Manon paused in the Place de l’Eglise. She was silent now, wide-eyed, serious. She made the sign of the cross as she looked up at the broken spire.
“It is still very beautiful. Let us go in.”
The church of Beaucourt had served many purposes. It had been a hospital, a supply store, a stable, and it carried the stigmata of all these experiences upon its stones. Soldiers had scribbled on its walls, driven in nails, left lewd phrases strung upon the plaster. Whenever it rained there were puddles on the floor. Rubbish and smashed masonry choked the aisles. Someone had slept on the altar and left a dirty mattress there, but the Gothic mystery remained, the awe, that invisible something that is like the sigh of an invisible god.
Brent followed Manon into the church, uncovering his head as she dipped a finger into the imaginary water of the piscina, and made her little obeisance to the altar. She knelt down on the stone floor, and Brent knelt down beside her. She remained thus for some minutes, eyes closed, hands folded,—but Brent did not close his eyes—for his religion was centred in Manon. Brent was just the ordinary man, supremely indifferent to dogmatic religion, well able to live without it, rather mistrustful of the so-called religious people. But Manon’s kneeling figure touched his sense of the beauty of human emotion. Her simple devoutness had the charm of a pleasant picture. It added mystery to her, made her eyes more than mere mirrors of consciousness, her blood more than a red and vitalizing fluid. Brent had always been something of a mystic, a man who had disliked his mysticism reduced to printer’s ink and pews.
A light breeze had sprung up. It played through the broken tracery of the windows and through the rents in the roof, making a soft and plaintive murmur like the rush of invisible wings. Manon opened her eyes, raised her head and smiled. Her face made Brent think of white light. He felt that he could trust Manon as very few women can be trusted; she had not the hard little soul of the modern girl; she would understand a man’s finer impulses; she would not shock him with some sudden little blasphemous confession of crude and vulgar egotism. And yet he realized that she was no fool.
She crossed herself, stood up, and brushed the dirt from her black skirt. It was the practical, pleasantly dainty little Frenchwoman who reappeared.
“They need a broom here. And what a bill there will be for glass!”
They passed out again into the sunlight.
“It was good of you to come with me. In these days men are not devout; they have other things to think of. Are you a Catholic, mon ami?”
Brent hesitated.