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—werecarrying 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 uponthe 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 nocrime, 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-MajorCray, 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, werehers 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.