The Little French Girl/Part 2/Chapter 8

was strange to meet them all again that evening, so unchanged to their own consciousness, so changed to his. Strange to find them still so charming and so to shrink from their charm. They came laughing up the steps of the verandah where he still sat, and he wondered if they felt in his voice and look, as he greeted them, any difference.

“Ah, it was an excellent set,” André de Valenbois said, laying down his racquet and seating himself next to Giles. “Where did you disappear to, mon ami? We looked, and you were in the chalet, and when we looked again, you were gone.”

“I felt I'd like a walk. I went up the hill behind the chalet,” said Giles. “The country is lovely up there.”

Madame Vervier's eyes were on him, hardly cogitative in their gaze, yet perhaps conjecturing something. She, doubtless, knew the names of the ladies of the chalet as well as they knew hers. She might infer the reasons for his flight. At all events, saying nothing, only maintaining her cool dim smile, she crossed the verandah and went into the house.

The evening meal at Les Chardonnerets was irregular in its hour and informal in its habit. Monsieur de Maubert and André de Valenbois only changed their flannels for light afternoon clothes, and Jules, when he came, did not change at all. Giles maintained his custom of evening dress, but he waited for some time alone in the drawing-room that evening, and even after André had joined him, exquisite in pale blues and greys, another five minutes passed before madame Vervier and Alix appeared.

Madame Vervier wore a dark silk dress, purple or red or russet—Giles in the waning light could not define the tint—fastening at the breast with a great old clasp of wrought gold. A fringed Empire scarf, purple, silver, and rose, fell about her beautiful bare arms; a high Empire comb was in her hair, and with her dark gaze she made Giles think of a lady drawn by Ingres.

She moved across to the window, her arm around Alix, and said, standing there and looking out: “La belle soirée!” It was a citron and ash sky above a golden sea.

“Maman, you will sing this evening,” said Alix. “Giles has not heard you sing.”

“Monsieur de Valenbois is the singer. I have no voice,” said madame Vervier.

“One needs no voice to sing the songs I mean,” said Alix. “Do you know our old songs of France, Giles?”

She looked round at him over her shoulder, palely shining in the white taffeta, and Giles, with a sinking and sickening as of an unimaginable yet palpable apprehension, saw that André de Valenbois' appreciative eyes were upon her; upon her, rather than upon her lovely mother.

“Do you know the one beginning,  'L'Amour de moi'” asked Alix.

Giles said he did not.

“Ah, it is the very dawn of loveliness, that song,” said André, and in the words Giles felt the expression of a perhaps subconscious train of thought. “It is so young. It is all dew and candour. You must hear it, monsieur Giles.” The young Frenchman wandered about the room, his hands in his pockets. “Of the time of your Chaucer,” he went on. “Our countries then had much the same heart. It was the time when our great cathedrals rose and miracles were as plentiful as turtle-doves.” He paused before the mantelpiece and took up one of the photographs set there. “This is of you, mademoiselle Alix?”

Madame Vervier had turned from the window, and, still holding Alix, she approached him.

“Yes; it is of me. It was taken in England,” said Alix.

Giles had not noticed the photograph, but he noticed a change in Alix's voice. He, too, drew near, and saw the little snap-shot of Alix with the dogs at the edge of the birch-wood. But it was in a frame delicately embroidered in blue and silver, and he asked in all innocence, “Where did the pretty frame come from, Alix?”

“Toppie made it,” said Alix. The alteration in her voice was now evident. He now knew why, and fell to instant silence.

“Toppie? What is Toppie?” André de Valenbois asked, laughing a little and looking at Alix over her photograph. “That is a name I have never heard before.”

“It is le petit nom of mademoiselle Enid Westmacott,” said madame Vervier, in tones sad and gentle. “She was the fiancée of monsieur Giles's brother, our friend, killed in battle, of whom you have often heard me speak. Mademoiselle Toppie”—how strangely the childish syllables fell from her untroubled lips—“made the little frame for me as a Christmas gift. Had you not seen it, monsieur Giles? It is exquisite. I was infinitely touched by her thought of me.”

“Ah. It is, indeed, exquisite,” André murmured, while Giles found no words. “One feels that only an exquisite person could have made it.—Yes, certainly I have heard you speak of monsieur Giles's brother, chère madame. But I did not know that he was betrothed.”

He spoke in a respectful tone, holding the frame, but for all his resource and grace of bearing, filled, Giles suddenly felt, with a conflict of thoughts. Did he know of Owen? Did he accept his place, in the succession? Was he jealous in retrospect; or, like monsieur de Maubert, in retrospect complaisant? And that there was something to be kept up—or was it for him, Giles, that she kept it up?—was manifest to him from the deliberate adequacy with which madame Vervier advanced to meet the occasion, while Alix, her eyes turned away from them all, fixed her gaze upon the sky.

“She is, indeed, exquisite. I can say it, monsieur Giles, although I have never met her. It is not only from Alix's letters that I know her. Before that. Your brother talked of her always. She was always in his thoughts. One could not know him well, or care for him as we did, without coming to know and care for his beautiful Toppie. It was a great devotion,” said madame Vervier, and her voice, in its sadness, sweetness, and decorum, seemed to lay a votive offering before Toppie and her bereavement. “I have never known a greater.” But as she thus offered her wreath and bowed her head, Giles saw a deep colour rise slowly in Alix's averted face.

“And here is monsieur de Maubert,” said madame Vervier, turning to greet the latest entry. “Jules evidently is belated in some distant village. We will wait no longer, I think. Albertine's soup will be spoiled.”

“Have you not a picture of this lovely mademoiselle Toppie?” Giles heard André say to Alix as they moved to the dining-room, madame Vervier leading the way on monsieur de Maubert's arm.

“No, I have no picture of her,” said Alix.

“You know her well?”

“Very well. She lives near Mr. Bradley's family.”

If madame Vervier's voice showed full adequacy, so did her child's. Alix's adequacy, her grave courtesy, untinged by withdrawal, yet setting a barrier, filled Giles's thoughts during the meal. She, too, knew just what she wanted to say and just how to say it; yet how much deeper, he felt sure, was her perturbation than madame Vervier's. She had seen her mother, before the eyes of her English friend, involve herself in a web of implicit falsehood. How false was madame Vervier's web Alix could not know; but she had known enough to feel ashamed before him; not, Giles knew, because Maman lied; but because she had need of lies. She herself had also lied. Giles, on their journey, had seen Toppie's photograph in her dressing-case. She had lied because she wished to remove Toppie, as well as herself, from even an indirect intimacy with André de Valenbois. It was as though some deep instinct warned her against him. And though Giles again deplored her readiness, he could not feel that he regretted it.

She sat opposite him, all silvery in the soft candle-light, her young downcast face set in its narrow frame of hair, and he knew that grief and fear were in her heart. Madame Vervier talked much, for her, and her gaze, turned once or twice on her child, seemed, as was its wont, to include her and to carry her on to further depths of contemplation. But even madame Vervier could not guess what was in Alix's heart.

After supper they all went out on the verandah. The vines fluttered against a moonlit sky and moonlight washed in upon them like a silvery tide. Mademoiselle Blanche, wrapped in swansdown, came gliding in, and Jules, with a pipe, emerged from the shadows and sat in his accustomed place on the steps. Giles felt that it soothed the lacerated heart of the young artist to be with madame Vervier. Like a wounded wild animal, he drew near the hand he trusted. She was capable of compassion; of great gentleness; of most disinterested friendship. An enigma to Giles, there she sat, and her soft, meditative alto joined in the old songs they all sang together, while Alix, behind her in the shadow, leaned her head, as if weary, upon her shoulder and listened. But more than weariness was expressed in the child's attitude. Giles, listening to the dove-like tenderness of “L'Amour de moi,” divined it all. Alix sought comfort from the pressure of new apprehensions, new intuitions, new complexities; and more than for herself, it was for Maman that she thus drew near. The very love, tender, devout, brooding, of the song, was in the gesture with which she laid her head beside her mother's and looked out across her breast into the unknown future.