Derry now wore the English suit he had worn on the day when he had come
to tea at Ker Annic, Jennie the white frock and the little white cap in
which she had stolen out of the house that night. I never knew what
became of their French clothes. To all appearances we were now four
English sight-seers in a place where English sight-seers are bumped into
at every turn. And I must mention a curious little incident that
occurred when, the next morning, after breakfast, we left the hotel and
strolled into the Church of St Sauveur to see how the little girls were
getting on with their decoration for the approaching fête.
There is only one decent piece of glass in St Sauveur. That is the
window of the north transept that looks down on the burial-place of Du
Guesclin's heart. As we passed among the gay and lightsome shrines
Jennie happened to pause under this window. I saw his sudden dead stop.
It is a remarkable thing when a man does the same thing twice in his
life, each time for the first time. He looked at Jennie in St Sauveur
just as, all those years before, he had looked at somebody else in a
village church in Sussex; and he had no knowledge of the repetition. She
stood there, all low-toned pearls of frock and cool dark apricot of face
and neck; her hair peeped forth beneath the little hat; and there, under
the mellow ambers and ruby-dust and bits of green that might have been
dyed in Dinard's sea, for a minute she was aureoled.... She moved on,
and we followed.
But in that moment it was not he who had been haled back into that
earlier time. That was all over for him. He did all anew. It was I
myself who had come close to the ghost of my own youth.
The nearest train to twelve o'clock, by which Alec had said he would
arrive, was the one reaching Dinard at twelve-fifteen. The one before
that, leaving Dinard at ten-twelve, ran on certain days only, and
moreover would hardly have allowed Alec the necessary time in which to
stop the various inquiries he had set afoot. Therefore we had a long
morning to ourselves, and it mattered little how we spent it. Indeed it
mattered very little now what we did with our time until my letters
should arrive from London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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