The Little French Girl/Part 2/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
“Then she is coming back. I am so glad. I was afraid, from things she said, once or twice, about herself, about her life in France with her mother, that she might not be coming,” said Toppie.
She and Giles sat up on the ridge where the junipers grew. The pine-woods were behind them; below were the birches in their autumnal dress of bronze and gold; and brooding over all a sky of dusty rose. It was the evening of the hottest September day and the breeze hardly stirred the spices of the pines.
Giles was only just back from his Cornish trip and Toppie and her father had been in Bournemouth when he had returned from France, so that this was their first meeting. Mr. Westmacott was not well and the sea had done him no good. Toppie was worn with nursing him. Giles had never seen her look so white.
From something deep and watchful in her eyes the feeling came to him that her father was even more ill than they had guessed and that she was schooling herself to the thought of losing him. With her father gone, Toppie's last close link with earth would be severed.
But she had not spoken of herself or of her anxieties this afternoon. They had climbed the hill slowly, stopping to look back at the sky, and Toppie had found this favourite spot among the junipers and had sunk down, taking off her Panama hat, battered like a boy's, and holding it with both hands clasped around her knees as she sat in the deep heather. She wore her usual grey, again an almost boyish formula; the thin silk jumper rolled back from the throat, the thin pleated skirt falling to her ankle. Her pale hair was ruffled up over the black silk ribbon that bound it. As she sat there while he lay beside her on his arm, Giles had never felt Toppie so near him. It was more sad than sweet to feel her so. It gave him the feeling he would have had if she were going away on a long journey and could be so near because she was to be so far. And she talked to him of his time in France and of Alix.
“Yes. She's coming back all right,” Giles said. “I am glad you are glad; for I am. It's as if the child belonged to us, isn't it?”
“It is quite strange, Giles, how much I feel that,” said Toppie, turning her eyes upon him.
They were such lovely eyes, those of Toppie's. Giles had always felt them, since he had first, a boy of fifteen, seen her, the loveliest eyes in the world. Not large; not vividly marked; her brows and lashes only a shade darker than her hair; they conveyed the impression of light rather than colour and of radiance rather than of warmth. It was as if they looked at you from the zenith on a cloudless, cold Spring day. And the words that had always gone with them, in Giles's mind, from the time that he had first seen Toppie, in church, in Advent, with pale, wintry sunlight streaming in over her, had been: “Dayspring from on high.”
She had stood there, in the Rectory pew, all alone, tall and slender in her grey, with a little high tight fur collar up to her chin and a little round fur cap coming over her golden hair and down to her ears, and she had, while the Psalms were being sung, turned her eyes on the Bradley family in the pew across the nave; looking at Owen; at Owen first—Giles felt it even then; Owen, his nut-brown head held high while he happily chanted out the responses in his sweet, accurate tenor. And then her eyes had met Giles's solemn gaze. And those had been the words that had come to him; full of the Christmas beauty; full almost to tears, for the boy standing there, of radiant promise and of heavenly love.—“Whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us.”
So he had seen her first. So he had always thought of Toppie's eyes. They showered light and loveliness upon you; and it came from far away.
“Quite strange,” she was saying now, thinking of him because she was thinking of Alix, just as she had always, in the past, thought of him because she was thinking of Owen. “From the first moment I saw her I felt that she belonged. Perhaps it was because of what Owen had written. He was so fond of her. She was the dearest little girl he had ever seen. Even then I used to think that some day, if the war left us to each other, we would have Alix come and stay with us often. And then the moment I saw her I felt that I loved her.—Giles, you were very bad about letters while you were in France. Never one to me; and hardly anything to your mother about madame Vervier. Only that she was charming and had a charming house. You told us more about monsieur de Maubert—was that the name?—and the young man who ought to have worn a ruff and fought with Henry of Navarre. I liked so much what you said about him. I felt as if he ought to have known Owen. As if they would have been friends. But of course what we most wanted to hear was about Alix's mother. Tell me everything now; everything you thought.”
“Everything. Well, that's rather difficult, you know.” Giles turned over on his elbow and looked down at the heather, pulling his hat over his eyes. “She's very different from Alix.”
“Is she? I'd always imagined her so much the same.”
“Almost as different as it is possible for a mother to be from her child,” said Giles, while he thought intently. How it had pleased, how it had lightened his heart to hear what Toppie had just been saying of Alix and her return to them; and how dismayed he knew himself to be by this further stretch of her interest.
“As different as that?” Toppie questioned, and with the faintest flavour of distress in the question. “Owen always wrote as if she were lovely, too.”
“Oh, as far as that goes she's lovelier, I suppose. Where Alix is like a crystal she is like a flower. And they both have that dignity and security, you know. Alix is such a dignified little creature, isn't she?”
“Yes. Beautifully dignified; beautifully secure. I always feel of Alix that she would be safe, always and everywhere. Yes; those are just the words for Alix.”
“And it's not exactly righteousness, is it?” Giles went on, finding more words since Toppie liked these ones. “It's integrity. Like a little noble Roman girl.”
“Integrity. Yes.” Toppie mused on Alix. But then, alas, she came back to Alix's mother. “The same in loveliness; the same in dignity and security.—In what ways different, then, Giles?”
He knew that there was hardly anything he could say of madame Vervier that it would not be unwise to say. He watched an ant, disturbed by his change of posture, thread its anxious way amongst the tufts of heather and felt that he was like the ant. He, too, must go forward and find the path that promised most safety. “Well, she's more impulsive, I feel; more selfish; less fastidious.”
Toppie, for a moment, reflected in silence. He saw her dimly, sitting there beside him, a grey silhouette against the sky. “Less fastidious?” she then said, and it was as if he had presented her with an object that she turned reluctantly, and with surprise, in her hands: “How strange. Owen gave me no impression of that. He gave me the impression of someone quite finished, quite exquisite; in every way. How do you mean less fastidious?”
“Oh, I don't exactly know,” said Giles, and he feared it was uneasily. “Merely in the sense, perhaps, that she'd put up with all sorts of queer people, for the sake of not being bored, that Alix wouldn't care to have. She is exquisite; very exquisite.”
“You did like her, didn't you, Giles? Very, very much?”
“Well, hardly very, very,” he qualified, pausing with wary antennæ, as it were. “She's not my sort, really. That's all that it comes to.”
He could not see Toppie's features, but he felt her more intent, and in her next words he saw that he had seemed to call Owen's taste in question—as well as madame Vervier's. “Wasn't that only because you didn't see enough of her? She was so much Owen's sort.”
“It doesn't follow she'd be mine, would it? Owen and I were really very different, weren't we, Toppie, dear?”
“Yes; very different. But you always liked the same people. It surprises me—so much—that you shouldn't like Alix's mother.”
“But I didn't say that, Toppie! 'Liking' isn't the word. She is charming. She is too charming; that's what it comes to.” Giles felt himself go forward to a new outlet. “Too much the woman of fashion; too sophisticated and highly flavoured for anyone so simple as I am. You know I am much simpler than Owen. He was a man of the world, and I, however long I live, will never be a man of the world. If one's just the shambling, shabby, scholastic type one will never feel at home with brilliant, resourceful people. It's as if”—Giles found the simile with satisfaction—“I liked rice pudding while Owen could appreciate caviare. Madame Vervier is caviare, as far as I am concerned.”
He glanced up at Toppie to see how she accepted the metaphor; but if she smiled it was with reserve. “You like me, Giles. I'm not caviare; but I'm not, I hope, rice pudding either.”
“No, you don't come into such categories,” Giles smiled back. “If one could find a fruit that tasted of frost and sunlight, a fruit one could pick only at daybreak—golden, and chill and sweet—that would be you, Toppie. A sort of apple of the Hesperides—that one must sail and sail for ever and a day to find.”
Something that came into his voice made him stop suddenly. And Toppie, too, was silent for a moment. When she spoke it was carefully, as if guiding their steps away from a menace to their quiet.
“That's a charming compliment, Giles,” she said. “I sometimes think, shambling and shabby though you call yourself, that you are a poet as well as a philosopher. But I'm sorry, you know, to feel madame Vervier lose by what I gain. Owen always wrote of her as someone he so wanted me to know. I can't believe he'd have wanted me to know anyone who was worldly and luxurious and meretricious. I can't help feeling that you must be unjust.”
Meretricious, luxurious, worldly? Was that the picture he had, all unwittingly, drawn for Toppie? The blood came to Giles's face. It was to be displayed to his own eyes as disloyal. He saw madame Vervier's figure standing against the great arch of the sky; he saw her rising up from the sea at dawn; he smelt the beeswax and seashells and cool, clean linen.
“But I don't mean that at all,” he stammered. “I don't think of her as any of those things. Nothing could be further from my mind.”
“If she's like the things rich people eat in restaurants; if she's selfish; if she's unfastidious and resourceful—” Toppie's voice built up before him the shape of madame Vervier as she had seen him draw it.
“You mustn't press mere metaphor so far, Toppie. I said she was like a flower, too. She is as out-of-door a creature as Alix herself. She belongs more to the cliffs and the country than to restaurants.—That's really the most vivid impression I have of her”—he was striving to atone to madame Vervier for the false picture he had put before Toppie; yet trying at the same time for truth to Toppie. “As I used to see her at sunrise; coming up from the sea after a morning swim. Like poetry and music personified, she used to look, walking against the dawn.”
Toppie's eyes were on him. It was curious how cold her eyes could be. It was as if, though Toppie herself were not judging you, the height, the light that her eyes conveyed revealed you to her as creeping and dingy.
“I don't understand you,” she said. She spoke gently, as if to mitigate the coldness that fell from her gaze.
“But what is it you don't understand, Toppie!” Giles exclaimed, and he heard that it was with irrepressible fretfulness. He felt it so unfair that he should be displayed to Toppie as creeping and dingy when all that he was trying for was to shield her from any hurt. Yet that there was another reason for his fretfulness, he knew. His loyalty to madame Vervier had betrayed him to too much ardour. Ardour had been in his voice. And Toppie must have heard it.
“That you should say such different things of Owen's friend,” Toppie replied at once. “You contradict yourself. It's as if you were hiding something from me.”
Poor Giles. His hat-brim was drawn down, but that could not conceal from Toppie the helpless red that surged up over his face and neck as he heard these words. He felt it rise, the burning, dark confusion, while, with sudden fear and sickness of heart, he groped for an answer. And her blow had been so sudden and unlooked for that the only answer that came was as helpless as his blush, “I'm sure I don't know what you mean. What could there be to hide?”
But there was no escape for him in Toppie's gaze. Giles, his eyes fixed on the heather, felt it dwell upon him, and when, at last, she looked away, it was as if she had seen the falsity between them. And all that she said, in accents of snow, was: “I'm sure I don't know. Perhaps you will tell me.”
“Toppie, this is absurd, you know,” Giles muttered, staring down. “You put me in a ridiculous position. It upsets one, naturally, to be cross-questioned as if one were a shifty witness in the witness-box. People are complicated and contradictory creatures. One can't draw a consistent picture of them. On one side of her nature madame Vervier may be weak and erring and on the other she may be like a goddess. How do I know? I've hardly seen her.”
And then Toppie made an astonishing statement. Turning her eyes from him, looking before her at the dull rose sky, coldly, though gently, and with a poise of tone that showed how deeply she was feeling, she said: “If you have fallen in love with her, Giles, why should you not say so? Why should you try to hide it as though you were ashamed? She is a widow, is she not? There is no reason, is there, why you should not love her?—It hurts me that you should speak like that—keeping things back; twisting your real feelings lest I should see them.—You speak of her as though you were ashamed of loving her.”