I stood a little while at the back of a dairy—laiterie—where a milkmaid on her knees, working the white rosary in her hands, was surrounded by a knot of small children. Their prattle was infinitely pleasing. For an instant it seemed to conciliate the monstrous prodigy about us with things human and ordinary.
"Comme, il est beau!" cried a small boy with his hands clapping in delight. "Je crois que les anges descendent sur la terre; n'est ce pas?" and he nudged the oblivious milkmaid who stuck persistently to her rosary.
"Ah, well," said a still smaller girl, "I think they are fairies—all those shining spots—and they come to live with us and help us. Voila."
"Ah then we shall have anything we wish—toys and good clothes I guess," muttered a rather larger girl.
"Yes, Bertha, but you must be very good and not kick Margarite. The fairies are—are—tres particulières. Ils n'aiment pas les filles méchantes."
"But where—where," asked another boy, pushing his way forward among the others, "where did the fairies get so many candles? Pas en Ciel?"
I looked up; there was now a startling glory in the spectacle. The white enveloping banks of ghostly things had become tremulous with countless flickering spires of light, so slightly different from the quality of the entire luminousness, that they appeared and disappeared, with an incessant discontinuity that produced the effect of an interior commotion most strangely beautiful.
We passed from the laiterie into an open pasture, where the cows, motionless and resting, continued to chew their cuds, apathetic and unmoved, while from point to point, marking the houses on our way, the dismayed dogs kept up their long prolonged baying, howls, and half suppressed growls. It was hard to believe that we were still in quite the usual world. Gabrielle retained her composure, and showed no symptoms of exhaustion. I feared her sudden collapse under the double strain of the mere muscular exertion, and that nervous preoccupation that drove her onward to the trenches. The rising ground to a higher hill indicated the approaching terminus of our fevered journey.
"Gabrielle, let us stay here a few minutes. Why kill yourself with this rapid gait? Besides, the morning comes, and then it will be time—quite time enough."
"Yes Alfred, I am quite willing. For a little time past I have noticed the fading of the light. Quintado said that in the daytime the host of the dead would be invisible though their influence would stay. Here—let us sit down and watch."