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 façades 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 façades 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 shell 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 passed.
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 passed 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 class-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 passion 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 passion 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.