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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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