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Young Countess Salern recognized me at once, and waved her hand to me repeatedly. Baron Rumling, whom I had previously seen in the antechamber, never was so courteous to me as on this occasion. I will soon write to you what passed with Salern. He was very kind, polite, and straightforward. P. S. Ma tres-chere soeur, next time I mean to write you a letter all for yourself.
The rumour was current in Paris that the example of "Soeur Louise" had touched me, and that I was going to take the veil in my convent. I took no notice of this fickle public, and persisted wisely in my plan. The unexpected and almost sudden decease of Mademoiselle de Fontanges had singularly moved the King.
He had no money, and Emile very little. "I'll get a Soeur de Charité from one of the convents. She'll come for nothing. Nursing is their work. I was I mean I'm a Catholic. She's a Catholic, too, isn't she?" "No, she hates them. She was educated in a convent, where as far as I can gather from her own account she acquired more learning than piety.
"I will," said the brave, cheery little Soeur Angélique, and went. It was nearly midnight when the sad little bustle that had been going on in the chamber of death was hushed at last, and the Soeur de Charité prepared to depart.
I intended giving this to our patients should they wake and call for drink, and I was just lifting my tray to go when a loud thumping on the front door made me set it down in haste. I looked at Soeur Laurent, who was preparing to answer the summons, much to the dismay of the soldiers. "I'll go," I called, and hurried out into the vestibule and down the wide white marble steps.
Soeur Angelica herself seemed almost more terrified than otherwise at the knowledge, for every conventual influence was brought to bear upon her morbid conscience to assure her that eternal damnation follows broken vows.
But there was at least one snug chamber in Versailles, and that was the room of the Red-Cross prisoners. However extravagant the degrees of frost registered without, the boys' sick-room was always pleasantly warm. How the good Soeur, who was on duty all day, managed to regulate the heat throughout the night-watches was her secret.
I recognized her at once from the photographs which were in every illustrated paper at the time when, for her magnificent bravery and presence of mind, she was named Chevalière of the Legion of Honour. But with her first smile I saw that the pictures had done her crude injustice. They made of Soeur Julie an elderly woman in the dress of a nun; somewhat stout, rather large of feature.
I tried all sorts of things too, a little bit of French you know, 'Avez-vous la plume de ma soeur? and 'Donnez-moi du pain, and things like that out of my French exercises, but it didn't do any good: we only went out to sea.
She had a certain surgical skill, learned as her untutored genius learned most things, with marvelous rapidity, by observation and intuition; and she had saved many a life by her knowledge and her patient attendance on the sufferers patience that she had been famed for when she had been only six years old, and a surgeon of the Algerian regiments had affirmed that he could trust her to be as wakeful, as watchful, and as sure to obey his directions as though she were a Soeur de Charite.
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