The next day we were five at the Hôtel de la Poste. We sat long after luncheon, on the creeper-awninged terrace that overhangs the Petits Fosses. The other tables had long since been cleared, but the waiters, smelling thunder in the air, kept well away from ours.
My heart was sore for Alec too. Officially he had been driven to accept the sworn but unbelievable statement; in his heart he neither understood nor believed one single word of it. It was so unlike the engineering and Rugby football that he did understand. That to which his mind always returned was the plain meaning of these words: Treachery, Seduction and Falsehood.
Madge's reception of the incredible thing had been one of the most extraordinary experiences I ever had in my life. She and Alec had arrived in Dinan at nine o'clock and had come straight to my hotel. At a quarter past nine I had locked my bedroom door against the interrupting bootboys and chambermaids who busied themselves on staircases and landings. The morning stir also filled the courtyard below. Jennie and Derry I had told to keep out of the way until lunch-time. I had hastily covered my bed, and Madge had sat down on the edge of it. During the whole of the time I had talked, half a dozen Alecs in the various mirrors had met and re-met one another as he had paced the room.
First of all she had drawn an extraordinarily deep breath. Then slowly she had pressed her fingertips over her eyelids. Her lips had moved under the little eaves made by her hands. She had had the air of trying to see something anew, to see a succession of things anew, and to name them as they came. She had sat there for quite two minutes, eyes hidden, lips moving, seeing, repeating....
Then, "The Club——" she had breathed.
And then, "Queen's Gate——"
I had found myself nodding.
"His brother—Arnaud—sketching——"
She was well away now.
Then suddenly her hands had dropped, she had stared at me, and a shrill cry had broken explosively from her.
"The Beautiful Bear! Derwent Rose! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!... George Coverham, tell me—is it?Isit?"
"It is."
"That afternoon—looking at himself in the picture—his brother in Queen's Gate—Arnaud—Derwent Rose—I knew it, I knew it all the time——"
And she had slid with my coverlet gently to the floor.
And she did in fact recognise him—did pick out, as it were through some bright reversed telescope of time, that still-sealed but identical beauty of the grown man she had found so superb. He was like, as a son is like a father, as for a fleeting instant a newly-born babe may resemble a grandparent. She had wished to meet Derwent Rose. She had now met him, at this far end of a corridor of years.
And I had had to pick her up from where she crouched, on a coverlet on my bedroom floor.
But give her a little time—the time to pull herself together—and you could no more have persuaded Madge that it was not so than you could have got Alec to believe it was.
"But why wasn't I told all this at once?" he had demanded, not twice or thrice, but twenty times. "Are you telling me now, or am I wrong in my head? Why didn't you? Why didn't you? Then he could have been put where he belongs—in the asylum yonder——"
And again, and yet again: "You brought him to my house, you brought him to my house! You practically introduced him under a French name—you didn't contradict it anyway—you knew all about him—and I wasn't told—I'm only told after he's stolen my girl! Why didn't you tell me, Coverham?"
But I considered that I had less to reproach myself with than he thought. I had done everything in my power to isolate him, to keep her out of his path. Madge, not I, had asked him to Ker Annic. Madge had invited herself to his hotel in St Briac. He had given me his word, I had trusted to it, and he had broken it. And had I at any time told Alec the truth he would no more have comprehended it than he did now.
So he had railed bitterly on, turning the nightmare over and over again, meeting and re-meeting himself in the mirrors, very much as Derwent Rose had met and re-met himself in the windings of his marvellous life.
"Oh, we're mad! We're all mad! Any chance of our waking up? And you talk to me about somebody called Derwent Rose as if I ought to know all about the fellow the moment you mention his name! I never heard of a Derwent Rose in my life! Who the devil is Derwent Rose anyway?"
This at any rate Madge had been able to tell him.
"But he says he's never written a book in his life! Who should know if he doesn't?"
I made another attempt.
"The idea, Alec, is that that is a corroboration of the whole thing. He doesn't remember that he ever wrote a book, and I've a notion it would be safer not to try to make him remember. Another thing, Alec. You say I'm mad. But you can have absolutely independent evidence any time you like. Julia Oliphant's in Dinard. She knows nothing of what's happening in this room. Go to her and tell her, from me, that she's to tell you all she knows about a man called Derwent Rose. Then see what she says."
"And you say you're going to make a legal adoption of something that's shaped like a man but ought to be kept in a padded room?"
"I am if it's possible. The letter's written and in the box. All we can do is to wait till I've had a reply to it."
"Oh, we're all daft, we're all daft!" he had cried, his head in his hands.
And that was still his burden—that we were all daft. I will not deny that there seemed something to be said for it.
My letter to my solicitors had taken me the best part of the night to write. I wanted to be sure of the position without divulging too much. Derwent Rose existed; the record of his birth was to be found in Somerset House among the files for the year 1875, and nowhere was there a certificate of his death. If Derwent Rose as he now in fact was ought properly to have been born in the year 1902 or thereabouts, the thought had come to me that this difference might be bridged by my own legal adoption of him. Discreetly I had asked for information on this point. If the thing was feasible, Derry would then be George Coverham's son, and his marriage to Alec Aird's daughter would follow immediately. I had not seen what fairer offer I could make, and even Alec had grudgingly agreed—until the whole thing had once more overwhelmed him, and he had cried out that we were all daft and ought to be locked up.
That creeper-hung terrace at the back of the Hôtel de la Poste will probably never crash with its diners and waiters down into the moat below, but it always looks as if it might. A few slender iron struts stepped on to the old corbels of the wall below support it; for the rest it is suspended in the air, high as the nests in the great elms opposite, part of the ivy of the outer wall on which the hotel is built. Save for its screen of creeper it is open to the sky, and its dozen or so tables stand behind the great letters you read from the Fosse far below—Hôtel de la Poste.
And if from the ramparts by St Sauveur you see the shirley poppies of the sunset in the east, here you see the sun himself, burning intolerable holes through the elms, and turning the creeper into a crewelwork of flame and the valerian of the walls to dark blood.
But this was only after lunch, with the sun just outlining the wall to our left with brightness and shining on the fruit and cheese and coffee-cups which the waiters were itching to clear away. In the promenade below, absurd little hatsput forth little feet, now fore, now aft, as they went about their affairs. Derry's eyes were musingly on the walkers. Alec had compelled himself to sit at the same table with us, though his own meal had consisted of nothing but a bottle of wine. A few moments before he had uttered a grunt, that had been understood to mean that, since there was nothing for it but to wait for letters from London, we might as well wait at Ker Annic as here.
Suddenly Derry removed his eyes from the hats below and looked at Alec, deferentially but obstinately.
"Speaking for myself, sir——"
Though he had nothing of Alec but his profile, he went on.
"If you don't mind I shall not come. Sir George has tried to explain to you, and I've tried to explain to you, that there was nothing for it but the way I took. We've agreed it's no good going into all that again. Call it my pigheadedness if you like; I can't very well object to anything you call me; but I won't come. I'll come, if I'm still asked, when everything's settled up. And that should be a week at the outside."
Alec turned. It was plain that he would loathe his son-in-law, when he became that, to the end of his days.
"It will or it won't," he growled.
"It can't be much longer than that, sir."
"Can't it? Let me tell you how it can. I may have to swallow that insane yarn for the moment; you've left me very little choice—took dashed good care of that. But you've got to find somebody else crazy enough to get it down yet."
"What do you mean, Alec?" I interposed.
"Any English parson," Alec flung over his shoulder as he rose and walked away.
Derry sighed as his broad back disappeared into the hotel. When you have cut a knot it is difficult to tie it again. The straightforward course of his choice seemed little less crooked than the other. Almost it seemed a mistake after all.
I perfectly well understood Derry's scruple about going to Ker Annic. It was the kind of scruple I should have liked a son of mine to have. Except as a husband he had no footing in that house, and except as a husband he refused to enter it. I think he would have given much to have been able to say that he never had set foot in it, but that milk was spilt.
But Jennie would never be torn from his side, and the chances were that Madge would not now be torn from Jennie's. So it looked as if either Alec must return to Dinard alone or else stay with us at the Poste and make the best of it.
Half an hour before lunch Madge had done an odd thing. She had called me away for a moment from Alec's side, and had asked me in which house in the Rue de la Cordonnerie I had found them. She had also wanted to know Madame Carguet's name. Then she had gone off.... I had seen her embrace of Jennie on her return. Her hand now once more stole to Jennie's as, with Alec's departure, we continued to sit at the table.
Again Derry sighed, but I think it was a little wilfully that he dwelt on the gloomier side, and that it was not altogether unmixed despair. We do allow ourselves these little luxuries at eighteen or thereabouts.
"Well, I've made a lot of bother," he sighed.
Madge was half cross, half consoling. "Oh, I expect it will come out all right in the end," she said impatiently. "He'll come round presently."
It began to look as if she herself had already come more than half-way round. And, now that Alec and his thundercloud had gone, a waiter ventured to advance.
"Si on peut désservir, Madame——"
Madge rose abruptly.
"Yes, let's go out. It's no good sitting here getting morbid. Which way has my husband gone? Because just foran hour I'm going in the opposite direction. Come along, let's all go for a walk."
We left the creepered terrace, crossed the courtyard of the hotel, and came out into the Place Duguesclin.
I think I have discovered what it is that gives certain French façades their air at once luminous and austere. It is the roofs above them. Our flat-pitched English roofs thanklessly send back heaven's light where it comes from; but these, steeply mansarded, dormered, and hog's-backed again above that—it is these that flash it into our eyes like mirrors, these across which the shadows of the chimneys lie, blots of black in the glitter. The façades themselves may be flatly lighted or gloomed over with pastel-like shade; it is above that everything happens, above that the sun, the brick and the shining slate play out the drama of the altering day.
And the sun was Lord of Dinan that afternoon. He turned the arcades of the fishmarket to barrels of blackness, but crowned the roofs beyond with flashing silver. The dark limes of the Place Duguesclin might drink up his rays like green blotting-paper, but the east side of the Square gave them out again as if the pale paint and chalk and plaster had been self-luminous—faint greens of peeling ironwork, flaky blues of closed shutters, the dazzle of the roof, the chimneys like tall dominoes on end, patched with bricks of rose. And what a town for him to play with! The towers, the gates, the ivied encircling walls, are but the outer shell of the immemorial place; within it, what pranks and gaieties of light and under-light and hide-and-seek of shadows does not his Lordship play! Derry began to cheer up. Eighteen is never downcast for long. This father-in-law-elect of his might sit morosely at the same table with them or take his bottle of wine to whatever table he pleased; the sun would shine on carved stone and old painted wood just the same. Yes, Derry bucked up, and in a bright voice began to take command.
"I say, let's have a peep into the Cordeliers," he said. "It was shut the last time I tried to get in."
Under the legs of the Porches, across the street and in at the half-open portail we passed.
Oh, yes, Derry was decidedly better. He had treated Alec with grave deference, if not with entire submission; but now less and less did he seem to consider himself a culprit. As we passed along the cloisters he paused to show Madge a "Ci-gist" or a bit of old woodwork let into a wall; and from these he turned to theaffichesand class-lists of the wall on the other side. His head was high. He was Derwent Rose, fixed and indivisibly. If lately he had not been so, so much the better these times than those. He was going ahead; he was going to marry; a year hence might find him looking exactly a year older than he looked at this moment; and though for the moment a certain modesty and humility might be due from him, abjectness and shame—no. He trod the cobbles anddalleslightly by Madge's side. And I think that already the rogue knew that he could turn her round his finger as he pleased.
For while Alec might never have heard of a novelist called Derwent Rose, and might secretly be rather proud of the fact, she had read every word he had ever written. She knew more about it than he knew about himself, since he now knew nothing. Perhaps, walking silently by his side, she realised the power and passion at present folded up in him, but soon again to be declared. And perhaps she saw even further than his own re-creation. There is a passion of grandmotherhood, different, but even more unrelenting than that tender rage that brings us all into the world. That Jennie should never have married was inconceivable; Jennie was to have married whom she chose; and what, for beauty and gentleness and knowledge and strength, could she have chosen better than this? Were there whispers in Dinard? Madge was capable of dealing with them. If there was talk, then there should be more talk, till all was talked down. By and by Madge would start her own, the authentic version of the affair. And with this young man presently settled as George Coverham's adopted son, and Jennie blushing and brooding on the other side of her, it would be a strange thing indeed if Madge Aird, who knew as much about intimate histories as anybody, could not put some sort of a face upon it.
Authoritatively Derry led us through the cloisters and under a low tunnel-like arch. We came out into a bright courtyard with plane trees and doors at intervals round it.
"This is what I wanted to see," he said smilingly, but a little as if what he wanted to see overruled everything else. "Especially that bit over there."
It was a lime-white old court, with tourelles to the west and north. In its south-eastern corner rose a slated ogival turret with a gilded ornamental flèche. An old woman in a lace cap was filling a bucket at a tap, and from one of the dark upper windows came a girl's light laugh. Through one of the doorways a glimpse could be seen of school-desks, grey and cracked and dry as the legs of the Porches themselves. The tourelle in front of us carried a little side-belfry, and its inch-thick plaster had flaked off in great maps, showing the rubble beneath. And again the sunlight was absorbed by the plane trees, but blazed on the roof, made the flèche a vivid sparkle against the blue, and seemed to penetrate into the very substance of the soft decaying white.
"Now just come and have a look at this," said Derry, striding across the court.
The thing that he had brought us to see might almost have passed unnoticed in Dinan, where at every corner something that man's fine wit has carved has been uncarved again by stupid and obliterating Time. It was no more than a bit of moulding, the upper edge of which caught the sun, directly, making the cavetto underneath it a soft yellowing glow. But into that rounded plaster tourelle with the belfry a flat door had at one time been placed without interruption to the moulding, and in the result the sun had a frolic indeed. For no man had designed that miraculous accident where curve and flat met and deliciously quarrelled, to be reconciled again by the sun's laughing kiss. Never did light and its opposite more sweetly interchange and compose.... I don't want you to think this is my own observation. But for Derry I should probably not have given it a glance. But for him it was a thing to come specially to see. He stood before it, moving his hand a little this way and a little that, as in asparkling room one will place one's hand over glass or water to see whether it is indeed that which makes the little fairy-ribbon on the wall. He peered underneath, he stood off, he glanced up at the sun. With his hand throwing the shadow, the sun and he were partners.
"What is it, Derry?" I asked him.
He laughed. "What is it? I should say it was everything," he replied. "Everything there is, and if there's any more, that too."
"Are you going to paint it, dearest?" Jennie asked.
He turned. "Eh?" he said.
And there, in that sun-flooded court, I had a swift premonition. Something seemed to tell me that he was not going to paint it. Neither was he going to write about it, nor even to speak of it again. He had no wish to communicate it to any other person, by any means whatever. That he himself possessed the pure understanding of it was enough; he would not even care that any should know that he knew, so he might but have the bliss of knowing. His painting was over, as his writing was over. Contemplation, withdrawal, solitude, the infinite soft ecstasy of being at one with that which is not one self, though it were but the sunlight on a bit of fifteenth-century plaster—that, it now flashed suddenly on me, was what we might henceforward expect.
And though he understood all mysteries, and had all knowledge, yet he now had something even richer to profit him. He had his Love.
"I should very much like a cup of tea," said Madge.
Instantly he was all graceful attention. The human desire for a cup of tea was equally a thing to be understood.
"This glare does get in your eyes a bit," he smiled. "There's a nice shady place not five minutes away."
As he led us back through the cloisters he all but took her arm.
His place was gratefully shady. Through a small teashop one passed into a sort of leafy cage that, I learned, had at one time been an aviary. It was empty, and at a little rustic table against the trellis we sat down.
"Would you mind ordering, Sir George?" he said. "This is one of my off-days for French, I'm afraid."
I ordered tea.
My new premonition proceeded to take still further possession of me. As he chatted with modest freedom to Madge I fell more and more into abstraction. I suppose that in all the circumstances it was my part to have taken charge of the conversation, to have guided it through the rocks and shoals of the difficult position, but I couldn't. Anyway he seemed quite capable of doing so.
Capable? There was nothing of which he was not capable. And yet at the same time he was capable of nothing! For, supposing that my foreboding was right, what was his future? Isolation and Oblivion indeed! What man can live, sufficient unto himself, excommunicated from the world, wrapped in the vanity that he is not as others? Who dare dwell alone with Truth? Is it not our anchorage and our joy to run with our little half-truths in our hands and to thrust them upon our neighbour, that he may admire and share them with us? Who so great that some such littleness is not the very leaven of his life? Derwent Rose had written; Derwent Rose had painted; and now Derwent Rose would withdraw himself to some Tower, shut the door behind him, and be forgotten of men because their affairs were too small for him.... It was just as well that I was going to adopt him. What otherwise would his living be? In what corner of earth would he plant his cabbages and cherish his perfect and unprofitable knowledge?
And would he retain his simplicity of heart, or would he harden into arrogance, sour into contempt, and—yes, it had to be faced—once more ask of God that One Question Too Many?...
And she, his meek and sweet Semele? How long would she endure this partnership of his Oblivion? How long would it be before she prayed that that Tower might fall and crush her into the earth? She was only Jennie Aird, seventeen years old, with the nape under her red-gold hair hardly yet browned by its exposure to the sun. Happier—I cannotsay; but better perhaps for her had she never seen this lovely lad who was so soon to be my son. She had married an angel, had endured his caress. But she could not follow him to his skies.
It was half-past five when we reached the hotel, and Alec was there waiting for us. He asked Madge where we had been, and when she said to the Convent of the Cordeliers I am pretty sure that I heard him mutter under his breath that that was exactly where "he" would spend his spare time—hanging about a girls' school.
"Well, I suppose you're staying here to-night," he said gruffly to his wife. "I'm going back. I may come again to-morrow. Better put a stop to those inquiries—unless they take it into their heads to bolt again. I shall probably be here by the nearest train to midday. I'm off now. Good night."
Poor fellow! I suppose it was the nearest approach to a kiss he could bring himself to give his wife and only child.
Something, I forget what, happened about our table on the terrace that night, and we had to dine in the room of which it was an extension. The sun was having his last and most magnificent fling for that day. He turned the room in which we sat to ebony-black. The eye could hardly distinguish in the corners the neo-Greek furnishings of key-pattern and fretted valances, of amphoræ on pedestals, of frieze and dentel and sham black marble. But everywhere through the ebony ran like wildfire a gold that the eye could hardly bear. A waiter would be lost in blackness save for a spot of burning gold on brow or nose-bridge or knuckle; a glass, a knife-blade or the edge of a plate would flash like a diamond. The creeper outside flamed like the Burning Bush itself; you would not have thought that the head of a woman dining under it could have flamed more, yet it did. And the glass of water she lifted pierced like a heliograph into the room.
And it was as we dined, not talking much, that Madge capitulated completely. The sun played "I spy" with thewhite hand she suddenly put on Derry's brown one. She was not speaking to me, but I heard.
"Oh, my dear, dear boy—you'll see it will be all right—be a little patient—his bark's ever so much worse than his bite—and come and say good night to your mother presently."
Derry now wore the English suit he had worn on the day when he had come to tea at Ker Annic, Jennie the white frock and the little white cap in which she had stolen out of the house that night. I never knew what became of their French clothes. To all appearances we were now four English sight-seers in a place where English sight-seers are bumped into at every turn. And I must mention a curious little incident that occurred when, the next morning, after breakfast, we left the hotel and strolled into the Church of St Sauveur to see how the little girls were getting on with their decoration for the approaching fête.
There is only one decent piece of glass in St Sauveur. That is the window of the north transept that looks down on the burial-place of Du Guesclin's heart. As we passed among the gay and lightsome shrines Jennie happened to pause under this window. I saw his sudden dead stop.
It is a remarkable thing when a man does the same thing twice in his life, each time for the first time. He looked at Jennie in St Sauveur just as, all those years before, he had looked at somebody else in a village church in Sussex; and he had no knowledge of the repetition. She stood there, all low-toned pearls of frock and cool dark apricot of face and neck; her hair peeped forth beneath the little hat; and there, under the mellow ambers and ruby-dust and bits of green that might have been dyed in Dinard's sea, for a minute she was aureoled.... She moved on, and we followed.
But in that moment it was not he who had been haled back into that earlier time. That was all over for him. Hedid all anew. It was I myself who had come close to the ghost of my own youth.
The nearest train to twelve o'clock, by which Alec had said he would arrive, was the one reaching Dinard at twelve-fifteen. The one before that, leaving Dinard at ten-twelve, ran on certain days only, and moreover would hardly have allowed Alec the necessary time in which to stop the various inquiries he had set afoot. Therefore we had a long morning to ourselves, and it mattered little how we spent it. Indeed it mattered very little now what we did with our time until my letters should arrive from London.
So once more that morning, watching Derry, I seemed to be watching, not the Derry actually by my side, but a Derry who had been a stripling when I had been in my middle twenties. For example, a troop of dragoons clattered past, in blue steel hats, dark blue tunics, red breeches, black boots; and I saw the sparkle of his eyes at the four red pennons they carried. Just so, for all I knew, his eyes had sparkled when he had first seen the sentries at the Horse Guards. We strolled on to the Porte St Louis, and under its arch he paused. He examined the portcullis-grooves, the remnants of hinges, the steep couloirs down which the stones had been rolled and the boiling water poured from the guard-room above. I don't know whether in his other boyhood he had known York or Sandwich, but I saw by his face that his memory reduplicated those old echoings, the clanging of iron, the hurtling of stones, the shouting of men within the ringing arch. Outside in the Petits Fosses it was the same. He peered into slits, glanced at the machicolations aloft, measured salients and re-entrants and dead-ground with his eyes. I think he saw that "bélier à griffes" again in use, the staggering storied sow pushed up to the walls by the horses and oxen in the hide-hung penthouse behind.... And this same man had seen modern war! He had flung the Mills and the "hairbrush," had worn a box-respirator, seen wire-netted gunpits and flame-throwing and the white puff-balls following the aeroplanes through the sky. Extraordinary, extraordinary! I could not get used to it....
At twelve o'clock I walked on to the station to meet Alec. His train was a few minutes late. It drew up on the farther set of rails. At Dinan one walks across on the level, and as I advanced to meet him I saw him appear round the engine.
But not until a moment later did I see that he was followed by Julia Oliphant.
She was dressed in travelling-tweeds, but it was not the tweeds that filled me with the instant conviction that she was departing and had come to say good-bye to Madge. It was rather something indefinable in her face. Nor had she come to corroborate my story. She and Alec had doubtless already got that over, if ever it could be got over. She greeted me with a faint smile, but without speaking. In fact I don't think that one of the three of us spoke during the seven or eight minutes it took us to reach the Poste.
Once more something had happened about our terrace-table. Perhaps because of the slight lateness of Alec's train, added to the quarter of an hour we had already delayed our meal (for déjeuner at the Poste is at twelve), the only table capable of seating six had been made over to a party of visitors who would depart in little more than an hour by the vedette.
This, however, seemed to suit Alec rather than otherwise. He took Madge by the arm.
"Then you come over here," he said to her. "You've got till six o'clock to talk to Julia. I want a word with you first."
"And I want a word with you too," I heard her reply as she turned to follow him.
So Madge and Alec lunched some tables away, out of earshot, while Julia and Jennie, Derry and myself, sat down behind the iron "O" of the signHôtel de la Poste.
Had it not been for Derry I think our lunch would have been as silent as our walk from the station had been. Jennie rolled bread-pellets and fiddled with salt. I moodily wondered whether Julia would not have done better to have taken her farewells with Madge as said and have stayed away. But it frequently happens that a happy mood at thebeginning of an acquaintance sets the key for the meetings that follow. Derry had come off gaily best with Miss Oliphant when, instead of questioning her about that bicycle she had fetched from St Briac, he had anticipated her and had taken the wind out of her sails with smiling acquiescence; and he now was wreathed in ease and charm. There was a dash of the gentlemanly devil about that son-elect of mine. His grey-blue eyes were frequently downcast, but when he did lift them that imp of fun and mischief peeped unmistakably out.
"I'd no idea when I showed you my sketches that morning that you were a painter yourself, Miss Oliphant," he said demurely over his soup. "Jennie only told me afterwards. I don't think that was quite fair of you.... What do you paint?" asked the man who had stood before her, stripped to the waist, with her sewing-machine held aloft.
"Very little lately," said Julia composedly.
"Now you're putting me off. But of course I ought to have known. You can always tell by the way a person looks at a thing whether they know anything about it or not. Do tell me what you paint!"
"I'm supposed to be painting Sir George's portrait one of these days."
"Ah!" A polite little inclination of the head made you forget the mischief for a moment. "I'm no good at portraits. Never dared try, in fact, except for that sketch of Jennie, and you can hardly call that a portrait. It would take more experience than I've got. You'd have to know a good deal about a person before you risked painting their portrait I should think, wouldn't you?"
And that of course was pure mischief again, for he was virtually telling her, though without words, that she knew very little about him if she had expected him to give his intentions away by making a fuss about that bicycle. And similarly unspoken was his daring little invitation to her—to her who had drawn him from memory as King Arthur, in armour and a golden beard—"Won't you learn a little about me and paint me one of these days?"
So I watched her as she saw, for the second time in her life, what I saw for the first time in mine—the father of the man he had been and was to be again, his acts and gestures varying with a thousand accidents of circumstance, but himself essentially and unchangeably the same. You may charge me if you will with laying claim to knowledge after the event, but there radiated from every particle of him his own yet-folded potentialities. His gentle mischief towards her was the germ of that masterful wit that had made the Barnacles ofThe Vicarage of Brayskip at his pleasure. His good-humour and urbanity and willingness to talk while we sat oppressed and silent were, in little, the qualities that had bloomed in his mature work,The Hands of Esau. Only the fierce passion ofAn Ape in Hellwas to seek, and none could have said that it did not lurk there, inappropriate to the occasion, therefore uncalled on, but deep-slumbering under all.
And if I was able to make a dim guess or two at these involutions, what of this woman to whom it was not guessing, but open knowledge? In her mind was a parallelism indeed! I had seen one trifle for myself that very morning—his sudden stop when Jennie had paused under the window of St Sauveur; but of just such bright threaded beads of memories her whole life, all of it that was worth anything to her, had been composed. Her unwavering love had been the string that had held all together. And not only did she sit there now telling, as it were, these beads over, to the last one drowned at the bottom of the pools of her deep eyes; she had them uniquely and desolately to herself. He, who had provided them, had no part whatever in them. She could no longer say "Do you remember this or that." He remembered only from the moment of his setting eyes on Jennie. As unconsciously as when he had stripped to the waist for her, as unknowingly as when he had swum before her, he now seared her in his very innocence and ignorance. A village church—Sussex fields and lanes—a day at Chalfont—another day somewhere else—and a week-end at myhouse ... oh, the jewels were quickly counted. Perhaps she had others of which I did not know. If so, they were the secret of the eyes that looked away past the elms, down on to the walking hats in the Fosse below.
And he would grow up again, but she could only continue her life. In another twenty years he would be as old as she was now; but she, I myself ... only Jennie, only Jennie would be by his side on that distant day. At some still unknown fireside, in some unguessed house or garden, they would speak of "poor old Miss Oliphant, poor old Coverham," long since out of the way. Different generations, different generations!
And—I cannot be sure of this, and I shall never know—but I do not think that by this time he, who had started the whole mystic thing, had the least recollection of anything whatever he had been and done.
"But look here, Miss Oliphant," he was saying. "Jennie's going to lie down this afternoon; won't you let me take you for a walk? Let's go to Léhon or somewhere. You don't mind, do you, Jennie? And"—he laughed, perfectly conscious of his charming and irresistible impudence—"it seems awfully stiff to go on calling you Miss Oliphant! Sounds so fearfully high-and-dry! Oh, I know! Shocking scandal! But if you'll come for a walk with me——" He twinkled.
Jennie had not uttered a word. Nor had she eaten more than a few crumbs. Suddenly she got up.
"I'm going to lie down now," she said. Then, turning timidly to Julia, "Can you come with me for just a minute—Julia?"
Julia got instantly up, passed round the table, and preceded her into the hotel.
Other lunchers also were astir. The party of visitors who had usurped our table were settling up with the waiter. Derry and I sat awaiting Julia's return. Alec and Madge, at the neighbouring table, seemed to have finished their talk. I did not know what Alec's announcement to her had been. What she had said to him I thought I could guess.
Suddenly, after an absence of barely five minutes, Julia reappeared. She walked straight up to Madge and held out her hand.
"What?" I heard Madge's surprised exclamation. "But I thought——"
"——by the boat, I think ... ever so much ... delightful...."
She shook hands with them and crossed over to us. She looked straight into Derry's face. We were all standing. The five or six words she spoke were as if she was telling those beads again. Each one was isolated, bright, lingering yet relentlessly passing, a thank-offering, a prayer——
"So—long—Derry—dear ... all—the—best," she said, her hand in his.
"Good-bye—Julia," he said, smiling.
She walked away.
I caught her up in front of the hotel. Little groups of people moved across the lime-shaded Square, all in one direction, seeking the Porches and the Lainerie, leaving themselves comfortable time for the vedette. We followed them. She did not take my arm, neither did any word pass between us.
Under the Porches, past the Convent we went. The groups of people became more frequent as they concentrated from various luncheon-places. We dropped down the steep astounding street that is called Jerzual. We were nearly at the Porte, of which the twelfth-century portion is the modern part, before she opened her lips.
"I hate people who cry," she said suddenly.
Then she closed her lips again.
I supposed she meant Jennie. I didn't answer.
She only spoke once more. This was at the embarcadère, as she stepped on to the vedette.
"Don't wait," she said. "I suppose I shall be seeing you in London some time."
Obediently I turned away.
Alec had had nothing new to say to Madge. Only the variations had been a little more elaborate. The thing was as lunatic to him as ever, and it all came of not stopping in one's own country. Things like that never happened at his office in Victoria Street or on the Rectory Ground at Blackheath.
"You can stay on here if you like, but I'm off back," he said. "And the next time you catch me in France or anywhere else foreign you can tell me about it. And you can let me know when they're married. Does that three-eighteen run to-day, or is that another of their Sundays-and-week-days excepted?"
"The waiter will tell you," said Madge.
"Damn the waiter," said Alec.
So there were four of us at the Hôtel de la Poste.
I don't know what happened to letters during those early September days in Dinan. Somebody told me they went on to Paris to be sorted; I only know that it took an unconscionable time to get an answer from a place I could have got to and back again in a couple of days. And as three, and then four days passed, I think I could have written a Guide Book to Dinan, so familiar with it did I begin to come. And always it was a laughing, buoyant, affectionate and extraordinarily clever Derry who conducted us everywhere.
Then, when finally my letter did arrive, it was inexplicit, and I had either to go to London myself or write again. It was Madge who entreated me to stay. So I wrote my second letter.
Often we went out into the surrounding country as a change from the town. Derry never touched a brush, never once mentioned painting. Occasionally he and Jennie went off together somewhere, but for the most part we kept together. So far I had to admit that there was no sign of his young godhead being too much for his simple white-hearted Semele. She adored him with every particle of herself,from the feet that ran to meet him to the eyes that continually thanked his face for being what it was. And never Bayard nor Du Guesclin nor Beaumanoir of them all had served his lady with a gentler love than young Derwent Rose had for Jennie Aird.
One morning at a little before ten we went up into the Clock Tower in the Rue de l'Horloge. This tower, together with the belfry of St Sauveur, is the highest point of the ancient town that crowns Dinan's rock. Up and up inside the turret we mounted, through lofts and empty chambers and timbered garrets, till the stone gave way to slate and wood and lead, and the soft tock-tocking of the clock itself began to sound. The clock is in a room with a locked and glass-panelled door, a machine of brass on an iron table, with a slow escapement, compensated pendulums, and the white hemp ropes of the weights disappearing through a hole in the floor to the stories below. On the iron table stood an oilcan, and the small indicator-clock showed a few minutes to ten. A circular piercing in the wall gave us light, and light also streamed down through the opening where the wooden ladder rose to the upper platform. We peered through the glass door, while "Tock-tock, tock-tock" spoke the unhurrying clock....
Then on the verge of ten a large vane slipped and dissolved itself into a mist, to the murmur of moving wheels. Four times on an open third sounded the warning tenor bell overhead; and then the twin vane slipped and dissolved. There was a clang that shook the timbers inside their skin of lead....
"Come along, Jennie!" cried Derry, making a dash for the belfry, while again the bell thundered out....
It was two short flights up, but Madge and I were after them in time to hear the last two strokes. The structure still trembled with an enormous humming. This lasted for minutes, wave succeeding wave, crests and troughs of lingering sound, diminishing but seeming as if they would never quite cease. Our eyes sought one another's eyes expectantly as we waited for the last murmur of the hymning metal....
Then light voices floated up from the street again, and the noises of the town could be heard once more.
"Just look at the view!" said Derry, hanging half over the rail.
But I wanted a rope round my waist before I approached that rail. A head for heights is not one of the things of which I boast.
Another day, this time in the afternoon, we pulled in a skiff a mile or two down the Rance, where men were fishing with the "balance"—the net on the crossed bough-like arms that made a dripping bag while the rope ran over the pulley of the pry-pole. Men used the same machine in the days before Moses, they are using it to-day on the Rance and the Yang-tse-Kiang. It was this vast antiquity that seemed to strike Derry, even more than the fortifications had struck him, even more than that clock that tried to measure with its "tock-tock" something that had no beginning and can have no end. Several times he seemed on the point of speaking, but each time desisted. There was nothing to be said, no word that, like the clock, was more than "tock-tock, tock-tock." And I fancied that for a day or more past he had talked much less, that he was ceasing to talk, as he had ceased to write, as he had ceased to paint. He sat for long spells thinking, as if measuring that which was himself against all that was not himself and coming to his understanding about it.... He and Jennie had the oars. Suddenly he gave a little laugh, very musical, and took the oar again.
"Stroke," he said.
We set off back up the stream.
We landed at the Old Bridge and began the ascent to the town; but near the Arch of Jerzual, almost on the very spot where Julia had said she hated people who cried, he stopped again. From a dark interior on our left had come the knocking of a hand-loom. We entered, and Madge translated his questions into French.
Once more he seemed to find the same fascination—the spell of the oldest and of the newest, the first primitiveprinciple of which our modern inventions are but elaborated conveniences, man measuring his strength and pitting his wit against all that is not man. So men had fished, so they did fish. So they had woven, so they did weave. They had fought in steel caps with hand-grenades in the past, they fought in steel caps with hand-grenades still. And nothing to be written, painted or said. As it had been in the beginning it would be until the end. A momentary life was not meant for the expression of these things. They were for contemplation, perfect understanding, and—silence.
That was on a Saturday evening. After dinner we strolled to the Jardin des Anglais again and stood looking over the ramparts. There were no shirley poppies in the sky now, but a serene unbroken heaven, a tender blue fading to the still tenderer peaches and greys that merged into the darkening land. The cypresses below us were inky black, the river where the fishermen had fished a soft thread of inverted sky. Folk again took their evening stroll round the walls. None of us spoke. I was wondering what Julia Oliphant was doing in London.
Suddenly Derry broke the silence. He did so in these words.
"It's all right for Léhon and the Château de Beaumanoir to-morrow morning, I suppose?"
"Yes, dear boy," said Madge.
How was she to have known, how was I to have known, how "all right" it was for Léhon, the Château de Beaumanoir and—to-morrow?
The château stands a bare mile out of Dinan, and we had been there half a dozen times before; but Derry loved those crumbling old towers on their upstanding rock. It rises almost sheer, buttressed round with the broken works, and from the talus to the plateau on the top is a network of precipitous paths. You ascend it very much as you can, and the view that is blocked as you approach it breaks on youfrom the summit—first the sickening gulf of air at your feet, then the three or four miles of the southward plain, and the canalised Rance parting company with its attendant road to Tressaint, écluse after écluse, until it picks it up again towards Evran. That is when you look south. To the north, peering down through oak and beech as you might peer over the edge of a nest, are glimpses of white ribbon—the road along which you have passed. And on the level plateau in the middle, enclosed by oak and beech and lime, rubble-built but with dressed stone buttresses, stands the tiny modern Chapel of St Joseph of Consolation.
Jennie and Derry waited at the top of the last zigzag for Madge and myself, and then gave us time to recover our breath. It was eleven o'clock of a Sunday morning, and Dinan's bells sounded lightly in the distance. They languished almost like human voices as, instead of quickening for the final summons, they delayed, with longer and longer intervals until, when you expected just one more sweet note, all was silence.
I think that what gives that château-crowned rock its air of lightsome space is that you come to it from Dinan, where everything crowds upon you, the Porches trample you, and the people across the street go to bed practically on the sill of your window. True, from the ramparts you have sweep enough, but unless you go there very early you get a mediocre, unbroken illumination, with every shadow hidden behind the face that is turned towards you, and two tones paint all, the pale blue of the sky and the average of the lighted land. So there is little to be seen from the Château de Beaumanoir to the north.
But turn your face south, and—ah! That is where the brightness lies! That flat average of greens and browns disappears, and you are looking, not at colour, but at Light itself! And yet every shadow points directly at you. All the sun that there is is on your own face—there, and graving as if on a tarnished silver plate a glittering outline round every object you see. Not a green, not a brown; all is grey; but twinkles with a silver edge every tree of Rance's valley,and fuming silver is every thread of house-smoke that ascends. That stretch of lock that is lost again towards Tressaint is a needle-flash, and you see the summer clouds only as you see the poplar-sheddings that float over the gulf in June—as if save for their edges they did not exist.
Then, turning your back on the glitter, you see the heavy browns and greens and ochres of the ruins once more.
"Do they never open this chapel, I wonder?" said Derry, peering through the grille of the closed door.
I peeped in after him. It had a tiny altar with four tapers, and a blue-and-white pennon with a device upon it. The little porcelain Virgin was blue and white and gold, and under the three lancet windows a dozen rickety chairs stood. The walls were whitewashed, with a picture here and there, and there was a rat-hole in the floor. A small and very bad rose-window reminded me of the window of St Sauveur, and I turned away again.
We pottered about here and there among the scrub and masonry. Seen from above, the west tower, that which looks over to Trélivan, is the most complete; but the one to the south-west can be entered by climbing down half-effaced steps in the thickness of the wall. I descended. But there was nothing to see inside but the peep through a single loophole. Its walls chirped with grasshoppers, and a thin screen of oak gave it a roof. I was restless, and came out again. I wanted my letters from London. Then this interminable business would be quickly finished.
But London reminded me once more of Julia Oliphant, of what she was doing, of what she would do....
Madge was waiting for me when I re-ascended. The others were nowhere to be seen. And we no longer had the ruins to ourselves. Over by thezigzagpath to the east of the rock I heard voices and the brushing of branches. But the colline is so overgrown with shrub that it is not difficult to lose anybody. Derry and Jennie could not be far away.
"I expect they're looking for blackberries," said Madge.
"Then they'll be on the sunny side," I replied; and I led her across the shady plateau.
Then suddenly Madge saw them, for she called "Be careful there, children!" They were standing on the brink of the southern tower, looking away into the brightness. Close to them a mountain-ash overhung the deep, and about the scabious at the foot of it butterflies hovered, part of the airy light. Her hand was on his shoulder, her white frock a luminosity of grey shadow. About one pink glowing ear her loosened hair was a radiance of coppery gold.
But the newly-come party was close behind us. Through the leaves I heard a rustle and a woman's voice suddenly raised.
"I'm sure I saw him come this way——"
"I should get rid of the little beast if I were you," a man's voice growled.
Then the woman's voice uplifted again. "Puppetty! Puppetty!Oh, you naughty boy!"
The man and the woman appeared.
"Puppetty! Puppetty!... Excuse me, have you seen anything of a little—— Good heavens alive, if it isn't Sir George Coverham! Of all the—fancy meeting——"
But I had eyes for her for one fleeting instant only. All at once there had come a stifled cry from Derry. He stood there, dark against the morning light, embroidered round with light. His eyes were immovably on that woman who had called the dog—on that Daphne Bassett who, in years that were now clean-sponged from his memory, had been Daphne Wade. Jennie too was staring at her, bewildered that he should stare so. Her hand was still on his shoulder. She drew a little more closely to him.
The struggle that began on his darkened face was a struggle to remember something; or perhaps its real beginning was that he seemed to remember that there was something to remember. But what? Not a book that he had written? Not a book that she had written? Not two books, of which he had written one and she the other? He had never written a book—had never dreamed of writing a book; he left that to clever people like Sir George Coverham and Mrs. Aird—"Mummie."
A picture, then? No, not a picture. He had dabbled in paint for a bit—there was a lot of stuffy old canvas in the hotel now—but it couldn't be that.... He did not look at Jennie. His hands tried to put her away from him. He muttered hoarsely.
"Let me go, Jennie, let me go."
But she only held him the more closely, both arms now wrapped about him.
Then he cried out sharply, loudly. "Let go—let go, I say—and don't look—take your eyes away—don't look at my face!"
But she would now never let him go. She would look at his face, yes, even though he commanded her not to, because of what had already begun to pass there....
And what that was you may see by turning back to the beginning of this book. Yesterday, in the Tour de l'Horloge, a clock had prepared to strike the hour. It had begun with the soft fluttering of a vane that had dissolved into a mist; there had been the murmur of mechanism, those preparatory notes on an open third.
But this was not hearing. It was seeing. We all saw. Jennie saw.
As the hues of a coloured top alter at a touch of the finger, so change began to succeed change over that face with its back to the morning light.
Oh, by no means violent ones at first. Quite gentle ones. We merely saw the youth who had painted a few pictures, the young man who had swum the Channel, the athlete who had discussed tides and currents with boatmen in the Lord Warden at Dover——
Then a certain acceleration (though you must understand that this fantasia on Time that we watched is but comparative, happened in a few instants, more quickly than I can write or you read). Against the sun a glint of golden beard appeared and was gone in a twink. I had once seen that beard at breakfast-time, in a South Kensington mews.
But oh my heart! Then a terrific leap!... His whole form bulked, loomed. Eleven years descended on him like aNasmyth hammer. He seemed to take the very brain out of my head and to put it, not in France at all, but into a house in Surrey with a pond in front of it, while he, with a punt-pole in his hand, brought a piece of water-starwort into Julia Oliphant's hand——
His arm, both his arms, were over his face as he tried to hide it all from her. No cry broke from him now. But her arms were locked desperately about his waist. She would never let him go.
Then somewhere a dog yapped, and at the sound the horrible life-slide ceased. It ceased because it could not go further. How could it go further than that side-street off Piccadilly in which the woman who had writtenThe Parthian Arrowhad set a dog upon the author ofAn Ape in Hell? Already I had started forward, but my foot caught in the scrub, and I found myself rolling, clutching wildly in the air for something to hold.
But I swear it was for them and not for myself that I feared.
Then, as they slowly swayed outward together by the mountain-ash, the beautiful, re-transfiguring thing happened.
A stupid woman with a wretched little pet dog! A rebuff on a pavement over a miserable literary squabble! Was it forthisthat the years had changed on his face as the hues change on a spinning top? Wasthatall that this commonplace apparition of a woman had reminded him of? Why, he had thought it had been something important, something to do with the peace of churches, the beauty of coloured windows, the glorious thunder-roll from the organ! He had thought it had something to do with his boyhood's dreams, aspirations, vows! But onlythis!... It was not worth the trouble of having sought it. He had better get back to his deliverance.
He laughed. The vane whirred in the opposite direction. He began to go back to Jennie——
He swam back to her across the Channel, knowing now that she awaited him on the other side——
He ran at Ambleteuse—ran swiftly to her.
His eyes met hers in the glow of the headlights at Ker Annic——
Once more he stood with her in that Tower of dead and forgotten doves—fled on silent wheels with her through the night—in that upper room in the Rue de la Cordonnerie took her, stainless, into his own virgin arms——
He was here again, back at the Château de Beaumanoir; young, beautiful, innocent, grave, his arm dropped now, looking into her eyes, calling to her.
"Look—look at me—yes, look, Jennie!"
"Oh, my God, catch them!" Madge screamed.
But I don't think she saw what I think I saw. Let us say that the scrub was treacherous, that it betrayed his foot; it makes no difference now, for I have no son. Why, after all, go forward again if going forward meant no more than that four-seconds pilgrimage from which he had but that moment returned? Better as it was, neither forward nor back nor standing still on that edge of masonry or on any other edge. He drew her close to him. Their lips met....
"Oh, Lord, Thou hast prevented him with sweetness; he asked life of Thee and Thou hast given him length of days."
We heard the parting of the bushes down below....
A yard beyond the mountain-ash the butterflies continued to hover, and past them the silver-flashing stretch of canal-lock by Tressaint could be seen once more.
I stood before the Tower at the Château de la Garaye. No thrashing-gin sounded, for the day's work was over, and in and out of the empty windows of the glimmering Renaissance ruin the bats flitted. Madge, Alec and I were leaving France to-morrow. There was nothing further to do, there is nothing further to write. I shall never re-visit Dinan.
But I did not enter their Tower. I should hardly have done so even had not that which showed in the saffron sky seemed to forbid me. For it seemed to me the perfect symbol of his end. It was the old moon in the new one's arms.
Just so, just like that curved golden thread, so thin that a few minutes before it had not been to be seen—just so had that tender crescent of his youth held that dim and gibbous and ghostly round of his past. Just so he had been haggardly haunted, but touched with golden innocence in the end. And he himself seemed to me to be peeping into that Tower which I did not enter, as for ages other crescents had peeped when the doves had filled that hollow with their crooning and no other sound had broken the hush of eve. And thenceforward he would always re-visit it, embracing with a gilded edge the whole dark content of man.
But they lay elsewhere. They are not together, but side by side. Alec would not have it otherwise, and Madge did not seem greatly to care.
The parallelism of their fair young bodies is the closing parallelism of this book. On his stone is a discrepancy that commonly passes as a carver's error. They lie thus: