The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“It might be very sad.” Alix considered the remote contingency. “I see that it might make me sad—if I loved him very much. But I should have the children, the foyer. And then he might still love me most, while loving others, too. Do you not find that possible, here in England? In France, I am sure, we do not feel it so strange a thought.”

“We feel it strange; very strange and dreadful,” said Mrs. Bradley with as much vehemence as she ever displayed on any subject. “And you will, too, I am sure, darling, when you are older and understand what it means to trust someone with your life.—No, no; such a thing would have been impossible with Owen and Toppie. All that I meant was that his love was different in quality from Giles’s. Giles’s nature, in some ways, is deeper than dear Owen’s was.”

“Oh, yes. Deeper. One feels that at once,” Alix murmured, while the thought, seen at last clearly, pierced her through that Giles was held from his happiness by an illusion since Toppie might not have cared for Captain Owen had she known how much he cared for Maman. “Perhaps in time she will come to see what Giles is and love him. Do you not think so?”

“It’s what I hope for more than anything, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Giles has had such a sad life. You wouldn’t think it, perhaps. He doesn’t show it, unless one knows him very well. Even as a little boy I always felt him rather frustrated and sad. He adored Owen, who didn’t pay much attention to him; and he adored Toppie who never gave him a hope. And then the war came and ended his youth and he saw worse things than Owen saw. He saw the worst things. His best friends were killed beside him. He went through everything. They all had to face the problem of it, the boys like Giles. It was never such a problem to men like Owen. They accepted it and didn’t try to understand. Giles hasn’t been embittered, as some of our young men have; but there is such a weight of grief on his heart. I feel it always. I so long for some happiness to come to him.”

It was all true. Alix had seen it in Giles’s face. Under his vehemence, his gaiety, he carried dark memories in his heart; and there were darknesses his mother did not know of. Perhaps it helped him to be less lonely that she should know of them and that they should be her darknesses, too. It gave Alix courage to bear the weight of perplexity and fear, during the winter, to feel that she shared the weight with Giles. She missed him so much at Heathside; yet he was there, too, in her sense that she was helping him with Toppie, that she, too, was shielding Toppie from hurt.

He wrote to her, and though he did not ask her for news of Toppie, she knew that was what he wanted and gave him every detail when she answered. Toppie went away to Bath at the end of February, but until then Alix sent Giles her bulletins. She and Toppie often walked together; they read together, too; and she often made Toppie laugh with her stories about the people at Montarel, the funny things they did and said. Giles was told of all this, and about the Greater Spotted Woodpecker that she and Toppie saw in the birch-woods, tapping with stealthy fierceness at a tree-trunk, beautiful in his Chinese white and black and vermilion; and about Jock who always came with them on their walks and had really adopted her as his most authentic mistress. She had not much to say about the High School and Ruth and Rosemary. But then it was Toppie Giles wanted to hear of.

Spring came at last, the early flowers, the returning birds, Toppie back from Bath and the Easter holidays hovering on a near horizon. And one day at tea-time Mrs. Bradley handed her a letter she had just received from Lady Mary Hamble, a letter in its unexpectedness and sweetness that was like the Spring. Could Mrs. Bradley lend Alix to them for a week-end, Lady Mary asked. There were to be young people in the house and a little dance and they would all enjoy having her.

At first, in her pleasure, strangely compounded of a sense of relief, escape, and the soft breath of a familiar balm wafted towards her, Alix did not notice the dates. Then, after Mrs. Bradley had said, “How delightful; of course you must go, dear,” she saw that the Monday of Lady Mary’s dance was the Monday of Mrs. Bradley’s; the dance to which Toppie had promised to come; the dance for which Giles would be back; the dance to show her white taffeta dress; her dance; the invitations all out and all accepted. “But our dance is on that Monday,” she said.

“It can’t be helped,” said Mrs. Bradley. “We’ll have to give another smaller one some day later on. I don’t think you ought to miss the much prettier dance at Lady Mary’s. You have us always, you see, dear.”

“But Giles.”