Strong sunshine and silver rain-storms; the winds of the equinox marshaling great swan-white droves of cloud across the blue, the wet earth sparkling like a jewel. The hill of the crucifix was green, pea-green with the growth of young wheat; the hill of woods opposite, still leafless, had a million delicate buds, cloud on cloud of russet, and bronze, and lilac, and faint yellow, and fainter green, softly rounding the shape of every bush. Great oaks detached themselves, gnarled lichen-gray skeletons, distinct in branch and twig, from purple hollows of the woodland. The valley was a streak of emerald; the river glistened like thin silver in the sun.
So peaceful, and so little changed! Across the stream the bridge lay broken-backed, but sounds of hammering came up through the thin air, and midget figures moved about with wheelbarrows, repairing it. Among the crushed roofs of Poupehan white scaffolding took the eye. Farther down the valley, where the woods had been stripped, and the Roche des Corneilles showed bare and gray on a bare purple hill-side, the young plantations were rising among the brushwood in dotted lines of green. The orchards of the Bellevue, brutally hacked down, had been doctored and replanted, and were whitening with early blossom; and through their branches a quick eye could discern other signs of growth and restoration. Of the original Bellevue not one stone was left upon another, but a new one was rising in its room. Soon, very soon, the scars would heal, and all would be as it had been.
And O, how deep the corn
Along the battlefield!
One change there was, not due to the tide of war. The forlorn wooden cross on the hill-top had gone: had given place to another, a lovely thing in marble, the inspiration of a French artist, standing forty feet high on its pedestal of steps. It had been put up by an English avion, presumably to commemorate his miraculous escape from death on that very spot, though the inscription on the plinth did not quite tally with that theory. Strange that a heretic and an Englishman should choose to erect a crucifix, stranger still to those who had known this Englishman before; but times change, and men with them. At any rate there stood the cross; and Rochehaut, if it could not understand, was inordinately proud of it. "Eh, madame, vous allez au Christ, n'est-ce pas?" said Madame Hasquin of the farm to the wife of her temporary lodger. "Ah! c'est beau ça, savez-vous! Mettez une petite prière pour moi, je vous prie!"
So Lettice, sitting on the steps with a pair of masculine socks, as she had once sat on the stones with the green tablecloth, added a prayer for little murdered Denise (which was what Madame meant by her moi) to the petition requested by the cross:
THE END