Turning slightly round, and lifting up her right arm, she clasped the poor, limp, nerveless hand in hers....
How many hands, hard, dirty, tortured hands, she had in pity clasped during the last few weeks!—the honest, valiant hands of her young, wounded, fellow-countrymen, in those peaceful, early days of war that now seemed to her so unutterably long ago. Lately, the hands she had held in hers, often in a useless, pitiful attempt to make them understand words of kindness or of hope, had been the huge hands of wounded Germans, those big men-children who had seemed to her so much less stoical in the braving of pain than the more highly-strung French soldiers.
The hand she now held was small and delicate, the hand of a surgeon and a student. How kindly that poor hand, now lying limply clasped in hers, had tended her father! At this thought, this recollection, she pressed it more closely, and as she did so, Max Keller, unknowing where he was, though aware of her nearness, came back to semi-consciousness.
Before his sightless eyes there suddenly gleamed the lights of the Schloss at Weimar, reflected in the waters of the Ulm. Then with extraordinary vividness he saw the Schloss gates—those gates which he had passed such myriads of times in his thirty-four years of life.... A moment later, he was gazing, with the same sense of vivid reality, at the bronze fountain, let into an old wall, of which the subject—found by Goethe in a church in Spain—is that of two beautiful youths, brothers who died young. One youth, who holds a torch reversed, has his arm round the other's neck. Beneath their feet the clear water has gushed forth since the day when Goethe's eyes first rested on the finished work, and now, lying there in the little cabin-room of a French Red Cross barge, Weimar's dying son seemed to hear the delicious bubbling of the spring.
There, too, he saw the door through which so often walked the one woman whom Goethe had supremely loved.
Thousands of times had the happy Goethe walked through that low door on his way to the beloved....
At last, vaguely, obscurely, there came to the Herr Doktor the knowledge of where he was, and who was with him there. But the knowledge brought confusion, and distress of mind. His associations with this little cabin-room were all of the mother-spoilt, given-to-base-pleasures princeling, his Highness Prince Egon von Witgenstein. The thought that the Prince might be in Valoise, lying in wait for the young French Red Cross nurse, disturbed him, made him restless. If only he could remember! But it was as if great stretches of his mind and memory were darkened, hopelessly.
'Honoured miss?' he muttered feebly.
And she answered, oh so gently, in a voice he had never heard her use to him, though often these last few days he had heard it whispering kind, consoling, hopeful things to the suffering and the dying: 'Yes, my friend?'
'Where is Prince Egon—my patient who was here?'