarried

daughters, and was old but robust and bearded and jovial, and he kept a

hand on Giles’s shoulder for a long time and promised Mrs. Bradley good

things of him.

Giles stood and smiled and promised nothing. She had an impression of

his strength and self-knowledge.

Monsieur le professeur’s daughters were middle-aged ladies with lean red

faces and grey hair strained tightly back above their ears and clothes

of which all that could be said was that they were warm and clean. So

tall, so spare they were, the pair of them, so rigid and with such

ingenuous eyes, that they made Alix think of the elongated figures on

the western portals of Chartres; only the Misses Cockburn were not

beautiful in their strangeness and had none of the exquisite

_chinoiserie_ of aspect upon which Maman and monsieur Villanelle had

discoursed on that summer afternoon when they had visited the great

cathedral. How it all rushed over her as she sat at the little table

Miss Jennifer had placed for her near the window! She saw them all

three, Maman in white under her white sunshade, in the hot French

sunlight before the sublime object. Up into the blue it went, august,

almost terrifying, so beautiful that it made one want to cry. And as

they had wandered in and out, into the vast, illuminated darkness where

the rose windows hung like apparitions, out into the fretted portals

with the sunlight washing up their steps, Maman had told her of a Queen

Alix who had borne a part in its history. Her heart contracted as she

remembered it all. Maman might have been one of those queens. She so

belonged to Chartres. When Chartres was in one’s blood, what could one

feel for Oxford?

She had time for these comparisons. The Misses Cockburn were kind, but

they paid no attention to her beyond carefully feeding her; as if, she

reflected, she had been a pet dog led in by Mrs. Bradley. People in

England, she had already surmised, did not feel an obligation to

entertain, further than by feeding, other people’s friends.

She sat and ate her scone and drank her tea and looked out at a

laburnum-tree and a hawthorn-tree, all leafless and dripping on the

background of ornamental red brick opposite. All the houses were of red

brick and all so singularly alike in spite of their adventurous

excrescences. “_Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose_,” thought

Alix, as she watched the tea-time lights come out in the bow-windows

with Gothic points over them, and felt that they held learned, innocent

people who would not be disconcerted by anything that happened in the

universe. She had never seen a place that seemed to her quite so safe as

the Banbury Road. And yet such safety made part of the _tristesse_.

Dieu! how _triste_ it was! How dreadful it would be to be caught and

imprisoned there.

Miss Grace came to draw the curtain and asked Alix if she were warm and

Alix said she was. Giles seemed quite at home, seemed, indeed, part of

it, lifting the scones from the little brass stand before the fire,

talking about municipal elections to Miss Jennifer and about the Bach

Choir to Miss Grace. With Giles as the link of identity between them,

she saw that Heathside was part of the Banbury Road, too. Even Giles

seemed far away as the sense of alienation grew within her.

Then as she sat there, alone, apart, the throb of a big motor came up to

the gate, and a moment afterwards a lady was among them who, by her

presence, dispelled the sense of loneliness. It might have been into

Maman’s salon that she came, so vivid was Alix’s sense of knowing what

she would do and say and of liking both beforehand. All furs and pearls

and softness, and such sweet smiles, she was one of the people who could

see and blow and catch the soap-bubbles, the beautiful, impalpable

things of human intercourse, and while she talked to monsieur le

professeur, she cast mild, bright glances at Giles, at Mrs. Bradley, at

herself. Alix saw that it was at herself that she looked most, and

presently, when the lady and Mrs. Bradley talked, Mrs. Bradley called

her to them, and holding her hand, scanning her face, the lady said she

knew her name. “It’s there behind me; where I don’t quite know;—in an

old letter; a volume of _mémoires_; an ancestor of mine, I feel it must

have been, who knew a Mouveray in Paris before the Revolution. Yes, that

was it. It comes back to me. A comte Henri de Mouveray.”

Alix remembered, too. “He was guillotined at Lyon. He was a great-uncle

of Grand-père’s.”

“And where is Grand-père?” asked Lady Mary Hamble, for such was her

name. “Do you live with him?”

Alix told her that she had lived with him; but that he was dead. “I live

with my mother in Paris,” she said.

When Lady Mary was gone, Alix felt herself scanned by Miss Grace and

Miss Jennifer as if from a spaniel she had altered to a monkey; not more

interesting, but more curious. Monsieur le professeur still didn’t see

her at all. He brushed aside Lady Mary and went on talking about

Relativity to Giles.

“Yes; was it not strange?” said Alix, as, in Giles’s rooms again, Mrs.

Bradley commented on the romantic encounter. “There was his portrait at

Montarel, that Henri de Mouveray. So grave yet so gay a face, blue-eyed,

and with dark hair.”

“Like you, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, and Alix remembered that he was

like her; very.

“And to think that someone so near you was guillotined at Lyon,” Mrs.

Bradley mused. “He could have known your grandfather.”

“Yes. If he had not been guillotined, if he had lived long enough, he

could have.”

“Don’t you think Lady Mary very lovely, Giles?” said Mrs. Bradley. “She

must be as old as I am, I suppose; yet how lovely.”

“She’s not nearly as lovely as you are,” said Giles, poking the fire.

Mrs. Bradley laughed at the absurdity. “That’s loyal—but not accurate,

my dear.”

“She’s very pretty, and she’s never had a doubt. She’s always felt that

she was lovely and that everyone thought her lovely, and I suppose that

preserves the complexion,” said Giles.

“But if everyone thinks one so, is it not likely that one is lovely?”

Alix inquired. “And if one is so, why should one not think so oneself?”

She considered that Giles was captious.

“No one is as right in every way as she thinks herself,” said Giles. “No

one can be so smooth without being artificial. She’s awfully nice, I’m

sure; but for beauty, give me Mummy.”

It would not be polite to contradict him, but Alix, too, thought Giles

absurd.

CHAPTER X

She and Mrs. Bradley motored home together next day. It had stopped

raining and the air had the unexpected softness that mid-winter in

England can mitigatingly display. Alix had never yet seen so much of

Mrs. Bradley as on this drive. She was the most occupied person; she was

always immersed in occupations; and to have her beside one, with nothing

to occupy her except driving the car, was to see her with a new

completeness. Mrs. Bradley was only not intimate because absorbed in

affairs remote from her own interests. She was not even intimate with

her own children, for Alix could not remember ever having heard her talk

with them about herself. She tenderly took them for granted and took for

granted—too much, Alix considered—their capacity for directing their

own lives once the main lines were laid out for them. But to-day, with

its sense of interlude, no papers to read, no committees to attend, it

was as if without becoming intimate she became confiding. It touched

Alix to hear her. It touched her because she felt that Mrs. Bradley must

so often need to confide and would not know it. She talked to her about

Giles. “I know he’ll do well. I know he will be useful. Giles will

always pull his weight wherever he is,” she said, and the conception of

life as a boat where one’s meaning consisted in pulling one’s weight was

a very new one to Alix. When his mother so spoke, she saw Giles sitting,

half stripped, in the chilly English air, grey water beneath, grey sky

above, bent to the oars among comrades and ready for the word of

command. That was what his mother desired for him; that strenuous,

rigorous life. Maman did not think of life like that. She wanted no

rigours for her child. She didn’t care a bit about her being useful.

Other people were to be of use to her and she was to enjoy herself. That

was Maman’s idea.

“You’ve seen, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Bradley, her gentle eyes fixed before

her as she drove, “how fond he is of Toppie. It’s always been so. He’s

never thought of anybody else. Even before she and Owen fell in love

with each other. I’ve sometimes wondered—I’ve sometimes wished—” Mrs.

Bradley’s voice dropped to a musing uncertainty.

“Giles was much younger than Captain Owen, was he not?” said Alix.

“Not so much younger. He is a year older than Toppie. Twenty-five. But

it wasn’t that. She would, I’m afraid, never have thought of him, with

Owen there. Perhaps she had always been too sure of him and taken him

too much for granted, while with Owen, until he did, at last, fall in

love with her, she was never sure. He was fond of several people, you

see, before he was fond of Toppie. I’m afraid she suffered, poor

darling. And that’s what one feels,” Mrs. Bradley mused on, while Alix

knew a growing discomfort in hearing her. “Owen could have been happy

with so many girls; it wasn’t, with him, the one great thing only;

whereas with Giles it was.”

“And perhaps if she had married him,” said Alix, her thoughts held by

that sense of something painful, twisted, difficult to see plainly, “she

would have suffered even more. If he continued to be fond of other

people.”

“Oh, but that couldn’t have been after they were married!” Mrs. Bradley

exclaimed, and with a shock of surprise in her voice, while her eyes,

almost scared by the suggestion, turned to scan the meditative face of

the little French girl beside her. “That couldn’t have been after he

loved her at last; after they were engaged. Oh, no; Owen would have been

faithful, always.”

“But all men are not faithful, are they?” Alix commented, keeping her

eyes before her and her voice quiet and impersonal. She felt that she

would like to know what Mrs. Bradley thought on this subject. Had not

Giles’s horror been somewhat misplaced? “So many wives, I mean, from

what one hears, have unfaithful husbands.”

Mrs. Bradley continued to scan her and with even more alarm.

“But I hope you don’t hear of such dreadful things, dear child. No good

husband is unfaithful.”

“Is it so very dreadful? Can one govern one’s heart? I see that it is

different for a wife,” said Alix. “She is at home and has the children.

But a man—out in the world—May he not form many attachments without so

much blame?—I do not understand these things, but I cannot see why it

is so dreadful.”

“You are too young, dear, to understand them. Yet even you, I am sure,

can imagine how terrible it would be to know that your husband, whom you

loved and trusted, loved other people.”

“It might be very sad.” Alix considered the remote contingency. “I see

that it might make me sad—if I loved him very much. But I should have

the children, the _foyer_. And then he might still love me most, while

loving others, too. Do you not find that possible, here in England? In

France, I am sure, we do not feel it so strange a thought.”

“We feel it strange; very strange and dreadful,” said Mrs. Bradley with

as much vehemence as she ever displayed on any subject. “And you will,

too, I am sure, darling, when you are older and understand what it means

to trust someone with your life.—No, no; such a thing would have been

impossible with Owen and Toppie. All that I meant was that his love was

different in quality from Giles’s. Giles’s nature, in some ways, is

deeper than dear Owen’s was.”

“Oh, yes. Deeper. One feels that at once,” Alix murmured, while the

thought, seen at last clearly, pierced her through that Giles was held

from his happiness by an illusion since Toppie might not have cared for

Captain Owen had she known how much he cared for Maman. “Perhaps in time

she will come to see what Giles is and love him. Do you not think so?”

“It’s what I hope for more than anything, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“Giles has had such a sad life. You wouldn’t think it, perhaps. He

doesn’t show it, unless one knows him very well. Even as a little boy I

always felt him rather frustrated and sad. He adored Owen, who didn’t

pay much attention to him; and he adored Toppie who never gave him a

hope. And then the war came and ended his youth and he saw worse things

than Owen saw. He saw the worst things. His best friends were killed

beside him. He went through everything. They all had to face the problem

of it, the boys like Giles. It was never such a problem to men like

Owen. They accepted it and didn’t try to understand. Giles hasn’t been

embittered, as some of our young men have; but there is such a weight of

grief on his heart. I feel it always. I so long for some happiness to

come to him.”

It was all true. Alix had seen it in Giles’s face. Under his vehemence,

his gaiety, he carried dark memories in his heart; and there were

darknesses his mother did not know of. Perhaps it helped him to be less

lonely that she should know of them and that they should be her

darknesses, too. It gave Alix courage to bear the weight of perplexity

and fear, during the winter, to feel that she shared the weight with

Giles. She missed him so much at Heathside; yet he was there, too, in

her sense that she was helping him with Toppie, that she, too, was

shielding Toppie from hurt.

He wrote to her, and though he did not ask her for news of Toppie, she

knew that was what he wanted and gave him every detail when she

answered. Toppie went away to Bath at the end of February, but until

then Alix sent Giles her bulletins. She and Toppie often walked

together; they read together, too; and she often made Toppie laugh with

her stories about the people at Montarel, the funny things they did and

said. Giles was told of all this, and about the Greater Spotted

Woodpecker that she and Toppie saw in the birch-woods, tapping with

stealthy fierceness at a tree-trunk, beautiful in his Chinese white and

black and vermilion; and about Jock who always came with them on their

walks and had really adopted her as his most authentic mistress. She had

not much to say about the High School and Ruth and Rosemary. But then it

was Toppie Giles wanted to hear of.

Spring came at last, the early flowers, the returning birds, Toppie back

from Bath and the Easter holidays hovering on a near horizon. And one

day at tea-time Mrs. Bradley handed her a letter she had just received

from Lady Mary Hamble, a letter in its unexpectedness and sweetness that

was like the Spring. Could Mrs. Bradley lend Alix to them for a

week-end, Lady Mary asked. There were to be young people in the house

and a little dance and they would all enjoy having her.

At first, in her pleasure, strangely compounded of a sense of relief,

escape, and the soft breath of a familiar balm wafted towards her, Alix

did not notice the dates. Then, after Mrs. Bradley had said, “How

delightful; of course you must go, dear,” she saw that the Monday of

Lady Mary’s dance was the Monday of Mrs. Bradley’s; the dance to which

Toppie had promised to come; the dance for which Giles would be back;

the dance to show her white taffeta dress; _her_ dance; the invitations

all out and all accepted. “But our dance is on that Monday,” she said.

“It can’t be helped,” said Mrs. Bradley. “We’ll have to give another

smaller one some day later on. I don’t think you ought to miss the much

prettier dance at Lady Mary’s. You have us always, you see, dear.”

“But Giles.”

“Giles doesn’t really count at a dance,” smiled Mrs. Bradley. “And he

will be at home all the holidays. You won’t be missing Giles.”

Toppie was with them, and she smiled, too, looking at Alix and said:

“You’re right not to go. Giles will be coming home that very Saturday.

You couldn’t miss his coming home even if you did miss the dance.”

“But she really mustn’t miss the week-end at Cresswell Abbey,” said Mrs.

Bradley. “It’s such a lovely place, I’ve always heard. And she’ll be

back on Tuesday.”

“They’ll ask her another time,” said Toppie. “People would ask Alix

another time,” and she smiled on at her young friend, well pleased with

her, Alix saw.

“Of course they’ll ask her, Mummy!” cried Ruth who, with Rosemary, had

sat transfixed with indignation while the invitation was thus discussed.

“And it makes no difference if they don’t. Who are the Hambles, anyway!

What does Alix care about them? She doesn’t know them and doesn’t want

to. I’ve seen your Lady Mary’s picture in the ‘Daily Mirror’—drooping

around with bare shoulders and a plume and pretending not to know she’s

being snapped. I hate such empty-headed creatures, and Alix would be

bored stiff by them. Of course she can’t go! Of course she must be here

for our dance!”

Alix was quite sure that she would not be bored by Lady Mary; but she

was also sure that she could not go. No one at Heathside would

appreciate the white taffeta as Lady Mary would. There would be no one

at the Heathside dance she would like as much, she felt sure of it, as

those young people at Cresswell Abbey—no one, that is, except Giles;

and he, as his mother had said, truly she felt sure, did not count at

dances; but all the same she could not go, and Ruth and Rosemary might

think, if they pleased, that it was for their reasons.

She did not tell Giles in her next letter about the visit to Cresswell

Abbey; but when he came home, Ruth told him, the first thing, at

tea-time, all assembled as they were in the drawing-room, Toppie and

herself in their accustomed places on the sofa beside Mrs. Bradley, and

Ruth sitting on the arm of her brother’s chair.

“Only think of it, Giles! Mummy actually thought she ought to go,

because Cresswell Abbey is such a lovely place! The day of our dance,

mind you! Toppie’s cousins here and all!”

Giles seemed taken aback. “The week-end? She’d have been going to-day,”

he said.

“And missed your coming home, Giles! As if she _could_!” cried Rosemary.

“And Amy expecting her puppies any day now,” said Jack. “I thought

they’d have come this morning. She’d want to see them as soon as they

were born, wouldn’t you, Alix?—only we must be very careful not to look

at them too often. Amy’s awfully nervous when she has her pups.”

“Mummy,” said Giles, eyeing his contented sisters, “you ought to have

made her go. Alix is over here to see England, all she can of it. And

she really doesn’t see so very much of it with us, you know.”

“I did my best, dear,” said Mrs. Bradley, pouring out her tea. “She

quite refused. And Toppie aided and abetted her.”

“Yes. I aided and abetted her, Giles,” said Toppie, and she smiled now

at him with more sweetness than Alix had ever yet seen on her face for

Giles. “She can go another time to Lady Mary’s.”

“Oh, one never knows about that,” Giles murmured. But now he was

thinking more about Toppie’s smile than about Alix’s frustrated visit.

“Didn’t you want to go to Cresswell Abbey?” he asked Alix next morning

in the study, and with the question the time of their separation

collapsed and, his eyes on hers, she felt him near and familiar once

more, concerned, as always, for her welfare.

That was it. He understood that it might have given her so much pleasure

and Ruth and Rosemary didn’t understand that at all. And he wanted her

to have gone because he wanted her to have pleasure. He was like Maman

in that.

She confessed. “Yes, I did. But not so much that I could miss you and

our dance. The dance was planned for me, Giles.”

Giles rubbed his hand through his hair.—His mother should have

corrected him of that trick, though Alix rather liked to see him do it;

it left his hair very much on end.

“It’s decent of you; awfully decent of you. But you wanted to go, of

course, you dear little kid. And I’d like to think you were to get a

wider look at England than you get with us.”

“I think she will ask me again, Giles. Your mother wrote and explained

it to her and she wrote back and said it must be for another time. I

think she likes me,” said Alix. “And I like her, too. Though Ruth and

Rosemary find her empty-headed. Perhaps it is empty-headed people that I

do like,” Alix smiled. “Perhaps I am empty-headed myself.”

“I saw you took to each other. I saw you belonged with each other,”

Giles mused. “I’m awfully sorry you didn’t go.”

“Would you rather I were staying with her than here with you, Giles?”

“No; I’d rather you were staying here. But I’d like you to have a slice

of cake now and then after all the thick bread-and-butter. Now you, of

course, would like to have the cake all the time,” and Giles smiled at

her, summoning her to confess to her frivolity. But when he asked her

like that, there in the study, with the gas-fire and the untidy heaped

books and the Greek temples and the foolish animals on the mantelpiece,

Alix did not feel so sure. She liked Lady Mary. She loved the balm she

wafted. She felt sure that no one here would appreciate her white

taffeta; they would think Ruth’s pink silk ninon with the embroidered

edges just as pretty. But there would not, she felt even surer, be any

one at Cresswell Abbey who would understand as Giles did.

PART II

CHAPTER I

“_C’est la France_,” said Alix. She leaned beside him on the railing of

the Channel steamer and looked through the blue of the July day to where

the town thinly shaped itself, like a line of grey-white shells floating

between sea and sky. Her phrase was spoken in a tone of quiet statement,

unstressed by any emotion, yet Giles, while they watched the shore

together, felt its echoes stretching back revealingly into the past and

out towards the future.

That was really what had been at the bottom of her heart during all her

time with them; France. And if she had talked about it so little that

must merely have been, he reflected, because she cared about it so much.

Of course she loved her own country; he could not expect or wish

anything else; but had she, he wondered, any more love for England now

than when she had first come among them? And he felt, when he asked

himself the question, a little rueful and a little vexed. She was not a

shallow child; that he knew; it was because she was not shallow that he

minded her imperviousness to all that meant so much to them. With the

imperviousness went an oddly mature security, as of a creature formed

and fixed and not to be altered by circumstance; and it was when he

thought of this security that Giles felt a little angry; for, after all,

what had France given her, poor kid?

Giles did not think of his family, in particular, as benefactors to the

little French girl. That side of her indebtedness was not one to engage

his attention. It was England as a whole that he had hoped would by this

time have crept about her heart; England with its gentle days of Spring,

its balmy days of Summer; all the happy family life they had just come

from; tennis, dogs, strawberries on the lawn, and long bicycle rides

over the hills; England’s sweetness and fidelity embodied in his mother;

its holiness in Toppie.

The starlike image of Toppie rose before the young man’s mind and with

it his deepest doubt of the little French girl beside him. He had come

from pity for the child’s unconscious plight, pity for the cruelty of

her position there among them—a little creature so proud that it would

have been to her a burning humiliation could she have guessed how her

mother had dealt with her and them in foisting her upon them—he had

come, from this initial pity, to feel affection, then an odd, perplexed

respect, and finally a profound, a tender solicitude. It was upon her

future in France, with her mother, that it centred; but that was the

outward aspect of the inner fear; for when he thought of Toppie and of

holiness the question he had also to ask himself was whether Alix was

impervious to holiness, too?

Giles felt that he would be better able to face that question, and with

it the whole problem of the child’s future, when he had seen “Maman.”

That was why he was here. That was why he had said “yes,” on the

morning, a fortnight ago, when Maman’s letter at last had come summoning

Alix home. Since their interview, long ago in the Winter, he and Alix

had never spoken of their mutual secret, that dreadful one-sided secret

that Giles visualized as an unexploded bomb lying there between them and

liable at a touch to go off and scatter the family happiness to

fragments. The interview had ended in a pact. She was to help him; she

had, poor little creature, helped him; he still felt stung with shame to

think how much; to think how he had profited, how they all had profited,

by her falsehoods. And he was bound to help her. He knew, when Maman’s

letter came, all that lay behind the appeal as she said: “Oh, Giles,

could you not come with me? and stay if only for a little while; so that

at last you and Maman may meet?”

She felt that it would help if he were to know Maman. And it might well

be that he could only effectually help Alix if he faced at last the

baleful woman who had brought the hidden disaster to their lives. It was

better that he should know, in regard to Alix’s future, what they were

“up against.” It had not been of Maman he was thinking when he assented;

it had been, as on that day last Winter, of Alix herself. And that was

why he was here, on his way to Normandy and the village on the cliff,

and it was Dieppe that was showing now, along its wharves, façades of

sunlit houses.

“Don’t you think, Giles,” said Alix, “that the air in France is very

different? Like golden wine?—There was a wine made at a little mountain

village near Montarel—Vernay-les-Vouvières it is called—and the wine

after it. I wish you could see that village. So high and steep it is,

the road climbs for miles before you reach it; and higher still, above

the village, is an old, old statue of _la Sainte Vierge_, looking down

over the vineyards and blessing them. When one stands beside her one

sees over all the crests of the mountain-ranges; like blue rolling

waves. We used to drink Vernay-les-Vouvières at Grand-père’s. It was

very cheap, for it could not travel; it lost its bouquet at once if it

travelled. And it was a delicious wine; so pale, so light, so delicate.

One felt like singing when one drank it. I think the air of France makes

one feel like that.”

Mrs. Bradley’s household, though not pledged to teetotal principles,

eschewed all alcoholic drink, and Giles, as he listened, seeing the

Virgin, the vineyards, the ingenuous piety, the pagan gaiety that Alix’s

words conjured up, wondered what her impressions of their unenlivened

meals must have been.

“I wish I could see Vernay-les-Vouvières,” he said. “A beautiful country

yours must be, so near the Alps.—We have sunny days in England, you

know. It’s a French superstition to think that English people go

staggering about in a fog all the year round. You ought to have got over

that,” he added. “Our weather is as good as the weather in Northern

France; every bit.”

“But different, Giles. As good; but not so happy. Never like wine, I

think. Always there is something soft and sleepy in the air. After the

air of France it is like milk.”

“Milk is a very excellent thing.”

“Yes. Excellent. As a food. But it does not make one want to sing.”

To this Giles said nothing.

“For a French town Dieppe is not so specially beautiful,” Alix took up

presently; for she and Giles knew each other so well that a disagreement

could be allowed to fall between them disregarded. “I do not think that

for a French town it has special beauty; yet, seen like this, with the

harbours, and the wharves, and houses—all so golden, do you not think

it is very lovely?”

Giles had just been thinking so. “Yes. Quite lovely,” he admitted. “For

a French town it’s rather rambling and shambling, too, and I like that.”

“Ah, but it keeps its dignity all the same,” said Alix. “It has gone

where it meant to go and when it got there it stood up well.”

“We have dignified towns,” said Giles. “Edinburgh; you must see

Edinburgh one day, Alix; and Bath; and Ludlow. Of course, as to ramble,

London is a bad offender; but London is beautiful all the same.”

“Beautiful, do you think, Giles? Beautiful you mean, then, as one might

find the face of a dear, funny old great-grandmother beautiful, for what

it means; but not for what it looks; I think it a very ugly town,” said

Alix in her tone of happy statement—for Alix was very happy to-day. “It

is like an old great-grand-mother over a tea-pot; and Paris is like a

goddess with a wreath.”

“I like old great-grandmothers much better than goddesses,” said Giles.

All the same he understood. She was initiating these comparisons—and it

was so uncharacteristic of her to make comparisons—not from any desire

to disparage, but from the deep, joyous excitement, the love and pride

that could not be repressed and that she could not overtly have

expressed without expressing emotion as well. She thrilled with it, he

knew, leaning beside him, her profile, forcible, intent, golden against

the sea. It looked golden like that because the sun fell on it and the

sea was blue; but he had always thought Alix’s skin a queer colour and

never knew whether he liked or disliked it. Sometimes it was grey, like

pussy-willows: and sometimes it was green, making one think of

olive-trees or the patina on an old bronze; and sometimes, as to-day, it

was pure gold; and always it seemed to be the final expression of

significant structure rather than a decorative bloom, and to go with her

blue eyes and black hair whichever tint it took. But, as he told

himself, he was a sentimental Englishman and liked girls to be the

colour of apple-blossoms.

Alix had fallen to silence now, and he was keeping his mind rather

consciously on their friendly altercation, and even on Alix’s profile,

because he did not wish to reflect on what lay before him. He had not an

idea of what he was to say to Alix’s mother, or to do with her; and it

was no good thinking about it until he saw her; saw her again.

Saw her again! How the phrase brought back the unforgettable pang and

misery. How the unforgettable image floated in his memory, vivid yet

unseizable; irrelevant as it were and not to be woven to any secure

conclusion. It had been the stillest day, that Spring day in the Bois.

The purpling grey of branches, above, behind the wandering pair, had

melted to shroud-like distances and they had emerged before his

astonished eyes like the spectral creatures of a clairvoyant vision;

silent, and with linked arms. He had gazed at them, and as he gazed his

impulse to go forward and greet his brother was checked ere it was

formed. Owen here in Paris: Owen with madame Vervier—he had known at

once that it was she; Owen to look like that. Rooted among the thinly

scattered saplings of the wood he had remained, gazing until they passed

away and the white distance received them into its folds as it had given

them up—ominous disappearance of the brother he was never to see again.

Rooted he stood, and heard the wild, monotonous phrase of a

missel-thrush ring forth suddenly from overhead and felt his mind slowly

take possession of the icy grief that crept upon it. Owen’s face had

given him all the truth; its rapture; its terrible stilled restlessness.

And though she was so quiet, walking there, her head bent down a little,

her eyes fixed before her, Giles had felt, for all the innocence of his

chaste boyhood, that she was so quiet because she possessed him so

completely.

How clearly he could see her still, with her brooding brightness, her

soft gloom. He could not see her as baleful; he could not see her as

guilty; he only saw her walking there secure in power and loveliness.

And this was the irrelevance, the tormenting discrepancy; for she was

the woman who had taken Owen from Toppie; she was the woman who, after

her lover’s death, had placidly made use of what assets he had left her;

his family; and its trust in him and her. And she was the more baleful

to him from the fact that, though he remembered her so vividly and knew

such portentous things about her, herself he did not know at all.

There was one thing about her, however, that he could and ought to know

at once, and the thought of it worked its way up into his mind while he

and Alix leaned there. They had never again spoken of their secret, but,

before he met her mother he ought to know whether Alix had told her what

he knew of Owen’s stays with them in Paris. Before he saw madame Vervier

he ought to know what she knew about him; and suddenly, his eyes fixed

upon the wharves and houses of Dieppe, he said: “You think she’ll feel

it all right that I’m come?”

“I wrote to her that you were coming,” said Alix. Her mind had perhaps

been following some train of thought not far removed from his, for she

spoke as if they were continuing a theme rather than taking it up. “She

will be delighted.”

“Will she? Look here, Alix”—Giles gazed down over the railing at the

sea—“she couldn’t be delighted, I take it, if she knew that I had a

grievance about my brother on her account.”

He had spoken very abruptly, yet he had, he felt, put it well. In the

little pause that followed his words, he was pleased with himself for

having found any so colourless and unprovocative.

“What we know of your brother,” said Alix after her pause, “would not

give her a grievance against you; only against him.”

“Against him?”

“Did he not deceive her, too?”

“Deceive her? Oh, I see. You think he didn’t tell her that he’d kept us

in the dark?”

“He could not have told her, Giles; if that is really what you are

asking me.”

Giles, a little confused, retraced his steps. “What I’m really asking

you is whether _you’ve_ told her. I want to know where I stand with her.

Haven’t you felt that she ought to be told?”

Again Alix was silent, and for a longer time. Then she said: “It has

been my great perplexity. She does not know. Of course she does not

know. But I wrote to her at once, that time last Winter, and begged that

I might come home; and when I found she could not have me, I thought it

best to say nothing then. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you will blame

me, Giles. But I thought it best to wait. It will give her such pain

when she knows.”

It would never have given her so much pain Giles, with a sudden glow of

indignation, felt, as it had already given her daughter. What Alix had

suffered in wrestling with her problem was in her voice. “Blame you? I?

You poor kid!” he exclaimed. And he added: “After all, his silence meant

devotion to herself.”

“Do you think so?” said Alix. “I am afraid she will not feel it so. I am

afraid she will feel that it meant cowardice and lack of loyalty;—as it

does to me.”

Giles was now aware of an uncomfortable astonishment. He had to remember

that Alix was nearly seventeen. A woman could not have spoken with a

more secure assurance of putting him in his place; and if, by the same

token, she put Owen in his place, was she not, from her own point of

view, her woman’s dignity veiled only by her child’s ignorance,

justified in doing so? For if Owen had really kept madame Vervier in the

dark she might have a right to resentment. The two culprits should have

had no secrets from one another.

“I see,” he repeated, lamely, as he felt. “And you would not like to

spoil her memory of him?”

“We kept it from your mother and from Toppie because it would spoil

their memory of him,” said Alix.

“I know; but you’ll own, won’t you, that it would be a far worse

spoiling for them?”

“Yes. For them it would be worse. But why should anyone feel pain now,

when it is all over? Why should anything be spoiled?”

“It’s only,” said Giles, going carefully, “that it seems unfair to your

mother to let me come and keep her in ignorance of what I know. It’s for

you to judge, Alix; but since you love your mother so much, I rather

wonder that you can bear to keep such a secret from her. And, quite

apart from me, oughtn’t she to know just what she does send you back

to?”

“Send me back to?” Alix echoed, and her eyes met his strangely.

“Yes. Before you come back in the Autumn, don’t you think she ought to

know?”

“Do you really imagine, Giles, that if Maman knew, she would send me

back?”

“Well”—he felt that he flushed. He had not foreseen this

emergency—“since I know, and since I want you back;—why not she?”

“Do you count Maman’s pride for nothing, Giles?”

Madame Vervier’s pride had never for a moment engaged his attention, and

did not now. His attention was fully engaged by Alix’s pride, facing him

with a look of granite.

“I don’t really see why she should take it so hardly,” he said after a

moment; but he was horribly uncomfortable, for he was not speaking with

frankness to his young friend. “Your relation to us has, really, nothing

to do with her relation to Owen. It’s a new thing; and that’s an old

one; and as you say, it’s all over.”

“But she could not have me there on false pretences, Giles,” said Alix.

The pride had dropped now. It was as if with sudden sadness she saw too

well the reasons for his misunderstanding. “I could not be there on

false pretences. You have a right to think it of me since I have never

told her. But it is all over now; the new as well as the old. I need

never tell her. For I am at home again and I shall never go back to

Heathside.”

“Never come back to Heathside!” Actually for the moment Maman, Owen,

Toppie, all the grief and perplexity that hung about these figures, were

swept from Giles’s mind by his deep discomfiture. “But this is only your

holiday. Your mother’s letter said so.”

“She thinks it is only my holiday. But I am older now. I shall see to it

that I do not return to England.”

Ass that he had been not to realize the _impasse_ to which their talk

was leading them! Too obviously, from Alix’s side, this was an

inevitable decision. And Giles saw that from his side it should have

been so, too. With Alix safely back in France, there would be no more

danger of pain for his mother and wreckage for Toppie; Owen’s memory

might sleep in untarnished peace.

But Alix herself had come to count for far too much. It was as if he saw

her walking away into a dark forest where dreadful creatures prowled.

Ever since that day in his study, she had counted for too much. She was

too fine, too brave, too loyal a little creature to be given up to her

fate. He had felt that day that he would fight her fate for her, and he

felt now that the moment had come for the first grapple. But the worst

of the problem was that in fighting Alix’s fate he must fight her. He

could not tell her the fact that would have turned her pride to dust and

ashes. He could not tell her that her mother had sent her to them on

pretences so false that the minor falsity she repudiated paled beside

them. Horribly handicapped as he was for the contest, he seized his bull

by the horns: “Look here, my dear child,” he declared, speaking with all

the elder brother authority he could summon up, “you said to me that day

when we talked that you were going to trust me. Well, I ask you to trust

me now. I want you back. We all want you back. Let that suffice. No;

wait a moment. I know what you are going to say;—if Toppie knew would

she want you? I’ll take the responsibility of answering for Toppie. She

is so fond of you that I know she would. Isn’t that enough, really?

Can’t we leave it at that? And you’re quite right not to tell your

mother. Let the whole thing rest for ever.”

Her eyes were on his while he spoke to her and she listened to him

gently; but her face still kept the invulnerable look strange in one so

young. “You are kind, dear Giles,” she said. “I do trust you. But you

can’t answer for Toppie. You can’t answer for anybody. And I have not

only myself to think of. I have Maman. I _can_ answer for Maman in this

matter. She would not let me come.”

“Are you so sure of that?” broke from Giles. And now, pushed to it, he

ventured far; he ventured very far, indeed. “After all she must have

known that he kept a great deal from us. After all she must have known

that he cared more for her than he did for Toppie; that he had been

faithless to Toppie because of her.”

Poor little Alix. It was not fair. She paled in hearing him. And for a

long moment she stood silent beside him, looking down at the sea. “May

he not have kept that from her, too?” was what she found at last to say.

“Do you think that possible?” Giles asked; but he was sorry now, seeing

the deep trouble on her face, that he had spoken.

“Perhaps it would not have been possible,” she said slowly. “But things

may be known and yet remain unspoken, Giles.”

He could not question her further. He could not ask madame Vervier’s

young daughter if she really believed that those things had been

unspoken between his brother and her mother. There had been an element

of desecration in going even so far as he had gone. And he had gained

nothing by it, for after the little pause that fell between them, Alix

added, in no spirit of retaliation as he saw, but as though she put up a

final barrier against his persistence.

“And even if they were not there, Giles; even if all the difficult

things we know of were not there, I should still not come back to

Heathside. I do not care, ever, to leave France again. I could not,

again, leave Maman.”