The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

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 Either her radiance would have withdrawn from him, or, beating too strongly at his defences, it would have discovered all.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.”