The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

It was so strange to think of Grand-père now. Since the day of her first arrival in England he had hardly visited her thoughts. And with what a new sadness she saw him again and felt once more his melancholy flow into her. Was it because she had for so long forgotten him and gone so far from him and Montarel that she felt thus suddenly the gloomy pressure of his eyes? It was as if he watched her, her life involved in lives so remote from his sympathy. It was not only the young yearning of her heart towards Jerry’s yearning that seemed a betrayal of Grand-père; this sharper yearning, not towards but over Giles, showed her as even more removed and alien. Young love Grand-père might have understood; but hardly this identification with an Englishman’s hopes and fears. She doubted whether Grand-père had ever in his life spoken to an English person. He had disliked the English. She recalled how, when she read her history to him, he would interrupt her to speak bitterly about them. “Un peuple pratique; sans idéal,” he had said. And he had said that England had always schemed against France and made use of her grace and generosity. How strange that was to remember now as she waited for Giles and listened to the blackbird. They had not schemed against her; France’s daughter; nor made use of her. Would it not be truer to say that France, through her helpless person, had schemed against and made use of them?

Maman schemed. Maman, with all her grace, her generosity, was oh! so practical. “And our people eat the blackbirds,” thought Alix while the song, as she listened to it, brought Giles’s face vividly before her. Jerry was like a goldfinch—golden flashes, summery sweetness, swift eagerness, and gay inconsequent song. Giles was the blackbird; its tenderness, its trust, its something of heaven and something of drollery too; and the way it brought long-past things back;—again; again; again;—brooding on the past with persistent fidelity. Faithful Giles; he would never forget. And why did the thought of goldfinches merge into this surreptitious aching? How strange it was that one should feel the anxious pressure of a new thought before one saw the thought itself! Goldfinches; Les Chardonnerets; André de Valenbois; she traced the sequence. Jerry made her think of André; only he was not so finely tempered; not so intelligent. But the thought of André was only a pain and a perplexity; whereas Giles believed her to be in love with Jerry; she had seen in his eyes that he believed her to be in love; and perhaps she was; only it was round the problem of worth that this new ache was centring. There must be so much worth on the one hand if, on the other, it was France that might have to be sacrificed. And Jerry was like the goldfinches. “Worth,” she thought, listening to the blackbird’s song. The word was such an English word. She loved the blackbird’s song, best of all, she said to herself, trying to turn away from the still half-unseen trouble.

Suddenly, behind her, she heard Giles’s voice speaking her name.

He had come up from the birch-woods; he had not come from the Rectory. He had been walking; his hair was ruffled with the wind; his shoes were muddy; he had not eaten; he was very tired. Alix saw all this in flashes as they approached each other, her mind catching at such straws. For it was shipwreck that his face revealed to her; so pallid, so haggard, with dark pinches in the eyelids under the eyes and strange, ageing furrows of suffering running down from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. Could the shipwreck of all his hopes make Giles look like this? There had been no hope to lose.

He had spoken her name in a quite gentle voice, as if, indeed, he were glad to find her there; as if she were a haven for what he could drag of hull and spars up out of reach of the battering waves. He walked beside her, and said: “Can we get to the study without being seen?”

“They are all out,” said Alix.

It was curious to feel, as she said it, as, silently, they made their way into the house, that it was as if they had left him to her. Even his mother had left Giles to her, and as they entered the study and she heard, through the open window, the blackbird, far away, still singing, she had the feeling of being in a dream. The past fell back into a strange, flat tapestry, russet, silver, blue, where the figures of Grand-père, Maman, and Jerry all went together. She and Giles stood against that background in the study.

He had walked in before her, to the window, and he stood looking out as if he, too, were listening to the blackbird, and when he turned at last and looked at her it was as if he asked her what he should do with himself. She saw him as a little boy who needed a mother to take him to her breast. And, like the little boy, he wanted his mother to ask him what was the matter before he could speak. So Alix asked him.

“What is the matter, Giles?”

Her voice trembled as she spoke. That was why, perhaps, Giles collapsed. He sank into the chair before the table and laid his head upon his arms and burst out crying.