Lorraine, A Romance

When he went into the cellar again Lorraine was pacing restlessly along the wine-bins.

"I cannot stay here," she said. "Jack, get some bottles of brandy and come to the barn. The wounded will need them."

"You cannot go out. I will take them."

"No, I shall go."

"I ask you not to."

"Let me, Jack," she said, coming up to him--"with you."

He could not make her listen; she went with him, her slender arms loaded with bottles. The shells were falling in the garden now; one burst and flung a shower of earth and glass over them.

"Hurry!" he said. "Are you crazy, Lorraine, to come out into this?"

"Don't scold, Jack," she whispered.

When she entered the stable he breathed more freely. He watched her face narrowly, but she did not blanch at the sickening spectacle of the surgeons' tables.

They placed their bottles of brandy along the side of a box-stall, and stood together watching the file of wounded passing in at the door.

"They do not need us here, yet," he said. "I wonder where Alixe is?"

"There is a Sister of Mercy out on the skirmish-line across the lawn," said a soldier of the hospital corps, pointing with bloody hands towards the smoke-veiled river.

Jack looked at Lorraine in utter despair.

"I must go; she can't stay there," he muttered.

"Yes, you must go," repeated Lorraine. "She will be shot."

"Will you wait here?" he asked.

"Yes."

So he went away, thinking bitterly that she did not care whether he lived or died--that she let him leave her without a word of fear, of kindness. Then, for the first time, he realized that she had never, after all, been touched by his devotion; that she had never understood, nor cared to understand, his love for her. He walked out across the smoky lawn, the din of the rifles in his ears, the bitterness of death in his heart. He knew he was going into danger--that he was already in peril. Bullets whistled through the smoke as he advanced towards the firing-line, where, in the fog, dim figures were outlined here and there. He passed an officer, standing with bared sword, watching his men digging up the sod and piling it into low breastworks. He went on, passing others, sometimes two soldiers bearing a wounded man, now and then a maimed creature writhing on the grass or hobbling away to the rear. The battle-line lay close to him now--long open ranks of men, flat on their stomachs, firing into the smoke across the river-bank. Their officers loomed up in the gloom, some leaning quietly back on their sword-hilts, some pacing to and fro, smoking, or watchfully steadying the wearied men.