When she had said this, it was as if the silence between her and Giles was altered in its quality. He said nothing for so long a time that the echoes of her own words began to sing in her head like brazen bells. They were true words. Yet they did not ring true. Long before Giles spoke, she wished she had not said them.
“And you think,” he said, “that Toppie would have cared to marry a man who hadn’t been kept from marrying her?” How dreadful was Giles’s voice. Dark and heavy, as his eyes had been last night.
“No; no, Giles. I do not mean that. I am sorry. Not that. It was of Maman I was thinking. You think of Toppie and I think of Maman; the ones we love most. No; I see that she would not have married him.”
“You do see, Alix. That’s all I wanted. You see why he didn’t tell us. And that’s all we need say about it. He was my brother, and I was awfully fond of him. But he was very wrong. He did a great wrong. And you have lied for our sakes, and we’ve profited by it; if it is profit. All I pray is that you’ll never feel you have to lie, for anyone’s sake, again. There. That’s over. We’ll get to work. Have you everything you want?” Giles got up and took his pipe from the mantelpiece and his tobacco-pouch from his pocket. “And don’t let me ever see you afraid to come in here in the morning. It made me feel quite queer to find you crouched away in the cold as if I’d been an ogre.”
“I thought you were angry with me, Giles; and I thought I was angry with you. It makes me angry, always, at once, if I think people are displeased with me unfairly. I am like that.”
“Jolly well it may have made you angry. Of course I was fairly sick about your lying; and the house on the cliff; and the wire to Owen; on the top of everything else.”
“And even the house might have been a lie, you know,” said Alix, looking up at him. “If it had needed to be invented, and if I could have invented it in time.”
“I’m afraid it could. Yes; that’s what I thought. And it made me feel sick. But you’ve promised me about lies, haven’t you; and you must promise me, besides, that if you’re ever angry you’ll come and tell me so. To work, then,” said Giles, and he dropped into his chair and took up Bergson.
Alix did not take up her pen. She sat above her paper, but she knew that the last thing she could think of doing that morning was to write to Maman. She might be able to read the book about birds, by Hudson, that Giles had given her, and she drew it towards her and opened it; but soon found she could not read. Her heart seemed to be trembling and her blood trembling. All her mind was shaken; and the picture that flashed, disappeared, and flashed again, was always that memory of Captain Owen’s eyes as he gazed across at Maman from his place before the fire. It was not Maman’s fault. How could she have averted, how could she have avoided such a devotion? A sense of intolerable grief broke down her silence.
“Giles,” she said suddenly.