But was it only an adventure?
He had pushed the gig along the Rue de Rosières, and had begun to unload the timber, stacking it in the back room on the right of the passage. Each time he carried in a length of timber that reached from the floor to some twelve feet up the wall, he found himself thinking, “Another rafter for Manon.”
“Mon ami,” he thought, using those words of hers, “why worry? We fools are always looking six months ahead and missing the glass of wine on the table.”
He decided that he would not be a creator of problems, but march straight ahead towards the broad sweep of this new horizon.
Brent spent the rest of the day in dismantling the framework of the largest of the huts, and in carting the timber to the café. The work had gone so well that he now had nearly all the material he needed for the rough work on the house, and the material included a couple of deal doors and four window-frames. One of the huts in the field on the road to Rosières had a wooden floor, and Brent made up his mind to salve that floor, for the boards would be invaluable when he came to dealing with three upper rooms. Just before dusk fell he trundled the barrow over to the factory and brought back a load of lime, making a second journey for some sand. The first job on the morrow would be the re-bricking of the holes in the walls, and after supper, when the moon rose, he went out again with the barrow and collected bricks.
Brent had not entered the cellar since Manon had left it, and at the end of that long day when he had taken his food cold, and between heroic spells of work, he went down the flight of steps into the darkness of the place. He stood holding the ground sheet aside, aware of a something that was Manon, a faint perfume—a perfume that had clung about her clothes. It made Brent think of a bed of gilliflowers on an evening in May.
He smiled, lit the candle, and glanced round the cellar. Manon had tidied everything before leaving. The cups and plates were white and clean on the shelves, she had made the bed, and left the stove filled with wood ready for a match. Old Mère Vitry’s picture of the Sacred Heart stood on the table, leaning against the wall. Brent found himself looking at it.
“There’s something in that—after all,” he thought; “and yet she says that she is not a Catholic!”
He lit the stove and watched the yellow flames climb up through the wood, and his thoughts were with Manon and her religion. These old beliefs, superstitions, as he had learnt to call them, these woodland shadows and red blaze of sunset glass, those saints, and martyrs, miracles, the wine that was blood, the tears, the terrors, the quaint paganism that lingered like sunlight on the dark edge of the eternal mystery! He had a feeling that the very soil of Beaucourt was saturated with this most human essence. It was like the sap in the roots of the plants and trees. The moderns were educated; they were—in the mass—very material people. Even these French peasants were children of the age of reason, and yet the sap was there under their feet, the mystic heritage of centuries. That was how Paul felt it in the person of Manon Latour. The scientific farmer thinks of his artificial manure and is apt to forget the spring. The miracle has got lost inside the machine. Yet the orchards put on their white garlands like girls who feel the great mystery within them.
“One always comes back to it,” said Brent.