"He wants you to pay attention, that is all: it is not right to laugh in church," she answered sternly and gravely.
"He is very angry. Perhaps he did not sleep last night, on account of the wind. Did you hear what an awful wind?"
The woman made no reply; she went into the dining-room and placed on the table enough bread and biscuits to satisfy the twelve apostles. Probably Paul would not touch a thing, but the mere act of moving about and making preparations for him, as though he were sure to come in as merry and hungry as a mountain shepherd, did something to assuage her trouble and perhaps quiet her conscience, which every moment stung her more and more sharply, and the boy's very remark, that "perhaps he was angry because he did not sleep last night," only increased her uneasiness. Her heavy footsteps echoed through the silent rooms as she went to and fro: she felt instinctively that although apparently all was over, in reality it was all only just beginning. She had well understood the words he spoke from the altar, that one must awake early and wash oneself and march forward, and she went to and fro, up and down, trying to imagine that she was marching forward in very truth. She went upstairs to put his room in order; but the mirror and the perfumes still vexed and alarmed her, in spite of the assurance that everything was now at an end, while a vision of Paul, pale and rigid as a corpse, seemed to meet her eyes from the depths of that cursed mirror, to hang with his cassock on the wall and lie stretched lifeless upon the bed. And her heart was heavy within her, as though some inward paralysis prevented her breathing.
The pillow-slip was still damp with Paul's tears and his fevered anguish of the night, and as she drew it off to replace it with a fresh one the thought came to her, for the first time in her life:
"But why are priests forbidden to marry?"
And she thought of Agnes's wealth, and how she owned a large house with gardens and orchards and fields.
Then suddenly she felt horribly guilty in even entertaining such thoughts, and quickly drawing on the fresh pillow-slip she went away into her own room.
Marching forward? Yes, she had been marching since dawn and was yet only at the beginning of the way. And however far one went, one always came back to the same place. She went downstairs and sat by the fire beside Antiochus, who had not moved and was determined to wait there all day, if needs be, for the sake of seeing his superior and making his peace with him. He sat very still, one leg crossed over the other and his hands clasped round his knee, and presently he remarked, not without a slight accent of reproach:
"You ought to have taken him his coffee into the church, as you do when he is delayed there hearing the women's confessions. As it is, he will be famished!"
"And how was I to know he would be sent for in such a hurry? The old man is dying, it seems," retorted the mother.