A delicious melancholy came over her. She leaned her head against the back of the seat, and thought once more of bygone days. She saw again the little church in the Via Belsiana, mysterious, shrouded in a bluish penumbra; the gallery, which had a curve like a balcony; the posy of young girls chanting in the choir. Below, the group of musicians with their string instruments, standing in front of white-pine pulpits. Roundabout, in the stalls of oak, the seated auditors, few in number, almost all gray or bald. The chapel-master beat the time. A pious perfume of incense and violets mingled with the music of Sebastian Bach.
Overcome by the suavity of her recollections, she leaned over more towards her lover, and murmured: "Are you thinking of the old days too?"
She would have liked to be able to communicate her emotions, in order to prove to him that she had forgotten nothing, not even the slightest circumstance of that solemn event. He, with a furtive gesture, sought Hippolyte's hand beneath the large folds of their travelling rug, and kept it slightly pressed in his own. Both felt in their souls a thrill which recalled to them certain delicate sensations of the first days of their love. And they remained in this attitude, pensive, somewhat exalted, somewhat lethargic from the warmth, soothed by the even and continuous movement of the train, at times seeing a green-clad landscape in the haze through the carriage windows. The sky was clouded; it was raining. Mr. Martlet dozed in a corner; Mrs. Martlet was reading a review-the Lyceum. The third traveller slept soundly, his cap down over his eyes.
"If the choir missed the tempo, Mr. Martlet beat time with energy, like the chapel-master. At a certain moment, all the old men beat time, as if moved by the spirit of the music. There was in the air an evaporated perfume of incense and violets." George abandoned himself with delight to the capricious workings of his memory. "Could I have dreamed of a stranger or more poetic prelude to my love? It seems like a recollection of some romantic tale; yet, on the contrary, it is a souvenir of my actual life. I constantly retain the smallest details of it before the eyes of my soul. The poetry of this beginning shed, later on, the shadow of a dream over my entire love." In the drowsiness of a light torpor, he dwelt on certain confused images which exerted a species of musical fascination over his mind. "A few grains of incense—a little bouquet of violets!"
"Look how Mr. Martlet sleeps!" said Hippolyte in a whisper. "As peacefully as an infant."
Then she added, smiling: "You, too, are sleepy, are you not? It is still raining. What a strange languor! My eyelids feel so heavy."
Her eyes half-shut, she looked at him from between her long eyelashes.
George thought to himself: "Her eyelashes pleased me at once. She was in the centre of the chapel, seated on a high-backed bench. Her profile was delineated in the light streaming from the window. When the clouds outside cleared away, the light suddenly grew stronger. She made a slight movement, and in the light I saw the real length of her eyelashes—a prodigious length."
"Tell me," said Hippolyte, "will it be long before we arrive?"
The shrill whistle of the locomotive announced the proximity of a station.