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

The surgeon lifted the canvas screen and called into the kitchen:
"Miss Merrick, have you time to take a little rest?"
"Plenty of time," answered a soft voice with an underlying melancholy in it,
plainly distinguishable though it had only spoken three words.
"Come in, then," continued the surgeon, "and bring the English lady with you.
Here is a quiet room all to yourselves."
He held back the canvas, and the two women appeared.
The nurse led the way--tall, lithe, graceful--attired in her uniform dress of
neat black stuff, with plain linen collar and cuffs, and with the scarlet cross
of the Geneva Convention embroidered on her left shoulder. Pale and sad, her
expression and manner both eloquently suggestive of suppressed suffering and
sorrow, there was an innate nobility in the carriage of this woman's head, an
innate grandeur in the gaze of her large gray eyes and in the lines of her
finely proportioned face, which made her irresistibly striking and beautiful,
seen under any circumstances and clad in any dress. Her companion, darker in
complexion and smaller in stature, possessed attractions which were quite marked
enough to account for the surgeon's polite anxiety to shelter her in the
captain's room. The common consent of mankind would have declared her to be an
unusually pretty woman. She wore the large gray cloak that covered her from head
to foot with a grace that lent its own attractions to a plain and even a shabby
article of dress. The languor in her movements, and the uncertainty of tone in
her voice as she thanked the surgeon suggested that she was suffering from
fatigue. Her dark eyes searched the dimly-lighted room timidly, and she held
fast by the nurse's arm with the air of a woman whose nerves had been severely
shaken by some recent alarm.
"You have one thing to remember, ladies," said the surgeon. "Beware of opening
the shutter, for fear of the light being seen through the window. For the rest,
we are free to make ourselves as comfortable here as we can. Compose yourself,
dear madam, and rely on the protection of a Frenchman who is devoted to you!" He
gallantly emphasized his last words by raising the hand of the English lady to
his lips. At the moment when he kissed it the canvas screen was again drawn
aside. A person in the service of the ambulance appeared, announcing that a
bandage had slipped, and that one of the wounded men was to all appearance
bleeding to death. The surgeon, submitting to destiny with the worst possible
grace, dropped the charming Englishwoman's hand, and returned to his duties in
the kitchen. The two ladies were left together in the room.
"Will you take a chair, madam?" asked the nurse.
"Don't call me 'madam,'" returned the young lady, cordially. "My name is Grace
Roseberry. What is your name?"
The nurse hesitated. "Not a pretty name, like yours," she said, and hesitated
again. "Call me 'Mercy Merrick,' " she added, after a moment's consideration.
Had she given an assumed name? Was there some unhappy celebrity attached to her
own name? Miss Roseberry did not wait to ask herself these questions. "How can I
thank you," she exclaimed, gratefully, "for your sisterly kindness to a stranger
like me?"
"I have only done my duty," said Mercy Merrick, a little coldly. "Don't speak of
it."
"I must speak of it. What a situation you found me in when the French soldiers
had driven the Germans away! My traveling-carriage stopped; the horses seized; I
myself in a strange country at nightfall, robbed of my money and my luggage, and