The Little French Girl/Part 2/Chapter 1

“C'est la France,” said Alix. She leaned beside him on the railing of the Channel steamer and looked through the blue of the July day to where the town thinly shaped itself, like a line of grey-white shells floating between sea and sky. Her phrase was spoken in a tone of quiet statement, unstressed by any emotion, yet Giles, while they watched the shore together, felt its echoes stretching back revealingly into the past and out towards the future.

That was really what had been at the bottom of her heart during all her time with them; France. And if she had talked about it so little that must merely have been, he reflected, because she cared about it so much. Of course she loved her own country; he could not expect or wish anything else; but had she, he wondered, any more love for England now than when she had first come among them? And he felt, when he asked himself the question, a little rueful and a little vexed. She was not a shallow child; that he knew; it was because she was not shallow that he minded her imperviousness to all that meant so much to them. With the imperviousness went an oddly mature security, as of a creature formed and fixed and not to be altered by circumstance; and it was when he thought of this security that Giles felt a little angry; for, after all, what had France given her, poor kid?

Giles did not think of his family, in particular, as benefactors to the little French girl. That side of her indebtedness was not one to engage his attention. It was England as a whole that he had hoped would by this time have crept about her heart; England with its gentle days of Spring, its balmy days of Summer; all the happy family life they had just come from; tennis, dogs, strawberries on the lawn, and long bicycle rides over the hills; England's sweetness and fidelity embodied in his mother; its holiness in Toppie.

The starlike image of Toppie rose before the young man's mind and with it his deepest doubt of the little French girl beside him. He had come from pity for the child's unconscious plight, pity for the cruelty of her position there among them—a little creature so proud that it would have been to her a burning humiliation could she have guessed how her mother had dealt with her and them in foisting her upon them—he had come, from this initial pity, to feel affection, then an odd, perplexed respect, and finally a profound, a tender solicitude. It was upon her future in France, with her mother, that it centred; but that was the outward aspect of the inner fear; for when he thought of Toppie and of holiness the question he had also to ask himself was whether Alix was impervious to holiness, too?

Giles felt that he would be better able to face that question, and with it the whole problem of the child's future, when he had seen “Maman.” That was why he was here. That was why he had said “yes,” on the morning, a fortnight ago, when Maman's letter at last had come summoning Alix home. Since their interview, long ago in the Winter, he and Alix had never spoken of their mutual secret, that dreadful one-sided secret that Giles visualized as an unexploded bomb lying there between them and liable at a touch to go off and scatter the family happiness to fragments. The interview had ended in a pact. She was to help him; she had, poor little creature, helped him; he still felt stung with shame to think how much; to think how he had profited, how they all had profited, by her falsehoods. And he was bound to help her. He knew, when Maman's letter came, all that lay behind the appeal as she said: “Oh, Giles, could you not come with me? and stay if only for a little while; so that at last you and Maman may meet?”

She felt that it would help if he were to know Maman. And it might well be that he could only effectually help Alix if he faced at last the baleful woman who had brought the hidden disaster to their lives. It was better that he should know, in regard to Alix's future, what they were “up against.” It had not been of Maman he was thinking when he assented; it had been, as on that day last Winter, of Alix herself. And that was why he was here, on his way to Normandy and the village on the cliff, and it was Dieppe that was showing now, along its wharves, façades of sunlit houses.

“Don't you think, Giles,” said Alix, “that the air in France is very different? Like golden wine?—There was a wine made at a little mountain village near Montarel—Vernay-les-Vouvières it is called—and the wine after it. I wish you could see that village. So high and steep it is, the road climbs for miles before you reach it; and higher still, above the village, is an old, old statue of la Sainte Vierge, looking down over the vineyards and blessing them. When one stands beside her one sees over all the crests of the mountain-ranges; like blue rolling waves. We used to drink Vernay-les-Vouvières at Grand-père's. It was very cheap, for it could not travel; it lost its bouquet at once if it travelled. And it was a delicious wine; so pale, so light, so delicate. One felt like singing when one drank it. I think the air of France makes one feel like that.”

Mrs. Bradley's household, though not pledged to teetotal principles, eschewed all alcoholic drink, and Giles, as he listened, seeing the Virgin, the vineyards, the ingenuous piety, the pagan gaiety that Alix's words conjured up, wondered what her impressions of their unenlivened meals must have been.

“I wish I could see Vernay-les-Vouvières,” he said. “A beautiful country yours must be, so near the Alps.—We have sunny days in England, you know. It's a French superstition to think that English people go staggering about in a fog all the year round. You ought to have got over that,” he added. “Our weather is as good as the weather in Northern France; every bit.”

“But different, Giles. As good; but not so happy. Never like wine, I think. Always there is something soft and sleepy in the air. After the air of France it is like milk.”

“Milk is a very excellent thing.”

“Yes. Excellent. As a food. But it does not make one want to sing.”

To this Giles said nothing.

“For a French town Dieppe is not so specially beautiful,” Alix took up presently; for she and Giles knew each other so well that a disagreement could be allowed to fall between them disregarded. “I do not think that for a French town it has special beauty; yet, seen like this, with the harbours, and the wharves, and houses—all so golden, do you not think it is very lovely?”

Giles had just been thinking so. “Yes. Quite lovely,” he admitted. “For a French town it's rather rambling and shambling, too, and I like that.”

“Ah, but it keeps its dignity all the same,” said Alix. “It has gone where it meant to go and when it got there it stood up well.”

“We have dignified towns,” said Giles. “Edinburgh; you must see Edinburgh one day, Alix; and Bath; and Ludlow. Of course, as to ramble, London is a bad offender; but London is beautiful all the same.”

“Beautiful, do you think, Giles? Beautiful you mean, then, as one might find the face of a dear, funny old great-grandmother beautiful, for what it means; but not for what it looks; I think it a very ugly town,” said Alix in her tone of happy statement—for Alix was very happy to-day. “It is like an old great-grand-mother over a tea-pot; and Paris is like a goddess with a wreath.”

“I like old great-grandmothers much better than goddesses,” said Giles.

All the same he understood. She was initiating these comparisons—and it was so uncharacteristic of her to make comparisons—not from any desire to disparage, but from the deep, joyous excitement, the love and pride that could not be repressed and that she could not overtly have expressed without expressing emotion as well. She thrilled with it, he knew, leaning beside him, her profile, forcible, intent, golden against the sea. It looked golden like that because the sun fell on it and the sea was blue; but he had always thought Alix's skin a queer colour and never knew whether he liked or disliked it. Sometimes it was grey, like pussy-willows: and sometimes it was green, making one think of olive-trees or the patina on an old bronze; and sometimes, as to-day, it was pure gold; and always it seemed to be the final expression of significant structure rather than a decorative bloom, and to go with her blue eyes and black hair whichever tint it took. But, as he told himself, he was a sentimental Englishman and liked girls to be the colour of apple-blossoms.

Alix had fallen to silence now, and he was keeping his mind rather consciously on their friendly altercation, and even on Alix's profile, because he did not wish to reflect on what lay before him. He had not an idea of what he was to say to Alix's mother, or to do with her; and it was no good thinking about it until he saw her; saw her again.

Saw her again! How the phrase brought back the unforgettable pang and misery. How the unforgettable image floated in his memory, vivid yet unseizable; irrelevant as it were and not to be woven to any secure conclusion. It had been the stillest day, that Spring day in the Bois. The purpling grey of branches, above, behind the wandering pair, had melted to shroud-like distances and they had emerged before his astonished eyes like the spectral creatures of a clairvoyant vision; silent, and with linked arms. He had gazed at them, and as he gazed his impulse to go forward and greet his brother was checked ere it was formed. Owen here in Paris: Owen with madame Vervier—he had known at once that it was she; Owen to look like that. Rooted among the thinly scattered saplings of the wood he had remained, gazing until they passed away and the white distance received them into its folds as it had given them up—ominous disappearance of the brother he was never to see again. Rooted he stood, and heard the wild, monotonous phrase of a missel-thrush ring forth suddenly from overhead and felt his mind slowly take possession of the icy grief that crept upon it. Owen's face had given him all the truth; its rapture; its terrible stilled restlessness. And though she was so quiet, walking there, her head bent down a little, her eyes fixed before her, Giles had felt, for all the innocence of his chaste boyhood, that she was so quiet because she possessed him so completely.

How clearly he could see her still, with her brooding brightness, her soft gloom. He could not see her as baleful; he could not see her as guilty; he only saw her walking there secure in power and loveliness. And this was the irrelevance, the tormenting discrepancy; for she was the woman who had taken Owen from Toppie; she was the woman who, after her lover's death, had placidly made use of what assets he had left her; his family; and its trust in him and her. And she was the more baleful to him from the fact that, though he remembered her so vividly and knew such portentous things about her, herself he did not know at all.

There was one thing about her, however, that he could and ought to know at once, and the thought of it worked its way up into his mind while he and Alix leaned there. They had never again spoken of their secret, but, before he met her mother he ought to know whether Alix had told her what he knew of Owen's stays with them in Paris. Before he saw madame Vervier he ought to know what she knew about him; and suddenly, his eyes fixed upon the wharves and houses of Dieppe, he said: “You think she'll feel it all right that I'm come?”

“I wrote to her that you were coming,” said Alix. Her mind had perhaps been following some train of thought not far removed from his, for she spoke as if they were continuing a theme rather than taking it up. “She will be delighted.”

“Will she? Look here, Alix”—Giles gazed down over the railing at the sea—“she couldn't be delighted, I take it, if she knew that I had a grievance about my brother on her account.”

He had spoken very abruptly, yet he had, he felt, put it well. In the little pause that followed his words, he was pleased with himself for having found any so colourless and unprovocative.

“What we know of your brother,” said Alix after her pause, “would not give her a grievance against you; only against him.”

“Against him?”

“Did he not deceive her, too?”

“Deceive her? Oh, I see. You think he didn't tell her that he'd kept us in the dark?”

“He could not have told her, Giles; if that is really what you are asking me.”

Giles, a little confused, retraced his steps. “What I'm really asking you is whether you've told her. I want to know where I stand with her. Haven't you felt that she ought to be told?”

Again Alix was silent, and for a longer time. Then she said: “It has been my great perplexity. She does not know. Of course she does not know. But I wrote to her at once, that time last Winter, and begged that I might come home; and when I found she could not have me, I thought it best to say nothing then. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you will blame me, Giles. But I thought it best to wait. It will give her such pain when she knows.”

It would never have given her so much pain Giles, with a sudden glow of indignation, felt, as it had already given her daughter. What Alix had suffered in wrestling with her problem was in her voice. “Blame you? I? You poor kid!” he exclaimed. And he added: “After all, his silence meant devotion to herself.”

“Do you think so?” said Alix. “I am afraid she will not feel it so. I am afraid she will feel that it meant cowardice and lack of loyalty;—as it does to me.”

Giles was now aware of an uncomfortable astonishment. He had to remember that Alix was nearly seventeen. A woman could not have spoken with a more secure assurance of putting him in his place; and if, by the same token, she put Owen in his place, was she not, from her own point of view, her woman's dignity veiled only by her child's ignorance, justified in doing so? For if Owen had really kept madame Vervier in the dark she might have a right to resentment. The two culprits should have had no secrets from one another.

“I see,” he repeated, lamely, as he felt. “And you would not like to spoil her memory of him?”

“We kept it from your mother and from Toppie because it would spoil their memory of him,” said Alix.

“I know; but you'll own, won't you, that it would be a far worse spoiling for them?”

“Yes. For them it would be worse. But why should anyone feel pain now, when it is all over? Why should anything be spoiled?”

“It's only,” said Giles, going carefully, “that it seems unfair to your mother to let me come and keep her in ignorance of what I know. It's for you to judge, Alix; but since you love your mother so much, I rather wonder that you can bear to keep such a secret from her. And, quite apart from me, oughtn't she to know just what she does send you back to?”

“Send me back to?” Alix echoed, and her eyes met his strangely.

“Yes. Before you come back in the Autumn, don't you think she ought to know?”

“Do you really imagine, Giles, that if Maman knew, she would send me back?”

“Well”—he felt that he flushed. He had not foreseen this emergency—“since I know, and since I want you back;—why not she?”

“Do you count Maman's pride for nothing, Giles?”

Madame Vervier's pride had never for a moment engaged his attention, and did not now. His attention was fully engaged by Alix's pride, facing him with a look of granite.

“I don't really see why she should take it so hardly,” he said after a moment; but he was horribly uncomfortable, for he was not speaking with frankness to his young friend. “Your relation to us has, really, nothing to do with her relation to Owen. It's a new thing; and that's an old one; and as you say, it's all over.”

“But she could not have me there on false pretences, Giles,” said Alix. The pride had dropped now. It was as if with sudden sadness she saw too well the reasons for his misunderstanding. “I could not be there on false pretences. You have a right to think it of me since I have never told her. But it is all over now; the new as well as the old. I need never tell her. For I am at home again and I shall never go back to Heathside.”

“Never come back to Heathside!” Actually for the moment Maman, Owen, Toppie, all the grief and perplexity that hung about these figures, were swept from Giles's mind by his deep discomfiture. “But this is only your holiday. Your mother's letter said so.”

“She thinks it is only my holiday. But I am older now. I shall see to it that I do not return to England.”

Ass that he had been not to realize the impasse to which their talk was leading them! Too obviously, from Alix's side, this was an inevitable decision. And Giles saw that from his side it should have been so, too. With Alix safely back in France, there would be no more danger of pain for his mother and wreckage for Toppie; Owen's memory might sleep in untarnished peace.

But Alix herself had come to count for far too much. It was as if he saw her walking away into a dark forest where dreadful creatures prowled. Ever since that day in his study, she had counted for too much. She was too fine, too brave, too loyal a little creature to be given up to her fate. He had felt that day that he would fight her fate for her, and he felt now that the moment had come for the first grapple. But the worst of the problem was that in fighting Alix's fate he must fight her. He could not tell her the fact that would have turned her pride to dust and ashes. He could not tell her that her mother had sent her to them on pretences so false that the minor falsity she repudiated paled beside them. Horribly handicapped as he was for the contest, he seized his bull by the horns: “Look here, my dear child,” he declared, speaking with all the elder brother authority he could summon up, “you said to me that day when we talked that you were going to trust me. Well, I ask you to trust me now. I want you back. We all want you back. Let that suffice. No; wait a moment. I know what you are going to say;—if Toppie knew would she want you? I'll take the responsibility of answering for Toppie. She is so fond of you that I know she would. Isn't that enough, really? Can't we leave it at that? And you're quite right not to tell your mother. Let the whole thing rest for ever.”

Her eyes were on his while he spoke to her and she listened to him gently; but her face still kept the invulnerable look strange in one so young. “You are kind, dear Giles,” she said. “I do trust you. But you can't answer for Toppie. You can't answer for anybody. And I have not only myself to think of. I have Maman. I can answer for Maman in this matter. She would not let me come.”

“Are you so sure of that?” broke from Giles. And now, pushed to it, he ventured far; he ventured very far, indeed. “After all she must have known that he kept a great deal from us. After all she must have known that he cared more for her than he did for Toppie; that he had been faithless to Toppie because of her.”

Poor little Alix. It was not fair. She paled in hearing him. And for a long moment she stood silent beside him, looking down at the sea. “May he not have kept that from her, too?” was what she found at last to say.

“Do you think that possible?” Giles asked; but he was sorry now, seeing the deep trouble on her face, that he had spoken.

“Perhaps it would not have been possible,” she said slowly. “But things may be known and yet remain unspoken, Giles.”

He could not question her further. He could not ask madame Vervier's young daughter if she really believed that those things had been unspoken between his brother and her mother. There had been an element of desecration in going even so far as he had gone. And he had gained nothing by it, for after the little pause that fell between them, Alix added, in no spirit of retaliation as he saw, but as though she put up a final barrier against his persistence.

“And even if they were not there, Giles; even if all the difficult things we know of were not there, I should still not come back to Heathside. I do not care, ever, to leave France again. I could not, again, leave Maman.”