She had half a mind to go back and spend the rest of the afternoon in dinning into her mother that by her untimely interruption she had arrested a coup de Grâce, and come between her and her ultimate redemption. But pleasant though this would be, the soft sunshine of early June was more so, so she ran down the stairs and into the street.
At first she felt so irritated and ruffled that she feared the spell was broken for ever, but gradually it was renewed under the magical idleness of the Sunday afternoon. In a house opposite some one was playing a Saraband on the lute. From a neighbouring street came the voices and laughter of children—otherwise the whole neighbourhood seemed deserted.
Down the long rue des Augustins, that narrowed to a bright point towards the Seine, she wandered with wide, staring eyes, to meet something, she knew not what. Then up the quays she wandered, up and on, still in a trance.
Finally she took her stand on the Pont-Rouge, a little wooden bridge long since replaced. For some moments she gazed at the Seine urbanely flowing between the temperate tints of its banks, and flanked on its right by the long, gray gallery of the Louvre. Everything was shrouded in a delicate distance-lending haze; there was the Cité—miles and miles away it seemed—nuzzling into the water and dominated by the twin towers of Notre-Dame. They had caught the sun, and though unsubstantial, they still looked sturdy—like solid cubes of light. The uniform gray-greenness of everything—Seine and Louvre and Cité—and a quality in it all of decorative unreality, reminded Madeleine of a great, flat, gray-green picture by Mantegna of the death of Saint Sebastian, that she had seen in one of the Palaces.
The bell of Saint-Germain-des-Prés began to peal for Vespers. She started murmuring to herself the Vesper hymn—Lucis Creator:—
‘Ne mens gravata crimine.
Vitæ sit exul munere,
Dum nil perenne cogitat,
Seseque culpis illigat.’
‘Grant that the mind, borne down by the charge of guilt, be not an exile from the fulfilment of life, perennially pondering emptiness and binding itself by its transgressions.’