The Tower of Oblivion Part 78

"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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d 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 cannot say; 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 amphorae 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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 the white 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."

III

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 b.u.mped 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 fete.

There is only one decent piece of gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 Suss.e.x; and he had no knowledge of the repet.i.tion. 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. He did 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 Pet.i.ts 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 "belier a 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-b.a.l.l.s 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 dejeuner 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 sign HoTEL 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 the beginning 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 of _The Vicarage of Bray_ skip 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 pa.s.sion of _An Ape in h.e.l.l_ was 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--Suss.e.x fields and lanes--a day at Chalfont--another day somewhere else--and a week-end at my house ... 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 Lehon 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, pa.s.sed 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----"