“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.
CHAPTER XI
“There are many things to consider,” madame Vervier pursued, simply and tranquilly, while Giles sat transfixed. “I should have to think of many things.—Your position; your prospects; they are not, I gather, brilliant. But one of the gravest disadvantages of a position like mine is that it narrows my field of choice; terribly narrows it. Family and position count for everything here in France. It is not one little individual choosing another little individual; we are more serious than you in that. It is one family choosing another. It is two foyers coming together to found a third. I have spoiled all this for Alix.” Madame Vervier took up her stone again, again weighing it in her hand, and now it was as if she weighed the sense of her culpability towards her child. “I have spoiled it. Money would have helped me to atone; but not only was I not philosophe at twenty-three; I was also credulous; ignorant; reckless. The man for whom I left my husband was poor and had great schemes. I gave him all I had. He sucked me dry. C’était un bien méchant homme,” madame Vervier remarked in a tone of surpassing detachment, “and what would have been my fate I cannot tell had not the admirable friend who rescued me from his clutches left me, on dying, a small annuity. That is all I dispose of. And with what I have been able to set aside for Alix year by year, I have amassed only the tiniest dot; hardly enough to clothe her.—I go into all this very summarily for the moment, though I owe you every detail. You shall have them later on. You shall hear of the old aunts who brought me up and who were, also, inveigled by monsieur Vervier. Even my family did not save me since I was so unfortunate as to marry him after the divorce. It is a long story. But for the present it is enough that you should see why, aside from my own position, there is for Alix no possibility of a suitable marriage in France. Whereas in England all is different.”
“Yes, it’s different in England,” Giles muttered, since she paused as if for his assent. He was still too transfixed by the sudden theme to dispose of his own thoughts. He felt as if madame Vervier, with her calm, her deliberation, her fluency, were casting, loop by loop, a silken net about him. And he, the dismayed and astonished fish, looked here and there through the meshes for a means of escape that would not too violently tear the web.
“Quite different,” said madame Vervier with confidence. “That is why I sent her to England. That is why I make you my proposal now. In blood Alix is much your superior; your fortune, I know is small; your position obscure. But I like you monsieur Giles;—I like you very much. Oh, I have studied you since you came among us! And,” madame Vervier added, smiling with a kind of indulgence upon him, “you like Alix very much. I have seen that.”