She was not to escape Ruth and Rosemary for long. Already, at lunch, she felt that Giles, talking gravely with his mother of treaties and leagues and such dull matters, seemed to have relegated her to their category. Over the dining-room mantelpiece hung a portrait of the late Mr. Bradley; she knew it must be he from his likeness to Aunt Bella and Ruth and Rosemary, and Alix felt sure, as she looked up at his pink and yellow, his tweeds and watch-chain and good, shrewd eyes, that Mrs. Bradley’s sons must always have interested her more than their father. But she would never have known this, just as she did not know, nor did they, that she was fonder of her boys than of Ruth and Rosemary. “But I believe that in this country everybody is fonder of sons,” thought Alix, marvelling at the reappearance of the strange cabbage cut into squares and recalling impressions of English literature where, despite romantic surfaces, it was apparent to the discerning eye that men always counted for more than women.
Mrs. Bradley carved. It was a well-roasted leg of mutton, that made Alix think of the mutton in “Alice.” The potatoes, too, were roasted and theentremetsa bread-and-butter pudding. Mr. Bradley had been nourished on such meals. They would produce Mr. Bradleys.
“Now we will show you everything,” said Ruth when luncheon was over. The implication seemed to be that a specially fortunate experience was in store for her. A fond complacency breathed from both girls. “And it is natural that one should love one’s home,” thought Alix, the tolerance of her comprehension giving her childish face a maturity beyond its years.
So she was led from the lawn to the shrubberies; shown the summer-house where in summer they had tea and the herbaceous border, neatly disposed for its winter sleep. The kitchen-garden was displayed, and at its far end they passed through a door to a little path, bordered by gorse-bushes, that ran beneath the garden-wall and then turned aside over the common. It was a sheltered, solitary little path, the branches of the garden fruit-trees hanging over it, and Alix felt that it might often be a refuge for her. It was a pretty path and had a character of its own. To Ruth and Rosemary its meaning lay in leading somewhere else, and they crossed the common and rambled in the birch-wood, inciting each other to long jumps over a sluggish little stream, half ditch, half brook, that flowed through it, and encouraging the dogs with loud cries to chase the scurrying rabbits on the further hillside.
“There’s the jolliest walk along the top,” said Ruth, “among the junipers. But perhaps you are tired. French girls aren’t much good at walking, are they?”
“I walk a good deal in the country,” said Alix, “but I think I will unpack my box now.”
“Edie will have unpacked it for you,” said Ruth, “so we’ll go on; only say if you are tired. You wear sensible shoes, I must say. I thought all French girls pinched their toes.”
So they continued to walk, talking as they went, asking her for none of her information, only imparting theirs, as if it must, self-evidently, have superior value. Alix heard them with interest when they told of Giles and of his scholastic feats at Oxford, feats interrupted by his departure for the war, but now to be resumed. Philosophy was Giles’s special branch, and they told her that he was going to teach philosophy, at Oxford probably, and write it some day.
“Tiens!” said Alix, relapsing, as was her wont when surprised, into French. She knew nothing of philosophers and the word only conjured up a picture of someone aged and bearded who drank hemlock.
“Yes,” said Ruth, accepting the ejaculation as a tribute, “he’ll be a great man, all right, Giles.”
And Alix also learned that Ruth and Rosemary both intended following professional careers and that their father had come from the north and had built Heathside and that their mother was a Londoner and that her father had been the editor of an important London paper. “What! Never heard of ‘The Liberal’!” Ruth exclaimed. Ruth, as eldest, did most of the talking, subjected to frequent interruptions from Rosemary. “I should have thought even French people would have heard of ‘The Liberal.’ Oh, yes, he was a great swell, our grandfather.”
Alix did not think she would have found him so. France, she saw, mainly existed for Ruth and Rosemary as a place where one’s brothers had gone to fight and one’s friends to nurse.
“And what is the pleasant house?” she inquired of them, when, after their walk along the hilltop, they had crossed the wood and emerged again upon the common.
It stood, with an air of serenity and detachment, half a mile away, a tall house of pale, eighteenth-century brick with a white door and white window-sills, a formal garden before it and a neat hedge dividing it from the road. One felt that the woods had grown up around it and that it preserved a tranquil personality of its own, unmoved by the haphazard accretions of a century.
“Oh, that’s the Rectory; where Toppie lives,” said Ruth. “You can see the church spire just above the trees to the right. Pleasant, do you call it? I think it’s rather dismal; so bare and square. It needs lots of creepers and shrubberies to make it cheerful; but old Mr. Westmacott doesn’t like them.”
“Creepers would not be in the character of that house, I feel,” said Alix; “and they would hide the pretty colour of the brick. There are a few roses, too, are there not?”
“Yes; a few. Toppie would have her roses. I hate a house without creepers.”
“Shall I soon see Toppie, do you think?”
“Oh, you’ll see her soon, all right,” said Ruth. “She’ll be coming in to tea to-day, probably.”
“I know she’s coming,” said Rosemary. “She asked me yesterday if Alix would be here, and when I told her we’d had the wire, she said she’d come. I think she’s rather keen on seeing you, Alix. Owen wrote a lot about you, you see.”
They spoke without any emotion of Toppie. They took her for granted. She was not, to them, a shrine. But even before the scene in the train with Giles, Alix had had a special feeling about Toppie herself, and as she walked on with the chattering girls her mind went back to the day at Cannes when Captain Owen had first showed her and Maman Toppie’s photograph. He carried the little leather case in his breast-pocket, his mother’s picture on one side and hers on the other, and Maman had said, as she took the case from him and looked: “Elle est tout-à-fait ravissante.”
“You don’t see very much of her in that,” said Captain Owen, wagging his foot a little, and Alix guessed that he was moved in speaking of hisfiancée. “But it does show something. Lovely the shape of her face, isn’t it? She’s not exactly beautiful.”
“Oh! ‘exactly’! Who would care to be ‘exactly’ beautiful!” said Maman.
He had told them that Miss Westmacott—Toppie’s real name was Enid Westmacott—had come with her father to live near them when she was only fifteen. Mr. Westmacott was the Rector of their parish and he had to explain to them—for Maman said that with all her English she could never get it quite clear—what rectors were and how they came to have daughters; and when Maman said, as though rectors must make up for having daughters by having devout ones, “Elle est très dévote?” Captain Owen, with his charming smile, rejoined, “Oh, much better than that!”
Later on, when they were alone, Maman had remarked to her: “She is pretty; but nothing more.Elle est nulle, cette Toppie; très, très nulle.” But Alix had not agreed. Often she did not agree with Maman. The little photograph had not said much, but it had said something definite. “She is like someone in a tower.” So she tried to fix her feeling.
“Even in a tower one may oneself be insignificant,” said Maman, and to this Alix had replied: “Not if oneisthe tower oneself.”
Toppie was there when they got in. A fire had been lighted for tea in the drawing-room, a long room with roses on the chairs and sofas and a high wainscotting of dark woodwork, and above that blue paper with old-fashioned crayon portraits and large photographs from famous pictures. A tall grey figure stood at the further end, and Alix knew at once that it was Toppie who turned her head to look at her like that. She was helping Mrs. Bradley arrange flowers, Michaelmas daisies, oak leaves, and sprays of golden larch. She held a large bronze vase and wore a grey tweed skirt and a grey woollen jumper and grey shoes strapping across the instep with a buckle. Her hair was as fair as primroses and was ruffled up a little above the black ribbon that bound it.
“This is Alix, Toppie, dear,” said Mrs. Bradley in a gentle voice, and she came forward and passed her arm in Toppie’s as if she knew that it must mean something very special to her to see the little French girl.
“I’m so glad,” said Toppie. She gazed at Alix for a long moment, as though forgetting that she held the vase; then, looking round her, vague in her absorption, she set it down on a table and held out her hand.
The water from the vase had spilled over it, and as it closed on Alix’s it made her think of the hand of a dryad, a naiad, or some chill, unearthly creature. “Yes; in towers,” she thought, as Toppie’s eyes dwelt on her. “And how much she loved him!”
She saw then that Giles was there. He was stretched out in a deep chair on one side of the fire, his hands clasped behind his head, and he was watching Toppie; her meeting with Toppie.
“And how much Giles loves her!” came the further thought, sharp with its sense of sudden elucidation. If he sat there, in that rather mannerless fashion, not helping with the water-cans, the baskets of flowers, the scissors, it was because he loved her and wanted to watch her.
Toppie, still with her absorption, had picked up the vase again and carried it to a far table.
“There; that’s the best we can do with the garden just now,” said Mrs. Bradley, smiling at her. “And without you, Toppie, I’d never have made the effort. Toppie thinks a room without flowers so sad. She made me come out with her and pick all these. It’s astonishing, really, what one can still find in a November garden.”
“They look awfully nice,” said Giles.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” said Ruth—Alix had already noted of her that, on all occasions, she gave her opinion without being asked—“they look to me rather dingy and frost-bitten. Rather a waste of time, I think, all this messing about to arrange flowers that don’t exist!”—and Ruth laughed, pleased with her own good sense, and went to seat herself on the arm of Giles’s chair.
“She bores him; but he would not like to say it,” thought Alix, seeing Giles’s kind but unwelcoming look. She had a feeling of excitement, yet of oppression. Toppie, she knew, was thinking of nothing but her.
The tea-table stood before the sofa on the other side of the fire from Giles, and Mrs. Bradley sat down to it and Toppie came beside her, and then, looking up at Alix, laying her hand on the place still vacant, said “Come here, Alix.”
“There’s room for me, too,” cried Rosemary, plunging down between them. “My place is always near the cake!”
But Toppie looked at her quite coldly and said: “There’s not room for you, Rosemary. Somewhere else, please. You make us all uncomfortable.”
She was very fair, with a skin that would have been of a milky whiteness had it not been thickly freckled. Her lips were small and pale, her chin long and narrow; all her head, bound round with the black ribbon, was singularly narrow, and that, perhaps, was why her grey eyes seemed to look out from towers. “And how she has suffered!” thought Alix.
Nights; how many nights of sleepless suffering had not Toppie known. The tears had run down as she had lain in the long darknesses, remembering; always remembering, seeing his face before her always. Tears; vigils; remembrance;—all were in Toppie’s eyes. “Oh, no, Maman; notnulle; anything butnulle,” Alix thought, while, with a great wave of depression, the meaning of the war, of all its lonely suffering, swept over her. Was Captain Owen worth so much suffering? His personality lived most for Alix in the memory of his smile and his worth seemed to live in that, too. He had been charming; and there was worth in charm.
Tea was made and they were all talking of the things they did and the people they did them with. Alix heard of a Women’s Institute, of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, and a village Choral Society that Mrs. Bradley conducted. Giles sang in it, and the girls and Jack and Francis when they were at home. “And you must sing with us, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, and they asked her about her piano lessons and the singing at the Lycée, and she had to confess that she had never heard “The Messiah,” at which there was a shout of good-natured protest from Ruth and Rosemary. “But you’re not a musical nation, are you?” said Ruth; and disposed of France as a musical nation.
The talk made Alix think of the thick slices of bread-and-butter that Ruth and Rosemary and Giles were eating, it was so kindly and useful. Very different from the talk to which she was accustomed in Maman’s salon; and Maman’s salon itself was as different from this as the talk. It was small, yet it was stately. She and Maman had done their best for the “petit trou” of anappartementin the rue de Penthièvre, and Maman’s russet head, as she sat with her cigarette at the tea-table, had melted and shone against the old tapestry, grey and green and citron, and her lovely face had seemed to belong to the Empire sconces and the carnations in their tall crystal vases that made light constellations on the mantelpiece. Maman’s salon, though stately, was dense and rich and sweet, and the talk that passed, soft and shining, was like a beautiful, iridescent soap-bubble tossed so lightly from one to the other; from monsieur de Villanelle, with his pointed red beard and sad blue eyes and long Flemish nose like a Memling saint; to mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine; and from her to monsieur de Maubert, with his Jovian head; and from him to monsieur Jules, dark and gloomy, who sometimes let it drop in his abstraction, unless Maman gave it a little puff that carried it on to madame Gérardin, who received it with shrill little outcries, prettily playing with it—Alix had to own that she played prettily with talk—until it was safely back in Maman’s hands again. And then another was blown. How Maman smiled; how she lifted gay yet sombre brows; how lovely they all thought her. And though one might see talk so light only as a soap-bubble, Alix dimly apprehended that it was fertile, creative; that it spread, like a sweet fragrance; that it floated like a winged seed on the breeze, out from Maman’s salon to permeate, alter the world. It made a difference to the world what monsieur Villanelle thought about the last book and poem; what monsieur Jules thought about the last painter, mademoiselle Blanche about the last play, and monsieur de Maubert about the latest feat of Léon Daudet or Charles Maurras. And since, to all of them, it was in Maman’s reception of their ideas that the final verdict lay, Maman, to the world at large, made the greatest difference of all.
“You’ll see what a jolly life you’ll have here, my dear kid,” Rosemary remarked to her; Rosemary, undismayed by her rebuff, had worked through the bread-and-butter and was now eating quantities of cake. She was only six months older than Alix, but she assumed protecting airs towards her. “Girls in France have a beastly mewed-up time, haven’t they?”
“Have you been much in France?” Alix asked her. She felt no call to combat Rosemary’s conceptions. She was, indeed, completely indifferent to what they might be. She asked her question from mere politeness.
“Not much; but Ruth and I stayed with a French family once. My word! they were quaint! They thought the Bible improper reading forjeunes fillesand picked their teeth at the table and I don’t believe they ever took a bath. They almost had apoplexy when we said we had to have one every day; thought it would be sure to give usdes rhumatismes.”
“Many of us are quite clean,” Alix remarked, and at this Giles laughed loudly.
“There’s one for you, you young savage,” he commented, whereupon Rosemary bounded at him and grappled with his hair.
“Help, Ruth! He’s choking me!” she screamed, and Alix, with some astonishment, watched the uncouth game that followed, Giles throwing off his sisters alternately until they tumbled on the floor and sat, dishevelled and delighted, getting their breath and smoothing back their loosened hair.
“Not quite so much noise, dears,” Mrs. Bradley remarked once or twice, but she continued calmly to converse with Toppie who glanced at themêlée, Alix thought, with a remote, repudiating eye, while she said: “I find him a thoroughly bad boy. There’s something fundamentally wrong with him.”
“Oh, poor little fellow!” Mrs. Bradley sighed. “His home and heredity are great handicaps, aren’t they?”
“I don’t see why they should be,” said Toppie. “Mrs. Brown is a patient hard-working woman and, though the father drinks, I don’t think he is dishonest. Whereas Percy is a sneak and a liar. He does mean things and then is too much of a coward to confess them.”
It was strange, thought Alix, listening, though not in the least interested in Percy Brown’s heredity, that with a face so sweet Toppie should have so cold a voice. She would be sorry for Percy Brown, she felt sure, if she were to see him confronting Toppie.
“It’s very difficult to confess when one has done a mean thing,” Mrs. Bradley mused—and Alix almost had to laugh at hearing her, so impossible was it to imagine Mrs. Bradley involved in such a dilemma. “The cowardice and the meanness go together, don’t they, and Percy is so young that they are not worse, really, than weakness and timidity. He may outgrow it.”
“I don’t think he will. I think he is fundamentally bad,” said Toppie, but now with more sadness than severity, and, turning to Alix she said: “Will you come and have tea with me to-morrow? We could have a little walk first, and then you could come back to tea with me and my father.”
“But she’s going to school with us, Toppie! We have to teach her hockey!” cried Ruth.
“Not to-morrow. She need not begin till Monday, need you, Alix?” Alix thought not, and though Ruth declared, “You can’t begin a day too soon for hockey,” Alix and Toppie had decided the question between them.
“Tell me everything; everything you remember,” said Toppie. She was striding along over the heather, a grey woollen scarf tossed over her shoulder, a knitted cap drawn down closely over her ears, and she made Alix feel shy. She had seen that Toppie liked her and she had foreseen that she would question her. But as she felt the pressure of her longing she knew how little she could satisfy it.
“I think I remember him best of all as I first saw him,” she said, searching her thoughts.
“Yes. As you first saw him. Tell me about it. How did you first see him? He wrote to me, often, from Cannes; so much about your mother; so much about you. He said you were the dearest little girl. I understand why he said it—if you don’t mind my saying so.—But he couldn’t tell me what I most wanted to know, could he? How he himself looked to you.—What he said to you.—How he seemed.—You understand, I know, though you are so young, how one longs for everything that remains on earth of anyone one loves. People’s memories; they are precious. You understand that,” said Toppie. And Alix felt that only by the pressure of her longing was she thus lifted above her natural reticence. The very words she used were not habitual to her; she would have been shy of using such words ordinarily.
“Yes; I understand,” said Alix. “We saw him first on the great road that runs above the sea. Maman and I were going up and he was coming down, so that we saw him tall against the sky; limping a little as he came. He looked at us, and we looked at him;—it is almost as if one recognized the people who are destined to be our friends, is it not, Mademoiselle?—and when we had passed, I looked back at him and he was looking round at us. It had been a mutual impression. We talked of it afterwards. We saw him against the sky and he saw us against the sea; as if we had risen from it, like people in a fairy-tale, he told us; and Maman laughed and said that people didn’t rise from the sea carrying parasols. I remember so well the expression of his eyes”—Alix felt still shyer, but she forced herself through the shyness—“gay and searching like a dog’s; out-of-door eyes. He had field-glasses in his hand. And that very evening, at the Casino, a friend of Maman’s brought him and introduced him to her. So it all began.”
“Tall against the sky. Out-of-door eyes. Yes, I can see him.—Don’t call me mademoiselle, Alix; call me Toppie.—And with his bird-glasses. He would have been watching birds. I see it all,” said Toppie, her eyes before her. “And then?”
“Then he came to see us every day. It was of birds we talked on the first day that he and I and Maman went for a walk. I knew them a little; not their names; but their songs and their habits, from having been so much in the country; whereas Maman is so much theparisiennethat she was very ignorant and she laughed at us and said they were all much alike; small, grey silhouettes in the leaves. And he used to say that I was like a black-cap and she like a nightingale; though we did not see those birds at Cannes.”
“And then?” Toppie repeated as Alix paused.
“He was still very lame,” said Alix, “so that he could not play tennis, but he used to come with us and watch Maman play; she is one of the finest players at Cannes; did he tell you? It is beautiful to watch her; she is perhaps at her best when playing tennis. And he used to write his letters in the garden of our little villa;—it was lent us, that Autumn, by friends; a charming little place; he will have told you of it. He must often have written you letters from the garden. And he and Maman sat there and read. He would read to her and she would correct his French, and she would read to him so that his ear might become accustomed to the correct accent. And sometimes it was I who read while he held, I remember, a skein of silk on his hands for Maman to wind to balls; lemon-coloured silk for a little jacket she was knitting me. She is so clever with her fingers.”
“Oh, she was so good to him! I know!” Toppie exclaimed, her eyes still fixed on the distance. “I don’t know what he would have done with himself if it hadn’t been for her kindness. He had been so frightfully lonely there at Cannes. He found it such a dismal place until you came; perhaps because it is supposed to be so gay; and that, in war-time, must have been dreadful. No shade, I remember he said; only sun and shadows.”
“Yes; I remember that he found so much sun depressing, and that seemed very strange to us, for we so love the sun. But there was real shade in our garden under the trees. The fuchsias, too, were in bloom everywhere, I remember, and I associate them so much with him; gay, delicate flowers.”
“Fuchsias?” said Toppie. “But that’s a soulless flower. How strange that he should have been associated with them in anyone’s mind.—Fuchsias”—she seemed to be forcing herself to see them, too. “They grow so much in the Riviera, of course. But I always think of Owen with daffodils. Our woods are full of them here in Spring. Fuchsias. Yes? What else? You all laughed together? Your mother is so gay. He was happy?”
“Very happy, I think. We all laughed a great deal. Maman is not what one would call a gay person; but she can make gaiety. He teased me a great deal. I have never cared for dolls and he teased me about them. He said a girl must be made to care about dolls, and he bought dreadful little ones with small feet in painted boots and hid them in my napkin at dinner or even under my pillow, where I found them at night. I used to fling them at him—rush down to the salon where he and Maman sat, and fling them at him.—For I was already fifteen, and at that age one is not supposed to care about dolls, in any case. We had great games, it was a happy time, in spite of all the sadness. He was a happy person.”
“Happy. Yes. A happy person,” Toppie repeated. She turned her strange shining eyes on Alix. “He is happy now. He is here, you know. We are not parted. I feel him every day; always; near me. His happiness shines round me.”
Alix was struck to dumbness. She felt afraid. Such thoughts were so alien to her that she even wondered if Toppie were quite sane.
Toppie went on. “You believe that, too, in your church, don’t you?—that the dead are near us; not far away; not shut into a hard golden heaven we can’t reach; but quite near and caring.”
“We have purgatory. I do not understand all these doctrines. But I am notdévote,” said Alix after a moment.
“Purgatory? That’s only a name. That’s only a symbol, like the golden heaven. And those who have died, giving their lives for us, will not have to pass through such an intermediary state.—You are too young. You have never lost anyone you loved.”
“No one except my poor grandfather. I always pray for the repose of his soul. That is what we do in my church. Is it different in yours? And if they are reposing, how can they be near us?” Indeed, the thought of Grand-père as near, in his new, unimaginable state, was even more disquieting than Toppie herself.
Toppie seemed to feel that she had drawn her young companion beyond her depth. She was silent for a moment, gathering back her thoughts from their search for sympathy, and she asked, then: “Why do you say your poor grandfather? Was he unhappy?”
“I am afraid he was. Very unhappy.”
“Oh, I am so sorry. You felt and shared it. I saw in your face at once, dear little Alix, that you had shared unhappiness.—You are so young; younger than your age in one way; yet in another you are so grown up; it is strange.” Toppie’s eyes mused on her for a moment. “Why was he unhappy?” she added gently. “Though, indeed, most people are.”
“He was ruined. He had lost everything,” said Alix. “Montarel, where the Mouverays have always lived, is sold now, and he knew before he died that it would be so. And he had lost everyone he loved, except me.”
“Your mother is not his daughter, then?”
“No; my father was his son; his only child.”
“But you and your mother were often with him?”
“Only I. He liked having me alone.” Alix did not require consideration to find an answer. To Giles, in the train, frankness had been possible; but it was difficult to repeat such frankness. And Toppie, Alix felt, was so different from Giles. She would not understand Maman being divorced as he had. So she evaded her question.
They had reached the Rectory now, and she was glad not only that they had passed away from Grand-père and his causes for unhappiness, but from Captain Owen, too. She would have been sorry to have had to answer questions about the Paris days when so much of the brightness had dropped from him. Her memories of Captain Owen in Paris were all tinged with sadness; perhaps because the war was so much nearer in Paris and Captain Owen’s return to it so imminent. It was as if, in seeing him there with them for his short leaves, they had seen death always beside him.
“I hope you will be here when our roses are out,” said Toppie, in the Rectory garden. “Father and I are proud of our roses.”
Alix counted on being back with Maman long before the time of roses, but she said that she hoped so, too, and as they passed a window she caught a glimpse of a tall, bleached man sitting at a writing-table, very erect, austere, and absorbed; like an old eighteenth-century print of d’Alembert, Diderot, or some such erudite wigged gentleman.
“Yes; it’s my father,” said Toppie. “You’ll see him directly; at tea.”
Alix stood still for a moment as they entered the drawing-room. It had everything of charm that the Bradleys’ drawing-room lacked, except the charm of cheerfulness, for it was, though so serenely beautiful, perhaps a little sad. The eighteenth-century panelling was painted in dim green, and three tall windows at one side looked out at the garden while, at the other, was a beautiful fireplace. In the walls were deep niches filled with rows of old china, and sedate chairs with backs and seats embroidered in green and dove-colour were ranged along the wall.
“And look at my china roses,” said Toppie, pleased, Alix saw, by her involuntary pause of pleasure. “Aren’t they rather wonderful for November? Only smell how sweet.” And Alix bent over the bowl filled with the little deep pink roses.
There was a sedate sofa to match the chairs, with the tea-table placed as at the Bradleys’; but how different was this tea. No thick bread-and-butter; no loaves of cake. Only a plate of little dry biscuits, that Alix liked, however, and another of bread-and-butter cut to a wafer-like thinness. And instead of the affectionate turmoil of Heathside was Toppie’s sweet, chill voice and Mr. Westmacott’s silence. He drank his tea, looking, with his crossed legs, which should have been in buckled knee-breeches, more than ever like d’Alembert; addressed a courteous question to Alix about her journey and her mother’s health, and soon went away, back to his writing-table; but not, Alix felt, to do much of significance there. He had a tall head and a meditative eye; but there was something of the sheep in his appearance, too. If he had had the close curled wig, that went with his type he would, Alix thought, have looked very like a silent, dignified sheep that may, in the meadow, as it looks at you, emit once or twice a formal baa.
Toppie told her that her father was writing a book on the Stoics. “He has, fortunately, a great deal of time. It’s a tiny parish; just right for a scholar like my father; more a scholar than a priest, I sometimes think. He is rather shy with people and his life here suits him perfectly.”
“Are not Stoics the people who do not mind the things other people mind?” Alix inquired.
“They cared, perhaps, so much for some things that other things did not hurt,” said Toppie, smiling. “I don’t know much about them, myself, though; I’m not at all learned. I’ve never been to school.”
“I am glad you are not learned. One may go to school and yet not be learned; as you can see from me,” Alix smiled back. “But I can’t imagine what those things can be that keep us from being hurt; can you?”
Toppie looked at her meditatively for a moment. “You said you were notdévote; but doesn’t your religion tell you what things they are?” she asked.
“Le bon Dieu, do you mean?” Alix inquired doubtfully. “La Sainte Vierge?One’s Guardian Angel?”
“Yes. When you go to church, to confession, aren’t you told?”
“We are told a great deal; but I am afraid I have never paid much attention. I only go to confession once a year. Maman insists on it. I do not like it,” said Alix. “Had the Stoics abon Dieuand aSainte Viergeto console them, then?”
“Oh, no! no!—you very ignorant child!” Toppie was perforce smiling again, though Alix saw that she was distressed. “They lived very nobly without our faith to help them.—In my church we do not have your beautifulSainte Viergeto look to, you know.”
“I know,” said Alix. “And I do not understand why you should leave her out. I like her better thanle bon Dieu, I must confess. But then rectors could not feel as we do about aSainte Vierge, could they?”
“And why not?”
“Could one feel like that and be married?”
“Oh, you funny child!” Toppie was really laughing, and Alix, seeing how she amused her, laughed, too. This was so much better than talking about the dead.—“You mean a priest could not? We are quite different about that, too. But I see what you mean”—Toppie’s eyes dwelt on her—“and sometimes I think that you are right. I think, perhaps”—Toppie was grave now—“that the best life could be lived if one were quite free; with no close human ties. One could live better for God, and for humanity, then. And we have nuns in our church, too, Alix.”
“Oh, but it is dreadful to be a nun!” Alix exclaimed. “I had an old great-aunt who was a nun. Grand-père’s sister. I was always taken to see her in her convent in Lyon. She came to agrilleand blessed me through it. She was like a sad old fish in an aquarium. One felt that her flesh must be cold. It would be death to me, such a life. And you? Can you really imagine it?”
“Perhaps not an order like that, that shuts one quite away,” said Toppie; “but there are nursing and teaching orders. Yes, I can imagine it. Not while I have my father; but if I were alone.”
“No, no! Do not imagine it!” Alix exclaimed, and there rose before her the memory of Giles’s face as he had watched Toppie yesterday evening. “Do not even imagine it. It is too dreadful. I am sorry that in your church you have nuns, too. That is foolish of you, I think, when you need not have them. It is different for priests. They have to administer the sacraments. But for a woman it is dreadful. Far, far better marry and be out in the world.”
“Perhaps.” Toppie was smiling sadly at her, seeing her, it was evident, as quite a child, yet touched by her feeling. “But if all question of marrying is over, the situation alters. You could not understand while you are so young.—See, Alix, I want you to look at this.” She moved forward a fire-screen, a square of satin on a mahogany stand. “Are you interested in needlework? French girls do it so beautifully, I know. My mother embroidered this. She copied it from those old chairbacks. Do look at them. Her grandmother did those.”
The screen, on a background of pearly satin, had two doves in a basket, entwined with laurel; and the chairs, in a softer, sadder key, repeated them.
“They are beautiful,” said Alix. It seemed to her, as she looked at the gentle doves, that the dead, in Toppie’s drawing-room, joined pale hands around her and whispered: “We are here.” But it was so sad. The doves nestling side by side, so confident of love, made her think of all the partings of the world.
“My great-grandmother was married to a soldier,” said Toppie, “and went out to India and died there when my grandfather was born. She did all those chairs while she was waiting for his birth. She was only twenty-one. I often think of her; so young; stitching her thoughts of home, her hopes for her baby—the past and the future—into the embroidery. And one feels how happy she must have been in her marriage to have chosen that design. My poor great-grandfather brought all her things back to England, with his little boy.—That funny little water-colour sketch is of him, in his frilled cap; with his ayah.—And he grew up to be a soldier, too, and was killed, out in India, fighting a frontier tribe. My mother was his only child. I was fourteen when she died. How happy you are to have your mother, Alix. She makes beautiful things, too. I shan’t forget the little lemon silk jacket.”
Alix’s sense of sadness had deepened while Toppie spoke. So different Toppie’s past; so different Toppie’s mother, she felt sure: and the sense of sadness was in the difference. An abyss seemed to lie between her and Toppie, an abyss that Toppie did not see and could not, perhaps, even imagine. She could not place Toppie against any of the backgrounds familiar to her. She could not see her in Maman’s salon, unless as one of those dim evasive figures, the “Misses” of her childhood, someone dressed differently, hovering diffidently and helping with the tea and cakes. She could see Toppie in Maman’s salon as her governess, but in no other capacity. Toppie would not understand anything said there, or would not care to understand. She would draw away from the shining soap-bubble. She would look with cold dismay at madame Gérardin and mademoiselle Fontaine. It was sad to feel fond of someone and to feel them fond of you, and yet to see that only here, among her doves, could their worlds touch at all.
It was growing dark, and Toppie said that she would take her home, and, in the hall, lighted a little lantern for the walk across the common. They had gone halfway when they saw, in the distance, another lantern advancing towards them.
“It is Giles,” said Toppie, pausing. “He has come for you. So I will go back. I have some letters to finish for the post.”
“But come to meet him. He will, I am sure, be glad of a word with you,” said Alix. She felt sure that it had been in the hope of a word with Toppie rather than to fetch herself that Giles had come.
“Oh, we have so many words; every day; all our lives long,” said Toppie, and, though she continued to advance, Alix felt a slight constraint in her voice. “He is a dear, is he not, Giles?” she added, as if irrelevantly.
“Oh, a dear!” said Alix. “I felt him that at once. And so good; and so intelligent.”—“More intelligent than Captain Owen; more good,” was in her mind. But that made, she knew, no difference. People were not loved for their intelligence, or their goodness, either.
“A great dear, Giles,” Toppie repeated, but with no intention, evidently, of being urged by her young companion’s warmth beyond her own sense of due commendation. “Owen loved him devotedly. After his mother it was Giles he loved best of all his family.”
“They were all three of the samepâte, were they not.”
“Pâte?” Toppie questioned. Her French was not quite so good as Giles’s.
“The paste, you know, of which earthenware or porcelain is made.”
“I see. Yes. And Owen was porcelain; and Giles is earthenware; and dear Mrs. Bradley is both together.” Toppie mused on the simile with satisfaction.
But it did not satisfy Alix. “Some earthenware is very rare and precious; tough and fine at once. And it wears and wears.”
“But it never has the beauty,” said Toppie.
Giles was now within speaking distance, and by the light of their lantern Alix saw that his eyes were fixed upon Toppie with an indefinable expression; not alarm; not inquiry; but a steady watchfulness that, to her perception, controlled these feelings.
“I was afraid you’d run away with our young guest and came out to look for you,” he said. “It’s six o’clock.” While Alix, feeling a soft touch on her glove, looked down to see the earnest, illumined eyes of Jock.
“I didn’t realize it was so late,” said Toppie, and to Alix’s ear the tone of her voice was altered. Toppie, for all her familiarity, would never, she felt, have talked with any of the Bradleys as she had with her this afternoon. “We’ve talked and talked; haven’t we, Alix. I must fly!”
“Come in for a little. Mother’s just back. She’d love to see you,” said Giles.
“No, indeed, I can’t. Give her my love. I’ll drop in upon her to-morrow afternoon, after my class.”
“Well, we’ll go back with you, then. It’s late for you to be out alone.”
“For me! On the common! How absurd you are, Giles! Good-night.”
“Good-night,” said Giles. He showed no grievance; some shade, rather, seemed lifted from him, and in a moment, as he and she walked on together, Alix divined that his anxiety had been lest she had said anything to hurt Toppie or revived memories that cut too deep. It had not been so much to see Toppie as to watch over her that he had come.
The lantern made a soft round of light into which they advanced and the November air was pleasant. “And what have you talked and talked about?” Giles asked.
“All sorts of things,” said Alix. She was glad to feel that she could give him fuller relief. “Her great-grandmother’s embroideries and the Stoics andla Sainte Vierge.”
“La Sainte Vierge!” said Giles, and he laughed. Yes, actually, he was speaking with her of the enshrined Toppie and she had made him laugh. “What did you have to say aboutla Sainte Vierge, pray?”
“Well,” Alix paused. She saw that she had perhaps taken a wrong turn, but it was best to go on as though she did not think so. “It was of religion andle Paradis, you see; and whether the dead are with us here. Do you, too, think that they are, Giles?”
“The dead! With us here!—Oh. Yes, I see.” Giles, after his exclamations of surprise, lapsed for a moment into silence. “She must like you very much, Alix, to talk to you about that,” he said presently.
“I think she does like me. He liked me. It would always be that for Toppie, wouldn’t it? And then I can give her more about him. We talked of that, too. Things she didn’t know.”
She felt Giles’s eyes turn down towards her. He contemplated her as they walked forward. “What sort of things?”
“How we met him. How he looked. What we all did together. She loved hearing; but especially that he was happy. And it is that she feels. That he is with her now; and happy. Do you believe it, too?”
Giles walked on beside her in the darkness that was not yet quite dark, the light melted into it so softly and went so far. Alix could see Bobby racing on ahead. Jock went just before them, and Amy followed meekly, her nose at Giles’s heels. It was easy to talk together in the melting darkness, and she must have given Giles a great deal to think about, for he said nothing for a long time. Then, as if he brought his thoughts back to her and her question with an effort, he said: “It doesn’t follow, because we’re dead, that we’re happy.”
“No; we are not happy in purgatory; and according to the church we must all go to purgatory, unless we have been great saints. She asked me about my religion. And we have purgatory, you see.”
“I hope you didn’t say anything about it that may have troubled her.”
“Oh, I said nothing at all that troubled her,” Alix assured him. “She did not take purgatory at all seriously.”
“Do you?” Giles was smiling a little. How much relief she had given him!
“I am afraid not,” Alix owned. “I am afraid I do not take heaven seriously either. But I did not tell her that. It might have grieved her. It always seems to me that we must go out like blown candles, when we are dead. I do not like to think it; but it seems so to me. Does it not to you?”
“No; it doesn’t. You are a little pagan, Alix.”
“A pagan! Not at all! I am a Catholic. I go to confession once a year.”
Giles now laughed out. So much had she relieved him that her unspiritual state roused only mirth in him. “Doesn’t your confessor give you any penances?”
“Yes. I have penances. I do them as I am told. TheChemin de la Croix—all round the church.—It is very tiring—dragging myprie dieu.”
Giles went on laughing;—“Is it? By Jove! And your first communion? Weren’t you prepared for that?”
“Yes. But that was five years ago. I was only a child then. I have altered my opinion of many things since then.”
How much Giles found her still a child she heard in his laughter as he asked on: “But what right have you to say you aren’t a pagan? What right have you to call yourself a Catholic?”
“I have been baptized,” said Alix. “I have been confirmed. I go to confession, and to Mass, at least at Easter. Most certainly I am a Catholic. You might as well say I was not French because I did not believe in the Republic as to say I am not a Catholic because I don’t believe in heaven. One is, or one is not. It is a question of being born so.”
“I see. I see.” Giles was looking down at her, so amused, yet also, she felt, touched by what she said. They entered the little door in the garden-wall. “There’s something to be said for that way of looking at it,” he owned. “It puts it neatly. It explains all sorts of things, in Catholicism and in France. You are a wonderful people, Alix.”
Of all her new experiences Alix most enjoyed “The Messiah.”
The village choir was a feeble enough little affair, its energy concentrated in Giles’s disciplined, sustaining baritone and the robust sopranos of Ruth, Rosemary, and the postmistress. The tenors were almost non-existent, and the altos, among whom Alix was placed at once, terribly weak. But the doctor’s daughter, at the piano, accompanied so accurately, Mrs. Bradley, gentle and absorbed, with her wand, conducted so carefully, that it was a pleasure to sing, and the grave exultant music wove itself deeply into Alix’s impressions of the new life. It made her think of Giles and of his mother, and of Toppie, too. It seemed to go with them; just as it seemed to go with the walk home by lantern-light, and even with the cheerful family supper afterwards where Giles boiled eggs over the fire, and Mrs. Bradley made cocoa on a spirit-lamp.
The High School, to which she and Ruth and Rosemary bicycled every day, was at once familiar and alien. It was like theLycée, in shape, as it were; but not in texture. Hockey could not give it the flavour that it lacked. The girls, all of them, were too much like Ruth and Rosemary. They lived, she felt, in what they did, not in what they thought. They had a sense of fun, but no sense of irony, and with their sharp-cut edges, their hardy colour, they seemed to repel any suggestion of mystery, in life or in themselves. They accepted her at once. They seemed to like her, just as Ruth and Rosemary did. But she felt that anybody else who could hold a hockey stick and tell the truth would have done just as well.
With the Christmas holidays Jack and Francis came home from school. Heathside seethed with noise, pets and handicrafts. Giles, now demobilized, was preparing for his return to Oxford after Christmas. He went up and down to London a good deal and she had the sensation of having lost him; of being relegated by him to the family group. One day, however, he came into the dining-room while she was trying to write a letter on a corner of the table. It was only in the dining-room that a fire was lighted in the mornings, and Jack and Francis were carpentering at one end, while Ruth cut out blouses in the middle. It was difficult to try to tell Maman about “The Messiah” in such surroundings, and though she liked Jack and Francis so much she could not bring herself to like the white rat that ambled heavily about among the tools andcrêpe de Chine.
“I say, that’s not much of a place for letter-writing,” Giles remarked. “Come to my study, Alix. I’m a favoured person and have a gas-fire going all morning.”
“But she’s going out with us directly, to see our ferrets!” shouted Jack and Francis. They were dear little boys; Francis brown, like Giles, and Jack fair like his sisters. Oddly, enough, with all their uproar, Alix felt them gentler, more respectful of one’s identity, than Ruth and Rosemary.
“Do you want to see the ferrets, Alix?” Giles inquired. “Are you fond of ferrets?”
“I do not like what I hear of them,” said Alix. “But cats, too, do dreadful things; and one loves cats.”
“I’ll defy anyone to love a ferret.”
“We’re not going to let her see the rabbiting. She says she doesn’t want to, though she misses a lot. It’s far kinder than traps. Bobby kills them in a minute.”
“No; I do not want to see that. But will after lunch do for ferrets? I would rather finish my letters now,” Alix owned. And though she was sorry to disappoint Jack and Francis, it was with a sense of escape that she followed Giles out of the dining-room.
The study was small, warm, and untidy. Under an ugly mantelpiece of carved oak was a bright little gas-fire, looking like incandescent dried apples, and on the mantelpiece were ranged pipes, family photographs, and quite a menagerie of small animal ornaments which Alix guessed to be family presents. There was a small metal bear on his hind legs holding spills in his arms, a horrible china cow, yellow with red spots and a place in her back for matches, and a foolish puppy in black velvet with a red flannel tongue and one ear that went up and one that went down. A very grubby and irrelevant statuette of Venus de Milo stood among them and Alix felt sorry for her.
“Behold my jewels!” said Giles with a grin. “Francis gave me that monster when he was three; that’s from Jack and that from Rosemary. The Venus is an effort of Ruth’s; brought to me from Paris. Everything you see there is either Christmas or birthdays.”
“You are very faithful to your anniversaries,” said Alix, smiling. “What a nice photograph of your mother.”
“Isn’t it?” said Giles, pleased. “You like my mother, don’t you?”
“I like all your family,” said Alix politely.
“Well, of course, in a way, you’d like them all,” said Giles. “But I am afraid they rather wear you out. There are so many of them and they are so young and vigorous. You must take refuge here when they dash over you too much. I’ll do my reading, and you can read or write or meditate, as you like. I shan’t speak to you and you mustn’t speak to me. I’ve noticed you are a kid who can keep still. We shall get on capitally.”
So it was arranged, and as Alix took her place at the little writing-table he pulled forward for her, she noticed that there were many books along two sides of the room and along the other a row of large framed photographs of Greek and Sicilian temples that more than atoned for the mantelpiece. When she did not feel like reading or writing, she would look at those. They made her think, in the sense of space and tranquillity and splendour they gave her, of Montarel.
For the first mornings of her withdrawal there mingled with her sense of security an apprehension of the unsaid things that lay between her and Giles and that might still have to be said; but this grew less with every day. It became quite evident that Giles was going to say nothing. Perhaps, indeed, she had imagined something of the trouble and confusion she had felt in him at their first meeting. Perhaps in some odd, twisted way, it had all been because of Toppie; because the sight of her brought back so vividly the memory of the dead brother and of Toppie’s loss. Whatever it had been, she did not think he would ever show it to her again.
She owed more than the peaceful mornings to him. He seemed to restore Maman to her. Now, at last, she could really tell Maman, with a mind composed, how surprised Mrs. Bradley had been at hearing that she wore a linen chemise next her skin and felt no need of wool; how like a dignified sheep was Toppie’s father; how strange the sense of growing strength the choruses of “The Messiah” gave one, like a sort of calisthenic. And how Mrs. Bradley had taken her up to London to choose a delightful winter outfit; woollen jumpers, ribbed stockings, and a winter coat and hat. Alix told Maman all about this and about the fat, jovial old lady with short grey hair with whom they had had tea in Kensington, a friend of Mrs. Bradley’s father and a public speaker. Some things, however, she did not tell her. She gave no account of Toppie’s beliefs in regard to Captain Owen, and, a lesser matter, yet significant, she had never yet satisfied Maman as to the social status of her new friends.
Perhaps it was because Giles sat there, his pipe between his teeth, his feet propped up against the mantelpiece, his hand, as he perused the tome upon his knees, raised now and then to rub his hair on end, that it seemed so irrelevant to write about such things. After all what business was it of Maman’s? She had had no further use for them than that they should warm and feed her child during a hard winter; what difference did their status make to her? It was true that she and Maman had always shared impressions to the last crumb of analysis, and it was with a slight sense ofmalicethat she thus withheld from her the crumb for which she asked more than once. “Who are they? What are they,ma chérie?” Maman, from Cannes, inquired. “Thetrain de vieyou described seems that of the trueconfort anglais; but, apparently, there is no elegance. What are theirrelations? Do they go at alldans le monde? Is there avie de châteauin the neighbourhood? I am interested in all you have to tell me of these excellent people.” Naturally. But though Alix might not have felt it unmeet, a month ago, to tell Maman all this, she would have felt it unmeet now. How funny Giles would have thought it if he had known that she sat there informing Maman that his family did not godans le mondeat all, in the sense that Maman meant byle monde; and that they were decidedly of thebourgeoisie. It was not that Maman was wrong in wanting to know, or that Giles would have been right in thinking thatle mondedidn’t matter. It was simply that she did not care to write in that way to Maman about him and his family.
Maman, meanwhile, was evidently enjoying manyrelations; dancing, dining, playing tennis, entertaining her friends. There were important names in her letters and Alix sometimes meditated a little over them. When she did not write or read, she meditated Giles’s Greek temples and Maman’srelations. The important names, in the world of art and letters—but that was not the world Maman meant in asking about the Bradleys—were male and female; in the world of fashion, male only. It was the marquis and the prince; but never the marquise and the princesse. Why? Alix wondered. Did Maman find the wives of fashion dull? But if one didn’t know them, too, could one be said to bedans le vrai grand monde? She knew how Maman’s gay, sombre eyes would meet the question (not that it was one that Alix would ever dream of putting to her): “Je suis du monde qui me plaît, ma chérie.” But Alix was not quite sure that this was true. She was not sure that Maman’s indifference was as securely grounded as Giles’s. Perhaps real indifference only came from reading so much Plato and Aristotle. Yet she herself, who did not read Plato, was indifferent. It was only in regard to Maman that she was not indifferent, and perhaps it was true that it was only in regard to herself that Maman was not. Poor, beloved, beautiful Maman; and wronged; deeply wronged, Alix felt sure. Always, when she thought of her, her heart expanded in love and then contracted in anxiety. She saw her as a wild, lovely creature caught in a trap and only escaping maimed for life. She could not range as far and as freely as the unmaimed creatures; dimly Alix saw that, as the explanation of what was ambiguous in her position. She had lost the full liberty hers by birth and instinct. Yet, despite the limitations of her misfortune, she had every right to her own standards.
Judged by Maman’s standards Alix could not conceal from herself that the Bradleys were very undistinguished. Maman would have hated the bounteous, graceless meals; Mrs. Bradley sitting at breakfast among the noise and porridge and kippers, heaped round with letters and circulars, reading an appeal for crippled babies while she poured out the tea and coffee and oftener than not slopping it into the saucer. “Oh, I’msosorry, dear,” she would exclaim; but Maman would have commented, dryly, that a woman so much occupied had better breakfast in bed and get through her correspondence out of sight. Maman could be terribly dry about disorder and gracelessness. Alix had never forgotten the terse and accurate reproofs that her own lapses in these respects had called down upon her in her childhood. As for the uproarious children, “Ces marmots-là ne sonts pas appétissants,” was what Maman would have said of Ruth and Rosemary, taking their ease during the holidays and padding from sideboard to table in shabby bedroom slippers, while Jack and Francis had already got their hands dirty. Alix could not see Maman at that breakfast-table; but then there was no need to try to. She would never have come down at all to breakfast, and Alix could not really think of anything later in the day that she would have thought it worth while to come down to. A drive with Giles in the car, perhaps. She would have liked Giles. She would have liked him, perhaps, as much as she had liked Captain Owen. But as for the rest of the family, she would have found them only fit for the happy task of warming, feeding, and clothing her child. “Trop honorée,” Maman might even remark, in the mood of mirthful impertinence she could display. Maman’s impertinencies usually amused Alix; but she did not want to see them evoked, ever, by the Bradleys. It hurt her to think of it. Already she was too fond of them. Maman must never come to Heathside.
Christmas was now close upon them, and the house, like a mysterious boiling pot, bubbled with happy secrets. Francis came to lunch unaware of the strip of gold paper gummed to his nose; Ruth and Rosemary sat hunched in corners working surreptitiously at belated pieces of knitting. Giles went up to London with his mother for a day’s shopping and came back in the evening with parcels hanging from every finger, and she and Toppie had a wonderful day there, for Mrs. Bradley had given her pocket-money to spend on presents and some had come from Maman, too, so that there was a real meaning for her in the long indecisions over crowded counters.
Alix usually went over to the Rectory to work at her presents with Toppie. She was making a tea-cloth for Mrs. Bradley and embroidering monograms, that elicited Toppie’s admiration, on fine handkerchiefs for Ruth and Rosemary; and she had found the right books for the boys and a silver pencil for Giles. Toppie had a beautiful cushion for his chair at Oxford, and Toppie, too, had thought of Maman. Alix almost felt the tears rise to her eyes when she showed her the little frame of blue and silver she had embroidered enclosing a snapshot of Alix herself, standing at the edge of the wood with the dogs about her. She had not expected anyone to think of Maman. Maman, she knew, would not think of them. And then Christmas was different in France.
But Maman, all the same, remembered that it was specially kept in England. It was on Christmas Day itself, and not on theNouvel Anas Alix had expected, that the long parcel, brought over by a friend of Maman’s, arrived for her from Cannes. Already she had had more presents than ever before in her life. A toilet-set from Mrs. Bradley; a writing-case from Giles; a scarf from Ruth, and a pair of stockings from Rosemary; from Jack a neat penknife, and from Francis a box of small brightly coloured handkerchiefs that were obviously what a little boy would admire. All the distributions took place at the breakfast-table, and Maman’s parcel had not yet arrived when Alix unrolled from its tissue-paper Toppie’s gift, and saw, in a tiny box of faded leather, the beautiful little old brooch, an emerald surrounded by pearls. It made her think at once of the doves and the laurel wreath and of Toppie’s great-grandmother; of the past, brooded upon; never forgotten. She gazed at it in astonishment.
“Isay!” Ruth exclaimed. They had all crowded round her to look. “She used to wear that. It belonged to some ancestress. She must be most awfully fond of you to give it to you, Alix.”
Alix met Giles’s eyes looking down at the brooch over their heads. She felt that she had gained in value for him from Toppie’s fondness.
And it was after all this excitement that the post brought Maman’s box and that the many wrappings of tissue-paper disclosed the most exquisite of evening dresses; white taffeta; crisp, supple, silvery; girdled with small white roses and their green leaves. The little card pinned to the breast said: “A ma chérie lointaine.”
“I never saw anything so lovely!” said Rosemary, and Alix felt a wave of warmth for Rosemary go through her.
“It’s too beautiful,” said Mrs. Bradley.
“She made it herself, I am sure,” said Alix. “It is wonderful how she makes these lovely things.”
Giles was looking at her again. His look was different. It was as if her pride in Maman touched him as much as Toppie’s brooch had done.
“It’s so much too pretty for anything you do here, isn’t it, dear,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I think we must have a little dance when Giles comes home for the Easter holidays, so that you can wear it.”
“Oh, Mummy!” cried Ruth and Rosemary. Rosemary had never yet been to a real dance.
“We’ll have new dresses then, too,” said Ruth. “Pink’s my colour, and blue’s Rosemary’s.”
“But can’t I wear pink, too? Toppie wears blue in the evenings,” Rosemary objected.
“Well, why shouldn’t you both wear blue? I don’t like to see sisters dressed alike. Besides, will Toppie come?” Ruth wondered.
“I believe she will, for Alix’s sake,” said Mrs. Bradley. “This will be Alix’s dance.”
“Blue will be much more becoming to you, really, Rosemary, with your golden hair,” Alix assured her younger friend, who was looking a little sulky.
“And you must go and see if you can persuade Toppie to say she’ll come, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley.
Alix saw how much Mrs. Bradley hoped that Toppie would consent, and Giles, his hands in his pockets, walked away to the window and looked out. “And how happy it would make Giles to see her in blue again,” she thought.
They were all going for tea to the Rectory next day, but though it was stormy Alix put on her raincoat and made her way across the common that very afternoon. So familiar was that path now, so familiar the old gardener, in holiday attire to-day, touching his hat and wishing her a happy Christmas, and then Toppie’s face of welcome at the door, for, seeing her from above, Toppie herself ran down to open to her.
“How sweet of you to come! There’s just time to see you between services. Come in. Happy Christmas, dear child!” said Toppie.
“Oh, Toppie—the emerald! Never have I had so beautiful an ornament!” Alix exclaimed while Toppie helped her strip off the streaming coat.
“And never have I seen a little box as beautiful as yours,” said Toppie, leading her into the drawing-room. Alix had made for Toppie a little satin box and had carefully copied the doves in the laurel-wreathed basket upon it. “It’s too beautifully done,” said Toppie. “How did you manage from memory?”
“I drew the doves one day, quickly, when you went out, and the colours are easy to carry in one’s head. I am glad you like it. I am so fond of little boxes.”
“So am I. I love them. I never can have too many of them.”
The fire was lighted in the drawing-room, and in the soft obscurity Toppie with her high golden head looked like a tall white lightedcierge; a Christmasciergein a votive chapel of a great cathedral; for though so sweet, so almost gay, the background to Toppie’s gaiety was something dedicated and remote.
“Mine are not very exact. They are too big for the basket,” said Alix, looking at the doves.
“I like them the more for that. I love the way they overflow,” said Toppie. “Alix, can you guess what I have put in your box?”
They were sitting on the sofa, side by side, and Toppie’s eyes, sweet, austere, were on her. “His letters from France. All the letters about you and your mother.” Alix had not needed to be told. She had guessed from Toppie’s look. “They just fit it,” said Toppie. “As if it had been made for them.” And, leaning forward, she kissed Alix lightly on the forehead. It felt a little to Alix as though the Virgin in the votive chapel had stooped down from her altar to kiss one. It was sweet; and it was also a little frightening. There was always something about Toppie that almost frightened her.
“Now, Toppie,” she said presently. “I have come about something very important. I had from Maman this morning the very dress to go with your brooch; green and white; the loveliest dress. And Mrs. Bradley says they will have a dance at Easter so that I can wear it. And what we all hope is that you will be there. You will come, will you not, Toppie?”
Toppie was looking at her with her cold sweet look and it did not alter as she smiled and said: “Of course I’ll come; and sit with Mrs. Bradley and look at you all.”
“But you would dance, Toppie? And wear pale blue? It is your colour they say, and I have only seen you in grey. You must be very lovely in blue.”
“Must I?” Toppie still smiled, and Alix had long since divined her to be invulnerable to praise. She wore her grey to-day; her Sunday grey; and her white neck and throat, unfreckled, were so fair that, imagining her in blue, Alix saw her as a birch-tree against the pale spring sky. But with the cold yet loving look she shook her head and said: “No; I won’t dance.”
“Oh, Toppie—No? Do you mean never?”
“Never,” said Toppie.
“You can say that? When you are so young?”
“It doesn’t need a promise, you know,” said Toppie. “I don’t have to take a pledge. Some things are for one time and some things for another. That time is past. But I’ll come to the dance, of course, and love seeing you all; and grey, really, has always been my colour more than blue. I’ve always worn grey,” said Toppie, smiling; and she went on, leaving that subject very definitely disposed of: “Tell me what you have all been doing since I saw you. Tying up parcels? Your box was so prettily tied.”
“I like ribbons onétrennes. And green ribbon seems to go with Christmas and snow and fir-trees.”
“Ruth and Rosemary had old knotted string round their parcels, poor dears, and brown paper,” Toppie remarked. She always showed a certain kindly ruthlessness in her allusions to the Bradley sisters and Alix sometimes wondered what, if she had married their brother, their relations with their gentle but inflexible sister-in-law would have been. They admired Toppie; they feared her, a very little, for they were not of a nature to feel fear easily; but they did not love her. Already, strange though that was, they were far fonder of herself than of Toppie, and took her for granted as part of the family pack.
“It was a desperation at the end—for string! And all the shops shut,” said Alix. “I bought my ribbon long ago. I had such nice presents from Ruth and Rosemary. Such patience it must take, to go down two whole stockings.”
“Good girls,” said Toppie. “And Giles gave you the writing-case.” Her voice in speaking of Giles was so much kinder than when he was there—to be kept away. Alix always felt a little rise of indignation on Giles’s account when she heard it. It was not as if Giles ever tried to draw near.