CHAPTER LXI.
I believe that that spring was the most radiant and the most
ravishingly happy one of my childhood, in contrast no doubt to the
terrible winter spent under the rigorous care of the Great Ape.
Oh! the end of May, the high grass and then the June mowing! In what a
glory of golden light I see it all again!
I took evening walks with my father and sister as I had done during my
earlier years; they now came to meet me at the close of school, at
half-past four, and we set out immediately for the fields. Our
preference that spring was for a certain meadow abloom with pink
amourettes, and I always brought home great bouquets of these flowers.
In that same meadow a migratory and ephemeral species of moth, black
and pink (of the same pink as the amourettes) had hatched out, and
they slept poised on the long stalks of the grass, or flew away as
lightly as the flowers shed their petals when we walked through the
hay. . . . And all of these things appear to me again as I saw them in
the exquisite, limpid June atmosphere. . . . During the afternoon
classes, the thought of the sun-dappled meadows made me more restless
than did even the mild air and the spring odors that came in through
the open windows.
I cherish particularly the remembrance of an evening in which my
mother had promised, as a special favor, to join us in our walk to the
fields of pink amourettes. That afternoon I had been more inattentive
than usual, and the Great Ape had threatened to keep me in, and all
during my lessons I firmly believed that I was to be punished. This
keeping in after school, which shut us away from the beautiful June
day an hour longer, was always a cruel torture. But to-day my heart
felt particularly heavy as I reflected that mamma would, doubtless,
come at the appointed hour and expect me,--and with some bitterness I
thought that the springtime was so very short, that the hay would soon
need to be cut, and that perhaps there would not be, the whole summer
long, such another glorious evening as this one.
As soon as school was over I anxiously consulted the fatal list in the
hands of the monitor; my name was not there! The Big Black Ape had
forgotten me, or had been merciful!
Oh! with what joy I rushed away to join mamma who had kept her promise
and who, with my father and sister, smilingly awaited me. . . . The
air that I breathed in was more delicious than ever, it was
exquisitely soft and balmy, and the atmosphere had a tropical
resplendence.
When I recall that time, when I think of those meadows all abloom with
amourettes, and of those pink moths, there is mingled, to my regret, a
sort of indefinable pain whose intensity I cannot understand, an
anguish I always feel when I find myself in the presence of things
that impress and charm me with their undercurrent of mystery.
