The children would get so excited at sight of the lamb and the little cart, that their elders had much ado to keep them from clapping their hands or shouting with glee, which would have been most unseemly in the sacred building.
Then, when the procession was over, they would scramble back into their seats and endure the rest of the Mass as best they could. Nicolette saw it all through the smoke of incense, the flaring candles and the thick, heady air. That was reality! not the dreary present with Tan-tan gone out of Nicolette’s life, and a beautiful stranger with golden hair and gentian-blue eyes shouting petulantly at him or feigning love which she was too selfish to feel. That surely could not be reality: the Bon Dieu was too good to treat Tan-tan so.
And as if to make the past more real still, the sound of fife and bagpipe and tambour struck suddenly upon Nicolette’s ear. She looked up and there was the procession just starting to go round the church, the baskets with the live pigeons, the little cart, the white lamb with its fleece all tied up with ribbons: the same procession which Nicolette had watched from the point of vantage of her father’s knee sixteen years ago, and had watched every year since—at first by Tan-tan’s side, then with him gone, and the whole world a dreary blank to her.
Was this then what life really meant? The same things over and over again, year after year, till one grew old, till one grew not to care? Did life mean loneliness and watching the happiness of others, while one’s own heart was so full that it nearly broke? Then, if that was the case, why not do as father wished and marry Ameyric?
CHAPTER IX
THE TURNING POINT
The first inkling that Nicolette had of the happenings at the château was on Christmas Day itself after High Mass. When she came out of church with her father some of the people had already got hold of the news: those who had arrived late had heard of it as they came along, and with that agitation which comes into even, monotonous lives whenever the unexpected occurs, groups of village folk stood about outside the church, and instead of the usual chaff and banter, every one talked only of the one thing: the events at the château.
“What? You have not heard?”
“No, what is it?”
“A death in the family.”
“Holy Virgin, who?”