"So he was sketching, and you went with him?"
"Yes. He did a sweet sketch, with me in it," she breathed, her eyes softly shining.
Only to see her and to go for bicycle-rides with her—only to speak to her and to paint her among the glowing sarrasin, the green translucence of the woods, the golden seaweed of the rocks or wherever it was——
"Oh, he did! And where was this?"
It was neither among the sarrasin, nor in the green woods, nor on the shore.
"It was miles and miles away, right past Saint Samson, nearly at Dinan, at a château called La Garaye," she said softly. "I never saw anything so lovely. There's a huge wide avenue of beeches like a tunnel—it's all in the middle of a lovely beechwood—and there's a lovely soft grass-ride right down the middle. Then at the bottom there are two great masses of ivy that used to be the château gates. And past them are the little white bits of the ruins. And there was an enormous loud humming everywhere, like a hundred aeroplanes. That was them thrashing at the farm with four horses that went round and round. We rode our bicycles down the green ride and put them up by some farm-buildings. They don't a bit mind your going anywhere you like, and they said he could paint if he wanted to. So he got out his things and I watched him. He didn't want me for the picture at once, because he had all the other to do first. Then he made me lie down in a frightfully nettley place, but he only laughed and said I'd got to be just there because it was where he wanted me. My hands are all nettled yet, look. So he painted me, Uncle George, and that horse-thing never stopped humming, and oh, it was so hot and blue and drowsy—I nearly went to sleep once. But the loveliest thing of all was afterwards. We climbed about among all those stones and ivy, and then there was a tower. Just like a castle tower, Uncle George, but not a hole or a window anywhere, except a place at the bottom just big enough to creep through. And what it was was an old pigeon-place, where they used to keep pigeons. All honeycombed inside with holes for thousands and thousands of pigeons. But, of course, there weren't any pigeons there, only an old sitting hen among the nettles that scurried round and round and then clucked away. It was like being at the bottom of a kiln or something, with grasses and flowers and things round the top and the sky e-ver so blue! And all those thousands of pigeon-holes, all grown up with birch and ivy and nettles and that silly old hen! I picked a bit of herb-robert. Oh, it was a heavenly place!"
Heavenly indeed, I thought grimly. Heaven enough inside that columbarium, with only a small hole to creep in at, and the muffled drone of that horse-gin, shut out by the walls that had once been filled with the cushing of a thousand doves and only God's blue looking down on them from the top!
Heavenly enough to make your heart ache when you remembered that there, in that ruined place of dead doves, he conscientiously sought to keep his promise to me—while she had given never a word to take back. Oh, I saw it all right. No question about that. She took very good care that I should see it....
For I was being as softly cajoled and canvassed and propagandised as ever I was in my life. Derry, piloting me from shop to shop into the Dinard Bazaar, had taken me by the arm; but she wound herself in among my very heartstrings. And her plan was to upheap me with unasked confidences before I could say her nay. After that, if I guessed her thoughts rightly, there would be nothing for me to do but to respect the sacred but unwanted encumbrance. I should then be enlisted against Alec and Madge. Those of us whom the years have perhaps mellowed a little are ever at the mercy of calculated guile of this sort. To tell somebody something they don't want to know—and then to put them upon their honour not to divulge it!
The boy, the father of the man, indeed! Save us from the machinations of the maiden who is mother of the woman!