The Red Cross Barge Part 7

'Well, my dear confrere--you will already have guessed the end of my story! The two hours which followed the decree of our General were the most painful of my life. But the Luxembourg doctor had made one mistake.

He had thought to find four spies--Monsieur, there were five. Exactly half of these ten men wearing the Red Cross knew nothing of medicine--nothing of surgery. The fifth man, he who had escaped suspicion, was more intelligent than the others; he, at any rate, had taken the trouble to make himself conversant with certain things which are the ABC of our n.o.ble profession. Perchance he was the son of a doctor--who knows? You will ask why we were so long as two hours? We were two hours because we first took those whom our Luxembourg confrere believed to be medical men. We put them through a very thorough examination and they came out of it admirably. Then we took the others.

Ah, Monsieur, that did not take long! We knew the truth very, very soon--almost within the first few moments. For the matter of that they scarcely went to the trouble of denying what we suspected--only the one of whom I have just spoken tried to deceive us. They were brave men--that I will say frankly--those Prussian officers who had done so dastardly a thing. Indeed, Monsieur, I do not mind admitting to you that, in the end, I understood their point of view far more than I did that of the five medical men who had lent themselves to so unprofessional an act of treachery. As for the spies, they were working for their country. I repeat, they were brave men. Not one of them flinched. A confrere who had been attached to a medical mission in the East said to me afterwards that to him they recalled fanatics. For the matter of that, even the German surgeons were not aware of the enormity of their crime. There seemed no shame among them--indeed, as one of them put it to me quite plainly, each of them placed his Fatherland above his sense of professional honour.'

And then at last the Herr Doktor spoke. 'You do not think any French Red Cross surgeon would such a--a trick have practised?'

And Jeanne Rouannes, glancing at him quickly, and then averting her eyes, saw that his usually pale face was red.

The old man stared at him, surprised. He lifted his s.h.a.ggy white eyebrows. 'I cannot answer for _every_ member of the French Army Medical Corps,' he answered, with a touch of impatience. 'But I can answer for it that you would not have found five men, nay, not three, willing to do such a thing in concert. Had such a proposal been made to them, one and all, I am quite convinced, would have refused. Further, I a.s.sert that no French general would have dared to make to them so dishonourable a proposal. The Red Cross, as you know, my dear confrere, is an international inst.i.tution; if it is to be used to cover, to serve military operations, then'--he shrugged his shoulders expressively.

The Herr Doktor rose to his feet. 'Yes,' he said, 'I quite see it, and from your point of view you have right--undoubted right!'

'And now, my dear father, I had better take the doctor downstairs. He has to go back to the barge.'

Dr. Rouannes grasped his colleague's hand with both his. 'It has done me great good to see you,' he said heartily. 'And I am sure you will be able to alleviate the slight pain from which I now and again suffer. You will remember all I have told you'--the old man looked up at him with a touch of painful anxiety in his eyes, and, as he heard the door behind the screen swing to behind his daughter--'You will help her to get to Paris?' he muttered. 'It would not be safe for her to remain alone here.

There may be fierce fighting our way soon. You have doubtless heard of our New Army?'

The Herr Doktor nodded. How piteous were these delusions of the conquered! He answered in all sincerity, 'In every possible way, my dear confrere, will I Mademoiselle Rouannes a.s.sist, when you no longer there to help her are.'

PART III

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The cemetery of what was once Valoise commands the wide valley of the Marne, and, as so often happens in France, it is on the highest ground in the town, at a considerable distance from the parish church.

On the morning of the eighth day of September the Herr Doktor was betaking himself there to attend the funeral of his late colleague and patient, Dr. Rouannes.

During the last three days he had scarcely ever left the house of the dying man. No son could have been more vigilantly, unwearyingly, devoted than had been this German surgeon to the dying Frenchman; but while to her whose vigils he shared time had seemed to drag with leaden feet, to him the hours had gone all too quickly, and every moment spent with the woman he loved had been fraught with emotions which gained in intensity owing to enforced lack of expression.

No wonder that he grew to care with an intimate, caressing affection for everything in the little homestead that now belonged to Jeanne Rouannes.

No wonder that he put far from him, even if he could not always wholly forget it, the fact that now, at this pregnant moment of their joint lives, their two countries were at war. Sometimes, indeed, he did actually forget it, for there was nothing to remind him of the conflict in the still, sunlit little house, hidden in its fragrant garden behind high walls. Even outside those walls, along the quiet, rudely paved streets and stony, steep byways of the town, there came no surge of the fierce, devastating tide of war now sweeping ever nearer and nearer to doomed Paris. Max Keller, one side of his nature absorbed in what had become an all-encompa.s.sing vision of coming joy, of heart-hunger satisfied, another side concerned with alleviating the last hours of Jeanne Rouannes' father, scarcely heard the little there was to hear, or saw the little there was to see. He heard, that is, without hearing, the rumours, now glad, now sad, which flew, even in remote Valoise, from lip to lip. He saw, without seeing, the streets become more solitary and barer of human life, as those first September days pa.s.sed by, bringing, as they always do in Northern France, a wonder of beautiful autumnal colour....

And now, this morning, as the Herr Doktor trudged up to the cemetery, he was conning over a suitable form of English words in which to tell Jeanne of her father's last wish and injunction--that they two should proceed to Paris without delay. As to what should follow their arrival in Paris he, Max Keller, must wait upon events. In any case, he knew that it would be an easy matter for him to afford the aunt and niece help and protection during the short time that must elapse ere Germany made peace with France.

In one thing, and one thing only, he had been keenly disappointed. Since they, together, had left the death-chamber, Mademoiselle Rouannes had gently and courteously refused to see him, and he had been made to feel by old Therese that his further presence in that house of bitter mourning was superfluous. Reluctantly he had gone off to the Tournebride to find there, as is always the case with an empty inn, an unnatural sense of peace and void. Madame Blanc had the s.p.a.cious hostelry all to herself, and she spent her time in a restless coming to and fro about her one guest. Of her two young daughters there was now, to his indifferent surprise, no sign at all.

Half an hour ago the Herr Doktor and his hostess had started out together, she bound for the parish church, he for the cemetery. Soon their ways had parted, and it had seemed to the German surgeon that the whole remaining population of Valoise, or at any rate all the old women and all the children too, intended to be present at the funeral of Dr.

Rouannes. He noted, with a certain indulgent amus.e.m.e.nt, that there was an air of subdued festivity about those black-clad feminine mourners, for the French are a gregarious people, and to the women walking in slow-moving groups towards the church, any excuse for meeting was welcome.

Now he had left them all behind him, and as, breasting the light wind, he strode up the last lap of the stony thoroughfare which led to the cemetery, the practical side of his German mind asked itself, with a kind of impatient wonder, why such a peculiarly unsuitable stretch of high ground should have been chosen.

But there is something very appealing, and very intimate, in the final resting-places of the French dead, and the Herr Doktor, when he at last walked through the gates, and found himself in the strangely situated cemetery of Valoise, looked about him with a good deal of sympathetic interest and curiosity.

To his now brimful-of-sentiment heart there was nothing jarring in the ugly, often even grotesque, mementoes which here surrounded him. In his present mood the stone and marble hands clasped closely together struck him as exquisitely symbolic of the highest type of human love; he was touched by the quaint conceit of a black tablet bedewed with a widower's white tears, and he gazed with softened eyes at the contorted bead wreaths and crosses inscribed 'A notre pere,' 'Mon cher pet.i.t enfant,' 'Regrets sinceres,' which were among the humbler forms of commemoration.

While walking with reverent footsteps along a narrow pathway, his eyes were suddenly arrested by an English inscription. Though cut deep into a now very weather-beaten stone cross, the words had become partly effaced. He soon, however, made out their sense:

On September 29, 1870, there fell, close to Valoise, three brave men, nameless German officers. An Englishwoman, a lover of Germany, has put up this cross to their memory. May they rest in peace.

There came a deep frown over the Herr Doktor's mouth. He turned his back abruptly on the old stone cross, wondering bitterly whether the Englishwoman who had done this kindly act was still alive. If so, what must she now think of the treachery of her decadent fellow-countrymen?

Somewhat ruffled by this untoward incident, he walked on, till he found the deep, roughly made grave wherein his French colleague was about to be laid.

Above the now open vault rose a miniature stone chapel, and below the lintel of the roof ran in gold letters the words: 'Famille Rouannes.'

Walking slowly forward Max Keller went and stood before the gates, between which rose the pair of trestles placed ready for the coffin.

Four marble tablets were fixed on the left-hand side of the entrance to the chapel, and on each was commemorated a member of the Rouannes family. Jeanne's grandfather, dead forty-five years ago; her grandmother; an uncle who had died in childhood. And then, in blacker, clearer characters, an inscription which touched him nearly:

Dame Emile Rouannes, nee Demoiselle Jeanne de Bligniere. Mere aimee. Femme adoree.

To the right of the Rouannes monument, a square aperture cut in the cemetery wall commanded a wonderful view, not only of the town of Valoise, but of the spreading plains below. He went there, and leaning over the low parapet, gazed down at the place where, some hundred feet beneath him, was a little square from which fell away the grey and red roofs which seemed, in their turn, to drop sheer into the valley.

An autumn haze, rising from the river, and from the many other smaller waterways intersecting the woods and lands beyond the river, hung over the countryside. And as his short-sighted eyes tried to pierce the ma.s.ses of shifting mist which moved over the wide, flat expanse of land below, there suddenly broke on the still air the sound of solemn chanting, and he saw, moving up the long winding street which led from the parish church to the cemetery, the funeral procession of Jeanne Rouannes' father.

2

The procession was headed by a woman whom he knew to be the old priest's plain-featured housekeeper. She bore in her uplifted arms a cross, and, immediately after her, came Monsieur le Cure himself. In his black-and-silver mourning vestments the parish priest of Valoise looked an imposing, as well as a reverent, figure. Behind him were eight little boys in black ca.s.socks, each of whom in his right hand held a lighted candle, which guttered and spluttered in the wind. Very slowly, and pacing in ordered array, the priest and his attendant acolytes debouched into the little square.

There followed a moment of confusion, and in the centre of a black-robed crowd of elderly women--of women the majority of whom each held a child by the hand--the Herr Doktor suddenly saw something which made him recoil and press further in to that side of the wall which concealed him from the people below.

On a rickety low cart, drawn by a decrepit pony, was a large wooden packing-case on which some well-meaning hand had drawn, in black paint which still gleamed wetly in the sun, a rude cross.

Such was the makeshift coffin of Doctor Rouannes.

The colour flamed up into the Herr Doktor's face. With a shock of shame and, yes, of nave surprise, he realised how barbarous, how lamentable, even how grotesque, can be the minor consequences of Glorious War.

Behind the little cart and its untoward burden, Jeanne Rouannes, shrouded in black, and heavily veiled, walked alone, followed at a few paces by the two servants of the dead man. Suddenly the cart stopped, and out of the crowd there came forward eight very old men. Stooping down till their knees almost touched the ground, they lifted the white deal case on to their shoulders, and slowly, pantingly, began the task of bearing it up the stony path which led to the cemetery.

The Herr Doktor, shrinking back, instinctively held his breath; he feared that each dragging moment might bring with it the slipping of the awkward burden from some heaving shoulder, and at last the strain on his nerves became so great that he deliberately turned away, and stared, in wretched suspense, unseeingly before him.

It seemed as if hours instead of minutes pa.s.sed by ere he heard the muttered exclamations of relief: 'ca y est!' 'Enfin!' 'Oh, la, la!'

which signified that the eight old men had reached level ground at last.

Then, and not till then, the onlooker left the embrasure in the wall where he had been hidden. But no one glanced his way, or seemed conscious of his alien presence, and with aching heart he gazed his fill at the mournful little procession which was now pa.s.sing a few yards to his left.

The coffin bearers walked more firmly, their burden now better adjusted to their frail shoulders, and close behind them came Jeanne Rouannes.

She had thrown back her long black veil; her face looked as though it were of wax; alone her blue eyes, gleaming dry and bright, seemed alive.

Very soon the crowd surged up, forming a large semicircle, and the one stranger there fell back, on to the outer rim of it. But, even so, he could still see Jeanne Rouannes quite clearly. And when the rude case which served as her father's coffin had been placed on the trestles standing ready for it, the hard waxen look left her face, a long quivering sigh escaped her lips, and these same poor lips began to tremble piteously. As the tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks, the Herr Doktor's filled in sympathy....

Suddenly their tear-dimmed eyes met, and though he did not know it, and was never to know it, she saw him, this German man, Max Keller, who loved her, as if for the first time--for the agony she was feeling unlocked the key to his heart, and made her see therein.

She blushed--a dusky, painful blush of outraged pride, anger, surprise, and quick self-examination and reproach. But no, she had done nothing to deserve, to bring upon herself, this new, this inconceivably outrageous humiliation! But very soon the deep colour receded, leaving her pale as she had been red, and it was with a composed countenance and downcast eyes that she stepped forward to perform the last of the pious offices the Catholic living perform to the Catholic dead--that of sprinkling holy water on the coffin.