"My son" (he read), "my little son, who, when you read this, will be a grown man, I who have not quite lost my birthright of prevision, know that some day you will go to my town and read this. Will you be in trouble, my little son? Something tells me you will be near the end, and so I write this to help you. You are lying on my lap now, and I think we shall have many years to wander in together, and you will grow away from me, but when you read this you will find me again, and something more as well. My son, I got no further than Paris, bearing you beneath my heart. There I heard from his priest-brother that he had been killed hunting, and there you were born. So you are mine, you belong to no one but me. Listen, my son. Life is good, but a clean death is good too. Never be afraid of one or the other. And when you read this in the home that was mine, put fear away and be a man. Find the one with whom you can face whatever comes without flinching, and when you have found her, never let her go till your arms must loose for good. My son, I was wrong to say that hearts went dead, they are merely numbed for a time if only we are never weak enough to regret. Always remember that it is the good woman who gives and the good man who creates, and take what is left to you of life and make with it. I am not merely imagining you as you read; I am actually with you, I have fused the present and the future into one, and I can see the dawn-light barring the floor through the slats of the shutters, and you are sitting by an empty hearth. Go out, my child, into the dawn. Edmond, my son, however long it is before you join me, I am to all eternity
"Your Mother."
Bernardy staggered to his feet and went to the window, and the steel-cold bars of light from the slats ran up over him as he approached. Flinging the shutters wide, he leant out, and drew deep breaths of the chill, sweet air. The yews and overgrown hedges of the garden were still velvety with shadow, but beyond the ramparts the delicate pallor of dawn was already tinged with a faint fire. So had his mother, half-timid child, half peasant, and entirely woman, often watched with him beneath her heart. Yet as Bernardy saw the rose light strengthen, his thoughts left his mother for that other Candide who had reddened so unaccountably the night before—that Candide who must be called after his mother. He was still thinking of her as he went downstairs and through the open door that led into the garden.
He crossed to the furthest rampart of it, that hung over the cliff edge, and sat down to watch the dawn. Away to a line of silver that told of the sea the country looked as though dappled in grey and gold, for the valleys were pools of shadow veined by the brightening ranges of the mountains. There was a transparency about the morning, a clarity of young green in leaf and grass, a glimmer of fragile dew globes and gossamer webs on the brambles, that all made for an agreeing lightness of that bubble the soul, and Bernardy was soothed to the core of him. Cupping his chin in his hands, he sat there, drenched in the ineffable light that seemed to make of the air some divine element, enveloping every edge in brightness, refracting from each leaf and vibrating with a diamond quality on the mists in the valley below. The pattern of events was beginning to clear for him as the world was cleared by the sunrise—it only needed some master event to be complete. He thought of the sleep into which he had fallen outside the town, and which had wiped his mind clear of resentment, and freed it for new impressions: he remembered the shock when he had first recognized the walls, his growing excitement as thing after thing was familiar to him, the blinding flash of the moment when he realized he had found his dream-city. On the crest of receptiveness he had entered the church, and the phrase of the old peasant woman had caught at his imagination. Looking back, he saw how it was the extraordinary serenity of the townsfolk that seemed their dominant characteristic—they were wrapped in it as in an atmosphere, they were clear-eyed, clear-skinned, clear-souled. From the moment when he recognized the nail-studded door till he put down the last of his mother's letters, his comprehensions had flowed outward in widening circles. In his new knowledge of his father and mother he saw himself more clearly than ever before. He remembered his mother, a silent, quiet-eyed woman, nearly always bent over her needlework—and he saw her as the eager, ignorant girl, full of romantic dreams; saw her change into the half-timid, half-reckless lover; followed her through her lonely grief to the attainment of quiet. She, too, could say it had been good—and with how far more reason than he! He saw his father—weak, hot-headed, swayed by passion and selfishness and regret—his father who had preferred conventional safety to this hill-hung garden in Provence, where he could have dreamt the greatest dream of all. He saw himself as he was, and there followed a twin-vision of how he would be lying cold and pulseless in a few weeks' time, and of how he might have lived in this city of dreams had he found it with his life still his own. He would indeed have dreamt the greatest dream of all—the dream that was life at its fullest. "It is the good woman who gives and the good man who creates. Take what is left to you of life and make with it" . . . so wrote his mother, and like an answer flashed the words of the peasant woman in the church, "C'est l'enfant qui donne courage!"
The greatest dream of all!
He looked up and saw Candide, large and serene, coming towards him down the path, her skirts swinging from her broad hips. He stood up, and for a moment they faced each other in silence.
She was just thirty and in some ways looked more, because of the solidity of her well-poised figure; and her clear eyes, rimmed with black round each iris, were not the ignorant eyes of a child, they were the eyes of a woman who faces knowledge naturally and patiently. Big-boned, and, but for the whiteness of her skin, with a something rockhewn about her face, her only beauty was that of health and a certain assurance which spoke of perfect poise. She was what Bernardy, in that moment's clarity of vision, knew her for—a woman born to be mother of men. He took a step towards her with the gesture of a frightened child, and with her big hands over his she drew him to the stone bench and sat beside him. He told her everything, simply and quickly, because he hated explanations, and was impatient that they were necessary to her. When he had made an end she said:
"Do you know why I blushed last night when my grandmother recognized you?"
"No," replied Bernardy, startled out of himself yet pricked to interest.
"Because my grandmother has always made me wait for you. . . ."
"Candide! Candide!" cried Bernardy, the child merged in the waxing possessiveness of the man, "shall we dream my last few weeks together, you and I?"