no difference to me. I don’t care a hang about ancestors and all that
sort of thing, and I expect we’ve plenty of rotters among our own. It’s
Mummy who takes it so hard. If only Alix had consented to marry me at
once, when I asked her, we’d have been all right. People always put up
with the _fait accompli_, don’t they, and Mummy’s so awfully fond of
Alix. Marigold might have come trotting with her little tale of woe, but
she’d have been too late. Well, she’s too late now, and I’ll show her
so—horrid little cat. I shall go over to Paris at once, and I don’t
suppose I shall meet with much opposition from madame Vervier.”
“I think you’ll meet with a great deal from Alix,” said Giles, aware of
restlessness and inquiry beneath the brave parade of Jerry’s words. “I
don’t think you’ve a chance of marrying her against your mother’s
wishes. Your only chance is to bring your mother round. That will take
time. You’ll have to show your mother that you mean it.”
Jerry eyed him for a moment. “Well, Alix is a French girl. She’s rubbing
it in enough that she’s French—and she’ll obey her mother. If her
mother tells her that she’s to marry me, I expect she will; and I’m
pretty sure I could get round madame Vervier. By the way, what sort of a
woman is she, really?” Jerry added, and boyishly, touchingly in Giles’s
eyes, he suddenly flushed.
Giles was thinking how like wax in madame Vervier’s hands would Jerry
be. “She’s a charming woman,” he said.
“Well, of course she’s that,” Jerry assented. “But I mean, is she a
lady, all that sort of thing?—Not that I care.”
Giles reflected. “The only person I ever met who reminds me of her is
your mother.”
“Mummy?” Jerry stared, indeed.
“They’re not alike at all in what they’ve done; but they are very much
alike in what they are. You could count upon madame Vervier as you could
count upon your own mother. She’d always know what to do. If you and
Alix married, she’d never trouble you.”
“You mean she’d give up Alix if it was for her happiness?”
“Absolutely. What she wants most is Alix’s happiness. Your difficulty
wouldn’t be at any time with madame Vervier, but with Alix herself.”
“She wouldn’t give her mother up, you mean?”
“From what you know of her, do you think she would?”
Jerry turned his eyes upon the fire and contemplated it. “She’s awfully
young,” he suggested.
“Yes, but she won’t change, in that respect, in getting older. It would
be difficult. Alix’s feeling for her mother would make it all very
difficult. You’d have to face that, Jerry.”
Jerry had never had to face anything that was difficult. Everything
about him seemed to be saying that as he sat there, his thoughtful
cigarette in his hand, his russet head poised meditatively. He saw Alix
as a bright object that he naturally wanted, and now it was shown to him
that, bright as she might be, darkness lay about her. It was evident to
Giles that he turned away from the thought of darkness as he said
presently: “Isn’t she absolutely the loveliest creature you ever
beheld?”
“Do you know,” Giles confessed, surprised by the change of theme, but
willing to follow to the best of his ability, “I’ve never thought much
about Alix’s appearance. I don’t suppose one does when one has known
someone from a child. I suppose she is lovely. I like everything her
face means; and the more I know Alix the more it goes on meaning.”
“She’s a Nike,” said Jerry, gazing at the fire. “She’s on the prow of a
Greek ship flying over the wine-dark sea. You’ve seen her dance—in that
white and crystal dress with the silver round her head—it’s like the
rhythm of Shelley’s Hymn of Pan. When I look at her dancing, I long to
dance with her; when I dance with her, I long to be looking at her. Odd,
isn’t it, how one never can get enough at once. She’s got the most
extraordinarily cold eyes, you know,” said Jerry, fully launched upon
his theme. “Even when one’s dancing with her and looks down into
them;—she’s so happy, she smiles up at you—and yet they are as cold,
as blue, as deep as mountain lakes.”
“Yet she’s not cold,” said Giles. He was seeing Alix as Jerry spoke
about her eyes, not dancing, not smiling, but looking as she had looked
the other morning when she had said: “Now, if other things should fail
her, she will know at least I am there to be depended upon.” With the
words he had seen her go forward to take her mother by the hand. A
tenderness, passionate, enfolding, had thrilled beneath the quiet words.
How right had madame Vervier been in believing that she could count
always upon Alix.—And Jerry only saw her dancing.
But he himself wanted Alix to dance. He wanted her to marry Jerry. He
believed that it might still be possible if Jerry could be good enough.
“If you hold on, you know,” he said—and Jerry could not think it
irrelevant—“I feel sure your mother will stand by you, and if she
stands by you, everything will fall into place and you and Alix can go
on dancing. So hold on. Deserve her. I’m standing by you already, as you
know.” He smiled down at Jerry, so young, so slight, but so charming and
so sound. If Jerry could get strength enough to hold on, he would waft
Alix far away. Philosophers could have little to do with dancing white
and silver Nikes. “Deserve her, you see,” he repeated.
“Not go over to-morrow, you mean?” Jerry questioned, looking up at his
host, docile to any suggestion. “I’d so much rather have it settled
straight off. And I have a feeling that if I could get at Alix over
there, with her mother to help me, I should get it settled.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t. And nothing would unsettle your own mother so
much. You’ll gain everything with Alix, and with your mother, if you
show them that you can wait. Write to Alix, of course; write constantly.
Tell her all about it; your feelings, you know, and what you think about
her eyes.—You both care for the same things: riding; out of doors;
fancy-dress balls, and the ‘Hymn of Pan.’ What you’ve got to uphold, you
see, Jerry, what you’ve got to justify, is our English conception of
being in love. You must overbear convention; you must break down
parental scruples. You must show yourself so much in love to Alix that
you’ll convince her that romance is common-sense. You see, I want you to
win her, not only for yourself, but for England.”
Jerry’s eyes were on him while he spoke and they dwelt for some moments
of bright contemplation as if for the first time he was looking at Giles
more carefully than he had looked at the gas-fire and the mantelpiece.
“You know, if I may say so, I do think you’re a very remarkable person,”
he observed.
“Am I? Why?” Giles asked, smiling rather sadly.
“Well”—Jerry continued to look at him, but he blushed again—“to care
so much about a girl you’re not in love with yourself. Doing everything
for her. I’ve heard a lot about you, you may be sure. Alix thinks more
of you than of anybody in the world.”
Giles, too, was blushing now. “Does she?” he said. They were suddenly
two boys together, and as they spoke of love and of Alix their words, to
Giles, seemed to lift her far away out of childhood and to set her, a
woman, between them.
“I’m most awfully fond of Alix,” he said.
“I know. That’s what’s so remarkable,” said Jerry, shyly smiling. “To be
so fond, yet not to be in love.”
“You see,” Giles found himself offering, really as if in a sort of
exculpation, “one may be in love with someone else; that would prevent,
wouldn’t it? And you can care immensely about someone without being in
love with them.”
“Could one? When she’s Alix? I can’t imagine it,” Jerry a little
nervously smiled. “Unless, as you suggest, there’s someone else, and
then I shouldn’t have time to care so much for another girl.”
Jerry’s ingenuous analysis certainly had its potency; Giles did not
quite know what to say to him. “Even if I had been, it wouldn’t have
done me any good,” he suggested. “Alix would never have thought of me.”
“Well, you mustn’t ask _me_ to say that she would!” Jerry laughed out at
this.
He got up as he spoke and went to the mantelpiece, picking up and
examining one of the horrid little china animals thereon. But he was not
seeing it.
“England will get her in a much more satisfactory way, for Alix, than it
would if I were in the running,” said Giles.
“And you really think it may get her; you really think I can manage it,”
Jerry murmured, still examining the china cow. Jerry, more than ever,
because he saw him as so remarkable, was depending upon him for
sustainment. It would have been a comparatively easy matter for him to
leap over the barriers and make off to the beloved. To wait, to hold on,
was a different matter, and Giles knew a little turn of fear as he saw
it. It was no good Jerry’s thinking that anyone else could hold on for
him.
“You can’t manage it unless you can count on yourself,” he now informed
him. “There’s nobody else for you to count on. Alix is against you, and
your mother is against you. It won’t be an easy thing to marry Alix.
It’s not only as a dancing Nike you have to think of her. It’s as madame
Vervier’s daughter, too.”
“And as a Catholic. And as French,” Jerry murmured, setting down the cow
to take up the cat. “You know she said—funny little darling—that the
children would have to be Catholics. Not that I’d care a rap.—Only, it
does somehow make everything more difficult.”
“It certainly does. Alix has all her objections. Nothing could be more
difficult,” Giles rather heavily assured him.
“And as the English lover it’s up to me to overcome them; show her that
I can carry her off in spite of them—in spite of herself—what? How
would you like it if your children had to be Catholics?” Jerry very
gloomily inquired.
Giles did not have to reflect for long. “I should not like it at all.
It’s one of the things I’d put up with if I were in love with Alix and
she in love with me.”
“Do you know, I almost wish you were,” Jerry now said, and he spoke from
a sudden cloud of darkness.
Giles paused. “Does that mean that you’ve given her up?” he inquired.
“No, I’ve not given her up.” Jerry looked down at the china cat. “I’m
going to try to live up to the part of the English lover. It’s only,”
said Jerry, “that I see the difficulties.”
CHAPTER IV
Before Giles went back to Oxford a short letter came to Mrs. Bradley
from Toppie saying that she was going to stay on in Bath for the present
and that her determination to become a nun was unaltered. After that,
for many weeks, he heard nothing more of her, and it was not until the
end of June that he received a letter telling him that she was at
Headington, staying with an old friend of her mother’s before entering
her novitiate, and asking him to come and see her. The old friend lived
in a little house sunken among the high walls and deep leafage of a
garden, and the drawing-room, where Giles waited for Toppie, its long
windows opening on a little lawn, seemed part of the garden, it was so
full of flowers and sunlight.
Giles stood at a window and looked out and listened to a garden-warbler
singing ceaselessly, like a running brook, among the branches. His heart
was full of presage, for he had not seen Toppie since the dreadful day
that had severed them from the past. Yet the song of the garden-warbler,
rippling incessantly over his fear, seemed to dissolve it into a happy
melancholy.—“The past is over, not forgotten, but over, over,”—the
song seemed to be saying. “This sweetness, this sunlight, this
tranquillity is the present. Believe in it, live in it, as I do. She is
not angry with you any longer. You have not failed.”
And when Toppie entered, he saw that she was not angry and that he had
not failed. More than that; there was much more than that for him in
Toppie’s face; but he could not at first determine what it was.
She was changed. So changed that it was almost as if he had forgotten
her and was seeing her for the first time again. Perhaps it was that
since last seeing her all his thoughts of her had been changed. Personal
hopes, personal longings, were gone, and seen without the aching glamour
that they had cast about her Toppie was at once less and more beautiful.
For never before had he recognized the defects and deficiencies of her
face. She was a pale, thin, freckled girl, slightly featured, with dry
lips and colourless eyes. Yet in this newly perceived earthliness there
was revealed to him the fulfillment, as it were, of that celestial
quality he had from the first divined in her.
This was what Toppie was; this was the material that had been given her
to work upon; and it was as if he saw her, through the power of prayer,
lifting from cold and arid soil flowers and fruit to heaven.
She looked at him sweetly and calmly giving him her hand, and saying:
“Dear Giles.”
“I’m so glad.—I’ve so hoped you would see me,” Giles murmured.
“Of course I was to see you. It only wanted a little time—to settle
things,” said Toppie. “Let us go into the garden. Isn’t it the dearest
garden?—I used to come here sometimes when I was a child.”
“Is it all settled?” Giles asked, as they went out and walked along a
grass path to the shade of a lilac-tree. “I mean about the convent;
about your leaving us?”
“It’s all settled.—But we don’t think of it like that, you know,” said
Toppie. “We think it’s to be much nearer you, really.—And then, of
course, I shall be able to see you all sometimes.”
They sat down under the lilac-tree. It was in thick bloom and the
fragrance fell about them.
Giles saw now what his greatest fear had been. And he knew that it was
groundless. Toppie would never ask him a question. The past was over;
not forgotten; but over. That was what her departure, her silence, had
won for them. She could not, at that past time, have kept herself from
pressing against the swords of every fullest realization. She could not
have kept herself from seeing, as balefully as he had seen them, the
figures of Owen and madame Vervier. She would never ask those questions
now.
And presently it was of Owen himself that she was speaking.
“I wanted to tell you what peace it has given me, Giles, to feel that he
did love me,” she said. The soft sweet flowers of the lilac were behind
her head, the shadowy green of its leaves. He seemed to see, as her eyes
dwelt on him, what Toppie would look like as a very old nun. Not so
different from now. Nuns had changeless faces.
“He loved me,” she said. “But not as I loved him. When one accepts the
truth, Giles, it gives peace. And now I see that we are not meant to ask
for the same love back. It is enough to love; and I shall always love
him.”
“He always loved you, Toppie,” Giles murmured. “He was swept away.”
After he had said these words he remembered that they were the words of
madame Vervier.
“Yes,” Toppie accepted quietly. “Swept away. And he was alone; in a
strange country; in a time of dreadful strain. And she was so kind and
so lovely.—And she does not believe the things we believe—I have seen
it all, Giles. I have forgotten nothing of all that you tried to tell,
to explain to me on that day. Wrong, you said, not wicked. And Alix is
her child.—I have seen it all—and how he suffered. He has suffered,
Giles,” said Toppie, looking deeply at him. “But now, with him, too,
there is peace. I believe it. With all that has come between, we are not
separated, he and I.”
Looking into Toppie’s eyes, Giles could not but believe it, too.
They were silent for a little while. Then Toppie said: “And you, dear
Giles?”
“I? Oh, I’m getting on quite nicely, Toppie, dear,” Giles smiled back at
her. “I shall take my First, I think.”
“Yes. But I didn’t mean you only, you alone. I mean you and Alix. What
are you going to do with our dear little Alix?”
“Ah, there’s a long story there,” said Giles. “Have you heard anything
about Jerry Hamble?”
“Only what your mother wrote about some trouble that Alix felt it better
to be away from.—I knew it could not be only that. I knew what other
trouble there was.—Oh, Giles—I was so cruel to Alix.—I could not
think of what I said.—But tell me about Jerry.”
Giles found, when he began to tell her about Jerry and Alix, that it was
not easy. There were still things that he must hide from Toppie. It was,
he knew, everything to her to believe that Owen had given his heart to a
woman not ignoble. But with all the celestial charity that had come to
her vision of life, how could she believe madame Vervier anything but
ignoble if she knew of Owen’s successor? “Lady Mary heard things about
her, you see,” he said. “She heard the things we know, Toppie. Madame
Vervier has made them easy to hear, and Lady Mary felt that since it was
so Alix wasn’t a possible person for her son to marry.”
“But I thought she loved Alix,” Toppie said. She was not thinking of
madame Vervier and the things Lady Mary had heard. She was thinking of
Alix.
Giles knew again the flavour of his old bitterness. “She doesn’t love
her enough. Perhaps one shouldn’t expect it.”
“But one does expect it. And does he love her enough?” asked Toppie.
Giles stopped to meditate. He had often to meditate over Jerry. “I see a
lot of him, you know,” he said presently. “He’s always coming to me. I
think he regards me as their tutelary deity. He shows me all her
letters—I think he’d be quite willing to show me his.—Yes, they write
to each other. Alix writes one letter to his four, Jerry complains, and
her letters are models of deportment. They might be read aloud to
anybody. Yes;—he loves her quite enough, if she’d have him now, against
his parents’ wishes. It’s waiting that’s so hard for Jerry. He needs to
do things on the crest of the wave, and Alix keeps him in the trough. He
gets absolutely no encouragement from Alix. Thus far and no farther, is
what all her letters really say.”
“I can’t help feeling that he isn’t good enough for Alix, Giles,” said
Toppie. “He’s too young and light and gay.”
Again Giles stopped to think. “I don’t say he’s good enough. But who is
good enough for Alix? She’s stuff in her for two, and lightness and
gaiety are in her blood as well as the things Jerry lacks. Jerry could
make her very happy. That’s what I’m quite sure of, Toppie. I want him
for her, and I shouldn’t want him unless I believed he could make her
happy.—For who is good enough, really, for our little Alix?” Giles
repeated.
Toppie had listened to him, her eyes looking out over the garden. Now,
turning them on him with a smile, she said quite suddenly: “You are good
enough. You must marry Alix, Giles.”
How strange it was. Madame Vervier had said almost those words only a
year ago and they had wakened not an echo in him. Now, as he heard them
spoken in Toppie’s confident voice a great confusion of fear, pain,
loneliness started up in Giles’s heart. It was as if he had been waiting
for Toppie to say them; as if he had felt that deep-toned bell hanging
in some sanctuary of his nature and known that Toppie would thus strike
upon it, sending the reverberations far into the past as well as into
the future. For a moment he could hardly think, he was so deafened by
the clamour, and then the first words that came were helpless words:
“She wouldn’t have me, Toppie, dear.”
“Why not?” smiled Toppie. She had taken his avowal quite for granted.
“If she loves anyone, it’s Jerry.”
“They won’t marry,” said Toppie. “There are too many difficulties; and
he doesn’t love her enough.”
“Yes, he does, if he’s helped. It’s someone like Jerry she needs;
someone young and gay, with things to offer her. I’ve nothing to offer
Alix.”
“You have your love. No one will ever love Alix as you do.” Toppie’s
loving eyes scanned his face while her confident voice thus assured him.
“But that’s no reason, for her.—She’ll have other people’s love. It’s
true, dear Toppie; of course. I see it’s true; and I suppose I’ve known
it for a long time. But Alix would never think of me like that. She
thinks of me as her brother. She thinks of me as her father, almost; as
someone kind and gruff and paternal. Alix is the fairy princess, and I’m
just the good old beast who carries her around on my back.”
“Fairy princesses marry the good old beast and then he turns into a
fairy prince,” said Toppie. “You’re so much more of a fairy prince
already, Giles, than you imagine.”
“But she has her full-fledged fairy prince waiting ready to fly off with
her. He may have his defects; but, all the same, he is the real thing.
He can give her the crystal dress and the prancing steed and the dancing
to flutes and cymbals.—Oh, you know perfectly well, Toppie, darling,
all the things I can never give her and that she loves with all her
heart. It’s queer, you know; I’ve wanted so to make Alix over into
something more English, and what I see is that she’s made me into
something more French. I’d have been indignant at the idea of fairy
princes two years ago; and at marriages with an object of advantage in
them;—but now I’ve been inoculated with a drop of the French realism.
Alix accepts the world and sees it as it is in a way that you and I,
Toppie, and people of our sort, never could. And she’s made me worldly
for her. I see the advantages for her, and I want her to have them.
She’s not a romantic English girl. She’d never believe in all for love
and the world well lost.”
Toppie was considering him. “You say she’s made you more French. It’s
true that you understand things you never could have understood
before.—You know how horribly afraid your understanding made me
once.—But as I listen to you it seems to me that you are the most
English thing there is. What Frenchman would ever do what you have done,
or feel what you feel about Alix? Isn’t it an English way of feeling to
love like that, without a thought of self?—And Alix has shown us, shown
you and me, Giles, how she can love.”
“I know, Toppie, dear, I know,” Giles murmured. “But with her it’s just
because she loves me selflessly that she’ll never love me differently.”
“I believe she may. I believe she will. And what you must do,” said
Toppie, “is go over and see.”
“With Jerry in the way? I couldn’t do that.”
“Let him have his chance, then, first. Let him go to France and ask her.
I’m not afraid of Jerry. I feel as if I understood Alix better than you
do. May I tell you something, Giles? You must not think me foolish, but
things seem to come to me so strangely now.—I’ve always wanted this for
you. From the first time I saw Alix, it was what I wanted. And now, when
I shut my eyes and think of you and her, it is always together that I
see you . . . with my doves around you. That would be my wedding-present
to you, you know,” Toppie smiled at him and her smile had the colour of
light and came from far distances; “all my doves, to watch over you and
Alix and keep you safe together always.”
CHAPTER V
Giles did not believe in what his dear Toppie had told him; did not
believe that the fairy princess could ever be for him; but the thought
of her words hovered round him as if her very doves sought the nest she
promised. It was impossible. He could not recall a glance or word of
Alix’s that made it seem possible; yet it hovered. The thought of Alix
accompanied his days. He had said that he had nothing to give her and it
was true that he had no fairy-prince gifts; but sculling quietly on the
Cherwell at evening, Giles, resting on his oars and watching his beloved
Oxford glide past, would remember how many things they had shared
together, simple, happy things, the gifts of life that were there for
everybody to share. She had liked Oxford, too, when she had last come.
He treasured every discerning phrase that his memory could recover. She
had said that it was kinder than anything in France; and the simile of
the humane old bishop, with his ring and robes and benignant face, came
back to him, and how one day, when they read “The Scholar Gipsy”
together, she had said: “It seems to me that learning is happier with
you than with us, Giles, and goes with happier things.—Some day you
will take me for all those walks your gipsy took.”
Yes, he could see himself and Alix in Oxford together and walking in
Oxfordshire and Berkshire fields and lanes. More than that. There was
another figure that Toppie had not brought into her picture; but she
would have thought of it. It was the figure that stood between Alix and
all those other dreams he had woven round her and Jerry. Who but himself
could care for Alix’s mother and accept her into his life? Madame
Vervier, he knew, would never have come to Oxford. He need not,
disconcertingly, try to see her there. But there were the long holidays
when he and Alix might have gone to her. Who but he could have kept
Alix’s mother near her? “But it’s only dear Toppie’s dream,” thought
Giles, watching the towers glide by. “And there’s Jerry.”
It was late one evening, at the end of Commemoration Week, that Jerry
burst into his rooms. Ruth and Rosemary and his mother had just left
him. Ruth and Rosemary were now old enough to join in any of the Oxford
festivities that he could offer them, and his mind was in a daze from
the mid-Summer excitement. It bubbled at the bottom of the glass like
froth after a long satisfying draught, for he knew that he had done well
in his exams and now only his viva lay before him;—so that the
wreathed, dancing heads of young girls, and the sun-browned heads of
youths on the river, glided past on a queer background of metaphysics.
He has seen Jerry dancing, and he had seen him on the river. Lady Mary
had waved to him from a barge in mild, unallusive affectionateness, and
for a moment they had spoken together in the crowd leaving the
Sheldonian.—“I think you could tell me that I might be proud of Jerry,”
was what she had said, and it was a very odd thing for Lady Mary to say.
It showed Giles that if to him Jerry showed his weakness, to his mother
he was showing his strength.
It was neither strength nor weakness that Jerry showed him now. All that
Giles could read in his headlong face was immense perplexity, and he
cried at once on entering: “I’ve had a most amazing letter from Alix.”
Giles pulled himself up in his chair and Jerry sat down on the edge of
the table beside him. It was a painful perplexity; humiliation;
bitterness; cogitation were mingled in it, and as Giles saw it fear rose
in his heart, though he asked, “Well?” with the voice of the friend and
counsellor.
“I was going over in a fortnight,” said Jerry. “I wrote and told her so.
And I told Mummy, and Mummy has behaved splendidly. She’s in a frenzy
underneath, no doubt; but she shows nothing. I expect she relies on Alix
to back her up. Well, by Jove, she may! Alix does more than back her up.
Here’s her answer. Am I really dished, do you think?” cried Jerry, “or
is it just to put me off?”
Giles read. Alix wrote in English as if to make herself more clear.
“DEAR JERRY: You must not come. I have told you that I could not
marry you, but I blame myself because I spoke that time in the
Spring with some uncertainty. It is not only the objections now.
There is another reason that did not then exist. Please do not
question me; and please forgive me for any pain that I may cause
you, but it is someone else that I love. I did not know what
love was when you asked me. You must marry some girl of your own
race, dear Jerry, and be happy. I shall never leave France now.
“Your friend,
“ALIX.”
Giles read, and his heart stood still while brightly, balefully the
fox-seraph visage of André de Valenbois rose before him. Alix’s letter
was dated from Vaudettes-sur-Mer.
Jerry was watching him. “Now isn’t that rather thick,” he said.
But Giles, gazing at the letter, found no reply.
“It must, of course, be some Frenchman,” said Jerry. “Can you imagine
who it is? Have you heard anything at all?”
Giles shook his head.
“Does her mother know any decent men?” Jerry inquired.
Giles folding the letter tried to think. Were they decent men? Judged by
the world’s standards, André de Valenbois was as decent as Jerry
himself. The difference was that he would not be decent for Alix. “Yes,”
he said, then, slowly. “I suppose they are quite decent. Only Frenchmen
are different, you know.”
He felt Jerry scanning his face. “You mean that no decent Frenchman
would think of marrying her?”
At this Giles felt as if he clutched Alix back from a danger. She might
have betrayed herself to him; he could not bear to see her betrayed to
Jerry. “She may marry someone quite decent, you see, but not of her own
class. Some nice young artist, for instance, some _savant_. Her mother
knows all sorts of interesting people.”
“But she doesn’t say anything about marrying,” Jerry persisted. “It
doesn’t somehow sound like getting married, does it? She’d tell his name
if it was that.”
“Well, I don’t know. Not at once; not to you, so soon. It may be only
coming on between them. Nothing definite may yet have been said.”
“I didn’t know French girls were allowed to have things come on,” said
Jerry. “I thought it was arranged for them.”
“But we may have changed Alix about all that,” said Giles.
Jerry at this was silent. He sat on the table and swung his leg. The
letter lay beside him where Giles had put it, and after a little while
he picked it up and read it over again. “Do you think she’s telling the
truth?” he then questioned. “Isn’t it still possible that it’s all her
pride? If Mummy could have written to say I was coming and that she gave
me her blessing—mightn’t it have been different?”
Giles for a moment contemplated the hope. Then he rejected it. “It
sounds to me like the truth,” was all that he could find. It sounded to
him too horribly like the truth. Something dry and cold breathed through
Alix’s few words, and to his apprehension it was the dryness, the
coldness of her despair. For if Alix knew that she loved her mother’s
lover, what must not her despair be? Only one gleam of ugliest hope he
suddenly saw and clung to;—in that case would she not have snatched at
any refuge; would she not in that case have married Jerry on any terms,
if only in order to escape her jeopardy?
Giles felt himself swinging in the void. How could one tell what was at
the bottom of Alix’s letter? Was it not even possible that, with all the
revelations that had overpowered her, she had not yet thought of her
mother as involved further than with Owen? Might she not think of the
truth, to which he had helplessly assented when she had asked him for
it, as applying only to the past? Might she not still have her
ignorances? Madame Vervier would have done all in her power to preserve
them.
He was not thinking of himself or of Jerry. He was thinking only of
Alix, and his absorption was so deep and so bitter that he was not aware
how long Jerry, sitting there beside him, had been observing him, until,
looking up, he met his eyes.
“It’s pretty sickening, isn’t it?” said Jerry.
Giles did not quite know to which aspect of the disaster he referred,
but he assented. “Yes, it’s pretty sickening.”
Then he saw that Jerry referred to his disaster. “I’m not an utterly
blind and complacent young donkey,” said Jerry, swinging his foot, while
his voice trembled a little. “You mind as much as I do; and you mind
more, because you really love her more. Whatever you may have been in
the Spring, you’re in love with Alix now, and I must say that I call it
a rotten shame.”
“My dear boy!” Giles ejaculated, faintly smiling.
“You’d have stood by and helped us. You’d have helped us to the end; I
see that,” said Jerry. “And you’d have been satisfied in feeling her
safe, in feeling that England had got her, even if you hadn’t. And now
you’ve lost even that.”
“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Giles. There was really no use in
denying anything to Jerry; but at the same time this was the final
bitterness. He had never been so sure of wanting Jerry for Alix.
“Perhaps there’s still some hope,” he said suddenly. “I’ll have to go
over, of course, as soon as I’ve had my viva, and see whether there’s
any hope.”
“Do you mean for me or for you?” Jerry inquired.
“I mean for you,” said Giles.
“You’d make her happier than I should,” said Jerry, swinging his foot
and looking a little as if he might cry. “You’re much more the ideal
English lover than I am. Carry her off from him; for yourself.—It’s
only what I deserve.”
“If there’s anyone in England that Alix could have fallen in love with,
it’s you. And it’s the person she can be in love with who can make her
happiest. That’s our English belief, isn’t it?” said Giles. “I am in
love with Alix, Jerry. It’s perfectly true. But it’s you I want her to
marry. And I’ve never felt so sure of it as now.”
“I’m living up to your ideal, what? Well, I’d like to do that, you know.
I like you to think me worthy of her even if I’m not. I leave it in your
hands, then,” said Jerry, getting off the table and turning his head
away while he stared before him. “I’m such a silly rotter that I want
her a great deal more, now that I know she may really be in love with
someone else.”
“Unless”—Giles had got up, too, and was gazing intently at his young
friend—“unless Jerry, after all, you went yourself.”
“No; I leave it to you.” Jerry shook his head, moving to the door. “I
leave it to you and Alix.”
“I don’t know; I don’t know,” Giles pondered. “It might be better. I
kept you back before. That may have been my grievous mistake. I don’t
believe in wooings by proxy.”
“Well, I didn’t make much headway when I wooed in person,” Jerry
remarked. “No. Clear away the other fellow if you can. And then we’ll
see. After all”—Jerry had actually got outside now, but he put his head
around the door to utter these last words—“you’ve never asked her
yourself yet. She’s never seen you as a lover.”
CHAPTER VI
Giles, as he leaned out of the train, almost expected to see the white
form of madame Vervier awaiting him on the platform as she had awaited
him and Alix last year. His heart then had been like a load in his side,
and how much heavier was the clogging weight upon it now; but, from the
fact that his sensations were so much the same, all the pageant of last
year’s arrival was summoned back into his memory with its climax in
Hélène Vervier’s uplifted gaze. But she was not there. On the sunny
platform it was Alix and André de Valenbois who stood side by side
looking towards the train, and Giles knew that it was sheer terror that
he felt as he saw them there together. Something in their stillness,
their silence, made part of it. Tall and white they stood, side by side,
and in their demeanour he read, with the sharp intuition of a first
impression, the curious quality of a constraint that expressed at once
familiarity and withdrawal. They stood so still because they did not
care to stroll up and down together, and they were silent because there
was nothing that they could say. Was it already as bad as that? Giles
asked himself, feeling the hot blood of the surmise beating up into his
neck and mounting to his face as he turned to pick up his bag and gather
his coat over his arm.
If it was as bad as that, André, at all events, could assume his old air
of unclouded radiancy. His eyes knew no shadow; his voice no hesitancy.
Delicate, sweet, sharp, able to do what he liked, with himself and
others, he was ready for any encounter, and Giles even imagined, as he
stepped down before them, a touch of sullen anger running a darker vein
along the heat in his blood, that André looked upon his English friend
as offering little complexity or difficulty. With people so simple, so
guileless, so ridiculous—for would not André see him as rather
ridiculous?—nothing more was really needed than a light hand on the
rein and the easiest of eyes on the landscape. They would go just where
one wished and see as much or as little as one intended them to see.
“Not so simple as you think, perhaps, my friend,” Giles was saying to
himself. But to know that he might see things that André would not
suspect him of seeing did not exercise the sickness in his blood. At the
same time, underneath everything, he was astonished, in a side glance as
it were, to see that he was not hating him; was still feeling him
charming.
“Here we all are, then, again. What a triumph over destiny!” was what
André was saying—and it was on him that Giles kept his eyes. He felt
that he must pull himself well together before looking at Alix.—“I
never expect happy things to repeat themselves.”
“No more they do,” thought Giles. But he could play up. “Is it all the
same as last year?”
“Exactly the same; but for the absence of Jules. Even your old friend
madame Dumont survives and is eagerly awaiting your arrival.”
“Still there, is she?” said Giles. “I’m not surprised. Unhappy things,
at all events, repeat themselves.”
“Oh,” laughed André, “your standard is too high.—I, more easily
contented, should count the old lady a very amusing piece of
bric-à-brac. We must have a furnished world, you know.—There is room
for all sorts of oddities.”
“No room at all, for that sort, in my world,” Giles returned.
They were walking, Alix between them, to the car outside and he could
glance at her. Rather than the constraint he had guessed at it was now
the cold dignity of complete self-mastery her profile showed him. He
knew that she had smiled at him—and had it not been with her old
sweetness?—when he had greeted her; but he felt, as they went thus
together, he, she, and André, that chasms lay between him and Alix. Seas
lay between them; race and tongue. Her voice came back to him as she had
said, last year when he had found her again, “But I am French.” Only it
was so much more now just that old difference. Her calm could not hide
from him how much more it was that lay between them. And what did it
hide from André? How was it possible, if deep instinct or the new
knowledge of her mother’s life had not armed her against him, that she
should not love him? Jerry was a boy beside him; beside the power of
André’s beautifully possessed, beautifully balanced experience, Jerry
would always seem a boy. He remembered, snatching still at hope, that
Alix had found such completeness _agaçant_; but then she might not
really like him even now. It might be some helpless hereditary strain
that had brought her, her young heart proudly pruned of its first happy
buddings, under the spell of the love that monsieur de Maubert had
defined on the distant Summer day; the love that burns itself out and
that may have nothing to do with liking.
She had said no word as yet, but as they emerged into the sunny _place_
she remarked that she had to buy a _baba-au-rhum_ for tea and asked
André to drive them across to the _pâtissier’s_.
“Alix is sad,” André observed when she had disappeared into the little
shop, where cakes blandly masked in chocolate, cakes touched with
rosettes of pistachio, cakes crusted over their glitter with crisp nuts,
were placed enticingly on crystal stands in the window. “Her cat was run
over yesterday by a motor. The very ugly cat;—you know him well, of
course. It was an instantaneous death, but her mother says that she
takes it much to heart. _Elle a un gros chagrin_,” said André.
“Poor Blaise dead.—Oh, I’m sorry,” said Giles. But he drew a dim
comfort from the news. There might be other and more childish reasons
for Alix’s aloofness. He knew how remote and stern she could look when
controlling tears.
Now that Alix was grown up, now that she was so obviously a beautiful
young girl, he noted that André made no comments on her appearance,
though it was hardly likely that he would remark it less. It was
courageous of madame Vervier to have them there together; though, in
spite of the fear he had seen so plainly in her, it might well be that
the special fear had never occurred to her. Sitting there in the French
sunlight, Giles felt again his old sense of astonishment that such
computations should, so inevitably, on this soil, occur to him; that he
should feel himself, with whatever moral bitterness, accepting
situations that could hardly, in England, present themselves to his
imagination. He felt himself immersed in madame Vervier’s _milieu_; he
felt himself implicated, for was one not implicated when one still felt
all its members charming? But one could not pretend to understand the
French unless one recognized in such situations the workings of a drama
to them commonplace. That special terrible _roman-à-trois_ of mother,
lover, and daughter, might not arise among the _bien pensants_ of the
nation; but the _bien pensants_ themselves would accept it as a
commonplace. They all accepted love as a devastating natural force,
overriding, where no barriers of creed were there to withstand it, the
scruples and inhibitions of taste and principle. They all saw love,
unless it were the duly stamped and docketed love of the Church, as
_Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée_.
And with this moral difference there went the difference in
everything;—the sunlight and the shadows, the streets, the houses, and
the people. Sunlight and shadows were blue-and-gold, strong and deep,
and the forms they defined revealed, under their spell, a classic
harmony. The people passing, intent on business, or sitting in front of
the cafés, at ease in idleness, saw idleness and work as two quite
different things, not to be confused; each yielding its own savour, its
own satisfaction. The sense of savour, of satisfaction everywhere; of
life as its own justification. The very smell, warm, golden, balmy,
wafted towards him from the _pâtissier’s_ was such as no pastry-cook’s
shop in England could ever yield; a dank surmise of suet and strong tea
would there hang about it and none of the cakes would give one the same
confidence of tasting as good as they looked. Why was it, Giles
wondered, as Alix came out with her flat-bottomed, cone-shaped, snowy
little parcel, saying as she stepped in beside him: “It is in honour of
your arrival, Giles, the _baba_. Maman remembered that you liked them
last summer.”—For no girl in England would look like Alix.
It was not only that she spoke and moved as they did not and that her
clothes were differently adjusted. These signs were only the expression
of a deeper divergence. Her face, still almost the face of a child, had,
notwithstanding, an almost alarming maturity. It was at once more
primitive and more civilized than English faces, but the primitiveness
was nothing shapeless or unpredictable; it was preserved and used; it
was, perhaps, only a deeper layer of civilization. Druidess or Roman
virgin, who could tell which underlay the something resistant, enduring,
in the structure of her head, sweet in glance as an Alpine flower,
remote and inaccessible as the mountain?—and, glancing at her as she
sat beside him, Giles could gauge something of the change in his own
feeling towards her by the fact that he was afraid of Alix. Not only
that; France had already done more to him; for it was as if he were
afraid of himself, too. As they sped out into the radiant landscape and
he felt the breeze blow strong and sweet from the sea, he was aware of
currents of strange feeling in the tide which bore him; bitter, dark,
delicious, and tumultuous.
“I am dreadfully sorry about Blaise,” he said—“André was telling me.”
“Yes,” said Alix, looking down at her parcel, “it is sad.”
“The comfort is that he had a very happy life,” said Giles, feeling
foolish, for indeed he was not thinking of poor Blaise.
“I never feel that a comfort,” said Alix. “I think it most sad of all;
that happiness should end.”
To this Giles found no answer.
“And have you taken your degree, Giles?” Alix inquired, with the air of
leaving an untimely subject. “Are you now a distinguished philosopher?”
“Well, I’ve taken my First all right,” said Giles. “I’ve done pretty
well. Next term will see me settled in Oxford. But it will need a great
many years, I am afraid, to make me distinguished.”
“And where will you live?” Alix inquired. “Still in the same rooms, high
up, looking at those rather sad grey stones?”
“Oh, I shall be a Fellow of my College and have rather beautiful rooms;
quite a vast sitting-room looking on a beautiful garden. I’ll be rather
a swell. You’ll be surprised when you see.”
“Oh, I am glad of that,” said Alix, smiling and passing by his allusion
to her return. “And there, in the beautiful rooms, you’ll teach
philosophy for the rest of your life?”
“Well, I expect I shall. And write it, you know; and play cricket, and
sing in the Bach choir. Sometimes I’ll go up to London and see pictures
and a play; in the Summers I’ll walk round the Cornish coast or climb
Welsh mountains. It’s just the life that suits me.”
“Yes. It will suit you admirably,” said Alix.
André, white against the blue, drove in front of them and, turning his
head, smiling, he now observed: “Alix has been reading philosophy of
late. She must tell you. She has been reading Bergson.”
“I find him interesting, but I’m afraid that I do not understand him,”
said Alix, and Giles saw that she slightly flushed as André thus
addressed them.
“He’s far too difficult to begin on,” said Giles. “He’s not for the
beginning at all; he’s for the very end.”
“But I thought that was just his point, that he started at the very
beginning,” said Alix—“with germs, or atoms, or small things like
that.”
“Ah, those are the things one should end with,” Giles assured her,
“because, you see, they are the furthest away from us. The beginning is
an idea, and the end is an atom. You can’t understand an atom, that is,
until you understand an idea. If you’ll come to Oxford and let me teach
you, I’ll land you safely in Bergson after three years.”
“No; I shall read no more philosophy,” said Alix. “I shall not go as far
as ideas or atoms in either direction. I shall stay in between. All the
nicest things are in between, I believe.”
“Bravo! Bravo!” André smiled round at her, and Giles could not interpret
his smile. Alix did not reply. She turned her head and looked out over
the plains.
Vaudettes-sur-Mer in its palisades of trees was before them now, painted
in delicate washes of colour against the sky. “It looks like the
beginning of a fairy-tale, doesn’t it,” said Giles and brought Alix’s
eyes to Vaudettes.
“Yes, like the place children find on the front page,” she said. “And a
happy fairy-tale, isn’t it?”
“But it can’t have the real fairy-tale pang and flavour to you,” said
Giles. “It’s a place I find, but can never keep. You wake up to it and I
wake up out of it. It’s my dream and your reality.”
“But you can keep it, Giles, as much as the Cornish coast, or the Welsh
mountains,” smiled Alix, “as much as we keep it, really;—for it is our
fairy-tale, too.—You have only to come back and find us in it,” said
Alix, and, while she looked before her steadily, he almost thought he
saw a hint of tears in her eyes, as though what he said of her loved
Vaudettes touched her too deeply. Did she see in it the fairy-tale place
of childhood never to be regained?
It was, as it had been last year at Les Chardonnerets, a blue and golden
day. The gulls were floating past on a level with the cliff-top and on
the verandah were monsieur de Maubert and madame Vervier.
They had passed through the wind-bent thickets and seen the sunny flags
with their oleanders and smelt again the fairy-tale smell Giles so
passionately remembered. But—he knew it as he came out on to the stage,
as it were, of the drama—the fairy-tale was spoiled for ever. Madame
Vervier had been its centre; the wine-like sweetness of her smile, her
Circe security, had been its atmosphere. And now the magic was broken.
He could see nothing else as she came forward to greet them, so lovely,
lovelier than ever to his eyes, so kind and simple, welcoming back with
her wide, enveloping gaze the friend who knew so much.
“We have watched your crossing,” said monsieur de Maubert, as the
greetings passed, “in imagination. It has been a sea of glass. A sea for
the Venus of Botticelli on her shell.—You rise before us in a guise
even more welcome than that of the amiable goddess.”
Monsieur de Maubert also was changed, though Giles had no time just then
for more than a passing glance at the recognition. He spoke with a
certain heaviness; as though he came forward to lend a hand.
“A kind young Englishman in tweeds is, I can assure him, far more
pleasing to me than any Venus ever painted by Botticelli,” smiled madame
Vervier.
“Giles has become a great philosopher, Maman,” said Alix. She untied her
_baba_ at the table and placed it carefully on a plate in its little
pasteboard dish.
“He always was a great philosopher,” smiled madame Vervier. “He is the
wisest young man, as well as the kindest, that I have ever known.”
“Ah, but it is now a professional wisdom as well,” said Alix.
Albertine, with a saturnine smile of welcome for Giles, brought out the
tea and madame Vervier took her place at the table.
Everything in her loveliness was altered and, as he looked at her, with
surreptitious glances, aware, so strangely, that André was looking at
him, Giles suddenly felt that it made him think of the alteration in
Toppie’s face. She, like Toppie, had drunk tears night after night; she
had seen the truth and been shattered by it; and she, like Toppie, was
built up again. A drift of lilac went behind her head in his imagination
while the link so marvellously bound them together. For had she, too,
not relinquished? It was as Alix had said it would be. She had guessed
everything. Yet, though so wan, so careful, so oppressed, she was
serene. Her strength, her security, even, was still there, but
disenchanted, turned to other uses.
“I feel it so strange that English people should be philosophers,” she
said. Giles saw that she intended them all to talk.
“Do you think it too reasonable a pursuit for such an irrational people
as we are?” he asked.
“Yes. Just that. You are a people who improvise as you go. To
philosophize would have been, I should imagine, against the genius of
your race.”
“Oh, we’re not all of us, all the time, lurching along on mere instinct.
We do, some of us,” said Giles, “stop, now and then, and reflect.”
“But lurching becomes you,” André at this put in. “You lurch, as a rule,
in the right direction—for yourselves. Look at your Empire,” he smiled,
taking a slice of _baba_, “all made up of lurches and success.”
“We planned to have India, you will remember,” Alix, at this, suddenly
remarked. “We planned and even plotted it. It was only as they worked as
best they could against our plots that the English won it, not intending
to have an Indian Empire at all.—I always like that. That always seems
to me just. And history is so seldom just.”
Giles felt that the eyes of her mother and compatriots were turned upon
her, as she made this statement, with a certain astonishment. “And I
think it is rather noble of those who do reflect,” Alix went on, calmly,
knowing evidently what she thought of the question in its national and
its personal applications; “for the others, those who lurch and make the
Empire, can pay so little attention to you. It is very disinterested.”
“We practise philosophy for our own satisfaction, what?” Giles laughed,
though aware of ambiguous cross-currents. “I’m glad you find us noble.”
“She is quite right, _mon ami_,” André said cordially. “You are a race
of adventurers. And it is as adventurous to reflect among a people
indifferent to thought as it is to set forth with a bundle on your back
and conquer a continent by chance. You are a people, in other words, who
do not need to see your goal.”
“But you prefer your own rationality,” said Giles.
“I prefer it; yes. I distrust instinct; perhaps because in our history,
as mademoiselle Alix has pointed out, we have so often been foiled by
it. I don’t see it as innocent, you know. I see it as crafty. As
craftier far than our open-eyed planning. And, apart from large
questions of national destiny, it is, I think, more comfortable to live
among a people all of whom reflect, if only a little, and all of whom
know where they want to get to. Our horizon is more restricted, but
because we see the frame we can fit our picture into it. Life with you,
over there across the Channel, for all your charm and force, is
essentially confused and haphazard. It goes through everything; from
your younger sons, flung out to swim or sink as best they can, to your
towns and your Shakespeare. You may, in one sense, beat us; but in
another we have, I think, the advantage. You take in more, but you don’t
know what to make of it. To make all that can be made of the time and
space at our disposal, that is our wisdom, _mon cher_ Giles, and can
there be a better one?”
“And what is the time and space at our disposal?” Giles felt Alix’s eyes
upon them. He did not quite know what he was defending or against whom
he was defending it; but it felt to him as if he were upholding England,
and all he wanted Alix to gain from England, against all he feared for
her in France.
“What we can make use of, what we can see and understand,” said André
promptly. “It’s because of our sobriety that we French are capable of
living a life beautiful in itself; a self-justifying life. We know how
to use life; we know how to shape it. The very workman, sitting at
midday in his café, makes a ritual of his meal of sheep’s trotters and
sour red wine. The _frotteur_ enjoys the polish he puts on the
_parquet_, and the _bonne_ enjoys her bed-making and dusting. We don’t
do things because of something else; we do them because we find them in
themselves enjoyable.”
“Yes. It’s true.” Giles was thinking of the French sunlight; of monsieur
de Maubert’s philosophy; of the _pâtissier’s_. The difference went down
to the very roots of things. “We are discontented and clumsy and
romantic, compared to you; it’s our very religion to be discontented,
with ourselves and what we can see. We are rebels; that’s what it comes
to. Rebels are the people who refuse the seen for the unseen.”
“And yet who pick up the seen, in their stride, as it were, and then
don’t know what to make of it.—It is that with which we reproach you.
You spoil one world in trying to reach the other.”
“Ah, these are themes too profound for my tea-table,” madame Vervier
interposed, while Giles, meeting André’s eye, felt, suddenly, something
challenging, sword-like, beneath its blue smile. “We will not pass from
history to metaphysics, if you please. Are you tired, Giles? Will you
rest? I have some letters to write for the post. After that we might
have a little walk if you felt so inclined.”
Giles said there was nothing he would like better. He would unpack and
rest a little and then join her.
She was in the salon with mademoiselle Fontaine when he came down half
an hour later, and on the verandah monsieur de Maubert sat alone,
heavily, Giles still felt, in his sunny corner; not reading; looking out
at the sea. Giles was aware of feeling sorry for him; but he did not
want to talk to monsieur de Maubert. He went out quietly at the back of
the house, and wandered through the garden, finding himself suddenly, as
he came to the gate, bareheaded, his hands in his pockets, face to face
with old madame Dumont and madame Collet. They sat in a small wicker
pony-chaise drawn by a ruminant stout pony, and Giles inferred, since
there was only room for two that mademoiselle Fontaine had walked beside
the pony’s head, taking her parents out thus for a peaceful airing. They
waited at the gate for her.
“_Ah. C’est monsieur Gilles_,” madame Collet simpered. “You remember
monsieur Gilles, Maman.”
Madame Dumont was not much altered. The vulture-like poise of her head
was perhaps more sunken, and her raven eye less piercing; but a light
came to it as she saw him; an old resentment and a present glee.
“_Charmée, monsieur, charmée de vous revoir_,” she assured him, and as
her eye measured the morsel thus presented to its greed Giles seemed to
see the vulture roused and rustling its feathers. “You are just
arrived?”
Giles told her that he was.
“You find your friends again,” said madame Dumont, and there was a
quaking note of hurry in the majesty of her tones. “You will, however,
find them changed.—Ah, changes are sad; disastrous. She has had much to
bear. It tells; it tells upon her. You find madame Vervier aged?
Altered? Sadly altered?”
“I see no alteration at all,” said Giles grimly, his eye turning on
madame Collet, who murmured a low word of protest to her mother. But
madame Dumont was not to be curbed. She leaned from the chaise and laid
her lean hand in its black silk mitt on Giles’s arm. “_Il l’a lachée_,”
she said in a harsh whisper. “_Il va se marier._”
“Maman; Maman,” madame Collet urgently whispered, casting a helpless
glance at Giles. “You must not thus repeat gossip about our friend.
Monsieur Gilles will not know what to think of you. Do not heed her,
Monsieur.—She is so very old.”
“What are these manners! To whom are you speaking! Old! I am old,
indeed, if I must thus accept impertinences from my daughter!” Madame
Dumont thundered, turning a terrible glance upon her child.
“_Mais Maman, Maman, je ne veux pas vous offenser!_” Giles heard poor
little madame Collet plead as he hastily muttered an adieu and fled from
them.
In the door he nearly collided with mademoiselle Blanche. If madame
Vervier was altered, mademoiselle Blanche was more so. Suddenly, looking
at her chalk-white mask, glittering there in the sunlight, Giles saw the
catastrophe that had befallen them all with a cruel sharpness that the
side-issues of a situation may sometimes display more cuttingly than its
centre. In mademoiselle Blanche’s face he read that any reversionary
hopes she might have cherished were withered. It was not to her that
André had turned. He would never turn to her. He had been sorry for
monsieur de Maubert, sitting in his patch of sunlight; and he was sorry
now for mademoiselle Blanche. She had a brilliant smile for him. Her
scarlet mouth made him feel sick. He promised her, did he not, to have
tea with them one day. Giles said he was afraid he had only a very
little time to spend at Les Chardonnerets this year.
“You have come to take mademoiselle Alix from us again?” smiled
mademoiselle Blanche, the cold flame of her eye traversing him, so that
he saw again, in a direful flash of prescience, that in old age her eye
would be like her grandmother’s. “You once more carry off our lovely
little Persephone?”
How mademoiselle Blanche desired that he would! The fear that circled
round Giles fastened a tentacle in his heart as he saw how mademoiselle
Blanche, all hopeless as she must be, feared Alix’s presence.
“I’m afraid not; I’m afraid I shall have to leave her where she wants to
be—with her mother,” he said, feeling a slow red mount to his face as
he saw all the things in mademoiselle Blanche that she did not want him
to see. For one strange shuffling moment the pretences between them
fell, and mademoiselle Blanche looked hard at him, looked as one human
being may look at another, with deep inquiry and surmise. Then,
murmuring a hasty farewell, she fled, a white marionette, down the path
between the nasturtiums.
CHAPTER VII
On the verandah Alix sat beside monsieur de Maubert reading “Bérénice,”
aloud to him. André was stretched near them in a deck-chair, his eyes
following the smoke of his cigarette, and madame Vervier emerged from
the salon, a little sheaf of letters in her hand. She laid them down on
a table and André said that he would presently post them. “Yes. You and
I would rather go by the cliff, Giles,” said madame Vervier.
She wore a white dress, not the tennis dress; this was fashioned
differently, with floating panels and long loose sleeves. She was
bareheaded, a sunshade in her hand.
“Alix reads to him every afternoon,” she said as they went towards the
cliff. She spoke of monsieur de Maubert, but her heart, Giles knew, must
be shaken by the interview with mademoiselle Blanche.—Mademoiselle
Blanche could only have come to measure her pangs, surreptitiously,
against madame Vervier’s. “His eyes trouble him of late, _le pauvre
cher_. He enjoys hearing Alix. He is very fond of her.”
They walked along the little path beaten in the grass at the edge of the
cliff. The sea was the Botticelli sea and against the sky went a flock
of young goldfinches.
“Our birds,” said madame Vervier, pointing to them, and he still heard
the breathlessness in her voice. What had she succeeded in concealing
from mademoiselle Blanche, and what had mademoiselle Blanche succeeded
in concealing from her? “See the pattern made by the triangles of gold
on their wings,” she said.
“We call such a flock, a charm of goldfinches,” said Giles. “Isn’t it a
pretty name?”
“A charm. A charm of goldfinches. And what a happy name. They look
that.” Madame Vervier’s eyes followed the flight of the bright birds. “I
wish one did not have to think of snares and cages when one sees them.
Our people are so cruel for birds. I wish such happy things might escape
the snare.”
“A great many do. We shouldn’t be seeing that charm now unless a great
many escaped,” Giles tried to smile at her.
“But it is the way of life, is it not, to snare and spoil happiness,”
said madame Vervier.
They left the woods of Les Chardonnerets behind them. Before them was
the great curve of the cliff and the empty sky.
“So, you see me punished,” said madame Vervier.
Giles walked beside her and found no word to say.
“Even you, stern moralist as you are,” madame Vervier pursued, “could
hardly have foreseen such a punishment.—To know that I have ruined my
child’s best chance of happiness; all that I could have hoped for
her.—To know that she is suffering because of me.”
“No, I didn’t think it would come like that,” Giles murmured.
“Ah, but it has come in the other way, too,” she said, looking round at
him in the pale shadow of her sunshade;—“though I have forestalled that
calamity, and a calamity forestalled is always endurable. André and I
are parted.” Madame Vervier continued to look at him steadily. “I have
told him that this Summer is the end. He still believes—or tries to
believe—that he loves me; but he consents. I knew that he would
consent.”
Giles walked beside her filled with a confusion of pain and pity. Never
before had madame Vervier openly admitted her relation to André;
admitted it to Owen’s brother. “He doesn’t look like partings,” was all
he found, most helplessly, to say.
“Partings, at his age, are the preludes to beginnings; and André has the
gift of looks. He is, perhaps, not quite at ease; but he has wisdom—our
French wisdom, Giles. His mother, already, is arranging a marriage for
him. As soon as our rupture is definitely known, he will be able to
settle himself in life;—_se ranger_,” said madame Vervier. “And he will
be glad to be settled; he will be glad to be married to a charming young
girl whom he has known since boyhood;—a young girl,” madame Vervier
continued in her steady voice, “whom your madame Marigold met when she
came to France last Spring.”
“You know all about that, then?” Giles muttered.
“How should I not know?” madame Vervier returned.
He saw her maimed for life. Yes; it had, with André, gone as deep as
that. She had unflinchingly performed the surgical operation, severed
the limb and bound the arteries. He saw her bandaged, spotted with
blood, drained of joy; but tranquil; moving forward.
“It was time,” she said as if to herself, looking before her. “When Alix
returned to me, when I saw what I had done to her, I knew that it was
time.”
He could not think of one thing to say to her; not one word of comfort
or approbation. He would have liked to say that she would be happier;
but he did not believe that she would be. He would have liked to say
that she had behaved worthily; but the note of moral appraisal was
repellent to his imagination. And under everything went that bitter
memory of who André was, and whose successor.
“But there were further reasons for André’s acquiescence,” said madame
Vervier suddenly.
They had gone for a long way in silence. A light breeze met them, now
that they had rounded a headland, and the thin panels of madame
Vervier’s dress were blown backward as she went. Goddess-like as he had
always felt her, there was something disembodied, unearthly in her
aspect now. It was as if, gliding through sad Elysian fields, beautiful,
changeless, with gazing eyes, she contemplated the sorrows of the past.
Yet her voice, as she spoke again, was not the voice of an Elysian
spirit. He recognized as he heard it that a bitter humanity still beat
at the heart of her confidences and that her tranquillity was not the
shining of an inner peace, but a shield proudly worn. What she had to
tell him was the thing most difficult to tell; the thing that throbbed
and echoed in her, as the scar of the severed limb burns and remembers;
and all her voice was altered as she spoke of it.
“There were further reasons,” she repeated, turning her face away from
him to the sea. “He knows that it is best to go, since to remain would
be to love Alix.”
And through all his fear, Giles saw it now; he had clung to the hope
that it was an ugly dream. He measured, in a sense of physical sickness,
the difference between an ugly dream and reality as in madame Vervier’s
words his dread was made close and palpable.
“But isn’t that impossible?” It was his English voice that asked the
question. His French understanding knew that it was possible.
“Why so?” madame Vervier’s French voice returned. All the acquiescence
of her race spoke in it. “Alix is exquisite.”
Alix’s face swam before Giles. “But she is your daughter.”
“That would offend his taste. That does offend it. That is one of the
reasons, as I have said, for his consent to our parting. It is not a
reason, if he stayed, that could repress his heart.”
“Couldn’t Alix be trusted to do that?” Giles asked after a moment. He
must ask it. He must approach, in order to know whether madame Vervier
saw it, too, the deepest fear of all. And with what a complex
thankfulness he heard in her reply that Alix’s secret was safe with him.
It did not exist for madame Vervier’s imagination even. A deep, strange
bitterness spoke in her voice as she said: “Her dislike of him is an
added attraction.”
“Her dislike of him? Does she dislike him?”
“Surely you have seen it. As if by instinct. Always. From the first. It
is an added attraction,” madame Vervier repeated; and with a little
laugh, more bitter than her voice, she said: “It is the first time in
his life that André has found himself disliked by a woman.”
How strange, how tortuous, how self-contradictory was the human heart,
Giles thought, walking beside his unhappy friend. With all her
passionate maternal love he felt, thrilling in her tone, a resentment
against her child that she should be indifferent to the charm that had
so subjugated herself. Giles felt it cruel to ask the further question
that came to him, yet he wondered if she had not, often, asked it of
herself. “He consents to go, then, because he is hopeless?”
She had, indeed, often asked it. He heard that in her voice as she
answered: “Oh—do not let us deprive him of all merit!”
They had reached by now a further promontory of the cliff and looked
over a long stretch of the coast, pale blue sea, pale cliffs, a delicate
distant finger of the land running out, against the horizon, with a tiny
lighthouse upon it. A bench was set amidst the grass before this view
and madame Vervier sank down upon it as if exhausted. Giles sat on the
grass at her feet and for a little while they surveyed the azure scene
in silence.
“And now,” said madame Vervier, and he heard that she gathered her
thoughts from dark broodings, “let us speak no more of me, but of
Alix.—Of Alix and Jerry. For you like this Jerry. It is because of him
that you have come.”
“Yes. It’s because of him. I like him very much.” Giles looked down at
the grass. “I saw him before I left. All that he asks is to marry her at
once.”
“Ah, he loves her, I know. He is an honourable young Englishman and he
loves her. That is what I have gone upon from the beginning. It is not
Jerry who is the difficulty. It is Alix.”
“We must give her time, you see,” Giles murmured. “Her pride had such a
blow.”
“Give her time! I would give her anything!” madame Vervier exclaimed.
“But I can do nothing with Alix.”—_Rien! rien! rien!_ she said in
French with a crescendo of grief and impatience almost comic to his ear
for all its pathos. “You have altered my Alix for me, you English,
Giles. You have given her a different heart. It is strange, strange to
me—and bitter—to feel how changed she is. She loves me. More than
ever. She has guessed everything, and she loves me more than ever; but
with a love almost maternal; a love terribly mature. I could not have
believed it possible in so short a time that a child should grow to
womanhood. She is docile, still; obedient; but she does not deceive
me;—it is only in the little things—the things that do not count. If,
in the great things, she would obey, nothing need be lost. There is now
only a _rangée_ mother to explain, to efface, to avoid.—How easy I
would make it for my Alix to avoid me if her happiness demanded
it!—But, no; she will not hear me. She is a stone to my supplications.
She denies that she has ever loved him. She takes her life into her own
hands and says that she will never marry, that she will stay with me
always and be happy so. I dash myself against a rock in Alix. More than
that;—she watches me; she suspects me—as if I were the daughter—_bon
Dieu_!—and she the mother!—I wrote to Jerry. I told him to come;—it
was but the other day.—I told him that it was best that they should
meet, and that I would help him. And Alix intercepted the letter.
Yes;—you may well stare. She confronted me with it and tore it in two
before my eyes. She told me she knew too well what I had said to Jerry
and that she had herself written and that all was over between them.
Cold! Stern!—I could hardly believe it was my little Alix.—She spoke
as if I had done her a great wrong.—As if I were the child and she the
mother,” madame Vervier repeated, a note of bewilderment mingling with
the grief of her tone; and, indeed, as she made him these ingenuous
confidences, Giles saw her as the child, the tricking child; all the
French rôles reversed and Alix sustained in hers by what England had
given her. No wonder madame Vervier was bewildered.
“But that was very wrong of you,” he said, as he might have said to the
child. “You had no right to do that.”
“No right! I, her mother, am to sit by with folded hands and watch her
ruin herself! Those are your English ideas. Those are the ideas that
Alix has made hers. She, too, said I had no right. As if a mother’s
right over her child’s life were not supreme!”
“We don’t think it is, you see. Not when the child has reached Alix’s
age. You don’t want her to marry a man she does not love.”
“Love! Why should she not love him, since she loves nobody else!” cried
madame Vervier, a deep exasperation thrilling in her voice. “And even if
she did not love him, she cares quite enough. He is an admirable
_parti_, this Jerry; I could not have chosen better had I been free to
choose; he is an admirable _parti_ and can give her all that I cannot
give; security, position, wealth. Such a marriage would atone for
everything that my darling has lacked. And love would come; why should
it not? It is, as you say, her pride only that stands in the way. Ah, if
she would only trust me!” madame Vervier’s voice for the first time
trembled, and looking up at her he saw tears in her eyes—“If she would
only trust me! I could arrange it all.”
He could not put before her the old, romantic protests. They had ceased
to have validity for himself. All that madame Vervier said was true;
truer far than she could know.
Better, far better, that Alix should marry Jerry, not loving him, than
be exposed to the perils of her life in France. She had loved him once;
why not again? She was a child. She could not know her own heart. Her
pride had had a dreadful blow; and she had come too near the fire; that
was all. She must trust them; it was true. She must trust him and her
mother. To this strange pass had France brought Giles.
“I’ve come over to try to help you, you know,” he said. “I want it as
much, I believe, as you want it. About her pride—Lady Mary, I’m sure,
expects them to marry now.—She shall hear that.”
“Ah, I felt that you had come to give me hope, Giles,” madame Vervier
breathed, and her hand, for a moment, rested on his shoulder. “You are
wonderful. You are _impayable_.—No one would believe in you.—If anyone
can help, it is you. Alix will listen to you when she will listen to no
one else.”
“I believe she will. I’ll do my best,” Giles muttered.
Yet, as he looked down at the grass, sitting there filially at madame
Vervier’s feet, he knew that his heart was torn in two and that he
longed to put his head down on her knees and tell her that no one in the
world would ever love Alix as he himself did.
CHAPTER VIII
When Giles came down to breakfast next morning, Alix was already there,
setting a bowl of nasturtiums on the blue-and-white cloth. He had not
had a word with her last night when a sudden fall of rain had kept them
all in the drawing-room, and he seized his opportunity.
“Will you have a long walk with me this morning, Alix?” he said. “A
really long one, you know. I want to go to Allongeville and see the
church again; and then, oh, a long way further. Along the cliffs for
ever so far.”
She looked at her flowers, drawing a leaf forward here and there around
the edge of the bowl, and he saw that she was troubled. But she said:
“We will go to the church, at all events. Yes. I should like a walk very
much.”
André entered as she spoke the words and she went on quietly, giving
Giles a suffocating sense of the imminence of peril from her very
readiness, her very calm: “Do you not think nasturtiums very charming
flowers, Giles? No one ever speaks of them;—yet they are charming. The
leaves; the colour. I like them, and yet I do not love them. Why is it?
There are no yellow flowers of Summer that one can love. The yellow of
Spring is so different.”
“One doesn’t love any of the things of Summer as one does the things of
Spring,” André remarked, strolling to the window to look out, and,
clearly this morning, Giles divined what he had only surmised yesterday,
that his temper was not attuned to brightness; that there might even
lurk beneath its graceful surface a vindictive watchfulness. And when he
had spoken he turned, leaning against the window, and looked at Alix,
poised in her whiteness above the bowl of glowing flowers, looked at her
as Giles had never before seen him look; as if with resentment that she
should be so beautiful; as if with a challenge to her to deny his right
to find her so.
“Oh, but that is not so,” said Alix. “One loves roses—especially white
roses;—and carnations; and jasmine; nothing in Spring is more lovely
than jasmine.”
“I would give them all for a handful of primroses,” said André, his eyes
fixed on her.
“Would you?” said Alix.
It was nothing; it was everything. It revealed nothing, yet it might
conceal anything.
“Yes: I would, mademoiselle Alix,” said André, laughing a little as he
stood, leaning, his arms folded, against the window. “Indeed, I would.”
Giles, watching the confrontation, sick with dread and fury, knew
himself as much baffled as André.
Alix showed nothing to him, too; or she showed everything. Just as one
chose to take it. “Here is our coffee,” she said. “And here is Maman.”
Lovely in her white, the white rose, the jasmine, madame Vervier bent
her forehead to Alix’s kiss and something in the daughter’s eyes made
Giles think of a sword in the hand of an avenging, or protecting, angel.
André bowed over his hostess’s hand.
“Giles and I are to have a long walk, Maman,” said Alix, going to her
place.
“You will be caught in the rain,” said André. “Have you noticed the sky?
It is threatening.”
“But see the sunlight,” said madame Vervier, pouring out the coffee. “It
will be a beautiful morning of great clouds and sunlight. There is
nothing I love better.”
“Then you will perhaps have a long drive with me, _chère_ madame,” said
André.
“If Robert may come, too. I do not like to leave him behind.”
How easy she made it for André to pretend that the relinquishment of the
_tête-à-tête_ was a favour he granted her with difficulty!
“But certainly.—Since you ask it! Certainly he must come.—Does he
still suffer this morning with his head, do you know?”
“I fear so. Albertine has taken him his breakfast to his room. That is a
bad sign. A drive will do him good.”
“He will not like being rained on, you know,” André smiled.
He was so glad that he was not to be alone with madame Vervier that he
dared thus embroider his feint of disappointment.
“We can shelter him,” said madame Vervier.
“While Giles converts mademoiselle Alix to the methods of the British
Empire,” said André, sitting with his back to the window where the
sunlight fell about him and buttering his roll with a curious light
crispness of touch, as if he were painting a picture. There was
something in the play of the long, fine hands with the bread that Giles
was never to forget; something cruel, controlled. He read in the young
Frenchman’s face the signs of an exasperation mastered with difficulty.
“But the method of the British Empire is unconscious,” said madame
Vervier. “It seeks no converts.”
“I am a little jealous of Giles, you know, mademoiselle Alix,” smiled
André, just raising his eyes to hers. “As a Frenchman, I am jealous of
his unconscious proselytizing. Once or twice yesterday I was afraid for
France. Do not forget, when you listen to him, that our French roots are
the most tenacious in the world. Perhaps that is why we do not found
empires. Sever us from our soil and we bleed to death—or else, a worse
destiny, wither. Do not forget that the unconscious is crafty.”
Alix, opposite her mother, sat silent. Whether, in her mother’s
presence, she had lost her readiness Giles could not divine. But she
made no reply.
“Alix has learned in England to be dispassionate,” said madame Vervier,
her lovely russet head a little bent downward. “She has learned to
combine love for another country with loyalty to her own. That is
something England has given her.”
“Ah—but that’s impossible;—impossible, for our French hearts, you
know!” laughed André. “We are not dispassionate. To be dispassionate is
to be tepid, sleepy, indifferent;—to be withering, in fact. No, no, no,
if mademoiselle Alix transferred her love, it would be to transfer her
loyalty also. It is for that that I beg her to stand firm;—to remember
that England can never give her what France can give.”
“_Encore du café, Maman, s’il vous plaît_,” said Alix. She passed her
cup to her mother. She did not look at André at all. Her voice, for all
its disconcerting matter-of-fact, conveyed no provocation. But, glancing
over at André, Giles saw that he suddenly blushed hotly, and then, as
she took Alix’s cup and poured out the milk and coffee, that a deep
colour mounted also to madame Vervier’s brow.
Yes. It would probably rain, thought Giles. He waited for Alix on the
cliff. It was a sunny, yet tumultuous and menacing day. Great clouds
piled themselves along the horizon; the sails of the fishing boats were
bent sideways as they went, on a ruffled sea, before the wind. “Yes.
Rain is coming,” he muttered to himself, though he was not thinking of
the weather. They had all parted in silence at the breakfast-table. Even
madame Vervier had found no words.
Suddenly André came down the steps of Les Chardonnerets. He had his
cigarette and an odd bright smile was on his lips; yet as he approached
he reminded Giles of the sails on the sea. André might still try to keep
up appearances; but the wind was blowing him.
But he was not going to keep up appearances. “So,” he said, “to-day is a
day of destiny. You are not at all unconscious, are you, Giles? You have
come to plead the cause of your laggard young friend the Englishman?”
Well, was the thought that went through Giles, let him have it, then.
“Why do you call him laggard?” he inquired, and he knew that the anger
that boiled up in his breast was so violent that he could have struck
André as he stood there. “Would you be eager to take into your family a
young girl placed as Alix is placed?”
André became very pale, but his eyes lighted. His sail scooped the sea.
“Will you plead my cause with her if I say that I would?” he asked.
Giles stood there, still; rooted to the ground. André had not meant to
say that. Something in his own look had made him say it. It was the blow
returned.
“You don’t think of marrying Alix?” said Giles in a low voice.
“I do,” André replied. “I think of it; now. It is my way out. Why should
I retire when there is that way? Little as you could imagine it, I care
for her enough.”
“Care for her enough?”
“Yes, if you like to put it so. You see where I stand. Don’t keep up
pretences,” said André. “It’s come on slowly;—but it has me now and
there is no escape.—_Elle est dans mon sang._—My family would have to
submit;—and her mother’s consent I could gain;—to marriage.—Why do
you look at me with that face? She does not love your Jerry. And in
marrying me she would marry a man whose devotion to her mother would
never waver. Don’t imagine,” said André, eyeing his friend, “that my
devotion to Alix’s mother has wavered. It is altered; yes; that is
inevitable; we have no power over these changes. But she will always
remain for me the most generous, most admirable of women.”
“You don’t see the hideousness of what you propose?” Giles felt his
foundations tottering beneath him. André’s aspect, bright and baleful,
seemed to tower above him like one of the darkly radiant clouds in the
sky. And it was a thunderbolt he had launched.
“I deplore a marked awkwardness,” he said. “Especially since Alix, I
fear, has become aware of it. Your English plan of destroying the
innocence of young girls has grave disadvantages. You will own that.
But, in any case, hideousness is not a word I could connect with any
project of mine.”
“She’ll never take you! Never!” Giles cried. He felt himself trembling
with the fury of his repudiation. “I can tell you that now. She would
feel it as I do. She would see it as hideous.”
“You don’t know what she would see; nor do I,” said André. “She thinks
she hates me. You needn’t tell me that. But I am not ignorant in women’s
hearts. Hate may be the best of beginnings. The struggle may be a little
longer;—I like struggles, let me tell you; the longer they last the
sweeter is the surrender at the end.—And I have every reason to believe
that to begin with hate is often to end with a more complete surrender.”
As André gave him this information Giles saw Alix emerge upon the
verandah of Les Chardonnerets.
She could not hear their voices, but their confrontation she must
remark.
Seeing Giles’s eyes fixed, André turned his head and looked for a
moment, also. Then he glanced back at Giles. “Plead your Jerry’s cause,”
he said. “_Je vous cède le pas._” He turned on his heel. “If you fail, I
shall plead mine.”
Giles was aware, as Alix approached him, that he must seem to stare
stupidly. “I could gain her mother’s consent.” Of all the brazen words
that André had uttered, it was these that rang most brazenly in his ear.
Was it true? Was it possible? If Alix already loved him? Could he be
sure of his Alix were the hideous complicity of events thus to disclose
itself? He could have fallen at her feet, in tears, clasping her and
supplicating her not to be abased.
But, as she approached him, silent, he muttered a trivial word and they
turned to walk along the cliff-path, while the clouds piled themselves
higher in the blue sky and the wind blew yet more strongly from the sea.
Alix did not say a word. She held her soft hat at her side and the wind
blew back her hair. Over her white dress a long white woollen cloak was
knotted at her throat, and it, too, blew back from her as she walked.
She looked before her with the high, majestic look he had already noted
on her face in moments of great emotion.
“Alix,” said Giles in a low voice.
They had gone for a long way in silence. The sea now was green beneath
them. The sky was a wild grey and all the grass silver as the wind blew
it towards their feet. He did not know what he was going to say. He did
not look at her. But he saw that she turned her face towards him. A clue
then came. “Alix, do you remember, long ago, you promised me that you
would never tell me a lie?” he said.
Not unclosing her lips she nodded. He had glanced at her and met her
eyes, but he could not read her look.
“Well”—he heard that his voice trembled and he was suddenly afraid that
he should not get far without crying—“Jerry, before I left Oxford,
showed me a letter he had from you. It troubled him; badly; but he
couldn’t know how it troubled me. You said you could never marry him
because you now loved someone else. Was that true, Alix?”
She turned away her head and looked before her; and again she did not
speak.
“Please tell me. Was it true? Do you love someone else, Alix?” Giles
pleaded.
She was terribly pale. Did she expect him not to have heard? Not to ask,
since he knew? “Please, Alix,” he repeated; and then, once more, she
bowed her head.
“Well”—Giles did not know how he forced his voice along—“One more
question. Will you tell me this—Is it André de Valenbois?”
“Oh, Giles!” said Alix.
She stopped short there in the wind, turned to him. The wind blew her
hair across her face and mechanically she put up her hand and pushed it
back while she gazed at him. “Oh, Giles!” she repeated, putting back the
short tresses that whipped across her eyes and lips. “Can you ask me
that?”
Her face was like a beacon set against the storm, high in the sky. In
its light he read all the monstrousness of what he had asked, and her
hand, still holding back her hair, seemed to clear it for him so that he
could receive the full illumination.
As he read her look and saw the tears that suddenly welled up into her
eyes, Giles, with an overwhelming lift of the heart, felt himself
sobbing. “Forgive me! Forgive me, darling.—It was all that I could
think.”
“Oh, poor Giles,” she said brokenly.
They were walking on, quickly now. Somewhere, near by, Giles was
conscious of a great brightness approaching him.
“I was horribly afraid. I could think of nobody else. And he loves
you;—you see that.”
“I see it.—Yes.—You have suffered.”
“And though it seemed to me that you hated him;—it might not have
prevented.”
“Do not let us speak of it.—And she has suffered. You would think,
would you not, that I would hate him more for what he has made her
suffer.” Alix spoke with difficulty, in short breaths; and though the
wind blew her hair backward, now that they again were breasting it, she
still kept her hand up against her face, looking before her as she tried
to tell him her difficult thoughts.—“Yet it is not so. It is not so,”
she repeated. “I feel as if I understood it all.—It is so strange,
Giles, all that I have had to understand in these last months. I seem to
understand people like him and Maman.—They are helpless, Giles. They
are like that.”
“Oh, my darling!” said Giles.
They went on side by side. The rain had begun to fall in great drops. On
their tip of promontory they seemed poised between sky and sea, the
marshalled chaos—above, below. And the brightness was spreading in
Giles’s heart.
“There is Allongeville,” said Alix. The town lay beneath them, half
obliterated with the rain.
“Let us run,” said Giles. “We can go into a shop.”
“Or into the church,” said Alix.
He put out his hand for hers and they started to run.
He could have sung with exultation. Not only André’s sinister shadow was
gone; but that tumult in himself. He was a boy again, and Alix, his
child, his darling, was beside him. They ran, with deep breaths, smiling
round at each other. The long wooded _allées_ of the town stretched
nearly to the cliff-top, and once beneath a steep, green tunnel there
was no need to go so fast, for they hardly felt the rain, so dense was
the roof of green; only heard it pattering heavily on the leaves above
their heads. But, still running, they reached the emptied _place_, its
cobblestones glistening with the wet, and as they passed Giles saw an
astonished face at the toy-shop door, where stout madame Bonnefoix stood
looking out between bunches of spades and buckets, string bags full of
brightly coloured balls and festoons of dolls in stiff muslin chemises.
The peaceful sculptured porch of the church was before them, and it
seemed to Giles that it had been waiting for them—for centuries.
When they entered, they found the church, with its whitewashed walls and
innocently bedizened saints, light and smiling after the darkened day
outside. A smell of incense, flowers, and cobwebs was in the air.
Alix paused to cross herself with holy water from the _bénitier_ carved
into the stone of a pillar and bent her knee before the High Altar as
they crossed the nave, while Giles held his Protestant head bashfully
high.
They sat down on a bench far back in an aisle and smiled, tremulously,
at each other. They were so much more alone than on the cliff with the
rain and sea. No one was in the church; no one was in the _place_
outside. It was very still, and the sound of the rain falling straightly
and steadily outside made the stillness more manifest. The wind had
already dropped. It was a summer rain, now, full of sweetness.
“May we talk in church?” Giles whispered. He looked away from Alix at
the remembered statue of the Virgin, all white and blue, with pots of
pink hydrangeas at her feet.
“I think we may,” Alix said. “We disturb no one.”
“Your saints won’t mind, will they?” Giles could not keep the tremor
from his voice. “Such a good Catholic as you are, Alix!”
“I think my saints are pleased,” Alix’s voice, too, trembled; though she
was not as shy as he was.
“You know, Toppie has gone into her convent,” Giles said, gazing at the
Virgin, whose uplifted, blessing hands brought the image of Toppie so
vividly before him. It was as if Toppie herself stood there, smiling
down upon them.
“Your mother wrote of it,” said Alix.
“We met again in Oxford, only a little while ago,” said Giles. “She saw
something that everybody has been seeing; even Jerry saw it.—You know,
Alix, I love Toppie as much as ever; yet I’m so changed. It’s all so
different. Can you understand that?”
“I never dreamed you could be different about Toppie,” Alix murmured
after a moment.
“Was that why you thought I’d never guess, even if I saw your letter to
Jerry?”
“I did not think you would ever guess.”
“I didn’t. I never dreamed there was a chance for me; never dreamed
it.—That’s what I told them all;—that there wasn’t a chance.”
Alix, too, had been gazing before her, sitting there beside him in her
wet white cloak; but as he said this she leaned forward and put her
hands up to her face.
“Oh, darling, are you crying?” Giles’s arms were round her as he asked
it. “Have I been so stupid?—Is it really me you love?”
“Ever since that day I came to you from Toppie.”
She was crying; but it was in his arms and his cheek was against her
dear wet head.
“Happy;—Happy;—Happy”—were the only words in Giles’s mind and they
went on and on like a song while he heard the rain falling sweetly and
the brightness was all about them.
He listened to the rain for a long time, but when he spoke it was to
answer her last words.—“It’s been since then with me, too.”
Alix’s head lay against his shoulder and he held both her hands in his
against his breast; and he was seeing the little French girl, the
strange, ominous little French girl, sitting in the Victoria
waiting-room with her straight black brows and her eyes calm over their
fear. He was seeing the lovely dancing head bound with crystal, aware of
him, looking for him even in her joy; he was seeing the Alix who had
come from Toppie. “We’ve always been so near, from the first, haven’t
we?” he said.
“So near, Giles. That was what troubled me, though I did not understand,
when Jerry asked me to marry him.—You were so much nearer than Jerry.”
“And who did you think I should believe it to be, darling, when I saw
the letter to Jerry?—Didn’t you know I’d have to ask you some time? Did
you really believe, when we were so near as that, you could hide it from
me?”
“I thought I could. I had to stop Jerry from coming. I could have
pretended that there was someone you didn’t know.—Someone who might not
love me, but whom I should always love.”
“You who promised never to tell me a lie!”
“But for those things women must always lie, Giles.”
She raised her head now to look at him. Her face was radiant yet grave.
“There will never be anything to hide any more;—never—never.—There is
nothing you do not understand. You understand all my life. You
understand Maman.—Giles, how happy this will make her.”
“I hope it will. But I came to plead Jerry’s cause, you know. She thinks
I’m pleading it now.”
“How happy it will make her that you did not have to plead it.”
“Will it? I can’t help being afraid that she’ll be disappointed. She’d
have preferred the better match for you, darling little Alix.”
“She will not think it better. It was all she had left to hope for, that
was all. It has wounded her pride horribly to have to hope for it—after
the bitter things it has meant for her and for me.”
“But—if you could have cared.—Everything would have come right. Lady
Mary is so fond of you and she would have stood by. Darling, it isn’t
only loving;—no one knows that better than you do;—it’s living. Do you
face it all? To live in Oxford? To be the wife of a humdrum scholar? To
have no balls and no riding? To wear”—Giles found—“the wrong sort of
clothes and think about ordering breakfast. Darling, Jerry loves you,
you know, and the bitter things would all fade away. Such a different
life is there for you to take. I can’t help seeing, though we love each
other, that it’s the life you were meant for and that the life with me
in Oxford isn’t.”
“Oh, no, Giles, you do not see that,” said Alix. She put her hand on his
shoulder, as if with its pressure to help him to think clearly. “You are
English and believe that more than anything it is right to marry the
person you love.”
“But you are French, Alix. It’s the other belief that’s in your blood.
The belief in what’s suitable.”
“Ah, but it is true what Maman says to me, when she reproaches me; I
have in some things become English. I think the thing most suitable of
all is to love one’s husband. To marry Jerry, loving you;—no, Giles;
you know that that would not be possible to me. And I do not love him at
all. He is not near me at all; while you are like a part of my
life.—No, listen to me, dear Giles.—This is not making love. It is
being French; it is being reasonable. Even the clothes and the
breakfasts;—oh, I know that they are important.—But I am used to being
poor and to knowing how to be right with very little money.—In clothes
and in breakfasts, Giles, I shall know how to be right.”
Her eyes, resting on him, were the eyes of the English Alix, of the
woman who chooses, for herself, her life and the man she will share it
with; yet their look was a French look, too. The look of one who has no
illusions; who sees an order and accepts it; an order to live for and to
make one’s own. “And there will be the ideas and the atoms to watch, and
the Bach choir to sing in,” she finished; “and walks in the
country;—and then I shall be in France, for all the holidays, with
Maman, Giles.”
She rose as she spoke, for the storm had passed. Sunlight was flooding
in through the high pale windows of the clerestory. The Virgin’s crown
glittered against her pillar. Slowly, hand in hand, Alix and Giles
walked down the nave.
But there was something more he had to say to her, here, in her France,
in her church, beneath her Virgin’s blessing hands. This woman Alix had
made none of the conditions that the child Alix, bewildered, charmed,
afraid, had asked of her first lover. She asked no promises. She left
everything to him. It was his order she accepted.
And before they turned aside to go, Giles paused and took both her hands
in his. It was at the feet of the dear, silly Virgin in her white and
blue and gold that he made his promise: “Darling, you shall lose
nothing, nothing that I can help. It will never be alone that you’ll
come for those holidays. If you take England for me, you must give me
all that you can of France.—Everything that is sacred to you, is sacred
to me, too.”
When they opened the door the world was dazzling with sunlight and a
great white cloud towered up like an august and welcoming angel in the
sky, while across the _place_ the little Curé came hurrying, stout and
active with his rosy, peasant face and thick grey hair. He looked at
them kindly, if very shyly, murmuring a word of greeting to Alix as they
all met in the porch, and Giles, in deference to convention, dropped the
hand he held. But Alix, as she smiled at the Curé and smiled beyond him
at all the sunlit world she was entering, took Giles’s hand in hers
again, and said: “Monsieur le Curé, may I present to you my _fiancé_?”
FINIS
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.