Next day, his last at Les Chardonnerets, dawned high, blue, beautiful, and looking out at sunrise Giles saw his wonderful hostess, as he had seen her on his first morning, walking back to the house across the grassy cliffs, wrapped in her bathing-robe. She came slowly. Her tread had not the buoyancy of the first day. Her head was bent; she meditated gravely. But she made him think of a goddess who had sought inspiration and sustainment from immersion in her own elements of sunlight and sea-water. Power breathed from her as she moved, and Giles, looking out at her, was filled with a deep yet beautiful sadness. It was like looking at a goddess. Madame Vervier seemed separated from him by thousands of years. She might have been a figure of myth and legend walking there, the outlines of her ruffled hair all haloed by the sunlight, her white arm crossed upon her breast.
When breakfast brought them all again face to face, Giles marvelled at Alix. If madame Vervier was ready, she was not less so. Pale, with darkened eyelids, there were certain appearances that she need not be expected to keep up. Monsieur de Maubert and André de Valenbois would understand that it had been a shock to her to learn that her mother was again to send her from her. But beyond the evidences of this shock they were to see nothing. Of the greater shock she had received, not a shadow showed itself in her glance or voice. She was grave and quiet only; she showed the calm resignation of thejeune fille sérieusewho bows to the decisions of her elders. She smiled at her mother; she held her kitten to lap milk. And Giles was sorry for his invulnerable goddess, for, if it was hard that she should have to shoulder the burden of André under Alix’s eyes, when she already had more than enough to carry in Owen, it must be for her the bitterest of alleviations that Alix should do all in her power to make the burden light. Madame Vervier must feel, as he felt, that such resource, such understanding in Alix could only rise from the child’s intuition of how sharp was her mother’s need. She stood beside her mother. She helped her.
“Maman is going to take charge of my kitten while I am away,” she said calmly to André.
If Alix could help her mother, Giles could help her. This was an opportunity. “But why shouldn’t you bring your kitten to England, Alix?” he said. “There’s no quarantine for cats. You could carry it easily in a basket.”
From the quick, upward glance that Alix cast at him above the kitten’s lapping head, he saw that its fate, in spite of Maman’s assurances, had indeed preoccupied her. “Oh, may I, Giles?”
“Of course you may.Rather!”
“Your mother will not mind?”
“Can you imagine Mummy minding another animal at Heathside? Why, she’s lived and breathed and had her being, always, in a swarm of dogs, cats, and guinea-pigs. You don’t forget, I’m sure, those white rats all over the place last winter. She never said a word even when she found them in her bed.”
“I remember. Yes. She is so kind. I should be very glad to have my kitten.” Alix stroked the kitten’s back. She looked down at it, and for a moment Giles was afraid that she might be on the verge of tears.
“And if mademoiselle Alix will permit me,” said André, wishing to do his bit, but, for once, blundering sadly, “I will present her, in place of this very ugly little cat, with the most beautifulchatAngora that can be found in Paris. A superb white Angora, mademoiselle Alix; with blue eyes like those of a saint in a missal.—Cela vous sourit?” André’s own eyes were as blue and as bright as those of any saint in any missal.
“Not at all, thank you,” said Alix. “This ugly little cat is the only one I want.”
Giles wondered, as the day went on, whether Alix was going to let him see nothing more than she showed the others. There must be for her a sense of bitter humiliation in Maman’s failure to fulfill her proud assurances. And it would be like Alix to keep silent if she were humiliated. But how near him she felt herself to be was shown to him when, after tea, following the others along the cliff-path, she said: “So I am to go back to you, Giles.”
She ignored the morning interlude. She dismissed it as the piece of acting it had been. She faced the whole subject for the first time, with him, her friend.
“Yes. So your mother told me. I hope you’re not too sorry; for I’m so awfully glad,” said Giles.
Madame Vervier, with monsieur de Maubert beside her, and André de Valenbois with mademoiselle Fontaine, went on before them. They were taking Giles, on his last evening, to see a little château that lay in its woods near the coast, in the opposite direction from Allongeville. Giles knew that madame Vervier had arranged that he and Alix should go together and that she trusted him to uphold her cause as best he could. “It was what I wanted, you know,” he added.
Alix, as she heard him, fixed her eyes upon her mother’s form, rounding a green projection of the path, her white sunshade upon her shoulder. “It was most of all what Maman wanted, was it not, Giles?” she observed, with a faint, curious smile.
“Not at all,” said Giles. “You know how much I wanted it.”
“You will hardly make me believe,” said Alix, her lips keeping their smile, “that it was you who persuaded Maman rather than she you.”
“There was no question of persuasion. How could there have been? When we were both agreed from the first.”
“I wish I could understand what it was that made you agree so strongly,” said Alix after a slight silence. “Maman says that it is for my good to finish my studies in England, among such friends. That does not seem to me a sufficient reason. I could finish my studies in my own country; and I have good friends here.”
“She thinks, and so do I,” said Giles, “that we are the best friends you have. Isn’t that a sufficient reason?”
“It seems to me a reason for not taking advantage of such friends,” said Alix, startling him.
“But that is what good friends ask,” he said. “To be taken advantage of.”
“You speak for yourself, Giles. There are others besides you. You have no right to speak for them.”
She had his back against the wall, and Giles knew it. The worst of it was that she knew it, too.
“I can answer for them. I told you I could. I told you that Toppie was so fond of you that she’d feel as I do.”
To this, after a moment’s silence, Alix only said in a voice suddenly grown sombre, “I do not blame you, Giles.”
“I hope you don’t blame your mother,” said Giles.
There before them went madame Vervier, her white, heelless feet hardly seeming, in their beautiful tread, to touch the grass she passed over. They had no glimpse of her face. She left them in their privacy, feeling so secure that their privacy, since it was in his hands, could only be for her benefit. How deeply madame Vervier had read his heart yesterday! How clearly she had seen that all that he asked was to show her beauty to her child and to help her, always, in hiding from Alix the pitiful handful of dust that, in her truth to him, she had displayed! “I hope you don’t blame her,” he repeated, for Alix had made no reply, and, glancing at her now, and seeing her eyes bent down, he guessed that at his question they had filled with tears.
“It would be strange, wouldn’t it, Alix,” he said gently, “if it were I who had to defend your mother to you.”
“Very strange, Giles,” said Alix in a low voice.
“It’s all for love of you,” said Giles; and in spite of the handful of dust he knew that this was the fundamental truth about madame Vervier—“because of what she thinks best for you.”
“But may one never be a judge of that oneself?” said Alix.
“Not if you are a young French girl; no; you may not,” said Giles, after a moment’s reflection. “Isn’t that just the great difference between you and us? We think for ourselves; but you, if you are a girl, may only think for yourself when you are married.”
“I like England better in that,” said Alix. “One should have a voice.”
“Perhaps your mother feels that you’ll learn to have a right to a voice by being in England.”
“I do not think so,” said Alix. “I do not think she believes in having a voice. That is another great difference. You believe that one learns to have a voice by being given freedom.”
“You can’t be free here, Alix; I see that for myself,” Giles said, looking at her and wondering how far her thought could follow. Already in such unexpected places it ran ahead of his own.
She raised her eyes to his. “You mean it is not safe, in France, for a girl to be free?”
“I’m afraid not. Not yet.”
“And what is our danger? Can you tell me that?”
Giles found an answer that he had only recently seen for himself: “The danger of growing up; in the wrong way; and too soon.”
“And Maman thinks that I run that danger by remaining with her? Why am I, then, different from other French girls whose mothers keep them with them? Why is she different from other French mothers? You need not tell me that she loves me. I see how it breaks her heart.” Alix’s voice trembled suddenly. “It breaks her heart to have to send me away. And why should it be so?”
She mastered the tears that had risen while she spoke, and her eyes held his. It was the strangest thing in his experience of Alix to feel himself seeking the right word in which to justify her mother to her.
“She has special difficulties,” he said slowly. “You see some of them already. You remember what you said to me long ago about her beauty and bravery, and her danger. It was all true. I’ve seen it now myself. And you wanted me to help her. You felt sure that if I knew her I’d want to help her. Well, I do. You must trust us both. For what I have to tell you now is that I can best help her by showing you how you can.”
Alix’s eyes, widened by the unshed tears, gazed at him. “I help her by not being with her?”
“Yes, by not being another difficulty, and the greatest of all.”
“And for how long must I be removed?”
“Until you are old enough to be free.”
“Until I marry?”
“Marry, or get the freedom of the English girl; the right to choose whether you’ll marry or not.”
“But how can I marry if I am in England. Is it to have me marry there that Maman removes me? Because,” said Alix—and her voice, tearless now, dropped to an iron note—“that will never be.”
Poor madame Vervier and her hopes! Giles continued to play her hand as best he could. “You wouldn’t be made to marry in England against your will. You might meet someone you cared for enough. How can you tell?”
“Cared for enough! To leave Maman! To leave France!” Alix held her head high and stared before her, facing this confirmation of her fears. And suddenly, her last words echoing too unbearably in her heart, he saw her lips tremble; part; and the tears, at last, helplessly ran down her cheeks.
“Oh—my dear little Alix—don’t grieve like that,” Giles implored. “Of course you won’t leave them;—unless you come to feel that you care so much for someone that you can.—And it would never be really to leave. And while you’re over there, can’t we count a little for you? Can’t I count? You know how much I care for you. I’ll do my best to make you happy.”
Alix shook her head. “It is not that,” she uttered brokenly.
“What is it, then? You shan’t be married against your will.” Giles tried to smile at her.
“It is not that,” Alix repeated. “Already you are too good to me. You are unbelievably good to me.—It is Maman.” Alix put her hand up to her eyes and hid her tears from him as she walked. “It is Maman.—How can she bear to let me go?—How can I bear to be parted from her; far away; hardly seeing her; until I am old?”
“Then she is coming back. I am so glad. I was afraid, from things she said, once or twice, about herself, about her life in France with her mother, that she might not be coming,” said Toppie.
She and Giles sat up on the ridge where the junipers grew. The pine-woods were behind them; below were the birches in their autumnal dress of bronze and gold; and brooding over all a sky of dusty rose. It was the evening of the hottest September day and the breeze hardly stirred the spices of the pines.
Giles was only just back from his Cornish trip and Toppie and her father had been in Bournemouth when he had returned from France, so that this was their first meeting. Mr. Westmacott was not well and the sea had done him no good. Toppie was worn with nursing him. Giles had never seen her look so white.
From something deep and watchful in her eyes the feeling came to him that her father was even more ill than they had guessed and that she was schooling herself to the thought of losing him. With her father gone, Toppie’s last close link with earth would be severed.
But she had not spoken of herself or of her anxieties this afternoon. They had climbed the hill slowly, stopping to look back at the sky, and Toppie had found this favourite spot among the junipers and had sunk down, taking off her Panama hat, battered like a boy’s, and holding it with both hands clasped around her knees as she sat in the deep heather. She wore her usual grey, again an almost boyish formula; the thin silk jumper rolled back from the throat, the thin pleated skirt falling to her ankle. Her pale hair was ruffled up over the black silk ribbon that bound it. As she sat there while he lay beside her on his arm, Giles had never felt Toppie so near him. It was more sad than sweet to feel her so. It gave him the feeling he would have had if she were going away on a long journey and could be so near because she was to be so far. And she talked to him of his time in France and of Alix.
“Yes. She’s coming back all right,” Giles said. “I am glad you are glad; for I am. It’s as if the child belonged to us, isn’t it?”
“It is quite strange, Giles, how much I feel that,” said Toppie, turning her eyes upon him.
They were such lovely eyes, those of Toppie’s. Giles had always felt them, since he had first, a boy of fifteen, seen her, the loveliest eyes in the world. Not large; not vividly marked; her brows and lashes only a shade darker than her hair; they conveyed the impression of light rather than colour and of radiance rather than of warmth. It was as if they looked at you from the zenith on a cloudless, cold Spring day. And the words that had always gone with them, in Giles’s mind, from the time that he had first seen Toppie, in church, in Advent, with pale, wintry sunlight streaming in over her, had been: “Dayspring from on high.”
She had stood there, in the Rectory pew, all alone, tall and slender in her grey, with a little high tight fur collar up to her chin and a little round fur cap coming over her golden hair and down to her ears, and she had, while the Psalms were being sung, turned her eyes on the Bradley family in the pew across the nave; looking at Owen; at Owen first—Giles felt it even then; Owen, his nut-brown head held high while he happily chanted out the responses in his sweet, accurate tenor. And then her eyes had met Giles’s solemn gaze. And those had been the words that had come to him; full of the Christmas beauty; full almost to tears, for the boy standing there, of radiant promise and of heavenly love.—“Whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us.”
So he had seen her first. So he had always thought of Toppie’s eyes. They showered light and loveliness upon you; and it came from far away.
“Quite strange,” she was saying now, thinking of him because she was thinking of Alix, just as she had always, in the past, thought of him because she was thinking of Owen. “From the first moment I saw her I felt that she belonged. Perhaps it was because of what Owen had written. He was so fond of her. She was the dearest little girl he had ever seen. Even then I used to think that some day, if the war left us to each other, we would have Alix come and stay with us often. And then the moment I saw her I felt that I loved her.—Giles, you were very bad about letters while you were in France. Never one to me; and hardly anything to your mother about madame Vervier. Only that she was charming and had a charming house. You told us more about monsieur de Maubert—was that the name?—and the young man who ought to have worn a ruff and fought with Henry of Navarre. I liked so much what you said about him. I felt as if he ought to have known Owen. As if they would have been friends. But of course what we most wanted to hear was about Alix’s mother. Tell me everything now; everything you thought.”
“Everything. Well, that’s rather difficult, you know.” Giles turned over on his elbow and looked down at the heather, pulling his hat over his eyes. “She’s very different from Alix.”
“Is she? I’d always imagined her so much the same.”
“Almost as different as it is possible for a mother to be from her child,” said Giles, while he thought intently. How it had pleased, how it had lightened his heart to hear what Toppie had just been saying of Alix and her return to them; and how dismayed he knew himself to be by this further stretch of her interest.
“As different as that?” Toppie questioned, and with the faintest flavour of distress in the question. “Owen always wrote as if she were lovely, too.”
“Oh, as far as that goes she’s lovelier, I suppose. Where Alix is like a crystal she is like a flower. And they both have that dignity and security, you know. Alix is such a dignified little creature, isn’t she?”
“Yes. Beautifully dignified; beautifully secure. I always feel of Alix that she would be safe, always and everywhere. Yes; those are just the words for Alix.”
“And it’s not exactly righteousness, is it?” Giles went on, finding more words since Toppie liked these ones. “It’s integrity. Like a little noble Roman girl.”
“Integrity. Yes.” Toppie mused on Alix. But then, alas, she came back to Alix’s mother. “The same in loveliness; the same in dignity and security.—In what ways different, then, Giles?”
He knew that there was hardly anything he could say of madame Vervier that it would not be unwise to say. He watched an ant, disturbed by his change of posture, thread its anxious way amongst the tufts of heather and felt that he was like the ant. He, too, must go forward and find the path that promised most safety. “Well, she’s more impulsive, I feel; more selfish; less fastidious.”
Toppie, for a moment, reflected in silence. He saw her dimly, sitting there beside him, a grey silhouette against the sky. “Less fastidious?” she then said, and it was as if he had presented her with an object that she turned reluctantly, and with surprise, in her hands: “How strange. Owen gave me no impression of that. He gave me the impression of someone quite finished, quite exquisite; in every way. How do you mean less fastidious?”
“Oh, I don’t exactly know,” said Giles, and he feared it was uneasily. “Merely in the sense, perhaps, that she’d put up with all sorts of queer people, for the sake of not being bored, that Alix wouldn’t care to have. She is exquisite; very exquisite.”
“You did like her, didn’t you, Giles? Very, very much?”
“Well, hardly very, very,” he qualified, pausing with wary antennæ, as it were. “She’s not my sort, really. That’s all that it comes to.”
He could not see Toppie’s features, but he felt her more intent, and in her next words he saw that he had seemed to call Owen’s taste in question—as well as madame Vervier’s. “Wasn’t that only because you didn’t see enough of her? She was so much Owen’s sort.”
“It doesn’t follow she’d be mine, would it? Owen and I were really very different, weren’t we, Toppie, dear?”
“Yes; very different. But you always liked the same people. It surprises me—so much—that you shouldn’t like Alix’s mother.”
“But I didn’t say that, Toppie! ‘Liking’ isn’t the word. She is charming. She is too charming; that’s what it comes to.” Giles felt himself go forward to a new outlet. “Too much the woman of fashion; too sophisticated and highly flavoured for anyone so simple as I am. You know I am much simpler than Owen. He was a man of the world, and I, however long I live, will never be a man of the world. If one’s just the shambling, shabby, scholastic type one will never feel at home with brilliant, resourceful people. It’s as if”—Giles found the simile with satisfaction—“I liked rice pudding while Owen could appreciate caviare. Madame Vervier is caviare, as far as I am concerned.”
He glanced up at Toppie to see how she accepted the metaphor; but if she smiled it was with reserve. “You like me, Giles. I’m not caviare; but I’m not, I hope, rice pudding either.”
“No, you don’t come into such categories,” Giles smiled back. “If one could find a fruit that tasted of frost and sunlight, a fruit one could pick only at daybreak—golden, and chill and sweet—that would be you, Toppie. A sort of apple of the Hesperides—that one must sail and sail for ever and a day to find.”
Something that came into his voice made him stop suddenly. And Toppie, too, was silent for a moment. When she spoke it was carefully, as if guiding their steps away from a menace to their quiet.
“That’s a charming compliment, Giles,” she said. “I sometimes think, shambling and shabby though you call yourself, that you are a poet as well as a philosopher. But I’m sorry, you know, to feel madame Vervier lose by what I gain. Owen always wrote of her as someone he so wanted me to know. I can’t believe he’d have wanted me to know anyone who was worldly and luxurious and meretricious. I can’t help feeling that you must be unjust.”
Meretricious, luxurious, worldly? Was that the picture he had, all unwittingly, drawn for Toppie? The blood came to Giles’s face. It was to be displayed to his own eyes as disloyal. He saw madame Vervier’s figure standing against the great arch of the sky; he saw her rising up from the sea at dawn; he smelt the beeswax and seashells and cool, clean linen.
“But I don’t mean that at all,” he stammered. “I don’t think of her as any of those things. Nothing could be further from my mind.”
“If she’s like the things rich people eat in restaurants; if she’s selfish; if she’s unfastidious and resourceful—” Toppie’s voice built up before him the shape of madame Vervier as she had seen him draw it.
“You mustn’t press mere metaphor so far, Toppie. I said she was like a flower, too. She is as out-of-door a creature as Alix herself. She belongs more to the cliffs and the country than to restaurants.—That’s really the most vivid impression I have of her”—he was striving to atone to madame Vervier for the false picture he had put before Toppie; yet trying at the same time for truth to Toppie. “As I used to see her at sunrise; coming up from the sea after a morning swim. Like poetry and music personified, she used to look, walking against the dawn.”
Toppie’s eyes were on him. It was curious how cold her eyes could be. It was as if, though Toppie herself were not judging you, the height, the light that her eyes conveyed revealed you to her as creeping and dingy.
“I don’t understand you,” she said. She spoke gently, as if to mitigate the coldness that fell from her gaze.
“But what is it you don’t understand, Toppie!” Giles exclaimed, and he heard that it was with irrepressible fretfulness. He felt it so unfair that he should be displayed to Toppie as creeping and dingy when all that he was trying for was to shield her from any hurt. Yet that there was another reason for his fretfulness, he knew. His loyalty to madame Vervier had betrayed him to too much ardour. Ardour had been in his voice. And Toppie must have heard it.
“That you should say such different things of Owen’s friend,” Toppie replied at once. “You contradict yourself. It’s as if you were hiding something from me.”
Poor Giles. His hat-brim was drawn down, but that could not conceal from Toppie the helpless red that surged up over his face and neck as he heard these words. He felt it rise, the burning, dark confusion, while, with sudden fear and sickness of heart, he groped for an answer. And her blow had been so sudden and unlooked for that the only answer that came was as helpless as his blush, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. What could there be to hide?”
But there was no escape for him in Toppie’s gaze. Giles, his eyes fixed on the heather, felt it dwell upon him, and when, at last, she looked away, it was as if she had seen the falsity between them. And all that she said, in accents of snow, was: “I’m sure I don’t know. Perhaps you will tell me.”
“Toppie, this is absurd, you know,” Giles muttered, staring down. “You put me in a ridiculous position. It upsets one, naturally, to be cross-questioned as if one were a shifty witness in the witness-box. People are complicated and contradictory creatures. One can’t draw a consistent picture of them. On one side of her nature madame Vervier may be weak and erring and on the other she may be like a goddess. How do I know? I’ve hardly seen her.”
And then Toppie made an astonishing statement. Turning her eyes from him, looking before her at the dull rose sky, coldly, though gently, and with a poise of tone that showed how deeply she was feeling, she said: “If you have fallen in love with her, Giles, why should you not say so? Why should you try to hide it as though you were ashamed? She is a widow, is she not? There is no reason, is there, why you should not love her?—It hurts me that you should speak like that—keeping things back; twisting your real feelings lest I should see them.—You speak of her as though you were ashamed of loving her.”
Giles, while Toppie spoke, had started up, resting on his hand and staring at her with eyes aghast and stupefied. What folly, what madness was this? How could Toppie find it in her heart to speak like this; to him—to him of all people?
Yet, in another moment, while he stared at her, memory had answered him. A vein of piercing intuition underlay Toppie’s blunder. It was only a half blunder. His misery of confusion had been for Owen, because of Owen’s secret that he had to hide. And she had seen it as for himself. But it was true that he had, if only for a moment, been in love with madame Vervier. He had, for a moment, partaken of the experience that swept men away. The figure of madame Vervier was haloed for him by fiery, dewy associations, and the pang of his sense of disloyalty to her would not have been so deep had he not known in her presence that poignant, perilous revelation of beauty. He saw all this while, silently, he stared at Toppie, and he saw that she could never, never understand or admit his half truth. It was a weakness even to think of its avowal.
“How can you say anything so monstrous to me, Toppie,” he questioned, and it was sternly, “when you know I’ve never loved anyone but you?” This, indeed, was a whole truth that it behoved Toppie not to traduce.
But his sternness did not deflect her. “There are different kinds of love. I know you love me. I know you’ve had, always, a boyish, idealizing devotion for me. I will always be grateful to you for your devotion. But you are not in love with me. You’ve never known what it was to be in love till you met madame Vervier. Oh! Giles—you must see what I see so plainly! Perhaps you really think that I could be hurt and jealous in feeling myself no longer first. That is so wrong of you. It would lift a burden from me if I could see you married. I should be so glad, so glad of your happiness.”
“Good Heavens, Toppie!” Giles had started to his feet and stood above her, crimson with grief and dismay. “This is the most extraordinary nonsense! Happiness! With another woman! With Alix’s mother! She’s old enough to be mine if it comes to that; and as to marrying me—she’d as soon think of marrying a Chinaman. People haven’t these romantic ideas about marrying in France, I can assure you. Marry me!” Giles suddenly found himself forced by the thought to a loud laugh. “Besides,” he added, “why should you think that monsieur Vervier is dead? Why should you think that madame Vervier is a widow?”
He felt in the silence that followed these last unguarded words that Toppie looked at him strangely and, as he heard them echo—what, indeed, did he know about monsieur Vervier, damn him! He had, actually, never considered monsieur Vervier except as a discarded, dangling phantom of the past—as he heard the words that disinterred monsieur Vervier and set him there between him and Toppie, he felt that the bewildered ant had, indeed, stumbled on a luckless path.
“Owen always wrote of her as though she were a widow,” said Toppie, going slowly. She was not bewildered. She looked carefully, if with shrinking, at the figure he had placed before her in his foolish haste. “But you know so much more about her than Owen ever knew.—In those few days you saw and learned things he never saw. Perhaps you do know about monsieur Vervier. Perhaps you know that he isn’t dead; that she isn’t free. If that is so—doesn’t it explain even more?—Oh, Giles—I am afraid”—She stopped. She looked away. He saw the blood rising in her cheek as she checked the speech that must give him too much offence.
“I suppose what you mean,” said Giles gloomily, thrusting his hands into his pockets as he looked down at her, “is that I do know she isn’t free, and that, therefore, being in love with her, my love is a guilty passion. Something of that sort, what? Well, if you won’t take my word for it, there’s no more for me to say, is there?” Resentment had come into his voice. “We’d better be going.”
“I accuse you of nothing, Giles,” said Toppie, still dyed with her blush; “only I am sure that I am right in feeling that something has happened. I am sorry, but I can’t help feeling it. From the moment you spoke of madame Vervier I heard that your voice was changed;—so strained and strange; so full of reluctance. You wanted to say all against her that you could find to say. You wanted to guard yourself against your own feeling. But what came through, from the beginning, was that you found her—beautiful; mysterious; compelling.” Toppie found the words, a strange tremor in her voice. “What came through was that she was a goddess.”
Giles stood motionless, gazing down at her. He was seeing, suddenly, straight into Toppie’s heart; straight into the heart of their situation. How futile were his denials, when he could deny only for himself—and not for the other. The vein of piercing intuition in Toppie had led her to the portals of the truth. The name she saw inscribed there was the wrong name; that was all. Change Giles to Owen, and the truth was in her grasp. She knew that madame Vervier was beautiful, mysterious, compelling. She knew that both he and Owen had felt her a goddess. A chill of fear crept about Giles’s heart.
“Come; we’d better be going,” he repeated. He heard that his voice was harsh. He would discuss no further and he held out his hand to her. Toppie took it and rose to her feet.
She meant to be kind to him. She meant to be his friend;—Giles said it to himself as, silently, they went down the hill together. But in spite of all his compassionate understanding of her, his fear for her, what came over him, in wave after wave of grief and resentment, was that she was cold and hard. He had made her suffer because of what she had felt as false in him; but it was now, as it had always been, of Owen that she was thinking. He had cast, thank Heaven, no shadow on Owen; but perplexity, mystery, pain had come into her vision of Owen’s friend.
“Owen never said she was a widow; but I’m sure he believed her to be one.—Forgive me, Giles, but have you heard what makes you think she may not be? What do you know of monsieur Vervier? Alix has never spoken of him. It is so strange; for if he were alive he would be with them, would he not?”
“C’était un bien méchant homme.” These words, in madame Vervier’s tones of surpassing detachment, came back to Giles. “Alix probably never saw him. Her mother spoke of him. She said he was a bad man.”
“She spoke of him to you?”
“Yes, to me.”
“And she didn’t say whether he were alive or dead?”
“No. We weren’t talking about him. We were talking about Alix and her future. Alix will have hardly anydot, it seems, because monsieur Vervier made away with all her mother’s money. They are parted.”
“Did she leave him, or did he leave her?”
“She left him,” said Giles after a moment and he felt his voice harden towards Toppie. “Continue your cross-examination, pray.”
“But you know so much, so surprisingly much, Giles. How can I help asking? How can I help feeling interest in Alix’s mother, in Owen’s friend? It isn’t cross-examination. It is unkind of you to say that. Horribly unkind.”
“I don’t mean to be unkind. It’s you who are unkind, I think. Ask any questions you like.”
“How long after her first husband’s death did she marry monsieur Vervier? May I ask that?”
“Certainly you may,” said Giles. His bitterness carried him so far. Then he paused, aghast. He had known that to Toppie Alix could never have spoken of her mother’s misfortune as frankly as she had to him. He had forgotten the first misfortune. He was aghast; but while he made his pause he determined that there should be no half-measure here. Toppie should not again accuse him of double-dealing. “Didn’t Alix ever tell you that her mother was divorced?” he demanded, and he heard how hard and dry was his voice.
For a moment Toppie said nothing. Then she spoke, softly, as if in all sincerity she could not believe what she heard. Disastrous, indeed, was the time for such a hearing. “What did you say, Giles?”
“Alix told me, the day I brought her here last winter, that her father and mother had been divorced. If she didn’t tell you, that was, no doubt, because she took it for granted that I would.”
And again came Toppie’s dire silence. “And why didn’t you?”
“Why should I? It was none of our affair.”
“Isn’t Alix our affair?”
“Certainly she is. And she has nothing to do with monsieur Vervier.”
“She has something to do with her mother.”
“Yes.” Giles’ voice grew harder, dryer. “What she has to do with her mother we see. She is the product of her mother. Do you find fault with it?”
They had reached the road that wound among the birch-woods and dusk had fallen in it. The sky, paled to a faint apricot tint, shone dimly between the trees. Toppie stood still on the wayside grass and looked at him. Ineffaceably, in this instant of strange, unbelievable alienation (for had he not, in his last words, challenged Toppie with madame Vervier’s standards as set against her own?), Toppie’s image was stamped upon his mind; as ineffaceably as on that first time he had seen her. And now all her light was withdrawn. It was the end, as that had been the beginning. Pale, wraith-like in the dusk, she fixed her eyes upon him and they were dark with their repudiation. “Alix is not the product of her mother. Alix is good and her mother may be bad. You know better than I do what you think of her mother. It’s you I find fault with, Giles. Your words don’t tell me what you think.”
“I’ve kept nothing from you,” said Giles. It was a lie. He knew it, and he saw that Toppie knew it. He attempted an amendation of his statement. “Everything you’ve asked I’ve answered.”
“Have you? I will ask this, then. Did she leave her husband with monsieur Vervier? Did her husband divorce her because of monsieur Vervier? Was she unfaithful to her husband?”
“There were faults on both sides, I believe. Alix wouldn’t have been given for half the time to her mother if there hadn’t been faults on both sides.” Giles forced himself to speak steadily. “She was very young. People don’t judge these things so hardly nowadays.”
Toppie, her eyes on his, put aside the palliation. “Did she leave monsieur Vervier with another man? Was she unfaithful to monsieur Vervier, too? Is she a woman who has had lovers?” said Toppie, and the word was strange on her lips.
Giles stood there, stricken. He was so aware of horrible danger, pressing in upon him and Toppie from every side, that he could hardly command his thoughts to an order. All that came was a helpless literalness. There was no refuge from Toppie’s eyes; for her, or for himself. “Yes,” he said, “I’m afraid she is. That’s the trouble, you see.”
Toppie then looked away from him. She looked round her, standing so still, with no gesture of amazement or distress. But there was a sudden wildness in her eyes.
“Toppie, dear Toppie,” Giles pleaded. “She is not a bad woman. Wrong; but not bad. You can’t judge of these things. I’m not defending her.—It’s only that, seeing her, seeing all the beauty she has made in her life, I cannot feel about her mistakes as I should have thought I would. That’s why you felt me strained in speaking of her. It was a shock to me. And I didn’t want you to know. Put it away now, Toppie, I do beg of you. It has nothing, nothing to do with us. She’s a very beautiful, a very unfortunate woman, and it’s only by chance that we’ve stumbled upon these unhappy things in her past.”
Oh, the fatal background to his words! He knew how false they were, spoken to Toppie, for all that there was of truth in them for himself. “Let’s go home,” he urged, “and not talk about it any more.”
Toppie stood, her eyes fixed as if in careful scrutiny upon the distance. She had raised her hand, as he spoke, and pressed her fingers, bent, against her lips. He saw that she kept herself with a great effort from breaking into tears.
“It’s not that,” she uttered with difficulty. “It’s you.” And now she moved away. “I’m going home from here. I would rather be alone, please.”
The road led over the common to Heathside; there was a short cut through the woods to the Rectory.
“But, Toppie—I do implore you.” Poor Giles with his rough head and great round eyes stood and pleaded. “What have I done? What have you against me?”
“It’s everything, everything,” Toppie murmured. “It’s all I’ve felt in you this afternoon. I’ve stumbled—from one hidden thing to another.—It gives me dreadful thoughts. It’s as if”—she stopped again, her eyes still fixed on the distance—“as if there might be anything. She’s changed you so much.” And, her eyes coming to him at last, she spoke on, helpless in the urgency of her half-seen fear:—“It’s as if she might have changed Owen;—if he had ever come to know her as well as you have.”
Suddenly, at this climax, Giles found himself prepared. “What if she had?” he demanded, and it was like riding, with a great thrust, to the top of the breaker that threatened to engulf them. “What if she had made him judge things more kindly? No doubt she would have changed him. He would have felt her beauty, too. But she wouldn’t have changed him towards you, Toppie; any more than she has me.”
Then Toppie drew back. Seeing suddenly where she stood, seeing her fear as a disloyalty, she drew away. She looked at Giles and he saw the door, as it were, mercifully or terribly close against him and Toppie, demanding no further lies, shut herself away. “Perhaps you are right,” she said slowly, and each word came with an effort, for they were, doubtless, the only false words Toppie had ever uttered. “Perhaps I am too ignorant of the world. I do not judge your friend. But if I knew her, I could not think her beautiful. I could not think a wicked woman beautiful. We must be different in that.—I’ll go home now. I’d rather be alone. Good-bye.”
She moved away into the wood.
Giles, standing where she left him, had the sensation of feeling his heart break. “Toppie,” he said in a choking voice.
She stopped and looked round at him. Her grey form among the birches was almost invisible, but he saw the thin oval of her face.
“Toppie.”—Only this—He could hardly speak. He was not thinking. Only that stifling pressure in his heart seemed to break its way out into words—“I do so love you.”
He saw that he touched her. If not his words, then his face of anguish. For the first time that day, if only for a moment, her thought was given to him alone and he felt rather than saw pity in her eyes.
“Giles—I’m so sorry,” she murmured.
“I do so love you,” he repeated, gazing at her. But, even as he gazed, the worst of the anguish was to know that something in his love was changed for ever.
“Dear Giles,” Toppie murmured again. “Forgive me.” And again she repeated, and the phrase was like a fall of snow: “I’m so sorry.”