“Well?” smiled Alix. “And did you appreciate the celebrated madame Dumont?”
Her smile hurt Giles. Its unconsciousness of what madame Dumont really meant; her ignorance of what such old harpies thought and said of her mother. “Horrible old creature!” he could not repress.
“Horrible?” Alix was evidently surprised. “That is very severe.”
“I want to be severe. I think she is quite horrible.”
“It is always horrible to be so old. But she is not stupid, Giles. She has been a great actress; at least, almost great. Monsieur de Maubert saw her act years ago, and says that it was good. And sometimes she will still repeat one of her famous scenes—as Phèdre or Athalie—to make one’s blood run chill.”
“She makes my blood run chill without any acting,” said Giles.
CHAPTER VI
“C’est la belle madame Vervier,” said a contemplative voice behind him, and Giles, glancing round, as he sat in the thatched chalet overlooking the tennis courts, saw that it was the lady in grey who spoke.
He had played tennis all the morning with Alix, André de Valenbois and another young man, a friend of André’s, who had motored over from a neighboring château, and now that they had come back after tea, and, with madame Vervier added to their number, made a quartette without him, he watched them from the chalet, with a book. The small old houses and large new villas of Allongeville climbed a valley that rose in a wooded amphitheatre about the little watering-place and the tennis grounds lay just outside it, pleasantly disposed, the highroad with its poplars on one hand and on the other a hillside of tall grasses and wild flowers.
Giles that afternoon had strolled back into the town to look at the church and buy some tobacco. He liked the church, with its austere, benignant Gothic and whitewashed cool interior, clumsy wooden beams meeting in fishes’ heads above his head and clumsy old wooden figures of saints standing against the pillars. Saint Martin was there with his cloak and the beggar; Saint Roch and his dog and a little round-faced Virgin Mary at the knee of Saint Anne. It was a homely, intimate church and a sense of peace fell upon the perplexed heart of Giles as he wandered about it. He wished, or almost wished, that he could kneel with as simple a faith as the washerwoman who set down her basket of snowy clothes in the aisle and said her rosary before the bright modern statue of the Virgin. The mere sense of haven expressed in the attitude of a sleeping old fisher-woman, with bare legs and hair like tangled seaweed, was enviable. Giles would have found comfort in placing a taper to burn on Toppie’s behalf before the gold-crowned Virgin and he would have liked to doze beside the fisher-woman and feel that he had a right to do so. And although he did not belong there, the church seemed to accept his presence with a special placidity and kindliness as though it saw in him merely a strayed sheep. It was the true fold, it seemed to say, and it could afford to await, for centuries if need be, the return of all such wanderers.