But they could not bring themselves to put in my room the old furniture, the old Breton odds and ends, and they excused themselves saying they had found nothing that seemed to them nice enough and suitable enough; and so they had gone to Quimper and bought me a bed like their own, in cherry wood, a light wood, bright and slightly reddish in colour. The tables and chairs are of the same wood. The smallest details have been arranged with tender thought; on the walls, in gilt frames, are drawings which I had made in earlier days and a large photograph of the tower of Saint Pol-de-Léon, which I had given Yves at the time when we were together in the misty waters of the North.
The boards of the floor are as clean as newly-sawn wood.
"You see, brother, everything is as spotless as on board," says Yves, who himself has taken the greatest pains to make it so, and who removes his shoes whenever he goes up so that he may not dirty the stairs.
And I must see everything, go everywhere, even into the store-room where the potatoes are laid by, and the logs of wood for the winter; even into the little vestibule of the staircase where is suspended, like the ex-voto of a sailor in a chapel of the Virgin, a miniature ship which Yves had made during his spare time in the crow's nest of the Primauguet; and finally into the garden where the strawberries and various green things are beginning to push up their fresh shoots in long neat rows.
Now we sit down at the table, Yves, Marie, little Corentine, little Pierre and I, round the spotless white cloth on which the dinner has been placed. And Yves, my brother Yves, becomes self-conscious and nervous all at once in his rôle of master of the house. And so it is I who have to carve, and, as it is the first time in my life, I get a little confused too.
At this dinner, I eat to please them; but this great happiness which I feel here near me and of which in some small measure I am the cause, this deep gratitude which surrounds me, all this moves me very strangely. To be in the midst of these rare things brings me the surprise of a new, delightful experience.
"You know," Yves says to me, low as if in confidence, "I go with her to mass now every Sunday."
And he makes in the direction of his wife a little grimace of childlike submission, very comical to see in one so serious. But his manner with Marie has quite changed, and I saw as soon as I entered that love had come at last to make its home for good and all in the new house. And my dear friends, therefore, have attained all that is best on earth. As Yves said "All that was wanted now was that the pendulum of time should stop so that this great happiness of their fulfilled dreams might never leave them."
They also are silent in their happiness, as if they feared they might frighten it away if they spoke too loud or too lightheartedly about it.
Besides we have to speak of the dead, of that little Yvonne who departed last autumn without waiting for the return of the Primauguet and whom Yves never saw; of old Corentin, her grandfather, who had found the cold weather of December too much for him.