It was strange to meet them all again that evening, so unchanged to
their own consciousness, so changed to his. Strange to find them still
so charming and so to shrink from their charm. They came laughing up the
steps of the verandah where he still sat, and he wondered if they felt
in his voice and look, as he greeted them, any difference.
“Ah, it was an excellent set,” André de Valenbois said, laying down his
racquet and seating himself next to Giles. “Where did you disappear to,
_mon ami_? We looked, and you were in the chalet, and when we looked
again, you were gone.”
“I felt I’d like a walk. I went up the hill behind the chalet,” said
Giles. “The country is lovely up there.”
Madame Vervier’s eyes were on him, hardly cogitative in their gaze, yet
perhaps conjecturing something. She, doubtless, knew the names of the
ladies of the chalet as well as they knew hers. She might infer the
reasons for his flight. At all events, saying nothing, only maintaining
her cool dim smile, she crossed the verandah and went into the house.
The evening meal at Les Chardonnerets was irregular in its hour and
informal in its habit. Monsieur de Maubert and André de Valenbois only
changed their flannels for light afternoon clothes, and Jules, when he
came, did not change at all. Giles maintained his custom of evening
dress, but he waited for some time alone in the drawing-room that
evening, and even after André had joined him, exquisite in pale blues
and greys, another five minutes passed before madame Vervier and Alix
appeared.
Madame Vervier wore a dark silk dress, purple or red or russet—Giles in
the waning light could not define the tint—fastening at the breast with
a great old clasp of wrought gold. A fringed Empire scarf, purple,
silver, and rose, fell about her beautiful bare arms; a high Empire comb
was in her hair, and with her dark gaze she made Giles think of a lady
drawn by Ingres.
She moved across to the window, her arm around Alix, and said, standing
there and looking out: “_La belle soirée!_” It was a citron and ash sky
above a golden sea.
“Maman, you will sing this evening,” said Alix. “Giles has not heard you
sing.”
“Monsieur de Valenbois is the singer. I have no voice,” said madame
Vervier.
“One needs no voice to sing the songs I mean,” said Alix. “Do you know
our old songs of France, Giles?”
She looked round at him over her shoulder, palely shining in the white
taffeta, and Giles, with a sinking and sickening as of an unimaginable
yet palpable apprehension, saw that André de Valenbois’ appreciative
eyes were upon her; upon her, rather than upon her lovely mother.
“Do you know the one beginning, ‘_L’Amour de moi_’” asked Alix.
Giles said he did not.
“Ah, it is the very dawn of loveliness, that song,” said André, and in
the words Giles felt the expression of a perhaps subconscious train of
thought. “It is so young. It is all dew and candour. You must hear it,
monsieur Giles.” The young Frenchman wandered about the room, his hands
in his pockets. “Of the time of your Chaucer,” he went on. “Our
countries then had much the same heart. It was the time when our great
cathedrals rose and miracles were as plentiful as turtle-doves.” He
paused before the mantelpiece and took up one of the photographs set
there. “This is of you, mademoiselle Alix?”
Madame Vervier had turned from the window, and, still holding Alix, she
approached him.
“Yes; it is of me. It was taken in England,” said Alix.
Giles had not noticed the photograph, but he noticed a change in Alix’s
voice. He, too, drew near, and saw the little snap-shot of Alix with the
dogs at the edge of the birch-wood. But it was in a frame delicately
embroidered in blue and silver, and he asked in all innocence, “Where
did the pretty frame come from, Alix?”
“Toppie made it,” said Alix. The alteration in her voice was now
evident. He now knew why, and fell to instant silence.
“Toppie? What is Toppie?” André de Valenbois asked, laughing a little
and looking at Alix over her photograph. “That is a name I have never
heard before.”
“It is _le petit nom_ of mademoiselle Enid Westmacott,” said madame
Vervier, in tones sad and gentle. “She was the _fiancée_ of monsieur
Giles’s brother, our friend, killed in battle, of whom you have often
heard me speak. Mademoiselle Toppie”—how strangely the childish
syllables fell from her untroubled lips—“made the little frame for me
as a Christmas gift. Had you not seen it, monsieur Giles? It is
exquisite. I was infinitely touched by her thought of me.”
“Ah. It is, indeed, exquisite,” André murmured, while Giles found no
words. “One feels that only an exquisite person could have made
it.—Yes, certainly I have heard you speak of monsieur Giles’s brother,
_chère madame_. But I did not know that he was betrothed.”
He spoke in a respectful tone, holding the frame, but for all his
resource and grace of bearing, filled, Giles suddenly felt, with a
conflict of thoughts. Did he know of Owen? Did he accept his place, in
the succession? Was he jealous in retrospect; or, like monsieur de
Maubert, in retrospect _complaisant_? And that there was something to be
kept up—or was it for him, Giles, that she kept it up?—was manifest to
him from the deliberate adequacy with which madame Vervier advanced to
meet the occasion, while Alix, her eyes turned away from them all, fixed
her gaze upon the sky.
“She is, indeed, exquisite. I can say it, monsieur Giles, although I
have never met her. It is not only from Alix’s letters that I know her.
Before that. Your brother talked of her always. She was always in his
thoughts. One could not know him well, or care for him as we did,
without coming to know and care for his beautiful Toppie. It was a great
devotion,” said madame Vervier, and her voice, in its sadness,
sweetness, and decorum, seemed to lay a votive offering before Toppie
and her bereavement. “I have never known a greater.” But as she thus
offered her wreath and bowed her head, Giles saw a deep colour rise
slowly in Alix’s averted face.
“And here is monsieur de Maubert,” said madame Vervier, turning to greet
the latest entry. “Jules evidently is belated in some distant village.
We will wait no longer, I think. Albertine’s soup will be spoiled.”
“Have you not a picture of this lovely mademoiselle Toppie?” Giles heard
André say to Alix as they moved to the dining-room, madame Vervier
leading the way on monsieur de Maubert’s arm.
“No, I have no picture of her,” said Alix.
“You know her well?”
“Very well. She lives near Mr. Bradley’s family.”
If madame Vervier’s voice showed full adequacy, so did her child’s.
Alix’s adequacy, her grave courtesy, untinged by withdrawal, yet setting
a barrier, filled Giles’s thoughts during the meal. She, too, knew just
what she wanted to say and just how to say it; yet how much deeper, he
felt sure, was her perturbation than madame Vervier’s. She had seen her
mother, before the eyes of her English friend, involve herself in a web
of implicit falsehood. How false was madame Vervier’s web Alix could not
know; but she had known enough to feel ashamed before him; not, Giles
knew, because Maman lied; but because she had need of lies. She herself
had also lied. Giles, on their journey, had seen Toppie’s photograph in
her dressing-case. She had lied because she wished to remove Toppie, as
well as herself, from even an indirect intimacy with André de Valenbois.
It was as though some deep instinct warned her against him. And though
Giles again deplored her readiness, he could not feel that he regretted
it.
She sat opposite him, all silvery in the soft candle-light, her young
downcast face set in its narrow frame of hair, and he knew that grief
and fear were in her heart. Madame Vervier talked much, for her, and her
gaze, turned once or twice on her child, seemed, as was its wont, to
include her and to carry her on to further depths of contemplation. But
even madame Vervier could not guess what was in Alix’s heart.
After supper they all went out on the verandah. The vines fluttered
against a moonlit sky and moonlight washed in upon them like a silvery
tide. Mademoiselle Blanche, wrapped in swansdown, came gliding in, and
Jules, with a pipe, emerged from the shadows and sat in his accustomed
place on the steps. Giles felt that it soothed the lacerated heart of
the young artist to be with madame Vervier. Like a wounded wild animal,
he drew near the hand he trusted. She was capable of compassion; of
great gentleness; of most disinterested friendship. An enigma to Giles,
there she sat, and her soft, meditative alto joined in the old songs
they all sang together, while Alix, behind her in the shadow, leaned her
head, as if weary, upon her shoulder and listened. But more than
weariness was expressed in the child’s attitude. Giles, listening to the
dove-like tenderness of “_L’Amour de moi_,” divined it all. Alix sought
comfort from the pressure of new apprehensions, new intuitions, new
complexities; and more than for herself, it was for Maman that she thus
drew near. The very love, tender, devout, brooding, of the song, was in
the gesture with which she laid her head beside her mother’s and looked
out across her breast into the unknown future.