had happened to Giles?
He was waiting for her on the Victoria platform and his patient gaze and poise told her that her train was late;—but fatigue did not account for what Alix saw at once as she stood at the door of her carriage and found his face. Her dear Giles. Her good Giles. What had happened to him?
Alix was aware that a great deal had happened to herself since she had last seen Giles, only two months ago. It was not only her lengthened skirts and her turned-in locks that gave her her new sense of maturity. Perhaps one only began really to be grown up when one began to know why one was unhappy. A child suffers in ignorance of the cause of its suffering and it can forget more easily because of that merciful vagueness. Unhappiness is only a cloud to put away or pass out of. But grown-up unhappiness was four solid walls of fact enclosing one.
Groping round and round her prison and finding always that solid facts were there resisting all attempts at forgetfulness, Alix, though she still could not see just what they were, sometimes asked herself if that was because she was still too young to understand, or because Maman, so deftly, so tenderly, with as much compassion as compunction, passed a bandage round her eyes and kept her blindfolded? She could not tell; but she knew that another mark of her own maturity was her understanding of Maman, her new capacity for helping her; and more than in any other way she helped her by never lifting a hand to push away the bandage and by never asking a question that Maman might find it difficult to answer.
She had known intuitively, in the past, that some questions must not be asked; questions about her father; about monsieur Vervier; about divorce. But now there were more pressing questions, and the first and foremost of them was the question of André de Valenbois.
He was there; in their lives. She had left him behind her in Paris; no longer their guest, but as much as at Les Chardonnerets the presiding presence. He was a great friend. So Maman had said to her, strangely pale, on that night when at Les Chardonnerets she had heard Giles and André de Valenbois talk of her return to England. Maman had great friends. And great friends made one suffer—Maman had not said that but Alix had seen it—and many things in life must be sacrificed to them. It was not that they were more loved than a child—oh, she was sure not!—though that was a surmise that had pierced her through; it was simply that one could not be sure of keeping them always; as one was sure of keeping one's child; and because one was not sure, one suffered. It was something from which one could not free oneself. It was something that made one helpless.
So Alix knew herself changed; a grave, meditative person; garnering in her silence and her submissiveness a power to meet all the emergencies that must lie in her path since, so obviously, they lay in Maman's.
“Hello, Alix,” said Giles. His eyes had found her and he was there below her, taking from her the basket she had lifted off the seat; and she said, “Hello, Giles,” though it seemed to her always such an odd phrase to meet upon.
“Is this the kitten?” said Giles.
“Yes. This is Blaise. You expected him? I wrote to Mrs. Bradley.”
“Expected him! Rather! They're wanting to see him almost as much as to see you.”
“That is well, then,” Alix smiled. “You haven't been ill, Giles?”
“Ill! Rather not! I'm as right as rain,” said Giles; and he added, hastily she felt: “But I say, you're quite different. What is it? Your clothes? Your hair?”
“Maman thought I was getting too old for short hair. It is taken back from my forehead, too. It makes me very digne, I assure you. And my skirts are nearly as long, you see, as anybody's skirts.”
Alix wore a dark blue dress and a dark blue cape, buttoned with little buttons on her breast and showing a satin lining of striped grey and blue. Her shoes and stockings were grey, and her loose, long gloves, and her soft little hat curving down over her brows with the big bow knotted at the side. Maman had made her, though so sober, very chic, and Giles was taking it all in; as far as he could; and that, she feared, with tender irony, was not very far.
Giles, as they moved along the platform, pursued the topic of her appearance, feeling it evidently opportune. He did not wish to speak about his own. “It's that you look so tremendously foreign;—the way you walk; the way your things are put on; the way your hat comes down like that. Even the way you speak English is as French as possible, for anyone who speaks it perfectly; and I'd never noticed that before.”