Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/58

 For Florian, indeed, the battle had already commenced. He was fighting it now, fiercely, under that smiling summer sky, between those fragrant meadows, fringed with flowering hedges, amongst the clustering orchards and smiling farms, the green nooks, the gleaming waters, and the free, fresh range of wooded hill and dale in pleasant Normandy. Little thought the buxom peasant-woman, with her clean white cap, long earrings, and handsome weather-beaten face, as she crossed herself in passing, and humbly received the muttered benediction—how much of war was in his breast who proffered peace to her and hers; or the prosperous farmer riding by on his stamping grey stallion, with tail tied up, broad, well-fed back, huge brass-bound saddle, and red-fronted bridle—how enviable was his own contented ignorance compared with the learning and imagination and aspirations running riot in the brain of that wan hurrying priest. The fat curé, thinking of his dinner, his duties, and the stone-fruit ripening on his wall, greeted him with professional friendliness, tempered by profound respect; for in his person he beheld the principle of self-devotion which constitutes the advance, the vanguard, the very forlorn hope of an army in which he felt himself a mere suttler or camp-follower at the best; but his sleep that afternoon over a bottle of light wine in his leafy arbour would have been none the sounder could he have known the horror of doubt and darkness that weighed like lead on his brother's spirit—the fears, the self-reproaches, the anxieties that tore at his brother's heart.

Yet the same sun was shining on them all; the same glorious landscape of wood and water, waving corn and laughing upland—gold, and silver, and blue, and green, and purple—spread out for their enjoyment; the same wild-flowers blooming, the same wild-birds carolling, to delight their senses; the same heaven looking down in tender pity on the wilful blindness and reckless self-torture of mankind.

Florian had entered the order, believing that in so doing he adopted the noblest career of chivalry below, to end in the proudest triumph of victory above. Like the crusaders of the Middle Ages, he turned to his profession, and beheld in it a means of ambition, excitement,