“I have already told you that I shall stay here,” she answered.
Monsieur Surville lifted his hands in polite remonstrance. Mercy held back the curtain, and pointed to the cottage door.
“Go,” she said. “My mind is made up.”
Even at that final moment the Frenchman asserted himself. He made his exit with unimpaired grace and dignity. “Madam,” he said, “you are sublime!” With that parting compliment the man of gallantry—true to the last to his admiration of the sex—bowed, with his hand on his heart, and left the cottage.
Mercy dropped the canvas over the doorway. She was alone with the dead woman.
The last tramp of footsteps, the last rumbling of the wagon wheels, died away in the distance. No renewal of firing from the position occupied by the enemy disturbed the silence that followed. The Germans knew that the French were in retreat. A few minutes more and they would take possession of the abandoned village: the tumult of their approach should become audible at the cottage. In the meantime the stillness was terrible. Even the wounded wretches who were left in the kitchen waited their fate in silence.
Alone in the room, Mercy’s first look was directed to the bed.
The two women had met in the confusion of the first skirmish at the close of twilight. Separated, on their arrival at the cottage, by the duties required of the nurse, they had only met again in the captain’s room. The acquaintance between them had been a short one; and it had given no promise of ripening into friendship. But the fatal accident had roused Mercy’s interest in the stranger. She took the candle, and approached the corpse of the woman who had been literally killed at her side.
She stood by the bed, looking down in the silence of the night at the stillness of the dead face.
It was a striking face—once seen (in life or in death) not to be forgotten afterward. The forehead was unusually low and broad; the eyes unusually far apart; the mouth and chin remarkably small. With tender hands Mercy smoothed the disheveled hair and arranged the crumpled dress. “Not five minutes since,” she thought to herself, “I was longing to change places with you!” She turned from the bed with a sigh. “I wish I could change places now!”