'And now, my dear father, I had better take the doctor downstairs. He has to go back to the barge.'
Dr. Rouannès 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 confrère, will I Mademoiselle Rouannès assist, when you no longer there to help her are.'
PART III
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....