He rang the bell, and moved on along the street that was cumbered with the wreckage of humble households. The old woman in sabots preceded him, assiduously lighting his path. And the boy and girl came after the priest, walking side by side decorously. But presently, when Juliette stumbled, Carolan took her hand.
"Ting!"
They might have been walking to the Sepulcher on that earliest Easter morning, when He Who wrought man in His Own Image broke asunder the bonds of Death. The air was sweet with a wonderful reviving fragrance. Their pulses throbbed calmly, their blood flowed through their veins smoothly as new milk. Presently the old woman who walked before them began in a monotone to recite the Rosary. They answered, murmuring the sacred words in unison, moving on as though in a dream.
Over the smoldering villages in the southeast the August moon was setting, hanging like a great ripe glowing fruit against a background of translucent silvery hue. A broad band of primrose-yellow banding the purple blackness in the East betokened daybreak. Above, there hung one star of blazing emerald.
When they turned out of Petit Plappeville into a lane that trended upward, they could see upon the right the long lines of Prussian watch fires twinkling like rubies out of a mist that covered the low-lying country like a shallow, milky sea. Upon the left rose the ivied stone wall of some orchard or chateau garden. Steps rose to an archway in which hung the fragments of a door that had been battered in.
"Ting!"
As the priest rang his bell a bareheaded man appeared in the doorway. He was very pale, his dress was disordered, and his eyes had a strained and anxious look. He bent the knee and crossed himself, then stood aside as the Curé mounted the doorsteps. His wild eyes questioned the faces of the strangers who followed the lantern-bearer. He seemed reassured by what he saw there, and said to the priest in a muffled tone, loud enough to be heard by his companions:
"Take care ... there is broken glass strewed everywhere about here. Do not put out the lantern; it will be safer walking with more than one light!"
Then he took up a heavy silver candlestick he had set down upon a sort of rustic flower stand. The candle wax had guttered all down one side, making what old women call a winding sheet. He glanced at this as he took it up, and then at Mère Catherine. Then he moved forward, taking her place as guide, and the glass of smashed wine bottles that covered the ground cracked and crackled under his own boots, and the Curé's wooden-soled shoes. The huge sabots of Mère Catherine made short work of the splinters. Following in her Brobdingnagian footsteps, Juliette's small feet took no hurt.
A long, low house rose up before them. Its rows of barred basement windows indicated an extensive cellarage. Many of the windows were broken, and some of the ground-floor shutters had been wrenched off. Shattered furniture was thrown about in confusion, shrubs and rose trees had been ruined, broken bottles were here, there, and everywhere. And as a slight sound of astonishment came from Juliette, the priest having mounted some red-brick steps and entered after his guide at an open hall door, the old woman, to whom silence was evidently a sore penance, glanced back at the young one and said to her in a whisper: