The Little French Girl/Part 4/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
When Giles came down to breakfast next morning, Alix was already there, setting a bowl of nasturtiums on the blue-and-white cloth. He had not had a word with her last night when a sudden fall of rain had kept them all in the drawing-room, and he seized his opportunity.
“Will you have a long walk with me this morning, Alix?” he said. “A really long one, you know. I want to go to Allongeville and see the church again; and then, oh, a long way further. Along the cliffs for ever so far.”
She looked at her flowers, drawing a leaf forward here and there around the edge of the bowl, and he saw that she was troubled. But she said: “We will go to the church, at all events. Yes. I should like a walk very much.”
André entered as she spoke the words and she went on quietly, giving Giles a suffocating sense of the imminence of peril from her very readiness, her very calm: “Do you not think nasturtiums very charming flowers, Giles? No one ever speaks of them;—yet they are charming. The leaves; the colour. I like them, and yet I do not love them. Why is it? There are no yellow flowers of Summer that one can love. The yellow of Spring is so different.”
“One doesn't love any of the things of Summer as one does the things of Spring,” André remarked, strolling to the window to look out, and, clearly this morning, Giles divined what he had only surmised yesterday, that his temper was not attuned to brightness; that there might even lurk beneath its graceful surface a vindictive watchfulness. And when he had spoken he turned, leaning against the window, and looked at Alix, poised in her whiteness above the bowl of glowing flowers, looked at her as Giles had never before seen him look; as if with resentment that she should be so beautiful; as if with a challenge to her to deny his right to find her so.
“Oh, but that is not so,” said Alix. “One loves roses—especially white roses;—and carnations; and jasmine; nothing in Spring is more lovely than jasmine.”
“I would give them all for a handful of primroses,” said André, his eyes fixed on her.
“Would you?” said Alix.
It was nothing; it was everything. It revealed nothing, yet it might conceal anything.
“Yes: I would, mademoiselle Alix,” said André, laughing a little as he stood, leaning, his arms folded, against the window. “Indeed, I would.”
Giles, watching the confrontation, sick with dread and fury, knew himself as much baffled as André.
Alix showed nothing to him, too; or she showed everything. Just as one chose to take it. “Here is our coffee,” she said. “And here is Maman.”
Lovely in her white, the white rose, the jasmine, madame Vervier bent her forehead to Alix's kiss and something in the daughter's eyes made Giles think of a sword in the hand of an avenging, or protecting, angel.
André bowed over his hostess's hand.
“Giles and I are to have a long walk, Maman,” said Alix, going to her place.
“You will be caught in the rain,” said André. “Have you noticed the sky? It is threatening.”
“But see the sunlight,” said madame Vervier, pouring out the coffee. “It will be a beautiful morning of great clouds and sunlight. There is nothing I love better.”
“Then you will perhaps have a long drive with me, chère madame,” said André.
“If Robert may come, too. I do not like to leave him behind.”
How easy she made it for André to pretend that the relinquishment of the tête-à-tête was a favour he granted her with difficulty!
“But certainly.—Since you ask it! Certainly he must come.—Does he still suffer this morning with his head, do you know?”
“I fear so. Albertine has taken him his breakfast to his room. That is a bad sign. A drive will do him good.”
“He will not like being rained on, you know,” André smiled.
He was so glad that he was not to be alone with madame Vervier that he dared thus embroider his feint of disappointment.
“We can shelter him,” said madame Vervier.
“While Giles converts mademoiselle Alix to the methods of the British Empire,” said André, sitting with his back to the window where the sunlight fell about him and buttering his roll with a curious light crispness of touch, as if he were painting a picture. There was something in the play of the long, fine hands with the bread that Giles was never to forget; something cruel, controlled. He read in the young Frenchman's face the signs of an exasperation mastered with difficulty.
“But the method of the British Empire is unconscious,” said madame Vervier. “It seeks no converts.”
“I am a little jealous of Giles, you know, mademoiselle Alix,” smiled André, just raising his eyes to hers. “As a Frenchman, I am jealous of his unconscious proselytizing. Once or twice yesterday I was afraid for France. Do not forget, when you listen to him, that our French roots are the most tenacious in the world. Perhaps that is why we do not found empires. Sever us from our soil and we bleed to death—or else, a worse destiny, wither. Do not forget that the unconscious is crafty.”
Alix, opposite her mother, sat silent. Whether, in her mother's presence, she had lost her readiness Giles could not divine. But she made no reply.
“Alix has learned in England to be dispassionate,” said madame Vervier, her lovely russet head a little bent downward. “She has learned to combine love for another country with loyalty to her own. That is something England has given her.”
“Ah—but that's impossible;—impossible, for our French hearts, you know!” laughed André. “We are not dispassionate. To be dispassionate is to be tepid, sleepy, indifferent;—to be withering, in fact. No, no, no, if mademoiselle Alix transferred her love, it would be to transfer her loyalty also. It is for that that I beg her to stand firm;—to remember that England can never give her what France can give.”
“Encore du café, Maman, s'il vous plaît,” said Alix. She passed her cup to her mother. She did not look at André at all. Her voice, for all its disconcerting matter-of-fact, conveyed no provocation. But, glancing over at André, Giles saw that he suddenly blushed hotly, and then, as she took Alix's cup and poured out the milk and coffee, that a deep colour mounted also to madame Vervier's brow.
Yes. It would probably rain, thought Giles. He waited for Alix on the cliff. It was a sunny, yet tumultuous and menacing day. Great clouds piled themselves along the horizon; the sails of the fishing boats were bent sideways as they went, on a ruffled sea, before the wind. “Yes. Rain is coming,” he muttered to himself, though he was not thinking of the weather. They had all parted in silence at the breakfast-table. Even madame Vervier had found no words.
Suddenly André came down the steps of Les Chardonnerets. He had his cigarette and an odd bright smile was on his lips; yet as he approached he reminded Giles of the sails on the sea. André might still try to keep up appearances; but the wind was blowing him.
But he was not going to keep up appearances. “So,” he said, “to-day is a day of destiny. You are not at all unconscious, are you, Giles? You have come to plead the cause of your laggard young friend the Englishman?”
Well, was the thought that went through Giles, let him have it, then. “Why do you call him laggard?” he inquired, and he knew that the anger that boiled up in his breast was so violent that he could have struck André as he stood there. “Would you be eager to take into your family a young girl placed as Alix is placed?”
André became very pale, but his eyes lighted. His sail scooped the sea.
“Will you plead my cause with her if I say that I would?” he asked.
Giles stood there, still; rooted to the ground. André had not meant to say that. Something in his own look had made him say it. It was the blow returned.
“You don't think of marrying Alix?” said Giles in a low voice.
“I do,” André replied. “I think of it; now. It is my way out. Why should I retire when there is that way? Little as you could imagine it, I care for her enough.”
“Care for her enough?”
“Yes, if you like to put it so. You see where I stand. Don't keep up pretences,” said André. “It's come on slowly;—but it has me now and there is no escape.—Elle est dans mon sang.—My family would have to submit;—and her mother's consent I could gain;—to marriage.—Why do you look at me with that face? She does not love your Jerry. And in marrying me she would marry a man whose devotion to her mother would never waver. Don't imagine,” said André, eyeing his friend, “that my devotion to Alix's mother has wavered. It is altered; yes; that is inevitable; we have no power over these changes. But she will always remain for me the most generous, most admirable of women.”
“You don't see the hideousness of what you propose?” Giles felt his foundations tottering beneath him. André's aspect, bright and baleful, seemed to tower above him like one of the darkly radiant clouds in the sky. And it was a thunderbolt he had launched.
“I deplore a marked awkwardness,” he said. “Especially since Alix, I fear, has become aware of it. Your English plan of destroying the innocence of young girls has grave disadvantages. You will own that. But, in any case, hideousness is not a word I could connect with any project of mine.”
“She'll never take you! Never!” Giles cried. He felt himself trembling with the fury of his repudiation. “I can tell you that now. She would feel it as I do. She would see it as hideous.”
“You don't know what she would see; nor do I,” said André. “She thinks she hates me. You needn't tell me that. But I am not ignorant in women's hearts. Hate may be the best of beginnings. The struggle may be a little longer;—I like struggles, let me tell you; the longer they last the sweeter is the surrender at the end.—And I have every reason to believe that to begin with hate is often to end with a more complete surrender.”
As André gave him this information Giles saw Alix emerge upon the verandah of Les Chardonnerets.
She could not hear their voices, but their confrontation she must remark.
Seeing Giles's eyes fixed, André turned his head and looked for a moment, also. Then he glanced back at Giles. “Plead your Jerry's cause,” he said. “Je vous cède le pas.” He turned on his heel. “If you fail, I shall plead mine.”
Giles was aware, as Alix approached him, that he must seem to stare stupidly. “I could gain her mother's consent.” Of all the brazen words that André had uttered, it was these that rang most brazenly in his ear. Was it true? Was it possible? If Alix already loved him? Could he be sure of his Alix were the hideous complicity of events thus to disclose itself? He could have fallen at her feet, in tears, clasping her and supplicating her not to be abased.
But, as she approached him, silent, he muttered a trivial word and they turned to walk along the cliff-path, while the clouds piled themselves higher in the blue sky and the wind blew yet more strongly from the sea.
Alix did not say a word. She held her soft hat at her side and the wind blew back her hair. Over her white dress a long white woollen cloak was knotted at her throat, and it, too, blew back from her as she walked. She looked before her with the high, majestic look he had already noted on her face in moments of great emotion.
“Alix,” said Giles in a low voice.
They had gone for a long way in silence. The sea now was green beneath them. The sky was a wild grey and all the grass silver as the wind blew it towards their feet. He did not know what he was going to say. He did not look at her. But he saw that she turned her face towards him. A clue then came. “Alix, do you remember, long ago, you promised me that you would never tell me a lie?” he said.
Not unclosing her lips she nodded. He had glanced at her and met her eyes, but he could not read her look.
“Well”—he heard that his voice trembled and he was suddenly afraid that he should not get far without crying—“Jerry, before I left Oxford, showed me a letter he had from you. It troubled him; badly; but he couldn't know how it troubled me. You said you could never marry him because you now loved someone else. Was that true, Alix?”
She turned away her head and looked before her; and again she did not speak.
“Please tell me. Was it true? Do you love someone else, Alix?” Giles pleaded.
She was terribly pale. Did she expect him not to have heard? Not to ask, since he knew? “Please, Alix,” he repeated; and then, once more, she bowed her head.
“Well”—Giles did not know how he forced his voice along—“One more question. Will you tell me this—Is it André de Valenbois?”
“Oh, Giles!” said Alix.
She stopped short there in the wind, turned to him. The wind blew her hair across her face and mechanically she put up her hand and pushed it back while she gazed at him. “Oh, Giles!” she repeated, putting back the short tresses that whipped across her eyes and lips. “Can you ask me that?”
Her face was like a beacon set against the storm, high in the sky. In its light he read all the monstrousness of what he had asked, and her hand, still holding back her hair, seemed to clear it for him so that he could receive the full illumination.
As he read her look and saw the tears that suddenly welled up into her eyes, Giles, with an overwhelming lift of the heart, felt himself sobbing. “Forgive me! Forgive me, darling.—It was all that I could think.”
“Oh, poor Giles,” she said brokenly.
They were walking on, quickly now. Somewhere, near by, Giles was conscious of a great brightness approaching him.
“I was horribly afraid. I could think of nobody else. And he loves you;—you see that.”
“I see it.—Yes.—You have suffered.”
“And though it seemed to me that you hated him;—it might not have prevented.”
“Do not let us speak of it.—And she has suffered. You would think, would you not, that I would hate him more for what he has made her suffer.” Alix spoke with difficulty, in short breaths; and though the wind blew her hair backward, now that they again were breasting it, she still kept her hand up against her face, looking before her as she tried to tell him her difficult thoughts.—“Yet it is not so. It is not so,” she repeated. “I feel as if I understood it all.—It is so strange, Giles, all that I have had to understand in these last months. I seem to understand people like him and Maman.—They are helpless, Giles. They are like that.”
“Oh, my darling!” said Giles.
They went on side by side. The rain had begun to fall in great drops. On their tip of promontory they seemed poised between sky and sea, the marshalled chaos—above, below. And the brightness was spreading in Giles's heart.
“There is Allongeville,” said Alix. The town lay beneath them, half obliterated with the rain.
“Let us run,” said Giles. “We can go into a shop.”
“Or into the church,” said Alix.
He put out his hand for hers and they started to run.
He could have sung with exultation. Not only André's sinister shadow was gone; but that tumult in himself. He was a boy again, and Alix, his child, his darling, was beside him. They ran, with deep breaths, smiling round at each other. The long wooded allées of the town stretched nearly to the cliff-top, and once beneath a steep, green tunnel there was no need to go so fast, for they hardly felt the rain, so dense was the roof of green; only heard it pattering heavily on the leaves above their heads. But, still running, they reached the emptied place, its cobblestones glistening with the wet, and as they passed Giles saw an astonished face at the toy-shop door, where stout madame Bonnefoix stood looking out between bunches of spades and buckets, string bags full of brightly coloured balls and festoons of dolls in stiff muslin chemises. The peaceful sculptured porch of the church was before them, and it seemed to Giles that it had been waiting for them—for centuries.
When they entered, they found the church, with its whitewashed walls and innocently bedizened saints, light and smiling after the darkened day outside. A smell of incense, flowers, and cobwebs was in the air.
Alix paused to cross herself with holy water from the bénitier carved into the stone of a pillar and bent her knee before the High Altar as they crossed the nave, while Giles held his Protestant head bashfully high.
They sat down on a bench far back in an aisle and smiled, tremulously, at each other. They were so much more alone than on the cliff with the rain and sea. No one was in the church; no one was in the place outside. It was very still, and the sound of the rain falling straightly and steadily outside made the stillness more manifest. The wind had already dropped. It was a summer rain, now, full of sweetness.
“May we talk in church?” Giles whispered. He looked away from Alix at the remembered statue of the Virgin, all white and blue, with pots of pink hydrangeas at her feet.
“I think we may,” Alix said. “We disturb no one.”
“Your saints won't mind, will they?” Giles could not keep the tremor from his voice. “Such a good Catholic as you are, Alix!”
“I think my saints are pleased,” Alix's voice, too, trembled; though she was not as shy as he was.
“You know, Toppie has gone into her convent,” Giles said, gazing at the Virgin, whose uplifted, blessing hands brought the image of Toppie so vividly before him. It was as if Toppie herself stood there, smiling down upon them.
“Your mother wrote of it,” said Alix.
“We met again in Oxford, only a little while ago,” said Giles. “She saw something that everybody has been seeing; even Jerry saw it.—You know, Alix, I love Toppie as much as ever; yet I'm so changed. It's all so different. Can you understand that?”
“I never dreamed you could be different about Toppie,” Alix murmured after a moment.
“Was that why you thought I'd never guess, even if I saw your letter to Jerry?”
“I did not think you would ever guess.”
“I didn't. I never dreamed there was a chance for me; never dreamed it.—That's what I told them all;—that there wasn't a chance.”
Alix, too, had been gazing before her, sitting there beside him in her wet white cloak; but as he said this she leaned forward and put her hands up to her face.
“Oh, darling, are you crying?” Giles's arms were round her as he asked it. “Have I been so stupid?—Is it really me you love?”
“Ever since that day I came to you from Toppie.”
She was crying; but it was in his arms and his cheek was against her dear wet head.
“Happy;—Happy;—Happy”—were the only words in Giles's mind and they went on and on like a song while he heard the rain falling sweetly and the brightness was all about them.
He listened to the rain for a long time, but when he spoke it was to answer her last words.—“It's been since then with me, too.”
Alix's head lay against his shoulder and he held both her hands in his against his breast; and he was seeing the little French girl, the strange, ominous little French girl, sitting in the Victoria waiting-room with her straight black brows and her eyes calm over their fear. He was seeing the lovely dancing head bound with crystal, aware of him, looking for him even in her joy; he was seeing the Alix who had come from Toppie. “We've always been so near, from the first, haven't we?” he said.
“So near, Giles. That was what troubled me, though I did not understand, when Jerry asked me to marry him.—You were so much nearer than Jerry.”
“And who did you think I should believe it to be, darling, when I saw the letter to Jerry?—Didn't you know I'd have to ask you some time? Did you really believe, when we were so near as that, you could hide it from me?”
“I thought I could. I had to stop Jerry from coming. I could have pretended that there was someone you didn't know.—Someone who might not love me, but whom I should always love.”
“You who promised never to tell me a lie!”
“But for those things women must always lie, Giles.”
She raised her head now to look at him. Her face was radiant yet grave. “There will never be anything to hide any more;—never—never.—There is nothing you do not understand. You understand all my life. You understand Maman.—Giles, how happy this will make her.”
“I hope it will. But I came to plead Jerry's cause, you know. She thinks I'm pleading it now.”
“How happy it will make her that you did not have to plead it.”
“Will it? I can't help being afraid that she'll be disappointed. She'd have preferred the better match for you, darling little Alix.”
“She will not think it better. It was all she had left to hope for, that was all. It has wounded her pride horribly to have to hope for it—after the bitter things it has meant for her and for me.”
“But—if you could have cared.—Everything would have come right. Lady Mary is so fond of you and she would have stood by. Darling, it isn't only loving;—no one knows that better than you do;—it's living. Do you face it all? To live in Oxford? To be the wife of a humdrum scholar? To have no balls and no riding? To wear”—Giles found—“the wrong sort of clothes and think about ordering breakfast. Darling, Jerry loves you, you know, and the bitter things would all fade away. Such a different life is there for you to take. I can't help seeing, though we love each other, that it's the life you were meant for and that the life with me in Oxford isn't.”
“Oh, no, Giles, you do not see that,” said Alix. She put her hand on his shoulder, as if with its pressure to help him to think clearly. “You are English and believe that more than anything it is right to marry the person you love.”
“But you are French, Alix. It's the other belief that's in your blood. The belief in what's suitable.”
“Ah, but it is true what Maman says to me, when she reproaches me; I have in some things become English. I think the thing most suitable of all is to love one's husband. To marry Jerry, loving you;—no, Giles; you know that that would not be possible to me. And I do not love him at all. He is not near me at all; while you are like a part of my life.—No, listen to me, dear Giles.—This is not making love. It is being French; it is being reasonable. Even the clothes and the breakfasts;—oh, I know that they are important.—But I am used to being poor and to knowing how to be right with very little money.—In clothes and in breakfasts, Giles, I shall know how to be right.”
Her eyes, resting on him, were the eyes of the English Alix, of the woman who chooses, for herself, her life and the man she will share it with; yet their look was a French look, too. The look of one who has no illusions; who sees an order and accepts it; an order to live for and to make one's own. “And there will be the ideas and the atoms to watch, and the Bach choir to sing in,” she finished; “and walks in the country;—and then I shall be in France, for all the holidays, with Maman, Giles.”
She rose as she spoke, for the storm had passed. Sunlight was flooding in through the high pale windows of the clerestory. The Virgin's crown glittered against her pillar. Slowly, hand in hand, Alix and Giles walked down the nave.
But there was something more he had to say to her, here, in her France, in her church, beneath her Virgin's blessing hands. This woman Alix had made none of the conditions that the child Alix, bewildered, charmed, afraid, had asked of her first lover. She asked no promises. She left everything to him. It was his order she accepted.
And before they turned aside to go, Giles paused and took both her hands in his. It was at the feet of the dear, silly Virgin in her white and blue and gold that he made his promise: “Darling, you shall lose nothing, nothing that I can help. It will never be alone that you'll come for those holidays. If you take England for me, you must give me all that you can of France.—Everything that is sacred to you, is sacred to me, too.”
When they opened the door the world was dazzling with sunlight and a great white cloud towered up like an august and welcoming angel in the sky, while across the place the little Curé came hurrying, stout and active with his rosy, peasant face and thick grey hair. He looked at them kindly, if very shyly, murmuring a word of greeting to Alix as they all met in the porch, and Giles, in deference to convention, dropped the hand he held. But Alix, as she smiled at the Curé and smiled beyond him at all the sunlit world she was entering, took Giles's hand in hers again, and said: “Monsieur le Curé, may I present to you my fiancé?”
FINIS