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

Englishwoman's head. Surgeon Surville's manner altered on the instant. The
expression of anxiety left his face; its professional composure covered it
suddenly like a mask. What was the object of his admiration now? An inert burden
in his arms--nothing more.
The change in his face was not lost on Mercy. Her large gray eyes watched him
attentively. "Is the lady seriously wounded?" she asked.
"Don't trouble yourself to hold the light any longer," was the cool reply. "It's
all over--I can do nothing for her."
"Dead?"
Surgeon Surville nodded and shook his fist in the direction of the outposts.
"Accursed Germans!" he cried, and looked down at the dead face on his arm, and
shrugged his shoulders resignedly. "The fortune of war!" he said as he lifted
the body and placed it on the bed in one corner of the room. "Next time, nurse,
it may be you or me. Who knows? Bah! the problem of human destiny disgusts me."
He turned from the bed, and illustrated his disgust by spitting on the fragments
of the exploded shell. "We must leave her there," he resumed. "She was once a
charming person--she is nothing now. Come away, Miss Mercy, before it is too
late."
He offered his arm to the nurse; the creaking of the baggage-wagon, starting on
its journey, was heard outside, and the shrill roll of the drums was renewed in
the distance. The retreat had begun.
Mercy drew aside the canvas, and saw the badly wounded men, left helpless at the
mercy of the enemy, on their straw beds. She refused the offer of Monsieur
Surville's arm.
"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.