Her eyes were on his while he spoke to her and she listened to him gently; but her face still kept the invulnerable look strange in one so young. “You are kind, dear Giles,” she said. “I do trust you. But you can’t answer for Toppie. You can’t answer for anybody. And I have not only myself to think of. I have Maman. I can answer for Maman in this matter. She would not let me come.”
“Are you so sure of that?” broke from Giles. And now, pushed to it, he ventured far; he ventured very far, indeed. “After all she must have known that he kept a great deal from us. After all she must have known that he cared more for her than he did for Toppie; that he had been faithless to Toppie because of her.”
Poor little Alix. It was not fair. She paled in hearing him. And for a long moment she stood silent beside him, looking down at the sea. “May he not have kept that from her, too?” was what she found at last to say.
“Do you think that possible?” Giles asked; but he was sorry now, seeing the deep trouble on her face, that he had spoken.
“Perhaps it would not have been possible,” she said slowly. “But things may be known and yet remain unspoken, Giles.”
He could not question her further. He could not ask madame Vervier’s young daughter if she really believed that those things had been unspoken between his brother and her mother. There had been an element of desecration in going even so far as he had gone. And he had gained nothing by it, for after the little pause that fell between them, Alix added, in no spirit of retaliation as he saw, but as though she put up a final barrier against his persistence.
“And even if they were not there, Giles; even if all the difficult things we know of were not there, I should still not come back to Heathside. I do not care, ever, to leave France again. I could not, again, leave Maman.”
CHAPTER II
The train moved slowly, almost ruminatingly, along the golden landscape, a little local train stopping at every station. The crops were still uncut and their vast undulations were broken only by lines of lonely, poplared road, or marshalled woods venturing out, here and there, upon the plains. Empty and rather sad, for all the splendour of the gold beneath, the blue above, it looked to Giles; but that might have been, he knew, because of its associations for him with scenes of the war; and he was feeling a little sick, too, apprehensions of the approaching future seizing him as he and Alix sat silent in the second-class carriage, where both the windows were tightly shut. Alix had widely opened hers on entering, but at the first station a lady had got in—little shopping people of the local bourgeoisie the passengers were, more estranged from fashion, Giles thought, than their equivalent English types—and, wrapping a scarf at once about her neck, she had complained of the effect of the courant d’air upon her névralgie. Without comment, Alix at once closed her window. No doubt she knew her compatriots and recognized the futility of discussion on this theme; but Giles reflected that Ruth and Rosemary would not so have submitted. They would have entered into altercation with the lady in the scarf and found pleasure in demonstrating her folly to her even if they did not succeed in keeping the window open. But to Alix altercation had no charms. Even when the lady, still mysteriously aggrieved in her furthest corner, murmured resentfully on about les anglais qui viennent nous déranger, Alix glanced meditatively at her for a moment and then resumed her survey of the landscape, indifferent to the misapprehension; and since Giles could not repress a smile, the lady, who still held up her scarf in retrospective protest, kept indignant eyes upon him.
“Now, you know, you are a worse-tempered people than we are. She’s still nursing her wrongs,” Giles murmured, and Alix, glancing at the lady of the névralgie, answered, “She is negligible.”