In his little garden, all suffused with the tender radiance, his fruit-trees, set in rows, outlined in shadows upon the paths their slender limbs of wood, scarce clothed with verdure. The giant honeysuckle, clinging to the house wall, exhaled its delicious, honeyed breath—the soul of perfume seemed to hover about in the warm, clear night.
He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink their wine; and he walked slowly, ravished, amazed, his niece almost forgotten.
When he reached the open country he paused to gaze upon the broad sweep of landscape, all deluged by that caressing radiance, all drowned in that soft and sensuous charm of peaceful night. Momently the frogs sounded out their quick metallic notes, and distant nightingales added to the seductive moonlight their welling music, which charms to dreams without thought—that gossamer, vibrant melody born only to mate with kisses.
The Abbé moved on again, his courage unaccountably failing. He felt as though he were enfeebled, suddenly exhausted—he longed to sit down, to linger there, to glorify God for all His works.
A little farther on, following the winding of the little river, curved a row of tall poplars. Suspended about and above the banks, enwrapping the whole sinuous course of the stream with a sort of light transparent down, was a fine white mist, shot through by the moon-rays, and transmuted by them into gleaming silver.
The priest paused once again, stirred to the deeps of his soul by a growing, an irresistible feeling of tenderness.
And a doubt, an undefined disquietude, crept over him; he discerned the birth of one of those questions which now and again came to him.
Why had God made all this? Since the night was ordained for slumber, for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything, why should He make it lovelier than the day, sweeter than dawn and sunset? And that star, slow-moving, seductive, more poetic than the sun, so like to destiny, and so delicate that seemingly it was created to irradiate things too subtle, too refined, for the greater orb—why was it come to illuminate all the shades?
Why did not the most accomplished of all singing birds repose now like the others, instead of singing in the unquiet dark?
Why was this semi-veil cast over the world? Why this sighing of the heart, this tumult of the soul, this languor of the flesh?