“For it can’t be true, can it, Giles?” Mrs. Bradley urged in her shaken voice. She was so much more worn than Lady Mary, yet she looked so much younger and Giles read on her face a resentment, all unconscious, against Lady Mary and her standards. “You know her, Giles, and can explain. She’s unconventional, isn’t she, and unworldly, and might do unusual things and be misjudged by worldly people;—but Alix’s mother can’t be a bad woman.”
So he found himself face to face once more with the bad woman.
“I had to come and see if you could tell me more. I’m so fond of darling little Alix.” Lady Mary had beautifully placed herself in a corner of the sofa, her furs unfolded, her long veil cast back from the framing velvet of her little hat. She was not thinking about looking beautiful;—Giles did her justice;—but she was thinking, very intently, about doing what she had to do as beautifully as possible, and that intention seemed to dispose her hands across the sables of her muff, to cross her silken ankles and tilt to a most appealing angle the pearls that glimmered in her ears. “You see—Jerry— It’s all foolishness”—she found her way. “He’s only a boy.—He falls in love with someone different every six months.—He fancies himself in love with Alix now—and I don’t wonder at it. She’s the most enchanting young girl I’ve seen for years.—But Marigold Hamble, my husband’s niece, heard in Paris, just the other day, such deplorable things. Deplorable.” Lady Mary’s voice sank to the longest, saddest emphasis. “Marigold is a wretched gossip, and worse.—She’s a mauvaise langue; I would not trust her story. But she gave chapter and verse to such an extent that I had to come to you—since you know madame Vervier.”
“But gossip is always like that,” Mrs. Bradley persisted, a spot of colour on each cheek. “Some people see evil in everything. And Giles liked her. And everything Alix has told me of her is so lovely. And my son, Owen, who is dead, was devotedly attached to her. It is because he was so fond of her mother that Alix is with us now.”
For a moment, after that, Lady Mary’s soft, bright eyes, from between the veils and the pearls, remained fixed on Mrs. Bradley’s candid countenance and Giles knew that his mother had revealed more of the miserable truth to Lady Mary than she herself, he hoped, would ever know.
“You’re quite right, Mummy, darling. I do like her,” so he felt impelled to sustain her, though he knew that such sustainment might only be for her immediate bewilderment. “I do like her,” he repeated, turning his eyes on Lady Mary and bidding her make what use she liked of the information. And then he found the words he had used to Alix yesterday: “She’s not bad. She’s unfortunate and wrong. But, it’s true:—I found out while I was with her, that she is a woman who—” poor Giles paused, while Lady Mary and his mother gazed at him—“who,” he finished, “has lovers.”
After this, it was Mrs. Bradley who first spoke. “Has lovers, Giles?”
He could almost have smiled—but he was nearer weeping at his mother’s voice. Steeped to the lips in the woes of the world as she was, lovers—for anyone one knew—for anyone in one’s own walk of life—was an idea almost as alien, and even more strange and sinister, than nuns and convents. Poor little shop-girls and housemaids had lovers, though usually known less romantically as the fathers of illegitimate babies; she had spent much time and strength in dealing with such sad cases and in pleading on committees that the man was most at fault. But even with Ruth flourishing Freudian theories before her and the latest novels of the newest young writers lying on her tables, Mrs. Bradley thought of unhallowed relations between men and women as of dark, mysterious deviations from the obvious standards of civilization. And now she heard Giles say that Alix’s mother had lovers.
“Has had them for years and years, dear Mrs. Bradley,” Lady Mary sadly but firmly defined for her. “Ever since she left Alix’s father with, let us trust, the first of them. With the monsieur Vervier, who, Marigold heard, has never divorced her, and still lives. The last is an André de Valenbois and Marigold met his people. It was from them she heard the story, and from what Giles says I see it is all too true. She is a very distinguished, very dignified demi-mondaine. Quite, quite notorious. She’s as well known in Paris,” said Lady Mary with a sigh, relinquishing madame Vervier’s corpse, as it were, to float down the tide of her destiny, “as the Mona Lisa. The masses may not know about her, but everybody else does.”
“Not quite so bad as that, is it?” said Giles. He knew, while he listened to Lady Mary, that it would be difficult to say why it was not so bad; but the loyalty to madame Vervier that had so direfully betrayed him to Toppie rose up in grief and anger against these suave definitions. “Madame Vervier isn’t mercenary,” he said. “To be a demi-mondaine you must be mercenary. And I’m sure,” he added, while his mother’s eyes, aghast, and Lady Mary’s eyes, imperturbably kind, dwelt on him, and he knew that to the one he appeared ominously mature, and to the other attractively boyish;—“I’m sure that Alix is legitimate; if that’s any comfort to us.”