This morning her foster-mother was in waiting to accompany her. The cold was keen in the greyness of the dawn; the sun, which at noon would vivify the winter landscape to summer-like warmth, was still hidden in the nether world, the earth and the sea were dark, the stars still lingered in the shadowy skies.
‘What folly, pétiote!’ muttered Nicole, who had her lanthorn, ‘to get up out of your bed to go and sing an ave! If it were to pack a crate of oranges there would be some sense!’
‘Hush, please,’ said Yseulte gently. ‘Perhaps grandmère hears.’
The memory of the old Marquise always touched and silenced the irreligious grumbling of Nicole. She said nothing more, but toiled on stoutly, her lanthorn twinkling amongst the rough grass, white with passing frost.
‘The child would be best in her bed,’ she thought; ‘but there is one thing,—she never takes cold. One would like to think the saints had a care of her, but that is all rubbish; even our mayor says so now, and he is such a dunderhead, what he cannot stomach nobody can.’
Still Nicole, who came to Mass for her sake, though the good woman in her soul hated the bigots, the black beetles, of the church, held on her way up the hill, stumbling over the roots of the old olives; it pleased the pétiote that she should come, and after all it could do no harm.
Eager, proud, joyous—more joyous she feared than was meet for the sanctity of the hour and the errand—Yseulte led her into the church as the first pale light of daybreak spread itself over the earth.
‘Now you will see how beautiful it is!’ she murmured to Nicole.
Alas, the fair garden she had made and left at twilight was a ruin now! Where she had caused the metal and the wood and the stone to bloom as with the blossoms of Paradise, there were only poor pale yellow withered things colourless as ashes!
The frost of the night had stolen the glory from the flowers as the hand of the Church would strike the youth from her life and leave it hard and dumb as a stone. The blossoms had died of cold like little children lost in the snow, like bright butterflies beaten down and drowned in a storm of hail.