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.”