“Well, I didn’t make much headway when I wooed in person,” Jerry remarked. “No. Clear away the other fellow if you can. And then we’ll see. After all”—Jerry had actually got outside now, but he put his head around the door to utter these last words—“you’ve never asked her yourself yet. She’s never seen you as a lover.”
CHAPTER VI
Giles, as he leaned out of the train, almost expected to see the white form of madame Vervier awaiting him on the platform as she had awaited him and Alix last year. His heart then had been like a load in his side, and how much heavier was the clogging weight upon it now; but, from the fact that his sensations were so much the same, all the pageant of last year’s arrival was summoned back into his memory with its climax in Hélène Vervier’s uplifted gaze. But she was not there. On the sunny platform it was Alix and André de Valenbois who stood side by side looking towards the train, and Giles knew that it was sheer terror that he felt as he saw them there together. Something in their stillness, their silence, made part of it. Tall and white they stood, side by side, and in their demeanour he read, with the sharp intuition of a first impression, the curious quality of a constraint that expressed at once familiarity and withdrawal. They stood so still because they did not care to stroll up and down together, and they were silent because there was nothing that they could say. Was it already as bad as that? Giles asked himself, feeling the hot blood of the surmise beating up into his neck and mounting to his face as he turned to pick up his bag and gather his coat over his arm.
If it was as bad as that, André, at all events, could assume his old air of unclouded radiancy. His eyes knew no shadow; his voice no hesitancy. Delicate, sweet, sharp, able to do what he liked, with himself and others, he was ready for any encounter, and Giles even imagined, as he stepped down before them, a touch of sullen anger running a darker vein along the heat in his blood, that André looked upon his English friend as offering little complexity or difficulty. With people so simple, so guileless, so ridiculous—for would not André see him as rather ridiculous?—nothing more was really needed than a light hand on the rein and the easiest of eyes on the landscape. They would go just where one wished and see as much or as little as one intended them to see. “Not so simple as you think, perhaps, my friend,” Giles was saying to himself. But to know that he might see things that André would not suspect him of seeing did not exercise the sickness in his blood. At the same time, underneath everything, he was astonished, in a side glance as it were, to see that he was not hating him; was still feeling him charming.
“Here we all are, then, again. What a triumph over destiny!” was what André was saying—and it was on him that Giles kept his eyes. He felt that he must pull himself well together before looking at Alix.—“I never expect happy things to repeat themselves.”
“No more they do,” thought Giles. But he could play up. “Is it all the same as last year?”
“Exactly the same; but for the absence of Jules. Even your old friend madame Dumont survives and is eagerly awaiting your arrival.”
“Still there, is she?” said Giles. “I’m not surprised. Unhappy things, at all events, repeat themselves.”
“Oh,” laughed André, “your standard is too high.—I, more easily contented, should count the old lady a very amusing piece of bric-à-brac. We must have a furnished world, you know.—There is room for all sorts of oddities.”
“No room at all, for that sort, in my world,” Giles returned.