Part 61

Strong men grew weary, and went away in search of rest and refreshment. Nurses collapsed, and were succeeded by other nurses. Relays of bearers were replaced by fresh relays. But the Lady-in-Chief remained at her post unflinchingly, and the white-haired man toiled on, and never stopped. For the strength and endurance that breathed from the still composure of Ada Merling seemed, despite his weakness, to communicate itself to Dunoisse. He was giddy, and faint, and breathless--his shoulders were galled, his hands were raw--his boots were in rags upon his blistered feet, when a rose-red dawn suffused the sky behind the wooded slopes of Bûlgurlû, and the last burden of wretchedness was carried in.

Then, and not until then, Ada Merling quitted her post, and followed. He who watched saw the tall, slight figure pass under the deep archway, saw the sentries present arms, saw the heavy gates shut. The last sightseers straggled away, and Dunoisse went down the hill-path, weary, and faint, and limping, yet happier and more at peace than he had been for many years. A tumbledown wooden eating-house, kept by a Greek named Demetrios, stood in those days near the landing-quay of Scutari. Dunoisse obtained a miserable room with a poor bed in it, slept for an hour or two, ate what they put before him, and returned to the Hospital.

CI

Changes were taking place in that vast, uncleanly caravanserai. Soldiers’ wives were washing linen, surgeons and nurses were passing to and fro. Working-parties of orderlies with barrows, brooms, and shovels, were gathering up waste-paper and vegetable refuse; removing from the great quadrangle derelict tin cans, piles of cast-off rags, and decomposing carcasses of cats and dogs. Others were bringing buckets of broth, milk, tea, and coffee, and trays of bread from the huge untidy kitchens, soon to be transformed into models of good management and economical excellence. Others--for the Red Reaper made his harvest daily--so that there was always room for more--no matter how many were received into the Hospital--were carrying the dead to the long trenches full of quicklime that scarred the hillside under the nightingale-haunted cypresses of the vast Cemetery of Scutari.

* * * * *

Fortune favored Dunoisse in his search for Ada Merling. He found her standing near a storehouse, barred, and fastened with its heavy Turkish lock, and guarded by a stolid Irish infantryman. Two nuns were with her--a minor official of the Hospital argued and gesticulated--the situation was evidently one of strain. As Dunoisse drew near, he heard her say to this personage:

“But, my good sir, this store contains most of the bales and cases that I brought with me from England. And I am in authority here!”

The man stammered something about an order from the Deputy Inspector-General.

She returned:

“It has been applied for, and has not been received; and patients are hourly dying for want of the nourishment and comforts that are contained in this store. Under the circumstances----”

“Under the circumstances there is nothing for it but to wait! Excuse me, madam!”

The official spread his hands, shrugged his shoulders, bowed and evaporated. She looked from his retreating back to the nuns’ faces, saw loyalty framed in bands of starched linen, and issued a mandate in unfaltering tones.

“Find me a hatchet, Mother Aquinas. Look for an iron bar, or a beam light enough for us to handle, Sister Jerome! For we are going to break open that door!”

The sentry muttered, bringing the butt of his musket sharply to the flagstones.

“Ma’am, av ye do, ’tis myself will smarrut for ut!... Flogged, an’ broke will I be, an’ divil a lie!”

His starting eyes and scarlet face confirmed his sincerity. She said to him:

“You shall not be flogged! I would strip my own shoulders to the lash rather than that you should suffer! Stand aside!” She caught up a stone and struck upon the wooden lock.

One of the nuns had found, and now brandished, an ancient, rusty chopper. The other had a bent poker, disinterred from a heap of scrap. As they advanced upon the door, the sentry whimpered, gave in, and put down his musket, crying:

“Stand away, ma’am! Hould harrud, Sisthers! I’ll do ut, be the hokey! The knife to my buttons--the lash to my back--divil a one av me cares wan way or the odher! Give me a hoult av the chopper!” He amended, for Dunoisse, with a brief word to the nun, had already possessed himself of the weapon. “The poker, thin--since the gintleman has a taste for the other article!--and we’ll be in among the blankuts and broth-bottles before yez can say ‘knife!’”

The door yielded to their united attack upon it. As the Sisters darted joyfully in, as the sentry resumed his musket, Dunoisse knew that he was recognized. For Ada Merling’s eyes were fixed on him, and a faint tinge of color suffused her paleness. He threw down the chopper on the scrap-heap and approached her, saying hurriedly:

“Miss Merling, I trust I have not alarmed you by an appearance you were not prepared for? When you have time to listen to me, I will explain why I am here.... Meanwhile, let me serve as best I may in this house of sickness and anguish, under an assumed name, for it will be best that my own should be forgotten! You will not deny me that comfort, I hope?”

“Not if it is a comfort,” she said, with her great eyes fixed upon him, and her delicate lip quivering. “But--are there not grave reasons for your desire to remain unknown? I cannot but suspect it and fear it. You look so worn, and changed from what you were!...”

“I am changed, as you say,” returned Dunoisse, “but the change is not altogether due to long sickness and close imprisonment----”

“Can it be possible?... You have really been a prisoner?” she asked, looking at him strangely; and he replied:

“I have been confined in a military fortress of Northern France for the last six months.”

“I dreamed it!”

The words had broken from her despite her will to stay them. To Dunoisse the utterance brought revival of life and hope. He drew nearer, and said, with deep, vibrating earnestness:

“Miss Merling, I was imprisoned without trial, for no crime, but for a desperate effort to retrieve a great wrong that I had done--at the instance of my superiors, unknowingly.... Should you hear ill of me, do not judge me!--do not condemn me!--try to believe that I have told you the very truth!”

“I do believe you!”

The words, softly spoken, conveyed unfaltering sincerity. He looked his gratitude, and said, in broken tones:

“You have no time to listen to the story now, but when you are free, you will hear me tell it?” He added, as she bent her head in assent: “And until then I will do what service I may in the Hospital. Years back, had I listened to you, I should have plucked myself from the morass of vanity and sensuality in which I was slowly, surely sinking. But I had gone too far to draw back. So I took, and spent, that money I had vowed never to touch, and leagued with rogues to put myself upon the throne of Widinitz, and was repaid, and richly, in disgrace and failure. You see, I hide nothing from you! Even in my days of blindness, you were for me the ideal of a woman, noble and pure, disinterested and true!”

She said, putting out her hand entreatingly:

“Your praise is undeserved. I have often reproached myself since, for the lack of tact and discrimination which I showed that night in our conversation at the Embassy. Upon the first occasion of our meeting, you may remember that you bestowed your confidence upon me very freely, very generously.... Possibly that is why I spoke to you candidly, as an old friend or an elder sister, forgetting that I had no right....”

“The right was yours!” said Dunoisse, gripping his thin hands together and speaking low and eagerly. “It is yours to-day! it will always belong to you! In exchange, you have given me a noble woman to believe in, an earthly angel to be my guardian and guide. How can I speak to you, who are so much above me, of what is in my heart towards you? How dare I dream----”

He broke off, for she had silenced him with an entreating look.

“I must go!” she said, and penciled a hasty line in a memorandum-book taken from her apron pocket, and tore out the scribbled leaf, and put it in his hand. “Give this to the Head of our Medical Department, Surgeon-Major Cray, if you are in earnest in your wish to help us? When I have leisure, we shall meet again, and I will hear your story. And in the meantime, have courage! You are among friends here!”

“If I have one in you,” said Dunoisse, deeply moved, “I need no other, for God has given me the best of all!... Yet one question I must entreat you to answer, before you leave me. You said just now that you had dreamed I was a prisoner.... To me, as I walked upon the ramparts under guard one day last March, came a message, in answer to a cry of waking anguish. For I called upon a woman’s name in my loneliness and desolation, and the woman answered--

“‘_I hear you! Oh! where are you!_’...”

It was the unforgettable voice, the very words that were graven upon his memory. Her bosom heaved, her eyes were starry, the rosy flush had risen to her very hair. He said, with a shock of joy in the revelation:

“I am sure, but I need words to confirm the belief that is mine already. Answer me, I entreat you! Was not the voice that answered yours?”

She bent her head and hurried swiftly from Dunoisse, leaving him standing in the great Hospital quadrangle, under the hot, blue, November sky.

The blood in his veins sang a song of hope. New life had come to him. He pressed the scribbled memorandum to his lips, and hurried in search of the Head of the Medical Department. Helpers were sorely needed; the services of the new volunteer were eagerly accepted. And for weeks Dunoisse wrought among the wounded in the Hospital of Scutari. No one cared to ask his name; to those he nursed he was a hand that raised and fed--a voice that spoke consolation--nothing more tangible. Nor during the weeks of toil and exertion that followed did he exchange a word with the woman who had become the one star of his lonely night. But he saw her, and that was enough. Wherever help and sympathy, skill and courage, were most needed, she was to be found unfailingly. Slight creature that she was, her strength seemed superhuman; the fire of zeal that burned in her was quenchless. She breathed her spirit into those who worked with her: they seemed to need no rest.

The most revolting cases, the most arduous duties, were hers invariably, by right, and claim, and choice. Anæsthetics were not supplied by Britannia for use in her military hospitals; surgical science was as yet in its infancy--but the presence, the voice, the touch, of Ada Merling nerved men to endure, unflinchingly, the atrocious agonies of amputation; if she stood by, there was no outcry when the sharp saw cut into the flesh, or bit through the bone.

And at the end of the long day, when Night had fallen upon the ancient city of the Byzantine Emperors, and porters, hawkers, and beggars slept, wrapped in their ragged mantles, on the grass slopes where Io rested--and only a few silent nuns on night-duty moved through the corridors of the Hospital of Scutari--a twinkling light would grow into vision at the end of those dark halls of anguish--echoing with shrieks of delirious laughter--death-rattles, and groans....

Like a Will-o’-the-Wisp of charity and mercy, a little brass lamp, carried in a woman’s hand, would move forwards--deviate to right or left, stop for a moment--then flit on again.... It is upon record how the blackened lips of the dying soldier kissed the shadow of the pure, clear profile of her who bore it, as it glided over his pillow. He buried his haggard cheek where it had been, and slept, when she had passed.

CII

When fever touched Ada Merling with his scorching wing, there was consternation among the staff, and grief among the patients of the Hospital. The attack was severe, but short; she was removed, during its continuance, to a small garden-villa adjoining the great Cemetery of Scutari.

And there, as she walked on the short, sweet grass, under the vast and ancient cypresses, Dunoisse--having been sent for--came to her; and had no words, seeing her pale and wan and wasted. She held out to him her thin, white hand, and said, with her smile of infinite sweetness:

“Now that I have leisure, I keep my promise. I do not think you need an introduction to Sister Jerome, who has nursed me so kindly and so well.”

Dunoisse exchanged a handshake and a smile with the Sister, who was a round-faced, bright-eyed little creature, with a voice sweet as a piping bullfinch’s, and the activity of a kitten or a child. To see Sister Jerome kiss a baby was to think of a blackbird pecking at a cherry.... When she dressed her patients’ cruel wounds, she joked and laughed with those who were able to enjoy chatter. But tears dropped from her bright eyes on the dressings whenever they could drop unseen.

Sister Jerome flitted up and down like a little black-and-white humble-bee between the alleys of turban-capped or flower-decked tombstones, while Dunoisse told his story to the accompaniment of the doves’ hoarse cooing in the branches overhead. And as he spoke, he sometimes looked for belief and sometimes for comprehension; and never failed to find them in Ada Merling’s eyes.

“I did not need to be told,” she said, when he had ended, “that you have suffered most cruelly. It is written on your face.... Possibly another might tell you you blame yourself needlessly--you were a tool in the hand of a master who was responsible--but I shall not do so!”

She sank down upon the prone trunk of a great cypress that old age had leveled, and in the characteristic way clasped her hands about her knee. She had on a plain gray dress of some soft material; a white silk shawl was wrapped about her. Not being on duty, she wore no cap, and the pure Greek outlines of the lovely head, with its classic coils and braids of golden-brown hair, were revealed in all their beauty--and the pale sea-shell pink of returning health was upon the oval cheek.

“I knew it!” she said, as though communing with herself, and forgetful of the man who stood beside her. “That the secret feeling of this man towards England and her people was fanged and venomous hatred, something has told me whenever I looked him in the face.... For the very generosity that harbored him, as for the indifference that merely tolerated while it despised him, he was bound to repay in his own coin. And that coin has been minted in Hell! And it has not only scorched and blistered the fingers that took it, but it has carried with it a pestilence that scourges and devastates.... And now that mourning, and sorrow, and ruin and desolation, sit in ashes by Britain’s hearth--_he_ comes knocking at the door with soft words of sympathy. For those who are the victims of his vengeance will never realize it! he has learned in those years of poverty, obscurity and humiliation, to hide his hate so well!”

She might have been a Fate as she linked her long white fingers and looked out beneath her leveled brows over the olive-groves and gardens fringing the Cemetery, and beyond the sapphire-blue water, populous with boats and shipping, towards the European shore. A moment she waited, gathering her forces, and then she drew a deep breath, and rose, and said to Dunoisse, holding out her hand:

“You tell me that it is your purpose to leave here and go to the Crimea, obtain an audience of Lord Dalgan, and unfold the plot to him. It will be a difficult task to convince him--almost an impossible task. Still--since to you as to me the voice of conscience is the Voice of God--go--and Heaven be with you and bring you safely back again!”

The thrill in her sweet voice, the magic of the hand that gently touched his, thawed the old ice about Dunoisse’s heart. He fell down upon his knees before her, and caught a fold of her dress and kissed it, crying passionately:

“Oh! my good angel, from whom once I turned away! oh! dearest and noblest of women, I bless you for those words that hold out hope to me! I swear to you that I will atone!”

He sought her hands, and she yielded them to his clasp, and he kissed them lingeringly. He folded them in his own, and laid them upon his heart, and cried:

“How can one speak to one so spotless of an earthly passion? And yet I will earn the right, one day. Tell me--when I have erased all those black entries from the book of the Recording Angel--when I have washed my soul clean of the guilt of all this blood--tell me that I may come to you and claim my priceless joy--my great reward of you! Give me some sign, even though you do not speak!”

Their eyes met. For answer she leaned over him, and kissed him once, upon the lips, divinely.... Her mouth was a chalice of strengthening. The clasp of her hands gave new life.... He said, exultantly, as they rose up, still looking in each other’s faces:

“Oh, my beloved! I will deserve so much of God, that one day He will give me even you!”

“Hush--hush!” she said, and touched his lips with her cool hand to bid them silence. He kissed the hand, glanced downwards and stooping, disentangled from the soft material of her dress a trailing branch of delicate, vividly-green creeper, hardly larger in leaf than the climbing rose, and set with long sharp thorns.

“What is that? How beautiful and how unusual!” she commented. Then--as he twisted the dewy green leaves and the sharp prickles into a rough circlet and offered it to her, she took it from him silently--saying to herself: “_It is always the hand we love that gives us the crown of thorns!_”

And then she called the nun, and bade him good-night, and went back to the little painted wooden villa standing in its nightingale-haunted garden on the main road to Ismid.

And Dunoisse knew a mad impulse to follow the tall, lightly moving figure, clutch at the softly flowing garments--stay her with desperate prayers not to leave him without one more kiss or at least a word of tenderness. But he fought it down, and went by the northern avenue back to his narrow, stuffy quarters at the Hospital, said farewell to his fellow-workers, and left next morning for the seat of war.

CIII

“FRENCH HEADQUARTERS, “BEFORE SEVASTOPOL, “_December, 1854_.

_To His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces. Staff Headquarters, near Balaklava._

“MY LORD,

“I have to inform your Lordship that a person, passing under the alias of M. Cain, and who is known to have left Scutari _en route_ for the Crimea, is an ex-Brigadier General of His Imperial Majesty’s private staff, named von Widinitz-Dunoisse, who was employed upon Survey in Bulgaria a few years previously, and upon his return to Paris, in May last, committed a gross outrage upon the person of the Emperor, and was consequently deprived of his rank in the French Army, and imprisoned in the Fortress of Ham. Of exceptional ability--this officer--who was released by the clemency of his Imperial Master--rendered excellent service to his Majesty, who has attributed his fantastic conduct and the strange suspicions that apparently possess him, to an intermittent fever contracted in the Dobrudja, the effects of which have permanently unhinged his mind.

“Madness is in the family of this unhappy gentleman, who, as a pupil at the Technical School of Military Instruction, attacked and dangerously wounded a fellow-student with a broken fencing-foil. His mother, the late Princesse Marie-Bathilde von Widinitz-Dunoisse, was for many years in confinement, and died as the inmate of a lunatic asylum a few months ago.

“Should your lordship find yourself annoyed by the assiduities of this person, you are respectfully requested to send him under guard to our Headquarters, where he will be placed under the human surveillance that his malady requires.

“I beg to assure your Lordship of my distinguished considerations,

“A. BOISROBERT,

“Commander-in-Chief.”

Lord Dalgan, Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces in the Crimea, stood leaning an elbow upon the narrow mantelshelf of the clay-brick fireplace that had been built in the corner of the bare, comfortless room of the farmhouse that served him as Headquarters, as he perused this letter--which was penned upon a square sheet of blue official paper, emblazoned with the eagle of Sire my Friend.

The handsome, high-bred, resolute face of Moggy Geogehagan’s bould ould gintleman bore the stamp of weariness and exhaustion. The gallant martial figure in the blue frock-coat that looked so absurdly plain beside the profusely gold-laced and bestarred uniforms of the French Generals, had gained a stoop; the dark gray trousers hung loosely on the wasted limbs.

It was dusk; by the light of the low-burning fire, and by the flicker of the stable-lantern that was held by an orderly who waited just inside the door as though for instructions--you saw the significant disorder of the place.

Papers were piled upon the central stove, papers were heaped upon the trestle-table, upon the three chairs and my lord’s narrow camp-bedstead. Papers filled the wine-hampers that served as waste-paper baskets, papers littered the floor of beaten earth, yet every moment fresh telegrams and dispatches were being brought in by breathless messengers.... One of my lord’s Staff aides-de-camp, a handsome, fair-haired, long-legged young Lieutenant of Lancers, came in, bringing a great handful, as my lord thoughtfully folded the letter that he had been reading and scratched his strong old chin with it in rather a characteristic way he had, and said to the orderly in quiet, level tones:

“Sergeant-Major Ransome, if the person who has again applied for an interview be still waiting in the courtyard, perhaps you had better bring him here!...” He added, taking three telegrams and a couple of bulky envelopes from the aide-de-camp: “And you will wait in the ante-room, Foltlebarre, and see that they have the horses in readiness. I purpose to visit the Cavalry Camp and the Camp of the Second Division before I go to bed.”

“But you had no sleep last night, my lord, or the night before that!”

The boy, scarlet to the ears, met the kindly, almost quizzical look that responded. My lord said, and condescension and hauteur mingled in his tone:

“I am obliged to you, my dear Foltlebarre, but rest will come for me in the due course of things. At present there is duty to be done.”

He opened a telegraphic message from the War Office. It read:

“_Communicate whether Captain Cronan Hundredth Fusiliers has been bitten by a snake or a centipede? Family urgently desirous to know._”

A second telegram repeated this message with the addition of the words: “_Highly urgent._” Amidst the innumerable interrogations, advices, demands, orders and counter-orders that had reached my lord that day, the casualty of Captain Cronan--who was son-in-law to a personage high in power at the Horse Guards, had figured prominently. My lord, with a stifled sigh of weariness, crossed the room and added the telegram to a file of others, as the orderly sergeant-major ushered in the person who had so urgently sought an interview, and saluted and retired, on the heels of the aide-de-camp.

* * * * *

We know who the stranger was. The interview was brief, and as Ada Merling had prophesied, fruitless. Dunoisse had no sooner made the purport of his visit plain, than my lord said, gently but authoritatively, checking him with a gesture of the hand: