The Red Cross Barge

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

1

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. Rouannès.

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 Rouannès. 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-encompassing vision of coming joy, of heart-hunger satisfied, another side concerned with alleviating the last hours of Jeanne Rouannès' 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 passed 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 Rouannès had gently and courteously refused to see him, and he had been made to feel by old Thérèse 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 spacious 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. Rouannès. He noted, with a certain indulgent amusement, 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 petit 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 Rouannès.'

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 Rouannès 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 Rouannès, née Demoiselle Jeanne de Blignière. Mère aimée. Femme adorée.

To the right of the Rouannès 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 masses 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 Rouannès' father.