A low pathetic cry of grief escaped her as she saw the lovely things, which she so ignorantly and innocently had slain, hanging their folded petals in the chill glimmer of the early day as the limbs of infants hang in death.
Her eyes filled with hot quick tears that ran down her cheeks.
‘Oh, look! Oh, look!’ she cried piteously.
‘What could you expect, pétiote,’ said Nicole with rough sympathy, ‘if you bring hothouse flowers from under their glass? Our nights are cold—my man said last night it was two below zero by the mercury tube in our wall. Do not cry, mignonne; you could not help it; you did not think of it; children never do think. But bay and laurel and all those common shrubs are best fit to stand the cold of the church. These things are only aristocrats.’
Nicole checked herself; she remembered the Marquise de Creusac, with the frost of poverty and cruel loss upon her, meeting misfortune with serene courage and unchanging dignity; her comparison, she saw, halted and failed.
Yseulte did not hear; she was thinking piteously, ‘And I did so want him to see how beautiful it all looked through his kindness!’
She was quite sure that Othmar would come to one office or another during the day. She was ashamed to be so occupied with this one thought when the drone of the acolyte was chanting in monotonous sing-song the opening words of the Mass; but it was stronger than herself. She thought of nothing else, to her own surprise and confusion; she was wholly unable to keep her mind to the holy offices of the hour; for the first time, the sonorous Latin words failed to carry her soul with them; she was glancing while she knelt at the closed rickety door, she was wondering whilst she sang the ‘Agnus Dei,’ would he come? She had taken such infinite pains with the flowers, and now all their beauty was gone!—they were only faded, helpless-looking melancholy wrecks of themselves, disfiguring the altar rather than lending it grace and glory.
‘Pauvre pétiote!’ thought Nicole, fingering her beads, and bending her stiff knees from habit. ‘The frost will come just like that to her, and nobody will care. Often have I a mind to go up to Millo and tell them it is a shame, a vile shame; but they would not care, they would have me turned out for an old mad woman.’
The church was very dark; the few lights there were did not dissipate the shadows of the dawn; the clear melodious voice of Yseulte rose in the gloom as a nightingale’s does in the lovelier dusk of a midsummer daybreak.
All her heart thrilled out in it, and when the last notes sank to silence there was a tremor as of tears in them.