The Little French Girl
PART IV

CHAPTER IV

Before Giles went back to Oxford a short letter came to Mrs. Bradley from Toppie saying that she was going to stay on in Bath for the present and that her determination to become a nun was unaltered. After that, for many weeks, he heard nothing more of her, and it was not until the end of June that he received a letter telling him that she was at Headington, staying with an old friend of her mother’s before entering her novitiate, and asking him to come and see her. The old friend lived in a little house sunken among the high walls and deep leafage of a garden, and the drawing-room, where Giles waited for Toppie, its long windows opening on a little lawn, seemed part of the garden, it was so full of flowers and sunlight.

Giles stood at a window and looked out and listened to a garden-warbler singing ceaselessly, like a running brook, among the branches. His heart was full of presage, for he had not seen Toppie since the dreadful day that had severed them from the past. Yet the song of the garden-warbler, rippling incessantly over his fear, seemed to dissolve it into a happy melancholy.—“The past is over, not forgotten, but over, over,”—the song seemed to be saying. “This sweetness, this sunlight, this tranquillity is the present. Believe in it, live in it, as I do. She is not angry with you any longer. You have not failed.”

And when Toppie entered, he saw that she was not angry and that he had not failed. More than that; there was much more than that for him in Toppie’s face; but he could not at first determine what it was.

She was changed. So changed that it was almost as if he had forgotten her and was seeing her for the first time again. Perhaps it was that since last seeing her all his thoughts of her had been changed. Personal hopes, personal longings, were gone, and seen without the aching glamour that they had cast about her Toppie was at once less and more beautiful. For never before had he recognized the defects and deficiencies of her face. She was a pale, thin, freckled girl, slightly featured, with dry lips and colourless eyes. Yet in this newly perceived earthliness there was revealed to him the fulfillment, as it were, of that celestial quality he had from the first divined in her.

This was what Toppie was; this was the material that had been given her to work upon; and it was as if he saw her, through the power of prayer, lifting from cold and arid soil flowers and fruit to heaven.

She looked at him sweetly and calmly giving him her hand, and saying: “Dear Giles.”

“I’m so glad.—I’ve so hoped you would see me,” Giles murmured.

“Of course I was to see you. It only wanted a little time—to settle things,” said Toppie. “Let us go into the garden. Isn’t it the dearest garden?—I used to come here sometimes when I was a child.”

“Is it all settled?” Giles asked, as they went out and walked along a grass path to the shade of a lilac-tree. “I mean about the convent; about your leaving us?”

“It’s all settled.—But we don’t think of it like that, you know,” said Toppie. “We think it’s to be much nearer you, really.—And then, of course, I shall be able to see you all sometimes.”

They sat down under the lilac-tree. It was in thick bloom and the fragrance fell about them.

Giles saw now what his greatest fear had been. And he knew that it was groundless. Toppie would never ask him a question. The past was over; not forgotten; but over. That was what her departure, her silence, had won for them. She could not, at that past time, have kept herself from pressing against the swords of every fullest realization. She could not have kept herself from seeing, as balefully as he had seen them, the figures of Owen and madame Vervier. She would never ask those questions now.

And presently it was of Owen himself that she was speaking.

“I wanted to tell you what peace it has given me, Giles, to feel that he did love me,” she said. The soft sweet flowers of the lilac were behind her head, the shadowy green of its leaves. He seemed to see, as her eyes dwelt on him, what Toppie would look like as a very old nun. Not so different from now. Nuns had changeless faces.

“He loved me,” she said. “But not as I loved him. When one accepts the truth, Giles, it gives peace. And now I see that we are not meant to ask for the same love back. It is enough to love; and I shall always love him.”

“He always loved you, Toppie,” Giles murmured. “He was swept away.” After he had said these words he remembered that they were the words of madame Vervier.

“Yes,” Toppie accepted quietly. “Swept away. And he was alone; in a strange country; in a time of dreadful strain. And she was so kind and so lovely.—And she does not believe the things we believe—I have seen it all, Giles. I have forgotten nothing of all that you tried to tell, to explain to me on that day. Wrong, you said, not wicked. And Alix is her child.—I have seen it all—and how he suffered. He has suffered, Giles,” said Toppie, looking deeply at him. “But now, with him, too, there is peace. I believe it. With all that has come between, we are not separated, he and I.”

Looking into Toppie’s eyes, Giles could not but believe it, too.

They were silent for a little while. Then Toppie said: “And you, dear Giles?”

“I? Oh, I’m getting on quite nicely, Toppie, dear,” Giles smiled back at her. “I shall take my First, I think.”

“Yes. But I didn’t mean you only, you alone. I mean you and Alix. What are you going to do with our dear little Alix?”

“Ah, there’s a long story there,” said Giles. “Have you heard anything about Jerry Hamble?”

“Only what your mother wrote about some trouble that Alix felt it better to be away from.—I knew it could not be only that. I knew what other trouble there was.—Oh, Giles—I was so cruel to Alix.—I could not think of what I said.—But tell me about Jerry.”

Giles found, when he began to tell her about Jerry and Alix, that it was not easy. There were still things that he must hide from Toppie. It was, he knew, everything to her to believe that Owen had given his heart to a woman not ignoble. But with all the celestial charity that had come to her vision of life, how could she believe madame Vervier anything but ignoble if she knew of Owen’s successor? “Lady Mary heard things about her, you see,” he said. “She heard the things we know, Toppie. Madame Vervier has made them easy to hear, and Lady Mary felt that since it was so Alix wasn’t a possible person for her son to marry.”

“But I thought she loved Alix,” Toppie said. She was not thinking of madame Vervier and the things Lady Mary had heard. She was thinking of Alix.

Giles knew again the flavour of his old bitterness. “She doesn’t love her enough. Perhaps one shouldn’t expect it.”

“But one does expect it. And does he love her enough?” asked Toppie.

Giles stopped to meditate. He had often to meditate over Jerry. “I see a lot of him, you know,” he said presently. “He’s always coming to me. I think he regards me as their tutelary deity. He shows me all her letters—I think he’d be quite willing to show me his.—Yes, they write to each other. Alix writes one letter to his four, Jerry complains, and her letters are models of deportment. They might be read aloud to anybody. Yes;—he loves her quite enough, if she’d have him now, against his parents’ wishes. It’s waiting that’s so hard for Jerry. He needs to do things on the crest of the wave, and Alix keeps him in the trough. He gets absolutely no encouragement from Alix. Thus far and no farther, is what all her letters really say.”

“I can’t help feeling that he isn’t good enough for Alix, Giles,” said Toppie. “He’s too young and light and gay.”

Again Giles stopped to think. “I don’t say he’s good enough. But who is good enough for Alix? She’s stuff in her for two, and lightness and gaiety are in her blood as well as the things Jerry lacks. Jerry could make her very happy. That’s what I’m quite sure of, Toppie. I want him for her, and I shouldn’t want him unless I believed he could make her happy.—For who is good enough, really, for our little Alix?” Giles repeated.

Toppie had listened to him, her eyes looking out over the garden. Now, turning them on him with a smile, she said quite suddenly: “You are good enough. You must marry Alix, Giles.”

How strange it was. Madame Vervier had said almost those words only a year ago and they had wakened not an echo in him. Now, as he heard them spoken in Toppie’s confident voice a great confusion of fear, pain, loneliness started up in Giles’s heart. It was as if he had been waiting for Toppie to say them; as if he had felt that deep-toned bell hanging in some sanctuary of his nature and known that Toppie would thus strike upon it, sending the reverberations far into the past as well as into the future. For a moment he could hardly think, he was so deafened by the clamour, and then the first words that came were helpless words: “She wouldn’t have me, Toppie, dear.”

“Why not?” smiled Toppie. She had taken his avowal quite for granted.

“If she loves anyone, it’s Jerry.”

“They won’t marry,” said Toppie. “There are too many difficulties; and he doesn’t love her enough.”

“Yes, he does, if he’s helped. It’s someone like Jerry she needs; someone young and gay, with things to offer her. I’ve nothing to offer Alix.”

“You have your love. No one will ever love Alix as you do.” Toppie’s loving eyes scanned his face while her confident voice thus assured him.

“But that’s no reason, for her.—She’ll have other people’s love. It’s true, dear Toppie; of course. I see it’s true; and I suppose I’ve known it for a long time. But Alix would never think of me like that. She thinks of me as her brother. She thinks of me as her father, almost; as someone kind and gruff and paternal. Alix is the fairy princess, and I’m just the good old beast who carries her around on my back.”

“Fairy princesses marry the good old beast and then he turns into a fairy prince,” said Toppie. “You’re so much more of a fairy prince already, Giles, than you imagine.”

“But she has her full-fledged fairy prince waiting ready to fly off with her. He may have his defects; but, all the same, he is the real thing. He can give her the crystal dress and the prancing steed and the dancing to flutes and cymbals.—Oh, you know perfectly well, Toppie, darling, all the things I can never give her and that she loves with all her heart. It’s queer, you know; I’ve wanted so to make Alix over into something more English, and what I see is that she’s made me into something more French. I’d have been indignant at the idea of fairy princes two years ago; and at marriages with an object of advantage in them;—but now I’ve been inoculated with a drop of the French realism. Alix accepts the world and sees it as it is in a way that you and I, Toppie, and people of our sort, never could. And she’s made me worldly for her. I see the advantages for her, and I want her to have them. She’s not a romantic English girl. She’d never believe in all for love and the world well lost.”

Toppie was considering him. “You say she’s made you more French. It’s true that you understand things you never could have understood before.—You know how horribly afraid your understanding made me once.—But as I listen to you it seems to me that you are the most English thing there is. What Frenchman would ever do what you have done, or feel what you feel about Alix? Isn’t it an English way of feeling to love like that, without a thought of self?—And Alix has shown us, shown you and me, Giles, how she can love.”

“I know, Toppie, dear, I know,” Giles murmured. “But with her it’s just because she loves me selflessly that she’ll never love me differently.”

“I believe she may. I believe she will. And what you must do,” said Toppie, “is go over and see.”

“With Jerry in the way? I couldn’t do that.”

“Let him have his chance, then, first. Let him go to France and ask her. I’m not afraid of Jerry. I feel as if I understood Alix better than you do. May I tell you something, Giles? You must not think me foolish, but things seem to come to me so strangely now.—I’ve always wanted this for you. From the first time I saw Alix, it was what I wanted. And now, when I shut my eyes and think of you and her, it is always together that I see you . . . with my doves around you. That would be my wedding-present to you, you know,” Toppie smiled at him and her smile had the colour of light and came from far distances; “all my doves, to watch over you and Alix and keep you safe together always.”

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