The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“We must give her time, you see,” Giles murmured. “Her pride had such a blow.”

“Give her time! I would give her anything!” madame Vervier exclaimed. “But I can do nothing with Alix.”—Rien! rien! rien! she said in French with a crescendo of grief and impatience almost comic to his ear for all its pathos. “You have altered my Alix for me, you English, Giles. You have given her a different heart. It is strange, strange to me—and bitter—to feel how changed she is. She loves me. More than ever. She has guessed everything, and she loves me more than ever; but with a love almost maternal; a love terribly mature. I could not have believed it possible in so short a time that a child should grow to womanhood. She is docile, still; obedient; but she does not deceive me;—it is only in the little things—the things that do not count. If, in the great things, she would obey, nothing need be lost. There is now only a rangée mother to explain, to efface, to avoid.—How easy I would make it for my Alix to avoid me if her happiness demanded it!—But, no; she will not hear me. She is a stone to my supplications. She denies that she has ever loved him. She takes her life into her own hands and says that she will never marry, that she will stay with me always and be happy so. I dash myself against a rock in Alix. More than that;—she watches me; she suspects me—as if I were the daughter—bon Dieu!—and she the mother!—I wrote to Jerry. I told him to come;—it was but the other day.—I told him that it was best that they should meet, and that I would help him. And Alix intercepted the letter. Yes;—you may well stare. She confronted me with it and tore it in two before my eyes. She told me she knew too well what I had said to Jerry and that she had herself written and that all was over between them. Cold! Stern!—I could hardly believe it was my little Alix.—She spoke as if I had done her a great wrong.—As if I were the child and she the mother,” madame Vervier repeated, a note of bewilderment mingling with the grief of her tone; and, indeed, as she made him these ingenuous confidences, Giles saw her as the child, the tricking child; all the French rôles reversed and Alix sustained in hers by what England had given her. No wonder madame Vervier was bewildered.

“But that was very wrong of you,” he said, as he might have said to the child. “You had no right to do that.”

“No right! I, her mother, am to sit by with folded hands and watch her ruin herself! Those are your English ideas. Those are the ideas that Alix has made hers. She, too, said I had no right. As if a mother’s right over her child’s life were not supreme!”

“We don’t think it is, you see. Not when the child has reached Alix’s age. You don’t want her to marry a man she does not love.”

“Love! Why should she not love him, since she loves nobody else!” cried madame Vervier, a deep exasperation thrilling in her voice. “And even if she did not love him, she cares quite enough. He is an admirable parti, this Jerry; I could not have chosen better had I been free to choose; he is an admirable parti and can give her all that I cannot give; security, position, wealth. Such a marriage would atone for everything that my darling has lacked. And love would come; why should it not? It is, as you say, her pride only that stands in the way. Ah, if she would only trust me!” madame Vervier’s voice for the first time trembled, and looking up at her he saw tears in her eyes—“If she would only trust me! I could arrange it all.”

He could not put before her the old, romantic protests. They had ceased to have validity for himself. All that madame Vervier said was true; truer far than she could know.

Better, far better, that Alix should marry Jerry, not loving him, than be exposed to the perils of her life in France. She had loved him once; why not again? She was a child. She could not know her own heart. Her pride had had a dreadful blow; and she had come too near the fire; that was all. She must trust them; it was true. She must trust him and her mother. To this strange pass had France brought Giles.

“I’ve come over to try to help you, you know,” he said. “I want it as much, I believe, as you want it. About her pride—Lady Mary, I’m sure, expects them to marry now.—She shall hear that.”

“Ah, I felt that you had come to give me hope, Giles,” madame Vervier breathed, and her hand, for a moment, rested on his shoulder. “You are wonderful. You are impayable.—No one would believe in you.—If anyone can help, it is you. Alix will listen to you when she will listen to no one else.”