"Wilkie Collins - The New Magdalen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Collins Wilkie)

The New Magdalen, Chapters 1 - 15THE NEW MAGDALEN.



TO THE MEMORY OF
CHARLES ALLSTON COLLINS.
(9th April, 1873.)



FIRST SCENE.
The Cottage on the Frontier.



PREAMBLE.
THE place is France.
The time is autumn, in the year eighteen hundred and seventy--the year of the
war between France and Germany.
The persons are, Captain Arnault, of the French army; Surgeon Surville, of the
French ambulance; Surgeon Wetzel, of the German army; Mercy Merrick, attached as
nurse to the French ambulance; and Grace Roseberry, a traveling lady on her way
to England.



CHAPTER I.
THE TWO WOMEN.
IT was a dark night. The rain was pouring in torrents.
Late in the evening a skirmishing party of the French and a skirmishing party of
the Germans had met, by accident, near the little village of Lagrange, close to
the German frontier. In the struggle that followed, the French had (for once)
got the better of the enemy. For the time, at least, a few hundreds out of the
host of the invaders had been forced back over the frontier. It was a trifling
affair, occurring not long after the great German victory of Weissenbourg, and
the newspapers took little or no notice of it.
Captain Arnault, commanding on the French side, sat alone in one of the cottages
of the village, inhabited by the miller of the district. The Captain was
reading, by the light of a solitary tallow-candle, some intercepted dispatches
taken from the Germans. He had suffered the wood fire, scattered over the large
open grate, to burn low; the red embers only faintly illuminated a part of the
room. On the floor behind him lay some of the miller's empty sacks. In a corner
opposite to him was the miller's solid walnut-wood bed. On the walls all around
him were the miller's colored prints, representing a happy mixture of devotional
and domestic subjects. A door of communication leading into the kitchen of the
cottage had been torn from its hinges, and used to carry the men wounded in the
skirmish from the field. They were now comfortably laid at rest in the kitchen,
under the care of the French surgeon and the English nurse attached to the
ambulance. A piece of coarse canvas screened the opening between the two rooms
in place of the door. A second door, leading from the bed-chamber into the yard,