CHAPTER XIV. COMING EVENTS CAST THEIR SHADOWS BEFORE.
“I WENT first to Mannheim, Lady Janet, as I told you I should in my letter, and I heard all that the consul and the hospital doctors could tell me. No new fact of the slightest importance turned up. I got my directions for finding the German surgeon, and I set forth to try what I could make next of the man who performed the operation. On the question of his patient’s identity he had (as a perfect stranger to her) nothing to tell me. On the question of her mental condition, however, he made a very important statement. He owned to me that he had operated on another person injured by a shell-wound on the head at the battle of Solferino, and that the patient (recovering also in this case) recovered—mad. That is a remarkable admission; don’t you think so?”
Lady Janet’s temper had hardly been allowed time enough to subside to its customary level.
“Very remarkable, I dare say,” she answered, “to people who feel any doubt of this pitiable lady of yours being mad. I feel no doubt—and, thus far, I find your account of yourself, Julian, tiresome in the extreme. Go on to the end. Did you lay your hand on Mercy Merrick?”
“No.”
“Did you hear anything of her?”
“Nothing. Difficulties beset me on every side. The French ambulance had shared in the disasters of France—it was broken up. The wounded Frenchmen were prisoners somewhere in Germany, nobody knew where. The French surgeon had been killed in action. His assistants were scattered—most likely in hiding. I began to despair of making any discovery, when accident threw in my way two Prussian soldiers who had been in the French cottage. They confirmed what the German surgeon told the consul, and what Horace himself told me—namely, that no nurse in a black dress was to be seen in the place. If there had been such a person, she would certainly (the Prussians inform me) have been found in attendance on the injured Frenchmen. The cross of the Geneva Convention would have been amply sufficient to protect her: no woman wearing that badge of honor would have disgraced herself by abandoning the wounded men before the Germans entered the place.”
“In short,” interposed Lady Janet, “there is no such person as Mercy Merrick.”
“I can draw no other conclusion,” said Julian, “unless the English doctor’s idea is the right one. After hearing what I have just told you, he thinks the woman herself is Mercy Merrick.”