At this Albine sprang to her feet, exasperated, threatening. She shook Serge and cried:
‘What are you saying? What is it you are dreaming aloud? Am I not your wife? Haven’t you come here to be my husband?’
He recoiled, trembling yet more violently.
‘No! Leave me! I am afraid!’ he faltered.
‘But our life together, our happiness, the children we shall have?’
‘No, no; I am afraid.’ And he broke out into a supreme cry: ‘I cannot! I cannot!’
For a moment Albine remained silent, gazing at the unhappy man who lay shivering at her feet. Her face flared. She opened her arms as if to seize him and strain him to her breast with wild angry passion. But another idea came to her, and she merely took him by the hand and raised him to his feet.
‘Come!’ said she.
She led him away to that giant tree, to the very spot where their love had reigned supreme. There was the same bliss-inspiring shade, there was the same trunk as of yore, the same branches spreading far around, like sheltering and protecting arms. The tree still towered aloft, kindly, robust, powerful, and fertile. As on the day of their nuptials, languorous warmth, the glimmer of a summer’s night fading on the bare shoulder of some fair girl, a sob of love dying away into passionate silence, lingered about the clearing as it lay there bathed in dim green light. And, in the distance, the Paradou, in spite of the first chills of autumn, sighed once more with passion, again becoming love’s accomplice. From the parterre, from the orchard, from the meadow-lands, from the forest, from the great rocks, from the spreading heavens, came back a ripple of voluptuous joy. Never had the garden, even on the warmest evenings of spring-time, shown such deep tenderness as now, on this fair autumn evening, when the plants and trees seemed to be bidding one another goodnight ere they sank to sleep. And the scent of ripened germs wafted the intoxication of desire athwart the scanty leaves.
‘Do you hear? Do you hear?’ faltered Albine in Serge’s ear, when she had let him slip upon the grass at the foot of the tree.