The officer brought out a note-book and entered the details, while the men put what was left of Beckett into the wooden shell that they had brought in the waggon. Brent stood and looked at the hole in the ground. He was thinking of that morning in March when Beckett had been killed. He remembered the frost on the grass, the sunlight, the stillness, the white splinters of the apple tree, the hob-nails in the soles of Beckett’s boots. The memory carried him to Manon, Manon who was alive, Manon who loved him. He turned away and walked back to the house, conscious of an immense gratitude to her, of a tenderness that had felt the taunt of some unclean act and rushed to purify itself in her presence. How clean and wholesome and human she was! Those dirty, soulless men in khaki spitting into Beckett’s grave; those conscript grave-diggers turning over the bones of a dead valour!
Manon heard him enter the house. She was upstairs. Something in her seemed to divine his mood. She called to him.
“Paul, I am here.”
He climbed the steep staircase that he had built, and found himself in her room—their room. And, suddenly, her arms went round him. She held him close with all her sturdy, human strength, and drew his face down to her shoulder.
“My man has such a soft heart.”
He turned his head, and with an emotion that was very near to tears, kissed her warm throat.
“It might have happened some other day.”
She smiled over him compassionately.
“Well, it is over. That mound there in the orchard always made me a little sad. Now, look, all this is yours and mine; it is ours.”
She made him look round the room at the new bed with its clean linen and red duvet, the rugs on the floor, the curtains that she had tacked up at the windows.