“You want her back?” madame Vervier asked from the window.
“Of course I want her back,” said Giles. He spoke quietly, almost casually; yet it was strange to feel the weight of his own decision. He pledged himself to something with his words. They implicated him in the situation from which he removed Alix. It was only for himself that he had a right to speak and in accepting Alix he accepted the cloud that hung about her; he brought it back among them; and he knew that the responsibility was heavy.
“Then she shall go to you,” said madame Vervier. “I shall not be able to persuade her. I shall attempt no persuasion. She will obey me. That is all. She will wonder at me for sending her. She will feel that it should too much offend my pride to send her back on false pretences”—how they understood each other, mother and child—“but she will go. Our French children learn to obey. It is the first article in their creed.—And since the pretences are not too false for your taste, monsieur Giles, they are not too false for mine.”
“They are too false for my taste,” said Giles. He was implicated, but madame Vervier must see just how and where. “It’s Alix I’m thinking of. I sacrifice my taste to her.”
“And I,” said madame Vervier, “sacrifice my pride.”
She stood there looking out, white against the blue, and her voice, for all its calm, was sombre. “I am not ungrateful,” she added. “Do not think me ungrateful. I see what you do for my child.”
“I see what you do for her,” said Giles.
“Yes;—but I am a mother!”
“It must be all the harder,” said Giles. “You consent to see yourself belittled in her eyes. And you consent to live without her.”
Madame Vervier stood silent at that for a long moment. Something of the grave ardour in the young Englishman’s voice may well have touched her to a deeper vision of herself, and of him. It was as if arrested that she stood contemplating the novel homage laid at her feet. For, after her pause, she turned suddenly, and fixed her dark gaze upon him. He was never to forget her as she stood there, against the great sea and sky; never to forget, as the last of all the varying impressions of the afternoon, his sense of a greatness, a magnanimity, like the sky’s, arching above her earthly errors. It remained with him even though the last words she spoke were so sad, as if, instead of the splendour he divined in her, she held out to him a handful of dust. “Do not think too well of me,” she said. “I like you too much. With you there can be no pretence. Do not think too well. It is best for Alix; but it is best for me, too, that she should not be near my life.”