Wanted, an English Girl

by Moore, Dorothea

  “Don’t think me interfering, but isn’t your shoulder hurting dreadfully? Oughtn’t you to go to bed?” Gill asked. “I don’t mind waiting by myself, if it’s that you’re thinking of. That sounds rude, but you know what I mean.”

  “Things one would have expressed differently,” grinned Dick. “But it’s all right, Miss Gillian. I want to stay for one thing, and for the other I really have something to say to Carina on my own.”

  Dick did consent, however, after some firmness upon her part, to lie down on a highly ornate and very uncomfortable sofa, and to let her prop his damaged shoulder into as easy a position as possible with cushions embroidered with the story of Ulysses and the Syrens, worked in silver thread on a background of sea-green satin. She sat down by him, watching him rather anxiously, and wondering whether it was the fading grey light that made him look so pale and so grave, and so unlike himself.

  She did not like to ask any more questions about what happened at St. Odelle, since the subject was so plainly a sore one to him: instead she remembered something which had seemed to matter in a past age, and inquired about the duel of the morning.

  Dick laughed a little, though he had to stop that exercise with a grimace of pain.

  “How did you know about it? Yes, it was decidedly one in the eye for the haughty Prussian. Of course, Cartaret knew last night that he would have to fight, and asked me to act as his friend in the matter. That was what we were talking about after supper at Estinotti’s, by the way, and, of course, we didn’t mean you ladies to know anything about it. Bless you! the most sporting of you can’t help funking at the idea of bloodshed; Mademoiselle de Monti was in a most fearful way last night—all but told Cartaret he had no right to fight—as though he could help it under the circumstances.—By George! she made me feel quite jumpy myself.”

  “Berta von Traume told me that Captain von Posen was an awfully good swordsman,” Gill remarked.

  “Well, I knew that. All these Prussian Johnnies are brought up to it—and I wondered about Cartaret. Had to ask him for his people’s address, etc., for, you see, Von Posen was out to kill. I must say, Cartaret’s a cool hand. He just said ‘Oh, thanks, Cheshire, but I really don’t intend being absent without leave, you know.’ And when I asked, for business you know, what his play was? he told me, ‘Fair to middling,’ as if it were golf. He put a rapier through Von Posen’s shoulder, though, in next to no time. I never saw any man so dumfounded as the Prussian. You bet he got the surprise of his life.”

  “Did Captain Cartaret catch his train?”

  “Yes, I saw him off. Didn’t mean to let him miss it, for there’s sure to be a lot of bad feeling about the result of the duel, and he would probably have found himself landed with about six on his hands. Waldemar and Von Posen will both be furious.”

  “Captain Cartaret must have been glad to find an Englishman to stand by him,” Gill said. “I should think it matters a good deal about having your own countryman, on occasions like that.”

  “I’m an Englishman all right,” Dick said, and became very quiet after that. Gill surmised that he was feeling too ill for much conversation, and sat patiently, without moving, in the fast-gathering twilight, watching the lights of the city come out against the background of hills.

  Presently Dick spoke again. “Miss Courtney?”

  “Yes, but you may as well call me Gillian. I’m not grown-up, you know,” Gill said.

  “Right-o, but you must call me Dick. I wanted to say I … I think you were awfully sporting to-day, the way you went after those Germans for that poor chap’s sake.”

  “Don’t talk about it, please,” urged Gill. “It’s … it’s so awful, and I didn’t do any good, you see.”

  “No one could. They meant to make an example, to discourage the others. But I did think you were Ai about it, only I wish …”

  “What?” Gill asked.

  “I wish your precious Baron had not seen you. He means mischief, I believe.”

  “Why did he let me go to the Grand-Duchess, then?”

  “Because I played up that you belonged to her household, and I imagine it’s their game to conciliate her. Besides—I wonder whether he has got anything else up his sleeve? Personally I was jolly well surprised he let you go so easily.”

  “He couldn’t keep me; I’m English,” bristled Gillian. “Besides, I don’t suppose he wants me now. Berta will have something else to do, I should guess, besides learning fluent English.”

  “You exploded their mine two or three hours too soon for them, and you gave away their plots and plans at Estinotti’s. The Baron won’t forgive you that in a hurry, I imagine. The little idea was to walk innocently across the bridge of St. Odelle, without anybody knowing anything about it, and then, when it was too late for objections, to spring that little manifesto about the French soldiers simultaneously upon the Duchess and the town, and apologise for the disagreeable necessity of acting as they had. They didn’t want the Grand-Duchess at the Frontier, convicting them out of their own mouths, and, you see, you made that possible. Anverra forgot that rising politicals have no use for enthusiasms, and got quite excited about you, and Carina sent me along for you straight.”

  “I don’t mind about the Baron; I’m here now, anyway,” Gill said. “But I say, Mr. Cheshire—Dick, I mean—do they think here that the Germans are going to stay?”

  “Nobody knows. The Grand-Duchess will protest, of course, to the Great Powers, against the violation of her neutrality, but Monsieur Dellotte thinks that the Great Powers will have enough to do in cooking their own porridge. Germany’s been preparing for war since goodness knows when.”

  “Will England be fighting? If not, surely the King …” Gill began, when Dick interrupted her quite angrily.

  “Will England be fighting? Of course England will! Do you think we’re going to stand by and let these beggars walk through treaties at their own sweet will. England will fight, of course, and I’m going to fight for her.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, I’m English, though they do give me my stepfather’s job here. But to-night I’m going to ask the Grand-Duchess’s leave to go to England.”

  “I think you’re splendid,” Gillian said, enthusiastically. “I’m sure the Grand-Duchess will think so too, and say yes.”

  “She wouldn’t hold anybody back. She’s the pluckiest girl out, herself, and you’re not far behind, Gillian.”

  Gillian was so much embarrassed by this splendid compliment that she had nothing to say in answer. Dick’s confidences were rather thrilling; still more was his certainty that honour demanded England should fight.

  It was all tremendously exciting; she sat silent, thinking so hard that she never even heard a door open somewhere near, and was taken by surprise when Carina’s voice said:

  “In the dark?”

  Gillian jumped up in a hurry, with one foot asleep; Dick tried to get up too, but Carina was beside the sofa in a moment.

  “No, Dick, lie still. Why didn’t you go to bed, you foolish boy?”

  Two or three dim figures had come into the room behind the Grand-Duchess, but Dick did not take any notice of them. He pulled himself up on the sofa and took Carina’s hand in his and kissed it.

  “Because I want your leave to go somewhere else,” he said quickly, “—to England!”

  “You will leave me, Dick?”

  “I must,” he said. “I’m English.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “But your loyal servant always,” Dick said, in a very low voice. “You know that?”

  “When do you go?” Carina asked.

  “To-night.’

  “To-night! But your shoulder?”

  “There’s no time to lose if one is to get through Belgium to Ostend,” Dick said. “I’ve written to the mater, and of course she’ll know I couldn’t do anything else. But what about Miss Courtney—Gillian?”

  Probably Carina had hardly realised Gillian’s presence in the shock of Dick’s words
. She made up now for that momentary neglect.

  “The heroine who warned us all and no one to welcome her!”

  She held out both hands to Gillian, and Gillian took one, curtsying as she did so.

  A footman was bringing lights, and Gill saw Carina, with a scarlet spot on either cheek; and behind her Mademoiselle de Monti and a grave, bald-headed gentleman, with a grey moustache, whom she guessed to be the Premier, Monsieur Dellotte.

  “Why, Gillian, you do not want to leave me, too?” Carina said, holding her hand. “Dick is a man and he must go and fight. We cannot; nor could you travel through Belgium just now. You will stay with me, Gillian?”

  In spite of all that had come and gone Gill could not help feeling a delirious thrill of joy. Only what was she to do about her clothes? The clothes at which Berta had turned up her nose were not suitable for court. She hesitated, wondering how to put it without ingratitude, and Mademoiselle de Monti, who had been talking with Dick and Monsieur Dellotte, saw her difficulty.

  “The Premier considers, Ma’am, that since Gillian put herself into direct opposition to the Germans on our account, it would be well to protect her during her stay here by formally appointing her to a salaried post about your person. Then she is under your protection.”

  “Will you be one of my ladies, Gillian?” asked the Grand-Duchess.

  CHAPTER XIX

  Three Months Later

  “Ready, Gill?”

  It was a very familiar voice, but Gillian jumped as she heard it, and then fell to drying plates with furious energy.

  “One minute—half a minute! I’m just ready,” she called back.

  At least a couple of dozen plates to be dried and placed in their rack ready for the night-nurses, some cups and glasses already dried to go into the cupboard, and then the greasy sink to be swilled round: all that, and the Grand-Duchess of Insterburg waiting for her.

  Still one could not leave hospital work half done, even for Grand-Duchesses, and Gill knew enough of Carina by this time to know that she would not have any work scamped upon her account.

  Gill was washing up in the rather makeshift scullery of a hospital which had been the Town Hall of Chardille three months ago.

  Much business had been transacted there in old days, and more than once a state ball had been held in it. Now it had beds for three hundred—occasionally for three hundred and fifty—wounded soldiers—Belgian and German.

  Gill went down to it every afternoon to help, and the Grand-Duchess went too. They could not nurse as Mademoiselle de Monti did, nor organise the commissariat of the great place like Mademoiselle Pipignon; but what they could do they did, and went on doing.

  Carina, indistinguishable in her uniform dress and cap and red-cross apron from other young probationers, ran to and fro in draughty passages, fetching and carrying; held lint and basins while ghastly wounds were dressed, emptied utensils, waited on the nurses—during her hospital shift: Gillian, being under seventeen, was only allowed in the kitchen department, where she spent most of her time standing in a stone-floored scullery, nine feet square, washing an endless succession of plates, and drying them with cloths that always smelt.

  In spite of those hateful dish-cloths, and a horrid feeling that took her sometimes, when she was not feeling well, that the greasy sour smell was permanently fixed on to her fingers, Gill was thankful for the work in those days. To stand up and do something, however disagreeable, seemed the only thing that made it possible to go on living day by day, without being too miserable to bear yourself.

  No English papers came to Chardille now, and the German ones were terrible reading indeed. From them it appeared that, though the greatest humanity had been shown to Belgium, it had been necessary to burn and to destroy to some small extent; though most of the damage had naturally been done by the Belgians themselves, who had even mutilated their little children in order to make out a case against the innocent and kindly invader. There were different stories told, or rather whispered by wounded Belgian soldiers in hospital, stories which Mademoiselle de Monti heard when she was on night duty, but only told in part to the Grand-Duchess and Gill when she came back to the Palace in the morning.

  They heard of Liége, holding out to the last gasp, and beyond it; but not of the hideous price exacted from what was left of the conquered by an enemy that had not one sportsman instinct to rise up and meet the golden courage that opposed them.

  They heard of the brave curé who rang his church bells till the Germans were upon him, to warn the helpless women and little children of the village that would lie next in their path; but did not know that both his hands were cut off for reward.

  They heard something of Louvain and Tourmande, but not of the nightmare brutalities there, that brought Mademoiselle de Monti back from the hospital with a terribly strained look about her beautiful dark eyes.

  What little they did hear was quite enough, however; those hot first weeks of the war were a muddle of horror, into which Gill was afraid to look too closely for sheer arrant terror of what she should see and hear.

  There were plates to wash and saucepans to scour, and that was something, and she tried not to look too much beyond; especially during those ghastly days when news came, through gloating German sources, of the long stubbornly contested retreat of that “contemptible little army” from Mons, and the Germans practically at the gates of Paris.

  Placards were up in the streets: “English Army Surrounded,” and “Annihilation of British Forces,” and Gill had to wash dishes very hard indeed, or she would have choked with fury.

  An even bigger comfort than the work in hospital, during that fearful time, was the consciousness that Carina cared too.

  Not that she said very much; Monsieur Dellotte saw to that, for Germans were occupying most of Insterburg and all the capital, and free speech on the part of the poor little ruler would probably have meant a dreadful retribution on the subjects she was trying to protect; but Gill knew it. And when the tide began to turn again, and with the fighting on the Marne the Germans in Chardille ceased to talk quite so big about “annihilation,” she felt that Carina rejoiced with her, for all the caution that the Grand-Duchess must display.

  She and Carina had become a great deal to each other during the three months which had passed between Gill’s appointment to a post at the little Grand-ducal Court and this dark November afternoon, when she stood in the scullery at the hospital, drying plates at her best speed, so that she should not keep Carina waiting one minute longer than she could help.

  It was odd, Gill thought, as she worked, how extraordinarily used she had grown to the life; so used that it was almost impossible to her to realise a time when she went to the “High” and prepared her own lessons, and helped Elys and Flossie with theirs in the dingy basement schoolroom of Aunt Edith’s house, and did not know Carina.

  Of course a court life would have been infinitely harder for her to fit in with at ordinary peaceful times; she knew that. She could not imagine herself keeping up all the ceremonial which Mademoiselle Pipignon would have expected of her, and always being properly and statelily respectful to Carina, and to the various great people who came to visit her.

  The war had altered a great deal of that. One said “Ma’am” when one spoke to Carina in public, and one got up when she came in, Gill discovered; but it was impossible to be very formal with a person when you went down with her to the hospital every afternoon from 1.30 to 5, and together wrestled with the mysteries of gas rings that would not light, or showed symptoms of exploding when they did.

  As to visitors, they had almost entirely ceased. Carina had occasionally to receive German officials, but Mademoiselle Pipignon was always with her, on such occasions, and of dinner parties and entertainments there were none.

  A strong hand seemed to have pulled down all the blinds in Insterburg, and life was in the shadow.

  The Royal Household was much smaller too. Dick Cheshire was by no means the only person who had left it. The Fre
nch chef, who had been earning a large salary by sitting in a comfortable chair and telling his subordinates how things should be done, had resigned everything with the utmost cheerfulness and gone off to serve as a private in the French Army. Three or four of the footmen had gone too, and little Mademoiselle de Tournay, a maid of honour, whose only brother was one of the first French officers to be badly wounded. She went to him at once, and when he died, wrote to the Grand-Duchess asking leave to remain in France, nursing at a hospital for wounded soldiers—Mademoiselle de Tournay, who had always been afraid of spiders, and who became almost hysterical over a caterpillar on her sleeve. They heard of her now and again as a very perfect little nurse, quiet, self-contained, and happy.

  Gillian took her place after a fashion; that is to say she was with Carina a good deal. All Carina’s other ladies were a good deal older than herself, and these two, who were so near in age, insensibly grew into a friendship that was closer every day.

  The friendship was mingled upon Gill’s side with an unfeigned admiration for the young Grand-Duchess, facing a situation unparalleled in history with a courage and endurance that never failed. Gill had seen her cry only once, during these dreadful months, and that was after a visit that she and Gill paid together to the house in the Rue des Carillons.

  The soldiers had been removed, in answer to Carina’s urgent representations to the Commandant, and Tienette had gone back to her lace-making. But she never sat in the doorway now, and always had her back turned to that door through which she had seen Bèrnard come so often.

  She had been working when Gill and the Grand-Duchess arrived, but she laid aside her pillow and rose to her feet when they came in; and Gill saw that she was glad to lay her work down. She was a Tienette whose eyes had grown very big, and, though she smiled in the old way, she seemed to Gillian to find it difficult to keep her mind on ordinary talk.

  It appeared quite an effort to her to remember what her pattern was, when Carina made enquiries about the lace; Gill could not put into so many words what was the change in her, but she saw it; and in Marie’s anxious glances at her sister, and in little Toté’s wistful eyes, she knew that others saw it too.