PART III
What had happened to Giles?
He was waiting for her on the Victoria platform and his patient gaze and poise told her that her train was late;—but fatigue did not account for what Alix saw at once as she stood at the door of her carriage and found his face. Her dear Giles. Her good Giles. What had happened to him?
Alix was aware that a great deal had happened to herself since she had last seen Giles, only two months ago. It was not only her lengthened skirts and her turned-in locks that gave her her new sense of maturity. Perhaps one only began really to be grown up when one began to know why one was unhappy. A child suffers in ignorance of the cause of its suffering and it can forget more easily because of that merciful vagueness. Unhappiness is only a cloud to put away or pass out of. But grown-up unhappiness was four solid walls of fact enclosing one.
Groping round and round her prison and finding always that solid facts were there resisting all attempts at forgetfulness, Alix, though she still could not see just what they were, sometimes asked herself if that was because she was still too young to understand, or because Maman, so deftly, so tenderly, with as much compassion as compunction, passed a bandage round her eyes and kept her blindfolded? She could not tell; but she knew that another mark of her own maturity was her understanding of Maman, her new capacity for helping her; and more than in any other way she helped her by never lifting a hand to push away the bandage and by never asking a question that Maman might find it difficult to answer.
She had known intuitively, in the past, that some questions must not be asked; questions about her father; about monsieur Vervier; about divorce. But now there were more pressing questions, and the first and foremost of them was the question of André de Valenbois.
He was there; in their lives. She had left him behind her in Paris; no longer their guest, but as much as at Les Chardonnerets the presiding presence. He was a great friend. So Maman had said to her, strangely pale, on that night when at Les Chardonnerets she had heard Giles and André de Valenbois talk of her return to England. Maman had great friends. And great friends made one suffer—Maman had not said that but Alix had seen it—and many things in life must be sacrificed to them. It was not that they were more loved than a child—oh, she was sure not!—though that was a surmise that had pierced her through; it was simply that one could not be sure of keeping them always; as one was sure of keeping one’s child; and because one was not sure, one suffered. It was something from which one could not free oneself. It was something that made one helpless.
So Alix knew herself changed; a grave, meditative person; garnering in her silence and her submissiveness a power to meet all the emergencies that must lie in her path since, so obviously, they lay in Maman’s.
“Hello, Alix,” said Giles. His eyes had found her and he was there below her, taking from her the basket she had lifted off the seat; and she said, “Hello, Giles,” though it seemed to her always such an odd phrase to meet upon.
“Is this the kitten?” said Giles.
“Yes. This is Blaise. You expected him? I wrote to Mrs. Bradley.”
“Expected him! Rather! They’re wanting to see him almost as much as to see you.”
“That is well, then,” Alix smiled. “You haven’t been ill, Giles?”
“Ill! Rather not! I’m as right as rain,” said Giles; and he added, hastily she felt: “But I say, you’re quite different. What is it? Your clothes? Your hair?”
“Maman thought I was getting too old for short hair. It is taken back from my forehead, too. It makes me verydigne, I assure you. And my skirts are nearly as long, you see, as anybody’s skirts.”
Alix wore a dark blue dress and a dark blue cape, buttoned with little buttons on her breast and showing a satin lining of striped grey and blue. Her shoes and stockings were grey, and her loose, long gloves, and her soft little hat curving down over her brows with the big bow knotted at the side. Maman had made her, though so sober, verychic, and Giles was taking it all in; as far as he could; and that, she feared, with tender irony, was not very far.
Giles, as they moved along the platform, pursued the topic of her appearance, feeling it evidently opportune. He did not wish to speak about his own. “It’s that you look so tremendously foreign;—the way you walk; the way your things are put on; the way your hat comes down like that. Even the way you speak English is as French as possible, for anyone who speaks it perfectly; and I’d never noticed that before.”
“When you first met me,” said Alix, putting the obvious explanation with mild competence before him, “what chiefly engaged your attention was that I spoke English at all. Now you notice that though I speak it so well I speak with my French accent. I am French, Giles.” She slightly smiled round at him, for she need not emphasize it. He as well as she would remember their last talk on the cliff-path. “I am a foreigner.”
“I suppose you are,” said Giles, and it was gravely, almost gloomily that he said so.
“Was the walking tour a success?” Alix asked him, while they waited at the customs, Alix’s box, this time, being larger than the last and subjected to the vicissitudes of a separate transit. “You did not overtire yourself? You look a little tired, you know.”
“Do I really? I haven’t been sleeping very well; it’s been so hot. Cornwall was a great success. I want you to see Cornwall some day.”
“It has been hot in Paris, too. But I always love Paris at this season, the stones all baked with sun, the trees all bronze. We have been dining in the Bois almost every night, at a little restaurant under the trees. It has been delicious. And the drive back down the avenue du Bois.—Calme-toi, mon chéri,” she addressed the kitten who was wailing.
“Poor little chap. He hasn’t liked the journey. Is he prettier?” asked Giles.
“He is uglier,” said Alix. “It isl’âge ingrat, you know. No longer kitten, and yet not cat. Like me. It is only the basket that troubles him. I had him out for most of the day, in my arms, and he was quiet and good.”
“It reassures me to see you still so fond of kittens,” Giles smiled at her. “It makes me feel you are still something of one yourself.”
“But I shall always be fond of kittens,” said Alix.
They were again to spend the night with Aunt Bella and in the taxi Alix opened the basket and displayed her pet. Very ugly indeed; gaunt in structure, though fully fed, of a most undistinguished white and brindle, with a nose already over-long and ears over-large; but as it nestled into Alix’s neck with loud choking purrs Giles owned that it was a nice little beast.
“And so full of love; and so intelligent, Giles,” said Alix, pleased by his commendation. “More loving, more intelligent, these common little cats are, thanchats de race, I always think.”
London, dusty and drowsy on this Autumn evening, seemed to yawn and smile and had, Alix thought, a welcoming air. It was a kind city. She even saw beauty in it, and commented on the Royal Hospital as they drove through Chelsea. “How well it goes in the thick, soft air—that period, that colour.” She had never liked London so much, although she came to it with an unwillingness so much greater than the unwillingness of last year, and it seemed to her, leaning back in the taxi beside Giles, her kitten against her cheek, that the dropped aitches, the little green-grocer’s shops, the strolling lovers, and the river gliding silvery-grey behind its trees, all went together in the impression of ease and kindliness.
In Aunt Bella’s flat all the windows were widely opened to the freshness, and Aunt Bella received not only her, but Blaise, quite as a matter of course. This matter-of-courseness, Alix had begun to feel, was a distinctive English trait. Once they knew you, they accepted you; you and your kittens. They had no surmises about you. You were simply there. Was it, Alix wondered, while she changed her dress in her little pink room—Blaise cautiously reconnoitring from piece to piece of the furniture—was it that Aunt Bella saw her benevolently as anœuvre de guerre, or sentimentally as a legacy from the dead nephew? As she reflected on her own presence, so intimately among them, Alix felt that if Maman’s motives were mysterious to her from their complexity, Aunt Bella’s would be mysterious from their simplicity. And it was all like London again; like the cosy little shops with the carrots and cabbages heaped before their windows, the muffling air and unadventurous river. There was peace in such simplicity, peace in being among people who had nothing to hide and who would hardly be able to imagine that you might have.
She felt at dinner that Aunt Bella looked at her, in her altered way of dressing, a little as Miss Grace and Jennifer had looked when Lady Mary talked to her about Henri de Mouveray. Aunt Bella, no doubt, found the little dress that Maman had so cleverly contrived out of two Empire scarves, curious rather than interesting. Charming in colour, dull blue shot with silver, it was a marvel of convenience as well as so pretty. One turn and it fell into place, leaving arms and shoulders bare, knotting low about the hips and falling in long silvery fringes to the ankle. Seen in Aunt Bella’s flat it had undoubtedly a very Parisian air, and perhaps Aunt Bella felt it too Parisian, for she began to question Alix about France’s foreign policy with some severity. Alix gathered that in Aunt Bella’s eyes her country was behaving badly.
“But we want the Germans to suffer,” she said. “If they are not made to suffer sufficiently, they will make us suffer again and perhaps destroy us.”
“But that is being revengeful, my dear child. And so short-sighted, too. You don’t change people’s hearts by making them suffer. You harm yourself as well as them.”
“I do not think we want to change their hearts.” Alix, all unversed in these large subjects as she was, felt herself impelled to make the answer so obvious to every French mind. “I do not think we care about their hearts. When a bad man is guillotined, it is sufficient that his head should be gone. His heart does not concern us.”
Giles at this laughed loudly and Aunt Bella’s eye-glassed gaze turned to glitter reprobation at him. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying, Giles. She is too young to have followed or understood the lamentable policy of her country. You really shouldn’t encourage her.”
“But it seems to me she has been following. She’s made the only honest answer. Have you heard people talking about it a good deal, Alix?”
She did not mind his mirth or Aunt Bella’s reprobation. She did not care at all what they thought about France. How could one expect even English friends really to understand? “I have heard people talk at Maman’s,” she said.
Blaise was on a chair beside her eating an excellent dinner, and Giles, still laughing, said: “Do you know what he looks like? A Boche baby. There was one born in a village we occupied after the Germans had been there for two years. It was the funniest, jolliest little fellow; but awfully ugly; with a face just like that.”
“But it was half French, I imagine,” said Alix dryly.
“Certainly half French, I regret to say. But he looked all German. And I’m sure that if you’d had to take care of him you’d have been as kind to him as you are to your kitten.”
“I do not care for babies,” Alix objected.
“You’d have been kind to him all the same. You wouldn’t have wanted to see his head cut off.”
“I do not want to see anyone’s head cut off; but if it were a choice between a Boche and a French baby, I should choose the French one to live. That is all we ask of our allies,” Alix added, looking over at Giles with kindly determination; “to help us to live;—as we have helped them;—even at the expense of the Germans.”
Aunt Bella, now, changed the subject. “How is Mr. Westmacott, Giles?”
“No better, I’m afraid.”
“Have they a trained nurse yet?”
“He won’t have one. He won’t admit he’s so bad.”
“It must be very taxing for Enid.” (Aunt Bella always called Toppie by her real name.) “How does she bear it?”
“She looks very worn,” said Giles.
“And I’m afraid she won’t be at all well off when he dies,” said Aunt Bella, as though she placed Toppie’s approaching bereavement and subsequent impoverishment in the same category. “She won’t be able to go on living in the way she does now. And she has been trained to no profession. I have always so blamed Mr. Westmacott for keeping her with him and giving her no education.”
“Toppie is educated, I think,” said Giles, dryly, but his dryness did not conceal from Alix the distress Aunt Bella’s surmises caused him. How much more capable Aunt Bella was, Alix reflected, of sympathizing with large vague masses of humanity than with one human being.
“Not educated at all from the modern point of view,” she returned decisively. “Quite incapable of making her own living. A very dear, good girl, but a useless girl, and there is no room in the world nowadays for useless people.”
“There’s room for Toppie,” said Giles coldly; and then, perhaps, Aunt Bella remembered that he had a special feeling about Toppie, for she desisted.
“I didn’t know Toppie’s father was so ill,” Alix said to Giles when he and she were for a little while alone in the drawing-room, Aunt Bella engaged on the telephone in the hall. “I had only one letter from her, from Bournemouth, and it did not lead me to think he was so seriously ill.”
“I’m afraid he is. She didn’t realize it then, perhaps. I’m afraid it’s only a question of time now,” said Giles, sunk in a deep chair and watching her while she pretended to play with Blaise. Was it grief, anxiety about Toppie, that had wrought the change in him? It had to do with Toppie she felt sure; but had it to do with her as well? Aunt Bella still issued directions on the telephone and Alix felt suddenly that she must ask him.
“Giles,” she said, not looking up from Blaise, who made soft onslaughts at her hand, “does Toppie know?”
“Know?” His echo had the strangest reverberations.
“About Captain Owen is what I mean;—that he cared so much for Maman.” She looked down at Blaise and moved her knotted handkerchief before his nose; and she felt the colour rising in her face.
Perhaps it was because he felt her confusion and shared it that he had to pause before replying. “Of course she doesn’t know,” he then said very gently.
“And you will not forget what you promised me?”
“What did I promise you?”
“That if she did know she would still want me back.”
And again there was a silence. How carefully Giles was considering his answer was made apparent by the length of the silence; but what he said finally, more gently than ever, seemed clear. “I’m more sure of that than ever, Alix. You see, she’s so fond of you.”
If Toppie, too, was changed, she was not changed to her. That was the first thing that Alix felt when she saw her again; next day;—for a note had been waiting for her at Heathside asking her to come to the Rectory.
It was a hot, still day and a bee was droning lazily about the Rectory drawing-room, flying out into the sunlight and in again to the bowl of mignonette that stood on a table near the window; and the bee made the day more still. It had been strange to find herself thinking of Racine as she waited for Toppie. Nothing so trivial and intimate as a bee could be imagined in any play of Racine’s; yet its soft drone had accompanied her sense of a pause, of an ominous interlude, like the pause before a scene where the heroine was to enter with some quiet, conclusive word. It was, perhaps, because of this association of ideas that Toppie, when she entered, had looked to her like the Racine heroine, like a creature delicate and austere, dimly conscious of an impending doom. There was fear in Toppie’s face as it found her there. Alix saw its white gleam mastered, resolutely veiled, while, at the same moment, the full security of Giles’s assurance was brought warmly home to her by Toppie’s encircling arms, by a new note of emotion in her voice as she said, kissing her, “Dear, dear child.”
Toppie was changed; but it could not be because of her. It was her father’s illness that had changed her and Giles had spoken the whole truth; but all the same, involuntarily, she found herself saying, while Toppie’s arms were still around her: “Are you glad to have me back?” And she heard that her voice trembled in speaking.
Whatever the fear had been, Toppie had mastered it. She held her by the shoulders and looked at her, smiling, and said: “So glad, dear little Alix, that I feel we ought to keep you always.” Then she held her off and looked her up and down, still smiling, and added: “But it isn’t a child any longer. It’s an almost grown-up young person.”
It was strange to feel herself, all reassured as she was, wanting dreadfully to cry; but Alix, too, was an adept at mastering emotion, and she said, taking off her hat so that Toppie should see all the changes: “Do you like my hair?”
“I like it very much.” Toppie kept her hand, turning her round. “I like seeing your forehead, such a gentle, thoughtful forehead. I like that big black bow at your neck.”
“That is ajeune fillebow—a bow of transition,” smiled Alix. “It is to be there while the hair grows long enough to make a knot.”
“I like it all,” said Toppie.
They sat down on the sofa side by side, Toppie still holding her hand, and then she said: “Toppie, I had not realized from your letter that your father was so ill.”
Toppie looked at her in silence for a moment and, slowly, her eyes filled with tears. “He is going to leave me, Alix,” she said.
It was her father, then. Alix could not but feel the deep, selfish relief. “Oh, you must hope,” she said.
“I do try to hope. I try to live on hope. But I am afraid he is going to leave me,” Toppie repeated. “He is not much changed,” she went on, for Alix found nothing to say. “You will not see much change in him, I am sure. I will take you up to him presently. He likes to follow what goes on. In a way he follows more than he has ever done. It is a sort of clinging, I think. And he is quite cut off from his own work. I read to him a great deal. Perhaps you will come sometimes and read to him in French. He likes that, you know.”
“I like it, too. You must let me come often. It is curious, Toppie, but when Giles is away my English life is really here with you; not that I am not very fond of them all at Heathside.”
“Is it?” Toppie looked at her very intently. “I am glad of that. Glad that I can mean home to you.—Dear little Alix.—But youarefond of them.”
“Especially of Mrs. Bradley. Only she is there so little. One hardly sees her. I am fond of Ruth and Rosemary, too. But I would rather be with you.” Alix smiled a little.
“And it will be Rosemary only this winter, since Ruth is going to Oxford. I am glad she is to be there. Giles will like having her near him.” Toppie spoke calmly the name of Giles.
“Do you think so?” said Alix. “Do you think she means much to Giles?”
“He is devoted to all his family. It will certainly be a pleasure to him to have her,” said Toppie, and Alix now thought she detected in her voice a strange detachment.
“He is fond of them to do things for them; not to be with them—I mean his sisters. He is so unlike his sisters; and most of all unlike Ruth. Ruth is so stupid beside Giles.”
“She is a very good girl; very courageous and honest,” said Toppie. “I think I see Ruth’s good points more than I used to. I think, Alix, the older one grows, the more one cares for those sterling qualities. Black would always be black to Ruth, and white, white. That has value, the highest value, in a person’s character, you know.”
Something in Toppie’s tone now dimly offended Alix. “But you could not really compare Ruth and Giles, Toppie. Giles is all that she is and so much more besides. He sees the greys and all the delicate in-between shades, too. Nothing is really black or white, and that is what is so stupid in Ruth; she sees things so.”
“It sometimes seems to me that they are nothing else,” said Toppie very calmly. “And Ruth has, I think, because of that downrightness in her, more strength of character than Giles. He would so much more easily be mistaken;—misled.” Toppie paused before finding these words. “He has what would be called the artistic temperament, I suppose; and that is the penalty one pays for having it; a certain weakness; a certain yielding. I feel that Giles would yield where Ruth would stand up like granite;—and I like the granite thing in people.”
Alix sat in indignant astonishment. “I have never known anyone so true as Giles,” she said slowly.
“I did not say that he was not true,” Toppie returned, with a touch of severity. “I said that he would be more easily misled than Ruth. I said that he was weaker than Ruth.”
They sat for a few strange moments silent.
“But it is as if you were changed to Giles,” Alix cried suddenly. She could not repress the cry. “What is it, Toppie? What has he done to displease you? You are unkind to him. You speak as if you did not care for him.”
A deep blush rose in Toppie’s face; but it was not the blush of surprise or confusion. Alix saw a competent sternness in the eyes bent upon her. “You must not say things like that,” Toppie said slowly, considering every word. “There are things you do not understand. I shall always care for Giles. I have not changed to him. No,” she repeated as if to herself, “I have not changed to Giles.”
They sat there, still hand in hand. Alix felt that she wished to fling Toppie’s hand aside. In answer to her sternness she had felt an instant anger rise within her. That Toppie should reprove, rebuff her, was itself an affront she bore with difficulty—and bore only because she feared to damage Giles’s cause by rejoinder; but her anger passed the personal wrong by and fastened itself, strangely, inevitably, on the figure of Captain Owen.
It was Toppie herself, in the picture she had drawn of Giles, who had set him so vividly before her. Captain Owen, not Giles, was the person who would blur black into grey; Captain Owen was the person who, in comparison with honest Ruth, lacked something. Giles was everything that his brother had not been, and yet it was Captain Owen who had betrayed Toppie—she found the word and it sank with a cold weight on her heart;—it was Captain Owen, now, she felt sure of it, who parted Giles and Toppie. She sat, her eyes fixed proudly before her; her lips hard.
“Alix,” Toppie said in a gentle voice, “if so much has changed in my life—you mustn’t change.”
“It feels to me as if it were you who were changed, Toppie,” said Alix.
“You must forgive me, then,” said Toppie with her firm gentleness. “I am not quite myself, perhaps. I am rather on edge. I know I seemed to speak harshly. You see, dear Alix, you are still, really, a child—one cares for you so much that one forgets it. But there are things you cannot understand.”
“Perhaps I understand some things better than you do, Toppie,” Alix returned, still not looking at her friend.
At that, for a moment, Toppie sat quite silent. “Perhaps you do,” she then said. “Some things, perhaps you do. But I feel sure that you do not understand the things I am speaking of.”
After that they tried to talk as if nothing had happened. Toppie’s manner had an atoning sweetness. Once or twice, in the way she spoke, the way she looked at her, it was as if, Alix felt, one of Toppie’s doves had spread its brooding wings over her, protectingly, tenderly. She knew that she had not forgiven Toppie; and yet she was the fonder of her because she had not forgiven her.
She was taken up to see Mr. Westmacott, who sat at an open window, a reading-table before him with books upon it. Sitting there, as formally courteous as ever, with his tall pale head and eyes still clearly blue, he did not look so ill. It was more in his voice as he questioned her about her journey that she felt change. His voice had become dry and brittle, like a glacial wind fluttering the leaves of an old abandoned volume that no one would ever read again. He would soon die; Alix felt sure of that as she heard him. He would die, and Toppie would leave the Rectory and wander forth desolate, among her doves. Why, oh, why, would she not see and understand Giles? Why would she not marry him? “Oh, if I could see her married to Giles,” she thought, when she had said good-bye to Toppie and was out again upon the common. “If I could only help Giles so that he should marry her, it would have been worth while that I should have come to England!” And that there was mistake, misunderstanding between Giles and Toppie, she was now sure.
She had gone halfway across the dried heather, when, as on the evening of her first visit to the Rectory, she saw Giles approaching her, Jock at his heels, and she knew now, as she had then only felt instinctively, that he had been waiting for her and that he was afraid of something. Of the same thing; yet of more.
Jock saw her and raced ahead to jump against her knees. He was still her special pet among the dogs and had received Blaise kindly. Alix stooped to caress his head while she watched Giles approach her.
“Well, how did you find Toppie?” he asked simply, as they met.—Giles not true! Giles easily misled! Alix felt herself suddenly blushing with anger as the thought of Toppie’s strange delusion returned to her. Giles drew her arm within his and they went across the common towards the birch-wood. It gave her a deep feeling of consolation that he should thus seek refuge with the one person who could understand him.
“I find her changed, Giles,” she said.
“In what way changed?” said Giles quickly.
And as quickly Alix answered: “Not at all to me, Giles.”
“You see how desperately ill her father is, don’t you?” said Giles. “She’s quite worn out with nursing him, you know. In what way do you feel her changed?” he repeated, looking down into her face.
Alix was pondering. She was not a person who believed in black and white. She believed in the greys and the in-between shades. She did not mean to tell Giles how she thought Toppie changed. What she found to say was: “If Toppie were happier she would not be so hard.”
“Hard?” She was looking at the ground, but she heard in Giles’s voice how the word startled him.
“Do you not think Toppie hard?” she asked.
“If she is,” said Giles after a moment, “it’s because of what you say—that she is unhappy.”
“And because she is too sure,” said Alix. They had entered the birch-wood and their footsteps rustled in the fallen golden leaves. They went forward, aimlessly, not thinking of where they went, Alix intent on her reading of Toppie, Giles listening. “Too sure of what she loves and believes in. She has had to be too sure, because she is so unhappy.—Is that it, Giles? And the things she loves and believes in are not the things she sees. Perhaps that makes us hard—if we can only think of the things we love and never see or touch them—makes us hard, I mean, to the things we have with us.”
Giles was, she knew, keeping his eyes on her as she put together these suggestions, and as he meditated for a little pause, her thoughts, in the silence, while she watched the golden leaves, took a long flight to France and she found herself suddenly wondering if perhaps Maman and André de Valenbois were wandering under the autumnal trees in the Bois—as Giles had seen Maman and Captain Owen wander under the Spring trees. And with the thought came such a pang of fear and grief.
“You’re right, I think,” Giles said. “And I see no help for it. She’ll grow more and more away from the things she has with her and shut herself more and more into her solitude—where she is safe with the things she can’t see.—What can we do about it, Alix?” said Giles gently, a little as if he spoke to a child from whose ingenuous wisdom he sought an oracle.—“Who can help Toppie in any way in which she’d accept help?”
Suddenly it was very easy, there in the twilight woods, to be courageous. She was so near Giles. It was as if her heart beat in his side. “No one can do anything for her but you, Giles. You must marry her and make her happy.”
“Oh, my dear little Alix,” he said, smiling bitterly, not even pausing to assess her daring, just as she herself had not needed to pause. “There’s no hope for me. No one can help her less than I.”
“Do you mean there never was hope;—or is none now?”
“There never was, perhaps;—but there’s less now. Her heart is full of Owen.”
“Yet if he had not been there, it would have been you she would have loved.”
“Who can tell? Perhaps.”
“And is it because of him that there’s less hope, even, now?”
“Put it like that if you choose,” said Giles. “Yes. Because of him.”
The old life flowed round her again, outwardly the same, inwardly so altered. She had been, she saw it, like nothing but a glass ofeau sucréewhen she had first come to Heathside;—or if that was a simile too insipid for even her youngest consciousness, likeeau sucréewith a squeeze of lemon in it. Now the wine of new perceptions, new emotions, tinged her deeply, and because she was enriched she saw a richer world about her. English history, from being a mere flat picture, dull at best compared to the splendid pageantry of France, began to take on depth and distance in her eyes. It was English history she saw now when she went up to Oxford with Giles and Ruth, and English history was English character; whereas event, in French history, played so much more potent a part. Wandering in and out with Giles, the beauty of the town, with its significance, stole upon her mind and senses. Meditative, benign, and so humane, it seemed to smile at you like an old ecclesiastic with kindly eyes for youth. As one sat in a sun-steeped garden or dim, carved chapel, one felt its quiet like that of a tree, full of life and growth, so that, though it was old, it was also young; the sap moved on to fresh leaves while the calm old trunk endured. Time had been distilled and preserved in it without a break or cleavage and its very light, she felt, in this autumnal weather, had that colour of time, as though it came through ancient glass. The quadrangles were brimmed with time and it brooded on the lawns of Saint John’s where the Michaelmas daisies growing against the grey stone walls made her think of the ring on the benignant hand of the bishop. “One would grow wise by being here even if one only sat still, like this, and looked at it,” she said to Giles. “I only wish one did!” said Giles. But he felt what she felt and was pleased with her for, at last, understanding his Oxford.
She began to wish for wisdom. Back at Heathside she bicycled to the High School every morning with Rosemary, through the birch-wood, past the red-brick villas of the town—villas upon which time had laid no kindly hand—and all the ugliness that had so fretted her fell into an insignificant background, since, for the first time, the day had its object. Knowledge, of course, was quite different from wisdom. The happy life depended on eyes to see the hands that blessed and the smile on the face of time; but it was knowledge that opened one’s eyes and she found in its acquisition a zest and an enfranchisement. It was in order that she might see that smile in France that she worked so hard. The sooner was she equipped, the sooner could she return to France and Maman. Already she outdistanced Rosemary, and she had a touch of kindly malice at seeing her friend of the chaffing complacencies and cheerful bullying left behind.
Rosemary was not ungenerous. She showed her chagrin and her admiration, openly. “It’s not even as if it were your own language,” she grumbled. “And you don’t seem to take half the trouble over it that I do.”
“Perhaps it is because you are in your own country and I out of mine,” Alix suggested.
“Now what on earth do you mean by that?” Rosemary inquired.
“I have nothing else to do but think about my studies,” said Alix.
Rosemary stared. “You’ve got the same things to think about that I have. Surely you are at home by now. All the girls like you and you’re never left out of anything.”
“It is not anything like that. Everybody is as kind as possible,” said Alix. She could not, she knew, make Rosemary understand. Rosemary, fundamentally, could not take foreign countries seriously—could not believe that anyone lucky enough to be in England should have all their energies bent on leaving it.
“And what do you girls intend to do with yourselves?” Mrs. Bradley asked them one day at the firelit tea-table. She had, as usual, a pile of papers beside her and laid down her fountain pen to pour out the tea. “Alix is doing so well that she can really begin to think of choosing a career and it’s not too soon to turn things in that direction.”
Even dear Mrs. Bradley took it for granted that she might be quite satisfied to make a career out of her own country.
“I hope I shall marry when I go back to Maman,” said Alix.
“Now isn’t she altogether too priceless, Mummy!” cried Rosemary. “One would have thought that with all the time you’ve been in England, Alix, you’d have got over those French ideas about marriage.—I suppose you’ll actually say that you’d let your mother choose a husband for you.”
“But who would choose one so well?” said Alix. Yet it was not true; it was not true that she still believed this of Maman. England had already changed her so much. But she did not intend that Rosemary should guess it.
“Who would? Why, you yourself!” cried Rosemary. “What can your mother know about it? Aren’t you an individual with your own tastes and feelings? And do you seriously think marriage the only career for a woman?—Do you really think getting married the whole meaning of life?”
“It is a sad thing to be avieille fille, I think,” said Alix.
“Sad? Why sad? You don’t call Aunt Bella sad, do you? And there’re thousands and thousands more like her. All of ’em as jolly as possible; the unmarried people nowadays. Jollier than the married ones, I think;—and no wonder.”
“In their hearts, you may be sure, they wish they did not have to be quite so jolly,” Alix demurred. “They must feel it sad when they reflect that they have only other people’s children to care for—and those not the most interesting. And it must be sad to be alone at one’sfoyer.”
“One may have one’s own children and yet have to take care of the others, too, you know, Alix,” Mrs. Bradley smiled, finishing her tea and taking up a packet of case papers. “All these are other people’s children.”
“One needn’t care for one’s own, or for other people’s unless one wants to,” Rosemary commented. “People specialize nowadays and know that some women are maternal and some aren’t. I’m sure I’m not. I couldn’t be bothered with children, or with a husband either—It’s as good as a play to hear you talk, you know, Alix—all your quaint French ideas. What can one hope of a nation that still has them!—Cradles, hearthstones, hubby’s socks to mend;—that’s what really appeals to you, I suppose.”
“What appeals to me is to be established,” said Alix. “I do not care for babies; but they are a part of marriage, and no doubt one would come to like them when one had them. As for the socks—I should hope to marry well enough to have a maid to do that.”
Rosemary’s eyes rounded. “You mean you’d marry for money?”
Alix smiled: “You are soréalistein some ways, Rosemary, and so romantic in others.”
“I hope, dear, you’d never think of marrying for money,” Mrs. Bradley put in. “Money is a very minor consideration in marriage.”
“Romantic! I romantic!—It’s merely a question of one’s own dignity!” cried Rosemary; while Alix said: “There would have to be character and taste and position as well;—but don’t you think,chère Madame, that it is well to marry suitably?”
“Suitably? Yes, of course.” Mrs. Bradley was gently bewildered. “But the most suitable thing of all is to marry someone one loves.”
Alix, in silence, wondered.
Mr. Westmacott seemed a little better now. She went to the Rectory twice a week and read aloud in French to him and Toppie. He seemed to enjoy it and followed if she read very slowly and distinctly. Toppie sat, her fair head bent over her knitting. She was knitting endless little vests for the poor babies of one of Mrs. Bradley’s charities. Alix wondered sometimes what was to become of all those babies. Were they passed on from Mrs. Bradley to more Mrs. Bradleys, until, at last, in one of the hospitals administered by the Aunt Bellas, they closed their eyes? Would some be good citizens and some mere beasts of burden, and some, perhaps, thieves and scoundrels? All were to begin with those little snowy woollen vests, and all were to end in coffins. It made her feel strange to think of it. But when she expressed something of these thoughts to Toppie one day, Toppie looked at her very gravely, and said: “They are all to end in heaven, Alix. We are all of us only that; souls setting out on our journey.” But Alix found it so difficult to think of some people as souls.
The babies’ vests were a strange accompaniment to Saint-Simon’s “Mémoires.” She found these on Giles’s shelves and asked Toppie if they would do. She had so often heard André de Valenbois and monsieur de Maubert and Maman quote Saint-Simon. Neither Toppie nor her father had read him and were quite contented with her choice, and she skipped about and found the people who most interested her. The French was strange, but it seemed to say more than modern French. The strangeness, she saw, was not apparent to Toppie and her father, nor was the acid irony nor the often unconscious humour. Toppie and her father rarely found anything to laugh at. Mr. Westmacott’s chief preoccupation was to follow the relationships of the characters and to place them correctly against the background of contemporaneous history, and for this purpose there were many interruptions while Toppie went to fetch the encyclopædia. Alix saw that Toppie sometimes listened with a vague distress. Saint-Simon and the people he wrote of were as alien to her understanding—to say nothing of her sympathies—as the Chinese. To Alix, for all the travesty of their tails and crests, they were clearly recognizable types. She saw the court of Louis Quatorze as a great golden aviary where splendid creatures, plumed, absurd, and beautiful, paced and preened and surreptitiously pecked at each other beneath the proud gaze of the monstrous bird of paradise on the throne. There was something sinister about them, there behind their bars; but something familiar and lovable too. Toppie only saw them as the denizens of a rather disagreeable fairy-tale, though at some moments of the recital, obscure to Alix, she saw that Toppie’s eyes rested upon her in a cogitativeness that seemed aware of too much reality. “They are all odious people, Alix,” she said to her one day. “Odious; vindictive; vulgar and wicked.”
“Oh; but not all, Toppie. Some are very good, like Fénélon—though Saint-Simon is unfair to him; and some are charming, like the Duchess de Bourgogne. She was too fond of pleasure, perhaps; but she is so merry and amusing that one can forgive her that.”
“Very much too fond, I am afraid,” said Toppie, colouring above her knitting. “I do not like her, Alix.”
“If you feel the book unsuitable for our young friend, Toppie,” Mr. Westmacott observed, “why should we not read ‘Corinne’? I remember finding madame de Staël very interesting and any young girl could read her.”
“But there are wicked people in all history,” cried Alix, aghast at this suggestion. “You all read Shakespeare, though he is full of wickedness. It is the point of view. The point of view of Saint-Simon is not wicked. He is ill-tempered, disagreeable, but upright; he means always to tell the truth. And then he was so devout, Monsieur; he was such a devout Christian.”
This was wily of her, and Mr. Westmacott, easily reassured, agreed; “Yes, yes, I see that.”
When Giles came home for the holidays, Toppie and her father had gone again to Bournemouth. “She might have waited a week longer, so that I could see her,” said Giles sadly. It was still taken happily for granted that Alix should sit with Giles in the mornings. There were fires everywhere this Winter, but she was more than ever glad of the refuge. Ruth had become a rather overwhelming presence. She had made new friends at Somerville and spent the first fortnight of her holidays with them in London, going to art-student dances in Chelsea and medical-student dances in Bloomsbury, and returning to her home with what Alix felt to be many a foolish flourish added to her sensible signature. She addressed Alix as “dear old ass,” and her favourite exclamation was “God!”
“It is so unlike ourmon Dieu,” Alix could not forbear writing to Maman. “It is as if one saw a hen suddenly lay an ostrich egg—and so proud of it. I think when English people like Ruth become emancipated, they are very like hens laying ostrich eggs. There is such a strain; and, when it is all over, it is not an interesting object.”
Ruth had been meant by nature to be like Aunt Bella, though with much of beauty added. She was tall and large and brightly fair. She had little gaiety, but she gave an impression of massive cheerfulness; and it knocked you down if you impeded it, and strode, almost gravely, on its way. Alix was pleased to feel that Giles, too, found Ruth irritating. He could be very sharp with her, especially when she patronized her mother. But Ruth now, fortified by her new experience of life and in less awe of a brother, was not to be quelled by sharpness, so that if Giles had not withdrawn into gloomy silences there would often have been quarrels.
“There’s no harm in her. She’s as good as gold. She’d go to the stake for Mummy if it were necessary, cheerfully and as a matter of course; only she’s so insufferably conceited,” Giles grumbled to Alix in the study. “Why didn’t you tell her she knew nothing about it, when she was chaffing you about French manners and customs just now? All she knows about French manners are those of the professor’s family she stayed with in Paris. Why didn’t you tell her to shut up?”
“That would have been rude,” said Alix.
“Well, she was rude.”
“But that is no reason for me,” Alix slightly smiled, looking up at him.
“By Jove, no!” Giles, with a rueful laugh, rubbed his hand through his hair. “Ruth’s manners could never be a reason for yours, could they! I say, you know, that’s a nasty one, Alix!”
“I do not mean it to be nasty. And she did not mean to be rude,” said Alix. “She meant only to be funny.”
“That makes her stupid, then, as well as conceited,” said Giles.
If she took refuge with Giles, it was curious and touching to Alix to note that before Ruth’s assaults Mrs. Bradley more and more took refuge with her. When Ruth, with a shout of laughter, crowed “Victorian!” at her mother, Alix begged that the inferiority of this term should be explained to her. “For in Maman’s salon,” she observed, “clever people—I mean the ones your clever people quarrel over in the reviews as to who should claim to have first read them—admire even George Eliot and Ruskin, I assure you. Admire them greatly.”
“Help! Help!” shrieked Ruth. She knew nothing of the clever people in Maman’s salon. She had not advanced to the recognition of cleverness beyond her reach; she had advanced only as far as scorn for unfashionable tastes, and in herself, as Alix, musing on her, perceived, she had none of the stuff from which new valuations are made.
“And you know,” Mrs. Bradley, for the sake of historical accuracy put forward—evading by the mere force of her impersonality any altercation—“it wasn’t really so long ago when I was young, Ruth. I didn’t live in the time of crinolines. I was reading my Dostoievsky in French and my Hardy in English when I was your age, and I don’t seem to see that you young people have got beyond them.”
“Oh, Mummy darling, it’s not a question of what you read or don’t read!” cried Ruth, affectionately ruffling her mother’s head. “It’s the colour of your mind! It’s the pattern of your complexes!”
“There’s some truth in that, you know,” Mrs. Bradley observed to Alix when, after this sally, Ruth seized her hockey stick and strode away.
Mrs. Bradley always saw whatever of truth there was to be seen in other people’s positions. She felt no impatience or grievance against her merciless daughter. She had not time for such reactions. Her own work occupied all her time. And she hoped for her children that they, too, would find work that would thus become the meaning of their lives. It was wonderful in her, this detachment, Alix thought, yet she found fault with it, and it was the only fault she found in Mrs. Bradley. She should have felt herself more responsible for the uncouthness of her daughter; she should have given less thought to the welfare of the London children, and more to the manners of her own. “It would have been better for them,” thought Alix, “if she could have become very angry with them. How excellent for Ruth and Rosemary if they could have been well whipped from time to time. And it is too late now.”
Mrs. Bradley would have thought whipping irrational and cruel. “She is too wise, too quiet,” thought Alix. “But then the saints were like that; wise and quiet and incapable of anger.”
Alix had never cared at all about the saints, and it was strange to feel that this heretic lady, creedless and uncloistered, made them more real and more lovable to her.
“Do you not think so, too, Giles?” she said to her friend in the study. “Do you not see what I mean? She is like a modern kind of saint; so selfless and dedicated and laborious. She never thinks about being happy.”
“You make her happy, Alix. Did you know that?” said Giles.—“Yes, I see perfectly what you mean. Yet Mummy never seems to me sad. Does she to you?”
“I do not know,” Alix reflected. “She did not begin so quiet, I am sure. Just as the saints did not. At the bottom of her heart she wanted to be loved more; much more;—isn’t that what all people want most, Giles?—And then when she found that she was not to be she must have felt very sad.”
“But, I say, you know!”—Giles stared at her from his chair. “You do say the most astonishing things! Not loved enough! Why don’t we all love her!”
“Oh, but it would have to be more than that. She would want far more love than English children could ever give to their parents.”
“English children! Surely you don’t think that the French love their parents more than we do!”
“But of course we do, Giles,” said Alix in candid surprise. “Our mothers we do; for perhaps fathers do not count for so much with us, either.”
“Oh, come, I can’t swallow that.” Giles smiling, yet disturbed, was rubbing his hand over his hair. “You—even you—don’t love your mother more than I do mine.”
“I think I do, Giles. I think we are more a part of our mothers in France. You stand more alone in England, in everything.”
Giles in his disturbance of mind had got up and was looking out of the window. “And what about my father, then?” he said. “What about his love for her? That’s what we think of in England as counting most in a woman’s life. He was devoted to her.”
Alix felt a little shy of sharing with Giles her deepest intuition about Mrs. Bradley’s selflessness.
“I am afraid not enough, Giles. Did he really see her as you see her? I am afraid he was not a part of herself, and that is what one expects in England and that is why she must have been sad. And I think she loved best always—if you do not mind my saying so—the ones who were most part of herself—you and Captain Owen and Francis. One cannot help loving most people who are most part of oneself.”
And though she still kept her French scepticism about marriage, the half-unconscious climax of a long process of change within Alix was reached when she added in her own thought: “How sad to be married to someone who is not part of yourself.”
It was in the last fortnight of the holidays that a letter, once more, came from Lady Mary asking, as if only a few weeks had elapsed since the last time of asking, if Alix could not now come and stay with them at Cresswell Abbey.
The letter was again addressed to Mrs. Bradley and again arrived at breakfast-time so that she read it aloud to the assembled family.
“You’ll have to go this time, Alix,” said Giles, with an air of fatherly authority.
“Where’s the ‘have’ about it, Giles?” Ruth inquired, helping herself to mustard with her kedgeree. “She’ll go if she likes, I suppose; and not otherwise. For my part I don’t see why she should be at the beck and call of Lady Hamble, or whatever her name is. She’s forgotten Alix for long enough.”
“What’s to the point is that she’s remembered her for long enough,” said Giles, “and that Alix has remembered her. Of course, you’re going, Alix.”
“Alix will be bored stiff among all those swells,” cried Rosemary; “and, besides, she’ll miss the Eustaces’ dance. Do refuse, Alix.”
“But I do not think they will bore me,” said Alix. “I should like to go.”
It was arranged that Giles was to motor her to Hampshire; the cross-country journey was too difficult by train, and while the map was brought and spread out over the jam-pots and butter-dishes and they all made suggestions as to the best route, Alix had time to wonder why, despite her assertion, her old eagerness about Cresswell Abbey and Lady Mary was much faded. Was it that she had grown fonder of Heathside? Yes; undoubtedly; but that was not the reason. It was not to lose Heathside to pay Cresswell Abbey a visit. But, with a new, unwonted shyness, she shrank from the thought of the environment that had, in Lady Mary herself, so reminded her of Maman. Maman would want her to go. She would want it more than Giles did; and did he not want it because he knew that it would be Maman’s desire for her? It was almost to suspect them of planning it for her and it affected her with almost a sense of grief to see his dark head bent above Ruth’s golden one while, so earnestly, he scanned the road that was to lead her away from them. Did he—with Maman to help him—believe that it would lead to an English marriage for her? The blood rose faintly in her cheeks as she sat there, silent.
But her disquiet was even deeper than this. She had no longer her old sense of security. It was Giles’s presence that lent her what security she had and he would not be at Cresswell Abbey.
She was very silent on the morning they set out for their long drive. It was nearly mid-day, yet the hoar frost still made the woods thick and white against the sky, and the twigs were like antlers in their mossy branching outlines. When they passed into the open country the buffs and cinnamons and mole-colours of the fields and uplands were all powdered to paleness. The beauty of the day was like a promise, but Alix felt it like a farewell.
“You’ll be back in the fortnight at most, you know,” said Giles. He saw that she was sad and said it to reassure her.
“But of course I shall not stay for a fortnight, Giles,” she said.
“Lady Mary didn’t fix any time; but I do hope you’ll stay for as long as she asks you,” Giles returned. She made no reply. That, of course, was what Maman would wish him to say to her.
They found the way longer than they had computed, and Alix was very hungry by the time they reached the little market-town where they were to lunch. It was disappointing to find the mutton so tough, and the untidy and decorated young person who waited on them brought the cabbage and potatoes with such a languid mien that they seemed to be almost a concession to special greed.
“I think the cooks in your provincial inns have no pride in their calling,” Alix observed, refraining from a very yellow custard pudding while Giles doggedly attacked bread and cheese. “It is a pity; for pride in one’s calling gives a zest to life, does it not?”
“Good Lord, Alix! Don’t rub it in!” Giles exclaimed, for the mutton had been very tough.
It was already four o’clock when they entered the lodge gates of Cresswell Abbey. The road through the park wound upwards and one saw the ample, happy house with the dropping sun yellowing its windows as it looked out over a southern aspect. Built of pale grey stone and thickly lichened with rosettes of gold, it belonged to an England almost intimate still in its associations. A Gainsborough lady, when it was but newly built, might, Alix thought, have come strolling out on the terrace, the white fur of her little silk jacket turned up about her ears, and a white dog, half Spitz, half Pomeranian, trotting by her side. There was nothing of the splendour or romance of antiquity about it, and Alix, as she saw it, a vision of haughty Montarel hovering at the back of her mind, was a little disappointed. But it was impossible to think of English people living at Montarel. How different this kind-eyed butler from Mélanie in hersavates; how different the firelit hall, filled with the scent of pot-pourri and burning logs, from the gaunt cobwebby spaces of Montarel! A wide staircase turned to an upper landing from the hall, and on the turn, with an ascending row of Chinese paintings behind him, a young man in hunting-dress was standing, looking down at them, as they were ushered in, with soft, bright, interested eyes. A group of people, half shut in by a high Chinese screen of red and gold, sat round the fire and from an open door came the sound of a piano playing a reckless jazz tune. Alix felt her sadness dispelled by a sweet stealing sense of excitement.
And now Lady Mary was again before her, looking older than she had remembered her—and that was perhaps because another woman, radiantly young, sat knitting by the fire—but showing the remembered bright softness, and she was drawing them both forward and saying to Giles: “Oh, but of course you must stay—oh, not only to tea; for the night. It’s so far. It’s so cold. It’s so late. Indeed, you must.—Jerry will lend you everything.”
Jerry came down the stairs. He had auburn hair and auburn eyes and thick upturned auburn lashes. He was, of course, Lady Mary’s son, and Alix was aware that during this little interval it had been at herself that he had been looking. She saw herself standing there as he must see her. The soft little grey travelling-hat came down over her eyebrows; the big, soft collar of her coat went up about her ears; there was not much of her face to be seen; but, for perhaps the first time in her young life, she knew—and the knowledge, mingling with the warm scent of the pot-pourri, the lurching, imbecile gaiety of the music, deepened her sense of excitement—that she held herself beautifully, and that as far as clothes were concerned she had no cause for disquiet.
“I am dark and she is fair,” this was the thought that passed through her mind as she felt herself observed not only by Jerry, but also by the radiant lady at the fireside; “but I am even younger than she is, and, I imagine, more unusual.”
“Yes,dostay,” said Jerry, looking now at Giles and smiling as if he were specially glad to see him.
Poor dear Giles! How gaunt and shabby and shy he looked among them all; rather, thought Alix, like a rook softly entreated by a flock of doves. They cooed about him; Lady Mary with her soft dark eyes, and Jerry, and a kind elderly gentleman who had advanced from the hearth, the “Times” held behind him, and who, apparently, was Lady Mary’s husband. Even the butler seemed to be one of the flock, and he gently withdrew Giles’s greatcoat and carried it away as if the question were settled before Giles had had time, as she knew, to gather his wits together.
“Youwill. That’s splendid,” said Jerry, though Giles had not said that he would. “Let’s have tea at once, Mummy; they’ll want it as much as I do, and I’ll change after.”
Lady Mary, taking Alix by the hand, as though she might feel, as a foreigner, strange in a strange country, led her upstairs to a bright sweet room where rose-clotted chintzes were drawn back from the bed and windows and flowers stood on the writing- and dressing-tables and enticing bottles with little labels round their necks on the wash-hand stand.
“Debenham will get you everything. Ask her for anything you want,” said Lady Mary, introducing the elderly maid who entered with hot water. “You can find your way down? We’re having tea in the drawing-room, just out of the hall. And then you must have a little rest. Some young people are coming over after dinner to dance. Are you fond of dancing?”
“Fonder than of anything, I think,” said Alix; and Lady Mary, smiling, said “Good.”
When she was left alone and had taken off her hat and washed, and combed her hair, Alix stood before the glass and looked at herself attentively. She looked well after the long drive. It had not been really cold, though her lips were a little pale. She bit them to make the colour come, and wondered, bending closer, whether she should powder her face. She had never yet used the box of powder,teinte Rachel, in her dressing-case, though Maman had told her that she might do so if she thought it advisable. The radiant lady used liquid powder; Alix had seen that at once, and her lips were reddened artificially. Alix decided that she would leave herself alone. “It goes better with my hair; one colour all over like that; and the right colour,” she reflected, while the spicy elation ran still more warmly through her veins. Maman had chosen with her, at a specially favourite little shop in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the jumper of palest blue and grey, patterned like a fritillary; and the string of dull brown beads and the blue skirt and the grey shoes and stockings all went perfectly with it. “I ambien; très bien,” she thought; and as she went down the passage and crossed the landing and looked down into the firelit hall with its flowers and screens and great blazing logs, she felt herself so strangely Maman’s child. It was as if she knew, for the first time in her life, an elation that Maman had often felt.
They were all in the drawing-room where tea was being laid, Jerry and Lady Mary and Mr. Hamble, and two young girls and a young man and an old-young man, who had evidently been dancing and who wished to seem much younger than he was.—“I will avoid dancing with him,” thought Alix. “He is too stout and he brushes his hair up over his head from behind so that it shall not be seen how bald he is.”—And the radiant lady was talking to Giles. Giles stood with her before the fire and looked dreadfully cross, and that was because he did not like her. But other people liked her; a great deal. Her soft locks, now smooth, now clustering, were of the purest gold and her eyes of a marvellous blue, and she, too, was undoubtedlybien, très bien, in her white silk jumper and her white woollen skirt and string of pearls. But Giles did not like her. And she did not like Giles, either, though she was pretending to carry on the kindest of conversations with a dull young man, and when Jerry came up to Alix herself the golden-haired lady, smiling more sweetly than ever upon Giles, saw everything that passed between them and was not pleased. She did not care a rap about Giles. What she cared about was Jerry.
It was characteristic of Alix that the more she saw and felt, the more silent and aloof did she become. It might have been a fundamental racial caution in her blood; the instinct for being sure, first, where you were, and, second, sure of where you wished to be seen as being before you made a movement; and as she felt the pressure of all these strange new realizations—strangest of all about herself—she knew that she possessed reserves of courteous convention more than adequate for any contingencies that might arise at Cresswell Abbey. Quietly smiling at Jerry, she took the place Lady Mary indicated to her beside her on the sofa and saw that the golden-haired lady still watched her while pretending not to.
The two young girls were guests. They had very sweet voices that did not mean much. One of them was pretty, and the stout gentleman with the hair brushed over his baldness jested with her in a low voice, but, though he tried so to please her, the pretty girl, while she ate a great many cakes, looked at him with eyes that did not find him amusing. Alix felt with her.
“From Jack,” said the radiant lady, looking up from a letter; the butler had just brought in the letters.
“What news of Jack?” asked Mr. Hamble. The golden-haired lady was married to his nephew and her name was Marigold. Jack, it seemed, was rather enjoying his job at Singapore. He wrote a long letter, and Mrs. Hamble’s marvellous eyes became very wistful while she read, but Alix felt sure that if she had been reading alone in her own room they would not have looked like that; hard and indifferent rather.
“My dear, don’t be so silly,” said the other girl to the young man who was short and robust with a tanned jolly face. He was a sailor, and Alix liked his face and felt that with him she would like to dance. They all knew each other very well and laughed and talked and she felt they saw her as a very young school-girl, for Jerry was now talking to Giles about Oxford, and no one paid any attention to her until Lady Mary began to ask her about Normandy and then about Beauvais and Rouen and so on to Chartres, on which the bald man, whose name was Mr. Fulham and who wrote books, as if observing her for the first time, asked her if she knew his friends the marquis and marquise de Tréville in Normandy and, when she said she did not, turned to the pretty girl again.
After tea she found herself alone for a little while with Giles. She felt as if they met after long separation, so completely had the morning’s sadness dissolved in the pervading sense of excitement.
“I like it here very much, don’t you?” she said.
“It’s a jolly place,” said Giles. “And they’re all so nice. I’m glad you like it. I’m glad you’ll be happy here.”
Giles no longer looked cross, but he looked thoughtful, and his eyes turned on her once or twice in a way that made her wonder, with a vague discomfort, whether he guessed at her excitement.
“I wish you were staying here, too, Giles,” she said. But this was not quite true. She would be sorry to see Giles go; even a little frightened; yet if that sense of excitement were to environ her more closely she would not care to have Giles observing it.
“Oh, but I don’t belong here at all,” said Giles, stretching up his arms and locking his hands behind his head, while his eyes still studied her. “And you do.”
“Why don’t you belong here?” she asked. But she knew. He was a rook among the doves.
“I haven’t done any of the things they do;—or very few of them.”
“Neither have I.”
“Oh, yes, you have; far more. Anyway, you’re fitted for them and I’m not.”
“Do you mean you look down upon them?”
“Of course not. But one has only time for so much in one’s life and my line is taken.”
“Philosophy and the Banbury Road,” said Alix, rather sadly musing.
“Yes; philosophy, though not necessarily the Banbury Road,” said Giles. “And tutoring and being poor. You couldn’t combine those with dances and hunting; even if you had the choice; which I haven’t.”
“Lady Mary cares for the things you do, Giles. Books and music, and the country. I believe they all care. I think you would be quite happy with her and Mr. Hamble and Jerry.”
“Oh, we’d manage for a week-end now and then, no doubt. He’s a nice boy that Jerry,” Giles added, moving his arms now, putting his hands in his pockets and looking with detachment at the foot crossed on his knee. “Lucky we’re the same size, isn’t it? I shan’t look too much of an ass in his evening things.”
“He is very nice, I think,” said Alix. “I do not care much for Joan and Patience Wagstaffe, they seem to me rathernulle. But the sailor is nice, too, and Mr. Hamble is so kind. He told me that he would teach me to play billiards. They seem to find that Mr. Fulham very clever, but I would not have him however clever he was. I do not like him. He has a sly face and eats too much. And is Mrs. Hamble nice, Giles?” Thus circuitously Alix approached her object. “She is exceedingly pretty. You had a long talk with her.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t.” Giles laughed suddenly. “She wasn’t talking with me—only at me; to see what she’d catch as a rebound.”
After all, it was always delightful to get back to Giles. After all, no one understood quite as well as Giles.
“What was she trying to catch?” Alix asked.
“Oh, just who we were, and what we were doing here, and why in the dickens you weren’t just the quiet little French girl she’d expected. The funny part of it was,” said Giles, smiling broadly as he thought of it, “she didn’t know a bit that I saw what she was after. Silly ass; thinking herself so gracefully concealed and all the time as gross and as glaring as possible. She’s stupid all right,” said Giles. “Though I daresay it makes one stupid to imagine one’s dealing with a negligible noodle. You let her alone, Alix. She’s a cat.”