'No, Monsieur le Médecin,' and this time a wave of colour flooded her face. 'If I do that, they will constantly be sending for me. Everything is in order. There is nothing I could do, that they cannot do.'
She spoke with the decision, the simple directness, which the Herr Stabsarzt admired. What would he not give, in times of peace of course he meant, to have such a capable young woman as this French girl had proved herself to be, in charge of the nurses in his beloved clinik!
2
Jeanne Rouannès tended the Herr Doktor all that long, still, cloudless day, as together they had tended so many wounded men during those days and nights which had seemed, to her at least, to contain an eternity of painful effort and strain, of dull despair, of agonising sights.
But here, in this clean, water-lapped little cabin-room, there reigned a delicious quietude, only broken by the drowsy murmur of the river which flowed swiftly just outside, past the wooden walls of the barge. From far off, making the stillness the more intense, came the deep booming of great guns, but with the falling of night that also ceased.
She had been prodigal with the morphia the German surgeon had left with her, and still more with that strange, suggestively-named drug, heroine. For she was dully, but none the less firmly, determined that this man should not suffer as some of the men she had tended during the last few days had suffered. He, at least, had earned immunity from that hellish pain by all the pain he had spared others.
He lay so rigidly unmoving that had he not sometimes breathed out a long, tired sigh, and now and again, not often, moved his bandaged head an inch to the right or an inch to the left, she might have doubted if he still lived.
At last an immense, limitless lassitude seemed to fall on Jeanne Rouannès. Soul, as well as body, cried out and hungered for rest. Slipping down on to the floor, to the left side of the bed, she propped her head against the hard back of a wooden chair and dozed.
She woke—was it moments or hours later?—to hear a little, stuffless sound—that of the Herr Doktor's hand moving feebly across the sheet.