Only one thing was missing—a wooden figure of St. George that had stood on a bracket in the corner. Luc had been fervently religious in his youth and passionately devoted to this image that he had even wished to take to the army with him. His mother, he remembered, had never liked this figure, which she had declared uncouth and hideous. Now, it seemed, she had taken her revenge, for the bracket was empty.
Luc went to the window, where the chestnut leaves were peering against the pane. The green of them, with the sun behind, was translucent as jade, and the workmanship of the white curling flowers seemed a beauty beyond bearing.
As Luc looked at them he took off his sword, his sash, his scarf, his coat, and laid them across the old wand-bottomed chair in the window-seat.
Then he crossed to the square tortoiseshell-framed mirror that hung by the bed and looked at himself in the murky, greenish glass.
No longer a soldier ... he had taken off his uniform for the last time. He stood the same as when he had last left this chamber, save that it was then all before him, now all behind. He gazed at his own face, white above the white shirt, still noble and pleasing, still young, but frail and wasted and sad.
Instinctively he turned, as he had done in his childish troubles, to the corner where St. George had stood. The loss struck him afresh as he, for a second time, beheld an empty bracket, and was symbolic also, for he had travelled far from the help of Christianity since he used to pray to St. George; yet the vacant place smote him. He turned at the opening of the door; a woman came towards him speechlessly, her lips moving and her eyes full of a kind of trembling light.
He sprang to meet her and clasped her strongly; she thrust into his arms what seemed a lump of wood.
“Safe, dear, safe. Did you think I had destroyed it?” she managed to say.
He kissed her cheek and then her hands. She began crying with pleasure. “St. George, Luc,” she murmured. “I have kept him very carefully.”
The young soldier looked at the idol of his childhood; his emotions reached the unbearable agony caused by dim recollections the hand of tenderness beckons from the past. He laid St. George on the bed.