Nicole’s heart swelled too as she heard, half with pain, half with rage.
‘I would sooner she were singing “do’, do’, l’enfant dor’!” by her baby’s cradle,’ thought this heathen.
She attended every office of the church during the next twelve hours, but Othmar came not to one of them. With Vespers all hope of seeing him there—such a vague, innocent, half-conscious hope as it was—had perished quite, like the orchids on the altar.
The day was over: the church had once more no light except that of its twinkling candles; the peasants shuffled to their feet and clattered out over the stones; Nicole began to chatter to the maid; the old vicar had tottered into the sacristy and was pulling off his vestments; the last office was done; the butterfly orchids were dying in the stench of the sputtering candlewicks; the acolyte—a ploughboy in a short linen tunic which showed his hobnailed boots—began to put the wicks out with a brass extinguisher fixed at the end of a long stick; she thought she would never bring flowers there any more—it was cruel—they withered and faded, and who could tell what they might suffer? She had never remembered that before.
The flowers had died in the service of the church; so would she. It had seldom seemed hard before.
While the two women chattered in low tones of the doings of Millo, she turned quickly back to the altar-steps and knelt down there and said one last prayer confusedly, conscious that she had been at fault all through the Mass in thinking of other things than the holy services in which she had taken part.
She rose, with the tears in her eyes, and went out through the little dark aisle between the two women, leaving the poor lost flowers in a confused and shadowy mass upon the altar until dawn, to be tossed away and thrust out under the sacristan’s broom to the dust-heap. Othmar had not come.
He was sitting at his own table, with the Princess Napraxine at his right hand.
The girl could see the lighted windows of his château as she walked down under the olives through the dusky furrows, already dotted with blades of corn, the women still chattering as they came behind her, the woods of Millo black under the moon, the stars shining, a distant watchdog giving tongue.
‘You are late, pétiote,’ said her foster-mother, kissing her hand at the door of the house. ‘But it will not matter; they are all dining at Count Othmar’s; if no one of those cats of gouvernantes tell the Duchesse, she will be none the wiser.’