“He was like a pool, was he not?” said Alix, struggling with thoughts Mrs. Bradley could not guess at; “a pool rippling and perhaps shallow, but open to the sun; and Toppie is like a well, cold and deep and narrow. And Giles is like the sea; deep and broad, too. How happy she might still be if she could love Giles.”
“Yes. Yes.” The tears rose to Mrs. Bradley’s eyes. “And all that he thinks of is to live for her and all that she thinks of is that Owen is near her. Isn’t it cruel?—I can’t believe that about darling Owen, you know. I haven’t her faith, and that distresses her in me, too. She doesn’t want to be with people who haven’t her faith. I feel that. She doesn’t want anything that seems to come in any way between her and him.”
“And if she did not believe him so near, so specially near, she could think of Giles as near,” said Alix, while a sense of unformulated fear, often felt, never seen, seemed to press more closely upon her than ever before. “It is Captain Owen who stands between them.”
“I am afraid he will stand between them always, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley.
Giles went off to the Rectory next morning. Ruth, Rosemary, and the boys had planned a picnic with the Eustaces, but Alix said that she would remain behind with Mrs. Bradley. By luncheon-time Giles had not returned and, exchanging glances over the table, each knew that the other found hope in the prolonged absence, for would Toppie keep Giles with her like this unless all was going well?
“You will see him when he comes back, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley when, after luncheon, she stepped into the car to drive off to the station. She had an address to give in London that afternoon and would not be back till late.
“Ah, perhaps he will not want to see me,” said Alix. “I shall be very discreet. I shall be there for him if he wants me; but not otherwise.”
“I think Giles would always want to see you, whatever had happened to him,” said Mrs. Bradley.
Left alone, Alix went out to her favourite walk, the little path under the garden wall, half obliterated by heather and grass, its bordering gorse bushes all broken into soft clusters of gold set in prickles and smelling of apricots. Bareheaded, her arms wrapped in her blue-and-grey scarf, she walked, smelling the gorse, feeling the sunshine, listening to a blackbird that fluted golden arabesques on the April air; while above her head the leaning fruit-boughs were full of thick grey-green buds.
The sense of excitement that had been with her since the day of Jerry’s declaration was immeasurably deepened this afternoon by her imaginative sharing of Giles’s ordeal. Jerry and Giles were mingled in her thoughts, and her mind recoiled from the striving of pain and hope and fear brought to it by their united images. Perhaps it was because she thus evaded her deep preoccupation, perhaps it was because she paced thus in the sunlight, as he had paced, that her memory, suddenly liberated, took a long flight backward to find Grand-père going along the terrace at Montarel with his dragging step and sombre eye.