“Bravo, Paule! You wouldn’t be afraid in Cochin-China or the Tonkin forests. You will see them some day. You belong to the same race as your brothers.”
“What, I?” she said, the fire in her eyes dying out. “I shall live and die at Le Maupas.”
They came back from the valley through the ash wood. These trees with their light trunks reared their heads proudly on high, wearing as a crown the mass of branches from which the autumn wind was tearing the leaves. Half stripped, they showed their shapeliness in all their youthful health and strength, and thousands of uplifted arms waved peacefully. Like naked hamadryads they betrayed the secret of their forms. The scanty leaves which still adorned them, were ruddy gold, almost as rich as the fallen ones which thickly carpeted the soil below. Evening came on and all the wood was bathed in a violet mist, which gave to it the mysterious aspect of a sacred grove.
Turned to the west on one side, on the other looking over meadows and vineyards, the farm of Montcharvin reflected in its windows the glow of the setting sun. This spacious house was built amid the ruins of an old castle, of which one dismantled tower and a Romanesque portico were all that remained. This portico, unprovided with a door and now quite useless, looked on to a roofless shed where old plough-shares were kept, and beyond, by reason of an abrupt descent, to a distant landscape which was framed in its arch. This arrangement called to mind the pictures of the old Italian masters, who, in order, doubtless, to sum up the multiform beauty of the world, used to supplement their human figures with a scene from nature, glimpsed between the columns of a palace or under the arches of a cloister.
Marcel and Paule skirted the old building and, following a screen of trees at the edge of a field which hid the deep valley of Forezan, they stopped in front of a fallen trunk, a natural bench which had been left there for years. Of one accord they sat down.
They saw the shades of evening falling over the land. They saw the path which they had followed and the dead leaves of the woods turning pink and violet. Two bullocks drawing a cart full of milk-cans passed in front of them, and, as they crossed a band of sunshine, a light haze could be plainly seen rising from their nostrils at every breath and mounting upwards. Peace filled the countryside, which was preparing for its winter rest with all the sadness of its shorn meadows and despoiled woods.
Marcel took his sister’s hand. Suddenly at his touch she burst into tears. They had too many sensations in their hearts at this moment of leave-taking. He was thinking of Alice and her weakness, Paule was thinking of him. For a moment he waited till the tears he had caused her to shed were dried.
“Listen,” he said at last. “You must watch over mother. I shall be away for a long time perhaps.”
Uneasily she felt a foreboding of some new misfortune, but immediately she mastered herself.
“You will come home next year from Algiers, won’t you?”