On the verandah Alix sat beside monsieur de Maubert reading “Bérénice,” aloud to him. André was stretched near them in a deck-chair, his eyes following the smoke of his cigarette, and madame Vervier emerged from the salon, a little sheaf of letters in her hand. She laid them down on a table and André said that he would presently post them. “Yes. You and I would rather go by the cliff, Giles,” said madame Vervier.
She wore a white dress, not the tennis dress; this was fashioned differently, with floating panels and long loose sleeves. She was bareheaded, a sunshade in her hand.
“Alix reads to him every afternoon,” she said as they went towards the cliff. She spoke of monsieur de Maubert, but her heart, Giles knew, must be shaken by the interview with mademoiselle Blanche.—Mademoiselle Blanche could only have come to measure her pangs, surreptitiously, against madame Vervier’s. “His eyes trouble him of late,le pauvre cher. He enjoys hearing Alix. He is very fond of her.”
They walked along the little path beaten in the grass at the edge of the cliff. The sea was the Botticelli sea and against the sky went a flock of young goldfinches.
“Our birds,” said madame Vervier, pointing to them, and he still heard the breathlessness in her voice. What had she succeeded in concealing from mademoiselle Blanche, and what had mademoiselle Blanche succeeded in concealing from her? “See the pattern made by the triangles of gold on their wings,” she said.
“We call such a flock, a charm of goldfinches,” said Giles. “Isn’t it a pretty name?”
“A charm. A charm of goldfinches. And what a happy name. They look that.” Madame Vervier’s eyes followed the flight of the bright birds. “I wish one did not have to think of snares and cages when one sees them. Our people are so cruel for birds. I wish such happy things might escape the snare.”
“A great many do. We shouldn’t be seeing that charm now unless a great many escaped,” Giles tried to smile at her.
“But it is the way of life, is it not, to snare and spoil happiness,” said madame Vervier.
They left the woods of Les Chardonnerets behind them. Before them was the great curve of the cliff and the empty sky.
“So, you see me punished,” said madame Vervier.
Giles walked beside her and found no word to say.
“Even you, stern moralist as you are,” madame Vervier pursued, “could hardly have foreseen such a punishment.—To know that I have ruined my child’s best chance of happiness; all that I could have hoped for her.—To know that she is suffering because of me.”
“No, I didn’t think it would come like that,” Giles murmured.
“Ah, but it has come in the other way, too,” she said, looking round at him in the pale shadow of her sunshade;—“though I have forestalled that calamity, and a calamity forestalled is always endurable. André and I are parted.” Madame Vervier continued to look at him steadily. “I have told him that this Summer is the end. He still believes—or tries to believe—that he loves me; but he consents. I knew that he would consent.”
Giles walked beside her filled with a confusion of pain and pity. Never before had madame Vervier openly admitted her relation to André; admitted it to Owen’s brother. “He doesn’t look like partings,” was all he found, most helplessly, to say.
“Partings, at his age, are the preludes to beginnings; and André has the gift of looks. He is, perhaps, not quite at ease; but he has wisdom—our French wisdom, Giles. His mother, already, is arranging a marriage for him. As soon as our rupture is definitely known, he will be able to settle himself in life;—se ranger,” said madame Vervier. “And he will be glad to be settled; he will be glad to be married to a charming young girl whom he has known since boyhood;—a young girl,” madame Vervier continued in her steady voice, “whom your madame Marigold met when she came to France last Spring.”
“You know all about that, then?” Giles muttered.
“How should I not know?” madame Vervier returned.
He saw her maimed for life. Yes; it had, with André, gone as deep as that. She had unflinchingly performed the surgical operation, severed the limb and bound the arteries. He saw her bandaged, spotted with blood, drained of joy; but tranquil; moving forward.
“It was time,” she said as if to herself, looking before her. “When Alix returned to me, when I saw what I had done to her, I knew that it was time.”
He could not think of one thing to say to her; not one word of comfort or approbation. He would have liked to say that she would be happier; but he did not believe that she would be. He would have liked to say that she had behaved worthily; but the note of moral appraisal was repellent to his imagination. And under everything went that bitter memory of who André was, and whose successor.
“But there were further reasons for André’s acquiescence,” said madame Vervier suddenly.
They had gone for a long way in silence. A light breeze met them, now that they had rounded a headland, and the thin panels of madame Vervier’s dress were blown backward as she went. Goddess-like as he had always felt her, there was something disembodied, unearthly in her aspect now. It was as if, gliding through sad Elysian fields, beautiful, changeless, with gazing eyes, she contemplated the sorrows of the past. Yet her voice, as she spoke again, was not the voice of an Elysian spirit. He recognized as he heard it that a bitter humanity still beat at the heart of her confidences and that her tranquillity was not the shining of an inner peace, but a shield proudly worn. What she had to tell him was the thing most difficult to tell; the thing that throbbed and echoed in her, as the scar of the severed limb burns and remembers; and all her voice was altered as she spoke of it.
“There were further reasons,” she repeated, turning her face away from him to the sea. “He knows that it is best to go, since to remain would be to love Alix.”
And through all his fear, Giles saw it now; he had clung to the hope that it was an ugly dream. He measured, in a sense of physical sickness, the difference between an ugly dream and reality as in madame Vervier’s words his dread was made close and palpable.
“But isn’t that impossible?” It was his English voice that asked the question. His French understanding knew that it was possible.
“Why so?” madame Vervier’s French voice returned. All the acquiescence of her race spoke in it. “Alix is exquisite.”
Alix’s face swam before Giles. “But she is your daughter.”
“That would offend his taste. That does offend it. That is one of the reasons, as I have said, for his consent to our parting. It is not a reason, if he stayed, that could repress his heart.”
“Couldn’t Alix be trusted to do that?” Giles asked after a moment. He must ask it. He must approach, in order to know whether madame Vervier saw it, too, the deepest fear of all. And with what a complex thankfulness he heard in her reply that Alix’s secret was safe with him. It did not exist for madame Vervier’s imagination even. A deep, strange bitterness spoke in her voice as she said: “Her dislike of him is an added attraction.”
“Her dislike of him? Does she dislike him?”
“Surely you have seen it. As if by instinct. Always. From the first. It is an added attraction,” madame Vervier repeated; and with a little laugh, more bitter than her voice, she said: “It is the first time in his life that André has found himself disliked by a woman.”
How strange, how tortuous, how self-contradictory was the human heart, Giles thought, walking beside his unhappy friend. With all her passionate maternal love he felt, thrilling in her tone, a resentment against her child that she should be indifferent to the charm that had so subjugated herself. Giles felt it cruel to ask the further question that came to him, yet he wondered if she had not, often, asked it of herself. “He consents to go, then, because he is hopeless?”
She had, indeed, often asked it. He heard that in her voice as she answered: “Oh—do not let us deprive him of all merit!”
They had reached by now a further promontory of the cliff and looked over a long stretch of the coast, pale blue sea, pale cliffs, a delicate distant finger of the land running out, against the horizon, with a tiny lighthouse upon it. A bench was set amidst the grass before this view and madame Vervier sank down upon it as if exhausted. Giles sat on the grass at her feet and for a little while they surveyed the azure scene in silence.
“And now,” said madame Vervier, and he heard that she gathered her thoughts from dark broodings, “let us speak no more of me, but of Alix.—Of Alix and Jerry. For you like this Jerry. It is because of him that you have come.”
“Yes. It’s because of him. I like him very much.” Giles looked down at the grass. “I saw him before I left. All that he asks is to marry her at once.”
“Ah, he loves her, I know. He is an honourable young Englishman and he loves her. That is what I have gone upon from the beginning. It is not Jerry who is the difficulty. It is Alix.”
“We must give her time, you see,” Giles murmured. “Her pride had such a blow.”
“Give her time! I would give her anything!” madame Vervier exclaimed. “But I can do nothing with Alix.”—Rien! rien! rien!she said in French with a crescendo of grief and impatience almost comic to his ear for all its pathos. “You have altered my Alix for me, you English, Giles. You have given her a different heart. It is strange, strange to me—and bitter—to feel how changed she is. She loves me. More than ever. She has guessed everything, and she loves me more than ever; but with a love almost maternal; a love terribly mature. I could not have believed it possible in so short a time that a child should grow to womanhood. She is docile, still; obedient; but she does not deceive me;—it is only in the little things—the things that do not count. If, in the great things, she would obey, nothing need be lost. There is now only arangéemother to explain, to efface, to avoid.—How easy I would make it for my Alix to avoid me if her happiness demanded it!—But, no; she will not hear me. She is a stone to my supplications. She denies that she has ever loved him. She takes her life into her own hands and says that she will never marry, that she will stay with me always and be happy so. I dash myself against a rock in Alix. More than that;—she watches me; she suspects me—as if I were the daughter—bon Dieu!—and she the mother!—I wrote to Jerry. I told him to come;—it was but the other day.—I told him that it was best that they should meet, and that I would help him. And Alix intercepted the letter. Yes;—you may well stare. She confronted me with it and tore it in two before my eyes. She told me she knew too well what I had said to Jerry and that she had herself written and that all was over between them. Cold! Stern!—I could hardly believe it was my little Alix.—She spoke as if I had done her a great wrong.—As if I were the child and she the mother,” madame Vervier repeated, a note of bewilderment mingling with the grief of her tone; and, indeed, as she made him these ingenuous confidences, Giles saw her as the child, the tricking child; all the French rôles reversed and Alix sustained in hers by what England had given her. No wonder madame Vervier was bewildered.
“But that was very wrong of you,” he said, as he might have said to the child. “You had no right to do that.”
“No right! I, her mother, am to sit by with folded hands and watch her ruin herself! Those are your English ideas. Those are the ideas that Alix has made hers. She, too, said I had no right. As if a mother’s right over her child’s life were not supreme!”
“We don’t think it is, you see. Not when the child has reached Alix’s age. You don’t want her to marry a man she does not love.”
“Love! Why should she not love him, since she loves nobody else!” cried madame Vervier, a deep exasperation thrilling in her voice. “And even if she did not love him, she cares quite enough. He is an admirableparti, this Jerry; I could not have chosen better had I been free to choose; he is an admirablepartiand can give her all that I cannot give; security, position, wealth. Such a marriage would atone for everything that my darling has lacked. And love would come; why should it not? It is, as you say, her pride only that stands in the way. Ah, if she would only trust me!” madame Vervier’s voice for the first time trembled, and looking up at her he saw tears in her eyes—“If she would only trust me! I could arrange it all.”
He could not put before her the old, romantic protests. They had ceased to have validity for himself. All that madame Vervier said was true; truer far than she could know.
Better, far better, that Alix should marry Jerry, not loving him, than be exposed to the perils of her life in France. She had loved him once; why not again? She was a child. She could not know her own heart. Her pride had had a dreadful blow; and she had come too near the fire; that was all. She must trust them; it was true. She must trust him and her mother. To this strange pass had France brought Giles.
“I’ve come over to try to help you, you know,” he said. “I want it as much, I believe, as you want it. About her pride—Lady Mary, I’m sure, expects them to marry now.—She shall hear that.”
“Ah, I felt that you had come to give me hope, Giles,” madame Vervier breathed, and her hand, for a moment, rested on his shoulder. “You are wonderful. You areimpayable.—No one would believe in you.—If anyone can help, it is you. Alix will listen to you when she will listen to no one else.”
“I believe she will. I’ll do my best,” Giles muttered.
Yet, as he looked down at the grass, sitting there filially at madame Vervier’s feet, he knew that his heart was torn in two and that he longed to put his head down on her knees and tell her that no one in the world would ever love Alix as he himself did.
When Giles came down to breakfast next morning, Alix was already there, setting a bowl of nasturtiums on the blue-and-white cloth. He had not had a word with her last night when a sudden fall of rain had kept them all in the drawing-room, and he seized his opportunity.
“Will you have a long walk with me this morning, Alix?” he said. “A really long one, you know. I want to go to Allongeville and see the church again; and then, oh, a long way further. Along the cliffs for ever so far.”
She looked at her flowers, drawing a leaf forward here and there around the edge of the bowl, and he saw that she was troubled. But she said: “We will go to the church, at all events. Yes. I should like a walk very much.”
André entered as she spoke the words and she went on quietly, giving Giles a suffocating sense of the imminence of peril from her very readiness, her very calm: “Do you not think nasturtiums very charming flowers, Giles? No one ever speaks of them;—yet they are charming. The leaves; the colour. I like them, and yet I do not love them. Why is it? There are no yellow flowers of Summer that one can love. The yellow of Spring is so different.”
“One doesn’t love any of the things of Summer as one does the things of Spring,” André remarked, strolling to the window to look out, and, clearly this morning, Giles divined what he had only surmised yesterday, that his temper was not attuned to brightness; that there might even lurk beneath its graceful surface a vindictive watchfulness. And when he had spoken he turned, leaning against the window, and looked at Alix, poised in her whiteness above the bowl of glowing flowers, looked at her as Giles had never before seen him look; as if with resentment that she should be so beautiful; as if with a challenge to her to deny his right to find her so.
“Oh, but that is not so,” said Alix. “One loves roses—especially white roses;—and carnations; and jasmine; nothing in Spring is more lovely than jasmine.”
“I would give them all for a handful of primroses,” said André, his eyes fixed on her.
“Would you?” said Alix.
It was nothing; it was everything. It revealed nothing, yet it might conceal anything.
“Yes: I would, mademoiselle Alix,” said André, laughing a little as he stood, leaning, his arms folded, against the window. “Indeed, I would.”
Giles, watching the confrontation, sick with dread and fury, knew himself as much baffled as André.
Alix showed nothing to him, too; or she showed everything. Just as one chose to take it. “Here is our coffee,” she said. “And here is Maman.”
Lovely in her white, the white rose, the jasmine, madame Vervier bent her forehead to Alix’s kiss and something in the daughter’s eyes made Giles think of a sword in the hand of an avenging, or protecting, angel.
André bowed over his hostess’s hand.
“Giles and I are to have a long walk, Maman,” said Alix, going to her place.
“You will be caught in the rain,” said André. “Have you noticed the sky? It is threatening.”
“But see the sunlight,” said madame Vervier, pouring out the coffee. “It will be a beautiful morning of great clouds and sunlight. There is nothing I love better.”
“Then you will perhaps have a long drive with me,chèremadame,” said André.
“If Robert may come, too. I do not like to leave him behind.”
How easy she made it for André to pretend that the relinquishment of thetête-à-têtewas a favour he granted her with difficulty!
“But certainly.—Since you ask it! Certainly he must come.—Does he still suffer this morning with his head, do you know?”
“I fear so. Albertine has taken him his breakfast to his room. That is a bad sign. A drive will do him good.”
“He will not like being rained on, you know,” André smiled.
He was so glad that he was not to be alone with madame Vervier that he dared thus embroider his feint of disappointment.
“We can shelter him,” said madame Vervier.
“While Giles converts mademoiselle Alix to the methods of the British Empire,” said André, sitting with his back to the window where the sunlight fell about him and buttering his roll with a curious light crispness of touch, as if he were painting a picture. There was something in the play of the long, fine hands with the bread that Giles was never to forget; something cruel, controlled. He read in the young Frenchman’s face the signs of an exasperation mastered with difficulty.
“But the method of the British Empire is unconscious,” said madame Vervier. “It seeks no converts.”
“I am a little jealous of Giles, you know, mademoiselle Alix,” smiled André, just raising his eyes to hers. “As a Frenchman, I am jealous of his unconscious proselytizing. Once or twice yesterday I was afraid for France. Do not forget, when you listen to him, that our French roots are the most tenacious in the world. Perhaps that is why we do not found empires. Sever us from our soil and we bleed to death—or else, a worse destiny, wither. Do not forget that the unconscious is crafty.”
Alix, opposite her mother, sat silent. Whether, in her mother’s presence, she had lost her readiness Giles could not divine. But she made no reply.
“Alix has learned in England to be dispassionate,” said madame Vervier, her lovely russet head a little bent downward. “She has learned to combine love for another country with loyalty to her own. That is something England has given her.”
“Ah—but that’s impossible;—impossible, for our French hearts, you know!” laughed André. “We are not dispassionate. To be dispassionate is to be tepid, sleepy, indifferent;—to be withering, in fact. No, no, no, if mademoiselle Alix transferred her love, it would be to transfer her loyalty also. It is for that that I beg her to stand firm;—to remember that England can never give her what France can give.”
“Encore du café, Maman, s’il vous plaît,” said Alix. She passed her cup to her mother. She did not look at André at all. Her voice, for all its disconcerting matter-of-fact, conveyed no provocation. But, glancing over at André, Giles saw that he suddenly blushed hotly, and then, as she took Alix’s cup and poured out the milk and coffee, that a deep colour mounted also to madame Vervier’s brow.
Yes. It would probably rain, thought Giles. He waited for Alix on the cliff. It was a sunny, yet tumultuous and menacing day. Great clouds piled themselves along the horizon; the sails of the fishing boats were bent sideways as they went, on a ruffled sea, before the wind. “Yes. Rain is coming,” he muttered to himself, though he was not thinking of the weather. They had all parted in silence at the breakfast-table. Even madame Vervier had found no words.
Suddenly André came down the steps of Les Chardonnerets. He had his cigarette and an odd bright smile was on his lips; yet as he approached he reminded Giles of the sails on the sea. André might still try to keep up appearances; but the wind was blowing him.
But he was not going to keep up appearances. “So,” he said, “to-day is a day of destiny. You are not at all unconscious, are you, Giles? You have come to plead the cause of your laggard young friend the Englishman?”
Well, was the thought that went through Giles, let him have it, then. “Why do you call him laggard?” he inquired, and he knew that the anger that boiled up in his breast was so violent that he could have struck André as he stood there. “Would you be eager to take into your family a young girl placed as Alix is placed?”
André became very pale, but his eyes lighted. His sail scooped the sea.
“Will you plead my cause with her if I say that I would?” he asked.
Giles stood there, still; rooted to the ground. André had not meant to say that. Something in his own look had made him say it. It was the blow returned.
“You don’t think of marrying Alix?” said Giles in a low voice.
“I do,” André replied. “I think of it; now. It is my way out. Why should I retire when there is that way? Little as you could imagine it, I care for her enough.”
“Care for her enough?”
“Yes, if you like to put it so. You see where I stand. Don’t keep up pretences,” said André. “It’s come on slowly;—but it has me now and there is no escape.—Elle est dans mon sang.—My family would have to submit;—and her mother’s consent I could gain;—to marriage.—Why do you look at me with that face? She does not love your Jerry. And in marrying me she would marry a man whose devotion to her mother would never waver. Don’t imagine,” said André, eyeing his friend, “that my devotion to Alix’s mother has wavered. It is altered; yes; that is inevitable; we have no power over these changes. But she will always remain for me the most generous, most admirable of women.”
“You don’t see the hideousness of what you propose?” Giles felt his foundations tottering beneath him. André’s aspect, bright and baleful, seemed to tower above him like one of the darkly radiant clouds in the sky. And it was a thunderbolt he had launched.
“I deplore a marked awkwardness,” he said. “Especially since Alix, I fear, has become aware of it. Your English plan of destroying the innocence of young girls has grave disadvantages. You will own that. But, in any case, hideousness is not a word I could connect with any project of mine.”
“She’ll never take you! Never!” Giles cried. He felt himself trembling with the fury of his repudiation. “I can tell you that now. She would feel it as I do. She would see it as hideous.”
“You don’t know what she would see; nor do I,” said André. “She thinks she hates me. You needn’t tell me that. But I am not ignorant in women’s hearts. Hate may be the best of beginnings. The struggle may be a little longer;—I like struggles, let me tell you; the longer they last the sweeter is the surrender at the end.—And I have every reason to believe that to begin with hate is often to end with a more complete surrender.”
As André gave him this information Giles saw Alix emerge upon the verandah of Les Chardonnerets.
She could not hear their voices, but their confrontation she must remark.
Seeing Giles’s eyes fixed, André turned his head and looked for a moment, also. Then he glanced back at Giles. “Plead your Jerry’s cause,” he said. “Je vous cède le pas.” He turned on his heel. “If you fail, I shall plead mine.”
Giles was aware, as Alix approached him, that he must seem to stare stupidly. “I could gain her mother’s consent.” Of all the brazen words that André had uttered, it was these that rang most brazenly in his ear. Was it true? Was it possible? If Alix already loved him? Could he be sure of his Alix were the hideous complicity of events thus to disclose itself? He could have fallen at her feet, in tears, clasping her and supplicating her not to be abased.
But, as she approached him, silent, he muttered a trivial word and they turned to walk along the cliff-path, while the clouds piled themselves higher in the blue sky and the wind blew yet more strongly from the sea.
Alix did not say a word. She held her soft hat at her side and the wind blew back her hair. Over her white dress a long white woollen cloak was knotted at her throat, and it, too, blew back from her as she walked. She looked before her with the high, majestic look he had already noted on her face in moments of great emotion.
“Alix,” said Giles in a low voice.
They had gone for a long way in silence. The sea now was green beneath them. The sky was a wild grey and all the grass silver as the wind blew it towards their feet. He did not know what he was going to say. He did not look at her. But he saw that she turned her face towards him. A clue then came. “Alix, do you remember, long ago, you promised me that you would never tell me a lie?” he said.
Not unclosing her lips she nodded. He had glanced at her and met her eyes, but he could not read her look.
“Well”—he heard that his voice trembled and he was suddenly afraid that he should not get far without crying—“Jerry, before I left Oxford, showed me a letter he had from you. It troubled him; badly; but he couldn’t know how it troubled me. You said you could never marry him because you now loved someone else. Was that true, Alix?”
She turned away her head and looked before her; and again she did not speak.
“Please tell me. Was it true? Do you love someone else, Alix?” Giles pleaded.
She was terribly pale. Did she expect him not to have heard? Not to ask, since he knew? “Please, Alix,” he repeated; and then, once more, she bowed her head.
“Well”—Giles did not know how he forced his voice along—“One more question. Will you tell me this—Is it André de Valenbois?”
“Oh, Giles!” said Alix.
She stopped short there in the wind, turned to him. The wind blew her hair across her face and mechanically she put up her hand and pushed it back while she gazed at him. “Oh, Giles!” she repeated, putting back the short tresses that whipped across her eyes and lips. “Can you ask me that?”
Her face was like a beacon set against the storm, high in the sky. In its light he read all the monstrousness of what he had asked, and her hand, still holding back her hair, seemed to clear it for him so that he could receive the full illumination.
As he read her look and saw the tears that suddenly welled up into her eyes, Giles, with an overwhelming lift of the heart, felt himself sobbing. “Forgive me! Forgive me, darling.—It was all that I could think.”
“Oh, poor Giles,” she said brokenly.
They were walking on, quickly now. Somewhere, near by, Giles was conscious of a great brightness approaching him.
“I was horribly afraid. I could think of nobody else. And he loves you;—you see that.”
“I see it.—Yes.—You have suffered.”
“And though it seemed to me that you hated him;—it might not have prevented.”
“Do not let us speak of it.—And she has suffered. You would think, would you not, that I would hate him more for what he has made her suffer.” Alix spoke with difficulty, in short breaths; and though the wind blew her hair backward, now that they again were breasting it, she still kept her hand up against her face, looking before her as she tried to tell him her difficult thoughts.—“Yet it is not so. It is not so,” she repeated. “I feel as if I understood it all.—It is so strange, Giles, all that I have had to understand in these last months. I seem to understand people like him and Maman.—They are helpless, Giles. They are like that.”
“Oh, my darling!” said Giles.
They went on side by side. The rain had begun to fall in great drops. On their tip of promontory they seemed poised between sky and sea, the marshalled chaos—above, below. And the brightness was spreading in Giles’s heart.
“There is Allongeville,” said Alix. The town lay beneath them, half obliterated with the rain.
“Let us run,” said Giles. “We can go into a shop.”
“Or into the church,” said Alix.
He put out his hand for hers and they started to run.
He could have sung with exultation. Not only André’s sinister shadow was gone; but that tumult in himself. He was a boy again, and Alix, his child, his darling, was beside him. They ran, with deep breaths, smiling round at each other. The long woodedalléesof the town stretched nearly to the cliff-top, and once beneath a steep, green tunnel there was no need to go so fast, for they hardly felt the rain, so dense was the roof of green; only heard it pattering heavily on the leaves above their heads. But, still running, they reached the emptiedplace, its cobblestones glistening with the wet, and as they passed Giles saw an astonished face at the toy-shop door, where stout madame Bonnefoix stood looking out between bunches of spades and buckets, string bags full of brightly coloured balls and festoons of dolls in stiff muslin chemises. The peaceful sculptured porch of the church was before them, and it seemed to Giles that it had been waiting for them—for centuries.
When they entered, they found the church, with its whitewashed walls and innocently bedizened saints, light and smiling after the darkened day outside. A smell of incense, flowers, and cobwebs was in the air.
Alix paused to cross herself with holy water from thebénitiercarved into the stone of a pillar and bent her knee before the High Altar as they crossed the nave, while Giles held his Protestant head bashfully high.
They sat down on a bench far back in an aisle and smiled, tremulously, at each other. They were so much more alone than on the cliff with the rain and sea. No one was in the church; no one was in theplaceoutside. It was very still, and the sound of the rain falling straightly and steadily outside made the stillness more manifest. The wind had already dropped. It was a summer rain, now, full of sweetness.
“May we talk in church?” Giles whispered. He looked away from Alix at the remembered statue of the Virgin, all white and blue, with pots of pink hydrangeas at her feet.
“I think we may,” Alix said. “We disturb no one.”
“Your saints won’t mind, will they?” Giles could not keep the tremor from his voice. “Such a good Catholic as you are, Alix!”
“I think my saints are pleased,” Alix’s voice, too, trembled; though she was not as shy as he was.
“You know, Toppie has gone into her convent,” Giles said, gazing at the Virgin, whose uplifted, blessing hands brought the image of Toppie so vividly before him. It was as if Toppie herself stood there, smiling down upon them.
“Your mother wrote of it,” said Alix.
“We met again in Oxford, only a little while ago,” said Giles. “She saw something that everybody has been seeing; even Jerry saw it.—You know, Alix, I love Toppie as much as ever; yet I’m so changed. It’s all so different. Can you understand that?”
“I never dreamed you could be different about Toppie,” Alix murmured after a moment.
“Was that why you thought I’d never guess, even if I saw your letter to Jerry?”
“I did not think you would ever guess.”
“I didn’t. I never dreamed there was a chance for me; never dreamed it.—That’s what I told them all;—that there wasn’t a chance.”
Alix, too, had been gazing before her, sitting there beside him in her wet white cloak; but as he said this she leaned forward and put her hands up to her face.
“Oh, darling, are you crying?” Giles’s arms were round her as he asked it. “Have I been so stupid?—Is it really me you love?”
“Ever since that day I came to you from Toppie.”
She was crying; but it was in his arms and his cheek was against her dear wet head.
“Happy;—Happy;—Happy”—were the only words in Giles’s mind and they went on and on like a song while he heard the rain falling sweetly and the brightness was all about them.
He listened to the rain for a long time, but when he spoke it was to answer her last words.—“It’s been since then with me, too.”
Alix’s head lay against his shoulder and he held both her hands in his against his breast; and he was seeing the little French girl, the strange, ominous little French girl, sitting in the Victoria waiting-room with her straight black brows and her eyes calm over their fear. He was seeing the lovely dancing head bound with crystal, aware of him, looking for him even in her joy; he was seeing the Alix who had come from Toppie. “We’ve always been so near, from the first, haven’t we?” he said.
“So near, Giles. That was what troubled me, though I did not understand, when Jerry asked me to marry him.—You were so much nearer than Jerry.”
“And who did you think I should believe it to be, darling, when I saw the letter to Jerry?—Didn’t you know I’d have to ask you some time? Did you really believe, when we were so near as that, you could hide it from me?”
“I thought I could. I had to stop Jerry from coming. I could have pretended that there was someone you didn’t know.—Someone who might not love me, but whom I should always love.”
“You who promised never to tell me a lie!”
“But for those things women must always lie, Giles.”
She raised her head now to look at him. Her face was radiant yet grave. “There will never be anything to hide any more;—never—never.—There is nothing you do not understand. You understand all my life. You understand Maman.—Giles, how happy this will make her.”
“I hope it will. But I came to plead Jerry’s cause, you know. She thinks I’m pleading it now.”
“How happy it will make her that you did not have to plead it.”
“Will it? I can’t help being afraid that she’ll be disappointed. She’d have preferred the better match for you, darling little Alix.”
“She will not think it better. It was all she had left to hope for, that was all. It has wounded her pride horribly to have to hope for it—after the bitter things it has meant for her and for me.”
“But—if you could have cared.—Everything would have come right. Lady Mary is so fond of you and she would have stood by. Darling, it isn’t only loving;—no one knows that better than you do;—it’s living. Do you face it all? To live in Oxford? To be the wife of a humdrum scholar? To have no balls and no riding? To wear”—Giles found—“the wrong sort of clothes and think about ordering breakfast. Darling, Jerry loves you, you know, and the bitter things would all fade away. Such a different life is there for you to take. I can’t help seeing, though we love each other, that it’s the life you were meant for and that the life with me in Oxford isn’t.”
“Oh, no, Giles, you do not see that,” said Alix. She put her hand on his shoulder, as if with its pressure to help him to think clearly. “You are English and believe that more than anything it is right to marry the person you love.”
“But you are French, Alix. It’s the other belief that’s in your blood. The belief in what’s suitable.”
“Ah, but it is true what Maman says to me, when she reproaches me; I have in some things become English. I think the thing most suitable of all is to love one’s husband. To marry Jerry, loving you;—no, Giles; you know that that would not be possible to me. And I do not love him at all. He is not near me at all; while you are like a part of my life.—No, listen to me, dear Giles.—This is not making love. It is being French; it is being reasonable. Even the clothes and the breakfasts;—oh, I know that they are important.—But I am used to being poor and to knowing how to be right with very little money.—In clothes and in breakfasts, Giles, I shall know how to be right.”
Her eyes, resting on him, were the eyes of the English Alix, of the woman who chooses, for herself, her life and the man she will share it with; yet their look was a French look, too. The look of one who has no illusions; who sees an order and accepts it; an order to live for and to make one’s own. “And there will be the ideas and the atoms to watch, and the Bach choir to sing in,” she finished; “and walks in the country;—and then I shall be in France, for all the holidays, with Maman, Giles.”
She rose as she spoke, for the storm had passed. Sunlight was flooding in through the high pale windows of the clerestory. The Virgin’s crown glittered against her pillar. Slowly, hand in hand, Alix and Giles walked down the nave.
But there was something more he had to say to her, here, in her France, in her church, beneath her Virgin’s blessing hands. This woman Alix had made none of the conditions that the child Alix, bewildered, charmed, afraid, had asked of her first lover. She asked no promises. She left everything to him. It was his order she accepted.
And before they turned aside to go, Giles paused and took both her hands in his. It was at the feet of the dear, silly Virgin in her white and blue and gold that he made his promise: “Darling, you shall lose nothing, nothing that I can help. It will never be alone that you’ll come for those holidays. If you take England for me, you must give me all that you can of France.—Everything that is sacred to you, is sacred to me, too.”
When they opened the door the world was dazzling with sunlight and a great white cloud towered up like an august and welcoming angel in the sky, while across theplacethe little Curé came hurrying, stout and active with his rosy, peasant face and thick grey hair. He looked at them kindly, if very shyly, murmuring a word of greeting to Alix as they all met in the porch, and Giles, in deference to convention, dropped the hand he held. But Alix, as she smiled at the Curé and smiled beyond him at all the sunlit world she was entering, took Giles’s hand in hers again, and said: “Monsieur le Curé, may I present to you myfiancé?”
FINIS
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.