Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/48

 to lie there in that sweet, sunny room and hear no groans but my own was almost like being in heaven. The daily cleanings of the wound, still pretty painful, were recommenced under the hands of another surgeon, who proved to be a very good fellow. He and I struck up quite a friendship after a while.

"Well, life was, if not exactly rosy, at any rate once more worth living. The brightness and calm were very sweet after the horrors of the Versailles hospital, and a serenity filled the air, like an echo of organ tones brought in by the nuns from chapel.

"The nun who attended to me was an angel. Don't be jealous. I was there in St. Malo three months. Before one month had passed, I had grown to love her as I should have loved my sister, if she had lived. I loved the sound of her voice, and the touch of her deft, gentle hands. I would have gone through the surgeon's probings without a groan, if she might have re-bandaged the arm afterwards. But Dr. Nadaud always did that himself. Sister Gabrielle—that was what they called her—would come directly he had done with me, and would try the bandages to make sure they were not hurting, arrange the pillows afresh, and smooth out the wrinkles in the counterpane, and my brow at the same time, sympathising with me all the while in the sweetest fashion possible. Her voice was a great part of her charm: very low, and yet the clearest voice in the world. She had a way of looking at one all the time, too, with a gaze that was almost like a mother's caress, and that wrapped one around with a delicious feeling of security and well-being. Sometimes she would sit and talk with me about the battles, and lead me into chats about my mother, who was ill herself at this time, and not able to come to see me.

How old was Sister Gabrielle?' Oh, I suppose she must have been about twenty-four or five then. She had the Norman blue eyes, and a fair complexion, which the white wrappings about her face seemed to heighten and irradiate. Is it the white lawn, or is it a beauty that the self-denying life lends to them, which makes the faces of so many of those women look so lovely? I called Sister Gabrielle an angel just now, but you must not fancy there was any cold saintliness about her; in fact, it was her very ready sympathy with all my accounts of my young life in the outer world that drew out my heart towards her. It was her very womanliness that soon set me wondering who she could have been, and what had led her to shut herself away from the world. There was little to do, lying there in bed week after week, and hundreds of times, as I looked at that sweet woman moving about the room, I pictured her without the coif, and said to myself that if she were not then a beloved wife, with a husband's protecting aim around her, and children climbing about her knees, it was not because the love that should have led to this had been wanting, but certainly because some marring chance had prevented the realisation of such happiness. It amused me to 'make a pretty history to myself,' with Sister Gabrielle for the heroine. A woman with a voice like hers, and such a smile, was bound to have loved deeply. Sometimes, when she was not speaking, her eyes had a sad far-away look. I can only compare it to the look that an emigrant who was toiling along a hot, dusty high-road to embark for a new country, might turn and give to the dear spot that he had said a long good-