“Come inside, Monsieur Lefèbre; I have something to show you in my garden.”
She led him through the house and into the garden where the new growth of the year was pushing up through broken bricks and coils of wire, old tins, the rusty frame of a bedstead, battered petrol cans, barbed wire, the wheel of a cart. The wooden frame and rusting springs of an old box-mattress lay across the path. But Mère Vitry was looking at none of this rubbish. She was pointing upwards and smiling at a gigantic apple tree whose limbs had been shot away. The tree was nothing but a torso, a huge, mutilated stump, but from one limb a young branch had grown out and brandished against the blue sky two little sprays of white blossom.
“That is fine, is it not, monsieur? He is holding up his flag; he is not beaten.”
She laughed.
“Here we are together, the old woman and the old tree. I flourish a broom, he waves a bit of blossom. What do you think of it, monsieur?”
The priest’s face was lit up like the face of a saint.
“It is France,” he said, “the very soul of my country.”
XXXIII
Manon had described to Paul Mère Vitry’s return to Beaucourt, and Brent had been so touched by it that he went down very early next morning to the house in the Rue Romaine. The old fruit tree welcomed him, throwing its white banner against the flush of the dawn, and he set to work at disentangling the miscellaneous rubbish from the dew-wet weeds. He had cleared away all the heavy débris and made a dump of it on the cobbled path between the cottage and the roadway when he was surprised by another enthusiast, Monsieur Marcel Lefèbre.
“Good morning,” said the priest; “it seems that I am a little late.”