The Little French Girl/Part 2/Chapter 10

was not until next day, after luncheon, that the time came, and Giles—as madame Vervier said to him, “I find it too hot for tennis to-day. Will you stay behind and talk with me, monsieur Giles?”—felt sure that it all had been planned, intended from the first. If she had thus delayed, it was in order that he should come to know her better and feel more at home with her. It was also in order that she should take his measure and see more surely what she was going to do with him.

Monsieur de Maubert, also, was going to Allongeville; André's motor waited at the gate. He and madame Vervier were to have the afternoon to themselves, and as they all parted on the verandah, Giles saw that Alix cast a long look at him.—Poor little Alix! How little she could guess at what he hoped for from this interview! If madame Vervier had her intentions, he had his. And though he believed they would not clash, his heart was beating quickly as he followed her to the drawing-room. So many things, lay between him and madame Vervier and her glance, her voice, seemed to tell him that none of them were to be evaded.

The drawing-room was fresh and pale; so pale in its citrons, whites, and dim jade-greens, that the sunlight outside, shining against the transparent reed blinds, looked tawny in its fierce, prowling splendour. The sea was there, sparkling in its immensity across the lower half of the long windows, and the sky of another blue was across the upper half and the vines and honeysuckle that garlanded the verandah outside hardly stirred in the brilliant air. There were bowls of sweet-smelling small white roses from the garden, and madame Vervier was in white, the thin woollen dress with the sash at her waist and tassels at her breast that left bare her lovely arms and neck. Her russet hair was all tossed back to-day and there was something ingenuous in the shape of her forehead thus uncovered; something candid and childlike. In her hand, as she sat before Giles, she held a stone, a flat, smooth stone, pinkish-grey, that she had perhaps picked up on the beach in one of her walks at dawn. She held it, weighing it slightly from time to time and from time to time putting it against her lips or cheek, as if to enjoy its coolness.

Giles had never in his life seen anything so beautiful. He knew that she was not beautiful if computed or examined by standards of exactitude; that her eyes were small, her nose a little flattened, her mouth clumsily drawn; but power so emanated from her gaze, magic so pervaded her lips and brows, sweetness lay with such a bloom of light upon her, that every imperfection was dissolved in the unity that made a sort of music in his mind. She was like an embodiment of music—and what was that urgent, searching rhythm, that evocation of flowers and dew and night? The melody of Brahms's “Sapphische Ode” surged into his mind and with it a deep, an almost overpowering sadness. With the song he remembered everything; everything was evoked. The Spring day in the Bois; Owen's face of love; and Toppie, far away, betrayed and forgotten, fixed in her trance of fidelity. To see madame Vervier, to remember Toppie, was almost to feel that he himself was Owen.

“You know, then,” said madame Vervier. Her arm lay along the table beside her. She looked across at him and held the stone in her upturned palm.

That was the way she began; those the very first words she said after she had led him in, after their long silence, when they found themselves alone together. The throb of André's car had long since faded down the lane. The house was still; and Giles felt that his heart was trembling.

“Yes. I've known from the beginning,” he said.

“Alix told me,” said madame Vervier. “You saw us one day in the Bois.”

“Yes,” said Giles.

“And she tells me that you feel him to have been unfaithful to his betrothed.”

“Yes,” Giles repeated. He was amazed yet not overwhelmed by her direct approach. He kept his eyes upon her. “Unfaithful.”

There was a weight in the word that madame Vervier would not feel, for André was now entangled with his thought of Owen. It was hardly eighteen months ago; and André had succeeded Owen. But all unaware, as she might well be, of his further knowledge, her next words answered, by implication, the charge. If she admitted contemporaneity in love, why not succession? “There,” she said, “you were mistaken. We were lovers, it is true; but he knew that it was not to last. He knew that if not death, then life must part us. In his heart he was not unfaithful. He would have gone back to her.”

“Do you mean with a lie?” asked Giles.

“With a lie? Yes; I imagine it would have been with a lie,” madame Vervier did not hesitate. “But the essential would be there. He had not ceased to love her.—It was not his fault. He was swept away,” she said.

Had she looked like that when she had swept Owen away? Was it an easy, an everyday thing to her, to see men swept away? He tried to beat down the visions that assailed him, but again and again, on the rising surge of the “Sapphische Ode,” they returned. Owen sitting before her, as he now sat, in the pale, fresh, shaded room; Owen rising suddenly to take her in his arms.—There would be no surprise to her in that.—She would have seen it coming. “You mean that it was your fault, then?” Giles muttered.

“No. I do not mean that,” madame Vervier answered, and as, in speaking, she weighed her stone lightly up and down, her eyes on his, he felt that it was his heart rather than her own guilt she weighed so in her hand.—How often she had weighed men's hearts! How conversant with their trembling must she be! “No; that is not what I meant.—He moored his boat at the edge of a torrent. That was all. He was swept away,” madame Vervier repeated.

“That was what Alix said of you,” Giles muttered again. He felt as if madame Vervier must see the throbbing of his heart.

“What Alix said of me?”

“That you were like a mountain-torrent. She wanted me to understand you. She thought I might be of help to you some day. She thought of you, poor child, as in some kind of danger; beautiful and in danger.—How can you say it wasn't your fault?” Giles demanded, and, with the thought of Alix and what she hoped from him, he felt that he struggled to keep his footing. “If you carried him away, it was your fault.—I believe that's what you live for; to carry men away,” he heard himself unbelievably uttering, and it seemed to him, as the sombre magic of her eyes dwelt on him that it was for Owen he was speaking, and for all the others; since now he understood them all.

Madame Vervier, after he had said these last words, contemplated him in silence. For a long time she said nothing, and Giles, in the silence, felt that their confrontation was altered in its quality. When she spoke at last, it was not in anger. It was, rather, with a strange mildness. “I do not overflow my banks, ever,” she said. “You must not launch your boat upon me; that is all.”

If he had found himself understanding them all—all those others—was it possible that she saw him merely as one of them? Was she warning him? Had she seen his need of warning? Giles felt his face growing hot.

“You must not launch your boat upon me,” madame Vervier repeated, observing him with grave but faintly ironic kindliness. “If I am a torrent, if I am dangerous, to myself and others, my nature is there as it was given to me. I may not alter it. The blame lies with those who are unwary.”

“That may be true,” Giles muttered. “I have nothing to do with you, of course. I don't understand you. But I do understand my brother. His weakness doesn't excuse him.”

“You are severe. You have never felt a great passion, that is evident,” madame Vervier observed. “The feeling he had for me was so different from the feeling he had for Toppie that infidelity was hardly in question.”

“Hardly in question? Don't you see that it shut him away from her for ever?” Giles's voice was dark with grief. “Don't you see that a man who chooses one kind of love turns his back on the other?”

“Not if he is strong enough,” madame Vervier, with her mildness, returned. “Your brother, I think, gained in strength from our friendship. We pay, it is true, for most things in life. It is painful to have a secret from the heart nearest ours; yet one need not regret one's secret. I believe that Owen would have been strong enough not to regret. Strong enough”—madame Vervier, while she dropped the quiet phrases kept her faint smile—“not to grow to hate me because he could not tell Toppie how much he had loved me.”

Was it true? Giles wondered, sitting there before her, his head bent down while he stared up at her from under his brows, frowning and intent. Could Owen, ever, have been as strong as that? And would it have been strength? No; madame Vervier might have armed him against remorse; but she did not know Toppie. Toppie's radiance would have fallen back, dimmed, startled, from the presence of the thing hidden yet operative in her life and Owen's. A canker would have eaten; bitterness and darkness would have spread. Either her radiance would have withdrawn from him, or, beating too strongly at his defences, it would have discovered all. Dismay, devastation would have broken in upon them, and if Toppie could still have forgiven it would have been with a sick and altered heart. But he could not talk to madame Vervier about Toppie. The strange thing was, as he saw Toppie's radiance, that he felt himself safe from the torrent, and that he began to understand madame Vervier.

“You think of yourself as very strong,” he said suddenly, and in their long silence he could see that something of her security left her; it was as if she felt the approach of an unexpected adversary. “You think you can do as you like with life. You're not afraid of life; and that's rather splendid of you—if I may say so. But it's never occurred to you to be afraid of yourself. And the time might come, you know, when you'd be carried away, too.”

“Carried away?” madame Vervier repeated. Her voice was altered. She was unprepared. And in her momentary confusion it was with haughtiness that she spoke.

“Yes, carried away,” Giles repeated, understanding madame Vervier more than ever and that the haughtiness was a shield. “And if you were, you'd be helpless, as he was; as all the others are;—and you'd find, I believe, that you couldn't go back quietly to the things you'd jeopardized.—I mean, they'd have changed; they'd have been spoiled. You made Owen suffer; I'm sure of it. You gave him more suffering than happiness. He lost Toppie through you, and he knew he'd lost her. He couldn't have lived with Toppie on a lie. The payment may be more than our own suffering; it may be other people's. That's what you don't seem to see.—And as for doing as you like, with yourself and other people, it doesn't work, the kind of life you lead. I'm sure it doesn't work. It will spoil you, too. More and more you'll be battered and bruised;—it's horrible to think of;—and at last wrecked. Or else so petrified and hardened that nothing can really come to you any more. That's the way it would happen with anyone like you.” Giles had looked away from her in speaking, but now he lifted his eyes to hers again. “I feel sure of it.”

Madame Vervier sat there, her arm lying on the table, her hand holding the stone, and looked fixedly upon him. He had thought of nothing definite, of nothing imminent in speaking. He had been able to speak only because the thought of Toppie had come to him so overmasteringly, arming him with such repudiation of madame Vervier's philosophy. But now, as she sat silent for so long, he saw suddenly what the fear was that, like a Medusa head, he had held up before her. She was older than André de Valenbois; she loved him passionately; and she was not sure of him. It was in her eyes, in her silence, as she faced him, that Giles read the fear; definite; imminent. And he was horribly sorry for her.

“You are a strange young man,” she said at last. The haughtiness was gone. There was no resentment in her voice. She only spoke carefully, as though she felt her way in a world changed to ice. “How can you think you know me well enough to say these things?”

“I don't know you well enough. It's because we are so near. Through Alix. Through my brother. You've made such a difference in my life. Everything is changed for me because of you.”

“It need not be as you say,” said madame Vervier, and after her long pause it was as if the strength he had called in question came creeping back into her frozen veins. “Not as you say;—if one has wisdom. One may suffer;—do you imagine that I have not already suffered?—but one need not be wrecked. And I have great wisdom.”

“I don't want you to be wrecked.—You know that,” Giles muttered.

“Yes. I know it. I see it. You are not an avenging angel,” said madame Vervier, and she was able once more to summon the faint, ironic smile. “You are really, under all the denunciation, so full of kindness. That is what makes you so unexpected.—So very strange.—But do not fear for me too much. I shall know when youth is over. I shall know when the laurels are cut and winter has come to the woods. I shall be able to furl my sails before the night comes on; and if one furls one's sails in time, monsieur Giles, one is never wrecked. And there will be, I trust, a little harbour for me somewhere. Alix's children to love. And my memories. I shall be in old age a much happier woman than most. Most old women”—madame Vervier smiled on, her eyes on his—“have only to remember how they were loved by nobody at all.”

What was there to say to her? Giles, as he considered her, felt a dim smart of tears rising to his eyes. She had done with him as Alix had hoped she would. He saw her as lovely; as menaced. He wished that he could protect her. “I hope it will be with you like that,” he said.

“Perhaps it will,” said madame Vervier. “You have seen me and my life a little too logically, too rigidly, my kind monsieur Giles. I did not choose it so. It chose me, rather.”

“Ah,” Giles exclaimed, “that's what I feel in you. That's my excuse for what I've said to you. Why can't you turn back even now? You are so much too good for it. You're good enough,” Giles declared, with a sense of further illumination, “for anything.”

Madame Vervier, again arrested, considered him. Then, gently, sadly, with a compassionate sincerity, she shook her head. “One never turns back at my age. One's path has grown too closely about one. Other paths are all blocked out. And I was perhaps destined for it. For some women the life of home, the still, deep stream suffices. Children may fill their hearts and stifle the personal longings; but for others these compensations are not enough. They must have love. They must have a lover. And in France husbands are seldom lovers. So, if one is a mountain-torrent, one leaps over the precipice. Do you see? That is my history.”

“It's different with us,” Giles murmured. “We have different hopes for marriage. You didn't give yourself time. If you turn your back on a thing, you can't find out its reality.”

“The mountain-torrent, at twenty-three,” said madame Vervier, “is not a philosopher. No; I did not see what I was leaping to, but I saw plainly what I left. And I do not say that I regret. All that I do say is that I wish no leaps for Alix. Let us now speak of Alix. You have done your duty by me and read me my lesson, and it is all because you want to speak of Alix. I am well aware that you have not come to France in order to understand or grow fond of her mother—kind though you are.”

“No; it was for you—only for you.” Giles did not know how to put it. “Because of what I see in you. As to Alix, you want for her what I want.”

“Safety. Yes,” said madame Vervier. “The deep, quiet stream.”

“She's that already,” said Giles. “Alix isn't the mountain-torrent.”

“Ah, we none of us know what we are till we come to the precipice,” said madame Vervier. “But I am glad you feel that of my Alix. I trust your reading. I could almost believe, at moments, watching you with her, that you understand her better than I do. There is in Alix an austerity that sometimes disconcerts me. Yours is a nature nearer hers than mine. I have thought of it deeply in these last days, monsieur Giles, and I have made up my mind. Will you marry her?” said madame Vervier, laying down the stone.