The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

But she had not spoken of herself or of her anxieties this afternoon. They had climbed the hill slowly, stopping to look back at the sky, and Toppie had found this favourite spot among the junipers and had sunk down, taking off her Panama hat, battered like a boy’s, and holding it with both hands clasped around her knees as she sat in the deep heather. She wore her usual grey, again an almost boyish formula; the thin silk jumper rolled back from the throat, the thin pleated skirt falling to her ankle. Her pale hair was ruffled up over the black silk ribbon that bound it. As she sat there while he lay beside her on his arm, Giles had never felt Toppie so near him. It was more sad than sweet to feel her so. It gave him the feeling he would have had if she were going away on a long journey and could be so near because she was to be so far. And she talked to him of his time in France and of Alix.

“Yes. She’s coming back all right,” Giles said. “I am glad you are glad; for I am. It’s as if the child belonged to us, isn’t it?”

“It is quite strange, Giles, how much I feel that,” said Toppie, turning her eyes upon him.

They were such lovely eyes, those of Toppie’s. Giles had always felt them, since he had first, a boy of fifteen, seen her, the loveliest eyes in the world. Not large; not vividly marked; her brows and lashes only a shade darker than her hair; they conveyed the impression of light rather than colour and of radiance rather than of warmth. It was as if they looked at you from the zenith on a cloudless, cold Spring day. And the words that had always gone with them, in Giles’s mind, from the time that he had first seen Toppie, in church, in Advent, with pale, wintry sunlight streaming in over her, had been: “Dayspring from on high.”

She had stood there, in the Rectory pew, all alone, tall and slender in her grey, with a little high tight fur collar up to her chin and a little round fur cap coming over her golden hair and down to her ears, and she had, while the Psalms were being sung, turned her eyes on the Bradley family in the pew across the nave; looking at Owen; at Owen first—Giles felt it even then; Owen, his nut-brown head held high while he happily chanted out the responses in his sweet, accurate tenor. And then her eyes had met Giles’s solemn gaze. And those had been the words that had come to him; full of the Christmas beauty; full almost to tears, for the boy standing there, of radiant promise and of heavenly love.—“Whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us.”

So he had seen her first. So he had always thought of Toppie’s eyes. They showered light and loveliness upon you; and it came from far away.

“Quite strange,” she was saying now, thinking of him because she was thinking of Alix, just as she had always, in the past, thought of him because she was thinking of Owen. “From the first moment I saw her I felt that she belonged. Perhaps it was because of what Owen had written. He was so fond of her. She was the dearest little girl he had ever seen. Even then I used to think that some day, if the war left us to each other, we would have Alix come and stay with us often. And then the moment I saw her I felt that I loved her.—Giles, you were very bad about letters while you were in France. Never one to me; and hardly anything to your mother about madame Vervier. Only that she was charming and had a charming house. You told us more about monsieur de Maubert—was that the name?—and the young man who ought to have worn a ruff and fought with Henry of Navarre. I liked so much what you said about him. I felt as if he ought to have known Owen. As if they would have been friends. But of course what we most wanted to hear was about Alix’s mother. Tell me everything now; everything you thought.”

“Everything. Well, that’s rather difficult, you know.” Giles turned over on his elbow and looked down at the heather, pulling his hat over his eyes. “She’s very different from Alix.”

“Is she? I’d always imagined her so much the same.”

“Almost as different as it is possible for a mother to be from her child,” said Giles, while he thought intently. How it had pleased, how it had lightened his heart to hear what Toppie had just been saying of Alix and her return to them; and how dismayed he knew himself to be by this further stretch of her interest.