And
as each new character is merely a metamorphosis from something older, in
these little grey balls I recognised green buds plucked before their time;
but beyond all else the rosy, moony, tender glow which lit up the blossoms
among the frail forest of stems from which they hung like little golden
roses--marking, as the radiance upon an old wall still marks the place of
a vanished fresco, the difference between those parts of the tree which
had and those which had not been 'in bloom'--shewed me that these were
petals which, before their flowering-time, the chemist's package had
embalmed on warm evenings of spring. That rosy candlelight was still their
colour, but half-extinguished and deadened in the diminished life which
was now theirs, and which may be called the twilight of a flower.
Presently my aunt was able to dip in the boiling infusion, in which she
would relish the savour of dead or faded blossom, a little madeleine, of
which she would hold out a piece to me when it was sufficiently soft.
At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of lemon-wood,
and a table which served at once as pharmacy and as high altar, on which,
beneath a statue of Our Lady and a bottle of Vichy-Celestins, might be
found her service-books and her medical prescriptions, everything that she
needed for the performance, in bed, of her duties to soul and body, to
keep the proper times for pepsin and for vespers.
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