The Children of Alsace Part 14

Odile went away. Jean admired the healthy and beautiful woman disappearing along the road. She walked well, without swinging her body. Above the white neck, Jean placed in imagination the big black bows of the Alsatian women who live beyond Strasburg. She no longer raised her eyes towards the cherry-trees. She let her skirt trail, and it swept the gra.s.s, making a little dust fly, and the petals of cherry blossoms, which flew about a little in the wind before dying.

The day after to-morrow was slow in coming. Jean had said to his father:

"Some pilgrims are going up to Sainte Odile on Sat.u.r.day to hear the Easter bells. I have never been there at this time. If you do not mind, it is an excursion I should much like to make."

He did not mind.

Jean opened his window when he woke that morning. There was a thick fog. The fields near the house were invisible.

"You will not go in this weather?" asked Lucienne, when she saw her brother come into the dining-room, where she was drinking her chocolate.

"Yes, I shall go."

"You will see nothing."

"I shall hear."

"Is it then so extraordinary?"

"Yes."

"Then will you take me?"

She did not wish to go to Sainte Odile. Dressed in a light morning-gown trimmed with lace, and drinking her chocolate in little sips, she had no intention whatever of doing anything but stop her brother on his way and kiss him.

"Seriously, are you making a kind of pilgrimage up there?"

"Yes--a kind of----"

Bending at this moment over her cup, she did not see the quick smile which accompanied the words. She answered a little bitterly:

"You know I'm not devout. I fulfil my obligations as a Catholic but poorly, and the practices of devotion do not tempt me. But you, you have more faith than I have. I am going to tell you what you ought to ask for--it will be worth a pilgrimage, I can tell you." She changed her tone, and her voice became suddenly pa.s.sionate; she raised her eyebrows, her eyes were at once self-willed and affectionate, and she said:

"You must ask for that miracle of perfection among women who will live with you here. When I am married and go away life will be terrible for you here. You will have to bear all alone the misery of the family quarrels, and the suspicions of the peasants. You will have no one to pity you. That is the part to play. Ask for some one strong enough, gay enough, and with a conscience fine enough to do it, since you would live at Alsheim. You see, my thought is that of a friend."

"Of a great friend."

They kissed each other.

"Good-bye, Pilgrim, good-bye--good luck!"

"Good-bye."

Jean got away. He was soon in the park, turned after pa.s.sing through the gate, went through the hop-fields and the vineyards, and so into the forest.

The forest was also full of mist. The serried ma.s.ses of pines, which took the hill as it were by storm, appeared grey from one bank of the stream to the other, and were almost immediately lost in a thick mist without sun and without shadow.

Jean did not go up the beaten track. He went gaily climbing up the woods when not too steep, and stopping sometimes to take breath and to listen if he could not catch above as below, somewhere in the mysterious and impenetrable mists of the mountain, either the voice of Odile or the chant of the pilgrims. But no; he only heard the rus.h.i.+ng of water, or perhaps the voice of some one calling to his dog, or the timid call of some poor peasant of Obernai picking up dead sticks with his child, in spite of the regulation which allows wood-picking only on Thursdays. The saucepan must boil on Easter Sunday! And was not this fog which hid everything a divine protection against the forest guard?

Jean experienced great pleasure from this solitary, stiff climb. As he went up he thought of Odile more and more, and he was more and more glad that he had chosen this holy place of Alsace in which to meet her--and this day--doubly affecting. Everywhere around him the beautiful scalefern which carpets the rocky slopes unfolded its velvet fronds. On all last year's shoots of honeysuckle there were little leaves; the first strawberries were in flower, and the first lilies of the valley. The geraniums, which are so fine in Sainte Odile, lifted their hairy stalks, and the mult.i.tude of whortle berries and bilberries and raspberries, that is the entire undergrowth, whole fields of it, began to pour out on the breeze the perfume of their moving sap. The fog retained these few scents and kept them in like a net work on the sides of the Vosges.

Jean came close to Heidenbruch, looked at the green shutters and went on his way. "Uncle Ulrich," he murmured, "you would be glad if you saw me, and if you knew where I am going, and with whom, perhaps, I shall be presently!" Fidele barked, half asleep, but did not come. The mountain was again deserted. A buzzard called above the mist. Jean, who had not been this way since his childhood, enjoyed the wildness and peacefulness of the place. He reached the higher part, which is the property of the bishopric of Strasburg, and followed the "pagan wall" which surrounds the summit for ten miles, that he might recall his school-boy impressions of long ago.

At midday he had pa.s.sed the Mannelstein rock and entered the convent courtyard, built on the mountain top, a crown of old stone placed above the summit of the pine forests; and there, although there was no crowd, he found groups of pilgrims, carriages with horses unharnessed, fastened to the trunks of ancient lime-trees, grown no one knew how at this alt.i.tude, and covering with their branches nearly the whole enclosure. Jean remembered the way; he went towards the chapels on the right. He merely pa.s.sed through the first, which is painted, but stopped in the second, with elliptical arches leading to the shrine, where lies the wax figure of the patroness of Alsace, the Abbess Sainte Odile--so gentle, with her pink face, her veil, and her golden crozier, her purple mantle lined with ermine.

Jean knelt down: with all the strength of his faith he prayed for his home, so sadly divided against itself, from which he felt glad to be away, and that Odile Bastian should not fail to keep this love tryst, the hour for which was so near at hand. As his was a sincere soul, he added: "Let our way be made clear to us! May we follow it together! Let us see all obstacles removed from our path!"

The whole of Alsace had knelt at the same spot for centuries.

Then he went out to the refectory, where the nuns had begun to help the first visitors. Odile was not there. After the lunch, which was very long, being continually lengthened by the arrival of fresh pilgrims, Jean went hastily to the foot of the great rock on which the convent is built, and finding once more the road which comes from Saint Nabor and pa.s.ses by Sainte Odile's well, he posted himself in a thick part of the wood which overlooked a bend in the road. At his feet was the narrow strip of downtrodden earth, bare of gra.s.s and covered with pine needles, and which seemed hanging in the air. Far beyond that point the slope of the mountain became so steep that he could see no farther. In clear weather you could see to right and left two sunken wooden b.u.t.tresses, but now the curtain of white mist hid everything--the abyss, the slopes, and the trees. But the wind blew and moved the mist, whose thickness, one could feel, varied from minute to minute.

It was two o'clock. In an hour the Easter bells would ring. The people who wanted to hear them could not now be far from the summit, and in the great silence Jean heard, rising upwards from below, voices blending round the bend of the wood. Then a phrase whistled: "_Formez vos bataillons!_" warned him that Alsatian students were near. Two young men--he who had whistled overtaken by another--came little by little out of the fog and went towards the abbey.

Then a young couple pa.s.sed, the wife dressed in black, her square-cut bodice showing a white chemise, and wearing a lace cap like a helmet on her head; the man wore a flowered velvet waistcoat, a jacket with a row of copper b.u.t.tons, and a fur cap.

Weissenburg peasants thought Jean.

Then he saw florid women from Alsheim and Heiligenstein pa.s.s, chattering, but not showing any trace of Alsatian dress.

Among them was a woman from the Munster valley, recognisable by her cap of dark stuff, bound round her head like the handkerchief of the southerners, and decorated in front with a red rosette. Two minutes slipped by. A step was heard through the fog, and a priest appeared--an old, heavy man, who wiped his face as he walked. Two children, very alert, doubtless the belated children of one of the women who had already gone by, overtook him, greeting him in Alsatian with the words, "Praised be Jesus Christ, M. le cure!"

"For ever and ever!" answered the priest.

He did not know them; he only spoke to them to answer the old and beautiful form of greeting. Jean, seated near a pine-tree and half hidden, heard an old man overtake the priest at the bend of the road and say, "Praised be Jesus Christ!"

How many times must that greeting have echoed through the vaults of the forest!

Jean looked before him as one in a dream, who sees only vague figures without attaching any meaning to them.

He stayed like that a short time. Then a murmur, almost imperceptible, so faint as to pa.s.s almost unheard, weaker than the twitter of a bird, was borne up on the fog: "Hail, Mary, full of grace; blessed art thou among women!" Another murmur followed, and finished with "Holy Mary, Mother of G.o.d, pray for us!" and an involuntary agitation, a mysterious certainty, preceded the appearance of two women.

They were both tall. The elder was an old spinster of Alsheim, whose face was the colour of the fog, and who lived in the shadow of the church, which she decorated on feast-days. She looked weary, but she smiled as she recited the rosary. The younger walked on the right, at the edge of the path, even with the slope, her proud head raised.

Her fair hair was like a beautiful piece of pine bark, her body, robust and perfectly proportioned, stood out completely from the pale screen of cloudy mist which filled the bend of the road.

Jean did not move, nevertheless the younger woman saw him, and turned her head towards him. Odile smiled, and without interrupting her prayer, her eyes, turned towards the summit of the mountain, said:

"I will wait for you up there."

The two women did not slacken their steps. With even steps, upright, moving slightly the rosaries which they held in their hands by the swaying of their bodies, they mounted upwards, and were hidden in the shadow of the old wood. Jean let some moments pa.s.s by and followed the same road. At the turning, where the road becomes straight and crosses the crest of the mountain to reach the convent, he saw the two women again. They were walking more quickly, glad to have arrived, their sunshades open, for the mist, which had not dispersed, was now warm, and there were splashes of shadow at the foot of the trees. The sun was going down towards the peaks of the Vosges and towards the plains of France beyond.

The pilgrims who had arrived had already made their pilgrimage to the shrine of Sainte Odile, and were hastening to visit the places consecrated by pious or profane tradition: Sainte Odile's well, St.

John's well, or by the pagan wall along the goat-path to the Rock of Mannelstein, from where there is generally such a lovely view, to the tops of the Bloss and the Elsberg, to the ruined castles which lift their ancient towers among the pines--Andlau, Spesburg, Landsberg, and others. Jean saw the two women cross the courtyard and go towards the chapel. He retraced his steps to the beginning of the wind-swept avenue, along the old building, which reminds one of the advance works of old forts, and pa.s.ses through a vaulted porch used as an entrance.

Ten minutes later Odile came out of the chapel alone, and guessing that Jean Oberle was waiting for her elsewhere rather than in this courtyard too full of onlookers, took the road leading to the forest.

She was dressed in the clothes she had worn on Maundy Thursday, the same dark dress, but her hat was very simple, very youthful, and suited her to perfection: a straw, with a wide brim turned up on one side, and trimmed with a twist of tulle. She carried a summer jacket on her arm, and a sunshade. Odile walked quickly, with her head slightly bent, as those walk who are not interested in the road, or who are either praying or dreaming. When she came near Jean, who was on the right of the portico, she looked up, and said without stopping:

"The woman who came with me is resting. Here I am!"