The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“Because of him,” Alix echoed, sitting straightly beside him and bending all her strength to thought.

“To be more near him. She says she feels she can be more near like that,” Giles spoke dully.

“But that is not a vocation,” said Alix after a moment. She was seeing the face of the old great-aunt at Lyons behind the grille. Pale old eyes; pale cold lips; a dead creature; yet—already the little child who stood there before her for her blessing felt it—living by a mysterious life unimaginable to those out in the great turmoil of the world. “You go into a convent to renounce the world,” she said. “Not to keep it more near.”

“Ah,” said Giles, and he uttered a hard laugh, “she doesn’t count Owen as the world. She counts him as heaven. He wasn’t worth it, you know, Alix,” said Giles, with the hardness in his voice. “Owen wasn’t worth a devotion like Toppie’s.”

And, while the word “worth,” laden with its thick cluster of associations, seemed to set a heavy bell ringing in her breast, Alix answered: “No; he was not worth it.”

They sat then for a long time silent. Once or twice Alix thought that Giles was going to speak to her. She saw it all now; clearly at last; and must he, too, not see? Must he not, in another moment, tell her of the sudden resolve to which, at last, he found himself knit? But when she turned her eyes—appalled, yet ready, upon him, he was not looking at her; not thinking at all of what she thought; gazing merely at the fireless grate, his mind fixed on the one figure that filled it. Toppie a nun; Toppie blotted out from any life where he could see or hear her. And suddenly he said: “She was so kind to me. She was so awfully sorry for me. She’s never been so kind—It was almost—I could see what it might have been—Oh, Alix, I’m so miserable!” groaned Giles, and again he put his head down on his arms and broke into sobs.

Alix looked over at him. No; it was her task; not his. Impossible for him; inevitable for her. It was a debt to be paid. A debt of honour. More than that. It was the crying out in her heart of intolerable grief. She could not bear that Giles should suffer so.

He hardly noticed it when she laid her hand on his head and said: “I will come back in a little while.” He was broken. The waves were going over him.

She left him there. She left the house. At the garden-gate, looking through the sunlight across the common, she stood still for a moment, feeling that she paused, for the last time, in childhood, and that with the next step she left it for ever behind her. It was she, now, who took up life; who made it. Destiny went with her; she was no longer its instrument, but its creator. And in this last moment how strange it was to hear the blackbird still singing:—It would always remember; that was what it seemed to be saying:—It would always remember. Even when she had forgotten her childhood, the blackbird’s song would remember, for her, how a child’s heart felt.

Once outside upon the common she began to run. She was carrying Giles’s heart in her hand and it was heavy to carry. From the tapestry she felt Grand-père’s stern eyes following her; and Maman’s eyes. Intently, intently Maman’s eyes watched her as she ran. She could not read their look. And far away, as if he had forgotten her, Jerry rode into the blue distance with ladies in hennins mounted on unicorns; figures faded to the pattern of the background. Or was it she who had forgotten Jerry?