Giles came down to breakfast next morning, Alix was already there, setting a bowl of nasturtiums on the blue-and-white cloth. He had not had a word with her last night when a sudden fall of rain had kept them all in the drawing-room, and he seized his opportunity.
“Will you have a long walk with me this morning, Alix?” he said. “A really long one, you know. I want to go to Allongeville and see the church again; and then, oh, a long way further. Along the cliffs for ever so far.”
She looked at her flowers, drawing a leaf forward here and there around the edge of the bowl, and he saw that she was troubled. But she said: “We will go to the church, at all events. Yes. I should like a walk very much.”
André entered as she spoke the words and she went on quietly, giving Giles a suffocating sense of the imminence of peril from her very readiness, her very calm: “Do you not think nasturtiums very charming flowers, Giles? No one ever speaks of them;—yet they are charming. The leaves; the colour. I like them, and yet I do not love them. Why is it? There are no yellow flowers of Summer that one can love. The yellow of Spring is so different.”
“One doesn't love any of the things of Summer as one does the things of Spring,” André remarked, strolling to the window to look out, and, clearly this morning, Giles divined what he had only surmised yesterday, that his temper was not attuned to brightness; that there might even lurk beneath its graceful surface a vindictive watchfulness. And when he had spoken he turned, leaning against the window, and looked at Alix, poised in her whiteness above the bowl of glowing flowers, looked at her as Giles had never before seen him look; as if with resentment that she should be so beautiful; as if with a challenge to her to deny his right to find her so.
“Oh, but that is not so,” said Alix. “One loves roses—especially white roses;—and carnations; and jasmine; nothing in Spring is more lovely than jasmine.”
“I would give them all for a handful of primroses,” said André, his eyes fixed on her.
“Would you?” said Alix.
It was nothing; it was everything. It revealed nothing, yet it might conceal anything.
“Yes: I would, mademoiselle Alix,” said André, laughing a little as he stood, leaning, his arms folded, against the window. “Indeed, I would.”
Giles, watching the confrontation, sick with dread and fury, knew himself as much baffled as André.
Alix showed nothing to him, too; or she showed everything. Just as one chose to take it. “Here is our coffee,” she said. “And here is Maman.”
Lovely in her white, the white rose, the jasmine, madame Vervier bent her forehead to Alix's kiss and something in the daughter's eyes made Giles think of a sword in the hand of an avenging, or protecting, angel.
André bowed over his hostess's hand.
“Giles and I are to have a long walk, Maman,” said Alix, going to her place.
“You will be caught in the rain,” said André. “Have you noticed the sky? It is threatening.”
“But see the sunlight,” said madame Vervier, pouring out the coffee. “It will be a beautiful morning of great clouds and sunlight. There is nothing I love better.”
“Then you will perhaps have a long drive with me, chère madame,” said André.
“If Robert may come, too. I do not like to leave him behind.”
How easy she made it for André to pretend that the relinquishment of the tête-à-tête was a favour he granted her with difficulty!
“But certainly.—Since you ask it! Certainly he must come.—Does he still suffer this morning with his head, do you know?”
“I fear so. Albertine has taken him his breakfast to his room. That is a bad sign. A drive will do him good.”
“He will not like being rained on, you know,” André smiled.
He was so glad that he was not to be alone with madame Vervier that he dared thus embroider his feint of disappointment.
“We can shelter him,” said madame Vervier.
“While Giles converts mademoiselle Alix to the methods of the British Empire,” said André, sitting with his back to the window where the sunlight fell about him and buttering his roll with a curious light crispness of touch, as if he were painting a picture. There was something in the play of the long, fine hands with the bread that Giles was never to forget; something cruel, controlled. He read in the young Frenchman's face the signs of an exasperation mastered with difficulty.
“But the method of the British Empire is unconscious,” said madame Vervier. “It seeks no converts.”