With Alix’s arm passed in hers, madame Vervier led him up a narrow staircase where the smell of beeswax, seashells, and linen seemed to cluster yet more thickly, and along a passage carpeted in matting where the sea-breeze, blowing in from windows at each end, made a singing noise. “Is Giles to have the chambre rose, Maman?” said Alix, and she exclaimed, as her mother, smiling, said, “Yes,” “Oh, I am so glad! I hoped for that!”
It was at the end of the passage, and when one entered one had before one in the windows nothing but sea and sky. Grey woodwork framed panels of voile de Gênes, rose, white, russet, and sepia. The little Louis Quinze bed was of grey painted wood, stately under its pink and russet embroideries. A bowl of rose-coloured carnations filled the air with spicy fragrance, and there was a tiny cabinet de toilette with an ancient set of rose-and-white china. Giles had never found himself installed in such a lovely room.
“Yes; this is your room,” said madame Vervier, as if she replied to a question. “You will be happy here, I think.”
Giles could only murmur that he would.
“We are very primitive,” said madame Vervier. “There are no bells. If you want Albertine, you must go to the stair and call down for her. She will hear and come.”
“Ah, she will not always come,” Alix demurred; whereat madame Vervier smiled and said that in that case he must call Alix.
Then they left him, and he could go to the window, turning away instinctively from the room and all it meant of madame Vervier, and stare at the sea, and, with a rising sense of dismay and fierceness in his heart, ask himself what he did there in the Circe sweetness. He was there because of Alix, of course; but how far away Alix had become. The process of removal seemed to have begun as they had leaned on the railing of the deck and seen Dieppe emerge over the water. In her declaration to him, when their talk so disastrously ended, she had drawn still further away; and now he saw her almost as a stranger, in a strange land. A foreigner; French; the daughter, only, of madame Vervier; no longer his little Alix.
When she knocked at his door, twenty minutes later, and told him that tea was ready, he felt that it was with a dull gaze that he met her. She had asked him to come because of something he could do to help her, but now her radiant demeanour seemed to demonstrate that she had brought him so that he might be enchanted. Madame Vervier was not a person in any need of help. There was nothing she asked less of you. Circe, Circe; that was the word in his mind. Only Circe, he supposed, allured; enticed; while madame Vervier only gazed at you with those wide, intent, indifferent eyes.
“Do you like Les Chardonnerets?” said Alix, standing in the door and smiling at him. She had changed her travelling dress for a white one, a straight white one made of a thin woollen stuff, like her mother’s; and her mother must have had it in readiness for her, for he had never seen her wear it before. Nor had he ever seen her look so happy.
“I suppose,” he said, with his hands in his pockets, standing in the middle of the lovely room, “you feel England has ceased to exist; and a good job, too.”