“Ah! now you are ill, and I am to blame for it,” she said.
But Rosalie shook her head, though she shivered.
“It’s the cold; everything is so damp down here.”
“Yes. Indeed, it has been kind of you. I never hoped to get a model. We can’t ask favours of each other here, and I’m sorry if I tired you; but—but—I don’t know whether it may not be against the rule, so it was best to complete it before the Master came, in order to plead ignorance.”
Truly this last was the most human thing Mariana had ever said to her, the only deviation from a hard, set rule of living.
“Yes,” said Rosalie, smiling despite the faintness and shivering that overcame her. “When you’ve done a thing no one can say anything, can they? At least, they can’t say much.”
Mariana helped her on with her customary dress, and just then the clock outside struck nine.
“My work-time is up now,” she said. “I will return with you.”
Perhaps no one ever greeted fire, and light, and warmth as Rosalie did when back in the small sitting-room in the storey up above. In bed at night she remembered the moths that had flickered round the dim light, and round her also, as if claiming this work as soon as finished, and identifying her with it, so it almost seemed to her. And yet how beautiful the thing had looked, how out of place with its surroundings! Suddenly great tears of bitterness fell on the pillow for this lonely woman, so utterly without the pale of human sympathy, and yet so uncomplaining. How beautiful she was! Once during the fitting on she had thrown a piece of satin on her shoulder, too busy for the second to turn round and put it down. And how its ivory smoothness had matched the smoothness of her neck and cheek. How well it had contrasted with her dark eyes and hair. And then there was about her such a nameless grace and gentle refinement! Yet there she had worked in the cold, damp cell, and been content to work, with apparently no hope for the future, but moths and mildew and decay.
It was in the midst of these reveries on Mariana that Rosalie fell asleep, to wake many times throughout the night, shivering, to think herself alone within that gloomy room below, tried on for shrouds by ghosts with horrid grinning laughter.