The Little French Girl
PART II

CHAPTER XV

Giles, while Toppie spoke, had started up, resting on his hand and staring at her with eyes aghast and stupefied. What folly, what madness was this? How could Toppie find it in her heart to speak like this; to him—to him of all people?

Yet, in another moment, while he stared at her, memory had answered him. A vein of piercing intuition underlay Toppie’s blunder. It was only a half blunder. His misery of confusion had been for Owen, because of Owen’s secret that he had to hide. And she had seen it as for himself. But it was true that he had, if only for a moment, been in love with madame Vervier. He had, for a moment, partaken of the experience that swept men away. The figure of madame Vervier was haloed for him by fiery, dewy associations, and the pang of his sense of disloyalty to her would not have been so deep had he not known in her presence that poignant, perilous revelation of beauty. He saw all this while, silently, he stared at Toppie, and he saw that she could never, never understand or admit his half truth. It was a weakness even to think of its avowal.

“How can you say anything so monstrous to me, Toppie,” he questioned, and it was sternly, “when you know I’ve never loved anyone but you?” This, indeed, was a whole truth that it behoved Toppie not to traduce.

But his sternness did not deflect her. “There are different kinds of love. I know you love me. I know you’ve had, always, a boyish, idealizing devotion for me. I will always be grateful to you for your devotion. But you are not in love with me. You’ve never known what it was to be in love till you met madame Vervier. Oh! Giles—you must see what I see so plainly! Perhaps you really think that I could be hurt and jealous in feeling myself no longer first. That is so wrong of you. It would lift a burden from me if I could see you married. I should be so glad, so glad of your happiness.”

“Good Heavens, Toppie!” Giles had started to his feet and stood above her, crimson with grief and dismay. “This is the most extraordinary nonsense! Happiness! With another woman! With Alix’s mother! She’s old enough to be mine if it comes to that; and as to marrying me—she’d as soon think of marrying a Chinaman. People haven’t these romantic ideas about marrying in France, I can assure you. Marry me!” Giles suddenly found himself forced by the thought to a loud laugh. “Besides,” he added, “why should you think that monsieur Vervier is dead? Why should you think that madame Vervier is a widow?”

He felt in the silence that followed these last unguarded words that Toppie looked at him strangely and, as he heard them echo—what, indeed, did he know about monsieur Vervier, damn him! He had, actually, never considered monsieur Vervier except as a discarded, dangling phantom of the past—as he heard the words that disinterred monsieur Vervier and set him there between him and Toppie, he felt that the bewildered ant had, indeed, stumbled on a luckless path.

“Owen always wrote of her as though she were a widow,” said Toppie, going slowly. She was not bewildered. She looked carefully, if with shrinking, at the figure he had placed before her in his foolish haste. “But you know so much more about her than Owen ever knew.—In those few days you saw and learned things he never saw. Perhaps you do know about monsieur Vervier. Perhaps you know that he isn’t dead; that she isn’t free. If that is so—doesn’t it explain even more?—Oh, Giles—I am afraid”—She stopped. She looked away. He saw the blood rising in her cheek as she checked the speech that must give him too much offence.

“I suppose what you mean,” said Giles gloomily, thrusting his hands into his pockets as he looked down at her, “is that I do know she isn’t free, and that, therefore, being in love with her, my love is a guilty passion. Something of that sort, what? Well, if you won’t take my word for it, there’s no more for me to say, is there?” Resentment had come into his voice. “We’d better be going.”

“I accuse you of nothing, Giles,” said Toppie, still dyed with her blush; “only I am sure that I am right in feeling that something has happened. I am sorry, but I can’t help feeling it. From the moment you spoke of madame Vervier I heard that your voice was changed;—so strained and strange; so full of reluctance. You wanted to say all against her that you could find to say. You wanted to guard yourself against your own feeling. But what came through, from the beginning, was that you found her—beautiful; mysterious; compelling.” Toppie found the words, a strange tremor in her voice. “What came through was that she was a goddess.”

Giles stood motionless, gazing down at her. He was seeing, suddenly, straight into Toppie’s heart; straight into the heart of their situation. How futile were his denials, when he could deny only for himself—and not for the other. The vein of piercing intuition in Toppie had led her to the portals of the truth. The name she saw inscribed there was the wrong name; that was all. Change Giles to Owen, and the truth was in her grasp. She knew that madame Vervier was beautiful, mysterious, compelling. She knew that both he and Owen had felt her a goddess. A chill of fear crept about Giles’s heart.

“Come; we’d better be going,” he repeated. He heard that his voice was harsh. He would discuss no further and he held out his hand to her. Toppie took it and rose to her feet.

She meant to be kind to him. She meant to be his friend;—Giles said it to himself as, silently, they went down the hill together. But in spite of all his compassionate understanding of her, his fear for her, what came over him, in wave after wave of grief and resentment, was that she was cold and hard. He had made her suffer because of what she had felt as false in him; but it was now, as it had always been, of Owen that she was thinking. He had cast, thank Heaven, no shadow on Owen; but perplexity, mystery, pain had come into her vision of Owen’s friend.

“Owen never said she was a widow; but I’m sure he believed her to be one.—Forgive me, Giles, but have you heard what makes you think she may not be? What do you know of monsieur Vervier? Alix has never spoken of him. It is so strange; for if he were alive he would be with them, would he not?”

“C’était un bien méchant homme.” These words, in madame Vervier’s tones of surpassing detachment, came back to Giles. “Alix probably never saw him. Her mother spoke of him. She said he was a bad man.”

“She spoke of him to you?”

“Yes, to me.”

“And she didn’t say whether he were alive or dead?”

“No. We weren’t talking about him. We were talking about Alix and her future. Alix will have hardly any dot, it seems, because monsieur Vervier made away with all her mother’s money. They are parted.”

“Did she leave him, or did he leave her?”

“She left him,” said Giles after a moment and he felt his voice harden towards Toppie. “Continue your cross-examination, pray.”

“But you know so much, so surprisingly much, Giles. How can I help asking? How can I help feeling interest in Alix’s mother, in Owen’s friend? It isn’t cross-examination. It is unkind of you to say that. Horribly unkind.”

“I don’t mean to be unkind. It’s you who are unkind, I think. Ask any questions you like.”

“How long after her first husband’s death did she marry monsieur Vervier? May I ask that?”

“Certainly you may,” said Giles. His bitterness carried him so far. Then he paused, aghast. He had known that to Toppie Alix could never have spoken of her mother’s misfortune as frankly as she had to him. He had forgotten the first misfortune. He was aghast; but while he made his pause he determined that there should be no half-measure here. Toppie should not again accuse him of double-dealing. “Didn’t Alix ever tell you that her mother was divorced?” he demanded, and he heard how hard and dry was his voice.

For a moment Toppie said nothing. Then she spoke, softly, as if in all sincerity she could not believe what she heard. Disastrous, indeed, was the time for such a hearing. “What did you say, Giles?”

“Alix told me, the day I brought her here last winter, that her father and mother had been divorced. If she didn’t tell you, that was, no doubt, because she took it for granted that I would.”

And again came Toppie’s dire silence. “And why didn’t you?”

“Why should I? It was none of our affair.”

“Isn’t Alix our affair?”

“Certainly she is. And she has nothing to do with monsieur Vervier.”

“She has something to do with her mother.”

“Yes.” Giles’ voice grew harder, dryer. “What she has to do with her mother we see. She is the product of her mother. Do you find fault with it?”

They had reached the road that wound among the birch-woods and dusk had fallen in it. The sky, paled to a faint apricot tint, shone dimly between the trees. Toppie stood still on the wayside grass and looked at him. Ineffaceably, in this instant of strange, unbelievable alienation (for had he not, in his last words, challenged Toppie with madame Vervier’s standards as set against her own?), Toppie’s image was stamped upon his mind; as ineffaceably as on that first time he had seen her. And now all her light was withdrawn. It was the end, as that had been the beginning. Pale, wraith-like in the dusk, she fixed her eyes upon him and they were dark with their repudiation. “Alix is not the product of her mother. Alix is good and her mother may be bad. You know better than I do what you think of her mother. It’s you I find fault with, Giles. Your words don’t tell me what you think.”

“I’ve kept nothing from you,” said Giles. It was a lie. He knew it, and he saw that Toppie knew it. He attempted an amendation of his statement. “Everything you’ve asked I’ve answered.”

“Have you? I will ask this, then. Did she leave her husband with monsieur Vervier? Did her husband divorce her because of monsieur Vervier? Was she unfaithful to her husband?”

“There were faults on both sides, I believe. Alix wouldn’t have been given for half the time to her mother if there hadn’t been faults on both sides.” Giles forced himself to speak steadily. “She was very young. People don’t judge these things so hardly nowadays.”

Toppie, her eyes on his, put aside the palliation. “Did she leave monsieur Vervier with another man? Was she unfaithful to monsieur Vervier, too? Is she a woman who has had lovers?” said Toppie, and the word was strange on her lips.

Giles stood there, stricken. He was so aware of horrible danger, pressing in upon him and Toppie from every side, that he could hardly command his thoughts to an order. All that came was a helpless literalness. There was no refuge from Toppie’s eyes; for her, or for himself. “Yes,” he said, “I’m afraid she is. That’s the trouble, you see.”

Toppie then looked away from him. She looked round her, standing so still, with no gesture of amazement or distress. But there was a sudden wildness in her eyes.

“Toppie, dear Toppie,” Giles pleaded. “She is not a bad woman. Wrong; but not bad. You can’t judge of these things. I’m not defending her.—It’s only that, seeing her, seeing all the beauty she has made in her life, I cannot feel about her mistakes as I should have thought I would. That’s why you felt me strained in speaking of her. It was a shock to me. And I didn’t want you to know. Put it away now, Toppie, I do beg of you. It has nothing, nothing to do with us. She’s a very beautiful, a very unfortunate woman, and it’s only by chance that we’ve stumbled upon these unhappy things in her past.”

Oh, the fatal background to his words! He knew how false they were, spoken to Toppie, for all that there was of truth in them for himself. “Let’s go home,” he urged, “and not talk about it any more.”

Toppie stood, her eyes fixed as if in careful scrutiny upon the distance. She had raised her hand, as he spoke, and pressed her fingers, bent, against her lips. He saw that she kept herself with a great effort from breaking into tears.

“It’s not that,” she uttered with difficulty. “It’s you.” And now she moved away. “I’m going home from here. I would rather be alone, please.”

The road led over the common to Heathside; there was a short cut through the woods to the Rectory.

“But, Toppie—I do implore you.” Poor Giles with his rough head and great round eyes stood and pleaded. “What have I done? What have you against me?”

“It’s everything, everything,” Toppie murmured. “It’s all I’ve felt in you this afternoon. I’ve stumbled—from one hidden thing to another.—It gives me dreadful thoughts. It’s as if”—she stopped again, her eyes still fixed on the distance—“as if there might be anything. She’s changed you so much.” And, her eyes coming to him at last, she spoke on, helpless in the urgency of her half-seen fear:—“It’s as if she might have changed Owen;—if he had ever come to know her as well as you have.”

Suddenly, at this climax, Giles found himself prepared. “What if she had?” he demanded, and it was like riding, with a great thrust, to the top of the breaker that threatened to engulf them. “What if she had made him judge things more kindly? No doubt she would have changed him. He would have felt her beauty, too. But she wouldn’t have changed him towards you, Toppie; any more than she has me.”

Then Toppie drew back. Seeing suddenly where she stood, seeing her fear as a disloyalty, she drew away. She looked at Giles and he saw the door, as it were, mercifully or terribly close against him and Toppie, demanding no further lies, shut herself away. “Perhaps you are right,” she said slowly, and each word came with an effort, for they were, doubtless, the only false words Toppie had ever uttered. “Perhaps I am too ignorant of the world. I do not judge your friend. But if I knew her, I could not think her beautiful. I could not think a wicked woman beautiful. We must be different in that.—I’ll go home now. I’d rather be alone. Good-bye.”

She moved away into the wood.

Giles, standing where she left him, had the sensation of feeling his heart break. “Toppie,” he said in a choking voice.

She stopped and looked round at him. Her grey form among the birches was almost invisible, but he saw the thin oval of her face.

“Toppie.”—Only this—He could hardly speak. He was not thinking. Only that stifling pressure in his heart seemed to break its way out into words—“I do so love you.”

He saw that he touched her. If not his words, then his face of anguish. For the first time that day, if only for a moment, her thought was given to him alone and he felt rather than saw pity in her eyes.

“Giles—I’m so sorry,” she murmured.

“I do so love you,” he repeated, gazing at her. But, even as he gazed, the worst of the anguish was to know that something in his love was changed for ever.

“Dear Giles,” Toppie murmured again. “Forgive me.” And again she repeated, and the phrase was like a fall of snow: “I’m so sorry.”

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