The Little French Girl
PART III

CHAPTER VII

It was only a few days after this interview that the news of Mr. Westmacott’s death reached them. Toppie spent ten days in Bath with friends before returning to the Rectory, and it was Mrs. Bradley who went to her first. She said, when she came back, that Toppie wanted to see Giles and hoped that he could come to her next morning. She wanted very much to see him. Giles, when he had been given this message, went away and shut himself into his study.

“Well, do you expect she’s going to have him at last!” Ruth exclaimed. “For my part I believe she is, and a good job, too. Giles may be able to wake her up a bit. I find Toppie distinctly depressing myself.”

“Poor old Giles,” said Rosemary, “it made him look most awfully queer. It’ll be a shame if she doesn’t have him now, after the way he’s waited.—If she doesn’t have him, where do you suppose she’ll live? There’s that jolly cottage on the common empty. It would just do for her; with an old aunt to live with her.”

“If she doesn’t have him,” said Ruth sagaciously, “my own feeling is that she’ll go away as far as possible. None of us, except perhaps Mummy, have ever meant anything to her. She’s not got much heart, if you ask my opinion. Or, at all events, only heart enough for one person.”

“How did you find her?” Alix asked Mrs. Bradley when they were left alone. “She will be too unhappy now, so soon after her father’s death, to think of Giles. But for the future, is there hope did you feel?”

“I really don’t know what to think, dear,” said Mrs. Bradley, taking off her hat and putting up her hand, with a gesture so like Giles, to push back her hair. “Toppie is rather strange. That is what I feel most. She doesn’t seem unhappy. Not more unhappy than she’s always been, I mean. She talked about Owen all the time. She said she had never felt him so near. That doesn’t look very hopeful for Giles, does it?”

“She might say that just because she was really turning a little towards Giles. One might hope that it would work like that in her, perhaps,” said Alix, though she had not indeed much hope.

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Bradley sadly. “But haven’t you felt for a long time that something has come between Toppie and Giles? Since last Autumn I’ve felt it. I believe, when she came back from Bournemouth, he asked her, and that it displeased her and made her draw away.”

“Yes, I believe, too, that it was like that,” said Alix. “I have felt her changed.”

“You know there’s something in what Ruth says,” Mrs. Bradley went on after a moment. “I’ve always loved and admired Toppie and thought her a lovely creature; but I confess to you, Alix—because you understand her so well—that she has always seemed to me a little heartless. Or is that too strong a word? I don’t know. Something is lacking. She would spend herself for people and do everything for them; there is no selfishness in her at all; but it’s as if she’d do the more because she felt the less, and had to make up for it. It’s strange, Alix, selfish, warm-hearted people may give much less pain than lovely people like Toppie. Owen was selfish compared to Toppie; but I don’t think he ever gave pain.”

“He was like a pool, was he not?” said Alix, struggling with thoughts Mrs. Bradley could not guess at; “a pool rippling and perhaps shallow, but open to the sun; and Toppie is like a well, cold and deep and narrow. And Giles is like the sea; deep and broad, too. How happy she might still be if she could love Giles.”

“Yes. Yes.” The tears rose to Mrs. Bradley’s eyes. “And all that he thinks of is to live for her and all that she thinks of is that Owen is near her. Isn’t it cruel?—I can’t believe that about darling Owen, you know. I haven’t her faith, and that distresses her in me, too. She doesn’t want to be with people who haven’t her faith. I feel that. She doesn’t want anything that seems to come in any way between her and him.”

“And if she did not believe him so near, so specially near, she could think of Giles as near,” said Alix, while a sense of unformulated fear, often felt, never seen, seemed to press more closely upon her than ever before. “It is Captain Owen who stands between them.”

“I am afraid he will stand between them always, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley.

Giles went off to the Rectory next morning. Ruth, Rosemary, and the boys had planned a picnic with the Eustaces, but Alix said that she would remain behind with Mrs. Bradley. By luncheon-time Giles had not returned and, exchanging glances over the table, each knew that the other found hope in the prolonged absence, for would Toppie keep Giles with her like this unless all was going well?

“You will see him when he comes back, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley when, after luncheon, she stepped into the car to drive off to the station. She had an address to give in London that afternoon and would not be back till late.

“Ah, perhaps he will not want to see me,” said Alix. “I shall be very discreet. I shall be there for him if he wants me; but not otherwise.”

“I think Giles would always want to see you, whatever had happened to him,” said Mrs. Bradley.

Left alone, Alix went out to her favourite walk, the little path under the garden wall, half obliterated by heather and grass, its bordering gorse bushes all broken into soft clusters of gold set in prickles and smelling of apricots. Bareheaded, her arms wrapped in her blue-and-grey scarf, she walked, smelling the gorse, feeling the sunshine, listening to a blackbird that fluted golden arabesques on the April air; while above her head the leaning fruit-boughs were full of thick grey-green buds.

The sense of excitement that had been with her since the day of Jerry’s declaration was immeasurably deepened this afternoon by her imaginative sharing of Giles’s ordeal. Jerry and Giles were mingled in her thoughts, and her mind recoiled from the striving of pain and hope and fear brought to it by their united images. Perhaps it was because she thus evaded her deep preoccupation, perhaps it was because she paced thus in the sunlight, as he had paced, that her memory, suddenly liberated, took a long flight backward to find Grand-père going along the terrace at Montarel with his dragging step and sombre eye.

It was so strange to think of Grand-père now. Since the day of her first arrival in England he had hardly visited her thoughts. And with what a new sadness she saw him again and felt once more his melancholy flow into her. Was it because she had for so long forgotten him and gone so far from him and Montarel that she felt thus suddenly the gloomy pressure of his eyes? It was as if he watched her, her life involved in lives so remote from his sympathy. It was not only the young yearning of her heart towards Jerry’s yearning that seemed a betrayal of Grand-père; this sharper yearning, not towards but over Giles, showed her as even more removed and alien. Young love Grand-père might have understood; but hardly this identification with an Englishman’s hopes and fears. She doubted whether Grand-père had ever in his life spoken to an English person. He had disliked the English. She recalled how, when she read her history to him, he would interrupt her to speak bitterly about them. “Un peuple pratique; sans idéal,” he had said. And he had said that England had always schemed against France and made use of her grace and generosity. How strange that was to remember now as she waited for Giles and listened to the blackbird. They had not schemed against her; France’s daughter; nor made use of her. Would it not be truer to say that France, through her helpless person, had schemed against and made use of them?

Maman schemed. Maman, with all her grace, her generosity, was oh! so practical. “And our people eat the blackbirds,” thought Alix while the song, as she listened to it, brought Giles’s face vividly before her. Jerry was like a goldfinch—golden flashes, summery sweetness, swift eagerness, and gay inconsequent song. Giles was the blackbird; its tenderness, its trust, its something of heaven and something of drollery too; and the way it brought long-past things back;—again; again; again;—brooding on the past with persistent fidelity. Faithful Giles; he would never forget. And why did the thought of goldfinches merge into this surreptitious aching? How strange it was that one should feel the anxious pressure of a new thought before one saw the thought itself! Goldfinches; Les Chardonnerets; André de Valenbois; she traced the sequence. Jerry made her think of André; only he was not so finely tempered; not so intelligent. But the thought of André was only a pain and a perplexity; whereas Giles believed her to be in love with Jerry; she had seen in his eyes that he believed her to be in love; and perhaps she was; only it was round the problem of worth that this new ache was centring. There must be so much worth on the one hand if, on the other, it was France that might have to be sacrificed. And Jerry was like the goldfinches. “Worth,” she thought, listening to the blackbird’s song. The word was such an English word. She loved the blackbird’s song, best of all, she said to herself, trying to turn away from the still half-unseen trouble.

Suddenly, behind her, she heard Giles’s voice speaking her name.

He had come up from the birch-woods; he had not come from the Rectory. He had been walking; his hair was ruffled with the wind; his shoes were muddy; he had not eaten; he was very tired. Alix saw all this in flashes as they approached each other, her mind catching at such straws. For it was shipwreck that his face revealed to her; so pallid, so haggard, with dark pinches in the eyelids under the eyes and strange, ageing furrows of suffering running down from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. Could the shipwreck of all his hopes make Giles look like this? There had been no hope to lose.

He had spoken her name in a quite gentle voice, as if, indeed, he were glad to find her there; as if she were a haven for what he could drag of hull and spars up out of reach of the battering waves. He walked beside her, and said: “Can we get to the study without being seen?”

“They are all out,” said Alix.

It was curious to feel, as she said it, as, silently, they made their way into the house, that it was as if they had left him to her. Even his mother had left Giles to her, and as they entered the study and she heard, through the open window, the blackbird, far away, still singing, she had the feeling of being in a dream. The past fell back into a strange, flat tapestry, russet, silver, blue, where the figures of Grand-père, Maman, and Jerry all went together. She and Giles stood against that background in the study.

He had walked in before her, to the window, and he stood looking out as if he, too, were listening to the blackbird, and when he turned at last and looked at her it was as if he asked her what he should do with himself. She saw him as a little boy who needed a mother to take him to her breast. And, like the little boy, he wanted his mother to ask him what was the matter before he could speak. So Alix asked him.

“What is the matter, Giles?”

Her voice trembled as she spoke. That was why, perhaps, Giles collapsed. He sank into the chair before the table and laid his head upon his arms and burst out crying.

Alix felt her heart stand still. “Captain Owen—Captain Owen has parted them,” she thought. And the unseen fear that had that morning pressed so near was there beside her now. It was a compulsion laid upon her; a necessity that was not now to be escaped, though still she did not see it clearly. She stood by Giles, gazing down at him, and her young face was stern rather than pitiful. It was hardly of Giles that she was thinking; or it was of his suffering rather than of him. It was because of Giles’s suffering that the necessity was laid upon her.

Even when, as if he felt her near in his darkness, he put out an arm and drew her to him, for the comfort of her closeness, even while she thought, “I am his mother now,” her face kept its sternness.

He spoke at last. “She’s going to leave us, Alix.”

“Going to leave us?” Alix wondered if Toppie were dying.

“She’s going into a convent. She’s going to be a nun. It was all settled at Bath. But she’s been meaning it for a long time.”

“Yes. I knew,” Alix murmured. “She told me that on the first day.”

“You knew?” In his astonishment Giles relinquished his clasp and fixed his broken gaze upon her.

“On that first day. When I went to see her. She told me that she could understand the wish to be a nun. She told me that you had them in your Church. If one were alone, she said, it might be the best life.”

Giles now got up and moved, stumbling, towards the sofa, and, Alix following him, they sat down.

“It’s because of him,” said Giles. He leaned his arm on the end of the sofa and kept his face covered.

“Because of him,” Alix echoed, sitting straightly beside him and bending all her strength to thought.

“To be more near him. She says she feels she can be more near like that,” Giles spoke dully.

“But that is not a vocation,” said Alix after a moment. She was seeing the face of the old great-aunt at Lyons behind the grille. Pale old eyes; pale cold lips; a dead creature; yet—already the little child who stood there before her for her blessing felt it—living by a mysterious life unimaginable to those out in the great turmoil of the world. “You go into a convent to renounce the world,” she said. “Not to keep it more near.”

“Ah,” said Giles, and he uttered a hard laugh, “she doesn’t count Owen as the world. She counts him as heaven. He wasn’t worth it, you know, Alix,” said Giles, with the hardness in his voice. “Owen wasn’t worth a devotion like Toppie’s.”

And, while the word “worth,” laden with its thick cluster of associations, seemed to set a heavy bell ringing in her breast, Alix answered: “No; he was not worth it.”

They sat then for a long time silent. Once or twice Alix thought that Giles was going to speak to her. She saw it all now; clearly at last; and must he, too, not see? Must he not, in another moment, tell her of the sudden resolve to which, at last, he found himself knit? But when she turned her eyes—appalled, yet ready, upon him, he was not looking at her; not thinking at all of what she thought; gazing merely at the fireless grate, his mind fixed on the one figure that filled it. Toppie a nun; Toppie blotted out from any life where he could see or hear her. And suddenly he said: “She was so kind to me. She was so awfully sorry for me. She’s never been so kind—It was almost—I could see what it might have been—Oh, Alix, I’m so miserable!” groaned Giles, and again he put his head down on his arms and broke into sobs.

Alix looked over at him. No; it was her task; not his. Impossible for him; inevitable for her. It was a debt to be paid. A debt of honour. More than that. It was the crying out in her heart of intolerable grief. She could not bear that Giles should suffer so.

He hardly noticed it when she laid her hand on his head and said: “I will come back in a little while.” He was broken. The waves were going over him.

She left him there. She left the house. At the garden-gate, looking through the sunlight across the common, she stood still for a moment, feeling that she paused, for the last time, in childhood, and that with the next step she left it for ever behind her. It was she, now, who took up life; who made it. Destiny went with her; she was no longer its instrument, but its creator. And in this last moment how strange it was to hear the blackbird still singing:—It would always remember; that was what it seemed to be saying:—It would always remember. Even when she had forgotten her childhood, the blackbird’s song would remember, for her, how a child’s heart felt.

Once outside upon the common she began to run. She was carrying Giles’s heart in her hand and it was heavy to carry. From the tapestry she felt Grand-père’s stern eyes following her; and Maman’s eyes. Intently, intently Maman’s eyes watched her as she ran. She could not read their look. And far away, as if he had forgotten her, Jerry rode into the blue distance with ladies in hennins mounted on unicorns; figures faded to the pattern of the background. Or was it she who had forgotten Jerry?

When she reached the Rectory, she did not ring. She entered softly, standing for a moment to regain her breath and listen. Footsteps were moving in the drawing-room. The drawing-room door was ajar. She pushed it open and entered.

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