CHAPTER XV
Giles, while Toppie spoke, had started up, resting on his hand and staring at her with eyes aghast and stupefied. What folly, what madness was this? How could Toppie find it in her heart to speak like this; to him—to him of all people?
Yet, in another moment, while he stared at her, memory had answered him. A vein of piercing intuition underlay Toppie’s blunder. It was only a half blunder. His misery of confusion had been for Owen, because of Owen’s secret that he had to hide. And she had seen it as for himself. But it was true that he had, if only for a moment, been in love with madame Vervier. He had, for a moment, partaken of the experience that swept men away. The figure of madame Vervier was haloed for him by fiery, dewy associations, and the pang of his sense of disloyalty to her would not have been so deep had he not known in her presence that poignant, perilous revelation of beauty. He saw all this while, silently, he stared at Toppie, and he saw that she could never, never understand or admit his half truth. It was a weakness even to think of its avowal.
“How can you say anything so monstrous to me, Toppie,” he questioned, and it was sternly, “when you know I’ve never loved anyone but you?” This, indeed, was a whole truth that it behoved Toppie not to traduce.
But his sternness did not deflect her. “There are different kinds of love. I know you love me. I know you’ve had, always, a boyish, idealizing devotion for me. I will always be grateful to you for your devotion. But you are not in love with me. You’ve never known what it was to be in love till you met madame Vervier. Oh! Giles—you must see what I see so plainly! Perhaps you really think that I could be hurt and jealous in feeling myself no longer first. That is so wrong of you. It would lift a burden from me if I could see you married. I should be so glad, so glad of your happiness.”
“Good Heavens, Toppie!” Giles had started to his feet and stood above her, crimson with grief and dismay. “This is the most extraordinary nonsense! Happiness! With another woman! With Alix’s mother! She’s old enough to be mine if it comes to that; and as to marrying me—she’d as soon think of marrying a Chinaman. People haven’t these romantic ideas about marrying in France, I can assure you. Marry me!” Giles suddenly found himself forced by the thought to a loud laugh. “Besides,” he added, “why should you think that monsieur Vervier is dead? Why should you think that madame Vervier is a widow?”
He felt in the silence that followed these last unguarded words that Toppie looked at him strangely and, as he heard them echo—what, indeed, did he know about monsieur Vervier, damn him! He had, actually, never considered monsieur Vervier except as a discarded, dangling phantom of the past—as he heard the words that disinterred monsieur Vervier and set him there between him and Toppie, he felt that the bewildered ant had, indeed, stumbled on a luckless path.
“Owen always wrote of her as though she were a widow,” said Toppie, going slowly. She was not bewildered. She looked carefully, if with shrinking, at the figure he had placed before her in his foolish haste. “But you know so much more about her than Owen ever knew.—In those few days you saw and learned things he never saw. Perhaps you do know about monsieur Vervier. Perhaps you know that he isn’t dead; that she isn’t free. If that is so—doesn’t it explain even more?—Oh, Giles—I am afraid”—She stopped. She looked away. He saw the blood rising in her cheek as she checked the speech that must give him too much offence.
“I suppose what you mean,” said Giles gloomily, thrusting his hands into his pockets as he looked down at her, “is that I do know she isn’t free, and that, therefore, being in love with her, my love is a guilty passion. Something of that sort, what? Well, if you won’t take my word for it, there’s no more for me to say, is there?” Resentment had come into his voice. “We’d better be going.”
“I accuse you of nothing, Giles,” said Toppie, still dyed with her blush; “only I am sure that I am right in feeling that something has happened. I am sorry, but I can’t help feeling it. From the moment you spoke of madame Vervier I heard that your voice was changed;—so strained and strange; so full of reluctance. You wanted to say all against her that you could find to say. You wanted to guard yourself against your own feeling. But what came through, from the beginning, was that you found her—beautiful; mysterious; compelling.” Toppie found the words, a strange tremor in her voice. “What came through was that she was a goddess.”