The walk was planted with old oaks on each side, and in the middle, near a wooden bench, stood a cast-iron statue of the Virgin.
He groaned as he looked at it. The crime of the church followed him once more; even in this little chapel so full of divine compassion, all the statues came from the religious bazaars of Paris or Lyons.
He took his position below, near the pond whose banks were bordered by reeds surrounded by tufts of osiers; and he amused himself by examining the colours of these shrubs, with their smooth green leaves and stalks of citron yellow, or blood red, noticing the curling water which began to foam with a gust of wind. And the martins skimmed it, touching it with the tips of their wings from which drops of water fell like pearls of quicksilver. And the birds rose whirling above and giving out their cries of weet, weet, weet, while the dragon-flies shone brightly in the air which they slashed with blue flames.
"Peaceful refuge!" thought Durtal; "I ought to have come to rest here before." He sat down on a bed of moss and interested himself in the noiseless and active life of the waters. Now the splash and flash of the turn of a leaping carp; now great spiders skating on the surface, making little circles and driving one against another, stopping, going back and making new rounds; then, near him on the ground, Durtal noticed jumping, green grasshoppers with vermilion bellies, or, scaling the oaks, colonies of queer insects on whose backs a devil's head was painted in red lead on a black ground.
And above all that, if he raised his eyes, there was the silent upturned sea of heaven, a blue sea crested with surging white clouds like waves; and at the same time this firmament moved in the water where it billowed under a blueish gray glass.
Durtal felt himself expand as he smoked cigarettes; the melancholy which had oppressed him since the dawn began to melt away, and joy crept into him as he felt his soul was washed in the pool of the Sacraments and dried in the air of a cloister. And he was at once happy and uneasy; happy, for the meeting he had had with the father guest-master, had removed all the doubts he had entertained as to the supernatural side to the sudden change of a priest for a monk to communicate him; happy, also, to know that not only had Christ not repulsed him in spite of all the disorders of his life, but that He was encouraging him and giving him pledges, ratifying the signs of His favours by perceptible acts. And nevertheless he was uneasy, for he knew himself to be barren, and felt that it was necessary for him to be grateful for this goodness by a struggle with himself and an entirely new existence differing completely from that he had hitherto led.
"Well, we shall see!" and he went off to the office of Sext almost calmed, and thence to dinner, where he found M. Bruno.
"We will go for a walk to-day," said the oblate, rubbing his hands.
Durtal looked at him with astonishment.
"Yes, indeed, I thought that after a communion a little air outside the walls would do you good, and I proposed to the Reverend Father Abbot to free you from the rule for to-day, if the offer is not disagreeable to you."