The Little French Girl
PART II

CHAPTER XI

“There are many things to consider,” madame Vervier pursued, simply and tranquilly, while Giles sat transfixed. “I should have to think of many things.—Your position; your prospects; they are not, I gather, brilliant. But one of the gravest disadvantages of a position like mine is that it narrows my field of choice; terribly narrows it. Family and position count for everything here in France. It is not one little individual choosing another little individual; we are more serious than you in that. It is one family choosing another. It is two foyers coming together to found a third. I have spoiled all this for Alix.” Madame Vervier took up her stone again, again weighing it in her hand, and now it was as if she weighed the sense of her culpability towards her child. “I have spoiled it. Money would have helped me to atone; but not only was I not philosophe at twenty-three; I was also credulous; ignorant; reckless. The man for whom I left my husband was poor and had great schemes. I gave him all I had. He sucked me dry. C’était un bien méchant homme,” madame Vervier remarked in a tone of surpassing detachment, “and what would have been my fate I cannot tell had not the admirable friend who rescued me from his clutches left me, on dying, a small annuity. That is all I dispose of. And with what I have been able to set aside for Alix year by year, I have amassed only the tiniest dot; hardly enough to clothe her.—I go into all this very summarily for the moment, though I owe you every detail. You shall have them later on. You shall hear of the old aunts who brought me up and who were, also, inveigled by monsieur Vervier. Even my family did not save me since I was so unfortunate as to marry him after the divorce. It is a long story. But for the present it is enough that you should see why, aside from my own position, there is for Alix no possibility of a suitable marriage in France. Whereas in England all is different.”

“Yes, it’s different in England,” Giles muttered, since she paused as if for his assent. He was still too transfixed by the sudden theme to dispose of his own thoughts. He felt as if madame Vervier, with her calm, her deliberation, her fluency, were casting, loop by loop, a silken net about him. And he, the dismayed and astonished fish, looked here and there through the meshes for a means of escape that would not too violently tear the web.

“Quite different,” said madame Vervier with confidence. “That is why I sent her to England. That is why I make you my proposal now. In blood Alix is much your superior; your fortune, I know is small; your position obscure. But I like you monsieur Giles;—I like you very much. Oh, I have studied you since you came among us! And,” madame Vervier added, smiling with a kind of indulgence upon him, “you like Alix very much. I have seen that.”

So she gathered up the last strand and considered her captive before drawing him definitely on shore.

“And poor little Alix? Where does she come in?” broke from Giles. After his long mute immobility these were the first words that came to him. “Is she to be considered in the matter?”

“Poor little Alix? Why poor?” madame Vervier questioned kindly. “It would not with you be brilliant; but it would be safe. You will be tender and faithful always. You have not to assure me of that. And you would, I am convinced, do all that is in your power to do in order that she may be well placed in the world.”

“And aren’t her feelings to count at all in this disposal of her? She’d never have me,” Giles declared with a sort of indignant mirth. “I’m the last person in the world she’d ever think of.”

“You underrate your attractions,” said madame Vervier, still more indulgently. “Alix is very fond of you. And she is still a child; singularly still a child. We may for a year or two put the question of Alix’s feelings aside. At her age one has no feelings. It lies with you, and with me, to see that when the time comes they are the right ones. She is devoted to you”—madame Vervier enlarged her assurance. “That is unquestionable.”

“But I care for somebody else!” Giles heard himself almost shouting. It was unbelievable that he should have to say to madame Vervier what he had never explicitly said to himself; unbelievable that he must set the sacred figure of Toppie between them. But she was actually drawing him on shore and there was nothing for it but to break through.

“Somebody else?” madame Vervier repeated. Giles had grown pale with the shock of his own avowal, yet, all the same, he was aware of a side glance at the comedy of her discomfiture. It was as if all the strands dropped from her hands.

“Yes,” he nodded; “I love somebody else.”

She might be discomfited, but she retained her resourcefulness. “Somebody I know of?”

“Yes,” Giles doggedly repeated. “Somebody you know of.”

It was then madame Vervier, after their little pause, who supplied, with a strange softness, the evident name.—“Toppie.”

“Yes, Toppie.” Giles turned his head away and fixed his eyes on the blue outside.

And madame Vervier sat silent. Very gently she laid down her stone—Giles was never to forget the look of that smooth, pinkish-grey stone—and folded her hands in her lap. She rested her eyes upon the young man—though his head was turned away from her Giles knew that she was looking at him;—and the silence, in the pale room, with the brilliant day beating from without upon it, grew long. It grew so long that Giles had time to draw his mind from his own confusion and to wonder what was in hers.

Then, when she spoke, her voice was so new to him, so unexpected, that it was as if a new chapter in his knowledge of her opened gently before his eyes. Uncertainty, hesitation was in it; something almost shy; a lovely sweetness. It was revealed to him that for all her goddess-like invulnerability she might have known a qualm of pity for Toppie; it was revealed to him that a romantic girl still lived in her heart, rapt in the wonder of a love-story. “But then—does not that make it all right?” she said.

“How do you mean, right?” Giles asked.

“If you love Toppie?—Will you not marry her? Will you not both be happy?—In your beautiful English way of happiness—for ever after?”

She was smiling at him from her cloud of shyness, seeming to feel the secret disclosed to her too beautiful and delicate for her to venture near its nest; and the childlike quality he had seen in her forehead irradiated all her features, while in sincerest, most ingenuous joy she forgot her own hopes.

“You see,” said Giles—and he spoke gently to that child—“Toppie would never have me. She’ll never love anyone but Owen.”

Owen’s name did not for a moment stay her. “Never? Oh, no. You are young enough to believe in that word; and so is she. I am old and wise in that. You may trust me when I tell you that it is a word too large for our slight human nature. So many eternities”—madame Vervier smiled at him—“I have seen melt away.”

“She’d never have me,” Giles repeated.

“You think that no one will have you. It is not so.—Have you tried?”

“No.” Giles shook his head. “I don’t think I want to try, really—I don’t think I want her different.”

“Dieu!” madame Vervier now breathed. “You will embrace a celibate life?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I shall. I never thought about it,” poor Giles muttered. “I’ve never thought about Toppie in that way. I’ve always loved her—ever since I was a boy—knowing that she could only be for somebody else.”

“But then”—madame Vervier in a slight bewilderment groped her way among these unfamiliar shapes—“if you have never thought about her in that way—perhaps you will be able to think about Alix. She, too, cares so much for your Toppie. Toppie would become your patron-saint. Together you would worship at her shrine.—Does it interfere with what I had planned for you and Alix?”

“I’m afraid it does. I’m afraid it absolutely interferes.” Giles, his face suffused with red, sat looking down, struggling with difficulty to master a sense of tears. “It’s impossible, you know; quite impossible. Dear little Alix. All I ask, you must see that, is to take care of her.”

“I have blundered,” said madame Vervier. “Forgive me. We will speak of it no more.”

“But you’ve spoken of it beautifully. I’m glad to have you know,” said Giles, and the strange sense that this was so made part of his amazement.

“We will speak quite differently, then, of Alix,” said madame Vervier. “We will talk of her, not as your future wife, but as your little friend. Even so she is fortunate. And I!—how fortunate I am—for I know that I can count upon you absolutely. You will help me as no one else can help me. If not you, then another English husband. Who is this Lady Mary of whom Alix has written to me? She has sons?”

It was like being borne on the wings of a great aeroplane from continent to continent;—one nearly as strange as the other. Giles really felt inclined to gasp and ask for mercy. He could not go so fast or rise so far without a sense of giddiness.

“Lady Mary Hamble? Sons? I’m sure I don’t know,” he said, staring at the pilot.

“You do not know her? You have no relations with her?”

“I’ve seen her only once in my life. Alix, as far as I remember, has seen her only once. Last winter. She’s a nice woman. That’s all I know about her.”

“Yes. It was last winter. But she asked Alix to go to them. It was very foolish of her not to have gone. If I had been there it would not have happened so. Alix wrote of her with much liking. I gathered from the impression Alix had of her that it would be a good milieu.”

“Oh, excellent I should say. Much better than ours, of course.” Giles was able to recover something of his own broad smile, the farce of it, to his seeing, breaking through too strongly. “You’re quite right about us. We’re not brilliant at all.”

“So I had inferred.” Madame Vervier considered him with kind and lucid eyes. “She is a femme du monde.”

“Very much so, I imagine. I don’t know any femmes du monde, except you,” said Giles.

“Ah, my claim to the rôle would be disputed,” madame Vervier remarked. “She will, I think, have sons. Since it is a position, there will be a son to inherit it.”

“Well, yes. There certainly might be,” said the laughing Giles. He leaned back, clasping his ankle with his hands, and took open possession of his mirth.

Madame Vervier, all indulgence, showed her awareness of its grounds. “It is strange to you, almost horrifying, that I should have such computations; is it not?”

“Well, I don’t know. Plenty of English mothers have them, of course. Only they’re not so frank about them. All the same, you know, you mustn’t count upon us. We couldn’t do much in that line. My mother, for instance, would never think of such a thing, and if Alix came back to us she’d be like one of my sisters; trained, if you like, to a profession. Marriage would only be by chance; for her, as for them.”

“Dieu! You are a strange people!” said madame Vervier. “To leave to chance what is of the most vital importance in a woman’s life! No; you are not serious. You live dans le brouillard. Life must be less difficult a thing with you since it is possible to face it so lightly. I should not, it is evident, care to leave Alix among you unless it were in the hope of marriage. I could myself have her trained to a profession. If I gave her up again, it would be because I hoped for something better. I am not féministe. I think a professional life deplorable for a woman. A necessity in many cases, no doubt; but a deplorable necessity. An artist’s life is happier; but I hope that my Alix may find the happiest life; the life of a woman married well. So, if she returns to England, it is for the sake of the chances, and you, I believe, will help to make them for her. To begin with, you will see that she accepts Lady Mary Hamble’s next invitation.”

“Confound her impudence!” Giles was saying to himself, but he was saying it tenderly. He was enjoying her impudence; it was part of the comedy that, for all her pitiful, her tragic aspects, she offered him. “I see that I am to be counted upon as a sort of père de famille for Alix,” he observed, and though genial his tone was certainly ironic.

“Précisément,” smiled madame Vervier. “You will not, I know, be a dog in the manger and grudge to others what you do not want for yourself.”

“Ah, but that’s a very different thing from asking Old Dog Tray to go trotting about to find her a husband,” Giles objected. “I don’t see myself as a matchmaker, you know; I can’t promise to do anything at all in that line for Alix.”

“You were not asked to be Old Dog Tray. You were asked to be le Prince Charmant,” madame Vervier returned, a hint of the caustic in her kindness. “And I do not now ask you to trot. I ask you only, if an occasion offers, to see that she does not miss it. She has not the heredity of the English girl. She will not know how to make, or take, occasions for herself.”

“I think you are being rather nasty about the English girl,” Giles now commented. He and madame Vervier were on strangely intimate terms and could deal out friendly irony to one another. “The English young man counts for something after all. What we hope for, we romantic English, is that he will make the occasion.”

“Oh, no. Not nasty; not at all nasty. I admire them, your English girls; I admire their enterprise,” smiled madame Vervier. “Young men do not know how to make occasions, and since the English mother feels it beneath her dignity to make them, it is left for the girl to combine the rôle of mother and daughter. It is a difference of mœurs, that is all, and I wish Alix to have the advantage of your mœurs while keeping the immunities of her own. The question that now remains is: Does she return to you? She does not expect to. You will have gathered that she feels very keenly your brother’s silence in regard to his visits to us in Paris.”

Again it was a case of her surpassing detachment. She went to the heart of the matter as if it had been, merely, a question of his brother. Yet the strange thing was that, though so detached, she did not affect one as callous.

“Yes. She feels it very keenly,” said Giles. “She can’t, of course, understand the grounds of his shrinking. She was sure that when you knew you would feel as she did and would not think of letting her come back.”

For madame Vervier had not known. He was sure of that now. She might be detached, and even callous; but she was not brazen.

“La pauvre chérie!” the mother ejaculated and it was on a sudden note of profound tenderness. “She is sensitive to such a point, and it is obvious that, had I imagined such a predicament for her, I could not have sent her among you. We must not blame him. He could not have foreseen what was to come.” She mused now, compassionately, upon the grounds of Owen’s shrinking. “But how much wiser had he written quite openly and naturally of his leaves to Paris. The tone should have been kept to the tone of Cannes. Ah, it is indeed a pity that he showed so little resource!”

“I don’t suppose Owen was in a state of mind to feel resourceful,” said Giles sombrely. When madame Vervier spoke like this, chasms opened between them. But were there not just such chasms between him and Alix? “I think I like him the better for it,” said Giles.

“Ah—and I do not love him the less!” madame Vervier returned with an effect of quickness, though she spoke quietly. “I do not love him the less. I do not even blame him. And it is this leniency of mine that has given Alix her first perplexity in regard to my conduct.—Or is it her first? Who knows what goes on in those innocent but astute young hearts!—Ah, monsieur Giles, that, you would like to tell me, will be the worst punishment of all;—when Alix knows.”

“I don’t want you to be punished,” said Giles sombrely. “I don’t want to tell you anything.”

“It is so sure to come that it needs no telling. That is perhaps what is in your mind.—Or, no; it is only that you are kind, strangely kind to me,” said madame Vervier, rising as she spoke and moving, with her light, majestic step to the window. She pulled up the blind, for the sun no longer beat into the room, and stood looking out for a moment without speaking, her back turned to him; then she said: “Alix, too, is kind. I do not fear for our relation, hers and mine. When she is of an age to hear the truth, she shall hear it.”

“She loves you very deeply,” said Giles.

“She loves me very deeply,” madame Vervier repeated. “I have no fear.”

Giles, too, had risen, and moved to the mantelpiece where the picture of Alix in its blue-and-silver frame stood. He looked at it in silence for some moments.

“And how will you persuade her to come back?” he said at last.

“You want her back?” madame Vervier asked from the window.

“Of course I want her back,” said Giles. He spoke quietly, almost casually; yet it was strange to feel the weight of his own decision. He pledged himself to something with his words. They implicated him in the situation from which he removed Alix. It was only for himself that he had a right to speak and in accepting Alix he accepted the cloud that hung about her; he brought it back among them; and he knew that the responsibility was heavy.

“Then she shall go to you,” said madame Vervier. “I shall not be able to persuade her. I shall attempt no persuasion. She will obey me. That is all. She will wonder at me for sending her. She will feel that it should too much offend my pride to send her back on false pretences”—how they understood each other, mother and child—“but she will go. Our French children learn to obey. It is the first article in their creed.—And since the pretences are not too false for your taste, monsieur Giles, they are not too false for mine.”

“They are too false for my taste,” said Giles. He was implicated, but madame Vervier must see just how and where. “It’s Alix I’m thinking of. I sacrifice my taste to her.”

“And I,” said madame Vervier, “sacrifice my pride.”

She stood there looking out, white against the blue, and her voice, for all its calm, was sombre. “I am not ungrateful,” she added. “Do not think me ungrateful. I see what you do for my child.”

“I see what you do for her,” said Giles.

“Yes;—but I am a mother!”

“It must be all the harder,” said Giles. “You consent to see yourself belittled in her eyes. And you consent to live without her.”

Madame Vervier stood silent at that for a long moment. Something of the grave ardour in the young Englishman’s voice may well have touched her to a deeper vision of herself, and of him. It was as if arrested that she stood contemplating the novel homage laid at her feet. For, after her pause, she turned suddenly, and fixed her dark gaze upon him. He was never to forget her as she stood there, against the great sea and sky; never to forget, as the last of all the varying impressions of the afternoon, his sense of a greatness, a magnanimity, like the sky’s, arching above her earthly errors. It remained with him even though the last words she spoke were so sad, as if, instead of the splendour he divined in her, she held out to him a handful of dust. “Do not think too well of me,” she said. “I like you too much. With you there can be no pretence. Do not think too well. It is best for Alix; but it is best for me, too, that she should not be near my life.”

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