The Little French Girl
PART II
CHAPTER VIII
It was strange to meet them all again that evening, so
unchanged to their own consciousness, so changed to
his. Strange to find them still so charming and so to
shrink from their charm. They came laughing up the
steps of the verandah where he still sat, and he wondered
if they felt in his voice and look, as he greeted
them, any difference.
“Ah, it was an excellent set,” André de Valenbois
said, laying down his racquet and seating himself next
to Giles. “Where did you disappear to, mon ami? We
looked, and you were in the chalet, and when we looked
again, you were gone.”
“I felt I’d like a walk. I went up the hill behind the
chalet,” said Giles. “The country is lovely up there.”
Madame Vervier’s eyes were on him, hardly cogitative
in their gaze, yet perhaps conjecturing something.
She, doubtless, knew the names of the ladies of
the chalet as well as they knew hers. She might infer
the reasons for his flight. At all events, saying nothing,
only maintaining her cool dim smile, she crossed the
verandah and went into the house.
The evening meal at Les Chardonnerets was irregular
in its hour and informal in its habit. Monsieur de
Maubert and André de Valenbois only changed their
flannels for light afternoon clothes, and Jules, when he
came, did not change at all. Giles maintained his custom
of evening dress, but he waited for some time alone
in the drawing-room that evening, and even after
André had joined him, exquisite in pale blues and
greys, another five minutes passed before madame
Vervier and Alix appeared.
Madame Vervier wore a dark silk dress, purple or
red or russet—Giles in the waning light could not define
the tint—fastening at the breast with a great old
clasp of wrought gold. A fringed Empire scarf, purple,
silver, and rose, fell about her beautiful bare arms;
a high Empire comb was in her hair, and with her
dark gaze she made Giles think of a lady drawn by
Ingres.
She moved across to the window, her arm around
Alix, and said, standing there and looking out: “La
belle soirée!” It was a citron and ash sky above a
golden sea.
“Maman, you will sing this evening,” said Alix.
“Giles has not heard you sing.”
“Monsieur de Valenbois is the singer. I have no
voice,” said madame Vervier.
“One needs no voice to sing the songs I mean,”
said Alix. “Do you know our old songs of France,
Giles?”
She looked round at him over her shoulder, palely
shining in the white taffeta, and Giles, with a sinking
and sickening as of an unimaginable yet palpable
apprehension, saw that André de Valenbois’ appreciative
eyes were upon her; upon her, rather than upon
her lovely mother.
“Do you know the one beginning, ‘L’Amour de
moi’ ” asked Alix.
Giles said he did not.
“Ah, it is the very dawn of loveliness, that song,”
said André, and in the words Giles felt the expression
of a perhaps subconscious train of thought. “It is so
young. It is all dew and candour. You must hear it,
monsieur Giles.” The young Frenchman wandered
about the room, his hands in his pockets. “Of the time
of your Chaucer,” he went on. “Our countries then
had much the same heart. It was the time when our
great cathedrals rose and miracles were as plentiful as
turtle-doves.” He paused before the mantelpiece and
took up one of the photographs set there. “This is of
you, mademoiselle Alix?”
Madame Vervier had turned from the window, and,
still holding Alix, she approached him.
“Yes; it is of me. It was taken in England,” said
Alix.
Giles had not noticed the photograph, but he noticed
a change in Alix’s voice. He, too, drew near, and
saw the little snap-shot of Alix with the dogs at the
edge of the birch-wood. But it was in a frame delicately
embroidered in blue and silver, and he asked
in all innocence, “Where did the pretty frame come
from, Alix?”
“Toppie made it,” said Alix. The alteration in her
voice was now evident. He now knew why, and fell to
instant silence.
“Toppie? What is Toppie?” André de Valenbois
asked, laughing a little and looking at Alix over her
photograph. “That is a name I have never heard before.”
“It is le petit nom of mademoiselle Enid Westmacott,”
said madame Vervier, in tones sad and gentle.
“She was the fiancée of monsieur Giles’s brother, our
friend, killed in battle, of whom you have often heard
me speak. Mademoiselle Toppie”—how strangely
the childish syllables fell from her untroubled lips—“made
the little frame for me as a Christmas gift. Had
you not seen it, monsieur Giles? It is exquisite. I was
infinitely touched by her thought of me.”
“Ah. It is, indeed, exquisite,” André murmured,
while Giles found no words. “One feels that only an
exquisite person could have made it.—Yes, certainly
I have heard you speak of monsieur Giles’s brother,
chère madame. But I did not know that he was betrothed.”
He spoke in a respectful tone, holding the frame,
but for all his resource and grace of bearing, filled,
Giles suddenly felt, with a conflict of thoughts. Did he
know of Owen? Did he accept his place, in the succession?
Was he jealous in retrospect; or, like monsieur
de Maubert, in retrospect complaisant? And that there
was something to be kept up—or was it for him,
Giles, that she kept it up?—was manifest to him from
the deliberate adequacy with which madame Vervier
advanced to meet the occasion, while Alix, her eyes
turned away from them all, fixed her gaze upon the sky.
“She is, indeed, exquisite. I can say it, monsieur
Giles, although I have never met her. It is not only
from Alix’s letters that I know her. Before that. Your
brother talked of her always. She was always in his
thoughts. One could not know him well, or care for
him as we did, without coming to know and care for
his beautiful Toppie. It was a great devotion,” said
madame Vervier, and her voice, in its sadness, sweetness,
and decorum, seemed to lay a votive offering before
Toppie and her bereavement. “I have never
known a greater.” But as she thus offered her wreath
and bowed her head, Giles saw a deep colour rise slowly
in Alix’s averted face.
“And here is monsieur de Maubert,” said madame
Vervier, turning to greet the latest entry. “Jules
evidently is belated in some distant village. We will
wait no longer, I think. Albertine’s soup will be
spoiled.”
“Have you not a picture of this lovely mademoiselle
Toppie?” Giles heard André say to Alix as they moved
to the dining-room, madame Vervier leading the way
on monsieur de Maubert’s arm.
“No, I have no picture of her,” said Alix.
“You know her well?”
“Very well. She lives near Mr. Bradley’s family.”
If madame Vervier’s voice showed full adequacy, so
did her child’s. Alix’s adequacy, her grave courtesy,
untinged by withdrawal, yet setting a barrier, filled
Giles’s thoughts during the meal. She, too, knew just
what she wanted to say and just how to say it; yet how
much deeper, he felt sure, was her perturbation than
madame Vervier’s. She had seen her mother, before
the eyes of her English friend, involve herself in a web
of implicit falsehood. How false was madame Vervier’s
web Alix could not know; but she had known
enough to feel ashamed before him; not, Giles knew,
because Maman lied; but because she had need of lies.
She herself had also lied. Giles, on their journey, had
seen Toppie’s photograph in her dressing-case. She
had lied because she wished to remove Toppie, as well
as herself, from even an indirect intimacy with André
de Valenbois. It was as though some deep instinct
warned her against him. And though Giles again
deplored her readiness, he could not feel that he regretted
it.
She sat opposite him, all silvery in the soft candle-light,
her young downcast face set in its narrow frame
of hair, and he knew that grief and fear were in her
heart. Madame Vervier talked much, for her, and her
gaze, turned once or twice on her child, seemed, as was
its wont, to include her and to carry her on to further
depths of contemplation. But even madame Vervier
could not guess what was in Alix’s heart.
After supper they all went out on the verandah. The
vines fluttered against a moonlit sky and moonlight
washed in upon them like a silvery tide. Mademoiselle
Blanche, wrapped in swansdown, came gliding in, and
Jules, with a pipe, emerged from the shadows and sat
in his accustomed place on the steps. Giles felt that it
soothed the lacerated heart of the young artist to be
with madame Vervier. Like a wounded wild animal,
he drew near the hand he trusted. She was capable of
compassion; of great gentleness; of most disinterested
friendship. An enigma to Giles, there she sat, and her
soft, meditative alto joined in the old songs they all
sang together, while Alix, behind her in the shadow,
leaned her head, as if weary, upon her shoulder and
listened. But more than weariness was expressed in
the child’s attitude. Giles, listening to the dove-like
tenderness of “L’Amour de moi,” divined it all. Alix
sought comfort from the pressure of new apprehensions,
new intuitions, new complexities; and more than
for herself, it was for Maman that she thus drew near.
The very love, tender, devout, brooding, of the song,
was in the gesture with which she laid her head beside
her mother’s and looked out across her breast into
the unknown future.