Madame Vervier did not come down to breakfast next morning. Giles had heard a murmur of voices in the room next his till late into the night and he saw from Alix’s eyes that she had slept little. They breakfasted as usual in the little dining-room which overlooked the garden at the back of the house and might have been dark, with its old polished panelling, had not the sunlight at this hour so flooded it. A linen cloth of blue-and-white squares was on the table, and a bowl of marigolds, that seemed to bring the sunlight clotted and palpable among them, in the middle. Above the marigolds, Alix, in Maman’s place, poured out their coffee, heavy-eyed but still adequate.
Monsieur de Maubert and André argued about politics with an impersonal vehemence that recalled to Giles, in its transposed key, the altercation of the friendly men in the train. He gathered, however, that they were both agreed on the necessity of a strong man for France and on many lopped heads. The French had not changed so much since the Revolution after all. Whatever the party, the solution seemed the same. Mademoiselle Fontaine, rushing in with a wonderful pink sunbonnet on her head, vividly contributed her own brand of violence, and then announced that it was the very morning forla pêche aux équilles. The tide was low; the sun shone; the breeze blew; and she had promised Maman and Grand’mère a marvellousfriturefor theirdéjeuner.
Giles had not yet seen this mildest sport. Armed with spades, bare-legged and shod inespadrilles, they made their way to the beach and, following the receding waves, dug vigorously for the evasive prey, half fish, half eel. He found himself laughing with them as they climbed rocks and raced to fresh stretches of wet, shining sand. He had never known anything more disquieting than the mingling of aversion and liking he felt for them. He and André and mademoiselle Blanche sat on a rock to rest while, at some distance, near the edge of the waves, Alix dug alone, and, as he listened to them and watched her, Giles realized that Alix had been with rather than of them. She had smiled, also, she had even laughed; but there was a disquiet in her deeper even than his own, and if she dug there so intently it was because she found relief in the childish toil.
“What a sky!” said André, looking up at the rippled blue and silver. “It is like music, is it not? Music of a celestial purity. Are you fond of César Franck, monsieur Giles?”
It filled Giles with gloom to hear André speak of celestial purity. It was not that he felt the charming young Frenchman to be impure. What separated them was their conception of life. André’s, like monsieur de Maubert’s, like madame Vervier’s, was a pagan philosophy and his was a Christian. He did not believe that they could understand César Franck.
“Ah! He is not for me!” cried mademoiselle Blanche, appropriately, her chin in her hand as she looked out with brilliant, intelligent eyes at the far horizon. It was strange to see her sitting there, her face whetted by artificial emotion, dyed and touched and rearranged to suit a fashion, among things as primitive as rocks and cliffs and sky. “It is a music without breathing; without blood; the music of a trance. The waves do not break, the clouds do not sail, the birds are silent; one is fixed in an eternity. I do not like eternity.”
“Ah, mademoiselle,” said André, “monsieur Giles here, who is a Platonist, will tell you that only when we reach eternity do we find life.”
André’s fox-seraph face was artificial, too, though so differently. Everything he had experienced had been a selection. He had had, all his life through, only to stretch forth his beautiful hand and take from the heaped and splendidcorbeilleoffered him by destiny what fruit, curious or lovely, most tempted him. And his grace, his gift, lay in the fact that he was tempted only by what was curious or lovely. There was nothing of sloth or sensuality in his being. Tempered like steel, he mastered every lesser taste by one finer, and Giles saw him like one of the gravely joyous youths of the Parthenon frieze riding life, as if it were a perfectly broken steed. How exquisite a being must madame Vervier be to have attached him! Such was the thought that passed through Giles’s mind, revealing to him, as it did so, how far he had advanced in the understanding of pagandom. And a stranger thought followed it. Unwilling as he was to admit it, it was yet indisputable that Owen had gained a value in his eyes from having been chosen by such a being; from having been André de Valenbois’s predecessor. Whatever Owen had lost—and Giles knew that the loss was beyond computation—that he had certainly gained. Meanwhile, on the subject of eternity and César Franck, he maintained a silence which, he hoped, might not seem too morose.
When they returned to Les Chardonnerets with theirpêche, madame Vervier sat on the verandah embroidering. Monsieur de Maubert was beside her, and Giles felt sure, from the moment he set eyes upon them, that monsieur de Maubert had by now fully repeated to her the conversation of yesterday. Giles’s impressions and discoveries and beliefs were known to her; and, no doubt, the fact that he had never had a mistress. She and monsieur de Maubert had talked him over and over and up and down, but what they had made of him he could not even imagine.
Her eyes met his with the bland serenity of a statue’s. “Have you had a goodpêche?” she asked Alix. She took her by the hand and drew her to her side and looked down into the bucket. “Admirable! Albertine will be overjoyed.Dieu, que tu as chaud, ma chèrie!”
“It is the climb up the cliff, Maman,” Alix bent her head obediently while her mother passed a handkerchief over her neck and brows.
Monsieur de Maubert had got up and gone inside and mademoiselle Blanche had parted from them at the cliff-top.
“I will sit here in the shade with you and rest,chère madame,” said André, casting himself into monsieur de Maubert’s vacated garden chair.
“And you,ma petite,” said madame Vervier, still holding her child by the hand, “may, if you wish, and if monsieur Giles will accompany you, bathe now. You will have time before lunch.”
“I should like that very much. But I do not need anyone. It is quite safe,” said Alix, with a curious lassitude in her tone.
“But, indeed, you may not go alone,” smiled madame Vervier.
“And I should love a swim,” said Giles.
So, presently, he and Alix were on the beach again.
But when they came to the rock where, with safety, the bathing-robes might be deposited, Alix, instead of doffing hers, sat down and said: “Shall we talk a little?”
“Do let us talk,” said Giles, and a great wave of relief went through him. At all events, Alix would not keep things from him. He sat down beside her. Only the sea and sky were before them.
“I had to tell Maman last night, Giles,” said Alix. She looked straight before her, wrapped to her chin in the white folds of her robe, and he felt that she had to keep herself by sheer self-mastery from reddening before him now, as she had last night when she had heard Maman talk of Toppie.
“Ah. Yes,” said Giles as quietly as he was able. “I thought perhaps you’d feel it best.”
Alix, her dark brows slightly knotted, looked before her. “And I think she sent me here with you so that I should tell you,” she went on. “Tell you, I mean, that she believed what she said last night about Captain Owen and Toppie. That Toppie was first with him. Not until I told her of his silence to you all did she see—what you and I saw, Giles;—that he cared most for her.”
Giles sat, struck to an icy caution. Yes; he saw it in a flash; that was how she would put it to Alix. He could find no word. But Alix expected none. Carefully she continued her tale. “It made her very sad when I told her of his silence. It made her cry. But she was not angry with me for having kept it from her. She understood.”
“And was she angry with him?” Giles asked after a moment.
Alix at that turned her eyes upon him and he read in them a deep perplexity. “I do not know,” she said. “She did not say. I do not think she was angry with him either. She is a person who understands everything. But I do not think she would have been so unhappy if it had not hurt her very much. Why else should she cry?”
Why, indeed? Was it for her unveiling before himself? How difficult to think it after the blank gaze of those dark eyes. Was it not, rather, in fear and grief at seeing her child entangled, at last, in her vicissitudes? However it might be, there was a new burden on her heart and, inevitably, Alix now must bear part of its weight with her.
“Well, I’m glad it’s all out,” Giles murmured. “It makes everything simpler, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?” said Alix.
When she asked that, he was aware that part of his thought had been that it made it simpler in regard to Alix herself and what he hoped to do for her. But was he really so sure of this? Would madame Vervier be more willing to let them have Alix now that she saw all her vicissitudes disclosed to him?
“I hope she’ll have a talk with me,” he said. “One can’t talk, really, if things aren’t clear.”
“She is going to talk with you, Giles,” said Alix. She still spoke with her lassitude. It was as if Maman had stretched her too far. “I do not know when. She is occupied, as you see, with her other friends. But she will talk with you. You please her. Very much.”
“Oh, do I?” Giles murmured. If it hadn’t been his dear little Alix he could hardly have kept the irony from his voice. “I hope it will be soon,” he said. “I hadn’t intended my visit to last over the week, you know.”
“I think it will be soon,” said Alix. “But I cannot say for Maman. Shall we swim now, Giles?”
When they all met again at lunch, over the marigolds, it seemed to Giles that madame Vervier looked at him with a new kindliness. She seemed to take it for granted that from his little interview with Alix there must have come a gain for their relation. She asked him if he was coming this afternoon to tennis, and when he said no, that he had work to do, she went on, smiling at him: “You will be abandoned, then, for we all have our tea at Allongeville. But perhaps you will take refuge with madame Dumont and her daughter.”
Alix had told tales. That was evident. Giles summoned an answering smile with which to own that nothing could be further from his wishes than to have tea with mesdames Dumont and Collet.
“You do not care for our ancient neighbor?”
“Not at all,” said Giles.
“Ah, in her day,la pauvre vieille, she had her qualities,” said monsieur de Maubert.
“Blanche told me that Grand’mère found youun jeune homme très sévère,” said madame Vervier, her eyes still resting on him as if with a mild amusement. “She is not accustomed to young men such as you. I do not think she has ever met such a one. It is a heavy intelligence”—she now addressed monsieur de Maubert. “It must always, I imagine, have been a heavy talent. One wonders where Blanche found her delicious gift.”
“A grandfather, a father, might account for that,” said monsieur de Maubert.
“A father might. A grandfather has only madame Collet to his credit,” smiled madame Vervier.
“Her talent is too sharp. Like herself,” said André.
“But the parts she prefers need the keen edge,” said madame Vervier.
“Every part needs a soul, and she has none;elle n’a pas d’âme,” said André.
Madame Vervier defended her friend.
“With so much intelligence she needs less soul than other people.”
“Pardon,chère madame. With so much intelligence one needs more. It is that one feels in her. The sheath is too thin. The blade comes through.”
“Vous êtes méchant,” said madame Vervier, and there was in her voice none of the inciting gaiety usual to the reproach; she spoke gravely, looking down at the cloth and slightly moving her spoon and fork upon it, and Giles suddenly divined that poor mademoiselle Blanche was in love with André.
“Mais non! Mais non!I think her charming,” laughed André. “But I can understand that madame Dumont is her grandmother.”
It was not until next day, after luncheon, that the time came, and Giles—as madame Vervier said to him, “I find it too hot for tennis to-day. Will you stay behind and talk with me, monsieur Giles?”—felt sure that it all had been planned, intended from the first. If she had thus delayed, it was in order that he should come to know her better and feel more at home with her. It was also in order that she should take his measure and see more surely what she was going to do with him.
Monsieur de Maubert, also, was going to Allongeville; André’s motor waited at the gate. He and madame Vervier were to have the afternoon to themselves, and as they all parted on the verandah, Giles saw that Alix cast a long look at him.—Poor little Alix! How little she could guess at what he hoped for from this interview! If madame Vervier had her intentions, he had his. And though he believed they would not clash, his heart was beating quickly as he followed her to the drawing-room. So many things, lay between him and madame Vervier and her glance, her voice, seemed to tell him that none of them were to be evaded.
The drawing-room was fresh and pale; so pale in its citrons, whites, and dim jade-greens, that the sunlight outside, shining against the transparent reed blinds, looked tawny in its fierce, prowling splendour. The sea was there, sparkling in its immensity across the lower half of the long windows, and the sky of another blue was across the upper half and the vines and honeysuckle that garlanded the verandah outside hardly stirred in the brilliant air. There were bowls of sweet-smelling small white roses from the garden, and madame Vervier was in white, the thin woollen dress with the sash at her waist and tassels at her breast that left bare her lovely arms and neck. Her russet hair was all tossed back to-day and there was something ingenuous in the shape of her forehead thus uncovered; something candid and childlike. In her hand, as she sat before Giles, she held a stone, a flat, smooth stone, pinkish-grey, that she had perhaps picked up on the beach in one of her walks at dawn. She held it, weighing it slightly from time to time and from time to time putting it against her lips or cheek, as if to enjoy its coolness.
Giles had never in his life seen anything so beautiful. He knew that she was not beautiful if computed or examined by standards of exactitude; that her eyes were small, her nose a little flattened, her mouth clumsily drawn; but power so emanated from her gaze, magic so pervaded her lips and brows, sweetness lay with such a bloom of light upon her, that every imperfection was dissolved in the unity that made a sort of music in his mind. She was like an embodiment of music—and what was that urgent, searching rhythm, that evocation of flowers and dew and night? The melody of Brahms’s “Sapphische Ode” surged into his mind and with it a deep, an almost overpowering sadness. With the song he remembered everything; everything was evoked. The Spring day in the Bois; Owen’s face of love; and Toppie, far away, betrayed and forgotten, fixed in her trance of fidelity. To see madame Vervier, to remember Toppie, was almost to feel that he himself was Owen.
“You know, then,” said madame Vervier. Her arm lay along the table beside her. She looked across at him and held the stone in her upturned palm.
That was the way she began; those the very first words she said after she had led him in, after their long silence, when they found themselves alone together. The throb of André’s car had long since faded down the lane. The house was still; and Giles felt that his heart was trembling.
“Yes. I’ve known from the beginning,” he said.
“Alix told me,” said madame Vervier. “You saw us one day in the Bois.”
“Yes,” said Giles.
“And she tells me that you feel him to have been unfaithful to his betrothed.”
“Yes,” Giles repeated. He was amazed yet not overwhelmed by her direct approach. He kept his eyes upon her. “Unfaithful.”
There was a weight in the word that madame Vervier would not feel, for André was now entangled with his thought of Owen. It was hardly eighteen months ago; and André had succeeded Owen. But all unaware, as she might well be, of his further knowledge, her next words answered, by implication, the charge. If she admitted contemporaneity in love, why not succession? “There,” she said, “you were mistaken. We were lovers, it is true; but he knew that it was not to last. He knew that if not death, then life must part us. In his heart he was not unfaithful. He would have gone back to her.”
“Do you mean with a lie?” asked Giles.
“With a lie? Yes; I imagine it would have been with a lie,” madame Vervier did not hesitate. “But the essential would be there. He had not ceased to love her.—It was not his fault. He was swept away,” she said.
Had she looked like that when she had swept Owen away? Was it an easy, an everyday thing to her, to see men swept away? He tried to beat down the visions that assailed him, but again and again, on the rising surge of the “Sapphische Ode,” they returned. Owen sitting before her, as he now sat, in the pale, fresh, shaded room; Owen rising suddenly to take her in his arms.—There would be no surprise to her in that.—She would have seen it coming. “You mean that it was your fault, then?” Giles muttered.
“No. I do not mean that,” madame Vervier answered, and as, in speaking, she weighed her stone lightly up and down, her eyes on his, he felt that it was his heart rather than her own guilt she weighed so in her hand.—How often she had weighed men’s hearts! How conversant with their trembling must she be! “No; that is not what I meant.—He moored his boat at the edge of a torrent. That was all. He was swept away,” madame Vervier repeated.
“That was what Alix said of you,” Giles muttered again. He felt as if madame Vervier must see the throbbing of his heart.
“What Alix said of me?”
“That you were like a mountain-torrent. She wanted me to understand you. She thought I might be of help to you some day. She thought of you, poor child, as in some kind of danger; beautiful and in danger.—How can you say it wasn’t your fault?” Giles demanded, and, with the thought of Alix and what she hoped from him, he felt that he struggled to keep his footing. “If you carried him away, it was your fault.—I believe that’s what you live for; to carry men away,” he heard himself unbelievably uttering, and it seemed to him, as the sombre magic of her eyes dwelt on him that it was for Owen he was speaking, and for all the others; since now he understood them all.
Madame Vervier, after he had said these last words, contemplated him in silence. For a long time she said nothing, and Giles, in the silence, felt that their confrontation was altered in its quality. When she spoke at last, it was not in anger. It was, rather, with a strange mildness. “I do not overflow my banks, ever,” she said. “You must not launch your boat upon me; that is all.”
If he had found himself understanding them all—all those others—was it possible that she saw him merely as one of them? Was she warning him? Had she seen his need of warning? Giles felt his face growing hot.
“You must not launch your boat upon me,” madame Vervier repeated, observing him with grave but faintly ironic kindliness. “If I am a torrent, if I am dangerous, to myself and others, my nature is there as it was given to me. I may not alter it. The blame lies with those who are unwary.”
“That may be true,” Giles muttered. “I have nothing to do with you, of course. I don’t understand you. But I do understand my brother. His weakness doesn’t excuse him.”
“You are severe. You have never felt a great passion, that is evident,” madame Vervier observed. “The feeling he had for me was so different from the feeling he had for Toppie that infidelity was hardly in question.”
“Hardly in question? Don’t you see that it shut him away from her for ever?” Giles’s voice was dark with grief. “Don’t you see that a man who chooses one kind of love turns his back on the other?”
“Not if he is strong enough,” madame Vervier, with her mildness, returned. “Your brother, I think, gained in strength from our friendship. We pay, it is true, for most things in life. It is painful to have a secret from the heart nearest ours; yet one need not regret one’s secret. I believe that Owen would have been strong enough not to regret. Strong enough”—madame Vervier, while she dropped the quiet phrases kept her faint smile—“not to grow to hate me because he could not tell Toppie how much he had loved me.”
Was it true? Giles wondered, sitting there before her, his head bent down while he stared up at her from under his brows, frowning and intent. Could Owen, ever, have been as strong as that? And would it have been strength? No; madame Vervier might have armed him against remorse; but she did not know Toppie. Toppie’s radiance would have fallen back, dimmed, startled, from the presence of the thing hidden yet operative in her life and Owen’s. A canker would have eaten; bitterness and darkness would have spread. Either her radiance would have withdrawn from him, or, beating too strongly at his defences, it would have discovered all. Dismay, devastation would have broken in upon them, and if Toppie could still have forgiven it would have been with a sick and altered heart. But he could not talk to madame Vervier about Toppie. The strange thing was, as he saw Toppie’s radiance, that he felt himself safe from the torrent, and that he began to understand madame Vervier.
“You think of yourself as very strong,” he said suddenly, and in their long silence he could see that something of her security left her; it was as if she felt the approach of an unexpected adversary. “You think you can do as you like with life. You’re not afraid of life; and that’s rather splendid of you—if I may say so. But it’s never occurred to you to be afraid of yourself. And the time might come, you know, when you’d be carried away, too.”
“Carried away?” madame Vervier repeated. Her voice was altered. She was unprepared. And in her momentary confusion it was with haughtiness that she spoke.
“Yes, carried away,” Giles repeated, understanding madame Vervier more than ever and that the haughtiness was a shield. “And if you were, you’d be helpless, as he was; as all the others are;—and you’d find, I believe, that you couldn’t go back quietly to the things you’d jeopardized.—I mean, they’d have changed; they’d have been spoiled. You made Owen suffer; I’m sure of it. You gave him more suffering than happiness. He lost Toppie through you, and he knew he’d lost her. He couldn’t have lived with Toppie on a lie. The payment may be more than our own suffering; it may be other people’s. That’s what you don’t seem to see.—And as for doing as you like, with yourself and other people, it doesn’t work, the kind of life you lead. I’m sure it doesn’t work. It will spoil you, too. More and more you’ll be battered and bruised;—it’s horrible to think of;—and at last wrecked. Or else so petrified and hardened that nothing can really come to you any more. That’s the way it would happen with anyone like you.” Giles had looked away from her in speaking, but now he lifted his eyes to hers again. “I feel sure of it.”
Madame Vervier sat there, her arm lying on the table, her hand holding the stone, and looked fixedly upon him. He had thought of nothing definite, of nothing imminent in speaking. He had been able to speak only because the thought of Toppie had come to him so overmasteringly, arming him with such repudiation of madame Vervier’s philosophy. But now, as she sat silent for so long, he saw suddenly what the fear was that, like a Medusa head, he had held up before her. She was older than André de Valenbois; she loved him passionately; and she was not sure of him. It was in her eyes, in her silence, as she faced him, that Giles read the fear; definite; imminent. And he was horribly sorry for her.
“You are a strange young man,” she said at last. The haughtiness was gone. There was no resentment in her voice. She only spoke carefully, as though she felt her way in a world changed to ice. “How can you think you know me well enough to say these things?”
“I don’t know you well enough. It’s because we are so near. Through Alix. Through my brother. You’ve made such a difference in my life. Everything is changed for me because of you.”
“It need not be as you say,” said madame Vervier, and after her long pause it was as if the strength he had called in question came creeping back into her frozen veins. “Not as you say;—if one has wisdom. One may suffer;—do you imagine that I have not already suffered?—but one need not be wrecked. And I have great wisdom.”
“I don’t want you to be wrecked.—You know that,” Giles muttered.
“Yes. I know it. I see it. You are not an avenging angel,” said madame Vervier, and she was able once more to summon the faint, ironic smile. “You are really, under all the denunciation, so full of kindness. That is what makes you so unexpected.—So very strange.—But do not fear for me too much. I shall know when youth is over. I shall know when the laurels are cut and winter has come to the woods. I shall be able to furl my sails before the night comes on; and if one furls one’s sails in time, monsieur Giles, one is never wrecked. And there will be, I trust, a little harbour for me somewhere. Alix’s children to love. And my memories. I shall be in old age a much happier woman than most. Most old women”—madame Vervier smiled on, her eyes on his—“have only to remember how they were loved by nobody at all.”
What was there to say to her? Giles, as he considered her, felt a dim smart of tears rising to his eyes. She had done with him as Alix had hoped she would. He saw her as lovely; as menaced. He wished that he could protect her. “I hope it will be with you like that,” he said.
“Perhaps it will,” said madame Vervier. “You have seen me and my life a little too logically, too rigidly, my kind monsieur Giles. I did not choose it so. It chose me, rather.”
“Ah,” Giles exclaimed, “that’s what I feel in you. That’s my excuse for what I’ve said to you. Why can’t you turn back even now? You are so much too good for it. You’re good enough,” Giles declared, with a sense of further illumination, “for anything.”
Madame Vervier, again arrested, considered him. Then, gently, sadly, with a compassionate sincerity, she shook her head. “One never turns back at my age. One’s path has grown too closely about one. Other paths are all blocked out. And I was perhaps destined for it. For some women the life of home, the still, deep stream suffices. Children may fill their hearts and stifle the personal longings; but for others these compensations are not enough. They must have love. They must have a lover. And in France husbands are seldom lovers. So, if one is a mountain-torrent, one leaps over the precipice. Do you see? That is my history.”
“It’s different with us,” Giles murmured. “We have different hopes for marriage. You didn’t give yourself time. If you turn your back on a thing, you can’t find out its reality.”
“The mountain-torrent, at twenty-three,” said madame Vervier, “is not a philosopher. No; I did not see what I was leaping to, but I saw plainly what I left. And I do not say that I regret. All that I do say is that I wish no leaps for Alix. Let us now speak of Alix. You have done your duty by me and read me my lesson, and it is all because you want to speak of Alix. I am well aware that you have not come to France in order to understand or grow fond of her mother—kind though you are.”
“No; it was for you—only for you.” Giles did not know how to put it. “Because of what I see in you. As to Alix, you want for her what I want.”
“Safety. Yes,” said madame Vervier. “The deep, quiet stream.”
“She’s that already,” said Giles. “Alix isn’t the mountain-torrent.”
“Ah, we none of us know what we are till we come to the precipice,” said madame Vervier. “But I am glad you feel that of my Alix. I trust your reading. I could almost believe, at moments, watching you with her, that you understand her better than I do. There is in Alix an austerity that sometimes disconcerts me. Yours is a nature nearer hers than mine. I have thought of it deeply in these last days, monsieur Giles, and I have made up my mind. Will you marry her?” said madame Vervier, laying down the stone.
“There are many things to consider,” madame Vervier pursued, simply and tranquilly, while Giles sat transfixed. “I should have to think of many things.—Your position; your prospects; they are not, I gather, brilliant. But one of the gravest disadvantages of a position like mine is that it narrows my field of choice; terribly narrows it. Family and position count for everything here in France. It is not one little individual choosing another little individual; we are more serious than you in that. It is one family choosing another. It is twofoyerscoming together to found a third. I have spoiled all this for Alix.” Madame Vervier took up her stone again, again weighing it in her hand, and now it was as if she weighed the sense of her culpability towards her child. “I have spoiled it. Money would have helped me to atone; but not only was I notphilosopheat twenty-three; I was also credulous; ignorant; reckless. The man for whom I left my husband was poor and had great schemes. I gave him all I had. He sucked me dry.C’était un bien méchant homme,” madame Vervier remarked in a tone of surpassing detachment, “and what would have been my fate I cannot tell had not the admirable friend who rescued me from his clutches left me, on dying, a small annuity. That is all I dispose of. And with what I have been able to set aside for Alix year by year, I have amassed only the tiniestdot; hardly enough to clothe her.—I go into all this very summarily for the moment, though I owe you every detail. You shall have them later on. You shall hear of the old aunts who brought me up and who were, also, inveigled by monsieur Vervier. Even my family did not save me since I was so unfortunate as to marry him after the divorce. It is a long story. But for the present it is enough that you should see why, aside from my own position, there is for Alix no possibility of a suitable marriage in France. Whereas in England all is different.”
“Yes, it’s different in England,” Giles muttered, since she paused as if for his assent. He was still too transfixed by the sudden theme to dispose of his own thoughts. He felt as if madame Vervier, with her calm, her deliberation, her fluency, were casting, loop by loop, a silken net about him. And he, the dismayed and astonished fish, looked here and there through the meshes for a means of escape that would not too violently tear the web.
“Quite different,” said madame Vervier with confidence. “That is why I sent her to England. That is why I make you my proposal now. In blood Alix is much your superior; your fortune, I know is small; your position obscure. But I like you monsieur Giles;—I like you very much. Oh, I have studied you since you came among us! And,” madame Vervier added, smiling with a kind of indulgence upon him, “you like Alix very much. I have seen that.”
So she gathered up the last strand and considered her captive before drawing him definitely on shore.
“And poor little Alix? Where does she come in?” broke from Giles. After his long mute immobility these were the first words that came to him. “Is she to be considered in the matter?”
“Poor little Alix? Why poor?” madame Vervier questioned kindly. “It would not with you be brilliant; but it would be safe. You will be tender and faithful always. You have not to assure me of that. And you would, I am convinced, do all that is in your power to do in order that she may be well placed in the world.”
“And aren’t her feelings to count at all in this disposal of her? She’d never have me,” Giles declared with a sort of indignant mirth. “I’m the last person in the world she’d ever think of.”
“You underrate your attractions,” said madame Vervier, still more indulgently. “Alix is very fond of you. And she is still a child; singularly still a child. We may for a year or two put the question of Alix’s feelings aside. At her age one has no feelings. It lies with you, and with me, to see that when the time comes they are the right ones. She is devoted to you”—madame Vervier enlarged her assurance. “That is unquestionable.”
“But I care for somebody else!” Giles heard himself almost shouting. It was unbelievable that he should have to say to madame Vervier what he had never explicitly said to himself; unbelievable that he must set the sacred figure of Toppie between them. But she was actually drawing him on shore and there was nothing for it but to break through.
“Somebody else?” madame Vervier repeated. Giles had grown pale with the shock of his own avowal, yet, all the same, he was aware of a side glance at the comedy of her discomfiture. It was as if all the strands dropped from her hands.
“Yes,” he nodded; “I love somebody else.”
She might be discomfited, but she retained her resourcefulness. “Somebody I know of?”
“Yes,” Giles doggedly repeated. “Somebody you know of.”
It was then madame Vervier, after their little pause, who supplied, with a strange softness, the evident name.—“Toppie.”
“Yes, Toppie.” Giles turned his head away and fixed his eyes on the blue outside.
And madame Vervier sat silent. Very gently she laid down her stone—Giles was never to forget the look of that smooth, pinkish-grey stone—and folded her hands in her lap. She rested her eyes upon the young man—though his head was turned away from her Giles knew that she was looking at him;—and the silence, in the pale room, with the brilliant day beating from without upon it, grew long. It grew so long that Giles had time to draw his mind from his own confusion and to wonder what was in hers.
Then, when she spoke, her voice was so new to him, so unexpected, that it was as if a new chapter in his knowledge of her opened gently before his eyes. Uncertainty, hesitation was in it; something almost shy; a lovely sweetness. It was revealed to him that for all her goddess-like invulnerability she might have known a qualm of pity for Toppie; it was revealed to him that a romantic girl still lived in her heart, rapt in the wonder of a love-story. “But then—does not that make it all right?” she said.
“How do you mean, right?” Giles asked.
“If you love Toppie?—Will you not marry her? Will you not both be happy?—In your beautiful English way of happiness—for ever after?”
She was smiling at him from her cloud of shyness, seeming to feel the secret disclosed to her too beautiful and delicate for her to venture near its nest; and the childlike quality he had seen in her forehead irradiated all her features, while in sincerest, most ingenuous joy she forgot her own hopes.
“You see,” said Giles—and he spoke gently to that child—“Toppie would never have me. She’ll never love anyone but Owen.”
Owen’s name did not for a moment stay her. “Never? Oh, no. You are young enough to believe in that word; and so is she. I am old and wise in that. You may trust me when I tell you that it is a word too large for our slight human nature. So many eternities”—madame Vervier smiled at him—“I have seen melt away.”
“She’d never have me,” Giles repeated.
“You think that no one will have you. It is not so.—Have you tried?”
“No.” Giles shook his head. “I don’t think I want to try, really—I don’t think I want her different.”
“Dieu!” madame Vervier now breathed. “You will embrace a celibate life?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps I shall. I never thought about it,” poor Giles muttered. “I’ve never thought about Toppie in that way. I’ve always loved her—ever since I was a boy—knowing that she could only be for somebody else.”
“But then”—madame Vervier in a slight bewilderment groped her way among these unfamiliar shapes—“if you have never thought about her in that way—perhaps you will be able to think about Alix. She, too, cares so much for your Toppie. Toppie would become your patron-saint. Together you would worship at her shrine.—Does it interfere with what I had planned for you and Alix?”
“I’m afraid it does. I’m afraid it absolutely interferes.” Giles, his face suffused with red, sat looking down, struggling with difficulty to master a sense of tears. “It’s impossible, you know; quite impossible. Dear little Alix. All I ask, you must see that, is to take care of her.”
“I have blundered,” said madame Vervier. “Forgive me. We will speak of it no more.”
“But you’ve spoken of it beautifully. I’m glad to have you know,” said Giles, and the strange sense that this was so made part of his amazement.
“We will speak quite differently, then, of Alix,” said madame Vervier. “We will talk of her, not as your future wife, but as your little friend. Even so she is fortunate. And I!—how fortunate I am—for I know that I can count upon you absolutely. You will help me as no one else can help me. If not you, then another English husband. Who is this Lady Mary of whom Alix has written to me? She has sons?”
It was like being borne on the wings of a great aeroplane from continent to continent;—one nearly as strange as the other. Giles really felt inclined to gasp and ask for mercy. He could not go so fast or rise so far without a sense of giddiness.
“Lady Mary Hamble? Sons? I’m sure I don’t know,” he said, staring at the pilot.
“You do not know her? You have norelationswith her?”
“I’ve seen her only once in my life. Alix, as far as I remember, has seen her only once. Last winter. She’s a nice woman. That’s all I know about her.”
“Yes. It was last winter. But she asked Alix to go to them. It was very foolish of her not to have gone. If I had been there it would not have happened so. Alix wrote of her with much liking. I gathered from the impression Alix had of her that it would be a goodmilieu.”
“Oh, excellent I should say. Much better than ours, of course.” Giles was able to recover something of his own broad smile, the farce of it, to his seeing, breaking through too strongly. “You’re quite right about us. We’re not brilliant at all.”
“So I had inferred.” Madame Vervier considered him with kind and lucid eyes. “She is afemme du monde.”
“Very much so, I imagine. I don’t know anyfemmes du monde, except you,” said Giles.
“Ah, my claim to the rôle would be disputed,” madame Vervier remarked. “She will, I think, have sons. Since it is a position, there will be a son to inherit it.”
“Well, yes. There certainly might be,” said the laughing Giles. He leaned back, clasping his ankle with his hands, and took open possession of his mirth.
Madame Vervier, all indulgence, showed her awareness of its grounds. “It is strange to you, almost horrifying, that I should have such computations; is it not?”
“Well, I don’t know. Plenty of English mothers have them, of course. Only they’re not so frank about them. All the same, you know, you mustn’t count upon us. We couldn’t do much in that line. My mother, for instance, would never think of such a thing, and if Alix came back to us she’d be like one of my sisters; trained, if you like, to a profession. Marriage would only be by chance; for her, as for them.”
“Dieu!You are a strange people!” said madame Vervier. “To leave to chance what is of the most vital importance in a woman’s life! No; you are not serious. You livedans le brouillard. Life must be less difficult a thing with you since it is possible to face it so lightly. I should not, it is evident, care to leave Alix among you unless it were in the hope of marriage. I could myself have her trained to a profession. If I gave her up again, it would be because I hoped for something better. I am notféministe. I think a professional life deplorable for a woman. A necessity in many cases, no doubt; but a deplorable necessity. An artist’s life is happier; but I hope that my Alix may find the happiest life; the life of a woman married well. So, if she returns to England, it is for the sake of the chances, and you, I believe, will help to make them for her. To begin with, you will see that she accepts Lady Mary Hamble’s next invitation.”
“Confound her impudence!” Giles was saying to himself, but he was saying it tenderly. He was enjoying her impudence; it was part of the comedy that, for all her pitiful, her tragic aspects, she offered him. “I see that I am to be counted upon as a sort ofpère de famillefor Alix,” he observed, and though genial his tone was certainly ironic.
“Précisément,” smiled madame Vervier. “You will not, I know, be a dog in the manger and grudge to others what you do not want for yourself.”
“Ah, but that’s a very different thing from asking Old Dog Tray to go trotting about to find her a husband,” Giles objected. “I don’t see myself as a matchmaker, you know; I can’t promise to do anything at all in that line for Alix.”
“You were not asked to be Old Dog Tray. You were asked to bele Prince Charmant,” madame Vervier returned, a hint of the caustic in her kindness. “And I do not now ask you to trot. I ask you only, if an occasion offers, to see that she does not miss it. She has not the heredity of the English girl. She will not know how to make, or take, occasions for herself.”
“I think you are being rather nasty about the English girl,” Giles now commented. He and madame Vervier were on strangely intimate terms and could deal out friendly irony to one another. “The English young man counts for something after all. What we hope for, we romantic English, is that he will make the occasion.”
“Oh, no. Not nasty; not at all nasty. I admire them, your English girls; I admire their enterprise,” smiled madame Vervier. “Young men do not know how to make occasions, and since the English mother feels it beneath her dignity to make them, it is left for the girl to combine the rôle of mother and daughter. It is a difference ofmœurs, that is all, and I wish Alix to have the advantage of yourmœurswhile keeping the immunities of her own. The question that now remains is: Does she return to you? She does not expect to. You will have gathered that she feels very keenly your brother’s silence in regard to his visits to us in Paris.”
Again it was a case of her surpassing detachment. She went to the heart of the matter as if it had been, merely, a question of his brother. Yet the strange thing was that, though so detached, she did not affect one as callous.
“Yes. She feels it very keenly,” said Giles. “She can’t, of course, understand the grounds of his shrinking. She was sure that when you knew you would feel as she did and would not think of letting her come back.”
For madame Vervier had not known. He was sure of that now. She might be detached, and even callous; but she was not brazen.
“La pauvre chérie!” the mother ejaculated and it was on a sudden note of profound tenderness. “She is sensitive to such a point, and it is obvious that, had I imagined such a predicament for her, I could not have sent her among you. We must not blame him. He could not have foreseen what was to come.” She mused now, compassionately, upon the grounds of Owen’s shrinking. “But how much wiser had he written quite openly and naturally of his leaves to Paris. The tone should have been kept to the tone of Cannes. Ah, it is indeed a pity that he showed so little resource!”
“I don’t suppose Owen was in a state of mind to feel resourceful,” said Giles sombrely. When madame Vervier spoke like this, chasms opened between them. But were there not just such chasms between him and Alix? “I think I like him the better for it,” said Giles.
“Ah—and I do not love him the less!” madame Vervier returned with an effect of quickness, though she spoke quietly. “I do not love him the less. I do not even blame him. And it is this leniency of mine that has given Alix her first perplexity in regard to my conduct.—Or is it her first? Who knows what goes on in those innocent but astute young hearts!—Ah, monsieur Giles, that, you would like to tell me, will be the worst punishment of all;—when Alix knows.”
“I don’t want you to be punished,” said Giles sombrely. “I don’t want to tell you anything.”
“It is so sure to come that it needs no telling. That is perhaps what is in your mind.—Or, no; it is only that you are kind, strangely kind to me,” said madame Vervier, rising as she spoke and moving, with her light, majestic step to the window. She pulled up the blind, for the sun no longer beat into the room, and stood looking out for a moment without speaking, her back turned to him; then she said: “Alix, too, is kind. I do not fear for our relation, hers and mine. When she is of an age to hear the truth, she shall hear it.”
“She loves you very deeply,” said Giles.
“She loves me very deeply,” madame Vervier repeated. “I have no fear.”
Giles, too, had risen, and moved to the mantelpiece where the picture of Alix in its blue-and-silver frame stood. He looked at it in silence for some moments.
“And how will you persuade her to come back?” he said at last.
“You want her back?” madame Vervier asked from the window.
“Of course I want her back,” said Giles. He spoke quietly, almost casually; yet it was strange to feel the weight of his own decision. He pledged himself to something with his words. They implicated him in the situation from which he removed Alix. It was only for himself that he had a right to speak and in accepting Alix he accepted the cloud that hung about her; he brought it back among them; and he knew that the responsibility was heavy.
“Then she shall go to you,” said madame Vervier. “I shall not be able to persuade her. I shall attempt no persuasion. She will obey me. That is all. She will wonder at me for sending her. She will feel that it should too much offend my pride to send her back on false pretences”—how they understood each other, mother and child—“but she will go. Our French children learn to obey. It is the first article in their creed.—And since the pretences are not too false for your taste, monsieur Giles, they are not too false for mine.”
“They are too false for my taste,” said Giles. He was implicated, but madame Vervier must see just how and where. “It’s Alix I’m thinking of. I sacrifice my taste to her.”
“And I,” said madame Vervier, “sacrifice my pride.”
She stood there looking out, white against the blue, and her voice, for all its calm, was sombre. “I am not ungrateful,” she added. “Do not think me ungrateful. I see what you do for my child.”
“I see whatyoudo for her,” said Giles.
“Yes;—but I am a mother!”
“It must be all the harder,” said Giles. “You consent to see yourself belittled in her eyes. And you consent to live without her.”
Madame Vervier stood silent at that for a long moment. Something of the grave ardour in the young Englishman’s voice may well have touched her to a deeper vision of herself, and of him. It was as if arrested that she stood contemplating the novel homage laid at her feet. For, after her pause, she turned suddenly, and fixed her dark gaze upon him. He was never to forget her as she stood there, against the great sea and sky; never to forget, as the last of all the varying impressions of the afternoon, his sense of a greatness, a magnanimity, like the sky’s, arching above her earthly errors. It remained with him even though the last words she spoke were so sad, as if, instead of the splendour he divined in her, she held out to him a handful of dust. “Do not think too well of me,” she said. “I like you too much. With you there can be no pretence. Do not think too well. It is best for Alix; but it is best for me, too, that she should not be near my life.”
The tennis-players returned at tea-time, bringing monsieur Claussel with them. He was a young man with shy, soft, prominent dark eyes and the smallest dot of a dark moustache on either side of a nervous upper lip, and, when tennis was not in progress to absorb his attention, it was excessively directed to the social exigencies of the occasion. Giles imagined, as he watched him spring from his chair to offer it, stand back to let a lady pass, bow with heels together, and tentatively resume his seat only again to leave it, that he was perhaps less at home in the jungle than André, and felt, in his introduction to it, a doubled need for every amenity. It was his first appearance at the Chardonnerets tea-table, and in his presence, the presence of mademoiselle Fontaine, her mother and grandmother, madame Vervier may have felt a convenience. If she found it at all difficult to face Alix and André and Giles after the interview from which she had just come, her guests, and monsieur Claussel in particular, gave her an excuse for looking at them rather than at her intimates. And Giles felt sure that she avoided her daughter’s eyes.
They were on her, those remote blue eyes of Alix’s, with no insistence, no appeal. They dwelt in a wide contemplativeness that recalled to him madame Vervier’s own, were it not that proud patience rather than security lay behind it; and Giles had the fancy, as he looked at her, that, in the gaze of Alix, the Mouverays, beneath the threshold of the child’s consciousness, were judging Hélène Vervier. Whatever the verdict, Alix’s tenderness for her mother would not waver; but he watched the Mouverays imparting to her need a further reënforcement of pride and courage.
Tea was prolonged. Madame Dumont, in a great crested bonnet, sat enthroned, receiving cakes and homage. She was rather silent, rather, in her black draperies, the sunken old raven, its feathers ruffled high. Yet Giles caught more than once the piercing glint of an avid eye, turning in conjectures that he could too well imagine upon madame Vervier and André; upon himself and Alix; and once, in the glance of mademoiselle Blanche, he seemed to see a stealthy hereditary surmise, and Alix rather than madame Vervier was its object.
Monsieur Jules was persuaded to bring out his canvases and range them for monsieur Claussel’s admiration. The painful, vivid patterns and colours still distressed Giles, but, his eyes already acclimatized to their strangeness, began to exercise a charm. “Quel horreur!” madame Dumont cried, but was fondly checked by mademoiselle Blanche, who murmured to her, smiling over her head at Giles: “We are no longer in the days of Bouguereau and Meissonnier, Grand’mère!”
She confided to him, as they stood side by side, that monsieur Claussel was a devout admirer of modern art and that his admiration, since he was the heir to afortune princière—faite dans les pâtes—might be of much significance to poor Jules. “She arranged it all, you may be sure,” said mademoiselle Blanche, casting a fond glance upon their hostess. “It is always she who thinks of such opportunities for her friends.—What a heart, what a mind it is!—Whatever her own perplexities and anxieties—and I can assure you that her life does not lack them—she never fails in resource and kindness when it is a question of her friends’ interests.—She is looking pale—very weary, is it not so?—You take mademoiselle Alix back to England with you?” And since Giles, disconcerted, remained silent, mademoiselle Blanche added: “She is ready always to sacrifice herself.”
“Mais oui, c’est très bizarre,” little madame Collet murmured, craning her neck to see the pictures, while Giles wondered over mademoiselle Blanche.
André, meanwhile, smiling in a happy confidence, pointed out planes and stresses to the heir ofles pâtes, who stood with his little shoulders screwed up, his elbows in his hands, rapt away from shyness and self-consciousness by his sincere delight. Monsieur Jules remained morose; but it was evident that he had found a munificent patron.
And when they were all gone and an evening of dusky rose began, after the hot day, to drop softly from the sky, madame Vervier said to André that she must take the air. She would go with him for a little turn in his car.
She was not yet ready for a meeting with her child. If she was to think things over and decide how she should put them to Alix, she must get away to do it. Giles understood; but how could Alix understand such necessities? He guessed at the grief and perplexity that must strive within her.
“And now, indefatigable as you are,ma chère enfant,” said monsieur de Maubert when he and Giles and Alix were left alone, “framed of steel and india-rubber as I sometimes feel you to be when I watch your day, you will doubtless wish to go for a walk with monsieur Giles. Do not hesitate to leave me. I shall, I think, have a siesta here with my head in the shade and my feet in the sunset; even in the details of life, monsieur Giles, I am, you see, the Epicurean.”
Giles knew, then, that madame Vervier’s intentions, in regard to himself and Alix, had been imparted to monsieur de Maubert who thus took occasion for furthering them.
But Alix said: “No; the walk is not to be with Giles. I have promised Annette Laboulie to catch shrimps with her on the beach till supper-time.”
“And who,” monsieur de Maubert, kindly, yet with a certain austerity inquired, “is Annette Laboulie?”
“She came with my shoes her father had mended, the other afternoon. Do you remember? A dark, thin girl. She has not enough to eat.”
“You mean the sad young ragamuffin with the untidy hair? Not enough to eat? That must be seen to.”
“She is a ragamuffin; and untidy; I reproach her for that. But she is clean. And she is a clever girl in all sorts of ways. There are eight children, and Annette is a mother to them all. We are great friends. I used to play with her when I was little and Maman and I first came here.”
“Monsieur Giles, you are not flattered by this preference!” smiled monsieur de Maubert.
“And they don’t even invite me to join them!” laughed Giles.
But he understood. After the longing to know what Maman had said to Giles must come the longing to know what Giles now felt about Maman; but Alix wanted none of his impressions until those of Maman had been vouchsafed to her. As if by some deep instinct she knew that her destiny had been in question that afternoon.
“But do come with us, Giles,” she now said, and he replied that he really had letters he ought to write. “Letters home. You see my time here is up.”
“Up? Indeed? Why up?” monsieur de Maubert inquired very kindly.
“Well, I’ve stayed already longer than I intended and they all expect me back in time to start next Monday on a walking tour around the coast of Cornwall.”
“Next Monday? But that means that you will leave us the day after to-morrow. You will miss our Sunday excursion to Caudebec.”
“I’m afraid I must.”
Alix was looking at him; wondering, he knew, whether his resolve was sudden.
After he had written his letter to his mother, he went out into the village to post it, and coming back by the cliff he was able to see that even if Annette had been an improvisation the drama of the shrimping was being carried out. The two girls were pushing their nets before them on the sands, bare-legged, in the shallow water. Their voices, bell-like, came to him through the evening air. Alix laughed.
Her faculty for fraternizing with the people seemed to him a charming gift. Neither Ruth nor Rosemary would have known what to do with Annette in tête-à-tête. They could have dealt with her coöperatively; in the Girl Guides or one of Aunt Bella’s clubs; but not as an individual. And Toppie, full of still solicitude, would have dealt with her as a soul. The difference was that Alix was not dealing with her at all. She was enjoying Annette as much as Annette was enjoying her. They were simply two girls engaged in a pastime delightful to them both; and Giles surmised that such easy intercourse was perhaps only possible in a country where caste was a thing so impassable that intimacy lent itself to no misinterpretation. Caste in France, he was coming more and more to see, centred itself on the question of marriage. In a country where the romance of themésalliance, so dear to English hearts, was nearly unknown, there was little likelihood of its disintegration. How little do those know France, thought Giles, who imagine her republican at heart!
Madame Vervier did not return from her drive till supper time, and after supper, during which she talked cheerfully, if with a certain languor, she established herself in the drawing-room with monsieur de Maubert. There was no moon to-night and the light streamed out over the verandah from the drawing-room window. Giles, from his place on the steps, could see that madame Vervier, beside the lamp, had her embroidery and that she spoke to monsieur de Maubert in low tones.
Alix brought out a saucer of milk for a stray kitten that she and Annette had found. “I shall take it to Paris with me,” she said, stroking the back of the little creature, while it drank, half choked with purrs and lapping.
“It is not a pretty kitten, mademoiselle Alix,” said André, who sat beside Giles smoking.
“No; it is not pretty; except as all kittens are pretty—the delicate little paws; the beautiful movements. In time it will look better; with brushing and good food,” said Alix. “And it has a charming little coral nose to match the coral beads under its feet.—Only hear it purr, Giles! Have you ever noticed the softness of a kitten’s feet?—they are like raspberries to hold in one’s hand.”
André watched her meditatively.
“It is time for your bed,mon enfant.” Madame Vervier’s voice came from the drawing-room. “I will visit you before you sleep.—Ah,mais non! You must not have the kitten with you. You would be devoured by fleas. It will be quite happy shut into the kitchen.”
“But it is so young, Maman; so lonely. It must so miss its mother.” Alix stood supplicating, the kitten held to her cheek. “I do not mind the fleas.”
Madame Vervier was melted; or it was, perhaps, an evening on which she was inclined to indulgence. “Very well. If you do not mind the fleas! While it misses its mother, then. Too soon, alas, it will be a mother itself!”
“No; for it is a male cat, Maman,” said Alix with austere realism. “You need fear nothing on that score. There will be no more kittens to trouble you.”
“A la bonne heure!” laughed madame Vervier.
“But she returns to you, after her holiday with us here, the charming young creature,” André, when Alix had carried away her kitten, observed to Giles. It was remarkable, the sense they all gave Giles, that Alix was permanently his responsibility, and André’s voice had almost the geniality of family affection. If not he, then another English husband. Alix’s future had been, by those most concerned with it—by himself and by her mother—definitely agreed upon; that was the fact to which André’s voice and smile bore witness; and madame Vervier was certainly imparting the same news to monsieur de Maubert as she now sat embroidering beside him in her Ingres dress and scarf.
Alix herself, meanwhile, remained in ignorance of her destiny.
“Rather a shame she shouldn’t know it yet,” said Giles. “She thinks she’s going back to Paris, you see.”
“Shame? Oh, no,” said André in gentle surprise. “It is much better that she should have her holiday unspoiled. We are to say nothing of it to her—as madame Vervier will tell you.—It would grieve her too much to hear it now. By degrees, as the time draws near, her mother will prepare her mind and bring her to see the wisdom of the decision.”
That, of course, would be André’s point of view. He took it for granted thatjeunes fillesshould be kept in ignorance of their destiny until such time as their elders thought fit to enlighten them.
Giles was aware of a confused anger that seemed to involve himself as well as André and madame Vervier. “Since she and her mother are so devoted, it’s a pity, I think, to hoodwink her,” he said. “I hope her mother will tell her what she’s decided on at once. I shall advise her to tell her.”
At this point, suddenly, a voice dropped to them through the darkness. “I am sorry. My room is above you. I can hear all that you say.” Alix’s voice. Thrilling with bitterness.
The young men sat mute, eyeing each other.
“Dieu! Quelle gaffe ai-je commise!” whispered André, and—“How much has she heard?”
“As little as she could, you may be sure,” Giles muttered.
André found his resource. “Très bien! Très bien, mademoiselle Alix,” he called. “But this is a case whereune écouteusewould hear only good of herself.”
Alix made no reply. The windows of her room, Giles now remembered, opened beside his, on the roof of the verandah. She must have heard all if she had stood near them.
“This is very unfortunate,” André murmured. “I have been stupid; very stupid. I must at once make my confession.”
“Yes. You’d better,” said Giles grimly. “It wouldn’t do for her mother to go up now and pretend she’d made no plans at all.”
“Oh—our hostess would be able to meet even that contingency,” said André with, perhaps, the slightest flavour of irony. “A daughter, with us, knows too well that she may trust her mother to do the best for her happiness.”
But, as Giles remained sitting on, hearing in the drawing-room the low murmur of consultation and André’s repeated “Je suis désolé,” it became disastrously clear to him that, more than Maman’s intended accommodations of the truth, Alix would resent André’s admission to Maman’s confidence. How, indeed, could she interpret that?
The murmur in the drawing-room ceased, madame Vervier rose and went upstairs, and, before André could rejoin him, Giles had taken refuge in his own room. He could not face André; he could not face monsieur de Maubert, or madame Vervier herself, again that evening. None of them, not even madame Vervier, could see as he saw the disaster that had befallen his poor little friend. He leaned at his window feeling hot and sick, but even here, though the windows of Alix’s room had been closed, the voices of mother and daughter came to him through the flimsy barrier of the wall. He could not hear the words, but in their sharp passionate rhythm he discerned what the words must be. “Why to him, Maman! What are his rights! He was a stranger to us when I left you!”
But madame Vervier would, indeed, never lack resource. Unready as she must feel herself to face this further predicament, Giles heard the muffled murmur of her voice, rising, falling, expostulating; urgent, tender, invulnerable. She would find answers to everything. Or was it that there were some questions her child would not ask of her? When, at last, she ceased, there was no reply. He heard that Alix was crying.