Page:Calvary mirbeau.djvu/26

20 soul, and palpitating! . . . Ah! yes! . . . I belonged to her, to her only; it was not at all of this conjugal submission that I was born; I was not the fatal consequence of the original sin as other children of men are; no! she had always carried me in her womb, and like Christ I was conceived in a long cry for love. All her troubles, her terrors, her past sufferings she understood now; it was because a great mystery of creation was being enacted in her being.

She had great difficulty in bringing me up, and if I outlived all that had threatened me one might say it was accomplished by a miracle of love. More than twenty times my mother snatched me from the clutches of death. . . . And then what a joy and what a recompense it was to her to see the little wrinkled body fill itself with the sap of health, the rumpled face take on the color of shiny pink, the little eyes open gaily into a smile, the lips, greedy and searching, move and gluttonously pump the life-giving liquid from her nourishing breast! My mother now tasted a few moments of complete and wholesome happiness. A desire to act, to be good and useful, to occupy her hands, heart and spirit, to live at last took hold of her, and even in the most commonplace duties of her household she found a new, a passionate interest which was doubled by a feeling of profound peace. Her gayety came back to her, a natural and gentle gayety without violent outbursts. She made plans, pictured the future to herself with confidence, and many a time she was astonished to discover that she no longer thought of her past—that evil dream which vanished.

I grew. "One can see him getting bigger every day," the nurse used to say. And with rapturous emotions my mother watched the hidden labor of nature which polished the rough places of flesh, giving it more pliant form, more definite features, better regulated move-