The New Magdalen

"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!"

The silence began to oppress her. She walked slowly to the other end of

the room.

The cloak on the floor--her own cloak, which she had lent to Miss

Roseberry--attracted her attention as she passed it. She picked it up

and brushed the dust from it, and laid it across a chair. This done, she

put the light back on the table, and going to the window, listened for

the first sounds of the German advance. The faint passage of the wind

through some trees near at hand was the only sound that caught her ears.

She turned from the window, and seated herself at the table, thinking.

Was there any duty still left undone that Christian charity owed to the

dead? Was there any further service that pressed for performance in the

interval before the Germans appeared?