“Dear Giles,” she wrote, “I think I begin to understand all that you have tried to do for me. It was wrong of you; but I think I understand. I have been wrong, too. Perhaps this came to show me that one can love wrongly. I do not think I love him less now; only differently. I know that he suffered before he died. When I read his last letters now, I can see the suffering in them. I send my love to everybody.“Always your friend, dear Giles,“Toppie.”
“Dear Giles,” she wrote, “I think I begin to understand all that you have tried to do for me. It was wrong of you; but I think I understand. I have been wrong, too. Perhaps this came to show me that one can love wrongly. I do not think I love him less now; only differently. I know that he suffered before he died. When I read his last letters now, I can see the suffering in them. I send my love to everybody.
“Always your friend, dear Giles,
“Toppie.”
And a postscript, written hurriedly, ran: “Keep poor, brave little Alix with you.”
Under the dry phrases he read the mastered anguish. But it was mastered. That was the comfort that Toppie’s letter brought him. She had risen already above her own sense of personal wreckage and could contemplate its meaning. As her piercing intuition on the day among the birch-woods had led her to the portals of the truth, so now it had led her to its heart. She saw at last, truly, what Giles had done; she no longer misunderstood him. Even, perhaps, she had begun, dimly, to understand what manner of woman madame Vervier might be. Toppie was noble enough for that. It would appease rather than lacerate her heart to believe that the woman to whom Owen had given his heart was not ignoble.
It was on the morning of Toppie’s letter that Jerry was ushered into Giles’s study.
Giles, as he rose to greet the bright apparition in his doorway, did not know whether it was with more gloom or satisfaction that he saw it. He was glad that Jerry was holding on, yet his presence there seemed to add to his own sense of bereavement. He could do nothing more for Alix. She had shown him that he could do nothing more. But though she had disowned Jerry, it now remained to be seen if Jerry could do something.
“Is she gone!” Jerry exclaimed. Giles’s face might have told it to him and his charming eyes, so like his mother’s, went swiftly round the room, partly as if they might still discover the missing Alix, and partly in the unconscious appraisal of a newmilieu. Like his mother, Jerry would always see everything, wherever he might be.
“Yes. She’s gone,” said Giles, giving a push to the sofa. Strange, indeed, to have Alix’s suitor sitting in Alix’s own corner; Giles was aware of a sense of relief as Jerry did not yet take it. “It seemed the simplest thing for her to do.”
For a moment, then, he seemed to detect, or suspect, a flavour of relief in the discomfiture on Jerry’s face, but it was in immediate self-exculpation that he said, as if Giles might call him to account: “I couldn’t get here before; really I couldn’t. I’ve been away. I didn’t know till yesterday that Mummy had stolen a march on me. Mummy couldn’t hide from me—she didn’t try to—I’ll do her that justice—how splendidly you’ve been standing up for us.—If she’s gone, do you mean she knows?”
“She knows, or has guessed enough,” said Giles. “I don’t really think she’d have seen you if you’d got here before. It’s three days now since she went. What she says, you see”—and Giles again indicated Alix’s corner to Jerry—“is that there are now insuperable objections on both sides, and that her place is with her mother. Do sit down.”
But Jerry stood for a moment longer, gazing. “Yes, I see,” he then said. “Yes. That’s just what she would say. But how disgusting that she should have to say anything about it—poor little darling. Isn’t it a miserable business,” he added, as he dropped on to the sofa and glanced with a sort of gentle alarm at the gas-fire, rather as though he might, unless he held himself in, shy at it. He was making Giles, too, think of a nervous, charming horse.
“Yes. It’s very miserable in some ways,” said Giles. He did not sit. He stood, his hands in his pockets and leaned against the mantelpiece looking down at his visitor. Very much like a charming horse was Jerry. Giles could almost see him nibbling reconnoitringly at the edge of the stained-oak mantelpiece or choosing suddenly to take a flying leap out of the window.
Jerry offered his cigarette-case as though it might help them.
“It’s that confounded Marigold nosing out this story about Alix’s mother,” he said, striking his match. “And it’s true, you say?”
“Not exactly as she put it, I gather; but true enough. Since it is true enough, it’s better, I suppose, that it came out as soon as possible,” said Giles.
“Oh—I’d rather it had never come out at all,” Jerry objected. “It makes 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 thefait 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 askmeto 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.”
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.”
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.”
“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, somesavant. 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.”
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 completenessagaçant; 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 sunnyplaceshe remarked that she had to buy ababa-au-rhumfor tea and asked André to drive them across to thepâtissier’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’smilieu; 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 terribleroman-à-troisof mother, lover, and daughter, might not arise among thebien pensantsof the nation; but thebien pensantsthemselves 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, asVénus 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 thepâtissier’swas 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, thebaba. 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 herbabaat 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 ofbaba, “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 cherGiles, 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. Thefrotteurenjoys the polish he puts on theparquet, and thebonneenjoys 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 thepâtissier’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.