When Lucienne left Jean he had turned round the house, crossed a semicircular court formed by stables and coach-houses, then a large kitchen-garden surrounded by walls, and opening a private door at the end on the right he found himself in the country, behind the village of Alsheim. His first joy at his return had already lessened and faded. He heard again sentences which had sunk into the depths of his soul; their very accent came back to him with the appearance and the gesture of the one who had uttered them.
He thought of the "sad house" there quite close to the wall which enclosed the grounds, and it pained him to remember what an entirely different idea he had formed years ago of the welcome which awaited him at Alsheim, and the almost religious emotion he had felt far away, in the towns and on the roads of Europe and the East, when he thought, "My mother, my father, my sister! My first day at home after my father has said yes!" The first day had begun. It had not been, up to the present, worthy of this old-time dream.
Even the weather was bad. Before him the plain of Alsace, smooth, scarcely marked with some lines of trees, stretched out to the foot of the Vosges, covered with forests which made their height appear less than it was. The north wind, blowing from the sea, filling all the valley with its continuous wailing, chased the dark clouds from the sky, broken and heaped together like furrows in fields, clouds full of rain and hail, which would dissolve in compact masses to fall in the south, on the side of the Alps. It was cold.
Meanwhile Jean Oberlé, having looked to the left, from the side where the land declined a little, perceived the avenue ending in a little wood, which he had seen in the morning, and he felt again that his youth called to her. He made sure no one was watching him from the windows of his home, and he took the path which turned round the village.
It was really only a track traced by people going to, and coming from work. It followed very nearly the zigzag line made by the sheds, the pig-styes, the stables, the barns, the low boundaries commanded by the manure-heaps, fowl-houses, all the back buildings of the dwellings of Alsheim, which had on the other side, on the road, their principal façade, or at least a white wall, a cart-door, and a great mulberry-tree overflowing the edge of it. The young man walked quietly on the beaten track. He passed the church which, almost in the centre of Alsheim, raised its square tower, surmounted by a slate roof in the form of a steeple, with a metal point, and came to the centre of a group of four enormous walnut-trees, serving as landmarks, as ornament and shelter to the last farm in the village. There began the property of M. Xavier Bastian, the mayor of Alsheim, the old friend of M. Joseph Oberlé, a man of influence, rich and patriotic, and to whose house Jean was going. The sound of flails could be heard in the neighbouring yard. It must be the fine, big sons of the Ramspacher, the Bastians' tenants. One had served his time in the German army, the other was going to join his regiment in the month of November. They were threshing under the barn in the old style. Every autumn, every winter, when the miller's store of corn diminished, and when the weather was bad outside, they spread out some sheaves in the shelter, and their flails struck blithely and galloped like colts let loose in high grass. Nothing had stopped the tradition.
"Isn't my Alsheim old?" said Jean to himself. Although he was very anxious not to be recognised, he approached the latticed door which opened on to the fields on this side, and if he did not see the workers, hidden by an unharnessed cart, he saw again with a friendly smile the yard of the old farm, a kind of road bordered with buildings which were only apparently framework with a little earth between the wooden beams, a demonstration of the everlasting strength of the chestnut which had furnished the jambs, the raising pieces, the wooden balconies, and the framework of the windows. No one heard him, no one saw him. He went on his way and his heart began to beat violently. For immediately after the farm of the Ramspachers, the path fell, at right angles, to an avenue of cherry-trees leading from the village to the house of M. Bastian. It was not probable that in this bad weather the Mayor would be far from home. In a few moments Jean would speak with him; he would meet Odile; he would find some means of knowing if she were betrothed.
Odile. All Jean's early childhood was full of that name. The daughter of M. Bastian had formerly been the playfellow of Lucienne and of Jean when the evolution of M. Oberlé had not been affirmed and known in the country-side; a little later she had become the charming vision which Jean saw again at the Munich Gymnasium when he thought of Alsheim; the young, growing girl, whom one saw in the holidays, on Sundays in church, whom one saluted without approaching when Monsieur or Madame Oberlé were present, but also the passer-by of the grape harvest and of the woods, and the walker who had a smile for Lucienne or for Jean met at the turn of a road. What secret enchantment did this girl of Alsheim possess, brought up entirely in the country, except for two or three years passed with the nuns of Notre-Dame in Strasburg, not worldly—less brilliant than Lucienne, more silent and more grave? The same, no doubt, as the country where she was born. Jean had left her, as he had left Alsace, without being able to forget her. He had forbidden himself to see her during his last short stay in Alsheim, in order to prove himself and to find out if truly the memory of Odile would resist a long separation, studies, and travels. He had thought: "If she marries in the interval, it will be a proof that she has never thought of me, and I shall not weep for her." She had not married. Nothing showed that she was engaged. And certainly Jean was going to see her again.
He preferred not to go down the wild cherry avenue, celebrated for its beauty, which guarded the Bastians' property. The people of the little town, the few workers in the neighbouring country, although they were few, would have recognised the manufacturer's son going to the Mayor of Alsheim's. He followed the trimmed blackthorn hedge, which bounded the alley, walking on the red earth or on the narrow border of grass left by the plough at the edge of the ditch. Behind him the noise of the flails in the barn followed him, fading in the distance and scattered by the wind. Jean asked himself: "How shall I approach M. Bastian? How will he receive me? Bah! I arrive; I am supposed to be ignorant of much!"
Two hundred yards to the south of the farm the avenue of wild cherries ended, and the grove, which one saw from so far off, bordered the sown fields. The wood was composed of fine old trees, oaks, planes, and elms, at this time bare of leaves—under which evergreen trees had grown up: pines, spindletrees, and laurels. Jean continued to follow the hedge as it curved across a field of lucerne to a rustic gate, with worn paint and half rotten, which rose between two jambs. A piece of sandstone thrown across the ditch served as a bridge. The laurel-trees growing out over the fence of blackthorn on each side of the upright posts, closed in the view at two yards. When Jean came near, a blackbird flew off, uttering a warning note. Jean remembered that to enter one had only to pass one's hand through the hedge and to lift an iron hook. So he opened the door, and, a little uneasy at his audacity, grazed from his coat to his gaiters by the overgrown branches of an alley far too narrow and hardly ever entered, he came out on to a sanded space, passed several clumps of shrubs edged with box, and arrived at the house on the far side from Alsheim. Here there were plane-trees more than a hundred years old, planted in a semi-circle, which sheltered a tiny lawn and spread their branches over the tiles of an old, low, squat house, from which two balconies projected, topped with overhanging roofs. Store-rooms, presses, barns, and a bee-hive formed the continuation of the master's house, where abundance, good nature, and the simplicity of the old Alsatian homely spirit were in evidence. Jean, kept back for a moment by the irresistible attraction of these places, once so familiar to him, looked at the plane-trees, the roof, a window with a balcony on which ivy grew. He was going to take the few steps which separated him from the half-open door, when on the threshold a tall man appeared, and recognising the visitor made a sign of surprise. It was M. Xavier Bastian. No man of sixty years of age in the division of Erstein was more robust or of a more youthful turn of mind. He had wide shoulders, a massive head, as wide below as above, quite white hair, divided in short locks overlapping each other, his cheeks and the upper lip shaven, the nose large, the eyes fine and grey, the mouth thickset, and on his countenance the sort of prepossessing pride of those who have never known fear of anything. He wore the long frock-coat to which many notable Alsatians remained faithful, even in the villages such as Alsheim, where the inhabitants have no special costume or any memory of having had any.
Seeing Jean Oberlé, whom he had often dandled on his knees, he made a movement of surprise.