"Mother, it's Henri's birthday to-day."
"Yes, I know," said Mme. Mauperin without moving.
"Suppose we were to go to church?"
Mme. Mauperin rose and went out of the room, returning very soon with
her bonnet and cape on. Half an hour later M. Mauperin was helping his
daughter out of the carriage at the Maricourt church-door. Renée went to
the little side-chapel, where the marble altar stood on which was the
little miraculous black wooden Virgin to which she had prayed with great
awe as a child. She sat down on a bench which was always there and
murmured a prayer. Her mother stood near her, looking at the church and
not praying at all. Renée then got up and, without taking her father's
arm, walked with a step that scarcely faltered right through the church
to a little side door leading into the cemetery.
"I wanted to see whether _that_ was still there," she said to her
father, pointing to an old bouquet of artificial flowers among the
crosses and wreaths which were hung on the tomb.
"Come, my child," said M. Mauperin; "don't stand too long. Let us go
home again now."
"Oh, there's plenty of time."
There was a stone seat under the porch with a ray of sunshine falling on
it.
"It's warm here," she said, laying her hand on the stone. "Put my shawl
there so that I can sit down a little. I shall have the sun on my
back--there."
"It isn't wise," said M. Mauperin.
"Oh, just to make me happy." When she was seated and leaning against
him, she murmured in a voice as soft as a sigh, "How gay it is here."
The lime-trees, buzzing with bees, were stirring gently in the faint
wind. A few fowl in the thick grass were running about, pecking and
looking for food. At the foot of a wall, by the side of a plough and
cart, the wheels of which were white with dry mud, on the stumps of some
old trees with the bark peeled off, some little chickens were frolicking
about, and some ducks were asleep, looking like balls of feathers. There
seemed to be a murmur of hushed voices from the church, and the light
played on the blue of the stained-glass windows. Flights of pigeons kept
starting up and taking refuge in the niches of sculpture and in the
holes between the old grey stones. The river could be seen and its
splashing sound heard; a wild white colt bounded along to the water's
edge.
"Ah!" said Renée after a few moments, "we ought to have been made of
something else. Why did God make us of flesh and blood? It's frightful!"
Her eyes had fallen on some soil turned up in a corner of the cemetery,
half hidden by two barrel-hoops crossed over each other and up which
wild convolvulus was growing.