The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

CHAPTER I

Two faces were with Giles that night as he turned, sleepless, again and again, on his pillow; Alix’s face, and Toppie’s face. Toppie was before him as he had seen her on the Autumn evening in the birch-woods when she had looked away from him with the wildness in her eyes and had said: “It’s as if there might be anything. As if you might hide anything. She’s changed you so much.” She was before him as she said: “It’s as if she might have changed Owen—if he had ever come to know her as well as you do.”

It was he himself, in his stumbling confusion, his half truths and his half loyalties, who had that evening set the deadly surmise before her. She had not, he believed, since seeing it, drawn a breath at ease. She would have been ready for what Alix had come to tell her. She would have known, at the first word, that it was true. He saw her freeze to stillness before the Medusa head.

Yet, if Toppie’s face brought the groan of helpless pity to his lips while he tossed and turned, an even deeper piercing came in the thought of Alix. She stood there, against the study door, facing him; facing the deed she had done; facing a truth worse than Toppie’s. Toppie saw herself betrayed by what she had most loved. But Alix saw herself as a betrayer. Her look was that of a creature at bay, with wolves at its throat.

Again, with a suffocating compassion, he saw her blind, outstretched hands; he heard her gasping breath: “Giles—Is it true?” His arms received her and he felt her sobs against his breast.

She became, while his comprehension yearned over her, part of himself. Something fiercely tender, something trembling and awe-struck dawned in his heart as he held her. To understand Toppie was to see her sink away from him. To understand Alix was to see her enter his very flesh and blood. It was for him that she had dared the almost inconceivable act; and, as he thus saw her offered up in sacrifice for him, Giles knew, with all that had been destroyed, something beautiful had been given. It was his justification for the act that he had, from the beginning, dared for her. It was the answer to an old perplexity. He had seen the dear little French girl as so securely secular, so serenely pagan; so hard. His perplexity had centred round the word Holiness and he had feared that she might be impervious to its meaning. But as quietness descended slowly upon his troubled heart Giles saw, while a sense of radiance grew about him, that it was Alix herself who showed him further meanings in the word.

He found on waking next morning that, with all the sense of calamity that lay like a physical weight on his heart, the sense of beauty, of something gained, still shone round him. He needed light, for his path was dark with perplexity. Alix had left him yesterday to go to her room, and to bed. In the few words that passed between him and his mother on her return from London the child’s shattered state was sufficiently explained by Toppie’s decision. Toppie’s decision, he felt, explained his state, too. Mrs. Bradley heard of it with consternation. “A nun, Giles! A convent!” she had gasped. Generations of candid Protestantism spoke in the exclamation. Nuns and convents were, to Mrs. Bradley, strange, alien, almost sinister anachronisms. Dim pictures from Fox’s “Book of Martyrs” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress” floated across her mind as she heard Giles. And tears rose to her eyes as she saw an end, not only to all his hopes, but to every link that bound them to Toppie. There was no need to explain anything further to his mother.

He had to face at breakfast the dismay of Ruth and Rosemary.

“Poor Alix! She’s bowled out completely.—Says she doesn’t want any breakfast; but I’m going to take her up a tray,” said Rosemary. “No, not kidneys, Jack; if you’re ill in bed you don’t want kidneys;—a boiled egg’s the thing, and toast, and tea. She looks rotten; perfectly rotten. She’s awfully fond of Toppie, you see.”

“I suppose there’s no good whatever in my going over and seeing what I can say to Toppie,” Ruth ventured to her brother when breakfast was over. “If she’d only let herself be psycho-analysed by Miriam Stott it would be sure to help. Miriam is extraordinary, you know. She’s a friend of the Burnetts; she does it professionally. Toppie is just a case for her.”