Part 14

“She is a nun of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul. You know, the nursing-community. I stayed some time with them at their Convent at Paris, studying their good, wise, enlightened methods, visiting their hospitals with them, helping to tend their sick. We were returning with a patient that night I saw Madame de Roux. It was a case of brain-fever, a young girl, an attendant at one of the gaudy, disreputable restaurants of the Palais-Royal, delirious and desperately ill. No conveyance could be got to take her to the Charité; the Sisters’ van was otherwise engaged. We hired a vegetable-truck from a street fruit-seller, on the understanding that it should be whitewashed before being returned to him, wrapped the poor girl in blankets, and wheeled her to the Hospital ourselves.”

“By--George!” said Bertham softly and distinctly. His forehead was thunderous, and his lips were compressed. She went on as though she had not heard:

“And so, as we went through the Rue de Richelieu, and Sister Saint Bernard and I, and the truck, were passing the Théâtre Français, into which all fashionable Paris was crowding to see the great actress play ‘Phédre,’ a beautiful woman alighted from a carriage and went in, leaning on the arm of a stout short man in uniform, with some decorations.... I pointed his companion out to Sister Saint Bernard. ‘_Tiens_,’ she said, ‘_voilà Madame la Comtesse de Roux. Une grande dame de par le monde_.’ And that is how I came to know M. de Moulny’s enchantress by sight.... I wonder whether M. Dunoisse has met her?”

“It is more than probable, seeing that the lady is his Colonel’s wife. And,” said Bertham, “if he has not yet had the honor of being presented, he will enjoy it very soon. A Hereditary Prince of Widinitz is a personage, even out of Bavaria. And whether the son of the Princess Marie Bathilde and old Nap’s _aide-de-camp_ likes his title, or whether he does not, it is his birthright, like the tail of the dog. He can’t get away from that!”

“He does look,” said Ada Merling, with a smile, “a little like what a schoolgirl’s ideal of a Prince would be.”

“Àpropos of that, a Prince who is not in the least like a schoolgirl’s ideal of the character dines with us at Wraye House on Tuesday. The Stratclyffes are coming, and the French Ambassador, with Madame de Berny.”

He added, naming the all-powerful Secretary for Foreign Affairs, with a lightness and indifference that were overdone:

“And Lord Walmerston.”

“Lord Walmerston!...”

Her look was one of surprise, changing to doubtful comprehension. He did not meet it. He was saying:

“It was his wish to come. His friendship for Mary dates from her schoolroom-days, and she cherishes the old loyal affection for her father’s friend in one of her heart’s warmest corners. He is charming to her, always ... and I have hopes of his weight in the balance for my Improved Married Quarters; and he really sees the advantage of the Regimental Schools.... But it is not to bore you with shop that I propose you should make one of us at dinner!” His voice was coaxing. “Do! and give Mary and me a happy evening!”

She shook her head with decision, though regret was in her face.

“I cannot leave my post. Remember, this is not only a Home.... It is also a Hospital. And what it pleases me to call my Staff”--she smiled--“are not experienced. They are willing and earnest, but they must be constantly supervised. And their training for this, the noblest profession that is open to women--as noble as any, were women equally free to follow all--is not the least of my responsibilities. We have lectures and classes here for their instruction in elementary anatomy, surgical dressing and bandaging, sanitation, the proper use of the thermometer and temperature-chart, and so on, almost daily. Mr. Alnwright and Professor Tayleur”--she named a famous surgeon and a celebrated physiologist--“are good enough to give their services, gratuitously; and I must be present at all times to assist them in their demonstrations. So you will understand, there is more to do here than you would have supposed.”

“Good gracious!” rejoined Bertham; “I should say so! And your band of trained attendants who are to supersede--and may it be soon!--the gin-sodden harridans and smiling, civil Incompetents who add to the discomforts and miseries of sickness, and lend to Death another terror--are they---- I suppose some of them are ladies?”

“The ideal nurse ought to be a lady,” she answered him, “in the true sense of the word. Many of these girls are well born and well bred, if that is--and of course it is--the meaning of your question. Some of them are frivolous and selfish and untrustworthy, and these must be weeded out. But the majority are earnest, honest, and sincere; and many of them are noble and high-minded, unselfish, devoted, and brave....”

There was a stately print of the Sistine Madonna of Raffaelle hanging above the fireplace. She lifted her face to the pure, spotless womanhood of the Face that looked out from the frame, and said:

“I try to keep up with these last-named ones, though often they put me to the blush.”

“You put to the blush! Don’t tell me that!” He spoke and looked incredulously.

“They have to learn to save their strength of mind and body, and not put out too much, even in the Christ-blessed service of the sick and suffering,” she said, “lest they should find themselves bankrupt, with no power of giving more. And sometimes the more ardent among them rebel against my rules, which enforce regular exercise, observance of precautions for the preservation of their own health, even the relaxation and amusement which should break the monotony of routine; and then I long to kiss them, Robert, even when I am most severe!”

There were tears in the man’s bright eyes as he looked at her. Her own eyes were on the Raffaelle print; she had forgotten him.

“What I should like best would be to endure long enough to see them outstripping and outdoing the poor example of their humble fellow-student and teacher, developing nursing as a higher Art, and spreading the knowledge of the proper treatment of the sick, until not one of the poorest and the roughest women of what we are content to call the Lower Classes, shall be destitute of some smattering of the knowledge that will save the lives of those she loves best in bitter time of need.”

Her face was rapt. She went on in a clear, low, even tone: “I should like to live to be very old, so old that I was quite forgotten, and sit quietly in some pleasant corner of a peaceful English home seeing the movement grow. For it will grow, and spread and increase, Robert, until it reaches every corner of the world! And to that end every penny that I possess; every ounce of strength that is mine; every drop of blood in my veins, would be cheerfully spent and given.... Do I say would?... Will be! if it please God!” Her eyes left the picture and went to Bertham’s absorbed face. “I have been holding forth at merciless length, have I not?” she said. “But you and I, with Mary, constitute a Mutual Society for the Talking-Over of Plans; and, though I sometimes tax your patience, I am always ready to lend ear. As for your dinner, it is a delightful temptation which I must resist. Beg Mary to tell me all about it afterwards!”

“Your would-be host and hostess will not be the only disappointed ones,” Bertham said, and rose as though to take leave. “Lord Walmerston is one of your admirers, and”--there was a gleam of mischief in the hazel eyes--“Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was urgent for an opportunity of meeting you again.”

“Indeed! I am very much honored.” Her calm eyes and composed face told nothing. But her tone had a clear frosty ring of something colder than mere indifference, and the curve of her lips was a little ironical. Seeing that touch of scorn, the twinkle in Bertham’s eyes became more mischievous. He said:

“The Prince’s lucky star might shine on such a meeting, Ada. A beautiful, wealthy, and wise Princess would be the making of the man.”

“_That_ man!” she said, and a shudder rippled through her slight body, and her calm, unruffled forehead lost its smoothness in a frown of repulsion and disgust. She rose as though escaping from actual physical contact with some repellent personality suddenly presented before her, and stood beside Bertham on the hearthrug, as tall as he, and with the same look of high-bred elegance and distinction that characterized and marked out her companion. The spark of mischief still danced in his bright eyes. His handsome mouth twitched with the laughter he repressed as he said:

“So you do not covet the Crown Imperial of France, and tame eagles do not please you? Yet the opportunities an Empress enjoys for doing good must be practically unrivaled.”

Her blue-gray eyes were disdainful now. She said:

“The position of a plain gentlewoman is surely more enviable and honorable than would be hers who should share the throne of a crowned and sceptered adventurer.”

Said Bertham:

“You do not call the First Napoleon that?”

“There was a terrible grandeur,” she returned, “about that bloodstained, unrelenting, icy, ambitious despot; a halo of old, great martial deeds surrounds his name that blinds the eyes to his rapacity and meanness, his selfishness, sensuality, and greed. But this son of Hortense! this nephew, if he be a nephew?--this charlatan trailing in the mire the sumptuous rags of the Imperial purple; this gentlemanly, silken-mannered creature, with phrases of ingratiating flattery upon his tongue, and hatred glimmering between the half-drawn blinds of those sick, sluggish eyes.... God grant, for England’s sake, that he may never mount the throne of St. Louis!”

“Ah! Ada--Ada!” Bertham said again, and laughed, awkwardly for one whose mirth was so melodious and graceful as a rule. For the little dinner at Wraye House, at which the Secretary for Foreign Affairs and the French Ambassador were to meet the Pretender to the Imperial Throne of France, was really a diplomatic meeting of somewhat serious political importance, in view of certain changes and upheavals taking place in that restless country on the other side of the Channel, and divers signs and tokens, indicative to an experienced eye that the White Flag, for eighteen years displayed above the Central Pavilion of the Palace of the Tuileries, might shortly be expected to come down.

XX

However, being a skillful diplomat, Bertham gave no sign: though Lord Walmerston, Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the Pretender to the Throne-Imperial of France, were to spend in the Persian smoking-room over the ground-floor billiard-room of Wraye House--a half-hour that would change every card in the poor hand held by that last-named gamester to a trump.

“Who is good enough for you, Ada?” he said, with his hazel glance softening as he turned it upon her, and sincerity in his sweet, courtly tones. “No one I ever met!”

Her rare and lovely smile illuminated her.

“Has it never struck you, Robert, how curious it is that the demand for entire possession of a woman’s hand, fortune and person, should invariably be prefaced by the candid statement that the suitor is not good enough to tie her shoes? As for being good enough for me, any man would be, provided he were honest, sincere, chivalrous in word and deed----”

“And not the present Head of the House of Bonaparte?” ended Bertham.

“You are right,” she said quickly. “Were I compelled to make choice between them, I should infinitely prefer the butcher!”

“‘_The butcher!_’” Bertham’s face of utter consternation mingled with incredulity drew her laugh from her. And it was so round and sweet and mellow that the crystal lusters of the Sèvres and ormolu candlesticks upon the mantel-shelf rang a little tinkling echo when it had stopped.

“The butcher who supplies us here,” she explained.

Bertham said, speaking between his teeth and with the knuckles showing white in the strong slender hand he clenched and shook at an imaginary vendor of chops and sirloins:

“What consummate and confounded insolence!”

“No, no!” she cried, for his tall, slight, athletic figure was striding up and down the little parlor, and the fierce grind of his heel each time he turned within the limit of the hearthrug threatened the cat’s repose. “You shall not fume, and say hard things of him! He knows nothing of me except that I am the matron here. And he thinks that I should be better off in the sitting-room behind his shop in Oxford Street, keeping his books of accounts and ‘ordering any nice little delicate joint’ I ‘happened to fancy for dinner....’ And possibly I should be better off, from his point of view?”

Bertham’s heel came sharply down upon the hearthrug. The outraged cat rent the air with a feline squall, and sought refuge under the sofa.

“Come out, Mr. Bright!” coaxed his mistress, kneeling by the injured one’s retreat. “He is very sorry! He didn’t mean it! He will never do it again!” She added, rising, with Mr. Bright, already soothed and purring, in her arms, “And he is going away now, regretful as we are to have to send him. For it is my night on duty, Robert, and I must rest.”

“You will always send me away,” said he, “when you choose. And I shall always come back again, until you show me that I am not wanted.”

“That will be never, dear friend!”

She gave him her true, pure hand, and he stooped and left a reverent kiss upon it, and said, as he lifted a brighter face:

“Do you remember three years ago, before you went to Kaiserswerke--when you sent me away, and forbade me to come back until I had sought and found my Fate in Mary?”

“A beautiful and loving Fate, dear Robert.”

“She is, God bless her!” he answered, with a warm flush upon his face and a thrill of tenderness in the charming voice that so many men and women loved him for.

She went with him into the hall then, and said as he threw on his long dark cloak lined with Russian sables:

“Those Berlin and Paris papers of Wednesday last.... It would interest me to glance through them in a spare moment, if you did not object to lend?”

“One of my ‘liveried menials with buttons on his crests,’ as a denunciatory Chartist orator put it the other day--shall bring them to you within half an hour. I wish you had asked me for something less easy to give you, Ada!”

She answered with her gentle eyes on his, as her hand drew back the latch of the hall door:

“Give me assurance you will never help to forge the link that shall unite Great Britain’s interests with her enemy’s.”

“Why, that of course!” He answered without heartiness, and his eyes did not meet hers. “I am not the master blacksmith, dear Ada. There are other hands more cunning in the welding-craft than mine!”

He bent his handsome head to her and threw on his hat and passed out into the rimy February fog. But he walked slowly, pondering as he went, and his face wore a moody frown. For Lord Walmerston’s influence and weight upon that pressing question, separate accommodation for married soldiers, and Military Schools for the men and their wives and children, was not to be had for nothing, he well knew....

She shut the door, and then the tea-bell rang, and she passed on to the dining-room, and took her place before the capacious tray at the matron’s end of the long, plainly-appointed, wholesomely-furnished table.

She had declined to dine in the society of a Prince because she doubted his motives and disapproved of his character. She played the hostess now to her staff of nurses and probationers, dispensing the household tea from the stout family teapot with a liberal hand, and leading the conversation with a gentle grace and an infectious gayety that drew sparks from the homeliest minds about the board and made bright wits shine brighter.

The Berlin and Paris papers came by Bertham’s servant as she went to her room to prepare, by some hours of rest, for the night-watch by a dying patient. She gave half-an hour of the time to reading the articles and paragraphs Bertham had considerately marked in red ink for her.

When she set about preparing for repose came a gentle knock at her door, and in answer to her soft “Come in!” the gray-haired, olive-skinned, pleasant-faced woman, who had admitted Dunoisse and shown him out again, appeared, saying:

“You never rang, Miss Ada, love, but I made bold to come.”... She added in tones of dismay, “And to find you brushing your beautiful hair yourself when your old Husnuggle’s in the house and asking nothing better than to do it for you!...”

“Thank you, dear!” She surrendered the brush, and sat down and submitted to the deft hands that set about their accustomed task, as though it were soothing to be so ministered to. Even as she said: “For this once, kind Husnuggle, but you must not do it again!”

“Don’t say that, Miss Ada! when night’s the only time of all the livelong day that I get my Wraye Rest talk with you.”

Entreated thus, she reached up a hand and patted the plump matronly cheek of the good soul, and said, with soft, considerate gentleness:

“Let it be so, since it will make you happy. But those who have chosen for their life’s task the duty of serving others should do without service themselves. Try to understand!”

The woman kissed the hand with a fervor contrasting incongruously with her staid demeanor and homely simple face, as she answered:

“I’ll try, my dear. Though to see you in this bare, plainly-furnished room, with scarce a bit of comfort in it beyond the fire in the grate, and not a stick of furniture beyond the bed and the wardrobe, and washstand and bath, and the chintz-covered armchair you’re sitting in, and a bookshelf of grave books, scalds my heart--that it do! And your sitting-room nigh as skimping. When either at Wraye Rest or at Oakenwode, or at the house in Park Lane, you have everything beautiful about you, as you ought; with paintings and statues and music, and carpets like velvet for you to tread upon, and flowers everywhere for you that love them so to take pleasure in them, and your dogs and horses, and cats and birds!... Eh! deary me! But I promised I’d never breathe a murmur, not if you let me come, and here I am forgetting!....”

“We will overlook it this time. And I will help you to understand why I am happier here, and more at peace than at Wraye or Oakenwode, or at the Park Lane house, dear to me as all three are. It is because, wherever I am, and whether I am walking or sleeping, I seem to hear voices that call to me for help. Chiefly the voices of women, weak, and faint, and imploring.... And they appeal to me, not because I am any wiser, or better, or stronger than others of my sex, but because I am able, through circumstances,--and have the wish and the will to aid them, I humbly believe, from God! And if I stayed at home and yielded to the desire for pleasant, easy, delightful ways of living, and bathed my eyes and ears in lovely sights and sounds, I should hear those voices over all, and see with the eyes of my mind the pale, wan, wistful faces that belong to them. And I should know no peace!... But here, even if the work I do be insignificant and ineffective, I am working for and with my poor sisters, sick and well. And on the day when I turn back and leave my plow in the furrow, then those voices will have a right to cry to me without ceasing: ‘_Oh, woman! why have you deserted us?--you who might have done so much_!’”

She ceased, but the rush and thrill of the words as they had come pouring from her, vibrated yet on the quiet atmosphere of the room.

“You had a pleasant talk, Miss Ada, with Master Robert?” the woman asked her, turning down the snowy sheet from the pillows, and preparing to leave the room.

“A long, grave talk, Husnuggle, even a little sad in places, but pleasant nevertheless. Now go down to supper, for it is eight o’clock.”

Husnuggle went, having bound up the wealth of hair into a great silken twist, and her mistress knelt at a _prie-Dieu_ beneath an ebony and olive-wood crucifix that hung upon the wall, and said her prayers, and sought her rest. When she slept, less easily and less soundly than usual, she dreamed; and the figure and face of the slight, ruddy-skinned, black-eyed man who had visited the Hospice that day, moved with others across the stage of her vision, and his voice echoed with other voices in the chambers of her sleeping brain.

* * * * *

The Havre packet had not sailed that evening, by reason of a boisterous gale and a great sea, and Dunoisse was spending the evening dismally enough at the T. R. Southampton, where “As you Like It” was being given for the benefit of Miss Arabella Smallsopp, advertised as of the “principal London theaters,” upon the last night of a Stock Season which had been “a supreme artistic success.”

Mr. Hawkington Bulph and a Full Company--which collectively and individually looked anything but that,--supported the star; and to the fatal sprightliness of the hapless Smallsopp, disguised as the immortal page, in a lace collar, drop-earrings, and a short green cotton-velvet ulster, dadoed with catskin, and adorned down the front with rows of brass buttons not distantly resembling coffin-nails (worn in combination with a Spanish hair-comb and yellow leather top-boots), must be ascribed the violent distaste which one member of the audience did then and there conceive for England’s immortal Bard. But ere long his attention strayed from the dingy, ill-lit Forest Scene, with a cork-and-quill nightingale warbling away in the flies, as Miss Smallsopp interpolated the pleasing ditty, “O Sing Again, Sweet Bird of Eve!” and he ceased to see the dirty boards, where underpaid, underfed, and illiterate actors gesticulated and strutted, and he went back in thought to Ada Merling, and her pure earnest face rose up before his mental vision, and the very sound of her crystal voice was in his ears.

* * * * *

Even as in her troubled dreams, she saw Hector Dunoisse standing before her, with that swift play of his emotions vividly passing in his face; and heard him passionately saying that the hour that saw him broach those tainted stored-up thousands should be for him an hour of branding shame; and that he prayed the dawning of the day that should break upon his completed barter of Honor for Wealth, and Rank and Power, might find him lying in his coffin.

And then he yielded--or so it seemed to her, and took the shining money, and the princely diadem offered him by smooth strangers with persuasive courtly voices, and she saw the fateful gold scattered from his reckless hands like yellow dust of pollen from the ripe mimosa-bloom when the thorny trees are bowed and shaken by the gusty winds of Spring.

And then she saw him going to his Coronation, and no nobler or more stately figure moved onwards in the solemn procession of Powers and Dignities, accompanying him through laurel-arched and flower-wreathed and flag-bedecked streets to the Cathedral, where vested and coped and mitered prelates waited to anoint and crown him Prince. And where, amidst the solemn strains of the great organ, the chanting of many voices, and the pealing of silver trumpets, the ceremony had nearly reached its stately close, when the jeweled circlet that should have crowned his temples slipped from the aged Archbishop’s venerable, trembling hands and rolled upon the inlaid pavement, shedding diamonds and pearls like dewdrops or tears.... And then she saw him lying, amidst wreaths of flowers and tall burning tapers, in a black-draped coffin in the black-hung nave. And a tall man and a beautiful woman leaned over the death-white face with the sealed, sunk eyes, smiling lustfully in each other’s. And she awakened at the chime of her silver clock in her quiet room; and it was dark, and the lamp-lighter was kindling the street-lamps, and she must rise and prepare for her night’s vigil.