"Twelve journeys in the forest," answered his uncle, who leaned, his arms crossed, on the window sill, "this is a fine ending to Lent! My compliments on your mission!" He looked at his nephew in walking-clothes, his strong, masculine face raised in the fog; he was thinking that one could have sworn that he was a French officer, and then, carried away by his imagination, he forgot to say whether or not he would accompany his morning visitor.

"Come, uncle," continued Jean. "Come! Don't refuse me! We will sleep in the inns; you will show me Alsace."

"I walked seven leagues yesterday, my friend!"

"We will only do six to-day."

"You really want me to come?"

"An absence of three years, Uncle Ulrich, think of that, and a whole education to go through!"

"Well! I won't refuse you, Jean; I am too delighted that you should have thought of me. I have even a second reason for agreeing to the journey and to thank you for it. I will tell you presently."

He shut the window. In the silence of the woods Jean heard him call the old valet, who was second in command in Heidenbruch.

"Pierre! Pierre! Ah! there you are! We are going for twelve days into the mountains. I take you with me. You will pack my bag; put it on your back with my nephew's bag. Take your shoes with the nails, your stick, and you will go in front to the halting-place, while Jean and I go to visit the cuttings. Do not forget my waterproof, nor my pocket medicine chest."

Going into the house, the young man saw Uncle Ulrich, full of business and radiant, pa.s.s him, open the drawing-room door, go to the wall, take down a long object in copper on two nails, and go quickly upstairs again.

"What are you taking away, uncle?"

"My telescope."

"Such an old one."

"I cling to it, my friend; it belonged to my great uncle, General Biehler. It saw the back of the Prussians at Jena!"

Half an hour later, in the meadow on the slope in front of the house was M. Ulrich, gaitered like Jean, with a soft hat, the telescope slung over his shoulder, his dog gambolling round him; old Pierre very dignified and solemn, carrying on his mountaineer's shoulders a great pack wrapped in linen and fastened by straps; then Jean Oberle, bending over a staff-officer's map, which the others knew by heart, discussing the two ways to go--the way of the baggage and the way of the walkers. The discussion was short. The servant went on in front, bearing to the left to reach the village where they would sleep, while the uncle and nephew took a path to the middle of the mountain--in a north-easterly direction.

"So much the better that it is a long way," said M. Ulrich, when they gained the shade of the wood. "So much the better. I wish it were for a lifetime. Two people who understand one another and go through the forest--what a dream!"

He half shut his eyes, as painters do, and breathed in the mist with pleasure.

"Do you know," he added, in the way he would have confided to him something delightful, "Do you know that we have had spring here for three days? There it is--that's my second reason!"

The forester said with enthusiasm what the manufacturer had said without admiration. By the same signs he recognised that a new season had begun. With his stick he pointed out to Jean the pine buds, red like arbutus berries; the bursting bark on the beech trunks, the shoots of wild strawberries running along the stones. In the uncovered pathways the north wind still blew, but in the hollows, the combes, the sheltered spots, one felt, in spite of the fog, the first warmth of the sun, which goes to the heart and makes men tremble, that warmth which touches the germ of the plants.

That day, and during those which followed, uncle and nephew lived under wood. They understood one another perfectly, whether they spoke fully on any subject or were silent. M. Ulrich knew the forest and the mountains by heart. He enjoyed this opportunity which had been given him to explain the Vosges and to discover his nephew.

Jean's ardent youthfulness often amused him and recalled bygone times. The instincts of the forester and hunter, slumbering in the young man's heart, were ripening and strengthening. But he had also his rage, his revolts, his juvenile threatening words, against which the uncle protested but feebly, because he really approved of them.

The plaint of Alsace rose to his ear for the first time, the complaining cry the stranger does not hear and the conqueror only half listens to, but can never understand. For Jean did not only observe the forest; he also observed the people of the forest, from the merchants and the officials, feudal lords on whom depend a mult.i.tude almost past numbering, down to woodcutters, jobbers, fellers, carters, charcoal burners, down even to wanderers, shepherds, and swineherds, pedlars of dead wood, freebooters, poachers, myrtle gatherers, who also gather mushrooms and wild strawberries and raspberries.

Introduced by Uncle Ulrich, or pa.s.sing by in his shadow, he aroused no suspicions.

He talked freely with the people--in their words, their silence, and in the atmosphere in which he lived day and night, he absorbed unto himself the very soul of his race. Many did not know France, among the young ones, and could not have said if they loved her, but even those had France in their veins. They did not get on with the German. A gesture, a look, an allusion, showed the secret disdain of the Alsatian peasant for his conqueror. The idea of a yoke was everywhere, and everywhere there was antipathy against the master who only knew how to govern by fear. Other young men of the families with traditions, instructed by their parents in the history of the past, faithful without any precise hope, complained that the poor of the mountain and plain were denied justice and subjected to annoyances if they were suspected of the crime of regretting France.

They spoke of the tricks played by way of revenge on the custom officers, on the police, on the forest guard--proud of their green uniform and of their Tyrolese hat--the stories of smuggling and desertion, of the Ma.r.s.eillaise sung in the taverns with closed doors, of fetes on French land, of perquisitions, domiciliary visits and pursuits, of the comic or tragic duel, useless and exasperating, between the strength of a great country and the mind of a small one. When the latter suffered, its thoughts, inherited from ancestors, through habit and from affection, went over the mountains.

There were also the old folk, and it was M. Ulrich's delight to make them talk. When on the roads, and in the villages, he saw a man of fifty years or more, and he knew him to be an Alsatian, it was seldom that he himself was not recognised and that a mysterious smile did not prepare the question for the Master of Heidenbruch:

"Come, is this not another friend--a child of our family?"

If M. Ulrich, by the expression of the face, by the movement of the eyes, by a little fear sometimes, felt that his conclusion was justified, he added in a low voice:

"You--you have the face of a French soldier!"

Then there were smiles or tears, sudden shocks to the heart, which changed the expression of the face pallors, flushings, pipes taken from the corner of the lips, and often, very often, a hand raised, turned palm outwards, touching the brim of the felt hat, thus making the military salute, as long as the two travellers were in sight.

"Do you see him?" said Uncle Ulrich, quite softly; "if he had a bugle he would play 'La Casquette.'"

Jean Oberle never ceased talking of France. He asked when he came to the top of a mountain ridge: "Are we far from the frontier?" He made the uncle tell him what Alsace was like under the "gentle rule"--what liberty was enjoyed by each and all, how the towns were administered? What difference was there between the French gendarmes--whom M. Ulrich mentioned with a friendly smile as good fellows, not too hard on the poor--and these German gendarmes, common informers, brutal, always officious and full of zeal, whom the whole of the Alsace of to-day hated? What was the name of that prefect of the First Empire who placed by the roadsides of Lower Alsace benches of stone of two tiers so that the women going to market could sit down, and place at the same time their load above them? "The marquis de Lezay Marnesia, my boy."

"Tell me the story of our artists, of our deputies in the old days, of our bishops. Tell me what Strasburg was like in your youth, and what a sight it was when the military band played at Contades?"

M. Ulrich, with the joy of living over again which mingles with all our memories, remembered and related. While climbing and descending the intersections of the Vosges he went through the history of French Alsace. He had only to let his ardent heart speak, and it made him weep. It also made him sing, with the gaiety of a child, the songs of Nadaud, of Beranger, La Ma.r.s.eillaise, or the old Noels, which he sang to the pointed arches of the forest.

Jean took such a pa.s.sionate interest in these evocations of old Alsace, and he so naturally entered into the hatreds and revolts of the present that his uncle, who was at first pleased at it as a sign of good family, ended by growing uneasy. One evening, when they had given alms to an old teacher, deprived of the right of teaching French, and reduced to misery because she was too old to get a German diploma, Jean's anger had carried him away.

"My dear Jean," said the uncle, "you must be careful not to go too far. You have to live with Germans."

Since then M. Ulrich had avoided returning so often to the question of the annexation. But alas! it was the whole of Alsace, it was the landscape, the descending road, the sign of some shop, the women's dress, the type of men, the sight of soldiers, the fortifications at the top of a hill, a finger-post, the different items in a newspaper bought in the Alsatian inn where they had dined in the evening--it was every hour of the day which called their minds back to the condition of Alsace, a nation conquered but not a.s.similated.

In vain did M. Ulrich answer more carelessly and quickly--he could not hinder Jean's thought from travelling the road to the unknown.

And when they climbed together a neck of the Vosges, the elder man saw with pleasure and apprehension Jean's eyes travel to seek the horizon on the west, and gaze there as at some loved face. Jean did not look so long at the east or the south.

A fortnight was employed in visiting the forest of the Vosges, and during this time M. Ulrich came back to Heidenbruch only twice for some hours. The separation took place only on Palm Sunday, in a village of the Valley of Munster.

It was evening--the hour when the valleys of the German side of the mountains were quite blue, and there was only a strip of light on the last pines which surrounded the shade. M. Ulrich Biehler had already said good-bye to this nephew, his dearest friend.

The servant had taken the train that same morning for Obernai, M.

Ulrich, the collar of his cloak turned up because the cold was piercing, had just whistled to Fidele and was leaving the inn, when Jean, in his blue hunting-costume, without a hat, came down the flight of steps.

"Again good-bye," he said.

And as the uncle, very upset, and not wishing to show it, made a sign with his hand to avoid words which might be tremulous--

"I will go with you to the last house of the village," continued Jean.

"Why, my boy, it is useless to prolong----"

His head turned towards his uncle, and his uncle, looking down the road, Jean began to walk. He commenced in his cajoling young voice:

"I am inexpressibly sorry to leave you, Uncle Ulrich, and I must tell you why. You understand before one says twenty words. You do not contradict aggressively: when you are not of my opinion, I know it by your mouth, which makes the point of your white beard rise--that is all. You are kind. You do not get angry, and I feel you are very decided. Other people's ideas all seem familiar to you--you are able to answer them so easily; you are respected by the weak. I was not accustomed to that on the other side of the Rhine."

"Bah! bah!"

"I even appreciate your fears about me."

"My fears?"

"Yes. Do you think that I did not see that there is another question which interests me intensely, and of which you have not spoken to me for six days?"