"They are helping to dress the reposoirs, they must all be in readiness for the morning," answered our friend, still beside us, when we asked the cause of this astonishing spectacle.
Everywhere garlands and firs, leaves, flowers, and wreaths; people moving rapidly; the carriers of the crosses stopping to chat for an instant with groups working at some mysterious scaffolding—all shapes in darkness. Everywhere, also, there was the sweet, aromatic scent of the greens and the pines abroad in the still, clear air of the summer night.
This was the perfume and these the dim pictures that were our company along the narrow Coutances streets.
CHAPTER XXVI.
A SCENE IN A NORMAN COURT.
The court-room was brightly lighted; the yellow radiance on the white walls made the eyes blink. We had turned, following our guide, from the gloom of the dim streets into the roomy corridors of the Prefecture. Even the gardens about the building were swarming with townspeople and peasants waiting for the court to open. When we entered it was to find the hallways and stairs blocked with a struggling mass of people, all eager to get seats. A voice that was softened to a purring note, the voice that goes with the pursuit of the five franc piece, spoke to our landlady. "The seats to be reserved in the tribune were for these ladies?"
No time had been lost, you perceive. We were strangers; the courtesies of the town were to be extended to us. We were to have of their best, here in Coutances; and their best, just now, was this mise en scène in their court room.
The stage was well set. The Frenchman's instinctive sense of fitness was obvious in the arrangements. Long lines of blue drapery from the tall windows brought the groups below into high relief; the scarlet of the judges' robes was doubly impressive against this background. The lawyers, in their flowing black gowns and white ties, gained added dignity from the marine note behind them. The bluish pallor of the walls made the accused and the group about him pathetically sombre. Each one of this little group was in black. The accused himself, a sharp, shrewd, too keen-eyed man of thirty or so, might have been following a corpse—so black was his raiment. Even the youth beside him, a dull, sodden-eyed lad, with an air of being here not on his own account, but because he had been forced to come, was clad in deepest mourning. By the side of the culprit sat the one really tragic figure in all the court—the culprit's wife. She also was in black. In happier times she must have been a fair, fresh-colored blonde. Now all the color was gone from her cheek. She was as pale as death, and in her sweet downcast eyes there were the tell-tale vigils of long nights of weeping. Beside her sat an elderly man who bent over her, talking, whispering, commenting as the trial went on.
Every eye in the tribune was fixed on the slim young figure. A passing glance sufficed, as a rule, for the culprit and his accomplice; but it was on the wife that all the quick French sympathy, that volubly spoke itself out, was lavished. The blouses and peasants' caps, the tradesmen and their wives crowded close about the railing to pass their comment.
"She looks far more guilty than he," muttered a wizened old man next to us, very crooked on his three-legged stool.