There is still the perfume of honeysuckle; but, with the night, have come a penetrating freshness and odours of moss, of earth, of the dampness of Brittany.
All this sleeping countryside, all these wooded hills which surround us, all these slumbering trees, all these tranquillities oppress us. We feel rather like strangers in the midst of it all, and we miss the sea, the sea which, after all, is the great open space, the great unconfined field over which we are accustomed to run.
Yves suffers these impressions and tells me of them in a naïve way, a way peculiarly his own, which would scarcely be intelligible to anyone but me. In the midst of his happiness, an uneasiness troubles him this evening, almost a regret that he should unthinkingly have fixed his destiny in this remote little cottage.
And presently we come upon a calvary, stretching out in the darkness its two grey arms, and we think of all these old granite chapels which lie here and there around us, isolated in the beech woods . . . in which the souls of the dead keep vigil.
[CHAPTER XLVII]
On the following day, Thursday, the 16th of June, 1878, in radiant weather, the baptismal party gets ready in the cottage of the Keremenens.
Anne, her back turned towards me in a corner, adjusts her coif before a mirror, a little embarrassed to be obliged to do so in my presence; but the cottages of Brittany are not large, and they have no other separations within than the little cupboards in which one sleeps.
Anne is dressed in a costume of black cloth, the open corsage of which is embroidered with different coloured silks and silver spangles; she wears an apron of blue moire, and, overflowing her shoulders, a white thousand-pleated collarette which remains rigid like a ruff of the sixteenth century. For my part, I have put on a uniform with bright gold facings and, certainly, we shall make a pretty picture presently, arm in arm, in the green lane.
In attendance on the baby this morning is a new personage, a very ugly and very extraordinary old woman, who assumes an air of much importance and receives general obedience: she is the nurse, it appears.
"She looks rather like a witch," says Anne, who guesses my thought. "But she is really a very good woman."