“Tell me her name.”
“Her name is Ada Merling.”
Even on de Moulny’s French tongue the name was full of music; it came to Hector’s ear like the sudden sweet gurgling thrill that makes the idler straying beneath low-hanging, green hazel-branches upon a June morning in an English wood or lane, look up and catch a glimpse of the golden bill and the gleaming, black-plumaged head, before their owner, with a defiant “tuck-tuck!” takes wing, with curious slanting flight. The boy had a picture of the blackbird, not of the girl, in his mind, as de Moulny went on:
“True, the dog seemed at the last gasp, but if it were possible to stop the bleeding, she said, there might be a chance, who knew? It had occurred to her that cold-water applications might check the flow of blood. ‘We will try, and see, Mademoiselle,’ said I.”
De Moulny’s tone was one of fatuous self-satisfaction.
“A rusty tin saucepan is lying in a corner of the shed. This I fill with water from a little spring that trickles down the cliff behind us. We contribute handkerchiefs. Bertham and I hold the dog while she bathes the torn throat and shoulder, and bandages them. Remains the swollen leg. It occurs to me that fomentations of hot water might be of use there; I mention this idea. ‘Good! good!’ she cries, ‘we will make a fire and heat some.’ She sets to collecting the dry leaves and sticks that are scattered in a corner. Bertham makes a pile of these, and attempts to kindle it with fusees.” A smile of ineffable conceit curved de Moulny’s flabby pale cheeks and quirked the corners of his pouting lips. “He burns matches and he loses his temper; there is no other result. Then I stepped forward, bowed.... ‘Permit me, Mademoiselle, to show you how we arrange these things in my country.’” De Moulny’s tone was so infinitely arrogant, his humility so evidently masked the extreme of bumptiousness, that Hector wondered how the athletic Bertham endured it without knocking him down?
“So I hollow a fireplace in the floor, with a pocket-knife and a piece of slate, devise a flue at each corner, light the fire—which burns, one can conceive, to a marvel.... She has meanwhile refilled the rusty saucepan at the little spring; she sets it on, the water boils, when it occurs to us that we have no more handkerchiefs. But the shepherd’s linen blouse hangs behind the shed-door; at her bidding we tear that into strips.... All is done that can be done; we bid Mademoiselle Merling au revoir. She will ride home presently when her patient is a little easier, she says. We volunteer to remain; she declines to allow us. She thanks us for our aid in a voice that has the clear ring of crystal—I can in no other way describe it! When I take my leave, I desire to kiss her hand. She permits me very gracefully; she speaks French, too, with elegance, as she asks where I learned to make a fireplace so cleverly?
“‘We are taught these things,’ I say to her, ‘at the Royal School of Technical Military Instruction, in my Paris. For we do not think one qualified for being an officer, Mademoiselle, until he has learned all the things that a private should know.’ Then it was that Bertham made that celebrated coq-à-l’âne about its being bad form to do servant’s work well. You should have seen the look she gave him. Sapristi!—with a surprise in it that cut to the quick. She replies: ‘Servants should respect and look up to us, and not despise us; and how can they look up to us if we show ourselves less capable than they? When I am older I mean to have a great house full of sick people to comfort and care for and nurse. And everything that has to be done for them I will learn to do with my own hands!’ My sister Viviette would have said: ‘When I grow up I shall have a rivière of pearls as big as pigeons’ eggs,’ or ‘I shall drive on the boulevards and in the Bois in an ivory-paneled barouche.’ Then I ask a stupid question: ‘Is it that you are to be a Sister of Charity, Mademoiselle?’ She answers, with a look of surprise: ‘Can no one but a nun care for the sick?’ I return: ‘In France, Mademoiselle, our sick-nurses are these holy women. They are welcome everywhere: in private houses and in public hospitals, in time of peace: and in the time of war you will find them in the camp and on the battle-field. Your first patient is a soldier wounded in war,’ I say to her, pointing to the dog. ‘Perhaps it is an augury of the future?’
“‘War is a terrible thing,’ she answers me, and grows pale, and her great eyes are fixed as though they look upon a corpse-strewn battle-field. ‘I hope with all my heart that I may never see it!’ ‘But a nurse must become inured to ugly and horrible sights, Mademoiselle,’ I remind her. She replies: ‘I shall find courage to endure them when I become a nurse.’ Then Bertham blurts out in his brusque way: ‘But you never will! Your people would not allow it. Wait and see if I am not right?’ She returns to him, with a smile, half the child’s, half the woman’s, guileless and subtle at the same time, if you can understand that? ‘We will wait—and you will see.’”
De Moulny’s whisper had dwindled to a mere thread of sound. He had long forgotten Hector, secretly pining for the end of a story that appeared to him as profoundly dull as interminably long; and, oblivious of the other’s martyrdom, talked only to himself.