"This is what I wanted to see," he said smilingly, but a little as if what he wanted to see overruled everything else. "Especially that bit over there."
It was a lime-white old court, with tourelles to the west and north. In its south-eastern corner rose a slated ogival turret with a gilded ornamental flèche. An old woman in a lace cap was filling a bucket at a tap, and from one of the dark upper windows came a girl's light laugh. Through one of the doorways a glimpse could be seen of school-desks, grey and cracked and dry as the legs of the Porches themselves. The tourelle in front of us carried a little side-belfry, and its inch-thick plaster had flaked off in great maps, showing the rubble beneath. And again the sunlight was absorbed by the plane trees, but blazed on the roof, made the flèche a vivid sparkle against the blue, and seemed to penetrate into the very substance of the soft decaying white.
"Now just come and have a look at this," said Derry, striding across the court.
The thing that he had brought us to see might almost have passed unnoticed in Dinan, where at every corner something that man's fine wit has carved has been uncarved again by stupid and obliterating Time. It was no more than a bit of moulding, the upper edge of which caught the sun, directly, making the cavetto underneath it a soft yellowing glow. But into that rounded plaster tourelle with the belfry a flat door had at one time been placed without interruption to the moulding, and in the result the sun had a frolic indeed. For no man had designed that miraculous accident where curve and flat met and deliciously quarrelled, to be reconciled again by the sun's laughing kiss. Never did light and its opposite more sweetly interchange and compose.... I don't want you to think this is my own observation. But for Derry I should probably not have given it a glance. But for him it was a thing to come specially to see. He stood before it, moving his hand a little this way and a little that, as in a sparkling room one will place one's hand over glass or water to see whether it is indeed that which makes the little fairy-ribbon on the wall. He peered underneath, he stood off, he glanced up at the sun. With his hand throwing the shadow, the sun and he were partners.
"What is it, Derry?" I asked him.
He laughed. "What is it? I should say it was everything," he replied. "Everything there is, and if there's any more, that too."
"Are you going to paint it, dearest?" Jennie asked.
He turned. "Eh?" he said.
And there, in that sun-flooded court, I had a swift premonition. Something seemed to tell me that he was not going to paint it. Neither was he going to write about it, nor even to speak of it again. He had no wish to communicate it to any other person, by any means whatever. That he himself possessed the pure understanding of it was enough; he would not even care that any should know that he knew, so he might but have the bliss of knowing. His painting was over, as his writing was over. Contemplation, withdrawal, solitude, the infinite soft ecstasy of being at one with that which is not one self, though it were but the sunlight on a bit of fifteenth-century plaster—that, it now flashed suddenly on me, was what we might henceforward expect.
And though he understood all mysteries, and had all knowledge, yet he now had something even richer to profit him. He had his Love.