The Red Cross Barge Part 5

_Im wunderschonen Monat Mai Als alle Knospen sprangen Da ist in meinem Herzen Die Liebe aufgegangen._

And then he looked up and gazed across the river. Strange, strange indeed, that love should wait till now to blossom in his heart!

There came the sound, the now beloved, familiar sound of Her quick, light footfalls on the jetty, and a moment later Mademoiselle Rouannes walked on to the barge.

Leaping to his feet, he brought his heels together and bowed. But the ceremonious words of inquiry he was about to utter concerning her father's state were stayed on his lip, and the secret joy which had flooded his whole being on seeing her was suddenly changed to concern, even distress, so unlike did Jeanne Rouannes appear to his usual vision of her. Her face was flushed, her eyelids reddened by much crying. The look of composure, of dignity, which always aroused his willing admiration, if also his aching sense of her aloofness from himself, was gone, and now there was something appealing, as well as piteous and even helpless, in the face into which he was gazing.

'I have come to ask you,' she said abruptly, and in English, 'if you will give me a little of your small store of morphia or laudanum? My father is now in constant pain--I fear he is far more ill than he will admit is the case. I am very, very anxious about him.' She uttered the words with quick, nervous haste, lowering her voice as she spoke.

Was it possible that she thought there could be any fear of his refusing her request? Apparently there was, for, 'I know you do not like to diminish your store of narcotics. But from what I understand a quite small amount might lessen the pain my father is enduring.'

She had moved away from the middle of the deck, and they were standing, side by side, on the river side of the barge. As she spoke she did not look at the man by her side, instead she stared straight before her, and he saw the tears well up into her tired eyes, and roll down her pale cheeks.

'Would it not possible be,' he asked, 'for me your father to see?'

'No. That is quite impossible. But I thank you for thinking of doing so.'

'But if you tell him that to the Red Cross,--that splendid, so-entirely-neutral and internationally-universal inst.i.tution--I too belong? Surely would he then consent me to see?'

She shook her head. 'The truth is that--that----' She stopped, and he said 'Yes?' interrogatively, encouragingly. 'The truth is that my poor father had a most unfortunate experience with some German Red Cross doctors!'

'With German doctors,' he repeated, discomfited. 'That very strange is.'

'Yes, it was strange--strange and most unfortunate, as matters now are; for it makes me feel that I do not dare propose your visit to him.'

The Herr Doktor--or so it seemed to the girl standing by his side--fell into an abstracted silence. She respected his mood for a few moments, then she asked timidly, in a voice very different from that which he had ever heard issue from her proud lips before, 'I suppose your medical stores are at the Tournebride?'

He looked round eagerly. 'No,' he said quickly. 'I have them here, in the motor ambulance, and what necessary is, go I at once to procure.

But, gracious miss! There has come to me a thought which I find most illuminating, a thought which I you earnestly beg very carefully before you it reject to consider. With my medical stores possess I naturally operation overalls.'

He stopped for a moment, as if anxious to give himself time, then went on hurriedly: 'Would it not possible be for me to put on an overall (it covers entirely my 'feld-grau' uniform) and then an English doctor to represent by the bedside of your honoured father? He surely would not object an English or, better still, a Scotch colleague to see?'

'That,' she said, and drew a long breath, 'is very true.'

And as he gazed at her with an earnest, longing look of the inner meaning of which she was, as he well knew, utterly unconscious, he saw surprise and indecision give way to hope and relief.

'But are you willing to do that?' she asked.'Would it not be very--very disagreeable for you to carry through such a--a----' Her English failed her, and she uttered a word of which he was ignorant, and could only guess the meaning--'to carry through such a _supercherie_? 'she said.

He answered eagerly, 'There is nothing I would not do'--and then he checked himself, and subst.i.tuted for what he had been going to say, the words, 'for a French colleague. Absolutely easy will it be,' he went on confidently. 'You will him tell that I very little French know--which indeed the truth is.'

Even as he spoke, her woman's wit was hard at work. 'I will write my father a note,' she said, 'and send it by Therese. Then he will not be able to say "No" to me, and I on my side shall not have the pain of speaking a lie to him face to face.'

The Herr Doktor's face relaxed into a smile; women, so he reflected, were the same all the world over--in France as in Germany. He took out of his breast pocket a neat letter-case, of which he had made no use since his arrival in Valoise. Deferentially he handed it to her, and then he had the pleasure of seeing her write a letter on his note-paper.

'Do you think that will do?' she said. And he read over slowly and carefully the short, clear French phrases.

'MY DEAR FATHER,--An English doctor has joined the Red Cross barge.

I much desire that he should see thee. I will bring him with me in an hour. As far as I can judge he is experienced.

'Thy 'JEANNE.'

'Most excellent, honoured miss! And only one little word not absolutely true is!' He ventured a smile. She smiled back with the words, 'But it is a very important word--"English"!' And then she wondered why his face altered and stiffened into such frowning gravity; the English, after all, were no more the Herr Doktor's enemies than were the French.

4

They sped along, two white, ghost-like figures, in the darkness. Every light in the little town was already extinguished, or hidden behind high walls and closely drawn curtains. Valoise only asked to be forgotten, to be obliterated from the map, while the awful tide of war swayed and swept on, within some twenty miles of the town, towards Paris.

Jeanne Rouannes walked as swiftly and unfalteringly as if it had been broad daylight through the steep byways and up the roughly paved alleys leading to the Haute Ville. But it seemed a long time ere they emerged into a street, lighted by one twinkling lamp which swung suspended over the centre of the highway.

'You are interested in the Revolution?' she said in English. 'Well, thirty people were hung in this street, from where that lamp now swings, a hundred and twenty years ago. That was the meaning of "a la lanterne!"'

'Ach!' exclaimed the Herr Doktor, gazing upwards. 'That truly informative is!' And while he uttered these words he was telling himself--that secret self to whom each of us tells so many amazing, unexpected, tragic and, yes, sometimes such delicious things--that this was the first time she had ever spoken to him, of her own volition, on any subject which lay quite outside her Red Cross work. That she had done so made him feel exultant, absurdly happy. Soon, quite soon, every barrier would surely be down between their two hearts....

She moved on a few steps, and then stopped in front of an aperture sunk far back in the wall which ran to the right of the historic lantern.

'We have arrived,' she said, and turning the handle of the door, she stepped back to allow him to pa.s.s through first.

He waited awkwardly for a moment. 'Won't you the way lead?' he asked; and quickly she walked past him into a garden which in the darkness seemed illimitable. Sweet pungent scents rose and mingled from each side of the narrow flagged path, and to his moved and ardent imagination it was as if Nature herself was offering the homage of her incense to the French girl now leading him into the sanctuary of her home.

Suddenly he saw a small low house rise whitely before him; a door opened, and a shaft of yellow light illumined the short, broad figure of the old woman servant, Therese, for in her hand she held a lamp with a gay Chinese shade over it.

Mademoiselle Rouannes called out, 'Here we are, Therese!' Then she turned round to her companion. 'If you will kindly wait in my salon for a moment, I will go and tell my father that you are here,' she said in a low voice.

Her white figure melted into the darkness and he followed the servant down a pa.s.sage, and into what was evidently the only sitting-room of the little house. Then Therese shut the door on him, and the Herr Doktor began looking about him with eager curiosity.

The room was not gay and bright as he would have thought to find a young Frenchwoman's salon. Rather was it simple and austere. The few pieces of furniture were of the First Empire period, of mahogany and bra.s.s, covered with bright green silk which with time had become dulled in tint, and even frayed. In the middle of the room was a marble-topped round table on which stood a lamp, fellow to that which old Therese had held in her hand. On the round table lay several books, and a magazine, the 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' to which the Herr Doktor in the now-so-far-away days of peace had been a subscriber.

He bent down and looked at the familiar orange cover. It bore the date of August 1. Idly he looked at the table of contents: no prevision, no suspicion even, of the coming cataclysm! He wondered whether the number of August 15 had been published. He thought it unlikely.

He turned away from the table, and looked up and about him. Above a narrow, straight settee hung two charming eighteenth-century pastels--that of a young man in a blue and silver uniform, and that of a slim, pale girl with powdered hair. She had a wistful and yet a proud little face, and it pleased the Herr Doktor to trace in this portrait a resemblance to Mademoiselle Rouannes.

At last the door opened, and he felt a slight shock of disappointment at seeing that it was old Therese, and not her young mistress, who had come for him. Stepping lightly, he followed her up a shallow staircase, and so to a landing on the first floor.

Jeanne Rouannes was standing there, waiting for him. She had changed from her white uniform into a black gown, and this change of dress altered her strangely. It made her look younger, slenderer, paler, more beautiful even than before in the Herr Doktor's eyes, for it intensified her peculiar fairness, and deepened the fire in her blue eyes.

Perhaps something in his face showed his surprise, for she said in English, and in a very low voice, 'I never wear my Red Cross dress when I am with my father. It disturbs him--makes him remember----' and then, without finis.h.i.+ng her sentence, she pushed open a red-baize door, and beckoned to him to follow her. As he did so, she put her finger to her lips and whispered, 'Wait here a moment----'

From where he stood, just within the door, he could see only one half of the room, and that half bare, save that the walls were lined with books set on mahogany shelves. Standing at right angles across the one corner visible from the door was a writing-table, covered with grey cloth. A high screen to his left hid the rest of the room.

The Herr Doktor's heart began to beat quickly. He told himself that he was about to enter into the very heart of her life--to take an amazing step forward in his intimacy with her....

A word or two was whispered behind the screen, and then she came for him. As together they walked forward into the room, she exclaimed, in French of course, 'Papa, I bring you the kind----'

But the words were cut across by the leonine-looking, grey-haired man sitting up in bed. 'Welcome!' cried Dr. Rouannes heartily. He stretched out both his hands. 'Welcome, my dear colleague--nay, I should now say, my dear ally! My daughter tells me that you speak French. Unhappily I do not know your splendid language, but, as you see, Jeanne was taught English. For some years after the death of my beloved wife, we had living with us a charming person, our excellent Miss--Miss----'

'Miss Owen,' said Mademoiselle Rouannes quietly.

'Yes, yes, Miss Owen!' He waited a moment; then he looked up at his daughter. 'My little girl,' he said, and there was a very tender, caressing inflection in his resonant French voice, 'I will now ask you to go downstairs while I confer with our friend.'