The Little French Girl
PART IV

CHAPTER I

Two faces were with Giles that night as he turned, sleepless, again and again, on his pillow; Alix’s face, and Toppie’s face. Toppie was before him as he had seen her on the Autumn evening in the birch-woods when she had looked away from him with the wildness in her eyes and had said: “It’s as if there might be anything. As if you might hide anything. She’s changed you so much.” She was before him as she said: “It’s as if she might have changed Owen—if he had ever come to know her as well as you do.”

It was he himself, in his stumbling confusion, his half truths and his half loyalties, who had that evening set the deadly surmise before her. She had not, he believed, since seeing it, drawn a breath at ease. She would have been ready for what Alix had come to tell her. She would have known, at the first word, that it was true. He saw her freeze to stillness before the Medusa head.

Yet, if Toppie’s face brought the groan of helpless pity to his lips while he tossed and turned, an even deeper piercing came in the thought of Alix. She stood there, against the study door, facing him; facing the deed she had done; facing a truth worse than Toppie’s. Toppie saw herself betrayed by what she had most loved. But Alix saw herself as a betrayer. Her look was that of a creature at bay, with wolves at its throat.

Again, with a suffocating compassion, he saw her blind, outstretched hands; he heard her gasping breath: “Giles—Is it true?” His arms received her and he felt her sobs against his breast.

She became, while his comprehension yearned over her, part of himself. Something fiercely tender, something trembling and awe-struck dawned in his heart as he held her. To understand Toppie was to see her sink away from him. To understand Alix was to see her enter his very flesh and blood. It was for him that she had dared the almost inconceivable act; and, as he thus saw her offered up in sacrifice for him, Giles knew, with all that had been destroyed, something beautiful had been given. It was his justification for the act that he had, from the beginning, dared for her. It was the answer to an old perplexity. He had seen the dear little French girl as so securely secular, so serenely pagan; so hard. His perplexity had centred round the word Holiness and he had feared that she might be impervious to its meaning. But as quietness descended slowly upon his troubled heart Giles saw, while a sense of radiance grew about him, that it was Alix herself who showed him further meanings in the word.

He found on waking next morning that, with all the sense of calamity that lay like a physical weight on his heart, the sense of beauty, of something gained, still shone round him. He needed light, for his path was dark with perplexity. Alix had left him yesterday to go to her room, and to bed. In the few words that passed between him and his mother on her return from London the child’s shattered state was sufficiently explained by Toppie’s decision. Toppie’s decision, he felt, explained his state, too. Mrs. Bradley heard of it with consternation. “A nun, Giles! A convent!” she had gasped. Generations of candid Protestantism spoke in the exclamation. Nuns and convents were, to Mrs. Bradley, strange, alien, almost sinister anachronisms. Dim pictures from Fox’s “Book of Martyrs” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress” floated across her mind as she heard Giles. And tears rose to her eyes as she saw an end, not only to all his hopes, but to every link that bound them to Toppie. There was no need to explain anything further to his mother.

He had to face at breakfast the dismay of Ruth and Rosemary.

“Poor Alix! She’s bowled out completely.—Says she doesn’t want any breakfast; but I’m going to take her up a tray,” said Rosemary. “No, not kidneys, Jack; if you’re ill in bed you don’t want kidneys;—a boiled egg’s the thing, and toast, and tea. She looks rotten; perfectly rotten. She’s awfully fond of Toppie, you see.”

“I suppose there’s no good whatever in my going over and seeing what I can say to Toppie,” Ruth ventured to her brother when breakfast was over. “If she’d only let herself be psycho-analysed by Miriam Stott it would be sure to help. Miriam is extraordinary, you know. She’s a friend of the Burnetts; she does it professionally. Toppie is just a case for her.”

“My dear Ruth,” said Giles, “I’m sure you mean well; but you are sometimes an arrant ass.”

“It’s all very well,” said Ruth to her sister when Giles had gone to shut himself in his study; “ass or no ass, I’ve thought for some time now that Toppie was quite liable to go off her chump. It’s sexual repression coming out in religious mania; plain as day.”

“Sexual repression!” Rosemary stared. “What an extraordinary thing to say, Ruth! Toppie’s no more repressed than you or I.”

“Yes, she is. Sensible people like you and me work it off, sublimate it, in games and work and all sorts of healthy activities, whereas poor foolish Toppie has always moped and brooded at home, never knowing what she was or what she wanted. You’re old enough to read Freud now, Rosemary, and the sooner you do the better. He will explain it all to you.” Ruth’s universe was of the latest tabloid variety.

Giles, meanwhile, in his study, sat and wondered what he should do next. Until he had seen Alix again he did not know. How could he go to Toppie? What was there to say to Toppie? He had answered all her questions on the Autumn afternoon in the birch-woods. He had answered all her questions about Owen, and he had answered all her questions about himself. She had seen him on that afternoon place himself on the side of madame Vervier. “She is the product of her mother,” he had said of Alix. “Do you find fault with it?” He had showed himself as understanding madame Vervier; as exculpating her. Toppie might come to forgive Owen, caught in the horrible siren’s net; she would never, he believed, forgive him. Unless she sent for him, how could he go to her?

In the midst of these reflections he heard a motor drive up to the door and, going to look out, saw with astonishment Lady Mary Hamble descending from it. Lady Mary could only have come to see Alix and, after she had disappeared, he stood wondering what Alix would find to say to her. He had, while he had brooded on their disaster, almost forgotten Alix’s love-story and it seemed now to have lost all its potency. Jerry was too light, too boyish to face the resolutions that would now be needed. “She’s too good for him,” Giles muttered to himself, as he had muttered of the French order on the summer day at Les Vaudettes, standing with bent head and hands in his pockets as if listening for what next was to happen. Too good for him. Yet perhaps Jerry would not fail.

What was next to happen did not long delay, and the sight of his mother’s face in the doorway warned him that it was something quite unforeseen.

“Oh, Giles, dear!—Will you come?” Rarely had he heard his mother’s voice so shaken, and if her face had shown consternation last night it was almost horror that it showed this morning. “Lady Mary is here,” she said. “She came to see me. Oh, Giles—it is about poor little Alix. Lady Mary has heard—terrible things about her mother.”

So it had fallen. Better so, perhaps, thought Giles, as for a moment he stared at his mother in a receptive silence before following her to the drawing-room.

Lady Mary was there, floating, to Giles’s sense, in an indefiniteness, made up of lovely hesitancy, veils, and a touch of tears, that was yet more definite than a steely armour. She came towards him at once with outstretched hands, saying: “Dear Giles, perhaps you can help us.”

“For it can’t be true, can it, Giles?” Mrs. Bradley urged in her shaken voice. She was so much more worn than Lady Mary, yet she looked so much younger and Giles read on her face a resentment, all unconscious, against Lady Mary and her standards. “You know her, Giles, and can explain. She’s unconventional, isn’t she, and unworldly, and might do unusual things and be misjudged by worldly people;—but Alix’s mother can’t be a bad woman.”

So he found himself face to face once more with the bad woman.

“I had to come and see if you could tell me more. I’m so fond of darling little Alix.” Lady Mary had beautifully placed herself in a corner of the sofa, her furs unfolded, her long veil cast back from the framing velvet of her little hat. She was not thinking about looking beautiful;—Giles did her justice;—but she was thinking, very intently, about doing what she had to do as beautifully as possible, and that intention seemed to dispose her hands across the sables of her muff, to cross her silken ankles and tilt to a most appealing angle the pearls that glimmered in her ears. “You see—Jerry— It’s all foolishness”—she found her way. “He’s only a boy.—He falls in love with someone different every six months.—He fancies himself in love with Alix now—and I don’t wonder at it. She’s the most enchanting young girl I’ve seen for years.—But Marigold Hamble, my husband’s niece, heard in Paris, just the other day, such deplorable things. Deplorable.” Lady Mary’s voice sank to the longest, saddest emphasis. “Marigold is a wretched gossip, and worse.—She’s a mauvaise langue; I would not trust her story. But she gave chapter and verse to such an extent that I had to come to you—since you know madame Vervier.”

“But gossip is always like that,” Mrs. Bradley persisted, a spot of colour on each cheek. “Some people see evil in everything. And Giles liked her. And everything Alix has told me of her is so lovely. And my son, Owen, who is dead, was devotedly attached to her. It is because he was so fond of her mother that Alix is with us now.”

For a moment, after that, Lady Mary’s soft, bright eyes, from between the veils and the pearls, remained fixed on Mrs. Bradley’s candid countenance and Giles knew that his mother had revealed more of the miserable truth to Lady Mary than she herself, he hoped, would ever know.

“You’re quite right, Mummy, darling. I do like her,” so he felt impelled to sustain her, though he knew that such sustainment might only be for her immediate bewilderment. “I do like her,” he repeated, turning his eyes on Lady Mary and bidding her make what use she liked of the information. And then he found the words he had used to Alix yesterday: “She’s not bad. She’s unfortunate and wrong. But, it’s true:—I found out while I was with her, that she is a woman who—” poor Giles paused, while Lady Mary and his mother gazed at him—“who,” he finished, “has lovers.”

After this, it was Mrs. Bradley who first spoke. “Has lovers, Giles?”

He could almost have smiled—but he was nearer weeping at his mother’s voice. Steeped to the lips in the woes of the world as she was, lovers—for anyone one knew—for anyone in one’s own walk of life—was an idea almost as alien, and even more strange and sinister, than nuns and convents. Poor little shop-girls and housemaids had lovers, though usually known less romantically as the fathers of illegitimate babies; she had spent much time and strength in dealing with such sad cases and in pleading on committees that the man was most at fault. But even with Ruth flourishing Freudian theories before her and the latest novels of the newest young writers lying on her tables, Mrs. Bradley thought of unhallowed relations between men and women as of dark, mysterious deviations from the obvious standards of civilization. And now she heard Giles say that Alix’s mother had lovers.

“Has had them for years and years, dear Mrs. Bradley,” Lady Mary sadly but firmly defined for her. “Ever since she left Alix’s father with, let us trust, the first of them. With the monsieur Vervier, who, Marigold heard, has never divorced her, and still lives. The last is an André de Valenbois and Marigold met his people. It was from them she heard the story, and from what Giles says I see it is all too true. She is a very distinguished, very dignified demi-mondaine. Quite, quite notorious. She’s as well known in Paris,” said Lady Mary with a sigh, relinquishing madame Vervier’s corpse, as it were, to float down the tide of her destiny, “as the Mona Lisa. The masses may not know about her, but everybody else does.”

“Not quite so bad as that, is it?” said Giles. He knew, while he listened to Lady Mary, that it would be difficult to say why it was not so bad; but the loyalty to madame Vervier that had so direfully betrayed him to Toppie rose up in grief and anger against these suave definitions. “Madame Vervier isn’t mercenary,” he said. “To be a demi-mondaine you must be mercenary. And I’m sure,” he added, while his mother’s eyes, aghast, and Lady Mary’s eyes, imperturbably kind, dwelt on him, and he knew that to the one he appeared ominously mature, and to the other attractively boyish;—“I’m sure that Alix is legitimate; if that’s any comfort to us.”

“And why are you sure?” Lady Mary asked, Mrs. Bradley remaining helplessly silent.

“She confided in me,” said Giles, and it was more difficult to face Lady Mary’s kindness than his mother’s dismay. “She was absolutely straight with me. It was when we talked about Alix that she told me everything. It was then I came to like her so much.”

“But, Giles”—poor Mrs. Bradley now almost wept—“how can you say you like these dreadful people? You made friends with monsieur de Valenbois, too—how can you like them?”

“But, dear Mrs. Bradley,” said Lady Mary with just the brush of a smile across her lips, “one does like them. Why not?”

“Dissolute people? People with no sense of conduct or duty? I’ve never met them. Giles has never, I am sure, met them before. I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Bradley, and her drawing-room seemed to be saying that it did not understand either;—the Watts’s “Love and Life” and “Love and Death,” the bowls of primroses picked by Jack and Francis, the crétonne covers, and the crayon drawing of Mrs. Bradley’s grandmother, a dove-eyed lady with lace tied over her head and a cameo brooch.

“I’ve met them,” said Lady Mary with sad equanimity. “I’ve cared very much for several women who were, alas, in that sense, dissolute. Only they were more fortunate than madame Vervier; or more discreet. They’ve not been dissolute openly. So one hasn’t had to lose them.”

“And one’s sons can marry their daughters,” said Giles. His mind was occupied by no anger against Lady Mary; only by that grief on madame Vervier’s account; and on Alix’s. Lady Mary he felt that he liked; much as he liked—it was the strangest feeling—madame Vervier. Lady Mary, too, was straight; she, too, was magnanimous; and, her eyes on his, she was liking him, liking him even while, not yielding an inch, she answered: “Exactly. One’s sons can marry their daughters. The difference couldn’t be put more clearly.” And she went on, reminding him more and more of madame Vervier, “Some things fit in and some things don’t. Women who have kept their place, fit; women who have lost it, don’t. It’s very harsh; it’s very hypocritical, you will say, Giles; but it is the only way in which a civilized society can protect itself. It’s impossible to judge each case on its own merits; so rules are made and the people who transgress them pay the penalty. It isn’t really that they are put out; they put themselves out. One pretends about them as long as they allow one to go on pretending. And when it comes to the sons and daughters;—young people don’t realize how horrid, how crippling, simple awkwardness can be. How awkward, for instance, to have a mother-in-law you couldn’t possibly, ever, invite to the house; how awkward to have babies to whom you’ve given a demi-mondaine for a grandmother. It becomes too difficult. One wants to spare one’s children such difficulty.”

“And what does one want to spare Alix?” Giles asked. With all his liking, with all her grace, her frankness, her resolve not to hurt, he was feeling for Lady Mary the same repudiation that he had felt for the ladies of the chalet—the people who connived and had no right to reject.

Lady Mary thought for a moment before saying: “Alix can marry someone who doesn’t mind.”

“But anyone good enough to marry Alix would have to mind,” said Giles. “Wouldn’t you be the first to say that where she belongs is with the people who do mind? What you really mean”—and Giles heard that his voice became rather bitter as he went on—“is that the daughter of the demi-mondaine must stay in the demi-monde. I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t so fond of Alix for herself. I wouldn’t blame you if it were a moral objection; but it isn’t. Those friends of yours are only in because they’ve escaped being divorced. Your objection to Alix is really, when you come to look at it, that her mother is unfortunate.—Isn’t that so?”

Yes, Lady Mary reminded him, vividly now, of madame Vervier. Her soft gaze was fixed upon him with something of the same surprise, yet with all of the same security, that madame Vervier’s had shown. Madame Vervier, in Lady Mary’s place, would feel precisely as she did. And he could see madame Vervier, after the little pause, bow her head as Lady Mary bowed hers in saying: “I accept it all. That is my objection. Her mother is too unfortunate. That is exactly what it comes to.”

Mrs. Bradley, shut out from her son’s understanding and from Lady Mary’s tolerance, looked from one to the other of them, a deepening flush on her girlish cheeks. “But it’s worse, far worse than unfortunate,” she said. “How could she have lived a life like that with a little daughter to care for? It isn’t as if she had had only to leave a bad husband, Giles. One could have understood that; one could have felt her right. But to have lovers—Don’t say only unfortunate when it’s so much worse.”

“I did say she was wrong, you know, Mummy.” Poor Giles rubbed his hand through his hair. “She knows how wrong I think her. I told her. But the point for us is to make up to Alix for her mother’s wrongness, isn’t it?”

“We must keep her here,” said Mrs. Bradley. “We must keep her away from her mother’s life. It is too terrible to think of our darling little Alix exposed to such depravity.”

“Well, that’s what I felt, you see,” said Giles.

Lady Mary was observing him. “You have been making up to Alix from the first, haven’t you, Giles?” she said, and though the kindness of her voice was unaltered there was in it a touch of dryness, too. “You’ve been engaged from the first in rescuing her from the demi-monde. It must have been a wonderful scene that between you and madame Vervier, when you told her how wrong you thought her and promised her to do your best to place Alix in another world than hers.”

Giles, his hand still clutched in his hair, now stared at Lady Mary, arrested. “It was you who sought Alix out, you know,” he reminded her after a moment. “It wasn’t I who asked for anything for her. You took your chances with Alix, just as we did. It was all on your own responsibility.”

“Dear Giles—I don’t blame you in the least for not telling me,” Lady Mary assured him.

But Giles would have none of such assurances. “I didn’t imagine you could. I hadn’t told my own mother. If anyone can blame me, it’s she.”

“And I’m sure she forgives you,” said Lady Mary.

“But, of course, darling,” Mrs. Bradley, confused, murmured. “How could you have done differently?”

“And did you think, then,” Lady Mary, all mildness, continued, “that it would never come out?”

“I knew it would have to come out if Alix ever got married,” said Giles. “In your case, I knew that you and madame Vervier were to meet. Alix had seen to that.”

“Yes,” Lady Mary meditated, her eyes on his. “Alix saw to it. Yes; you knew you could count on Alix. We can all count on Alix. Alix was perfect.” She had moved away from the theme of reproach, but it still smarted in Giles and it was with a heavy gaze that he listened as she went on, sweetly showing him that she, too, appreciated to the full their little French girl. “She made everything clear. I never met such clearness. It was wonderful to hear her on that day. Jerry had really, I believe, touched her heart a little—poor little dear—but the last thing she was thinking about was her own heart. She was thinking of all sorts of strange claims and duties. The children, if she married, would have to be Catholics, she told me! And she could not marry anyone who asked her to give up France.”

“I hope you recognize,” said Giles, his heavy gaze on her, “that she would have been just as perfect if, not being French and not being a Catholic, she’d accepted Jerry.”

It was then as if, in the heavy eyes of the young man sitting there, Lady Mary found herself arrested by an unfamiliar image of herself. She had come to do exquisitely what had to be done; and to do it so exquisitely that the element of forbearance in her attitude should be barely, if at all, perceptible. She was, perhaps, doing it exquisitely; but the mirror of dispassionate contemplation presented to her in Giles’s gaze showed her, for perhaps the first time in her life, an unbecoming distortion of her features. She might have been seen as poised there, regretting that she had exposed herself to the revelation. Then, feeling, no doubt, that no evasion was possible, she submitted to seeing that while she could retain the grace of candour she must lose the grace of disinterestedness, and answered: “She wouldn’t have been nearly so perfect for my purposes.”

Giles, at that, turned his eyes away.

“You see, the truth is, my dear Giles,” said Lady Mary, and it was perhaps not the least part of her discomfort to know that he was uncomfortable for her, “dear little Alix needs someone better and braver to deal with her situation than I can afford to be. Someone quite, quite detached and devoted must fall in love with her; someone without a worldly mother to shackle his impulses.—I’m sure he will turn up,”—Lady Mary’s smile dwelt on him, but Giles did not meet it. “And as far as I am concerned, my best security is Alix herself. I’m perfectly aware of that.”

“What is your difficulty, then?” Giles inquired, still averting his eyes from Lady Mary.

“Why, Jerry, of course,” she said, glad to escape to the wider theme. “He won’t leave it where Alix made it so possible to leave it. He is indignant with me and furious with Marigold. He says he won’t give up Alix if her mother is a Messalina. I’m afraid he’s coming here to see her.”

“Aren’t you rather proud of him?” Giles inquired.

“No, my dear Giles, I am not proud of him!” Lady Mary now gave herself the relief of impatience, and Jerry was to bear the weight of her discomposure. “He isn’t like Alix. He doesn’t see other people’s point of view. He is thinking only of himself. It was just the same last year when he wanted to marry a little dancer.”

“He’s thinking of Alix as well as of himself. And you must own that he’s improved in taste since last year,” said Giles.

He looked at Lady Mary now, and her eyes searched his. “Does that mean that you’re going to help Jerry?”

Giles reflected. “It means, I suppose, that I’m going to help Alix. If he’s really good enough for Alix—of course I’ll do my best for them.”

He and Lady Mary gazed deeply at each other. She was clever. She was as clever as madame Vervier. She saw that she had not concealed herself from him and that he had recognized her intimations; first that, again the old dog Tray, he should marry Alix himself, and then, that if he did not marry her, he should at all events secure Jerry from the unpropitious match by removing her. Yet, still, he liked Lady Mary. “Why don’t you stand by them?” he suddenly suggested.

At that, Lady Mary rose; mournful, but showing no reprobation. “I would stand by them, of course, if it had to be. But I must try to prevent its being. I must stand by my darling, that’s what it comes to, as you must stand by yours. Jerry is my only child. I don’t want madame Vervier in my family.”

“You could count on her, too, you know,” said Giles. “She’d do everything to make it easy, for Alix’s sake. You see, already she gives her up to us.”

“Ah—but only because of what she hopes you can do for her!” Lady Mary exclaimed, and it was now, again, with the note of impatience. “No; the only person I count upon is Alix herself. I don’t see Alix entering a family that doesn’t want her. She will draw back when she feels that we can’t come forward. She’ll send Jerry away—whatever her mother, or you, or Jerry himself, may say—when she sees that he speaks for himself alone. And Jerry, when he’s given a little time, will come to feel that it’s all too difficult. After all, they’re only children. Little by little he will forget her.”

“And will you?” asked Giles.

Lady Mary, with sweetest, softest emphasis, had pressed Mrs. Bradley’s hand in farewell and now moved beside him to the door. She was gracefully occupied in swathing and enfolding; she dropped her veil; she drew her furs together; she avoided meeting again the mirror of his eyes; and she said: “At my age one has learned to give up things. I must give up my dear little Alix.”

She made Giles think of a soft white hand, withdrawing itself, while avoiding all danger of a rent, from a glove that has proved a misfit.

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