“Oh, nothing ever disturbs me, Monsieur. I can work equally well before anyone. As the design is yours, it is quite natural that you should wish to follow the execution of it.”
Quite discountenanced by this reception, Felicien would not have dared to have taken a seat, had not Hubertine welcomed him cordially, as she smiled in her sweet, quiet way at this excellent customer. Almost immediately she resumed her work, bending over the frame where she was embroidering on the sides of the mitre the Gothic ornaments in guipure, or open lacework.
On his side, Hubert had just taken down from the wall a banner which was finished, had been stiffened, and for two days past had been hung up to dry, and which now he wished to relax. No one spoke; the three workers kept at their tasks as if no other person had been in the room with them.
In the midst of this charming quiet, the young man little by little grew calmer. When the clock struck three, the shadow of the Cathedral was already very long, and a delicate half-light entered by the window, which was wide open. It was almost like the twilight hour, which commenced early in the afternoon for this little house, so fresh and green from all the verdure that was about it, as it stood by the side of the colossal church. A slight sound of steps was heard on the pavement outside; it was a school of young girls being taken to Confession.
In the workroom, the tools, the time-stained walls, everything which remained there immovable, seemed to sleep in the repose of the centuries, and from every corner came freshness and rest. A great square of white light, smooth and pure, fell upon the frame over which Hubertine and Angelique were bending, with their delicate profiles in the fawn-coloured reflection of the gold.
“Mademoiselle,” began Felicien, feeling very awkward, as he realised that he must give some reason for his visit—“I wish to say, Mademoiselle, that for the hair it seems to me it would be better to employ gold rather than silk.”
She raised her head, and the laughing expression of her eyes clearly signified that he need not have taken the trouble of coming if he had no other recommendation to make. And she looked down again as she replied, in a half-mocking tone:
“There is no doubt about that, Monsieur.”
He was indeed ridiculous, for he remarked then for the first time that it was exactly what she was doing. Before her was the design he had made, but tinted with water-colours, touched up with gold, with all the delicacy of an old miniature, a little softened, like what one sees in some prayer books of the fifteenth century. And she copied this image with the patience and the skill of an artist working with a magnifying glass. After having reproduced it with rather heavy strokes upon the white silk, tightly stretched and lined with heavy linen, she covered this silk with threads of gold carried from the bottom to the top, fastened simply at the two ends, so that they were left free and close to each other. When using the same threads as a woof, she separated them with the point of her needle to find the design below. She followed this same drawing, recovered the gold threads with stitches of silk across, which she assorted according to the colours of the model. In the shaded parts the silk completely hid the gold; in the half-lights the stitches of silk were farther and farther apart, while the real lights were made by gold alone, entirely uncovered. It was thus the shaded gold, that most beautiful of all work, the foundation being modified by the silks, making a picture of mellow colours as if warmed from beneath by a glory and a mystic light.
“Oh!” suddenly said Hubert, who began to stretch out the banner by separating with his fingers the cords of the trellis, “the masterpiece of a woman who embroidered in the olden time was always in this difficult work. To become a member of the Corporation she had to make, as it is written in the statutes, a figure by itself in shaded gold, a sixth part as tall as if life-size. You would have been received, my Angelique.”