… E chi allora m’avesse domandalo di cosa alcuna, la mia risponsione sarebbe stata solamente amore, con viso vestito d’umiltà.⁠ ⁠…

All Saints’ Day. Outside, a gray light and a cold wind. Christophe was with Cécile, who was sitting near the cradle, and Madame Arnaud was bending over it. She had dropped in. Christophe was dreaming. He was feeling that he had missed happiness: but he never thought of complaining: he knew that happiness existed.⁠ ⁠… Oh! sun, I have no need to see thee to love thee! Through the long winter days, when I shiver in the darkness, my heart is full of thee: my love keeps me warm: I know that thou art there.⁠ ⁠…

And Cécile was dreaming too. She was pondering the child, and she had come to believe that it was indeed her own. Oh, blessed power of dreams, the creative imagination of life! Life.⁠ ⁠… What is life? It is not as cold reason and our eyes tell us that it is. Life is what we dream, and the measure of life is love.

Christophe gazed at Cécile, whose peasant face with its wide-set eyes shone with the splendor of the maternal instinct⁠—she was more a mother than the real mother. And he looked at the tender weary face of Madame Arnaud. In it, as in books that moved him, he read the hidden sweetness and suffering of the life of a married woman which, though none ever suspects it, is sometimes as rich in sorrow and joy as the love of Juliet or Ysolde: though it touches a greater height of religious feeling.⁠ ⁠…

Socia rei humanæ atque divinæ.⁠ ⁠…

And he thought that children or the lack of children has as much to do with the happiness or unhappiness of those who marry and those who do not marry as faith and the lack of faith. Happiness is the perfume of the soul, the harmony that dwells, singing, in the depths of the heart. And the most beautiful of all the music of the soul is kindness.

Olivier came in. He was quite calm and reposeful in his movements: a new serenity shone in him. He smiled at the child, shook hands with Cécile and Madame Arnaud, and began to talk quietly. He watched them with a sort of surprised affection. He was no longer the same. In the isolation in which he had shut himself up with his grief, like a caterpillar in the nest of its own spinning, he had succeeded after a hard struggle in throwing off his sorrow like an empty shell. Some day we shall tell how he thought he had found a fine cause to which to devote his life, in which he had no interest save that of sacrifice: and, as it is ordered, on the very day when in his heart he had come to a definite renunciation of life, it was kindled once more. His friends looked at him. They did not know what had happened, and dared not ask him: but they felt that he was free once more, and that there was in him neither regret nor bitterness for anything or against anybody in the whole wide world.

Christophe got up and went to the piano, and said to Olivier:

“Would you like me to sing you a melody of Brahms?”

“Brahms?” said Olivier. “Do you play your old enemy’s music nowadays?”

“It is All Saints’ Day,” said Christophe. “The day when all are forgiven.”

Softly, so as not to wake the child, he sang a few bars of the old Swabian folksong:

“… Für die Zeit, wo du g’liebt mi hast,
Da dank’ i dir schön,
Und i wünsch’, dass dir’s anders wo
Besser mag geh’n.⁠ ⁠…”

“… For the time when thou did’st love me,
I do thank thee well;
And I hope that elsewhere
Thou may’st better fare.⁠ ⁠…”

“Christophe!” said Olivier.

Christophe hugged him close.

“Come, old fellow,” he said. “We have fared well.”

The four of them sat near the sleeping child. They did not speak. And if they had been asked what they were thinking⁠—with the countenance of humility, they would have replied only:

“Love.”