CHAPTER XV

Giles, while Toppie spoke, had started up, resting on his hand and

staring at her with eyes aghast and stupefied. What folly, what madness

was this? How could Toppie find it in her heart to speak like this; to

him—to him of all people?

Yet, in another moment, while he stared at her, memory had answered him.

A vein of piercing intuition underlay Toppie’s blunder. It was only a

half blunder. His misery of confusion had been for Owen, because of

Owen’s secret that he had to hide. And she had seen it as for himself.

But it was true that he had, if only for a moment, been in love with

madame Vervier. He had, for a moment, partaken of the experience that

swept men away. The figure of madame Vervier was haloed for him by

fiery, dewy associations, and the pang of his sense of disloyalty to her

would not have been so deep had he not known in her presence that

poignant, perilous revelation of beauty. He saw all this while,

silently, he stared at Toppie, and he saw that she could never, never

understand or admit his half truth. It was a weakness even to think of

its avowal.

“How can you say anything so monstrous to me, Toppie,” he questioned,

and it was sternly, “when you know I’ve never loved anyone but you?”

This, indeed, was a whole truth that it behoved Toppie not to traduce.

But his sternness did not deflect her. “There are different kinds of

love. I know you love me. I know you’ve had, always, a boyish,

idealizing devotion for me. I will always be grateful to you for your

devotion. But you are not in love with me. You’ve never known what it

was to be in love till you met madame Vervier. Oh! Giles—you must see

what I see so plainly! Perhaps you really think that I could be hurt and

jealous in feeling myself no longer first. That is so wrong of you. It

would lift a burden from me if I could see you married. I should be so

glad, so glad of your happiness.”

“Good Heavens, Toppie!” Giles had started to his feet and stood above

her, crimson with grief and dismay. “This is the most extraordinary

nonsense! Happiness! With another woman! With Alix’s mother! She’s old

enough to be mine if it comes to that; and as to marrying me—she’d as

soon think of marrying a Chinaman. People haven’t these romantic ideas

about marrying in France, I can assure you. Marry me!” Giles suddenly

found himself forced by the thought to a loud laugh. “Besides,” he

added, “why should you think that monsieur Vervier is dead? Why should

you think that madame Vervier is a widow?”

He felt in the silence that followed these last unguarded words that

Toppie looked at him strangely and, as he heard them echo—what, indeed,

did he know about monsieur Vervier, damn him! He had, actually, never

considered monsieur Vervier except as a discarded, dangling phantom of

the past—as he heard the words that disinterred monsieur Vervier and

set him there between him and Toppie, he felt that the bewildered ant

had, indeed, stumbled on a luckless path.

“Owen always wrote of her as though she were a widow,” said Toppie,

going slowly. She was not bewildered. She looked carefully, if with

shrinking, at the figure he had placed before her in his foolish haste.

“But you know so much more about her than Owen ever knew.—In those few

days you saw and learned things he never saw. Perhaps you do know about

monsieur Vervier. Perhaps you know that he isn’t dead; that she isn’t

free. If that is so—doesn’t it explain even more?—Oh, Giles—I am

afraid”—She stopped. She looked away. He saw the blood rising in her

cheek as she checked the speech that must give him too much offence.

“I suppose what you mean,” said Giles gloomily, thrusting his hands into

his pockets as he looked down at her, “is that I do know she isn’t free,

and that, therefore, being in love with her, my love is a guilty

passion. Something of that sort, what? Well, if you won’t take my word

for it, there’s no more for me to say, is there?” Resentment had come

into his voice. “We’d better be going.”

“I accuse you of nothing, Giles,” said Toppie, still dyed with her

blush; “only I am sure that I am right in feeling that something has

happened. I am sorry, but I can’t help feeling it. From the moment you

spoke of madame Vervier I heard that your voice was changed;—so

strained and strange; so full of reluctance. You wanted to say all

against her that you could find to say. You wanted to guard yourself

against your own feeling. But what came through, from the beginning, was

that you found her—beautiful; mysterious; compelling.” Toppie found the

words, a strange tremor in her voice. “What came through was that she

was a goddess.”

Giles stood motionless, gazing down at her. He was seeing, suddenly,

straight into Toppie’s heart; straight into the heart of their

situation. How futile were his denials, when he could deny only for

himself—and not for the other. The vein of piercing intuition in Toppie

had led her to the portals of the truth. The name she saw inscribed

there was the wrong name; that was all. Change Giles to Owen, and the

truth was in her grasp. She knew that madame Vervier was beautiful,

mysterious, compelling. She knew that both he and Owen had felt her a

goddess. A chill of fear crept about Giles’s heart.

“Come; we’d better be going,” he repeated. He heard that his voice was

harsh. He would discuss no further and he held out his hand to her.

Toppie took it and rose to her feet.

She meant to be kind to him. She meant to be his friend;—Giles said it

to himself as, silently, they went down the hill together. But in spite

of all his compassionate understanding of her, his fear for her, what

came over him, in wave after wave of grief and resentment, was that she

was cold and hard. He had made her suffer because of what she had felt

as false in him; but it was now, as it had always been, of Owen that she

was thinking. He had cast, thank Heaven, no shadow on Owen; but

perplexity, mystery, pain had come into her vision of Owen’s friend.

“Owen never said she was a widow; but I’m sure he believed her to be

one.—Forgive me, Giles, but have you heard what makes you think she may

not be? What do you know of monsieur Vervier? Alix has never spoken of

him. It is so strange; for if he were alive he would be with them, would

he not?”

“_C’était un bien méchant homme._” These words, in madame Vervier’s

tones of surpassing detachment, came back to Giles. “Alix probably never

saw him. Her mother spoke of him. She said he was a bad man.”

“She spoke of him to you?”

“Yes, to me.”

“And she didn’t say whether he were alive or dead?”

“No. We weren’t talking about him. We were talking about Alix and her

future. Alix will have hardly any _dot_, it seems, because monsieur

Vervier made away with all her mother’s money. They are parted.”

“Did she leave him, or did he leave her?”

“She left him,” said Giles after a moment and he felt his voice harden

towards Toppie. “Continue your cross-examination, pray.”

“But you know so much, so surprisingly much, Giles. How can I help

asking? How can I help feeling interest in Alix’s mother, in Owen’s

friend? It isn’t cross-examination. It is unkind of you to say that.

Horribly unkind.”

“I don’t mean to be unkind. It’s you who are unkind, I think. Ask any

questions you like.”

“How long after her first husband’s death did she marry monsieur

Vervier? May I ask that?”

“Certainly you may,” said Giles. His bitterness carried him so far. Then

he paused, aghast. He had known that to Toppie Alix could never have

spoken of her mother’s misfortune as frankly as she had to him. He had

forgotten the first misfortune. He was aghast; but while he made his

pause he determined that there should be no half-measure here. Toppie

should not again accuse him of double-dealing. “Didn’t Alix ever tell

you that her mother was divorced?” he demanded, and he heard how hard

and dry was his voice.

For a moment Toppie said nothing. Then she spoke, softly, as if in all

sincerity she could not believe what she heard. Disastrous, indeed, was

the time for such a hearing. “What did you say, Giles?”

“Alix told me, the day I brought her here last winter, that her father

and mother had been divorced. If she didn’t tell you, that was, no

doubt, because she took it for granted that I would.”

And again came Toppie’s dire silence. “And why didn’t you?”

“Why should I? It was none of our affair.”

“Isn’t Alix our affair?”

“Certainly she is. And she has nothing to do with monsieur Vervier.”

“She has something to do with her mother.”

“Yes.” Giles’ voice grew harder, dryer. “What she has to do with her

mother we see. She is the product of her mother. Do you find fault with

it?”

They had reached the road that wound among the birch-woods and dusk had

fallen in it. The sky, paled to a faint apricot tint, shone dimly

between the trees. Toppie stood still on the wayside grass and looked at

him. Ineffaceably, in this instant of strange, unbelievable alienation

(for had he not, in his last words, challenged Toppie with madame

Vervier’s standards as set against her own?), Toppie’s image was stamped

upon his mind; as ineffaceably as on that first time he had seen her.

And now all her light was withdrawn. It was the end, as that had been

the beginning. Pale, wraith-like in the dusk, she fixed her eyes upon

him and they were dark with their repudiation. “Alix is not the product

of her mother. Alix is good and her mother may be bad. You know better

than I do what you think of her mother. It’s you I find fault with,

Giles. Your words don’t tell me what you think.”

“I’ve kept nothing from you,” said Giles. It was a lie. He knew it, and

he saw that Toppie knew it. He attempted an amendation of his statement.

“Everything you’ve asked I’ve answered.”

“Have you? I will ask this, then. Did she leave her husband with

monsieur Vervier? Did her husband divorce her because of monsieur

Vervier? Was she unfaithful to her husband?”

“There were faults on both sides, I believe. Alix wouldn’t have been

given for half the time to her mother if there hadn’t been faults on

both sides.” Giles forced himself to speak steadily. “She was very

young. People don’t judge these things so hardly nowadays.”

Toppie, her eyes on his, put aside the palliation. “Did she leave

monsieur Vervier with another man? Was she unfaithful to monsieur

Vervier, too? Is she a woman who has had lovers?” said Toppie, and the

word was strange on her lips.

Giles stood there, stricken. He was so aware of horrible danger,

pressing in upon him and Toppie from every side, that he could hardly

command his thoughts to an order. All that came was a helpless

literalness. There was no refuge from Toppie’s eyes; for her, or for

himself. “Yes,” he said, “I’m afraid she is. That’s the trouble, you

see.”

Toppie then looked away from him. She looked round her, standing so

still, with no gesture of amazement or distress. But there was a sudden

wildness in her eyes.

“Toppie, dear Toppie,” Giles pleaded. “She is not a bad woman. Wrong;

but not bad. You can’t judge of these things. I’m not defending

her.—It’s only that, seeing her, seeing all the beauty she has made in

her life, I cannot feel about her mistakes as I should have thought I

would. That’s why you felt me strained in speaking of her. It was a

shock to me. And I didn’t want you to know. Put it away now, Toppie, I

do beg of you. It has nothing, nothing to do with us. She’s a very

beautiful, a very unfortunate woman, and it’s only by chance that we’ve

stumbled upon these unhappy things in her past.”

Oh, the fatal background to his words! He knew how false they were,

spoken to Toppie, for all that there was of truth in them for himself.

“Let’s go home,” he urged, “and not talk about it any more.”

Toppie stood, her eyes fixed as if in careful scrutiny upon the

distance. She had raised her hand, as he spoke, and pressed her fingers,

bent, against her lips. He saw that she kept herself with a great effort

from breaking into tears.

“It’s not that,” she uttered with difficulty. “It’s you.” And now she

moved away. “I’m going home from here. I would rather be alone, please.”

The road led over the common to Heathside; there was a short cut through

the woods to the Rectory.

“But, Toppie—I do implore you.” Poor Giles with his rough head and

great round eyes stood and pleaded. “What have I done? What have you

against me?”

“It’s everything, everything,” Toppie murmured. “It’s all I’ve felt in

you this afternoon. I’ve stumbled—from one hidden thing to another.—It

gives me dreadful thoughts. It’s as if”—she stopped again, her eyes

still fixed on the distance—“as if there might be anything. She’s

changed you so much.” And, her eyes coming to him at last, she spoke on,

helpless in the urgency of her half-seen fear:—“It’s as if she might

have changed Owen;—if he had ever come to know her as well as you

have.”

Suddenly, at this climax, Giles found himself prepared. “What if she

had?” he demanded, and it was like riding, with a great thrust, to the

top of the breaker that threatened to engulf them. “What if she had made

him judge things more kindly? No doubt she would have changed him. He

would have felt her beauty, too. But she wouldn’t have changed him

towards you, Toppie; any more than she has me.”

Then Toppie drew back. Seeing suddenly where she stood, seeing her fear

as a disloyalty, she drew away. She looked at Giles and he saw the door,

as it were, mercifully or terribly close against him and Toppie,

demanding no further lies, shut herself away. “Perhaps you are right,”

she said slowly, and each word came with an effort, for they were,

doubtless, the only false words Toppie had ever uttered. “Perhaps I am

too ignorant of the world. I do not judge your friend. But if I knew

her, I could not think her beautiful. I could not think a wicked woman

beautiful. We must be different in that.—I’ll go home now. I’d rather

be alone. Good-bye.”

She moved away into the wood.

Giles, standing where she left him, had the sensation of feeling his

heart break. “Toppie,” he said in a choking voice.

She stopped and looked round at him. Her grey form among the birches was

almost invisible, but he saw the thin oval of her face.

“Toppie.”—Only this—He could hardly speak. He was not thinking. Only

that stifling pressure in his heart seemed to break its way out into

words—“I do so love you.”

He saw that he touched her. If not his words, then his face of anguish.

For the first time that day, if only for a moment, her thought was given

to him alone and he felt rather than saw pity in her eyes.

“Giles—I’m so sorry,” she murmured.

“I do so love you,” he repeated, gazing at her. But, even as he gazed,

the worst of the anguish was to know that something in his love was

changed for ever.

“Dear Giles,” Toppie murmured again. “Forgive me.” And again she

repeated, and the phrase was like a fall of snow: “I’m so sorry.”

PART III

CHAPTER I

What had happened to Giles?

He was waiting for her on the Victoria platform and his patient gaze and

poise told her that her train was late;—but fatigue did not account for

what Alix saw at once as she stood at the door of her carriage and found

his face. Her dear Giles. Her good Giles. What had happened to him?

Alix was aware that a great deal had happened to herself since she had

last seen Giles, only two months ago. It was not only her lengthened

skirts and her turned-in locks that gave her her new sense of maturity.

Perhaps one only began really to be grown up when one began to know why

one was unhappy. A child suffers in ignorance of the cause of its

suffering and it can forget more easily because of that merciful

vagueness. Unhappiness is only a cloud to put away or pass out of. But

grown-up unhappiness was four solid walls of fact enclosing one.

Groping round and round her prison and finding always that solid facts

were there resisting all attempts at forgetfulness, Alix, though she

still could not see just what they were, sometimes asked herself if that

was because she was still too young to understand, or because Maman, so

deftly, so tenderly, with as much compassion as compunction, passed a

bandage round her eyes and kept her blindfolded? She could not tell; but

she knew that another mark of her own maturity was her understanding of

Maman, her new capacity for helping her; and more than in any other way

she helped her by never lifting a hand to push away the bandage and by

never asking a question that Maman might find it difficult to answer.

She had known intuitively, in the past, that some questions must not be

asked; questions about her father; about monsieur Vervier; about

divorce. But now there were more pressing questions, and the first and

foremost of them was the question of André de Valenbois.

He was there; in their lives. She had left him behind her in Paris; no

longer their guest, but as much as at Les Chardonnerets the presiding

presence. He was a great friend. So Maman had said to her, strangely

pale, on that night when at Les Chardonnerets she had heard Giles and

André de Valenbois talk of her return to England. Maman had great

friends. And great friends made one suffer—Maman had not said that but

Alix had seen it—and many things in life must be sacrificed to them. It

was not that they were more loved than a child—oh, she was sure

not!—though that was a surmise that had pierced her through; it was

simply that one could not be sure of keeping them always; as one was

sure of keeping one’s child; and because one was not sure, one suffered.

It was something from which one could not free oneself. It was something

that made one helpless.

So Alix knew herself changed; a grave, meditative person; garnering in

her silence and her submissiveness a power to meet all the emergencies

that must lie in her path since, so obviously, they lay in Maman’s.

“Hello, Alix,” said Giles. His eyes had found her and he was there below

her, taking from her the basket she had lifted off the seat; and she

said, “Hello, Giles,” though it seemed to her always such an odd phrase

to meet upon.

“Is this the kitten?” said Giles.

“Yes. This is Blaise. You expected him? I wrote to Mrs. Bradley.”

“Expected him! Rather! They’re wanting to see him almost as much as to

see you.”

“That is well, then,” Alix smiled. “You haven’t been ill, Giles?”

“Ill! Rather not! I’m as right as rain,” said Giles; and he added,

hastily she felt: “But I say, you’re quite different. What is it? Your

clothes? Your hair?”

“Maman thought I was getting too old for short hair. It is taken back

from my forehead, too. It makes me very _digne_, I assure you. And my

skirts are nearly as long, you see, as anybody’s skirts.”

Alix wore a dark blue dress and a dark blue cape, buttoned with little

buttons on her breast and showing a satin lining of striped grey and

blue. Her shoes and stockings were grey, and her loose, long gloves, and

her soft little hat curving down over her brows with the big bow knotted

at the side. Maman had made her, though so sober, very _chic_, and Giles

was taking it all in; as far as he could; and that, she feared, with

tender irony, was not very far.

Giles, as they moved along the platform, pursued the topic of her

appearance, feeling it evidently opportune. He did not wish to speak

about his own. “It’s that you look so tremendously foreign;—the way you

walk; the way your things are put on; the way your hat comes down like

that. Even the way you speak English is as French as possible, for

anyone who speaks it perfectly; and I’d never noticed that before.”

“When you first met me,” said Alix, putting the obvious explanation with

mild competence before him, “what chiefly engaged your attention was

that I spoke English at all. Now you notice that though I speak it so

well I speak with my French accent. I am French, Giles.” She slightly

smiled round at him, for she need not emphasize it. He as well as she

would remember their last talk on the cliff-path. “I am a foreigner.”

“I suppose you are,” said Giles, and it was gravely, almost gloomily

that he said so.

“Was the walking tour a success?” Alix asked him, while they waited at

the customs, Alix’s box, this time, being larger than the last and

subjected to the vicissitudes of a separate transit. “You did not

overtire yourself? You look a little tired, you know.”

“Do I really? I haven’t been sleeping very well; it’s been so hot.

Cornwall was a great success. I want you to see Cornwall some day.”

“It has been hot in Paris, too. But I always love Paris at this season,

the stones all baked with sun, the trees all bronze. We have been dining

in the Bois almost every night, at a little restaurant under the trees.

It has been delicious. And the drive back down the avenue du

Bois.—_Calme-toi, mon chéri_,” she addressed the kitten who was

wailing.

“Poor little chap. He hasn’t liked the journey. Is he prettier?” asked

Giles.

“He is uglier,” said Alix. “It is _l’âge ingrat_, you know. No longer

kitten, and yet not cat. Like me. It is only the basket that troubles

him. I had him out for most of the day, in my arms, and he was quiet and

good.”

“It reassures me to see you still so fond of kittens,” Giles smiled at

her. “It makes me feel you are still something of one yourself.”

“But I shall always be fond of kittens,” said Alix.

They were again to spend the night with Aunt Bella and in the taxi Alix

opened the basket and displayed her pet. Very ugly indeed; gaunt in

structure, though fully fed, of a most undistinguished white and

brindle, with a nose already over-long and ears over-large; but as it

nestled into Alix’s neck with loud choking purrs Giles owned that it was

a nice little beast.

“And so full of love; and so intelligent, Giles,” said Alix, pleased by

his commendation. “More loving, more intelligent, these common little

cats are, than _chats de race_, I always think.”

London, dusty and drowsy on this Autumn evening, seemed to yawn and

smile and had, Alix thought, a welcoming air. It was a kind city. She

even saw beauty in it, and commented on the Royal Hospital as they drove

through Chelsea. “How well it goes in the thick, soft air—that period,

that colour.” She had never liked London so much, although she came to

it with an unwillingness so much greater than the unwillingness of last

year, and it seemed to her, leaning back in the taxi beside Giles, her

kitten against her cheek, that the dropped aitches, the little

green-grocer’s shops, the strolling lovers, and the river gliding

silvery-grey behind its trees, all went together in the impression of

ease and kindliness.

In Aunt Bella’s flat all the windows were widely opened to the

freshness, and Aunt Bella received not only her, but Blaise, quite as a

matter of course. This matter-of-courseness, Alix had begun to feel, was

a distinctive English trait. Once they knew you, they accepted you; you

and your kittens. They had no surmises about you. You were simply there.

Was it, Alix wondered, while she changed her dress in her little pink

room—Blaise cautiously reconnoitring from piece to piece of the

furniture—was it that Aunt Bella saw her benevolently as an _œuvre de

guerre_, or sentimentally as a legacy from the dead nephew? As she

reflected on her own presence, so intimately among them, Alix felt that

if Maman’s motives were mysterious to her from their complexity, Aunt

Bella’s would be mysterious from their simplicity. And it was all like

London again; like the cosy little shops with the carrots and cabbages

heaped before their windows, the muffling air and unadventurous river.

There was peace in such simplicity, peace in being among people who had

nothing to hide and who would hardly be able to imagine that you might

have.

She felt at dinner that Aunt Bella looked at her, in her altered way of

dressing, a little as Miss Grace and Jennifer had looked when Lady Mary

talked to her about Henri de Mouveray. Aunt Bella, no doubt, found the

little dress that Maman had so cleverly contrived out of two Empire

scarves, curious rather than interesting. Charming in colour, dull blue

shot with silver, it was a marvel of convenience as well as so pretty.

One turn and it fell into place, leaving arms and shoulders bare,

knotting low about the hips and falling in long silvery fringes to the

ankle. Seen in Aunt Bella’s flat it had undoubtedly a very Parisian air,

and perhaps Aunt Bella felt it too Parisian, for she began to question

Alix about France’s foreign policy with some severity. Alix gathered

that in Aunt Bella’s eyes her country was behaving badly.

“But we want the Germans to suffer,” she said. “If they are not made to

suffer sufficiently, they will make us suffer again and perhaps destroy

us.”

“But that is being revengeful, my dear child. And so short-sighted, too.

You don’t change people’s hearts by making them suffer. You harm

yourself as well as them.”

“I do not think we want to change their hearts.” Alix, all unversed in

these large subjects as she was, felt herself impelled to make the

answer so obvious to every French mind. “I do not think we care about

their hearts. When a bad man is guillotined, it is sufficient that his

head should be gone. His heart does not concern us.”

Giles at this laughed loudly and Aunt Bella’s eye-glassed gaze turned to

glitter reprobation at him. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying, Giles.

She is too young to have followed or understood the lamentable policy of

her country. You really shouldn’t encourage her.”

“But it seems to me she has been following. She’s made the only honest

answer. Have you heard people talking about it a good deal, Alix?”

She did not mind his mirth or Aunt Bella’s reprobation. She did not care

at all what they thought about France. How could one expect even English

friends really to understand? “I have heard people talk at Maman’s,” she

said.

Blaise was on a chair beside her eating an excellent dinner, and Giles,

still laughing, said: “Do you know what he looks like? A Boche baby.

There was one born in a village we occupied after the Germans had been

there for two years. It was the funniest, jolliest little fellow; but

awfully ugly; with a face just like that.”

“But it was half French, I imagine,” said Alix dryly.

“Certainly half French, I regret to say. But he looked all German. And

I’m sure that if you’d had to take care of him you’d have been as kind

to him as you are to your kitten.”

“I do not care for babies,” Alix objected.

“You’d have been kind to him all the same. You wouldn’t have wanted to

see his head cut off.”

“I do not want to see anyone’s head cut off; but if it were a choice

between a Boche and a French baby, I should choose the French one to

live. That is all we ask of our allies,” Alix added, looking over at

Giles with kindly determination; “to help us to live;—as we have helped

them;—even at the expense of the Germans.”

Aunt Bella, now, changed the subject. “How is Mr. Westmacott, Giles?”

“No better, I’m afraid.”

“Have they a trained nurse yet?”

“He won’t have one. He won’t admit he’s so bad.”

“It must be very taxing for Enid.” (Aunt Bella always called Toppie by

her real name.) “How does she bear it?”

“She looks very worn,” said Giles.

“And I’m afraid she won’t be at all well off when he dies,” said Aunt

Bella, as though she placed Toppie’s approaching bereavement and

subsequent impoverishment in the same category. “She won’t be able to go

on living in the way she does now. And she has been trained to no

profession. I have always so blamed Mr. Westmacott for keeping her with

him and giving her no education.”

“Toppie is educated, I think,” said Giles, dryly, but his dryness did

not conceal from Alix the distress Aunt Bella’s surmises caused him. How

much more capable Aunt Bella was, Alix reflected, of sympathizing with

large vague masses of humanity than with one human being.

“Not educated at all from the modern point of view,” she returned

decisively. “Quite incapable of making her own living. A very dear, good

girl, but a useless girl, and there is no room in the world nowadays for

useless people.”

“There’s room for Toppie,” said Giles coldly; and then, perhaps, Aunt

Bella remembered that he had a special feeling about Toppie, for she

desisted.

“I didn’t know Toppie’s father was so ill,” Alix said to Giles when he

and she were for a little while alone in the drawing-room, Aunt Bella

engaged on the telephone in the hall. “I had only one letter from her,

from Bournemouth, and it did not lead me to think he was so seriously

ill.”

“I’m afraid he is. She didn’t realize it then, perhaps. I’m afraid it’s

only a question of time now,” said Giles, sunk in a deep chair and

watching her while she pretended to play with Blaise. Was it grief,

anxiety about Toppie, that had wrought the change in him? It had to do

with Toppie she felt sure; but had it to do with her as well? Aunt Bella

still issued directions on the telephone and Alix felt suddenly that she

must ask him.

“Giles,” she said, not looking up from Blaise, who made soft onslaughts

at her hand, “does Toppie know?”

“Know?” His echo had the strangest reverberations.

“About Captain Owen is what I mean;—that he cared so much for Maman.”

She looked down at Blaise and moved her knotted handkerchief before his

nose; and she felt the colour rising in her face.

Perhaps it was because he felt her confusion and shared it that he had

to pause before replying. “Of course she doesn’t know,” he then said

very gently.

“And you will not forget what you promised me?”

“What did I promise you?”

“That if she did know she would still want me back.”

And again there was a silence. How carefully Giles was considering his

answer was made apparent by the length of the silence; but what he said

finally, more gently than ever, seemed clear. “I’m more sure of that

than ever, Alix. You see, she’s so fond of you.”

CHAPTER II

If Toppie, too, was changed, she was not changed to her. That was the

first thing that Alix felt when she saw her again; next day;—for a note

had been waiting for her at Heathside asking her to come to the Rectory.

It was a hot, still day and a bee was droning lazily about the Rectory

drawing-room, flying out into the sunlight and in again to the bowl of

mignonette that stood on a table near the window; and the bee made the

day more still. It had been strange to find herself thinking of Racine

as she waited for Toppie. Nothing so trivial and intimate as a bee could

be imagined in any play of Racine’s; yet its soft drone had accompanied

her sense of a pause, of an ominous interlude, like the pause before a

scene where the heroine was to enter with some quiet, conclusive word.

It was, perhaps, because of this association of ideas that Toppie, when

she entered, had looked to her like the Racine heroine, like a creature

delicate and austere, dimly conscious of an impending doom. There was

fear in Toppie’s face as it found her there. Alix saw its white gleam

mastered, resolutely veiled, while, at the same moment, the full

security of Giles’s assurance was brought warmly home to her by Toppie’s

encircling arms, by a new note of emotion in her voice as she said,

kissing her, “Dear, dear child.”

Toppie was changed; but it could not be because of her. It was her

father’s illness that had changed her and Giles had spoken the whole

truth; but all the same, involuntarily, she found herself saying, while

Toppie’s arms were still around her: “Are you glad to have me back?” And

she heard that her voice trembled in speaking.

Whatever the fear had been, Toppie had mastered it. She held her by the

shoulders and looked at her, smiling, and said: “So glad, dear little

Alix, that I feel we ought to keep you always.” Then she held her off

and looked her up and down, still smiling, and added: “But it isn’t a

child any longer. It’s an almost grown-up young person.”

It was strange to feel herself, all reassured as she was, wanting

dreadfully to cry; but Alix, too, was an adept at mastering emotion, and

she said, taking off her hat so that Toppie should see all the changes:

“Do you like my hair?”

“I like it very much.” Toppie kept her hand, turning her round. “I like

seeing your forehead, such a gentle, thoughtful forehead. I like that

big black bow at your neck.”

“That is a _jeune fille_ bow—a bow of transition,” smiled Alix. “It is

to be there while the hair grows long enough to make a knot.”

“I like it all,” said Toppie.

They sat down on the sofa side by side, Toppie still holding her hand,

and then she said: “Toppie, I had not realized from your letter that

your father was so ill.”

Toppie looked at her in silence for a moment and, slowly, her eyes

filled with tears. “He is going to leave me, Alix,” she said.

It was her father, then. Alix could not but feel the deep, selfish

relief. “Oh, you must hope,” she said.

“I do try to hope. I try to live on hope. But I am afraid he is going to

leave me,” Toppie repeated. “He is not much changed,” she went on, for

Alix found nothing to say. “You will not see much change in him, I am

sure. I will take you up to him presently. He likes to follow what goes

on. In a way he follows more than he has ever done. It is a sort of

clinging, I think. And he is quite cut off from his own work. I read to

him a great deal. Perhaps you will come sometimes and read to him in

French. He likes that, you know.”

“I like it, too. You must let me come often. It is curious, Toppie, but

when Giles is away my English life is really here with you; not that I

am not very fond of them all at Heathside.”

“Is it?” Toppie looked at her very intently. “I am glad of that. Glad

that I can mean home to you.—Dear little Alix.—But you _are_ fond of

them.”

“Especially of Mrs. Bradley. Only she is there so little. One hardly

sees her. I am fond of Ruth and Rosemary, too. But I would rather be

with you.” Alix smiled a little.

“And it will be Rosemary only this winter, since Ruth is going to

Oxford. I am glad she is to be there. Giles will like having her near

him.” Toppie spoke calmly the name of Giles.

“Do you think so?” said Alix. “Do you think she means much to Giles?”

“He is devoted to all his family. It will certainly be a pleasure to him

to have her,” said Toppie, and Alix now thought she detected in her

voice a strange detachment.

“He is fond of them to do things for them; not to be with them—I mean

his sisters. He is so unlike his sisters; and most of all unlike Ruth.

Ruth is so stupid beside Giles.”

“She is a very good girl; very courageous and honest,” said Toppie. “I

think I see Ruth’s good points more than I used to. I think, Alix, the

older one grows, the more one cares for those sterling qualities. Black

would always be black to Ruth, and white, white. That has value, the

highest value, in a person’s character, you know.”

Something in Toppie’s tone now dimly offended Alix. “But you could not

really compare Ruth and Giles, Toppie. Giles is all that she is and so

much more besides. He sees the greys and all the delicate in-between

shades, too. Nothing is really black or white, and that is what is so

stupid in Ruth; she sees things so.”

“It sometimes seems to me that they are nothing else,” said Toppie very

calmly. “And Ruth has, I think, because of that downrightness in her,

more strength of character than Giles. He would so much more easily be

mistaken;—misled.” Toppie paused before finding these words. “He has

what would be called the artistic temperament, I suppose; and that is

the penalty one pays for having it; a certain weakness; a certain

yielding. I feel that Giles would yield where Ruth would stand up like

granite;—and I like the granite thing in people.”

Alix sat in indignant astonishment. “I have never known anyone so true

as Giles,” she said slowly.

“I did not say that he was not true,” Toppie returned, with a touch of

severity. “I said that he would be more easily misled than Ruth. I said

that he was weaker than Ruth.”

They sat for a few strange moments silent.

“But it is as if you were changed to Giles,” Alix cried suddenly. She

could not repress the cry. “What is it, Toppie? What has he done to

displease you? You are unkind to him. You speak as if you did not care

for him.”

A deep blush rose in Toppie’s face; but it was not the blush of surprise

or confusion. Alix saw a competent sternness in the eyes bent upon her.

“You must not say things like that,” Toppie said slowly, considering

every word. “There are things you do not understand. I shall always care

for Giles. I have not changed to him. No,” she repeated as if to

herself, “I have not changed to Giles.”

They sat there, still hand in hand. Alix felt that she wished to fling

Toppie’s hand aside. In answer to her sternness she had felt an instant

anger rise within her. That Toppie should reprove, rebuff her, was

itself an affront she bore with difficulty—and bore only because she

feared to damage Giles’s cause by rejoinder; but her anger passed the

personal wrong by and fastened itself, strangely, inevitably, on the

figure of Captain Owen.

It was Toppie herself, in the picture she had drawn of Giles, who had

set him so vividly before her. Captain Owen, not Giles, was the person

who would blur black into grey; Captain Owen was the person who, in

comparison with honest Ruth, lacked something. Giles was everything that

his brother had not been, and yet it was Captain Owen who had betrayed

Toppie—she found the word and it sank with a cold weight on her

heart;—it was Captain Owen, now, she felt sure of it, who parted Giles

and Toppie. She sat, her eyes fixed proudly before her; her lips hard.

“Alix,” Toppie said in a gentle voice, “if so much has changed in my

life—you mustn’t change.”

“It feels to me as if it were you who were changed, Toppie,” said Alix.

“You must forgive me, then,” said Toppie with her firm gentleness. “I am

not quite myself, perhaps. I am rather on edge. I know I seemed to speak

harshly. You see, dear Alix, you are still, really, a child—one cares

for you so much that one forgets it. But there are things you cannot

understand.”

“Perhaps I understand some things better than you do, Toppie,” Alix

returned, still not looking at her friend.

At that, for a moment, Toppie sat quite silent. “Perhaps you do,” she

then said. “Some things, perhaps you do. But I feel sure that you do not

understand the things I am speaking of.”

After that they tried to talk as if nothing had happened. Toppie’s

manner had an atoning sweetness. Once or twice, in the way she spoke,

the way she looked at her, it was as if, Alix felt, one of Toppie’s

doves had spread its brooding wings over her, protectingly, tenderly.

She knew that she had not forgiven Toppie; and yet she was the fonder of

her because she had not forgiven her.

She was taken up to see Mr. Westmacott, who sat at an open window, a

reading-table before him with books upon it. Sitting there, as formally

courteous as ever, with his tall pale head and eyes still clearly blue,

he did not look so ill. It was more in his voice as he questioned her

about her journey that she felt change. His voice had become dry and

brittle, like a glacial wind fluttering the leaves of an old abandoned

volume that no one would ever read again. He would soon die; Alix felt

sure of that as she heard him. He would die, and Toppie would leave the

Rectory and wander forth desolate, among her doves. Why, oh, why, would

she not see and understand Giles? Why would she not marry him? “Oh, if I

could see her married to Giles,” she thought, when she had said good-bye

to Toppie and was out again upon the common. “If I could only help Giles

so that he should marry her, it would have been worth while that I

should have come to England!” And that there was mistake,

misunderstanding between Giles and Toppie, she was now sure.

She had gone halfway across the dried heather, when, as on the evening

of her first visit to the Rectory, she saw Giles approaching her, Jock

at his heels, and she knew now, as she had then only felt instinctively,

that he had been waiting for her and that he was afraid of something. Of

the same thing; yet of more.

Jock saw her and raced ahead to jump against her knees. He was still her

special pet among the dogs and had received Blaise kindly. Alix stooped

to caress his head while she watched Giles approach her.

“Well, how did you find Toppie?” he asked simply, as they met.—Giles

not true! Giles easily misled! Alix felt herself suddenly blushing with

anger as the thought of Toppie’s strange delusion returned to her. Giles

drew her arm within his and they went across the common towards the

birch-wood. It gave her a deep feeling of consolation that he should

thus seek refuge with the one person who could understand him.

“I find her changed, Giles,” she said.

“In what way changed?” said Giles quickly.

And as quickly Alix answered: “Not at all to me, Giles.”

“You see how desperately ill her father is, don’t you?” said Giles.

“She’s quite worn out with nursing him, you know. In what way do you

feel her changed?” he repeated, looking down into her face.

Alix was pondering. She was not a person who believed in black and

white. She believed in the greys and the in-between shades. She did not

mean to tell Giles how she thought Toppie changed. What she found to say

was: “If Toppie were happier she would not be so hard.”

“Hard?” She was looking at the ground, but she heard in Giles’s voice

how the word startled him.

“Do you not think Toppie hard?” she asked.

“If she is,” said Giles after a moment, “it’s because of what you

say—that she is unhappy.”

“And because she is too sure,” said Alix. They had entered the

birch-wood and their footsteps rustled in the fallen golden leaves. They

went forward, aimlessly, not thinking of where they went, Alix intent on

her reading of Toppie, Giles listening. “Too sure of what she loves and

believes in. She has had to be too sure, because she is so unhappy.—Is

that it, Giles? And the things she loves and believes in are not the

things she sees. Perhaps that makes us hard—if we can only think of the

things we love and never see or touch them—makes us hard, I mean, to

the things we have with us.”

Giles was, she knew, keeping his eyes on her as she put together these

suggestions, and as he meditated for a little pause, her thoughts, in

the silence, while she watched the golden leaves, took a long flight to

France and she found herself suddenly wondering if perhaps Maman and

André de Valenbois were wandering under the autumnal trees in the

Bois—as Giles had seen Maman and Captain Owen wander under the Spring

trees. And with the thought came such a pang of fear and grief.

“You’re right, I think,” Giles said. “And I see no help for it. She’ll

grow more and more away from the things she has with her and shut

herself more and more into her solitude—where she is safe with the

things she can’t see.—What can we do about it, Alix?” said Giles

gently, a little as if he spoke to a child from whose ingenuous wisdom

he sought an oracle.—“Who can help Toppie in any way in which she’d

accept help?”

Suddenly it was very easy, there in the twilight woods, to be

courageous. She was so near Giles. It was as if her heart beat in his

side. “No one can do anything for her but you, Giles. You must marry her

and make her happy.”

“Oh, my dear little Alix,” he said, smiling bitterly, not even pausing

to assess her daring, just as she herself had not needed to pause.

“There’s no hope for me. No one can help her less than I.”

“Do you mean there never was hope;—or is none now?”

“There never was, perhaps;—but there’s less now. Her heart is full of

Owen.”

“Yet if he had not been there, it would have been you she would have

loved.”

“Who can tell? Perhaps.”

“And is it because of him that there’s less hope, even, now?”

“Put it like that if you choose,” said Giles. “Yes. Because of him.”

CHAPTER III

The old life flowed round her again, outwardly the same, inwardly so

altered. She had been, she saw it, like nothing but a glass of _eau

sucrée_ when she had first come to Heathside;—or if that was a simile

too insipid for even her youngest consciousness, like _eau sucrée_ with

a squeeze of lemon in it. Now the wine of new perceptions, new emotions,

tinged her deeply, and because she was enriched she saw a richer world

about her. English history, from being a mere flat picture, dull at best

compared to the splendid pageantry of France, began to take on depth and

distance in her eyes. It was English history she saw now when she went

up to Oxford with Giles and Ruth, and English history was English

character; whereas event, in French history, played so much more potent

a part. Wandering in and out with Giles, the beauty of the town, with

its significance, stole upon her mind and senses. Meditative, benign,

and so humane, it seemed to smile at you like an old ecclesiastic with

kindly eyes for youth. As one sat in a sun-steeped garden or dim, carved

chapel, one felt its quiet like that of a tree, full of life and growth,

so that, though it was old, it was also young; the sap moved on to fresh

leaves while the calm old trunk endured. Time had been distilled and

preserved in it without a break or cleavage and its very light, she

felt, in this autumnal weather, had that colour of time, as though it

came through ancient glass. The quadrangles were brimmed with time and

it brooded on the lawns of Saint John’s where the Michaelmas daisies

growing against the grey stone walls made her think of the ring on the

benignant hand of the bishop. “One would grow wise by being here even if

one only sat still, like this, and looked at it,” she said to Giles. “I

only wish one did!” said Giles. But he felt what she felt and was

pleased with her for, at last, understanding his Oxford.

She began to wish for wisdom. Back at Heathside she bicycled to the High

School every morning with Rosemary, through the birch-wood, past the

red-brick villas of the town—villas upon which time had laid no kindly

hand—and all the ugliness that had so fretted her fell into an

insignificant background, since, for the first time, the day had its

object. Knowledge, of course, was quite different from wisdom. The happy

life depended on eyes to see the hands that blessed and the smile on the

face of time; but it was knowledge that opened one’s eyes and she found

in its acquisition a zest and an enfranchisement. It was in order that

she might see that smile in France that she worked so hard. The sooner

was she equipped, the sooner could she return to France and Maman.

Already she outdistanced Rosemary, and she had a touch of kindly malice

at seeing her friend of the chaffing complacencies and cheerful bullying

left behind.

Rosemary was not ungenerous. She showed her chagrin and her admiration,

openly. “It’s not even as if it were your own language,” she grumbled.

“And you don’t seem to take half the trouble over it that I do.”

“Perhaps it is because you are in your own country and I out of mine,”

Alix suggested.

“Now what on earth do you mean by that?” Rosemary inquired.

“I have nothing else to do but think about my studies,” said Alix.

Rosemary stared. “You’ve got the same things to think about that I have.

Surely you are at home by now. All the girls like you and you’re never

left out of anything.”

“It is not anything like that. Everybody is as kind as possible,” said

Alix. She could not, she knew, make Rosemary understand. Rosemary,

fundamentally, could not take foreign countries seriously—could not

believe that anyone lucky enough to be in England should have all their

energies bent on leaving it.

“And what do you girls intend to do with yourselves?” Mrs. Bradley asked

them one day at the firelit tea-table. She had, as usual, a pile of

papers beside her and laid down her fountain pen to pour out the tea.

“Alix is doing so well that she can really begin to think of choosing a

career and it’s not too soon to turn things in that direction.”

Even dear Mrs. Bradley took it for granted that she might be quite

satisfied to make a career out of her own country.

“I hope I shall marry when I go back to Maman,” said Alix.

“Now isn’t she altogether too priceless, Mummy!” cried Rosemary. “One

would have thought that with all the time you’ve been in England, Alix,

you’d have got over those French ideas about marriage.—I suppose you’ll

actually say that you’d let your mother choose a husband for you.”

“But who would choose one so well?” said Alix. Yet it was not true; it

was not true that she still believed this of Maman. England had already

changed her so much. But she did not intend that Rosemary should guess

it.

“Who would? Why, you yourself!” cried Rosemary. “What can your mother

know about it? Aren’t you an individual with your own tastes and

feelings? And do you seriously think marriage the only career for a

woman?—Do you really think getting married the whole meaning of life?”

“It is a sad thing to be a _vieille fille_, I think,” said Alix.

“Sad? Why sad? You don’t call Aunt Bella sad, do you? And there’re

thousands and thousands more like her. All of ’em as jolly as possible;

the unmarried people nowadays. Jollier than the married ones, I

think;—and no wonder.”

“In their hearts, you may be sure, they wish they did not have to be

quite so jolly,” Alix demurred. “They must feel it sad when they reflect

that they have only other people’s children to care for—and those not

the most interesting. And it must be sad to be alone at one’s _foyer_.”

“One may have one’s own children and yet have to take care of the

others, too, you know, Alix,” Mrs. Bradley smiled, finishing her tea and

taking up a packet of case papers. “All these are other people’s

children.”

“One needn’t care for one’s own, or for other people’s unless one wants

to,” Rosemary commented. “People specialize nowadays and know that some

women are maternal and some aren’t. I’m sure I’m not. I couldn’t be

bothered with children, or with a husband either—It’s as good as a play

to hear you talk, you know, Alix—all your quaint French ideas. What can

one hope of a nation that still has them!—Cradles, hearthstones,

hubby’s socks to mend;—that’s what really appeals to you, I suppose.”

“What appeals to me is to be established,” said Alix. “I do not care for

babies; but they are a part of marriage, and no doubt one would come to

like them when one had them. As for the socks—I should hope to marry

well enough to have a maid to do that.”

Rosemary’s eyes rounded. “You mean you’d marry for money?”

Alix smiled: “You are so _réaliste_ in some ways, Rosemary, and so

romantic in others.”

“I hope, dear, you’d never think of marrying for money,” Mrs. Bradley

put in. “Money is a very minor consideration in marriage.”

“Romantic! I romantic!—It’s merely a question of one’s own dignity!”

cried Rosemary; while Alix said: “There would have to be character and

taste and position as well;—but don’t you think, _chère Madame_, that

it is well to marry suitably?”

“Suitably? Yes, of course.” Mrs. Bradley was gently bewildered. “But the

most suitable thing of all is to marry someone one loves.”

Alix, in silence, wondered.

* * * * *

Mr. Westmacott seemed a little better now. She went to the Rectory twice

a week and read aloud in French to him and Toppie. He seemed to enjoy it

and followed if she read very slowly and distinctly. Toppie sat, her

fair head bent over her knitting. She was knitting endless little vests

for the poor babies of one of Mrs. Bradley’s charities. Alix wondered

sometimes what was to become of all those babies. Were they passed on

from Mrs. Bradley to more Mrs. Bradleys, until, at last, in one of the

hospitals administered by the Aunt Bellas, they closed their eyes? Would

some be good citizens and some mere beasts of burden, and some, perhaps,

thieves and scoundrels? All were to begin with those little snowy

woollen vests, and all were to end in coffins. It made her feel strange

to think of it. But when she expressed something of these thoughts to

Toppie one day, Toppie looked at her very gravely, and said: “They are

all to end in heaven, Alix. We are all of us only that; souls setting

out on our journey.” But Alix found it so difficult to think of some

people as souls.

The babies’ vests were a strange accompaniment to Saint-Simon’s

“Mémoires.” She found these on Giles’s shelves and asked Toppie if they

would do. She had so often heard André de Valenbois and monsieur de

Maubert and Maman quote Saint-Simon. Neither Toppie nor her father had

read him and were quite contented with her choice, and she skipped about

and found the people who most interested her. The French was strange,

but it seemed to say more than modern French. The strangeness, she saw,

was not apparent to Toppie and her father, nor was the acid irony nor

the often unconscious humour. Toppie and her father rarely found

anything to laugh at. Mr. Westmacott’s chief preoccupation was to follow

the relationships of the characters and to place them correctly against

the background of contemporaneous history, and for this purpose there

were many interruptions while Toppie went to fetch the encyclopædia.

Alix saw that Toppie sometimes listened with a vague distress.

Saint-Simon and the people he wrote of were as alien to her

understanding—to say nothing of her sympathies—as the Chinese. To

Alix, for all the travesty of their tails and crests, they were clearly

recognizable types. She saw the court of Louis Quatorze as a great

golden aviary where splendid creatures, plumed, absurd, and beautiful,

paced and preened and surreptitiously pecked at each other beneath the

proud gaze of the monstrous bird of paradise on the throne. There was

something sinister about them, there behind their bars; but something

familiar and lovable too. Toppie only saw them as the denizens of a

rather disagreeable fairy-tale, though at some moments of the recital,

obscure to Alix, she saw that Toppie’s eyes rested upon her in a

cogitativeness that seemed aware of too much reality. “They are all

odious people, Alix,” she said to her one day. “Odious; vindictive;

vulgar and wicked.”

“Oh; but not all, Toppie. Some are very good, like Fénélon—though

Saint-Simon is unfair to him; and some are charming, like the Duchess de

Bourgogne. She was too fond of pleasure, perhaps; but she is so merry

and amusing that one can forgive her that.”

“Very much too fond, I am afraid,” said Toppie, colouring above her

knitting. “I do not like her, Alix.”

“If you feel the book unsuitable for our young friend, Toppie,” Mr.

Westmacott observed, “why should we not read ‘Corinne’? I remember

finding madame de Staël very interesting and any young girl could read

her.”

“But there are wicked people in all history,” cried Alix, aghast at this

suggestion. “You all read Shakespeare, though he is full of wickedness.

It is the point of view. The point of view of Saint-Simon is not wicked.

He is ill-tempered, disagreeable, but upright; he means always to tell

the truth. And then he was so devout, Monsieur; he was such a devout

Christian.”

This was wily of her, and Mr. Westmacott, easily reassured, agreed;

“Yes, yes, I see that.”

When Giles came home for the holidays, Toppie and her father had gone

again to Bournemouth. “She might have waited a week longer, so that I

could see her,” said Giles sadly. It was still taken happily for granted

that Alix should sit with Giles in the mornings. There were fires

everywhere this Winter, but she was more than ever glad of the refuge.

Ruth had become a rather overwhelming presence. She had made new friends

at Somerville and spent the first fortnight of her holidays with them in

London, going to art-student dances in Chelsea and medical-student

dances in Bloomsbury, and returning to her home with what Alix felt to

be many a foolish flourish added to her sensible signature. She

addressed Alix as “dear old ass,” and her favourite exclamation was

“God!”

“It is so unlike our _mon Dieu_,” Alix could not forbear writing to

Maman. “It is as if one saw a hen suddenly lay an ostrich egg—and so

proud of it. I think when English people like Ruth become emancipated,

they are very like hens laying ostrich eggs. There is such a strain;

and, when it is all over, it is not an interesting object.”

Ruth had been meant by nature to be like Aunt Bella, though with much of

beauty added. She was tall and large and brightly fair. She had little

gaiety, but she gave an impression of massive cheerfulness; and it

knocked you down if you impeded it, and strode, almost gravely, on its

way. Alix was pleased to feel that Giles, too, found Ruth irritating. He

could be very sharp with her, especially when she patronized her mother.

But Ruth now, fortified by her new experience of life and in less awe of

a brother, was not to be quelled by sharpness, so that if Giles had not

withdrawn into gloomy silences there would often have been quarrels.

“There’s no harm in her. She’s as good as gold. She’d go to the stake

for Mummy if it were necessary, cheerfully and as a matter of course;

only she’s so insufferably conceited,” Giles grumbled to Alix in the

study. “Why didn’t you tell her she knew nothing about it, when she was

chaffing you about French manners and customs just now? All she knows

about French manners are those of the professor’s family she stayed with

in Paris. Why didn’t you tell her to shut up?”

“That would have been rude,” said Alix.

“Well, she was rude.”

“But that is no reason for me,” Alix slightly smiled, looking up at him.

“By Jove, no!” Giles, with a rueful laugh, rubbed his hand through his

hair. “Ruth’s manners could never be a reason for yours, could they! I

say, you know, that’s a nasty one, Alix!”

“I do not mean it to be nasty. And she did not mean to be rude,” said

Alix. “She meant only to be funny.”

“That makes her stupid, then, as well as conceited,” said Giles.

If she took refuge with Giles, it was curious and touching to Alix to

note that before Ruth’s assaults Mrs. Bradley more and more took refuge

with her. When Ruth, with a shout of laughter, crowed “Victorian!” at

her mother, Alix begged that the inferiority of this term should be

explained to her. “For in Maman’s salon,” she observed, “clever

people—I mean the ones your clever people quarrel over in the reviews

as to who should claim to have first read them—admire even George Eliot

and Ruskin, I assure you. Admire them greatly.”

“Help! Help!” shrieked Ruth. She knew nothing of the clever people in

Maman’s salon. She had not advanced to the recognition of cleverness

beyond her reach; she had advanced only as far as scorn for

unfashionable tastes, and in herself, as Alix, musing on her, perceived,

she had none of the stuff from which new valuations are made.

“And you know,” Mrs. Bradley, for the sake of historical accuracy put

forward—evading by the mere force of her impersonality any

altercation—“it wasn’t really so long ago when I was young, Ruth. I

didn’t live in the time of crinolines. I was reading my Dostoievsky in

French and my Hardy in English when I was your age, and I don’t seem to

see that you young people have got beyond them.”

“Oh, Mummy darling, it’s not a question of what you read or don’t read!”

cried Ruth, affectionately ruffling her mother’s head. “It’s the colour

of your mind! It’s the pattern of your complexes!”

“There’s some truth in that, you know,” Mrs. Bradley observed to Alix

when, after this sally, Ruth seized her hockey stick and strode away.

Mrs. Bradley always saw whatever of truth there was to be seen in other

people’s positions. She felt no impatience or grievance against her

merciless daughter. She had not time for such reactions. Her own work

occupied all her time. And she hoped for her children that they, too,

would find work that would thus become the meaning of their lives. It

was wonderful in her, this detachment, Alix thought, yet she found fault

with it, and it was the only fault she found in Mrs. Bradley. She should

have felt herself more responsible for the uncouthness of her daughter;

she should have given less thought to the welfare of the London

children, and more to the manners of her own. “It would have been better

for them,” thought Alix, “if she could have become very angry with them.

How excellent for Ruth and Rosemary if they could have been well whipped

from time to time. And it is too late now.”

Mrs. Bradley would have thought whipping irrational and cruel. “She is

too wise, too quiet,” thought Alix. “But then the saints were like that;

wise and quiet and incapable of anger.”

Alix had never cared at all about the saints, and it was strange to feel

that this heretic lady, creedless and uncloistered, made them more real

and more lovable to her.

“Do you not think so, too, Giles?” she said to her friend in the study.

“Do you not see what I mean? She is like a modern kind of saint; so

selfless and dedicated and laborious. She never thinks about being

happy.”

“You make her happy, Alix. Did you know that?” said Giles.—“Yes, I see

perfectly what you mean. Yet Mummy never seems to me sad. Does she to

you?”

“I do not know,” Alix reflected. “She did not begin so quiet, I am sure.

Just as the saints did not. At the bottom of her heart she wanted to be

loved more; much more;—isn’t that what all people want most,

Giles?—And then when she found that she was not to be she must have

felt very sad.”

“But, I say, you know!”—Giles stared at her from his chair. “You do say

the most astonishing things! Not loved enough! Why don’t we all love

her!”

“Oh, but it would have to be more than that. She would want far more

love than English children could ever give to their parents.”

“English children! Surely you don’t think that the French love their

parents more than we do!”

“But of course we do, Giles,” said Alix in candid surprise. “Our mothers

we do; for perhaps fathers do not count for so much with us, either.”

“Oh, come, I can’t swallow that.” Giles smiling, yet disturbed, was

rubbing his hand over his hair. “You—even you—don’t love your mother

more than I do mine.”

“I think I do, Giles. I think we are more a part of our mothers in

France. You stand more alone in England, in everything.”

Giles in his disturbance of mind had got up and was looking out of the

window. “And what about my father, then?” he said. “What about his love

for her? That’s what we think of in England as counting most in a

woman’s life. He was devoted to her.”

Alix felt a little shy of sharing with Giles her deepest intuition about

Mrs. Bradley’s selflessness.

“I am afraid not enough, Giles. Did he really see her as you see her? I

am afraid he was not a part of herself, and that is what one expects in

England and that is why she must have been sad. And I think she loved

best always—if you do not mind my saying so—the ones who were most

part of herself—you and Captain Owen and Francis. One cannot help

loving most people who are most part of oneself.”

And though she still kept her French scepticism about marriage, the

half-unconscious climax of a long process of change within Alix was

reached when she added in her own thought: “How sad to be married to

someone who is not part of yourself.”

CHAPTER IV

It was in the last fortnight of the holidays that a letter, once more,

came from Lady Mary asking, as if only a few weeks had elapsed since the

last time of asking, if Alix could not now come and stay with them at

Cresswell Abbey.

The letter was again addressed to Mrs. Bradley and again arrived at

breakfast-time so that she read it aloud to the assembled family.

“You’ll have to go this time, Alix,” said Giles, with an air of fatherly

authority.

“Where’s the ‘have’ about it, Giles?” Ruth inquired, helping herself to

mustard with her kedgeree. “She’ll go if she likes, I suppose; and not

otherwise. For my part I don’t see why she should be at the beck and

call of Lady Hamble, or whatever her name is. She’s forgotten Alix for

long enough.”

“What’s to the point is that she’s remembered her for long enough,” said

Giles, “and that Alix has remembered her. Of course, you’re going,

Alix.”

“Alix will be bored stiff among all those swells,” cried Rosemary; “and,

besides, she’ll miss the Eustaces’ dance. Do refuse, Alix.”

“But I do not think they will bore me,” said Alix. “I should like to

go.”

It was arranged that Giles was to motor her to Hampshire; the

cross-country journey was too difficult by train, and while the map was

brought and spread out over the jam-pots and butter-dishes and they all

made suggestions as to the best route, Alix had time to wonder why,

despite her assertion, her old eagerness about Cresswell Abbey and Lady

Mary was much faded. Was it that she had grown fonder of Heathside? Yes;

undoubtedly; but that was not the reason. It was not to lose Heathside

to pay Cresswell Abbey a visit. But, with a new, unwonted shyness, she

shrank from the thought of the environment that had, in Lady Mary

herself, so reminded her of Maman. Maman would want her to go. She would

want it more than Giles did; and did he not want it because he knew that

it would be Maman’s desire for her? It was almost to suspect them of

planning it for her and it affected her with almost a sense of grief to

see his dark head bent above Ruth’s golden one while, so earnestly, he

scanned the road that was to lead her away from them. Did he—with Maman

to help him—believe that it would lead to an English marriage for her?

The blood rose faintly in her cheeks as she sat there, silent.

But her disquiet was even deeper than this. She had no longer her old

sense of security. It was Giles’s presence that lent her what security

she had and he would not be at Cresswell Abbey.

She was very silent on the morning they set out for their long drive. It

was nearly mid-day, yet the hoar frost still made the woods thick and

white against the sky, and the twigs were like antlers in their mossy

branching outlines. When they passed into the open country the buffs and

cinnamons and mole-colours of the fields and uplands were all powdered

to paleness. The beauty of the day was like a promise, but Alix felt it

like a farewell.

“You’ll be back in the fortnight at most, you know,” said Giles. He saw

that she was sad and said it to reassure her.

“But of course I shall not stay for a fortnight, Giles,” she said.

“Lady Mary didn’t fix any time; but I do hope you’ll stay for as long as

she asks you,” Giles returned. She made no reply. That, of course, was

what Maman would wish him to say to her.

They found the way longer than they had computed, and Alix was very

hungry by the time they reached the little market-town where they were

to lunch. It was disappointing to find the mutton so tough, and the

untidy and decorated young person who waited on them brought the cabbage

and potatoes with such a languid mien that they seemed to be almost a

concession to special greed.

“I think the cooks in your provincial inns have no pride in their

calling,” Alix observed, refraining from a very yellow custard pudding

while Giles doggedly attacked bread and cheese. “It is a pity; for pride

in one’s calling gives a zest to life, does it not?”

“Good Lord, Alix! Don’t rub it in!” Giles exclaimed, for the mutton had

been very tough.

It was already four o’clock when they entered the lodge gates of

Cresswell Abbey. The road through the park wound upwards and one saw the

ample, happy house with the dropping sun yellowing its windows as it

looked out over a southern aspect. Built of pale grey stone and thickly

lichened with rosettes of gold, it belonged to an England almost

intimate still in its associations. A Gainsborough lady, when it was but

newly built, might, Alix thought, have come strolling out on the

terrace, the white fur of her little silk jacket turned up about her

ears, and a white dog, half Spitz, half Pomeranian, trotting by her

side. There was nothing of the splendour or romance of antiquity about

it, and Alix, as she saw it, a vision of haughty Montarel hovering at

the back of her mind, was a little disappointed. But it was impossible

to think of English people living at Montarel. How different this

kind-eyed butler from Mélanie in her _savates_; how different the

firelit hall, filled with the scent of pot-pourri and burning logs, from

the gaunt cobwebby spaces of Montarel! A wide staircase turned to an

upper landing from the hall, and on the turn, with an ascending row of

Chinese paintings behind him, a young man in hunting-dress was standing,

looking down at them, as they were ushered in, with soft, bright,

interested eyes. A group of people, half shut in by a high Chinese

screen of red and gold, sat round the fire and from an open door came

the sound of a piano playing a reckless jazz tune. Alix felt her sadness

dispelled by a sweet stealing sense of excitement.

And now Lady Mary was again before her, looking older than she had

remembered her—and that was perhaps because another woman, radiantly

young, sat knitting by the fire—but showing the remembered bright

softness, and she was drawing them both forward and saying to Giles:

“Oh, but of course you must stay—oh, not only to tea; for the night.

It’s so far. It’s so cold. It’s so late. Indeed, you must.—Jerry will

lend you everything.”

Jerry came down the stairs. He had auburn hair and auburn eyes and thick

upturned auburn lashes. He was, of course, Lady Mary’s son, and Alix was

aware that during this little interval it had been at herself that he

had been looking. She saw herself standing there as he must see her. The

soft little grey travelling-hat came down over her eyebrows; the big,

soft collar of her coat went up about her ears; there was not much of

her face to be seen; but, for perhaps the first time in her young life,

she knew—and the knowledge, mingling with the warm scent of the

pot-pourri, the lurching, imbecile gaiety of the music, deepened her

sense of excitement—that she held herself beautifully, and that as far

as clothes were concerned she had no cause for disquiet.

“I am dark and she is fair,” this was the thought that passed through

her mind as she felt herself observed not only by Jerry, but also by the

radiant lady at the fireside; “but I am even younger than she is, and, I

imagine, more unusual.”

“Yes, _do_ stay,” said Jerry, looking now at Giles and smiling as if he

were specially glad to see him.

Poor dear Giles! How gaunt and shabby and shy he looked among them all;

rather, thought Alix, like a rook softly entreated by a flock of doves.

They cooed about him; Lady Mary with her soft dark eyes, and Jerry, and

a kind elderly gentleman who had advanced from the hearth, the “Times”

held behind him, and who, apparently, was Lady Mary’s husband. Even the

butler seemed to be one of the flock, and he gently withdrew Giles’s

greatcoat and carried it away as if the question were settled before

Giles had had time, as she knew, to gather his wits together.

“You _will_. That’s splendid,” said Jerry, though Giles had not said

that he would. “Let’s have tea at once, Mummy; they’ll want it as much

as I do, and I’ll change after.”

Lady Mary, taking Alix by the hand, as though she might feel, as a

foreigner, strange in a strange country, led her upstairs to a bright

sweet room where rose-clotted chintzes were drawn back from the bed and

windows and flowers stood on the writing- and dressing-tables and

enticing bottles with little labels round their necks on the wash-hand

stand.

“Debenham will get you everything. Ask her for anything you want,” said

Lady Mary, introducing the elderly maid who entered with hot water. “You

can find your way down? We’re having tea in the drawing-room, just out

of the hall. And then you must have a little rest. Some young people are

coming over after dinner to dance. Are you fond of dancing?”

“Fonder than of anything, I think,” said Alix; and Lady Mary, smiling,

said “Good.”

When she was left alone and had taken off her hat and washed, and combed

her hair, Alix stood before the glass and looked at herself attentively.

She looked well after the long drive. It had not been really cold,

though her lips were a little pale. She bit them to make the colour

come, and wondered, bending closer, whether she should powder her face.

She had never yet used the box of powder, _teinte Rachel_, in her

dressing-case, though Maman had told her that she might do so if she

thought it advisable. The radiant lady used liquid powder; Alix had seen

that at once, and her lips were reddened artificially. Alix decided that

she would leave herself alone. “It goes better with my hair; one colour

all over like that; and the right colour,” she reflected, while the

spicy elation ran still more warmly through her veins. Maman had chosen

with her, at a specially favourite little shop in the rue du Faubourg

Saint-Honoré, the jumper of palest blue and grey, patterned like a

fritillary; and the string of dull brown beads and the blue skirt and

the grey shoes and stockings all went perfectly with it. “I am _bien;

très bien_,” she thought; and as she went down the passage and crossed

the landing and looked down into the firelit hall with its flowers and

screens and great blazing logs, she felt herself so strangely Maman’s

child. It was as if she knew, for the first time in her life, an elation

that Maman had often felt.

They were all in the drawing-room where tea was being laid, Jerry and

Lady Mary and Mr. Hamble, and two young girls and a young man and an

old-young man, who had evidently been dancing and who wished to seem

much younger than he was.—“I will avoid dancing with him,” thought

Alix. “He is too stout and he brushes his hair up over his head from

behind so that it shall not be seen how bald he is.”—And the radiant

lady was talking to Giles. Giles stood with her before the fire and

looked dreadfully cross, and that was because he did not like her. But

other people liked her; a great deal. Her soft locks, now smooth, now

clustering, were of the purest gold and her eyes of a marvellous blue,

and she, too, was undoubtedly _bien, très bien_, in her white silk

jumper and her white woollen skirt and string of pearls. But Giles did

not like her. And she did not like Giles, either, though she was

pretending to carry on the kindest of conversations with a dull young

man, and when Jerry came up to Alix herself the golden-haired lady,

smiling more sweetly than ever upon Giles, saw everything that passed

between them and was not pleased. She did not care a rap about Giles.

What she cared about was Jerry.

It was characteristic of Alix that the more she saw and felt, the more

silent and aloof did she become. It might have been a fundamental racial

caution in her blood; the instinct for being sure, first, where you

were, and, second, sure of where you wished to be seen as being before

you made a movement; and as she felt the pressure of all these strange

new realizations—strangest of all about herself—she knew that she

possessed reserves of courteous convention more than adequate for any

contingencies that might arise at Cresswell Abbey. Quietly smiling at

Jerry, she took the place Lady Mary indicated to her beside her on the

sofa and saw that the golden-haired lady still watched her while

pretending not to.

The two young girls were guests. They had very sweet voices that did not

mean much. One of them was pretty, and the stout gentleman with the hair

brushed over his baldness jested with her in a low voice, but, though he

tried so to please her, the pretty girl, while she ate a great many

cakes, looked at him with eyes that did not find him amusing. Alix felt

with her.

“From Jack,” said the radiant lady, looking up from a letter; the butler

had just brought in the letters.

“What news of Jack?” asked Mr. Hamble. The golden-haired lady was

married to his nephew and her name was Marigold. Jack, it seemed, was

rather enjoying his job at Singapore. He wrote a long letter, and Mrs.

Hamble’s marvellous eyes became very wistful while she read, but Alix

felt sure that if she had been reading alone in her own room they would

not have looked like that; hard and indifferent rather.

“My dear, don’t be so silly,” said the other girl to the young man who

was short and robust with a tanned jolly face. He was a sailor, and Alix

liked his face and felt that with him she would like to dance. They all

knew each other very well and laughed and talked and she felt they saw

her as a very young school-girl, for Jerry was now talking to Giles

about Oxford, and no one paid any attention to her until Lady Mary began

to ask her about Normandy and then about Beauvais and Rouen and so on to

Chartres, on which the bald man, whose name was Mr. Fulham and who wrote

books, as if observing her for the first time, asked her if she knew his

friends the marquis and marquise de Tréville in Normandy and, when she

said she did not, turned to the pretty girl again.

After tea she found herself alone for a little while with Giles. She

felt as if they met after long separation, so completely had the

morning’s sadness dissolved in the pervading sense of excitement.

“I like it here very much, don’t you?” she said.

“It’s a jolly place,” said Giles. “And they’re all so nice. I’m glad you

like it. I’m glad you’ll be happy here.”

Giles no longer looked cross, but he looked thoughtful, and his eyes

turned on her once or twice in a way that made her wonder, with a vague

discomfort, whether he guessed at her excitement.

“I wish you were staying here, too, Giles,” she said. But this was not

quite true. She would be sorry to see Giles go; even a little

frightened; yet if that sense of excitement were to environ her more

closely she would not care to have Giles observing it.

“Oh, but I don’t belong here at all,” said Giles, stretching up his arms

and locking his hands behind his head, while his eyes still studied her.

“And you do.”

“Why don’t you belong here?” she asked. But she knew. He was a rook

among the doves.

“I haven’t done any of the things they do;—or very few of them.”

“Neither have I.”

“Oh, yes, you have; far more. Anyway, you’re fitted for them and I’m

not.”

“Do you mean you look down upon them?”

“Of course not. But one has only time for so much in one’s life and my

line is taken.”

“Philosophy and the Banbury Road,” said Alix, rather sadly musing.

“Yes; philosophy, though not necessarily the Banbury Road,” said Giles.

“And tutoring and being poor. You couldn’t combine those with dances and

hunting; even if you had the choice; which I haven’t.”

“Lady Mary cares for the things you do, Giles. Books and music, and the

country. I believe they all care. I think you would be quite happy with

her and Mr. Hamble and Jerry.”

“Oh, we’d manage for a week-end now and then, no doubt. He’s a nice boy

that Jerry,” Giles added, moving his arms now, putting his hands in his

pockets and looking with detachment at the foot crossed on his knee.

“Lucky we’re the same size, isn’t it? I shan’t look too much of an ass

in his evening things.”

“He is very nice, I think,” said Alix. “I do not care much for Joan and

Patience Wagstaffe, they seem to me rather _nulle_. But the sailor is

nice, too, and Mr. Hamble is so kind. He told me that he would teach me

to play billiards. They seem to find that Mr. Fulham very clever, but I

would not have him however clever he was. I do not like him. He has a

sly face and eats too much. And is Mrs. Hamble nice, Giles?” Thus

circuitously Alix approached her object. “She is exceedingly pretty. You

had a long talk with her.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t.” Giles laughed suddenly. “She wasn’t talking with

me—only at me; to see what she’d catch as a rebound.”

After all, it was always delightful to get back to Giles. After all, no

one understood quite as well as Giles.

“What was she trying to catch?” Alix asked.

“Oh, just who we were, and what we were doing here, and why in the

dickens you weren’t just the quiet little French girl she’d expected.

The funny part of it was,” said Giles, smiling broadly as he thought of

it, “she didn’t know a bit that I saw what she was after. Silly ass;

thinking herself so gracefully concealed and all the time as gross and

as glaring as possible. She’s stupid all right,” said Giles. “Though I

daresay it makes one stupid to imagine one’s dealing with a negligible

noodle. You let her alone, Alix. She’s a cat.”

This was very pleasant to Alix.

“She has a false face,” she observed. “I shall certainly let her alone;

for she displeased me from the first.”

Then Lady Mary came back and sat down and talked with them, of France

again, and of Oxford, and Professor Cockburn, and then Jerry, having

changed his hunting-clothes for homespun, came and carried Giles off to

billiards, but Lady Mary said she would keep Alix with her, and, when

the two young men were gone, said: “How dear he is, your Giles; such a

delightful solid mind,” so that Alix flushed with pleasure. She was glad

to have Giles appreciated and it made her fonder of Lady Mary that she

should appreciate him.

Lady Mary then questioned her about Giles and his family and how she had

come to know them, and Alix, replying, felt herself move along the

surfaces prepared for her by Giles and Maman. She told Lady Mary about

Captain Owen and how great a friend he had been and of how he had wished

her to know his family. There was nothing else to tell. Lady Mary knew

just what Mrs. Bradley knew.

She was glad to rest for a little while before dinner, lying in her room

on the sofa with a soft cushion under her head and the firelight softly

glowing on her closed eyelids, until it was time to dress. Debenham had

laid out on the bed the very dress she herself would have chosen; her

prettiest dress, of white and crystal; and the sense of elation and

excitement mounted in her with thick swift strokes, as of rising wings,

while, before the mirror, Debenham fastened it for her. Debenham thought

her beautiful. Her quiet, sagacious face, glancing at the reflected

figure, told Alix that she thought so; and Debenham had seen many pretty

young ladies.

When she was left alone, she stood and looked at herself. Yes; was it

true. Beautiful that little head; beautiful the long, splendid throat,

the breast and arms so white. In the tilted mirror she looked like a

naiad hovering within the thin falling lines of a fountain. Tiny crystal

drops fell along her arms and flowed from breast to hem. She moved, and

liquid lines of crystal moved with her. Her shoes were of silver and a

fillet of twisted silver and crystal bound her dark hair. “_Dieu que je

suis belle!_” Alix murmured. She seemed to float on a sense of buoyant

power. She had never known such happiness.

They all thought her beautiful. She saw that as she came among them.

Jerry was there—he was the first she saw, looking at her; and the young

sailor looked; and kind Mr. Hamble; Marigold Hamble in pink and diamonds

looked, too, very hard.

“The lovely dress! Paris, of course,” said Lady Mary, smiling at her as

though she were grateful to her for placing an object so decorative in

her drawing-room.

“Paris and Maman,” Alix smiled, and the memory of Maman rushed over her

almost with a smart of tears. She owed it all to Maman, this

transfiguration. She was not really so beautiful, by daylight. It was

Maman’s magic that enveloped her, and Maman was not here to see her in

it. It was cruel that a stranger, Lady Mary, should garner Maman’s

sheaves.

She saw now that Giles’s large eyes were dwelling upon her from a

distance; but they were not like the other eyes. They kept their look of

thoughtfulness. He was not seeing her in the magic. He was only seeing

her as herself. It would always be only oneself that Giles would see.

From within her fountain of happiness she glimmered a little smile over

to him—for Jerry was beside her saying that he was to take her in to

dinner—and in Giles’s answering smile she read something touched and

gentle. She was glad that it should be so, for Giles might have looked

gloomily at her, seeing her so happy at being beautiful; but he was only

touched; and those gentle eyes of Giles’s seemed at once to quiet the

excitement and to reassure her, as though he said: “But of course you

must be happy, dear kid.”

The long table in the dining-room, shining under the candles, was like a

lake of bright water all drifted over with floating knots of flowers.

Everything made her think of gliding, falling water to-night; everything

was beautiful. Jerry was beside her and he was used to beautiful people.

He saw them every day of his life. He was like André de Valenbois in

that. Giles’s very thoughts about André crossed her mind as she turned

her eyes on the charming face beside her. He, too, was a person removed

from the earthy, primitive aspects of life; he, too, had only had,

always, to choose what he would have and never to have what he did not

choose. And now—she felt it falling around her, cool and refreshing as

the sense of crystal drops—it was herself he chose rather than Mrs.

Hamble. He did not look at Mrs. Hamble. He talked and talked, trying to

find out about her all the things that interested him; her tastes, her

prejudices, the colour of her personality. He talked happily, eagerly,

with something of the ardour of a little boy playing at gardening; that

was the simile that came to Alix while she smiled quietly at him—a

little boy who gathers up armfuls of flowers and thistles, the lovely

and the commonplace together, and brings them for

admiration:—“_Beautiful_, isn’t it?” was what he said continually; and

he did not see that there were thistles. He was younger than André; much

younger. She was dimly glad of that, for something in the likeness she

had felt disquieted her. She liked him better than André, though he had

not André’s fine discrimination. His admirations lay along the paths of

fashion, and the fact that fashion prided itself on being a pioneer led

him into ardours for the new and the strange soon discarded for the

newer and the stranger. He had an air, Alix saw, of caring, immensely,

that you should sympathize with him about the latest painter, the latest

poet, the latest composer. He did not really care whether you

sympathized or not; but if you didn’t, you were negligible for his

purposes. She saw that he had already found Giles negligible; and she

wondered why he did not put her into the same category. Did he imagine

that she possessed and withheld even fresher appraisals? It was not so

and she did not pretend it, looking at him with her quiet smile and

softly shaking her head now and then. She had never thought of herself

as a person whose appraisals mattered; she had thought of herself as too

much of a child. But perhaps it was because Jerry found her beautiful

that he was indifferent to her indifference.

After dinner they danced. Many young people arrived and the tall red

Chinese screens in the hall were put back. There was a piano and two

violins and one of the young men who played had such a gloomy face, like

a French or Italian face—like Jules’ face—that Alix wished she could

talk to him and ask him if he were a foreigner. But there was no time

for talk. She and Jerry found that their steps went beautifully

together. She danced with him; many times; and with other young men; and

Jerry helped her to evade Mr. Fulham who, seeing how many partners she

had, wished to be one of them. But with Jerry it was best of all, and

how much more important it was to have steps that chimed than to care

about the same books and pictures! It seemed to-night, among the

flowers, and lights, and music, the most important of all things; though

once or twice, when she found Giles’s eyes again, she knew that the

sense of ecstasy on which she floated must have the evanescence of a

mirage. Dear Giles. She made him dance with her and they laughed

together as they went slowly round the hall, for Giles did not dance

well. Afterwards she saw that he talked with Lady Mary and with Mr.

Hamble. He did not go into the mirage. He only looked on at it.

When Alix fell asleep that night in the firelight, she dreamed that a

cool crystal stream flowed round her and that she floated on its silver

surfaces. Golden lights lay like a chain of little suns along its margin

and her hands, softly moving in the current, felt rosy petals pass

between their fingers. The throb of dance-music, sweet, reckless,

imbecile, beat in her blood, and in her ears the sound of Jerry’s voice

saying: “_Beautiful_, isn’t it?” And Giles’s eyes were there watching

her. In her dream she wanted to tell Giles that she had nothing to

conceal. She tried to tell him, but she felt the silver stream flowing

over her lips and making them dumb, though they smiled. If Giles looked

at her like that she might begin to blush. But even so she did not want

him gone. While he was there she was so safe.

CHAPTER V

“And you will see that Blaise is happy until I come back, Giles?” said

Alix, as she stood beside the car next morning to say good-bye. “And you

will write to me?”

“We haven’t time for many letters, you know,” Giles smiled reassuringly.

“I’ll see to Blaise.”

“Give my love to them all,” said Alix. The car was beginning slowly to

slide away and she went beside it. She was not unhappy; not sad; it was

only that she was a little frightened to see Giles go. If one night had

changed so much in herself, what changes might not one week bring? She

almost felt she loved Ruth and Rosemary this morning. Whatever their

deficiencies they had not false faces. It was true that they could not,

even if they had wished to, have concealed themselves gracefully; but it

would never occur to them to wish to be concealed; gracefully or

otherwise. Neither were they insipid like the two Wagstaffe girls. If

Ruth and Rosemary were like roast mutton, the Wagstaffes, Alix

reflected, were like _fondants_. She stood gazing after Giles for a

moment as he disappeared among the beeches.

Jerry and his mother stood on the step above her, having come out with

her to say good-bye. Lady Mary was looking at her, a little, she felt,

as Giles had looked at her last night; thoughtfully, with great kindness

in the thoughtfulness; seeing her as herself.

“Now you’re going to let me teach you how to ride,” said Jerry. “Mummy

has a habit for you.”

“An old one of mine. I don’t ride any longer,” said Lady Mary, putting

her hand on Alix’s shoulder as they went into the warm sweet house. “I

think it will fit you beautifully. You and I are rather of the same

build, aren’t we, Alix?”

“Alix’s shoulders are broader than yours, Mummy,” said Jerry, “and I’m

afraid, darling, that her legs are a little longer. She’s rather like a

Jean Goujon nymph and you are just a lovely mortal size.”

It was odd, Alix thought, to have a young man define the length of one’s

legs; but not _mal élevé_, as it would have been in France. Jerry

discussed the physical attributes of his friends as he would have

discussed their moral qualities.

“The habit may be a trifle too short, it’s true,” said Lady Mary; “but

that makes no difference. The Jean Goujon nymph will be able to get into

it. We must dress Alix in the Gainsborough Blue Boy clothes one day,

Jerry, to show off her long legs. We must have a little fancy-dress ball

in the Easter holidays.”

“Oh, but I’m afraid I cannot be here in the Easter holidays,” said Alix.

“You see, those are Giles’s holidays, too. I should miss him.”

“You’ll be coming here off and on, I hope;—and Giles will, too,

perhaps,” smiled Lady Mary. “I can always send the car for you. Where’s

Marigold, Jerry? Not up yet?”

“You know, she looks rather like the Blue Boy, doesn’t she?” said Jerry.

“Only his eyes aren’t blue, and he has a gentler face. Alix’s face is

rather _farouche_;—is that the word?—You frighten me a little, Alix,

with those cold blue eyes of yours.—Marigold’s still in bed. She sent

for me to see her just now. Writing letters,” said Jerry, “in a most

adorable little cap; a Watteau little cap; most frightfully becoming.

That was why she sent for me, of course, so that I should see her in it;

though the alleged motive was the Fairlies’ ball.”

“Naughty Jerry,” smiled his mother.

“Not a bit naughty. I told her I saw through her. I told her that the

cap was a brilliant success. Nothing _souterrain_ about me.—Eh, Alix?

Is that right?” They all called her Alix;—as if she had been ten years

old; or as if they had always known her.

“I think you must try to talk a little French with Alix,” said Lady

Mary. “His accent is good, isn’t it? But his verbs and genders are

dreadful, and _souterrain_ isn’t right, my dear boy.”

“Don’t you think Marigold quite extraordinarily beautiful?” Jerry

inquired. “Isn’t the colour of her hair and eyes a Hans Christian

Andersen fairy-tale colour?”

“But she is much more like a Watteau than like a fairy-tale,” said Alix.

“But Watteau people are fairy-tale people.—You mean she’s an artificial

fairy-tale.—Yes, I see what you mean.—And it’s really more Fragonard

than Watteau, too—‘A dainty rogue in porcelain,’ that’s what she is. Do

you read Meredith? I love him, though I know he is _démodé_ just now.”

But Alix had not read Meredith.

Half an hour later, when Jerry had lightly hoisted her to the saddle and

the groom had released the chestnut’s eager head, Alix felt as if, at

last, she had discovered her true vocation. This—yes, even more than

dancing—was what she had been made for.

She did not feel that she had anything to learn. She felt no fear. Her

hands went easily where Jerry told her to put them; her knee and foot

found their security. Nothing this delicious creature could do, moving

with satin ease and steel strength beneath her, would take her unawares.

She understood him, and he, his gentle ears quivering at the sound of

her voice, understood her. “Yes; yes, I see,” she said, as Jerry gave

his explanations. “Yes, we will walk to the end so that I shall be quite

used to it and then canter on the turf. Yes; I understand; holding with

my knee.”

It was not swimming, or dancing, or flying, but it combined the delights

of all three. One floated, buoyantly sustained; one embodied the beauty

of rhythmic movement; one glided at a height strange enough for a sense

of slight, delicious trembling. The earth was new, seen from this

height; one looked into the branches of the beeches at the level where

the chaffinches were perching and flitting.

“You sit as if you were born to it,” Jerry told her, and she replied

that her father had been a great horseman.

Then came the canter. It surprised her a little. For one surging moment,

cheeks hot, lips closed fast, she felt that she was coming off and then,

suddenly, that nothing could bring her off. Between that fast-held knee

and that supple foot, she was poised in safety. Her mind and body

adjusted themselves to the sense of mastered peril.

“Splendid!” Jerry smiled at her when they drew rein at the end of the

long upland.

Below them the country fell away in rippled planes of colour, like a

tapestry, russet, silver and blue. Alix seemed to see it threaded with

ladies riding unicorns and wearing high white hennins. Fragments of song

rang in her mind; the joyous melancholy of _Les Filles de la Rochelle_,

the blissful sadness of _L’Amour de moi_. Riding brought such memories

crowding to one’s mind. This was a better intoxication than the dancing

mirage. It went deeper. It set the bells of all the buried Atlantises of

the soul ringing.

“What are you thinking about _now_!” she heard Jerry ask. She had almost

forgotten Jerry while she gazed and listened;—far away in France; in an

old, old France. But it was part of the better happiness to find Jerry

again and to feel herself again a child, with Jerry her comrade. Mrs.

Hamble was as remote as a lady on a unicorn. The woman’s happiness of

the night before, made up of power and conquest, faded before the

child’s mere joyousness. Jerry made her think of the chestnut horse she

rode, with his eager russet head.

“Oh, I do so like riding, Jerry!” she exclaimed.

“You’d soon be able to hunt, if you get on like this. How I wish I could

take you out hunting!”

“I should not care to hunt,” said Alix. “This is what I like. Riding in

a beautiful country with everything happy around one.”

“But everything is happy around you when you hunt,” said Jerry. “Hounds

and horses and people. One is part of an immense shaded joy. And one

never sees how beautiful a country is until one has ridden right across

it and known that at every wall one might break one’s neck.”

“I like this better,” said Alix. “This is like riding with a flower in

one’s hand, and that would be to ride with a knife between one’s

teeth.—Though I understand the pleasure of the danger.—But the fox

would spoil it all for me. He would not be part of the immense joy.”

“Oh, I assure you—he enjoys it, too, in his own sharp way. Imagine his

joy when he outwits us.”

“A terrible joy,” said Alix. “There must always be terror in his blood.

No; I could not bear to feel that he was there, with his straining

heart, before us. I could never hunt. But I should like to ride for

ever.”

When they got back they went to find Lady Mary in the morning-room.

“Alix is a marvel, Mummy!” Jerry exclaimed. “She’s not afraid of

anything, and rides as if she’d been born in the saddle.”

“I was afraid once,” said Alix. “When we started to canter.”

Lady Mary sat at her writing-bureau, photographs and flowers ranged

about her, and smiling at them both she said: “You must come and tell me

all about it, Alix, when you’ve had your bath. Will you? I shall be

here.”

“And I must do some reading,” said Jerry. “_Au revoir_, Alix. Billiards

after lunch, you know.”

Lady Mary had finished her morning tasks when Alix returned and was

sitting near the fire with a little table before her on which she was

laying out tiny patience cards. Alix again thought of a lady in a hennin

as she saw her there in her long, grey, fur-bordered robe; a hennin

would have been so becoming to her.

“Curl up in the big chair,” she said. “You must be tired, and you’ll

find yourself very stiff by to-morrow. Do you smoke? Not yet? Good. I’m

glad not. Joan and Patience both do already, and I’m sure it’s bad for

them. That’s all their life it seems to me; smoking and dancing. Have

you many girls in France like that? I haven’t stayed in France for so

many years.”

“I should not be allowed to smoke; not until I married, I think,” said

Alix, leaning her head on the side of the big chair and watching her

hostess’s white hands place the little cards. “I don’t know about other

girls. But I do not think that they have as much liberty as in England.

I like liberty; but not for so many cigarettes.”

She felt very much at home with Lady Mary, who continued to make her

think of Maman.

“Liberty for the right things and not for the foolish things,” smiled

Lady Mary. “And it’s a pity to have liberty for foolish things even when

one marries. Tell me where you and Jerry went. Across the ridge and down

to Minching’s Pond? A wonderful place that is for birds in Spring—Three

Oaks Corner; yes; only the oaks went during the war. Did Jerry tell you?

Dreadful to see the empty places. And as far as the Mill. That was a

splendid round. Ah, I felt sure you’d like Darcy. Isn’t he a lamb of a

horse! Jerry wanted you to have Darcy.—I’m so glad you are here to play

with Jerry,” Lady Mary went on. “Marigold is such a flirt. She can’t

help it.” Lady Mary smiled at Alix and shuffled her cards. “She is a

born siren. And Jerry is too young for sirens.”

Alix had again the sensation of being confided in despite her youth. It

was curious how quickly, if they liked you, they confided in you, these

strange English people.

“You didn’t answer Jerry this morning about her looks,” Lady Mary was

going on. “It’s a thin little face, I feel, don’t you? And too

pink-and-white; too blue-and-gold. But perhaps that’s because I’m dark.

I suppose dark people, like you and me, Alix, usually suspect the

white-and-gold ones of being cats.”

“I do not like her face,” said Alix.