The apprentice seemed not to hear, but kept on looking after Guida, a pitiless leer on his face. “Dame, lucky for her the Sieur died before he had chance to change his will. She’d have got ni fiche ni bran from him.”
“Support d’en haut, if you don’t stop that I’ll give you a coffin before your time, keg of nails--you. Sorrow and prayer at the throne of grace that she may have a contrite heart”--he clutched the funeral bill tighter in his fingers--“is what we must feel for her. The day the Sieur died and it all came out, I wept. Bedtime come I had to sop my eyes with elder-water. The day o’ the burial mine eyes were so sore a-draining I had to put a rotten sweet apple on ‘em over-night--me.”
“Ah bah, she doesn’t need rosemary wash for her hair!” said the apprentice admiringly, looking down the street after Guida as she turned into the Rue d’Egypte.
Perhaps it was a momentary sympathy for beauty in distress which made the Master say, as he backed from the doorway with stealthy step:
“Gatd’en’ale, ‘tis well she has enough to live on, and to provide for what’s to come!”
But if it was a note of humanity in the voice it passed quickly, for presently, as he examined the bill for the funeral of the Sieur de Mauprat, he said shrilly:
“Achocre, you’ve left out the extra satin for his pillow--you.”
“There wasn’t any extra satin,” drawled the apprentice.
With a snarl the Master of Burials seized a pen and wrote in the account:
Item: To extra satin for pillow, three livres.
Guida’s once blithe, rose-coloured face was pale as ivory, the mouth had a look of deep sadness, and the step was slow; but the eye was clear and steady, and her hair, brushed under the black crape of the bonnet as smoothly as its nature would admit, gave to the broad brow a setting of rare attraction and sombre nobility. It was not a face that knew inward shame, but it carried a look that showed knowledge of life’s cruelties and a bitter sensitiveness to pain. Above all else it was fearless, and it had no touch of the consciousness or the consequences of sin; it was purity itself.
It alone should have proclaimed abroad her innocence, though she said no word in testimony. To most people, however, her dauntless sincerity only added to her crime and to the scandalous mystery. Yet her manner awed some, while her silence held most back. The few who came to offer sympathy, with curiousness in their eyes and as much inhumanity as pity in their hearts, were turned back gently but firmly, more than once with proud resentment.