“God is great!” said the soldier, coming to a stand in the middle of the road, of which he saw neither beginning nor end.
“You do me good,” cried Benassis. “It was a pleasure to hear you say over again what I have so often said in the midst of this avenue. There is something holy about this place. Here, we are like two mere specks; and the feeling of our own littleness always brings us into the presence of God.”
They rode on slowly and in silence, listening to their horses’ hoof-beats; the sound echoed along the green corridor as it might have done beneath the vaulted roof of a cathedral.
“How many things have a power to stir us which town-dwellers do not suspect,” said the doctor. “Do you not notice the sweet scent given off by the gum of the poplar buds, and the resin of the larches? How delightful it is!”
“Listen!” exclaimed Genestas. “Let us wait a moment.”
A distant sound of singing came to their ears.
“Is it a woman or a man, or is it a bird?” asked the commandant in a low voice. “Is it the voice of this wonderful landscape?”
“It is something of all these things,” the doctor answered, as he dismounted and fastened his horse to a branch of a poplar tree.
He made a sign to the officer to follow his example and to come with him. They went slowly along a footpath between two hedges of blossoming hawthorn which filled the damp evening air with its delicate fragrance. The sun shone full into the pathway; the light and warmth were very perceptible after the shade thrown by the long wall of poplar trees; the still powerful rays poured a flood of red light over a cottage at the end of the stony track. The ridge of the cottage roof was usually a bright green with its overgrowth of mosses and house-leeks, and the thatch was brown as a chestnut shell, but just now it seemed to be powdered with a golden dust. The cottage itself was scarcely visible through the haze of light; the ruinous wall, the doorway and everything about it was radiant with a fleeting glory and a beauty due to chance, such as is sometimes seen for an instant in a human face, beneath the influence of a strong emotion that brings warmth and color into it. In a life under the open sky and among the fields, the transient and tender grace of such moments as these draws from us the wish of the apostle who said to Jesus Christ upon the mountain, “Let us build a tabernacle and dwell here.”