Often he talked to her of God, of his God, walking beside her along the footpaths through the fields. She hardly listened, but looked at the sky, the grass, the flowers, with a joy of living which could be seen in her eyes. Sometimes she rushed forward to catch some flying creature, and, bringing it back, would cry: “Look, uncle, how pretty it is; I should like to kiss it.” And this desire to “kiss flies” or bunches of lilac, worried, irritated, and revolted the priest, who saw, also in that, the ineradicable tenderness which ever springs in the hearts of women.
One day the sacristan’s wife, who kept house for the Abbé Marignan, told him, very cautiously, that his niece had a lover!
He experienced a dreadful emotion, and stood choking, with the soap all over his face, for he was shaving.
When he found himself able to think and speak once more, he cried: “It is not true; you are lying, Mélanie!”
But the peasant woman placed her hand on her heart: “May our Lord judge me if I am lying, Monsieur le Curé. I tell you she goes to him every evening as soon as your sister is in bed. They meet each other beside the river. You have only to go there between ten o’clock and midnight, and see for yourself.”
He ceased scraping his chin and began to pace the room rapidly, as he always did in his hours of serious meditation. When he tried to begin his shaving again, he cut himself three times from nose to ear.
All day long, he remained silent, filled with indignation and rage. To his priestly zeal against the mighty power of love was added the moral indignation of a father, of a teacher, of a keeper of souls, who has been deceived, robbed, outwitted by a child. He felt the egotistical sorrow that parents feel when their daughter announces that she has chosen a husband without them and in spite of their advice.
After his dinner, he tried to read a little, but he could not attune himself to it; and he grew more and more exasperated. When it struck ten, he took his walking-stick, a formidable oaken club which he always carried when he had to go out at night to visit the sick. Smilingly he regarded the enormous cudgel, holding it in his strong, countryman’s fist and cutting threatening circles with it in the air. Then, suddenly, he raised it, and grinding his teeth, he brought it down upon a chair, the back of which split in two, and fell to the ground.
He opened his door to go out; but he stopped upon the threshold, surprised by such a splendid moonlight as one seldom sees.
Endowed as he was with an exalted spirit, such a spirit as must have belonged to those dreamer-poets, the Fathers of the Church, he felt himself suddenly softened and moved by the grand and serene beauty of the pale night.
In his little garden, bathed in the soft brilliance, his fruit-trees, all in a row, were outlining upon the walk the shadows of their slender wooden limbs scarcely clothed with green; while the giant honeysuckle climbing up the wall of the house exhaled delicious breaths as sweet as sugar, which hovered through the warm, clear night like a perfumed soul.
He began to breathe deep, drinking in the air as drunkards drink their wine, and he walked slowly, delighted, surprised, almost forgetting his niece.
As he stepped into the open country he stopped to contemplate the whole plain, inundated by this caressing radiance, and drowned in the tender and languishing charm of the serene night. In chorus the frogs threw into the air their short, metallic notes, and to the seduction of the moonlight, distant nightingales added that fitful music of theirs which brings no thoughts but dreams, that light and vibrant music which seems attuned to kisses.
The abbé continued his walk, his courage failing, he knew not why. He felt, as it were, enfeebled, and suddenly exhausted; he had a great desire to sit down, to stop there and contemplate and admire God in all His works.
Below him, following the twists of the little river, wound a great line of poplars. Around and above the banks, wrapping all the tortuous watercourse in a kind of light, transparent wadding, hung suspended a fine mist, a white vapour, which the moon-rays crossed, and silvered, and caused to gleam.
The priest paused again, penetrated to the depths of his soul by a strong and growing emotion. And a doubt, a vague uneasiness, seized on him; he felt that one of those questions he sometimes put to himself was now arising within him.
Why had God done this? Since the night is destined for sleep, for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything, why, then, make it more charming than the day, sweeter than dawns and sunsets? And this slow, seductive star, more poetical than the sun, and so discreet that it seems designed to light up things too delicate, too mysterious, for the great luminary—why had it come to brighten all the shades?
Why did not the sweetest of all songsters go to rest like the others? Why set himself to singing in the disturbing shadows? Why this half-veil over the world? Why these quiverings of the heart, this emotion of the soul, this languor of the body? Why this display of seductions which mankind never sees, since men are asleep in their beds? For whom was this sublime spectacle intended, this flood of poetry poured from heaven to earth? The abbé did not understand it at all.
But then,
