She liked his lean dark face and the long lines that came in it when it smiled. It despised the firing, it despised death, it despised everything that could be done to him there. And it was utterly compassionate.
"Then," he said, "it is for you and me to carry him, Mademoiselle." He stooped to the stretcher.
Between them they lifted him very slowly and gently into the ambulance.
"There, Monsieur, at the bottom."
At the bottom because of the steady drip, drip, that no bandaging could staunch. He lay straight and stiff, utterly unconcerned, and his feet in their enormous boots, slightly parted, stuck out beyond the stretcher. The four others sat in a row down one side of the car and stared at him.
The curé climbed in after him, carrying the Host. He knelt there, where the blood from the smashed head oozed through the bandages and through the canvas of the stretchers to the floor and to the skirts of his cassock.
The Last Sacrament. Charlotte waited till it was over, standing stolidly by the tail of the car. She could have cried then because of the sheer beauty of the curé's act, even while she wondered whether perhaps the wafer on his tongue might not choke the dying man.
The curé hovered on the edge of the car, stooping with a certain awkwardness; she took from him his missal and his purple bag as he gathered his cassock about him and came down.
"Can I do anything, Monsieur?"
"No, Mademoiselle. It is done."
His eyes smiled at her; but his lips were quivering as he took again his missal and his purple bag. She watched him going on slowly down the street till he turned into the wine-shop. She wondered: Had he seen? Did he know why John was there? In another minute John came out, hurrying to the car.
He glanced down at the blood stains by the back step; then he looked in; and when he saw the man lying on the stretcher he turned on her in fury.
"What are you thinking of? I told you you weren't to take him."
"I had to. I couldn't leave him there. I thought--"
"You've no business to think."
"Well, but the curé--"
"The curé doesn't know anything about it."
"I don't care. If he's in a clean bed--if they take his boots off--"
"I told you they can't spare clean beds for corpses. He'll be dead before you can get him there."