CHAPTER VIII
It was only a few days after Christmas that a dreadful thing happened to Alix; the most dreadful thing that had ever happened to her.
They were all in the drawing-room after dinner—all except Francis and Jack who had gone to bed;—Ruth writing, Rosemary altering a blouse and Giles reading in his accustomed place. Alix sat beside Mrs. Bradley on the sofa, turned sideways while she held a skein of wool for her to wind, and she was never to forget the look of that heather-coloured wool.
“Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley suddenly, “how was it that Owen didn’t see you when he went to Paris on leave?—that one leave he had; in February last winter. You must have been away, I think, for he said nothing of you.”
Alix sat there, holding up the wool, and, even as she faced Mrs. Bradley thus, steadying eyes and lips and hands, she was aware, though she could only see him as a blurred form, that Giles, suddenly, was watching her.
Captain Owen’s leave! His one leave! He had come to Paris three times in that last winter, and the last had been in April only a fortnight before his death. And he had never told his family! Why had he not told them? Why! Why! The clamour of her thoughts seemed so to fill her ears that it was like sinking in the sea. She had the sensation of drowning, yet of keeping calm while she drowned, resourceful, even as she measured her calamity, and she heard her own voice speaking from far above her it seemed—while beneath Mrs. Bradley’s eyes, beneath Giles’s, her thoughts raced swiftly, swiftly;—“Yes; we should, of course, have seen him, but we were away; we were away in the country at that time.”
“At Cannes, I suppose,” said Mrs. Bradley. “What a pity for Owen. How lonely he must have been. He hadn’t time to come home, you see; only the two days. And he knew nobody in Paris except the old professor’s family, where Ruth and Rosemary stayed before the war.”
“No; we were not at Cannes; we had gone to the sea in Normandy,” said Alix. It was in her tradition, that an emergency should find one resourceful, yet, had she had time for the reflection, her own swiftness in resource might now have surprised herself. “Maman has a little house on the coast that we sometimes go to, but that she usually lets. We depend very much on letting it every summer. We went that time in February to put it in order for the spring. It could not be helped; tenants were coming early,” said Alix.
“What a pity,” Mrs. Bradley repeated sadly. “Or if only he could have managed to go to you there.”
“You may be sure that we wired at once and suggested it; but the time was too short,” said Alix.