The Tower of Oblivion Part 77

That creeper-hung terrace at the back of the Hotel 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--HoTEL 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 hats put 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.

II

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 desservir, 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 for an 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 facades 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 facades 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 sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed.

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 pa.s.sed 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 the _affiches_ and cla.s.s-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 and _dalles_ lightly 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 fleche. 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 fleche 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 pa.s.sed 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 a sparkling room one will place one's hand over gla.s.s 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.