The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

He stopped. He stopped for a long time after saying this and suddenly she saw the blood mounting to his face. He became, slowly, crimson. He did not know what to say. Oh, poor Giles, what was this horrible perplexity that so darkened his good face when all that he had to tell her, when it finally came, was so simple? “I wasn’t in the same part of the front as he was. I didn’t follow what he did. It was by chance that I saw him in Paris, that time in February. I had a leave, too. And I saw him there, walking in the Bois with your mother.”

Giles had seen Maman! Alix felt herself grow dim with perplexity. She looked about her and sank down on a chair before her little writing-table. “Did you not speak to them?”

“No, I didn’t speak to them.” Giles stood there, in his helplessness, before her. “I thought they wanted to be alone.”

“But Maman would so have wished to know you. I do not see why you did not speak. Yes. I remember that they went to the Bois. He was with us all the time, you see. He stayed with us,” said Alix.

Poor Giles. How overwhelming was his plight! Could shame for his brother’s inexplicable duplicity, shame for his own strange silence, that day in the Bois, account for such confusion? “Yes. I was afraid you were lying,” was all he found to mutter.

“But you knew. You knew, and yet you kept it from your mother. It was for her sake that you kept it from her. It was for her sake I lied. What else could I do?” said Alix.

“Do you often lie like that? I mean—the house on the cliff;—the galet beach; the wire you sent him to come to you in Normandy;—were they all invented?” Giles ignored the question of his complicity.

“Some were invented and some not.” Alix tried to steady her thoughts so that she might satisfy Giles as to this point—so irrelevant a point it seemed to her. “I do not think I could have invented it all so quickly. We have the little house at Vaudettes. We often go there. But of course we were not there then. I do not think I often lie. Only when it is necessary; like this.”

Giles’s eyes studied her. “And if you had spoken the truth last night—the whole truth—as you know it—what would you have said?”

“But what I have said to you, Giles. That he was with us three times. That all his leaves were with us;—the last a fortnight before he was killed. Was it not better that I should lie to her than that she should know her son had been disloyal to her—as well as to my mother?”