I
That evening I sat in Ker Annic, alone. Alec and Madge had gone out for an after-dinner walk, taking a silent Jennie with them. Silent too had been our return along the cliff-tops that afternoon. Whether she already regretted having opened her heart to me I could not tell.
I sat at the open window of the salon, looking out over the sea that showed pale milky green against the heavy sunset bank. Inside the room Ganymede and the Eagle had been lighted, and my shadow streamed down the steps and was lost in the darkening garden. It was not a cold evening, and yet I felt a little cold. No fire was laid behind the drawn-down iron shutter where Alec threw his crumpled tobacco packets, and it was hardly worth while troubling a maid. I closed the window, crossed to the shuttered fireplace, and sat down in a striped tapestried chair.
What had become of my illusion that certain things could not exist in this clear atmosphere of Northern France? No man with two memories bathe in that milky green sea I had just shut out? But he had swum it. No man of forty-five masquerade as a quarter of a century younger in this broomy, thymy air? But here he was.... I looked round the little salon, as if its spurious gaiety had misled me. Across the varnished ceiling the lamp-chains threw straggling spider's webs of shadow. In one gilt oval mirror a corner of the lamp was duplicated, in another re-duplicated. Everywhere were bits of inessential decoration, the trophy of Senegalese spears over the door, the fringed and fretted bracket with nothing on it, a bronze fingerplate, a bit of lace or coloured glass, all the rest of the quick artifice with which that great nation diverts attention from its naked purpose in life—to wring from everything the last benefit the occasion will yield. Or so at any rate it seemed to me that night, as my eyes rested on the wriggling gilt ribbons of the mirrors and Ganymede struggling in the Eagle's clutch.
When Alec Aird had greeted me on Dinard Cale he had glanced at the two suit-cases I had thrown ashore and asked me whether that was all the gear I had brought with me. And it is true that one cannot stay many weeks in a place on the resources of two suit-cases. But the length or shortness of my stay was now only part of a wider issue. The question was, not how long I was to stay, but how I was ever going to leave until Derry was ready to come with me. Was he likely to come now? Would anything drag him away? Hardly! Jennie was perfectly right: "He isn't even thinking of leaving, because we both know now—we knew in the shop—and he loves me too!"
A pretty kettle of fish, I reflected, looking at the empty brackets and the spears over the doorway....
For it was all very well to talk about only seeing one another, only speaking to one another. How long was that likely to last? How long had it lasted Julia Oliphant? Just as long as it had taken her to help herself to more. True, Julia was not a sleeping, but a particularly wide-awake beauty. Julia was not Jennie. For the glimmers of starlight that Julia had formerly brought into his life Jennie had now given him the sun itself. Both had known it in that long exchange of eyes in the Dinard Bazaar that morning.