“This is very unfortunate,” André murmured. “I have been stupid; very stupid. I must at once make my confession.”
“Yes. You’d better,” said Giles grimly. “It wouldn’t do for her mother to go up now and pretend she’d made no plans at all.”
“Oh—our hostess would be able to meet even that contingency,” said André with, perhaps, the slightest flavour of irony. “A daughter, with us, knows too well that she may trust her mother to do the best for her happiness.”
But, as Giles remained sitting on, hearing in the drawing-room the low murmur of consultation and André’s repeated “Je suis désolé,” it became disastrously clear to him that, more than Maman’s intended accommodations of the truth, Alix would resent André’s admission to Maman’s confidence. How, indeed, could she interpret that?
The murmur in the drawing-room ceased, madame Vervier rose and went upstairs, and, before André could rejoin him, Giles had taken refuge in his own room. He could not face André; he could not face monsieur de Maubert, or madame Vervier herself, again that evening. None of them, not even madame Vervier, could see as he saw the disaster that had befallen his poor little friend. He leaned at his window feeling hot and sick, but even here, though the windows of Alix’s room had been closed, the voices of mother and daughter came to him through the flimsy barrier of the wall. He could not hear the words, but in their sharp passionate rhythm he discerned what the words must be. “Why to him, Maman! What are his rights! He was a stranger to us when I left you!”
But madame Vervier would, indeed, never lack resource. Unready as she must feel herself to face this further predicament, Giles heard the muffled murmur of her voice, rising, falling, expostulating; urgent, tender, invulnerable. She would find answers to everything. Or was it that there were some questions her child would not ask of her? When, at last, she ceased, there was no reply. He heard that Alix was crying.
CHAPTER XIII
Next day, his last at Les Chardonnerets, dawned high, blue, beautiful, and looking out at sunrise Giles saw his wonderful hostess, as he had seen her on his first morning, walking back to the house across the grassy cliffs, wrapped in her bathing-robe. She came slowly. Her tread had not the buoyancy of the first day. Her head was bent; she meditated gravely. But she made him think of a goddess who had sought inspiration and sustainment from immersion in her own elements of sunlight and sea-water. Power breathed from her as she moved, and Giles, looking out at her, was filled with a deep yet beautiful sadness. It was like looking at a goddess. Madame Vervier seemed separated from him by thousands of years. She might have been a figure of myth and legend walking there, the outlines of her ruffled hair all haloed by the sunlight, her white arm crossed upon her breast.
When breakfast brought them all again face to face, Giles marvelled at Alix. If madame Vervier was ready, she was not less so. Pale, with darkened eyelids, there were certain appearances that she need not be expected to keep up. Monsieur de Maubert and André de Valenbois would understand that it had been a shock to her to learn that her mother was again to send her from her. But beyond the evidences of this shock they were to see nothing. Of the greater shock she had received, not a shadow showed itself in her glance or voice. She was grave and quiet only; she showed the calm resignation of the jeune fille sérieuse who bows to the decisions of her elders. She smiled at her mother; she held her kitten to lap milk. And Giles was sorry for his invulnerable goddess, for, if it was hard that she should have to shoulder the burden of André under Alix’s eyes, when she already had more than enough to carry in Owen, it must be for her the bitterest of alleviations that Alix should do all in her power to make the burden light. Madame Vervier must feel, as he felt, that such resource, such understanding in Alix could only rise from the child’s intuition of how sharp was her mother’s need. She stood beside her mother. She helped her.
“Maman is going to take charge of my kitten while I am away,” she said calmly to André.