It was not until next day, after luncheon, that the time came, and
Giles—as madame Vervier said to him, “I find it too hot for tennis
to-day. Will you stay behind and talk with me, monsieur Giles?”—felt
sure that it all had been planned, intended from the first. If she had
thus delayed, it was in order that he should come to know her better and
feel more at home with her. It was also in order that she should take
his measure and see more surely what she was going to do with him.
Monsieur de Maubert, also, was going to Allongeville; André’s motor
waited at the gate. He and madame Vervier were to have the afternoon to
themselves, and as they all parted on the verandah, Giles saw that Alix
cast a long look at him.—Poor little Alix! How little she could guess
at what he hoped for from this interview! If madame Vervier had her
intentions, he had his. And though he believed they would not clash, his
heart was beating quickly as he followed her to the drawing-room. So
many things, lay between him and madame Vervier and her glance, her
voice, seemed to tell him that none of them were to be evaded.
The drawing-room was fresh and pale; so pale in its citrons, whites, and
dim jade-greens, that the sunlight outside, shining against the
transparent reed blinds, looked tawny in its fierce, prowling splendour.
The sea was there, sparkling in its immensity across the lower half of
the long windows, and the sky of another blue was across the upper half
and the vines and honeysuckle that garlanded the verandah outside hardly
stirred in the brilliant air. There were bowls of sweet-smelling small
white roses from the garden, and madame Vervier was in white, the thin
woollen dress with the sash at her waist and tassels at her breast that
left bare her lovely arms and neck. Her russet hair was all tossed back
to-day and there was something ingenuous in the shape of her forehead
thus uncovered; something candid and childlike. In her hand, as she sat
before Giles, she held a stone, a flat, smooth stone, pinkish-grey, that
she had perhaps picked up on the beach in one of her walks at dawn. She
held it, weighing it slightly from time to time and from time to time
putting it against her lips or cheek, as if to enjoy its coolness.
Giles had never in his life seen anything so beautiful. He knew that she
was not beautiful if computed or examined by standards of exactitude;
that her eyes were small, her nose a little flattened, her mouth
clumsily drawn; but power so emanated from her gaze, magic so pervaded
her lips and brows, sweetness lay with such a bloom of light upon her,
that every imperfection was dissolved in the unity that made a sort of
music in his mind. She was like an embodiment of music—and what was
that urgent, searching rhythm, that evocation of flowers and dew and
night? The melody of Brahms’s “Sapphische Ode” surged into his mind and
with it a deep, an almost overpowering sadness. With the song he
remembered everything; everything was evoked. The Spring day in the
Bois; Owen’s face of love; and Toppie, far away, betrayed and forgotten,
fixed in her trance of fidelity. To see madame Vervier, to remember
Toppie, was almost to feel that he himself was Owen.
“You know, then,” said madame Vervier. Her arm lay along the table
beside her. She looked across at him and held the stone in her upturned
palm.
That was the way she began; those the very first words she said after
she had led him in, after their long silence, when they found themselves
alone together. The throb of André’s car had long since faded down the
lane. The house was still; and Giles felt that his heart was trembling.
“Yes. I’ve known from the beginning,” he said.
“Alix told me,” said madame Vervier. “You saw us one day in the Bois.”
“Yes,” said Giles.
“And she tells me that you feel him to have been unfaithful to his
betrothed.”
“Yes,” Giles repeated. He was amazed yet not overwhelmed by her direct
approach. He kept his eyes upon her. “Unfaithful.”
There was a weight in the word that madame Vervier would not feel, for
André was now entangled with his thought of Owen. It was hardly eighteen
months ago; and André had succeeded Owen. But all unaware, as she might
well be, of his further knowledge, her next words answered, by
implication, the charge. If she admitted contemporaneity in love, why
not succession? “There,” she said, “you were mistaken. We were lovers,
it is true; but he knew that it was not to last. He knew that if not
death, then life must part us. In his heart he was not unfaithful. He
would have gone back to her.”
“Do you mean with a lie?” asked Giles.
“With a lie? Yes; I imagine it would have been with a lie,” madame
Vervier did not hesitate. “But the essential would be there. He had not
ceased to love her.—It was not his fault. He was swept away,” she said.
Had she looked like that when she had swept Owen away? Was it an easy,
an everyday thing to her, to see men swept away? He tried to beat down
the visions that assailed him, but again and again, on the rising surge
of the “Sapphische Ode,” they returned. Owen sitting before her, as he
now sat, in the pale, fresh, shaded room; Owen rising suddenly to take
her in his arms.—There would be no surprise to her in that.—She would
have seen it coming. “You mean that it was your fault, then?” Giles
muttered.
“No. I do not mean that,” madame Vervier answered, and as, in speaking,
she weighed her stone lightly up and down, her eyes on his, he felt that
it was his heart rather than her own guilt she weighed so in her
hand.—How often she had weighed men’s hearts! How conversant with their
trembling must she be! “No; that is not what I meant.—He moored his
boat at the edge of a torrent. That was all. He was swept away,” madame
Vervier repeated.
“That was what Alix said of you,” Giles muttered again. He felt as if
madame Vervier must see the throbbing of his heart.
“What Alix said of me?”
“That you were like a mountain-torrent. She wanted me to understand you.
She thought I might be of help to you some day. She thought of you, poor
child, as in some kind of danger; beautiful and in danger.—How can you
say it wasn’t your fault?” Giles demanded, and, with the thought of Alix
and what she hoped from him, he felt that he struggled to keep his
footing. “If you carried him away, it was your fault.—I believe that’s
what you live for; to carry men away,” he heard himself unbelievably
uttering, and it seemed to him, as the sombre magic of her eyes dwelt on
him that it was for Owen he was speaking, and for all the others; since
now he understood them all.
Madame Vervier, after he had said these last words, contemplated him in
silence. For a long time she said nothing, and Giles, in the silence,
felt that their confrontation was altered in its quality. When she spoke
at last, it was not in anger. It was, rather, with a strange mildness.
“I do not overflow my banks, ever,” she said. “You must not launch your
boat upon me; that is all.”
If he had found himself understanding them all—all those others—was it
possible that she saw him merely as one of them? Was she warning him?
Had she seen his need of warning? Giles felt his face growing hot.
“You must not launch your boat upon me,” madame Vervier repeated,
observing him with grave but faintly ironic kindliness. “If I am a
torrent, if I am dangerous, to myself and others, my nature is there as
it was given to me. I may not alter it. The blame lies with those who
are unwary.”
“That may be true,” Giles muttered. “I have nothing to do with you, of
course. I don’t understand you. But I do understand my brother. His
weakness doesn’t excuse him.”
“You are severe. You have never felt a great passion, that is evident,”
madame Vervier observed. “The feeling he had for me was so different
from the feeling he had for Toppie that infidelity was hardly in
question.”
“Hardly in question? Don’t you see that it shut him away from her for
ever?” Giles’s voice was dark with grief. “Don’t you see that a man who
chooses one kind of love turns his back on the other?”
“Not if he is strong enough,” madame Vervier, with her mildness,
returned. “Your brother, I think, gained in strength from our
friendship. We pay, it is true, for most things in life. It is painful
to have a secret from the heart nearest ours; yet one need not regret
one’s secret. I believe that Owen would have been strong enough not to
regret. Strong enough”—madame Vervier, while she dropped the quiet
phrases kept her faint smile—“not to grow to hate me because he could
not tell Toppie how much he had loved me.”
Was it true? Giles wondered, sitting there before her, his head bent
down while he stared up at her from under his brows, frowning and
intent. Could Owen, ever, have been as strong as that? And would it have
been strength? No; madame Vervier might have armed him against remorse;
but she did not know Toppie. Toppie’s radiance would have fallen back,
dimmed, startled, from the presence of the thing hidden yet operative in
her life and Owen’s. A canker would have eaten; bitterness and darkness
would have spread. Either her radiance would have withdrawn from him,
or, beating too strongly at his defences, it would have discovered all.
Dismay, devastation would have broken in upon them, and if Toppie could
still have forgiven it would have been with a sick and altered heart.
But he could not talk to madame Vervier about Toppie. The strange thing
was, as he saw Toppie’s radiance, that he felt himself safe from the
torrent, and that he began to understand madame Vervier.
“You think of yourself as very strong,” he said suddenly, and in their
long silence he could see that something of her security left her; it
was as if she felt the approach of an unexpected adversary. “You think
you can do as you like with life. You’re not afraid of life; and that’s
rather splendid of you—if I may say so. But it’s never occurred to you
to be afraid of yourself. And the time might come, you know, when you’d
be carried away, too.”
“Carried away?” madame Vervier repeated. Her voice was altered. She was
unprepared. And in her momentary confusion it was with haughtiness that
she spoke.
“Yes, carried away,” Giles repeated, understanding madame Vervier more
than ever and that the haughtiness was a shield. “And if you were, you’d
be helpless, as he was; as all the others are;—and you’d find, I
believe, that you couldn’t go back quietly to the things you’d
jeopardized.—I mean, they’d have changed; they’d have been spoiled. You
made Owen suffer; I’m sure of it. You gave him more suffering than
happiness. He lost Toppie through you, and he knew he’d lost her. He
couldn’t have lived with Toppie on a lie. The payment may be more than
our own suffering; it may be other people’s. That’s what you don’t seem
to see.—And as for doing as you like, with yourself and other people,
it doesn’t work, the kind of life you lead. I’m sure it doesn’t work. It
will spoil you, too. More and more you’ll be battered and bruised;—it’s
horrible to think of;—and at last wrecked. Or else so petrified and
hardened that nothing can really come to you any more. That’s the way it
would happen with anyone like you.” Giles had looked away from her in
speaking, but now he lifted his eyes to hers again. “I feel sure of it.”
Madame Vervier sat there, her arm lying on the table, her hand holding
the stone, and looked fixedly upon him. He had thought of nothing
definite, of nothing imminent in speaking. He had been able to speak
only because the thought of Toppie had come to him so overmasteringly,
arming him with such repudiation of madame Vervier’s philosophy. But
now, as she sat silent for so long, he saw suddenly what the fear was
that, like a Medusa head, he had held up before her. She was older than
André de Valenbois; she loved him passionately; and she was not sure of
him. It was in her eyes, in her silence, as she faced him, that Giles
read the fear; definite; imminent. And he was horribly sorry for her.
“You are a strange young man,” she said at last. The haughtiness was
gone. There was no resentment in her voice. She only spoke carefully, as
though she felt her way in a world changed to ice. “How can you think
you know me well enough to say these things?”
“I don’t know you well enough. It’s because we are so near. Through
Alix. Through my brother. You’ve made such a difference in my life.
Everything is changed for me because of you.”
“It need not be as you say,” said madame Vervier, and after her long
pause it was as if the strength he had called in question came creeping
back into her frozen veins. “Not as you say;—if one has wisdom. One may
suffer;—do you imagine that I have not already suffered?—but one need
not be wrecked. And I have great wisdom.”
“I don’t want you to be wrecked.—You know that,” Giles muttered.
“Yes. I know it. I see it. You are not an avenging angel,” said madame
Vervier, and she was able once more to summon the faint, ironic smile.
“You are really, under all the denunciation, so full of kindness. That
is what makes you so unexpected.—So very strange.—But do not fear for
me too much. I shall know when youth is over. I shall know when the
laurels are cut and winter has come to the woods. I shall be able to
furl my sails before the night comes on; and if one furls one’s sails in
time, monsieur Giles, one is never wrecked. And there will be, I trust,
a little harbour for me somewhere. Alix’s children to love. And my
memories. I shall be in old age a much happier woman than most. Most old
women”—madame Vervier smiled on, her eyes on his—“have only to
remember how they were loved by nobody at all.”
What was there to say to her? Giles, as he considered her, felt a dim
smart of tears rising to his eyes. She had done with him as Alix had
hoped she would. He saw her as lovely; as menaced. He wished that he
could protect her. “I hope it will be with you like that,” he said.
“Perhaps it will,” said madame Vervier. “You have seen me and my life a
little too logically, too rigidly, my kind monsieur Giles. I did not
choose it so. It chose me, rather.”
“Ah,” Giles exclaimed, “that’s what I feel in you. That’s my excuse for
what I’ve said to you. Why can’t you turn back even now? You are so much
too good for it. You’re good enough,” Giles declared, with a sense of
further illumination, “for anything.”
Madame Vervier, again arrested, considered him. Then, gently, sadly,
with a compassionate sincerity, she shook her head. “One never turns
back at my age. One’s path has grown too closely about one. Other paths
are all blocked out. And I was perhaps destined for it. For some women
the life of home, the still, deep stream suffices. Children may fill
their hearts and stifle the personal longings; but for others these
compensations are not enough. They must have love. They must have a
lover. And in France husbands are seldom lovers. So, if one is a
mountain-torrent, one leaps over the precipice. Do you see? That is my
history.”
“It’s different with us,” Giles murmured. “We have different hopes for
marriage. You didn’t give yourself time. If you turn your back on a
thing, you can’t find out its reality.”
“The mountain-torrent, at twenty-three,” said madame Vervier, “is not a
philosopher. No; I did not see what I was leaping to, but I saw plainly
what I left. And I do not say that I regret. All that I do say is that I
wish no leaps for Alix. Let us now speak of Alix. You have done your
duty by me and read me my lesson, and it is all because you want to
speak of Alix. I am well aware that you have not come to France in order
to understand or grow fond of her mother—kind though you are.”
“No; it was for you—only for you.” Giles did not know how to put it.
“Because of what I see in you. As to Alix, you want for her what I
want.”
“Safety. Yes,” said madame Vervier. “The deep, quiet stream.”
“She’s that already,” said Giles. “Alix isn’t the mountain-torrent.”
“Ah, we none of us know what we are till we come to the precipice,” said
madame Vervier. “But I am glad you feel that of my Alix. I trust your
reading. I could almost believe, at moments, watching you with her, that
you understand her better than I do. There is in Alix an austerity that
sometimes disconcerts me. Yours is a nature nearer hers than mine. I
have thought of it deeply in these last days, monsieur Giles, and I have
made up my mind. Will you marry her?” said madame Vervier, laying down
the stone.