“Our Lady knows you’d be better so,” she said.
So that was how, on Easter morning, with the bells pealing like a softer silver across the silver of the city, Pelleas and I found ourselves back in our lonely drawing-room considerably shaken and hovering before the fire which Nichola stirred to a leaping blaze. And with us, since we had insisted on her coming, was our new little friend, fluttering about us with the prettiest concern, taking away my cloak, untying my bonnet and wheeling an arm-chair for Pelleas, quite as if she were the responsible little hostess and we her upset guests. Presently, the bright hat and worn coat laid aside, she sat on a hassock before the blaze and looked up at us, like a little finch that had alighted at our casement and had been coaxed within. I think that I love best these little bird-women whom one expects at any moment to hear thrilling with a lilt of unreasonable song.
“My dear,” said I, on a sudden, “how selfish of us. I dare say you will have been going to church?”
She hesitated briefly.
“I might ’a’ gone to the mission,” she explained, unaccountably colouring, “but I don’t know if I would. On Easter.”
“But I should have thought,” I cried, “that this is the day of days to go.”
“It would be,” she assented, “it would be—” she went on, hesitating, “but, ma’am, I can’t bear to go,” she burst out, “because they don’t have no flowers. We go to the mission,” she added, “and not to the grand churches. And it seems—it seems—don’t you think God must be where the most flowers are? An’ last Easter we only had one geranium.”
Bless the child. I must be a kind of pagan, for I understood.
“Your flowers are beau-tiful,” she said, shyly, with a breath of content. “Are they real? I’ve been wantin’ to ask you. I never saw so many without the glass in front. But they don’t smell much,” she added, wistfully; “I wonder why that is?”
Pelleas and I had been wondering that very morning. They looked so sweet-scented and yet were barren of fragrance; and we had told ourselves that perhaps they were lilies of symbol without mission or message beyond the symbol, without hue or passion or, so to say, experience.