‘Holy Virgin!  I had forgotten the cruets!’ she stammered, rushing to the cupboard.  ‘Come, look sharp, lad!’

Thereupon Vincent filled the cruets, phials of coarse glass, while she hastened to take a clean finger-cloth from a drawer.  Abbe Mouret, holding the chalice by its stem with his left hand, the fingers of his right resting meanwhile on the burse, then bowed profoundly, but without removing his biretta, to a black wooden crucifix, which hung over the side-board.  The lad bowed too, and, bearing the cruets covered with the finger-cloth, led the way out of the sacristy, followed by the priest, who walked on with downcast eyes, absorbed in deep and prayerful meditation.

II

The empty church was quite white that May morning.  The bell-rope near the confessional hung motionless once more.  The little bracket light, with its stained glass shade, burned like a crimson splotch against the wall on the right of the tabernacle.  Vincent, having set the cruets on the credence, came back and knelt just below the altar step on the left, while the priest, after rendering homage to the Holy Sacrament by a genuflexion, went up to the altar and there spread out the corporal, on the centre of which he placed the chalice.  Then, having opened the Missal, he came down again.  Another bend of the knee followed, and, after crossing himself and uttering aloud the formula, ’In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,’ he raised his joined hands to his breast, and entered on the great divine drama, with his countenance blanched by faith and love.

‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’

‘Ad Deum qui loetificat juventutem meam,’ gabbled Vincent, who, squatting on his heels, mumbled the responses of the antiphon and the psalm, while watching La Teuse as she roved about the church.

The old servant was gazing at one of the candles with a troubled look.  Her anxiety seemed to increase while the priest, bowing down with hands joined again, recited the Confiteor.  She stood still, in her turn struck her breast, her head bowed, but still keeping a watchful eye on the taper.  For another minute the priest’s grave voice and the server’s stammers alternated: 

‘Dominus vobiscum.’

‘Et cum spiritu tuo.’

Then the priest, spreading out his hands and afterwards again joining them, said with devout compunction:  ‘Oremus’ (Let us pray).

La Teuse could now stand it no longer, but stepped behind the altar, reached the guttering candle, and trimmed it with the points of her scissors.  Two large blobs of wax had already been wasted.  When she came back again putting the benches straight on her way, and making sure that there was holy-water in the fonts, the priest, whose hands were resting on the edge of the altar-cloth, was praying in subdued tones.  And at last he kissed the altar.

Behind him, the little church still looked wan in the pale light of early morn.  The sun, as yet, was only level with the tiled roof.  The Kyrie Eleisons rang quiveringly through that sort of whitewashed stable with flat ceiling and bedaubed beams.  On either side three lofty windows of plain glass, most of them cracked or smashed, let in a raw light of chalky crudeness.