When fever touched Ada Merling with his scorching wing, there was
consternation among the staff, and grief among the patients of the
Hospital. The attack was severe, but short; she was removed, during its
continuance, to a small garden-villa adjoining the great Cemetery of
Scutari.
And there, as she walked on the short, sweet grass, under the vast and
ancient cypresses, Dunoisse--having been sent for--came to her; and had
no words, seeing her pale and wan and wasted. She held out to him her
thin, white hand, and said, with her smile of infinite sweetness:
“Now that I have leisure, I keep my promise. I do not think you need an
introduction to Sister Jerome, who has nursed me so kindly and so well.”
Dunoisse exchanged a handshake and a smile with the Sister, who was
a round-faced, bright-eyed little creature, with a voice sweet as a
piping bullfinch’s, and the activity of a kitten or a child. To see
Sister Jerome kiss a baby was to think of a blackbird pecking at a
cherry.... When she dressed her patients’ cruel wounds, she joked and
laughed with those who were able to enjoy chatter. But tears dropped
from her bright eyes on the dressings whenever they could drop unseen.
Sister Jerome flitted up and down like a little black-and-white
humble-bee between the alleys of turban-capped or flower-decked
tombstones, while Dunoisse told his story to the accompaniment of the
doves’ hoarse cooing in the branches overhead. And as he spoke, he
sometimes looked for belief and sometimes for comprehension; and never
failed to find them in Ada Merling’s eyes.
“I did not need to be told,” she said, when he had ended, “that you
have suffered most cruelly. It is written on your face.... Possibly
another might tell you you blame yourself needlessly--you were a tool
in the hand of a master who was responsible--but I shall not do so!”
She sank down upon the prone trunk of a great cypress that old age had
leveled, and in the characteristic way clasped her hands about her
knee. She had on a plain gray dress of some soft material; a white silk
shawl was wrapped about her. Not being on duty, she wore no cap, and
the pure Greek outlines of the lovely head, with its classic coils and
braids of golden-brown hair, were revealed in all their beauty--and the
pale sea-shell pink of returning health was upon the oval cheek.
“I knew it!” she said, as though communing with herself, and forgetful
of the man who stood beside her. “That the secret feeling of this
man towards England and her people was fanged and venomous hatred,
something has told me whenever I looked him in the face.... For the
very generosity that harbored him, as for the indifference that
merely tolerated while it despised him, he was bound to repay in
his own coin. And that coin has been minted in Hell! And it has not
only scorched and blistered the fingers that took it, but it has
carried with it a pestilence that scourges and devastates.... And now
that mourning, and sorrow, and ruin and desolation, sit in ashes by
Britain’s hearth--_he_ comes knocking at the door with soft words
of sympathy. For those who are the victims of his vengeance will never
realize it! he has learned in those years of poverty, obscurity and
humiliation, to hide his hate so well!”
She might have been a Fate as she linked her long white fingers and
looked out beneath her leveled brows over the olive-groves and gardens
fringing the Cemetery, and beyond the sapphire-blue water, populous
with boats and shipping, towards the European shore. A moment she
waited, gathering her forces, and then she drew a deep breath, and
rose, and said to Dunoisse, holding out her hand:
“You tell me that it is your purpose to leave here and go to the
Crimea, obtain an audience of Lord Dalgan, and unfold the plot to him.
It will be a difficult task to convince him--almost an impossible task.
Still--since to you as to me the voice of conscience is the Voice of
God--go--and Heaven be with you and bring you safely back again!”
The thrill in her sweet voice, the magic of the hand that gently
touched his, thawed the old ice about Dunoisse’s heart. He fell down
upon his knees before her, and caught a fold of her dress and kissed
it, crying passionately:
“Oh! my good angel, from whom once I turned away! oh! dearest and
noblest of women, I bless you for those words that hold out hope to me!
I swear to you that I will atone!”
He sought her hands, and she yielded them to his clasp, and he kissed
them lingeringly. He folded them in his own, and laid them upon his
heart, and cried:
“How can one speak to one so spotless of an earthly passion? And yet
I will earn the right, one day. Tell me--when I have erased all those
black entries from the book of the Recording Angel--when I have washed
my soul clean of the guilt of all this blood--tell me that I may come
to you and claim my priceless joy--my great reward of you! Give me some
sign, even though you do not speak!”
Their eyes met. For answer she leaned over him, and kissed him once,
upon the lips, divinely.... Her mouth was a chalice of strengthening.
The clasp of her hands gave new life.... He said, exultantly, as they
rose up, still looking in each other’s faces:
“Oh, my beloved! I will deserve so much of God, that one day He will
give me even you!”
“Hush--hush!” she said, and touched his lips with her cool hand to
bid them silence. He kissed the hand, glanced downwards and stooping,
disentangled from the soft material of her dress a trailing branch
of delicate, vividly-green creeper, hardly larger in leaf than the
climbing rose, and set with long sharp thorns.
“What is that? How beautiful and how unusual!” she commented. Then--as
he twisted the dewy green leaves and the sharp prickles into a rough
circlet and offered it to her, she took it from him silently--saying to
herself: “_It is always the hand we love that gives us the crown of
thorns!_”
And then she called the nun, and bade him good-night, and went back to
the little painted wooden villa standing in its nightingale-haunted
garden on the main road to Ismid.
And Dunoisse knew a mad impulse to follow the tall, lightly moving
figure, clutch at the softly flowing garments--stay her with desperate
prayers not to leave him without one more kiss or at least a word of
tenderness. But he fought it down, and went by the northern avenue back
to his narrow, stuffy quarters at the Hospital, said farewell to his
fellow-workers, and left next morning for the seat of war.