my son conversant with the works, and you will explain to him the purchases we have made for the past six months. From to-morrow he will accompany you in your round of visits to where the fellings and cuttings are being carried out in the interests of the firm."
The door was shut again.
That young enthusiast, the elegant Jean Oberlé, was standing in front of his father. He held out his hand to him and said, pale with joy:
"Now I am again some one in Alsace! How I thank you!"
The father took his son's hand with a somewhat studied effusion. He thought:
"He is the image of his mother! In him I find again the spirit, the words, and the enthusiasm of Monica." Aloud he said:
"You see, my son, that I have only one aim in view, to make you happy. I have always had it. I agree to your adopting a career quite different from the one I chose for you. Try now to understand our position as your sister understands it."
Jean went away, and his father, a few minutes later, went out also. But while M. Joseph Oberlé went towards the house, being in haste to see his daughter, the only confidante of his thoughts, and to report the conversation he had just had with Jean, the latter crossed the timber yard to the left, passed before the lodge, and took the road to the forest. But he did not go far, because the luncheon hour was approaching. By the road that wound upward he reached the region of the vineyards of Alsheim, beyond the hop-fields which were still bare, where the poles rose tied together, like a stack of arms. His soul was glad. When he came to the entrance of a vineyard which he had known since his earliest childhood, where he had gathered the grapes in the days of long ago, he climbed on to a hill which overlooked the road and the rows of vines at the bottom. In spite of the grey light, in spite of the clouds and the wind, he found his Alsace beautiful, divinely beautiful – Alsace, sloping down very gently in front of him, and becoming a smooth plain with strips of grass and strips of ploughed land, and whence the villages here and there lifted their tile roofs and the point of their belfries. Round, isolated trees – leafless because it was winter – resembled dry thistles; some crows were flying, helped by the north wind, and seeking a newly sown spot.
Jean raised his hands, and spread them as if to embrace the expanse of land stretching out from Obernai, which he saw in the farthest undulations to the left, as far as Barr, half buried under the avalanche of pines down the mountain-side. "I love thee, Alsace, and I have come back to thee!" he cried. He gazed at the village of Alsheim, at the house of red stone which rose a little below him, and which was his; then at the other extremity of the pile of houses, inhabited by the workmen and peasants, he marked a sort of forest promontory which pushed out into the smooth plain. It was an avenue ending in a great group of leafless trees, grey, between which one could see the slopes of a roof. Jean let his eyes rest a long time on this half-hidden dwelling, and said: "Good day, Alsatian woman! Perhaps I am going to find that I love you. It would be so good to live here with you!"
The bell rang for luncheon, rang out from the Oberlés' house, and recalled him to himself. It had a thin, miserable sound, which gave some idea of the immensity of free space in which the noise vanished away, and the strength of the tide of the wind which carried it away over the lands of Alsace.
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST FAMILY MEETING
Jean turned slowly towards this bell which was calling him. He was full of joy at this moment. He was taking possession of a world which, after some years, had just been opened to him and pointed out as his place of habitation, of work, and of happiness. These words played on his troubled mind deliciously. They pursued each other like a troop of porpoises, those travellers on the surface, and other words accompanied them. Family life, comfort, social authority, embellishments, enlargements. The house took to itself a name – "the paternal home." He looked at it with tenderness, following the alley near the stream; he went up the steps with a feeling of respect, remembering that they had been built by the grandfather to whom the house still belonged, as also all the grounds except the saw-mill and the timber yard.
After having gone across the entrance hall, which extended from the front to the back of the house, he opened the last door on the left. The dining-room was the only room which had been "done up" according to the directions and the taste of M. Joseph Oberlé. Whilst one found elsewhere – in the drawing-room, the billiard-room, and the other rooms – the furniture bought by the grandfather, of yellow or green Utrecht velvet and mahogany, "My Creation," according to the expression of M. Joseph Oberlé, showed a complete absence of line. Colour took the place of style. The walls were covered with wainscoting of veined maple, blue-grey, purple in places, ash-grey, and pink-grey, covering half the height of the room. Above this, and reaching to the small beams, were four panels of stretched cloth, decorated with designs of smooth felt representing irises, hollyhocks, verbena, and gladioli. Everywhere, as far as possible, the straight line had been modified. The door mouldings described curves which rambled madly like stalks of tropical bindweed without any apparent reason. The framework of the large window was curved. The chairs of bent beechwood came from Vienna. The whole had no character, but a charm of softened light, and a remote resemblance to the vegetable kingdom. One would have taken it for the dining-room of a newly married couple.
The four usual table companions Jean was going to meet there hardly corresponded to this joyous picture, and there was no harmony between them and the decorations of the room. They invariably sat in the same places, round the square table, according to the established order of deep affinities and antipathies.
The first to the left of the window, the nearest to the glass, which shed on her the reflection of its levelled edges, was Madame Monica Oberlé, tall and slender, with a face that had been rounded and fresh, but was now pale, lined, and thin. She gave the impression of a being accustomed only to hear around her the words "You are wrong." Her short-sighted eyes, very gentle, glanced at the guests who were introduced to her with a smile always ready to withdraw and fade away. They only paused after they had looked about for a little time, when nothing had repulsed or misunderstood them. Then they revealed a clear intelligence, a very kind heart, become a little shy and sad, but still capable of illusions and outbursts of youth. No one could have had a more careless youth, nor one that seemed a less fitting preparation for the part she had to play later. She was then called Monica Biehler, of the ancient family Biehler of Obernai. From the top of her father's house, whose fortified gable-end rises on the ramparts of the little town, she saw the immense plain all round her. The garden full of trimmed box and pear-trees, and hawthorn, where she played, was only separated by an iron railing from the public promenade built on the old wall, so that the vision of Alsace was printed each day on this child's soul, and at the same time love of her country, so happy then – love of its beauty, its peace, and its liberty, of its villages, whose names she knew, whose rosy bunches of grapes she could have pointed out among the harvest fields. Monica Biehler knew nothing else. She only left Obernai to go with all the family to spend two summer months in the lodge at Heidenbruch, in the Forest of Sainte Odile. Only once did she happen to cross the Vosges, the year before her wedding, to make a pilgrimage to Domrémy in Lorraine. Those had been three days full of enthusiasm. Madame Oberlé remembered those three days as the purest joy of her life. She would say: "My journey in France." She had remained simple; she had kept, in her very retired life at Alsheim, the easy fears, but also the sincerity – the secret boldness of her youthful affection for the country and for the country people. She had therefore suffered more than another would have done in her place, in seeing her husband draw near to the German party in Alsace, and finally join it. She had suffered in her Alsatian pride, and still more in her maternal love. For the same cause which separated her morally from her husband, her children were taken from her. The lines on her face, faded before its time, could each have borne a name, that of the grief which had scored them there: the line of despised goodness, the line of useless warnings, the line of her insulted country, of separation from Jean and Lucienne, of the uselessness of the treasure of love she had stored up for them during her single and married life.
Her bitterness had been the greater because Madame Oberlé had no illusions as to the true motives which guided her husband. And this he had divined. He was humiliated by this witness whom he could not deceive, and whom he could not help esteeming. She personified for him the cause which he had abandoned. It was to her he spoke when he