The Little French Girl
PART IV

CHAPTER V

Giles did not believe in what his dear Toppie had told him; did not believe that the fairy princess could ever be for him; but the thought of her words hovered round him as if her very doves sought the nest she promised. It was impossible. He could not recall a glance or word of Alix’s that made it seem possible; yet it hovered. The thought of Alix accompanied his days. He had said that he had nothing to give her and it was true that he had no fairy-prince gifts; but sculling quietly on the Cherwell at evening, Giles, resting on his oars and watching his beloved Oxford glide past, would remember how many things they had shared together, simple, happy things, the gifts of life that were there for everybody to share. She had liked Oxford, too, when she had last come. He treasured every discerning phrase that his memory could recover. She had said that it was kinder than anything in France; and the simile of the humane old bishop, with his ring and robes and benignant face, came back to him, and how one day, when they read “The Scholar Gipsy” together, she had said: “It seems to me that learning is happier with you than with us, Giles, and goes with happier things.—Some day you will take me for all those walks your gipsy took.”

Yes, he could see himself and Alix in Oxford together and walking in Oxfordshire and Berkshire fields and lanes. More than that. There was another figure that Toppie had not brought into her picture; but she would have thought of it. It was the figure that stood between Alix and all those other dreams he had woven round her and Jerry. Who but himself could care for Alix’s mother and accept her into his life? Madame Vervier, he knew, would never have come to Oxford. He need not, disconcertingly, try to see her there. But there were the long holidays when he and Alix might have gone to her. Who but he could have kept Alix’s mother near her? “But it’s only dear Toppie’s dream,” thought Giles, watching the towers glide by. “And there’s Jerry.”

It was late one evening, at the end of Commemoration Week, that Jerry burst into his rooms. Ruth and Rosemary and his mother had just left him. Ruth and Rosemary were now old enough to join in any of the Oxford festivities that he could offer them, and his mind was in a daze from the mid-Summer excitement. It bubbled at the bottom of the glass like froth after a long satisfying draught, for he knew that he had done well in his exams and now only his viva lay before him;—so that the wreathed, dancing heads of young girls, and the sun-browned heads of youths on the river, glided past on a queer background of metaphysics. He has seen Jerry dancing, and he had seen him on the river. Lady Mary had waved to him from a barge in mild, unallusive affectionateness, and for a moment they had spoken together in the crowd leaving the Sheldonian.—“I think you could tell me that I might be proud of Jerry,” was what she had said, and it was a very odd thing for Lady Mary to say. It showed Giles that if to him Jerry showed his weakness, to his mother he was showing his strength.

It was neither strength nor weakness that Jerry showed him now. All that Giles could read in his headlong face was immense perplexity, and he cried at once on entering: “I’ve had a most amazing letter from Alix.”

Giles pulled himself up in his chair and Jerry sat down on the edge of the table beside him. It was a painful perplexity; humiliation; bitterness; cogitation were mingled in it, and as Giles saw it fear rose in his heart, though he asked, “Well?” with the voice of the friend and counsellor.

“I was going over in a fortnight,” said Jerry. “I wrote and told her so. And I told Mummy, and Mummy has behaved splendidly. She’s in a frenzy underneath, no doubt; but she shows nothing. I expect she relies on Alix to back her up. Well, by Jove, she may! Alix does more than back her up. Here’s her answer. Am I really dished, do you think?” cried Jerry, “or is it just to put me off?”

Giles read. Alix wrote in English as if to make herself more clear.

Giles read, and his heart stood still while brightly, balefully the fox-seraph visage of André de Valenbois rose before him. Alix’s letter was dated from Vaudettes-sur-Mer.

Jerry was watching him. “Now isn’t that rather thick,” he said.

But Giles, gazing at the letter, found no reply.

“It must, of course, be some Frenchman,” said Jerry. “Can you imagine who it is? Have you heard anything at all?”

Giles shook his head.

“Does her mother know any decent men?” Jerry inquired.

Giles folding the letter tried to think. Were they decent men? Judged by the world’s standards, André de Valenbois was as decent as Jerry himself. The difference was that he would not be decent for Alix. “Yes,” he said, then, slowly. “I suppose they are quite decent. Only Frenchmen are different, you know.”

He felt Jerry scanning his face. “You mean that no decent Frenchman would think of marrying her?”

At this Giles felt as if he clutched Alix back from a danger. She might have betrayed herself to him; he could not bear to see her betrayed to Jerry. “She may marry someone quite decent, you see, but not of her own class. Some nice young artist, for instance, some savant. Her mother knows all sorts of interesting people.”

“But she doesn’t say anything about marrying,” Jerry persisted. “It doesn’t somehow sound like getting married, does it? She’d tell his name if it was that.”

“Well, I don’t know. Not at once; not to you, so soon. It may be only coming on between them. Nothing definite may yet have been said.”

“I didn’t know French girls were allowed to have things come on,” said Jerry. “I thought it was arranged for them.”

“But we may have changed Alix about all that,” said Giles.

Jerry at this was silent. He sat on the table and swung his leg. The letter lay beside him where Giles had put it, and after a little while he picked it up and read it over again. “Do you think she’s telling the truth?” he then questioned. “Isn’t it still possible that it’s all her pride? If Mummy could have written to say I was coming and that she gave me her blessing—mightn’t it have been different?”

Giles for a moment contemplated the hope. Then he rejected it. “It sounds to me like the truth,” was all that he could find. It sounded to him too horribly like the truth. Something dry and cold breathed through Alix’s few words, and to his apprehension it was the dryness, the coldness of her despair. For if Alix knew that she loved her mother’s lover, what must not her despair be? Only one gleam of ugliest hope he suddenly saw and clung to;—in that case would she not have snatched at any refuge; would she not in that case have married Jerry on any terms, if only in order to escape her jeopardy?

Giles felt himself swinging in the void. How could one tell what was at the bottom of Alix’s letter? Was it not even possible that, with all the revelations that had overpowered her, she had not yet thought of her mother as involved further than with Owen? Might she not think of the truth, to which he had helplessly assented when she had asked him for it, as applying only to the past? Might she not still have her ignorances? Madame Vervier would have done all in her power to preserve them.

He was not thinking of himself or of Jerry. He was thinking only of Alix, and his absorption was so deep and so bitter that he was not aware how long Jerry, sitting there beside him, had been observing him, until, looking up, he met his eyes.

“It’s pretty sickening, isn’t it?” said Jerry.

Giles did not quite know to which aspect of the disaster he referred, but he assented. “Yes, it’s pretty sickening.”

Then he saw that Jerry referred to his disaster. “I’m not an utterly blind and complacent young donkey,” said Jerry, swinging his foot, while his voice trembled a little. “You mind as much as I do; and you mind more, because you really love her more. Whatever you may have been in the Spring, you’re in love with Alix now, and I must say that I call it a rotten shame.”

“My dear boy!” Giles ejaculated, faintly smiling.

“You’d have stood by and helped us. You’d have helped us to the end; I see that,” said Jerry. “And you’d have been satisfied in feeling her safe, in feeling that England had got her, even if you hadn’t. And now you’ve lost even that.”

“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” said Giles. There was really no use in denying anything to Jerry; but at the same time this was the final bitterness. He had never been so sure of wanting Jerry for Alix.

“Perhaps there’s still some hope,” he said suddenly. “I’ll have to go over, of course, as soon as I’ve had my viva, and see whether there’s any hope.”

“Do you mean for me or for you?” Jerry inquired.

“I mean for you,” said Giles.

“You’d make her happier than I should,” said Jerry, swinging his foot and looking a little as if he might cry. “You’re much more the ideal English lover than I am. Carry her off from him; for yourself.—It’s only what I deserve.”

“If there’s anyone in England that Alix could have fallen in love with, it’s you. And it’s the person she can be in love with who can make her happiest. That’s our English belief, isn’t it?” said Giles. “I am in love with Alix, Jerry. It’s perfectly true. But it’s you I want her to marry. And I’ve never felt so sure of it as now.”

“I’m living up to your ideal, what? Well, I’d like to do that, you know. I like you to think me worthy of her even if I’m not. I leave it in your hands, then,” said Jerry, getting off the table and turning his head away while he stared before him. “I’m such a silly rotter that I want her a great deal more, now that I know she may really be in love with someone else.”

“Unless”—Giles had got up, too, and was gazing intently at his young friend—“unless Jerry, after all, you went yourself.”

“No; I leave it to you.” Jerry shook his head, moving to the door. “I leave it to you and Alix.”

“I don’t know; I don’t know,” Giles pondered. “It might be better. I kept you back before. That may have been my grievous mistake. I don’t believe in wooings by proxy.”

“Well, I didn’t make much headway when I wooed in person,” Jerry remarked. “No. Clear away the other fellow if you can. And then we’ll see. After all”—Jerry had actually got outside now, but he put his head around the door to utter these last words—“you’ve never asked her yourself yet. She’s never seen you as a lover.”

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