The Little French Girl
PART IV

CHAPTER VII

On the verandah Alix sat beside monsieur de Maubert reading “Bérénice,” aloud to him. André was stretched near them in a deck-chair, his eyes following the smoke of his cigarette, and madame Vervier emerged from the salon, a little sheaf of letters in her hand. She laid them down on a table and André said that he would presently post them. “Yes. You and I would rather go by the cliff, Giles,” said madame Vervier.

She wore a white dress, not the tennis dress; this was fashioned differently, with floating panels and long loose sleeves. She was bareheaded, a sunshade in her hand.

“Alix reads to him every afternoon,” she said as they went towards the cliff. She spoke of monsieur de Maubert, but her heart, Giles knew, must be shaken by the interview with mademoiselle Blanche.—Mademoiselle Blanche could only have come to measure her pangs, surreptitiously, against madame Vervier’s. “His eyes trouble him of late, le pauvre cher. He enjoys hearing Alix. He is very fond of her.”

They walked along the little path beaten in the grass at the edge of the cliff. The sea was the Botticelli sea and against the sky went a flock of young goldfinches.

“Our birds,” said madame Vervier, pointing to them, and he still heard the breathlessness in her voice. What had she succeeded in concealing from mademoiselle Blanche, and what had mademoiselle Blanche succeeded in concealing from her? “See the pattern made by the triangles of gold on their wings,” she said.

“We call such a flock, a charm of goldfinches,” said Giles. “Isn’t it a pretty name?”

“A charm. A charm of goldfinches. And what a happy name. They look that.” Madame Vervier’s eyes followed the flight of the bright birds. “I wish one did not have to think of snares and cages when one sees them. Our people are so cruel for birds. I wish such happy things might escape the snare.”

“A great many do. We shouldn’t be seeing that charm now unless a great many escaped,” Giles tried to smile at her.

“But it is the way of life, is it not, to snare and spoil happiness,” said madame Vervier.

They left the woods of Les Chardonnerets behind them. Before them was the great curve of the cliff and the empty sky.

“So, you see me punished,” said madame Vervier.

Giles walked beside her and found no word to say.

“Even you, stern moralist as you are,” madame Vervier pursued, “could hardly have foreseen such a punishment.—To know that I have ruined my child’s best chance of happiness; all that I could have hoped for her.—To know that she is suffering because of me.”

“No, I didn’t think it would come like that,” Giles murmured.

“Ah, but it has come in the other way, too,” she said, looking round at him in the pale shadow of her sunshade;—“though I have forestalled that calamity, and a calamity forestalled is always endurable. André and I are parted.” Madame Vervier continued to look at him steadily. “I have told him that this Summer is the end. He still believes—or tries to believe—that he loves me; but he consents. I knew that he would consent.”

Giles walked beside her filled with a confusion of pain and pity. Never before had madame Vervier openly admitted her relation to André; admitted it to Owen’s brother. “He doesn’t look like partings,” was all he found, most helplessly, to say.

“Partings, at his age, are the preludes to beginnings; and André has the gift of looks. He is, perhaps, not quite at ease; but he has wisdom—our French wisdom, Giles. His mother, already, is arranging a marriage for him. As soon as our rupture is definitely known, he will be able to settle himself in life;—se ranger,” said madame Vervier. “And he will be glad to be settled; he will be glad to be married to a charming young girl whom he has known since boyhood;—a young girl,” madame Vervier continued in her steady voice, “whom your madame Marigold met when she came to France last Spring.”

“You know all about that, then?” Giles muttered.

“How should I not know?” madame Vervier returned.

He saw her maimed for life. Yes; it had, with André, gone as deep as that. She had unflinchingly performed the surgical operation, severed the limb and bound the arteries. He saw her bandaged, spotted with blood, drained of joy; but tranquil; moving forward.

“It was time,” she said as if to herself, looking before her. “When Alix returned to me, when I saw what I had done to her, I knew that it was time.”

He could not think of one thing to say to her; not one word of comfort or approbation. He would have liked to say that she would be happier; but he did not believe that she would be. He would have liked to say that she had behaved worthily; but the note of moral appraisal was repellent to his imagination. And under everything went that bitter memory of who André was, and whose successor.

“But there were further reasons for André’s acquiescence,” said madame Vervier suddenly.

They had gone for a long way in silence. A light breeze met them, now that they had rounded a headland, and the thin panels of madame Vervier’s dress were blown backward as she went. Goddess-like as he had always felt her, there was something disembodied, unearthly in her aspect now. It was as if, gliding through sad Elysian fields, beautiful, changeless, with gazing eyes, she contemplated the sorrows of the past. Yet her voice, as she spoke again, was not the voice of an Elysian spirit. He recognized as he heard it that a bitter humanity still beat at the heart of her confidences and that her tranquillity was not the shining of an inner peace, but a shield proudly worn. What she had to tell him was the thing most difficult to tell; the thing that throbbed and echoed in her, as the scar of the severed limb burns and remembers; and all her voice was altered as she spoke of it.

“There were further reasons,” she repeated, turning her face away from him to the sea. “He knows that it is best to go, since to remain would be to love Alix.”

And through all his fear, Giles saw it now; he had clung to the hope that it was an ugly dream. He measured, in a sense of physical sickness, the difference between an ugly dream and reality as in madame Vervier’s words his dread was made close and palpable.

“But isn’t that impossible?” It was his English voice that asked the question. His French understanding knew that it was possible.

“Why so?” madame Vervier’s French voice returned. All the acquiescence of her race spoke in it. “Alix is exquisite.”

Alix’s face swam before Giles. “But she is your daughter.”

“That would offend his taste. That does offend it. That is one of the reasons, as I have said, for his consent to our parting. It is not a reason, if he stayed, that could repress his heart.”

“Couldn’t Alix be trusted to do that?” Giles asked after a moment. He must ask it. He must approach, in order to know whether madame Vervier saw it, too, the deepest fear of all. And with what a complex thankfulness he heard in her reply that Alix’s secret was safe with him. It did not exist for madame Vervier’s imagination even. A deep, strange bitterness spoke in her voice as she said: “Her dislike of him is an added attraction.”

“Her dislike of him? Does she dislike him?”

“Surely you have seen it. As if by instinct. Always. From the first. It is an added attraction,” madame Vervier repeated; and with a little laugh, more bitter than her voice, she said: “It is the first time in his life that André has found himself disliked by a woman.”

How strange, how tortuous, how self-contradictory was the human heart, Giles thought, walking beside his unhappy friend. With all her passionate maternal love he felt, thrilling in her tone, a resentment against her child that she should be indifferent to the charm that had so subjugated herself. Giles felt it cruel to ask the further question that came to him, yet he wondered if she had not, often, asked it of herself. “He consents to go, then, because he is hopeless?”

She had, indeed, often asked it. He heard that in her voice as she answered: “Oh—do not let us deprive him of all merit!”

They had reached by now a further promontory of the cliff and looked over a long stretch of the coast, pale blue sea, pale cliffs, a delicate distant finger of the land running out, against the horizon, with a tiny lighthouse upon it. A bench was set amidst the grass before this view and madame Vervier sank down upon it as if exhausted. Giles sat on the grass at her feet and for a little while they surveyed the azure scene in silence.

“And now,” said madame Vervier, and he heard that she gathered her thoughts from dark broodings, “let us speak no more of me, but of Alix.—Of Alix and Jerry. For you like this Jerry. It is because of him that you have come.”

“Yes. It’s because of him. I like him very much.” Giles looked down at the grass. “I saw him before I left. All that he asks is to marry her at once.”

“Ah, he loves her, I know. He is an honourable young Englishman and he loves her. That is what I have gone upon from the beginning. It is not Jerry who is the difficulty. It is Alix.”

“We must give her time, you see,” Giles murmured. “Her pride had such a blow.”

“Give her time! I would give her anything!” madame Vervier exclaimed. “But I can do nothing with Alix.”—Rien! rien! rien! she said in French with a crescendo of grief and impatience almost comic to his ear for all its pathos. “You have altered my Alix for me, you English, Giles. You have given her a different heart. It is strange, strange to me—and bitter—to feel how changed she is. She loves me. More than ever. She has guessed everything, and she loves me more than ever; but with a love almost maternal; a love terribly mature. I could not have believed it possible in so short a time that a child should grow to womanhood. She is docile, still; obedient; but she does not deceive me;—it is only in the little things—the things that do not count. If, in the great things, she would obey, nothing need be lost. There is now only a rangée mother to explain, to efface, to avoid.—How easy I would make it for my Alix to avoid me if her happiness demanded it!—But, no; she will not hear me. She is a stone to my supplications. She denies that she has ever loved him. She takes her life into her own hands and says that she will never marry, that she will stay with me always and be happy so. I dash myself against a rock in Alix. More than that;—she watches me; she suspects me—as if I were the daughter—bon Dieu!—and she the mother!—I wrote to Jerry. I told him to come;—it was but the other day.—I told him that it was best that they should meet, and that I would help him. And Alix intercepted the letter. Yes;—you may well stare. She confronted me with it and tore it in two before my eyes. She told me she knew too well what I had said to Jerry and that she had herself written and that all was over between them. Cold! Stern!—I could hardly believe it was my little Alix.—She spoke as if I had done her a great wrong.—As if I were the child and she the mother,” madame Vervier repeated, a note of bewilderment mingling with the grief of her tone; and, indeed, as she made him these ingenuous confidences, Giles saw her as the child, the tricking child; all the French rôles reversed and Alix sustained in hers by what England had given her. No wonder madame Vervier was bewildered.

“But that was very wrong of you,” he said, as he might have said to the child. “You had no right to do that.”

“No right! I, her mother, am to sit by with folded hands and watch her ruin herself! Those are your English ideas. Those are the ideas that Alix has made hers. She, too, said I had no right. As if a mother’s right over her child’s life were not supreme!”

“We don’t think it is, you see. Not when the child has reached Alix’s age. You don’t want her to marry a man she does not love.”

“Love! Why should she not love him, since she loves nobody else!” cried madame Vervier, a deep exasperation thrilling in her voice. “And even if she did not love him, she cares quite enough. He is an admirable parti, this Jerry; I could not have chosen better had I been free to choose; he is an admirable parti and can give her all that I cannot give; security, position, wealth. Such a marriage would atone for everything that my darling has lacked. And love would come; why should it not? It is, as you say, her pride only that stands in the way. Ah, if she would only trust me!” madame Vervier’s voice for the first time trembled, and looking up at her he saw tears in her eyes—“If she would only trust me! I could arrange it all.”

He could not put before her the old, romantic protests. They had ceased to have validity for himself. All that madame Vervier said was true; truer far than she could know.

Better, far better, that Alix should marry Jerry, not loving him, than be exposed to the perils of her life in France. She had loved him once; why not again? She was a child. She could not know her own heart. Her pride had had a dreadful blow; and she had come too near the fire; that was all. She must trust them; it was true. She must trust him and her mother. To this strange pass had France brought Giles.

“I’ve come over to try to help you, you know,” he said. “I want it as much, I believe, as you want it. About her pride—Lady Mary, I’m sure, expects them to marry now.—She shall hear that.”

“Ah, I felt that you had come to give me hope, Giles,” madame Vervier breathed, and her hand, for a moment, rested on his shoulder. “You are wonderful. You are impayable.—No one would believe in you.—If anyone can help, it is you. Alix will listen to you when she will listen to no one else.”

“I believe she will. I’ll do my best,” Giles muttered.

Yet, as he looked down at the grass, sitting there filially at madame Vervier’s feet, he knew that his heart was torn in two and that he longed to put his head down on her knees and tell her that no one in the world would ever love Alix as he himself did.

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