Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/76

52 herself as a young girl, a little milkmaid, standing in the shadow of the beech which commanded the vast plain of Campine. Blandine hears again the frogs croaking in the ponds and ditches, and her heart delights, as long ago, in the scent of burning newly-clipped wood, that the breeze carries leagues away from those localities. Shepherds' bivouacs, betrayed in the twilight by their spirals of smoke, and at night, by their thin pale flames! Soul of the infinite plain! Barbaric perfume, herald of the region, that none who has once breathed it can ever forget!

It was with this poetry, if somewhat wild and sad, yet hearty and energetic, inspiritress of duty and even of sacrifices aye, and of unknown acts of heroism, that Blandine was impregnated. She was then a small, hard-worked peasant, but one who found time to dream and to wonder, notwithstanding the hard and continual toils to which her stepmother harnessed her.

There was above all one climacteric period which induced in the pseudo-mistress of Escal-Vigor a sort of homesickness for the past: it was towards the twenty-ninth of June, the day of St. Peter and St. Paul, the