The New Magdalen

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[Italics are indicatedby underscores
James Rusk, jrusk@cyberramp.net.]

THE NEW MAGDALEN

by Wilkie Collins

TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES ALLSTON COLLINS. (9th April, 1873.)

FIRST SCENE.

The Cottage on the Frontier.

PREAMBLE.

THE place is France.

The time is autumn, in the year eighteen hundred and seventy--the
year of the war between France and Germany.

The persons are, Captain Arnault, of the French army; Surgeon
Surville, of the French ambulance; Surgeon Wetzel, of the German
army; Mercy Merrick, attached as nurse to the French ambulance;
and Grace Roseberry, a traveling lady on her way to England.

CHAPTER I.

THE TWO WOMEN.

IT was a dark night. The rain was pouring in torrents.

Late in the evening a skirmishing party of the French and a
skirmishing party of the Germans had met, by accident, near the
little village of Lagrange, close to the German frontier. In the
struggle that followed, the French had (for once) got the better
of the enemy. For the time, at least, a few hundreds out of the
host of the invaders had been forced back over the frontier. It
was a trifling affair, occurring not long after the great German
victory of Weissenbourg, and the newspapers took little or no
notice of it.

Captain Arnault, commanding on the French side, sat alone in one
of the cottages of the village, inhabited by the miller of the
district. The Captain was reading, by the light of a solitary
tallow-candle, some intercepted dispatches taken from the
Germans. He had suffered the wood fire, scattered over the large
open grate, to burn low; the red embers only faintly illuminated
a part of the room. On the floor behind him lay some of the
miller's empty sacks. In a corner opposite to him was the
miller's solid walnut-wood bed. On the walls all around him were
the miller's colored prints, representing a happy mixture of
devotional and domestic subjects. A door of communication leading
into the kitchen of the cottage had been torn from its hinges,
and used to carry the men wounded in the skirmish from the field.
They were now comfortably laid at rest in the kitchen, under the
care of the French surgeon and the English nurse attached to the
ambulance. A piece of coarse canvas screened the opening between
the two rooms in place of the door. A second door, leading from
the bed-chamber into the yard, was locked; and the wooden shutter
protecting the one window of the room was carefully barred.
Sentinels, doubled in number, were placed at all the outposts.
The French commander had neglected no precaution which could
reasonably insure for himself and for his men a quiet and
comfortable night.

Still absorbed in his perusal of the dispatches, and now and then
making notes of what he read by the help of writing materials
placed at his side, Captain Arnault was interrupted by the
appearance of an intruder in the room. Surgeon Surville, entering
from the kitchen, drew aside the canvas screen, and approached
the little round table at which his superior officer was sitting.

"What is it?" said the captain, sharply.

"A question to ask," replied the surgeon. "Are we safe for the
night?"

"Why do you want to know?" inquired the captain, suspiciously.

The surgeon pointed to the kitchen, now the hospital devoted to
the wounded men.

"The poor fellows are anxious about the next few hours," he
replied. "They dread a surprise, and they ask me if there is any
reasonable hope of their having one night's rest. What do you
think of the chances?"

The captain shrugged his shoulders. The surgeon persisted.

"Surely you ought to know?" he said.

"I know that we are in possession of the village for the
present," retorted Captain Arnault, "and I know no more. Here are
the papers of the enemy." He held them up and shook them
impatiently as he spoke. "They give me no information that I can
rely on. For all I can tell to the contrary, the main body of the
Germans, outnumbering us ten to one, may be nearer this cottage
than the main body of the French. Draw your own conclusions. I
have nothing more to say."

Having answered in those discouraging terms, Captain Arnault got
on his feet, drew the hood of his great-coat over his head, and
lit a cigar at the candle.

"Where are you going?" asked the surgeon.

"To visit the outposts."

"Do you want this room for a little while?"

"Not for some hours to come. Are you thinking of moving any of
your wounded men in here?"

"I was thinking of the English lady," answered the surgeon. "The
kitchen is not quite the place for her. She would be more
comfortable here; and the English nurse might keep her company."

Captain Arnault smiled, not very pleasantly. "They are two fine
women," he said, "and Surgeon Surville is a ladies' man. Let them
come in, if they are rash enough to trust themselves here with
you." He checked himself on the point of going out, and looked
back distrustfully at the lighted candle. "Caution the women," he
said, "to limit the exercise of their curiosity to the inside of
this room."

"What do you mean?"

The captain's forefinger pointed significantly to the closed
window-shutter.

"Did you ever know a woman who could resist looking out of
window?" he asked. "Dark as it is, sooner or later these ladies
of yours will feel tempted to open that shutter. Tell them I
don't want the light of the candle to betray my headquarters to
the German scouts. How is the weather? Still raining?"

"Pouring."

"So much the better. The Germans won't see us." With that
consolatory remark he unlocked the door leading into the yard,
and walked out.

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 drenched to the skin by the pouring rain! I am indebted to
you for shelter in this place--I am wearing your clothes--I
should have died of the fright and the exposure but for you. What
return can I make for such services as these?"

Mercy placed a chair for her guest near the captain's table, and
seated herself, at some little distance, on an old chest in a
corner of the room. "May I ask you a question?" she said,
abruptly.

"A hundred questions," cried Grace, "if you like." She looked at
the expiring fire, and at the dimly visible figure of her
companion seated in the obscurest corner of the room. "That
wretched candle hardly gives any light," she said, impatiently.
"It won't last much longer. Can't we make the place more
cheerful? Come out of your corner. Call for more wood and more
lights."

Mercy remained in her corner and shook her head. "Candles and
wood are scarce things here," she answered. "We must be patient,
even if we are left in the dark. Tell me," she went on, raising
her quiet voice a little, "how came you to risk crossing the
frontier in wartime?"

Grace's voice dropped when she answered the question. Grace's
momentary gayety of manner suddenly left her.

"I had urgent reasons," she said, "for returning to England."

"Alone?" rejoined the other. "Without any one to protect you?"

Grace's head sank on her bosom. "I have left my only
protector--my father--in the English burial-ground at Rome," she
answered simply. "My mother died, years since, in Canada."

The shadowy figure of the nurse suddenly changed its position on
the chest. She had started as the last word passed Miss
Roseberry's lips.

"Do you know Canada?" asked Grace.

"Well," was the brief answer--reluctantly given, short as it was.

"Were you ever near Port Logan?"

"I once lived within a few miles of Port Logan."

"When?"

"Some time since." With those words Mercy Merrick shrank back
into her corner and changed the subject. "Your relatives in
England must be very anxious about you," she said.

Grace sighed. "I have no relatives in England. You can hardly
imagine a person more friendless than I am. We went away from
Canada, when my father's health failed, to try the climate of
Italy, by the doctor's advice. His death has left me not only
friendless but poor." She paused, and took a leather letter-case
from the pocket of the large gray cloak which the nurse had lent
to her. "My prospects in life," she resumed, "are all contained
in this little case. Here is the one treasure I contrived to
conceal when I was robbed of my other things."

Mercy could just see the letter-case as Grace held it up in the
deepening obscurity of the room. "Have you got money in it?" she
asked.

"No; only a few family papers, and a letter from my father,
introducing me to an elderly lady in England--a connection of his
by marriage, whom I have never seen. The lady has consented to
receive me as her companion and reader. If I don't return to
England soon, some other person may get the place."

"Have you no other resource?"

"None. My education has been neglected--we led a wild life in the
far West. I am quite unfit to go out as a governess. I am
absolutely dependent on this stranger, who receives me for my
father's sake." She put the letter-case back in the pocket of her
cloak, and ended her little narrative as unaffectedly as she had
begun it. "Mine is a sad story, is it not?" she said.

The voice of the nurse answered her suddenly and bitterly in
these strange words:

"There are sadder stories than yours. There are thousands of
miserable women who would ask for no greater blessing than to
change places with you."

Grace started. "What can there possibly be to envy in such a lot
as mine?"

"Your unblemished character, and your prospect of being
established honorably in a respectable house."

Grace turned in her chair, and looked wonderingly into the dim
corner of the room.

"How strangely you say that!" she exclaimed. There was no answer;
the shadowy figure on the chest never moved. Grace rose
impulsively, and drawing her chair after her, approached the
nurse. "Is there some romance in your life?" she asked. "Why have
you sacrificed yourself to the terrible duties which I find you
performing here? You interest me indescribably. Give me your
hand."

Mercy shrank back, and refused the offered hand.

"Are we not friends?" Grace asked, in astonishment.

"We can never be friends."

"Why not?"

The nurse was dumb. Grace called to mind the hesitation that she
had shown when she had mentioned her name, and drew a new
conclusion from it. "Should I be guessing right," she asked,
eagerly, "if I guessed you to be some great lady in disguise?"

Mercy laughed to herself--low and bitterly. "I a great lady!" she
said, contemptuously. "For Heaven's sake, let us talk of
something else!"

Grace's curiosity was thoroughly roused. She persisted. "Once
more," she whispered, persuasively, "let us be friends." She
gently laid her hand as she spoke on Mercy's shoulder. Mercy
roughly shook it off. There was a rudeness in the action which
would have offended the most patient woman living. Grace drew
back indignantly. "Ah!" she cried, "you are cruel."

"I am kind," answered the nurse, speaking more sternly than ever.

"Is it kind to keep me at a distance? I have told you my story."

The nurse's voice rose excitedly. "Don't tempt me to speak out,"
she said; "you will regret it."

Grace declined to accept the warning. "I have placed confidence
in you," she went on. "It is ungenerous to lay me under an
obligation, and then to shut me out of your confidence in
return."

"You _will_ have it?" said Mercy Merrick. "You _shall_ have it!
Sit down again." Grace's heart began to quicken its beat in
expectation of the disclosure that was to come. She drew her
chair closer to the chest on which the nurse was sitting. With a
firm hand Mercy put the chair back to a distance from her. "Not
so near me!" she said, harshly.

"Why not?"

"Not so near," repeated the sternly resolute voice. "Wait till
you have heard what I have to say."

Grace obeyed without a word more. There was a momentary silence.
A faint flash of light leaped up from the expiring candle, and
showed Mercy crouching on the chest, with her elbows on her
knees, and her face hidden in her hands. The next instant the
room was buried in obscurity. As the darkness fell on the two
women the nurse spoke.

CHAPTER II.

MAGDALEN--IN MODERN TIMES.

"WHEN your mother was alive were you ever out with her after
nightfall in the streets of a great city?"

In those extraordinary terms Mercy Merrick opened the
confidential interview which Grace Roseberry had forced on her.
Grace answered, simply, "I don't understand you."

"I will put it in another way," said the nurse. Its unnatural
hardness and sternness of tone passed away from her voice, and
its native gentleness and sadness returned, as she made that
reply. "You read the newspapers like the rest of the world," she
went on; "have you ever read of your unhappy fellow- creatures
(the starving outcasts of the population) whom Want has driven
into Sin?"

Still wondering, Grace answered that she had read of such things
often, in newspapers and in books.

"Have you heard--when those starving and sinning fellow-creatures
happened to be women--of Refuges established to protect and
reclaim them?"

The wonder in Grace 's mind passed away, and a vague suspicion of
something painful to come took its place. "These are
extraordinary questions," she said, nervously. "What do you
mean?"

"Answer me," the nurse insisted. "Have you heard of the Refuges?
Have you heard of the Women?"

"Yes."

"Move your chair a little further away from me." She paused. Her
voice, without losing its steadiness, fell to its lowest tones."
_I_ was once of those women," she said, quietly.

Grace sprang to her feet with a faint cry. She stood
petrified--incapable of uttering a word.

"_I_ have been in a Refuge," pursued the sweet, sad voice of the
other woman." _I_ have been in a Prison. Do you still wish to be
my friend? Do you still insist on sitting close by me and taking
my hand?" She waited for a reply, and no reply came. "You see you
were wrong," she went on, gently, "when you called me cruel--and
I was right when I told you I was kind."

At that appeal Grace composed herself, and spoke. "I don't wish
to offend you--" she began, confusedly.

Mercy Merrick stopped her there.

"You don't offend me," she said, without the faintest note of
displeasure in her tone. "I am accustomed to stand in the pillory
of my own past life. I sometimes ask myself if it was all my
fault. I sometimes wonder if Society had no duties toward me when
I was a child selling matches in the street--when I was a
hard-working girl fainting at my needle for want of food." Her
voice faltered a little for the first time as it pronounced those
words; she waited a moment, and recovered herself. "It's too late
to dwell on these things now," she said, resignedly. "Society can
subscribe to reclaim me; but Society can't take me back. You see
me here in a place of trust--patiently, humbly, doing all the
good I can. It doesn't matter! Here, or elsewhere, what I _am_
can never alter what I _was_. For three years past all that a
sincerely penitent woman can do I have done. It doesn't matter!
Once let my past story be known, and the shadow of it covers me;
the kindest people shrink."

She waited again. Would a word of sympathy come to comfort her
from the other woman's lips? No! Miss Roseberry was shocked; Miss
Roseberry was confused. "I am very sorry for you," was all that
Miss Roseberry could say.

"Everybody is sorry for me," answered the nurse, as patiently as
ever; "everybody is kind to me. But the lost place is not to be
regained. I can't get back! I can't get back?" she cried, with a
passionate outburst of despair--checked instantly the moment it
had escaped her. "Shall I tell you what my experience has been?"
she resumed. "Will you hear the story of Magdalen--in modern
times?"

Grace drew back a step; Mercy instantly understood her.

"I am going to tell you nothing that you need shrink from
hearing," she said. "A lady in your position would not understand
the trials and the struggles that I have passed through. My story
shall begin at the Refuge. The matron sent me out to service with
the character that I had honestly earned--the character of a
reclaimed woman. I justified the confidence placed in me; I was a
faithful servant. One day my mistress sent for me--a kind
mistress, if ever there was one yet. 'Mercy, I am sorry for you;
it has come out that I took you from a Refuge; I shall lose every
servant in the house; you must go.' I went back to the
matron--another kind woman. She received me like a mother. 'We
will try again, Mercy; don't be cast down.' I told you I had been
in Canada?"

Grace began to feel interested in spite of herself. She answered
with something like warmth in her tone. She returned to her
chair--placed at its safe and significant distance from the
chest.

The nurse went on:

"My next place was in Canada, with an officer's wife: gentlefolks
who had emigrated. More kindness; and, this time, a pleasant,
peaceful life for me. I said to myself, 'Is the lost place
regained? _Have_ I got back?' My mistress died. New people came
into our neighborhood. There was a young lady among them--my
master began to think of another wife. I have the misfortune (in
my situation) to be what is called a handsome woman; I rouse the
curiosity of strangers. The new people asked questions about me;
my master's answers did not satisfy them. In a word, they found
me out. The old story again! 'Mercy, I am very sorry; scandal is
busy with you and with me; we are innocent, but there is no help
for it--we must part.' I left the place; having gained one
advantage during my stay in Canada, which I find of use to me
here."

"What is it?"

"Our nearest neighbors were French-Canadians. I learned to speak
the French language."

"Did you return to London?"

"Where else could I go, without a character?" said Mercy, sadly.
"I went back again to the matron. Sickness had broken out in the
Refuge; I made myself useful as a nurse. One of the doctors was
struck with me--'fell in love' with me, as the phrase is. He
would have married me. The nurse, as an honest woman, was bound
to tell him the truth. He never appeared again. The old story! I
began to be weary of saying to myself, 'I can't get back! I can't
get back!' Despair got hold of me, the despair that hardens the
heart. I might have committed suicide; I might even have drifted
back into my old life--but for one man."

At those last words her voice--quiet and even through the earlier
part of her sad story--began to falter once more. She stopped,
following silently the memories and associations roused in her by
what she had just said. Had she forgotten the presence of another
person in the room? Grace's curiosity left Grace no resource but
to say a word on her side.

"Who was the man?" she asked. "How did he befriend you?"

"Befriend me? He doesn't even know that such a person as I am is
in existence."

That strange answer, naturally enough, only strengthened the
anxiety of Grace to hear more. "You said just now--" she began.

"I said just now that he saved me. He did save me; you shall hear
how. One Sunday our regular clergyman at the Refuge was not able
to officiate. His place was taken by a stranger, quite a young
man. The matron told us the stranger's name was Julian Gray. I
sat in the back row of seats, under the shadow of the gallery,
where I could see him without his seeing me. His text was from
the words, 'Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that
repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which
need no repentance. 'What happier women might have thought of his
sermon I cannot say; there was not a dry eye among us at the
Refuge. As for me, he touched my heart as no man has touched it
before or since. The hard despair melted in me at the sound of
his voice; the weary round of my life showed its nobler side
again while he spoke. From that time I have accepted my hard lot,
I have been a patient woman. I might have been something more, I
might have been a happy woman, if I could have prevailed on
myself to speak to Julian Gray."

"What hindered you from speaking to him?"

"I was afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Afraid of making my hard life harder still."

A woman who could have sympathized with her would perhaps have
guessed what those words meant. Grace was simply embarrassed by
her; and Grace failed to guess.

"I don't understand you," she said.

There was no alternative for Mercy but to own the truth in plain
words. She sighed, and said the words. "I was afraid I might
interest him in my sorrows, and might set my heart on him in
return." The utter absence of any fellow-feeling with her on
Grace's side expressed itself unconsciously in the plainest
terms.

"You!" she exclaimed, in a tone of blank astonishment.

The nurse rose slowly to her feet. Grace's expression of surprise
told her plainly--almost brutally--that her confession had gone
far enough.

"I astonish you?" she said. "Ah, my young lady, you don't know
what rough usage a woman's heart can bear, and still beat truly!
Before I saw Julian Gray I only knew men as objects of horror to
me. Let us drop the subject. The preacher at the Refuge is
nothing but a remembrance now--the one welcome remembrance of my
life! I have nothing more to tell you. You insisted on hearing my
story--you have heard it."

"I have not
heard how you found employment here," said Grace, continuing the
conversation with uneasy politeness, as she best might.

Mercy crossed the room, and slowly raked together the last living
embers of the fire.

"The matron has friends in France," she answered, "who are
connected with the military hospitals. It was not difficult to
get me the place, under those circumstances. Society can find a
use for me here. My hand is as light, my words of comfort are as
welcome, among those suffering wretches" (she pointed to the room
in which the wounded men were lying) "as if I was the most
reputable woman breathing. And if a stray shot comes my way
before the war is over--well! Society will be rid of me on easy
terms."

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