The Red Cross Barge

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

'The town has nothing to fear.' The Herr Doktor spoke in a loud voice. His nerves were taut. The other's tone, at once commanding and appealing, irritated him. 'With every consideration will you treated be,' he said stiffly. 'I will myself go and the Commandant seek out.'

The old priest, glancing round, saw that Jeanne Rouannès was practically out of earshot. Approaching yet closer, he said urgently, 'I also trust to you, Monsieur le Médecin, to make a special effort to protect that poor girl, and I appeal to you to tell me now, at once, if she will be safer with you or with me? In any case it is clear she must go home as soon as possible, and assume there once more her Red Cross uniform. That in itself is a protection.'

The Herr Doktor looked straight into the face of the priest. He saw there fear, horror, and indignation struggling for mastery. Very different had been the attitude, the appearance, of Monsieur le Curé when they had first met on that August day, nearly three weeks ago, when the Uhlans had taken peaceful possession of Valoise! Then there had been no sign of fear on the priest's face, and that though he had absurdly supposed himself to be about to be led out and shot. But now? Now the old Frenchman did look afraid.

As for a moment the Herr Doktor remained silent, the other repeated, with a touch of angry impatience and urgency in his voice—'What is it you advise? What do you believe will be best for the protection of Mademoiselle Rouannès? I beg of you to tell me! There is no time to lose—soon it will be too late for me to do anything, for they will want me again as a hostage.'

'Yes,' said the Herr Doktor reluctantly, 'I fear it is true that you an hostage will have to be. But as—as for Mademoiselle Rouannès, she, I assure you, will be perfectly safe! Of her to ask that she should her Red Cross dress again put on, that could I not on the day of her father's funeral do. Indeed, there is no reason why she again should to the barge go down. The men whom I have been compelled as prisoners to keep down there are nearly well, and she has never my own patient nursed.'

His French was poor and halting, but the old priest understood it well enough to be filled with dismay at such—such an obstinate blindness!

'Is it possible you do not know,' he said in a quick whisper, 'how the Prussians have been behaving since they began to retreat—since there began that great battle three days ago?'

The German surgeon stared at the old French priest. He felt amazed, incredulous, and yet—yet a gleam of doubt filled his soul. 'I have nothing heard!' he exclaimed. 'You forget that I the last few days constantly with Dr. Rouannès have been. Why did you me unknowing leave of what you seem to think I should have known? Even now I do not what you mean understand. And I must of you request to tell me what it is you believe?'

But even as he asked the question the Herr Doktor's mind had rushed back to many apparently insignificant happenings of the last few days....

All through those days there had arisen an unwonted stir outside the little house where he was engaged in so skilfully tending a dying man. Along the quiet, sunny Rue des Jardins there had been an incessant coming and going of peasant women pouring into Valoise from the surrounding country. He also remembered now that a group of girls, crying bitterly, had come to see Mademoiselle Rouannès, and that old Thérèse had informed him that they belonged, like Mademoiselle herself, to a Sodalité, or religious society, and that they were leaving the town.