The Little French Girl
PART I

CHAPTER II

Alix opened her eyes. Someone was standing still before her. Of all the footsteps that came and went, these had stopped. For a moment, so deeply was she sunk in the vision of the past, she stared bewildered at the young man in khaki, forgetting where she was and how she had come there. Then a jostling, irrelevant crowd of recent memories pressed forward:—“They will be glad to see my darling”; the grey Channel; the faces like earthenware jugs. And, even before she had identified him as monsieur Giles, a suffocating relief rose in her at the sight of him, while, strangely, one more memory seemed, on the threshold of the new life, to offer itself with a special significance, a special interpretation of what she was to find;—the memory of Maman, herself, and Captain Owen standing together in the Place de la Concorde and of Maman’s voice saying to him, as they looked at the spot where the guillotine had been, at Strasbourg, still in her crêpe, and up the Champs Élysées, while splendid clouds sailed in the blue above them:—“We are not like you, mon ami. Tocsins, tumbrils, trumpets are in our blood;—Saint Bartholomew; the Revolution; Napoleon. Your history knows no rivers of blood and no arcs of triumph.”

It was monsieur Giles, of course, and he was like Captain Owen, only en laid. He was tall and young and grave with round, solemn eyes, staring at her, and a big mouth. And he was very good; she saw that at once; and then she saw that he was deeply troubled. “I’m so horribly sorry,” was what he said. But it was more than embarrassment at the miscarriage of their meeting and dismay at her plight, though the echo of her own distressful state came to her from his face. She, who from the earliest age seemed to have been fashioned by life to read the signs of discomfort and restraint in the faces of those about her, knew now unerringly that this good young man, who had no tocsins or tumbrils or trumpets in his blood, was deeply troubled at seeing her. “I’m so horribly sorry,” he repeated, and he seized her dressing-case, Maman’s old discarded one with the tarnished monogram “H. de M.,” from which the crest had fallen away. “You’ve been here for hours,” he said. “Your mother’s letter did not give the day. Her wire only came this afternoon, late. We are a good way from London and trains are bad.” He was not trying to throw the blame on anybody. His voice accepted it all for himself; but she knew that the mistake had been Maman’s, Maman so forceful, so practical, yet so careless, too. Maman had taken it for granted that they lived quite near London; she had taken it for granted that the wire would arrive in good time.

“Have you had anything to eat?” monsieur Giles almost shouted at her. “Where’s your box? Is this all? I’m so horribly sorry.”

“Yes, this is all. It has not been so long, really. I have not eaten. I was afraid to go to the restaurant lest I should miss you.”

Her English was so good that she saw him at once a little reassured. He had shouted like that partly from embarrassment and partly because he thought she might only understand if he talked loud. His face, as he seized her box in his other hand, echoed her smile as it had echoed her distress. It was a kind face. It echoed people’s feelings easily.

“Let me take the bag; you cannot carry all,” said Alix.

But he shoved himself sideways through the door and then held it open while she passed out, commenting as he did so, “But, I say, you’re not a child!”

“A year makes a great difference,” said Alix. “And I was not really so young; already fifteen, when Captain Owen first saw me, last October, in Cannes.”

Monsieur Giles said nothing to this, and she wondered what Captain Owen had written of her and Maman after that first meeting.

Now they were sitting opposite each other at a little table that seemed to have a great many cruets and salt-cellars upon it. It was a very bright and very ugly room, and through the doors, opening and shutting incessantly, came the muffled roar of incoming trains; but after the waiting-room it was homelike. She was safe with monsieur Giles. He was a person who made you feel safe. Soup was put before them, all substance and no savour, but she ate it eagerly, and said that, yes, please, she would like fish.

“And then the beef,” said Giles to the waiter, who had a pallid face and looked, Alix thought, detached and meditative as he was, like a littérateur.

“I don’t advise the beef, Sir,” he said in a low, impassive voice. “It’s specially tough to-day, Sir. You’d do better with the mutton.”

“Mutton, then, by all means!” said Giles, laughing. “Rather nice, that, what?” he asked, smiling at Alix across the table when the waiter was gone.

He showed beautiful white teeth when he smiled. They were his only beauty; though she liked his golden-green eyes, fig-coloured. His face was vehement, almost violent in structure with a prominent nose and so high a top to his head that it seemed to be boiling over. Though he looked so kind, he looked also as if he could get angry rather easily, with a steady, reasonable anger, and the more she observed him the less she found him like his brother. Captain Owen’s lips, though broad, had been delicately curved, and his nut-shaped eyes had always seemed to smile a little lazily. Sweetness rather than strength had been in his face and an air of taking everything lightly. She had always felt of him that he would fight just as if he were playing tennis; whereas when Giles fought, she felt sure, he would clench his teeth and look fierce and sick. And though he was younger than Captain Owen, he was far more worn, strangely worn for one so young; and he was not at all homme du monde.

Captain Owen had always struck them as homme du monde. But even Maman could not have been sure about that, since she had so emphatically impressed upon Alix that she was to define for her with exactitude the social status of the Bradleys. Maman was sure that they were not noblesse; but Alix was to tell her whether they were petite noblesse or haute bourgeoisie, or, tout simplement, commerçants.

“Not that, I think,” said Maman thoughtfully; “but with another race it is difficult to tell.”

“And since Captain Owen was so much our friend, what interest can it have for us?” Alix had inquired, with the dryness she could sometimes show towards Maman.

Maman had replied that it made no difference at all as far as an individual, at large, as it were, unattached and irresponsible in a foreign country, was concerned; but that it did make a difference, all the difference, when it came to the family itself and its milieu. “At all events, they are rich, I am sure of that,” said Maman; but Alix, as she ate her fish and looked across at monsieur Giles, was not so sure. He was rather shabby; even for an old uniform.

“You know,” he said, “I’m not going to take you to Sussex to-night. It’s too late and you’re too tired. Don’t try to eat that nasty sauce; scrape it off and leave it. I apologize for our sauces, Mademoiselle.—I’m going to take you to my aunt’s. She’ll be able to put us up and I’ll telephone to her now. Don’t run away in disgust with us and our sauces, while I’m gone.”

There was no danger of that. Even when he was not there, Alix felt herself safe in the hands of monsieur Giles, and the waiter when he brought the mutton helped her very considerately, as though he recognized her as young and tired and a foreigner, and placed before her, almost with a paternal air, a dish half of which was devoted to pommes de terre à l’eau and half to a slab of dark green cabbage strangely struck into squares.

“I’ve wired to Mummy, too,” said Giles, when he came back, “and told her we’ll turn up to-morrow morning; so that’s all right.” And now he asked her questions. What did she read? Did she care for pictures and music? How had she learned to speak such admirable English?

Alix told him that she and Maman had often spoken English together and that she had had English governesses. “I always liked your books, too. That made it easier. ‘Alice’ and the rabbit and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Dombey and Son.’ Have you read those?”

He said he had. “There are no books in France for girls to read as far as I can make out,” he added; and Alix, suspecting a hint of detraction, replied: “Our chefs d’œuvre are for later in life. Perhaps great books cannot be written for girls.”

“I question that!” said Giles, smiling at her. “Great books should be written for everybody.”

“We can read Racine and Corneille and Lamartine,” said Alix.

“And Bossuet,” said Giles, grinning, “and ‘Les Pensées de Pascal.’ Awfully jolly, isn’t it! Unfortunate child;—or, rather, fortunate, since you can read us.”

Alix reflected, a little vexed.

“Here’s another kind of sauce,” said Giles, as a portion of apricot tart was placed before each of them surrounded by a yellow glutinous substance. “I’ll grant you your cooking if you’ll grant me the best books for everybody.—Anyhow, I see you’re too tired to argue. We’ll fight it out some other time.”

“But how did you come to appreciate our cooking so well?” Alix asked. “It is made with flour, this sauce, not properly cooked;—that is the trouble.”

“The trouble is that it’s the same sauce as the one that went with the fish, only coloured to look different.—I travelled in France when I was a boy, you see. And I’m just back from nine months there. I was in the East before that, for the first years of the war.”

“In France for nine months? Why did you not come to see us?” Alix asked. She asked it without stopping to think, for it was so strange that they should not have seen Captain Owen’s brother.

“I was at the front, and wanted all my leaves at home,” said Giles, and he smiled very brightly at her. He did not look at all embarrassed now; yet she had a surmise. He stopped himself from showing embarrassment. Surely he could have come? Had he not wanted to come? And he was going on talking, while he paid the bill, as if he felt she might be asking herself that question: “My aunt lives in a part of London called Chelsea. At the time ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was written, it was all gardens there; it’s mostly flats now. We’ve changed very much, in all sorts of ways from the England of ‘Pride and Prejudice’; just as you have from the France of Lamartine.”

Everything was dimmed with fog as they drove through the streets and she was suddenly very sleepy, yet she kept on thinking, as she looked out, of those nine months that monsieur Giles had been in France. He must have been there, then, when Captain Owen was killed. How strange that he had never come, and that Captain Owen had never spoken of him. She was too sleepy, however, to think of it very carefully and, when they stopped at the brightly lighted door of a large building, she stumbled in alighting so that Giles, with a steadying “Hello, hello,” put a hand under her elbow and guided her into a lift; and, still so sustained, she was presented a moment later to a stout, rosy lady with pince-nez and smooth grey hair who herself opened the door of a white and green appartement and said: “Poor child, she must be put to bed at once.”

From Giles she passed to Aunt Bella, who smelt of toilet vinegar and had a seal ring on her small glazed-looking hand.

After that Alix was only drowsily aware of a little pink bedroom where a row of pink, blue and green water-colours framed in gilt hung upon the walls. Her head sank into a pillow and all the troubled thoughts into sleep; but, just before she was quite oblivious, a little tap came to the door; it opened softly and a tall head, silhouetted on the lighted hall, looked in, and Giles said, “Good-night, Alix.”

It was treating her as a child and it made her feel very safe.

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