The Little French Girl
PART I

CHAPTER VIII

It was only a few days after Christmas that a dreadful thing happened to Alix; the most dreadful thing that had ever happened to her.

They were all in the drawing-room after dinner—all except Francis and Jack who had gone to bed;—Ruth writing, Rosemary altering a blouse and Giles reading in his accustomed place. Alix sat beside Mrs. Bradley on the sofa, turned sideways while she held a skein of wool for her to wind, and she was never to forget the look of that heather-coloured wool.

“Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley suddenly, “how was it that Owen didn’t see you when he went to Paris on leave?—that one leave he had; in February last winter. You must have been away, I think, for he said nothing of you.”

Alix sat there, holding up the wool, and, even as she faced Mrs. Bradley thus, steadying eyes and lips and hands, she was aware, though she could only see him as a blurred form, that Giles, suddenly, was watching her.

Captain Owen’s leave! His one leave! He had come to Paris three times in that last winter, and the last had been in April only a fortnight before his death. And he had never told his family! Why had he not told them? Why! Why! The clamour of her thoughts seemed so to fill her ears that it was like sinking in the sea. She had the sensation of drowning, yet of keeping calm while she drowned, resourceful, even as she measured her calamity, and she heard her own voice speaking from far above her it seemed—while beneath Mrs. Bradley’s eyes, beneath Giles’s, her thoughts raced swiftly, swiftly;—“Yes; we should, of course, have seen him, but we were away; we were away in the country at that time.”

“At Cannes, I suppose,” said Mrs. Bradley. “What a pity for Owen. How lonely he must have been. He hadn’t time to come home, you see; only the two days. And he knew nobody in Paris except the old professor’s family, where Ruth and Rosemary stayed before the war.”

“No; we were not at Cannes; we had gone to the sea in Normandy,” said Alix. It was in her tradition, that an emergency should find one resourceful, yet, had she had time for the reflection, her own swiftness in resource might now have surprised herself. “Maman has a little house on the coast that we sometimes go to, but that she usually lets. We depend very much on letting it every summer. We went that time in February to put it in order for the spring. It could not be helped; tenants were coming early,” said Alix.

“What a pity,” Mrs. Bradley repeated sadly. “Or if only he could have managed to go to you there.”

“You may be sure that we wired at once and suggested it; but the time was too short,” said Alix.

Now she was able, since Mrs. Bradley said no more, to come to the surface, alive and apparently uninjured, but to her own consciousness floating like a helpless, battered object. Something dreadful had happened to her; she knew that; and to Maman; and to them all. But she could not see it clearly. Only by degrees, as Mrs. Bradley wound her last loops of wool and said, “Thank you, dear,” and her hands could fold again in her lap, did it come to her that the dreadful thing was something that Captain Owen had done; and most of all to Maman.

He had been with them; staying with them; three times; the cherished friend; and he had never told his family. She sat there, very still, and tried to think why it could have been, and the picture that came to her was of Captain Owen sitting on one side of the fire in the little salon of the rue de Penthièvre; sitting as Giles now sat; looking across at Maman who, her finger in the pages of a half-closed book, returned his gaze with a strange sadness. And from this picture, lifting her eyes, she met Giles’s fixed upon her and saw that Giles knew, too.

She looked back at him. All she could do was to look. To pretend not to see that he knew, to look away while she pretended, would only be to reveal more glaringly to him her sense of their mutual misfortune. Giles, too, knew that Captain Owen had been with them in Paris; he would not have looked at her like that if he had not known; with that dark and heavy look.

“Oh, I say!” groaned Rosemary, stretching herself out in her chair with a wide yawn of fatigue, “why was I such a fool as to take out this sleeve! It was well enough long, and I’ll never get it in properly again.”

“I told you to cut it kimono shape; you’d have had no trouble then,” said Ruth. “Where’s your house in Normandy, Alix? We were in Houlegate, years ago, when we were kids. I never thought of you in Normandy somehow. Only in Cannes, among the orange-trees you know, romantic child.”

“It is at Vaudettes-sur-Mer,” said Alix. “I like Normandy better than the Riviera.”

“I never heard of Vaudettes-sur-Mer,” said Ruth. “Is it pretty? Has it got a sandy beach?”

“No; it is galets, not sand; not until the tide is low; and Vaudettes is up on the cliff so that one has a long climb down to get to it. But the village is very pretty.”

“Most French seaside villas are such hideous gimcrack things; worse than ours, I always think. Is your house an old one?”

“Yes; quite old; quite unspoiled. There are no modern villas yet at Vaudettes.”

Giles got up.

“Are you going to bed, dear?” Mrs. Bradley asked.

“No; I’m going to read in my room.”

“Do we make too much noise?”

“A little too much. Good-night everybody,” said Giles.

“How tired Giles looks,” said Mrs. Bradley.

“He’s grinding too hard at his work,” said Ruth.

Alix felt that it was not his work. Giles, too, had had a blow; and he was angry with her; darkly, heavily angry; why she could not tell. Only her heart swelled with a suffocating sense of resentment and of tears.

She did not go to the study next morning. She had thought and thought in the night, and she saw now that if Giles knew something that she knew, he also knew something she did not know. She was afraid of Giles and his knowledge; afraid of what they might have to say to each other. And she was angry with him, too, for making her afraid. Pain, dark and mysterious, pain that seemed to have come to her from his eyes, pressed upon her. And it made her think of the suffering that Grand-père’s eyes had conveyed; and of Maman. What she feared was that he would speak to her of Maman.

She did not go; but Giles came to her. She was curled up in her scarf on the sofa in the cold drawing-room, and it made her think of the time that she had waited at Victoria and Giles had been so late. He was not late now; he was early; and he said at once, making no pretence about it: “Come, please, I want to talk to you.”

She had felt herself angry with Giles, because of the injustice of his anger towards herself; but as she faced him in the study, the grey January morning outside the window, the gas-fire creaking in its dismal mirth in the grate, her anger went down. She felt pity for him. He, too, had not slept; he, too, had had a horrible night; and if he looked at her thus sternly it was, she saw, more because he was suffering than because he was angry. He stood before her, his hands thrust deeply in his pockets, and what he said was: “Look here, Alix, were you lying last night?”

Astonishment almost bereft her of breath. Lying? Could he have thought it possible that she was not lying? Could he have thought it possible—turning it over and over in his mind during the night—that she did not know about Captain Owen’s leaves? It flashed across her that, if she could find another lie, now, for him, and say that she had not been lying, he might believe her. He would have no knowledge with which to contradict that lie. But, while she looked at him, feeling her face getting whiter and whiter, what strangely came to her was that she could not lie to Giles. It was better to share whatever pain there was to be shared with him than to be shut out, with her lie, in loneliness, if in safety. So, keeping her eyes on him, in a steady voice she said: “Yes. I was lying.”

Giles at this contemplated her for a long time and it seemed to be with deep thoughtfulness rather than with any other feeling.

“Why?” he said at last.

“How could I not?” asked Alix.

“How could you not?—You can invent such a story, in every detail, and then come and ask me how not? What in Heaven’s name do you mean?” said Giles. “Have you no sense of truth?”

“Your mother did not know. Captain Owen never told your mother.” Alix’s voice was trembling, for she heard the emotion in his. “Would you have had me say to her, after he had kept silence, that he had been with us three times in Paris?”

Giles’s expression altered. “Three times?”

“Yes. Three. Not the once she thought. That time in February was the first. He came twice afterwards. You did not know?”

“No,” said Giles, “I didn’t know that. I thought it was only the once.”

He stopped. He stopped for a long time after saying this and suddenly she saw the blood mounting to his face. He became, slowly, crimson. He did not know what to say. Oh, poor Giles, what was this horrible perplexity that so darkened his good face when all that he had to tell her, when it finally came, was so simple? “I wasn’t in the same part of the front as he was. I didn’t follow what he did. It was by chance that I saw him in Paris, that time in February. I had a leave, too. And I saw him there, walking in the Bois with your mother.”

Giles had seen Maman! Alix felt herself grow dim with perplexity. She looked about her and sank down on a chair before her little writing-table. “Did you not speak to them?”

“No, I didn’t speak to them.” Giles stood there, in his helplessness, before her. “I thought they wanted to be alone.”

“But Maman would so have wished to know you. I do not see why you did not speak. Yes. I remember that they went to the Bois. He was with us all the time, you see. He stayed with us,” said Alix.

Poor Giles. How overwhelming was his plight! Could shame for his brother’s inexplicable duplicity, shame for his own strange silence, that day in the Bois, account for such confusion? “Yes. I was afraid you were lying,” was all he found to mutter.

“But you knew. You knew, and yet you kept it from your mother. It was for her sake that you kept it from her. It was for her sake I lied. What else could I do?” said Alix.

“Do you often lie like that? I mean—the house on the cliff;—the galet beach; the wire you sent him to come to you in Normandy;—were they all invented?” Giles ignored the question of his complicity.

“Some were invented and some not.” Alix tried to steady her thoughts so that she might satisfy Giles as to this point—so irrelevant a point it seemed to her. “I do not think I could have invented it all so quickly. We have the little house at Vaudettes. We often go there. But of course we were not there then. I do not think I often lie. Only when it is necessary; like this.”

Giles’s eyes studied her. “And if you had spoken the truth last night—the whole truth—as you know it—what would you have said?”

“But what I have said to you, Giles. That he was with us three times. That all his leaves were with us;—the last a fortnight before he was killed. Was it not better that I should lie to her than that she should know her son had been disloyal to her—as well as to my mother?”

Giles, while she spoke, had put up his hand to rub in perplexity through his hair; now it paused. “To your mother?”

“Was it not a great wrong he did her, too?”

“How do you mean?” Giles’s voice was short and sharp.

It came over her with a wave of old bitterness that this was an aspect of the question he had too much ignored. “Does my mother’s dignity not count? It was as if he had something to hide in their friendship; as if he were ashamed. That was to do her a great wrong. He owed Maman so much. She had been home to him.”

The memory of all that he owed Maman, the lonely young soldier; fireside talks; happy walks; plays, pictures, people; the lavishing of all she had to give;—the best, was it not, that life had to show?—struck too deeply at her, and suddenly she felt her eyes fill with tears. For Giles, too, made part of the wrong to Maman. His silence had had its complicity. It was as if he, too, tacitly, had helped Captain Owen to hide something of which he, too, was ashamed.

“I know, I know,” Giles muttered. He saw her tears and he was dreadfully troubled. “Of course she was most awfully good to him.—I mean—I can’t imagine why he said nothing—I can’t imagine why.”

But wasn’t he lying now? He who had not spoken to his brother and to Maman in the Bois? The sharp tangle of her thoughts hurt her. She leaned her elbows on the table and her forehead on her hands. “I don’t understand,” she said, keeping herself from crying.

“Poor little kid! Poor little kid!” broke as if irresistibly from Giles. He was almost crying, too. He walked up and down behind her. She felt that he would have liked to kiss and comfort her as if she had been Ruth or Rosemary. But, turning away at last, he dropped into his chair before the fire and for a long time they were both silent.

“Look here, Alix,” he said suddenly at last. He had, it was evident, been thinking things out to quite new conclusions. “I wasn’t quite straight with you just now, and I want to be straight with you. I want you to be straight with me. Will you promise me to? Will you promise not to lie to me, ever?”

“Ever? How can I tell?” said Alix from between her hands. “It is sometimes necessary; if someone one loves is concerned.”

“Well,” Giles reflected on her proviso and, apparently, accepted it, “I can know you’ll want to tell me the truth, can’t I?”

“Yes. Oh, yes, Giles.”

“Good. I believe you’ll come to see it’s always better. Even in a hateful puzzle like this, perhaps. Well, then, I’ll begin. I wasn’t straight just now. I can imagine why Owen didn’t tell us about those Paris leaves. And I think it best you should be able to imagine it, too. It was because of Toppie.”

“Toppie?” Alix echoed faintly.

Giles’s back was turned to her as he sat before the fire. She could not see his face as he went on: “Yes, Toppie. They were engaged. They loved each other. You’ve seen what Toppie feels about him now. He is her past and he is her present; and her future, too. There’s nobody in the world for her but him. Well. That’s it. Can you imagine Toppie, while he was away in France, seeing as much of another man as Owen saw of your mother?”

Alix sat staring at the back of Giles’s head. “She was not alone; in a strange country. Why should he not find a little peace and happiness with a friend?”

“Yes, I know. That seems all right. But why didn’t he come home and see Toppie? He could have managed to get one leave for England, instead of three for Paris; almost certainly, if he’d wanted to. And put all that aside. The worst thing of all, the thing that would shatter Toppie’s life if she could know it, is that he kept quiet about the last two leaves, and never wrote to any of us that he’d been with you and your mother for the first. What would Toppie feel if she could know that? I ask you.”

“You mean,” said Alix, pressing her forehead on her hands and staring, now, down at the table, “that he cared most for Maman?”

“Doesn’t it look like it?”

She tried to think. “He would have come back to Toppie after the war. It was perhaps because of the war. He did not know, those times he came to us, that it was the end.” The new, strange shapes of things Giles had set before her were mingling irrefutably with all her memories, and the memory of last night returned to her. Captain Owen and Maman on either side of the fire. Captain Owen’s dwelling eyes. How much he had cared for Maman! Oh, how much! And, trying to answer her own thoughts, she went on: “Maman did not care most for him. I do not think so. She cared very much. His death was a great blow. But so many people care for Maman. He could have come back to Toppie; Maman would not have kept him.”

When she had said this, it was as if the silence between her and Giles was altered in its quality. He said nothing for so long a time that the echoes of her own words began to sing in her head like brazen bells. They were true words. Yet they did not ring true. Long before Giles spoke, she wished she had not said them.

“And you think,” he said, “that Toppie would have cared to marry a man who hadn’t been kept from marrying her?” How dreadful was Giles’s voice. Dark and heavy, as his eyes had been last night.

“No; no, Giles. I do not mean that. I am sorry. Not that. It was of Maman I was thinking. You think of Toppie and I think of Maman; the ones we love most. No; I see that she would not have married him.”

“You do see, Alix. That’s all I wanted. You see why he didn’t tell us. And that’s all we need say about it. He was my brother, and I was awfully fond of him. But he was very wrong. He did a great wrong. And you have lied for our sakes, and we’ve profited by it; if it is profit. All I pray is that you’ll never feel you have to lie, for anyone’s sake, again. There. That’s over. We’ll get to work. Have you everything you want?” Giles got up and took his pipe from the mantelpiece and his tobacco-pouch from his pocket. “And don’t let me ever see you afraid to come in here in the morning. It made me feel quite queer to find you crouched away in the cold as if I’d been an ogre.”

“I thought you were angry with me, Giles; and I thought I was angry with you. It makes me angry, always, at once, if I think people are displeased with me unfairly. I am like that.”

“Jolly well it may have made you angry. Of course I was fairly sick about your lying; and the house on the cliff; and the wire to Owen; on the top of everything else.”

“And even the house might have been a lie, you know,” said Alix, looking up at him. “If it had needed to be invented, and if I could have invented it in time.”

“I’m afraid it could. Yes; that’s what I thought. And it made me feel sick. But you’ve promised me about lies, haven’t you; and you must promise me, besides, that if you’re ever angry you’ll come and tell me so. To work, then,” said Giles, and he dropped into his chair and took up Bergson.

Alix did not take up her pen. She sat above her paper, but she knew that the last thing she could think of doing that morning was to write to Maman. She might be able to read the book about birds, by Hudson, that Giles had given her, and she drew it towards her and opened it; but soon found she could not read. Her heart seemed to be trembling and her blood trembling. All her mind was shaken; and the picture that flashed, disappeared, and flashed again, was always that memory of Captain Owen’s eyes as he gazed across at Maman from his place before the fire. It was not Maman’s fault. How could she have averted, how could she have avoided such a devotion? A sense of intolerable grief broke down her silence.

“Giles,” she said suddenly.

“What?” He put down his book at once. He, too, was not really reading. Perhaps his heart was trembling, too.

“May I say one thing more?”

“All right.”

“It is Maman, Giles. It is what you think of her. Perhaps I am always angry with you, because of what you think of her. Let me say it now, then. He cared for her most. But if you knew her you would understand; you would not blame her; perhaps you would not blame him so much.”

Giles had turned in his chair and was looking at her over his shoulder, in deep astonishment. “I’ve never said a word against your mother, Alix,” he said in a low voice.

“It is worse than words, Giles. I am not so stupid. You put her out. You will not look at her. But if you could see her you would understand. Maman never asks for anything. Why should she? She only gives.”

“I have seen her, you know,” said Giles. In sudden, intense uneasiness, distress, even, he got up and walked away to the window and stood there, his back to her, looking out.

“Did that explain nothing?” said Alix.

“She is very beautiful,” said Giles. “I never saw anyone so beautiful.”

“Oh, more, much more than that. How could he help caring for her? How can one govern one’s love for people? I do not mean that he was right. But he had always known Toppie, had he not? While Maman was something quite strange to him. And one thinks most, perhaps, of what is strange. Oh, I do not forget Toppie. But it would not have been to keep him true to Toppie, if she had sent him away.”

“She is very beautiful,” Giles repeated, almost dully; as if that were all he could find to say.

“Oh, Giles, if you could only know her!” said Alix. It was possible to speak like this to him now. And his back was turned to her and that made it easier. She leaned her forehead on her hands and looked down at the table while she went on: “Let me tell you what Maman makes me think of always. A mountain torrent. We have them in the mountains near Montarel. So swift, and dark, and clear, with such deep pools among the rocks; and such great leaps. Oh, more than beautiful! I saw an eagle once when I was kneeling by a pool. As I looked down into the water, it was as if I looked down into the sky and there was an eagle, wheeling in the blue—far, far below me. It gave me the strangest feeling; like Maman sometimes. And her lovely, small things; like the little pinks and campanulas that grow along the banks; so sweet and tiny; and little mésanges with bright blue heads, hanging upside down in the birches. There is no one like her. Everyone else is still and dull beside her. Who could help loving her? Toppie would love her, I am sure. You would love her, too, Giles, if you knew her.”

He had turned, while she spoke, and was looking at her and, lifting her head, she met his eyes and saw how deeply she had touched him. Deeply touched, deeply troubled, Giles looked across at her; but she saw that he was thinking of her and not of Maman. It was as if he were so sorry for her, and so fond of her, that he hardly knew what to say. And what he did say at last was: “You are rather like a mountain torrent yourself; eagles and campanulas and all!”

“I? Oh, no.” She was glad that Giles should think that of her, but it was of Maman she wanted him to think. “I am one of the still ones; one of the dull ones, beside Maman. And I never have great shattering leaps.” She looked away from Giles as she saw further into her simile, saw things she wanted him—oh! so wanted him—to see and understand. “Let me tell you, Giles. When one loves her, that is what one fears for her—those great leaps down from the rocks. So splendid; so bright and splendid; but so dangerous. There is danger for her always. When one loves her, that is what one fears.”

He said nothing. He stood there, leaning back against the window. Never in her life had she so spoken to anybody. For no one but this young Englishman, so lately a stranger, could she have found such words. They rose up from her heart unbidden, and the impulse beneath them was the deepest impulse of her life. More than the child’s love for its mother. There was in it a maternal love, watchful and succouring, for a creature cherished and in peril.

She had not looked back at Giles, and he came presently to her table and stood above her, moving the objects upon it here and there, as if he could not find the words to use. And at last he said: “You are right to love your mother. Never think I don’t understand that.”

“Perhaps we both love in the same way, Giles,” said Alix, still not looking at him. “You think of Toppie—and I think of Maman—perhaps in the same way.”

Giles stood very still. Then he said gently: “Perhaps we do. I feel Toppie in danger; in dreadful danger of being hurt; if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes, that is what I mean. And I can help you with Toppie. I can help you to keep the things that would hurt her from her. And perhaps, some day, if the time came, you would help me with Maman.”

Giles had ceased to move the inkstand and candle-sticks. He put his hands in his pockets. “What do you think of as her danger, Alix?” he brought out.

Alix had to think; it was not a new wonder; but she seemed to feel it newly, now that Giles was there to help her with it. “Perhaps you see it, Giles,” she suggested. “Is it something in her nature? Is it because she left my father? Perhaps you see the danger I can only fear. You give me that feeling sometimes. I am so much younger than you. There are things I do not understand.”

“Yes. I see. Yes.” Giles stood there. “You trust me with it all, then.”

“I trust you with everything, Giles.”

“You help me, and I’ll help you if ever I get the chance. I’ll not forget, Alix.” He put out his hand as he said these words and Alix felt that their clasp was on a pact. Yet, as he turned from her and went back to his chair, she had still the feeling that it was of her, not of Maman, that he was thinking. It was as if he saw her in danger.

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