He stayed with her till dusk had thickened into darkness, sometimes standing at her side to look down on her face, sometimes bowed to his knees by the burden of the years without her. When the priest came back to rouse him he was crouched in the attitude of prayer; but his prayer (if such it might be called) was only the eternal petition of the bereaved, “Would God that I had died instead!”
The village sexton was of those who had already fled at the rumour of the oncoming German; so that night the Englishwoman, who had acquired in a west-country garden some skill in the handling of a spade, took turns with a bent old peasant in digging a grave for Griselda. When daylight failed them they dug by the shine of a lantern; the Englishwoman was not over-imaginative or nervous but she found the job an eerie one—the more so since the square-walled cemetery, like French graveyards in general, lay well away from its village—and she was glad when the moment came to pay off her companion and return to her quarters in the little Hôtel de la Gare. Other formalities in connection with the funeral there were none—for the reason that the maire and his clerk, who in ordinary seasons would have devoted much time and stationery to the subject, had departed that evening, bearing with them the archives of the commune.
William, for his part, spent the night on the priest’s horsehair sofa, next door to the room where the candles burned around the body of his wife. From weariness of the flesh he dozed now and again; but for the greater part of the night lay wakeful and staring at darkness. There were moments when the horsehair sofa shook beneath his sobbing; and there were others when it seemed to him impossible that a horror so brutal and so undeserved should have mangled his harmless life. At one such moment he crept from his couch, felt his way across the room and into the passage—possessed by some wild and unconfessed thought that he might not find Griselda on the sheeted table with her hands crossed over her breast. The door, when he tried it, was locked and the key withdrawn—fastened by the priest or his housekeeper before they retired for the night; but when he knelt down to peer through the keyhole he could see two of the tall church candles and the vase with its bunch of white roses that someone had placed near her head. He crept back, knowing that she lay there indeed, and sat down to stare at the darkness till it softened from black into grey.
The morning was still flushed in the east when the old woman came to him with bread and a bowl of coffee; the coffee was hot, aromatic and sweet, after the fashion of that which had once been brewed by Madame Peys—and, remembering breakfasts not eaten alone, his tears dropped into it thickly. While he ate, sitting humped on the edge of the horsehair sofa, the street outside was already astir with traffic, nomad and military; those fugitives who had rested in the village for the night were once more taking to the road, other fugitives from the neighbourhood were dribbling in to join them, troops were moving up and today was even as yesterday. When he had finished his bread and coffee the old woman signed him to the kitchen sink, where she furnished him with soap and a towel; and, the process of washing completed, she produced a clothes-brush, led him out into the garden and attacked with vigour the mud and stain on his garments. He was standing passively while she scoured at his shoulders when the Englishwoman came up, and, looking anywhere except at his face, put his wife’s rings into his hands. There were two of them—the new gold band, with a month’s wear behind it, and the little engagement half-hoop—and at sight of them the housekeeper ceased to scour and crept away with her brush. He looked down at them lying in his palm till the tears veiled them, and knotted them slowly and tightly in a corner of his handkerchief. His companion cleared her throat and, still looking anywhere except at his face, told him that the train to Paris—very probably the last one to run—would be starting that morning.
“Yes?” he said vaguely, conscious that she expected a reply.
She explained that what she had meant was, the funeral must take place immediately. … Chiefly for the sake of breaking the silence she supposed that his wife was not a Roman Catholic?
He answered “No,” staring at a row of hollyhocks and a butterfly that quivered above them.
She asked, she explained, because in that case the priest would have read the proper service. As it was … She hoped he would understand that they had done their best to—be reverent. But there were difficulties—so many of the tradesmen were leaving or had left already. Carpenters and so on. … He listened stupidly with his eyes on the quivering butterfly, dumbly rebellious at the cruelty that tore him even from the body—and it only dawned on him what she meant by her stumbling hints when she led him through the house to the front door where a cart stood waiting with the priest at the horse’s head. It was a farm-cart, borrowed by the priest from a neighbour; and on the floor of it that which had been Griselda lay coffinless and wrapped in a sheet. There were roses scattered on the folds of the sheet and the old Frenchwoman was waiting at the gate with a shapeless little wreath of
