All this was very pleasant to Mary. Cuthbert was now of course nothing to her, but it soothed her to hear his praises. He had been wicked in one respect, but in all others he seemed to have been what she had thought of him when he was a child, save that he developed a talent and the power of steady work, for which she had never given him credit, for on this head Rene was as emphatic as on other points.

"He will be a great artist, mademoiselle, if he lives. You do not know how much the master thought of him and so did we all. He worked harder than any of us, much harder; but it was not that only. He has talent, great talent, while the rest of us are but daubers. You will see his pictures hung on the line and that before long. We are all burning to see those he was painting for the Salon this year. There are only three of us painting for that, the master would not let any others think of it. Pierre Leroux is the third and he would have had little chance of being hung had not the Englishman gone into his room one day, and taking his brush from his hand transformed his picture altogether--transformed it, mademoiselle--and even Goude says now that it is good and will win a place. But Pierre declares that he has not the heart to finish it. If Cuthbert dies he will put it by for another year."

Rene was admitted to see Cuthbert the day after the fever had left him and sat for an hour by his bedside telling, after his first burst of emotion on seeing the change that had taken place in him, about the fate of his comrades in the studio. Mary did not go near them. There were questions Cuthbert would want to ask. Messages that he would want to send that she ought not to hear. She had wondered that this woman, who had for a time come every day and had as regularly made a scene at the entrance to the ambulance, had, since Cuthbert was at his worst, ceased coming.

She had never asked about her, and was ignorant that for the last four days she had been allowed to sit for a time by the side of a patient in another ward. She thought most likely that she was ill and had broken down under the stress of her grief and anxiety. She had even in thought pitied her. It was she and not herself that ought to be watching Cuthbert's bedside. She might not be good, but she was a woman and she loved, and it must be terrible for her to know how ill he was and never to be allowed even to see him for a moment. It was evident that she had been taken ill, and when on Rene's leaving she went to her patient she expected to find him downcast and anxious. Sad he certainly was, but he did not seem to her restless or excited as she had expected.

"I have been hearing of the others," he said. "Six of them are gone, all merry lads, taking life easily, as students do, but with plenty of good in them, that would have come to the surface later on. It will make a sad gap in our ranks when the rest of us come together again. The wounded are all going on well, I hear, that of course is a great comfort. I hear the other two companies suffered much more than we did.

The walls we fought behind saved us a good deal you see. Rene says the troops all went out again three days ago, and that there was a talk of a great fight, but there has only been some skirmishing and they have begun to come back into the town again. Our corps did not go out. They think they have done a fair share of the work, and I think so too. Rene says the old major, who is now in command, is so furious at the cowardice shown last time by the National Guards and some of the troops that he declares he will not take out his brave lads to throw away their lives when the Parisians will not venture within musket-shot of the enemy.

"I think he is quite right. I hope there will be no more sorties, for I am sure it would be useless. If you had seen, as I did, seven or eight thousand men running like a flock of frightened sheep, you would agree with me that it would be hopeless to think of breaking through the Germans with such troops as this. One victory would make all the difference in the world to their morale, but they will never win that one victory, and it will take years before the French soldier regains his old confidence in himself. Have you taken to rats yet, Mary?" he asked, with a flash of his old manner.

"No, sir, and do not mean to. We are still going on very fairly. The meat rations are very small, but we boil them down into broth, and as we have plenty of bread to sop into it we do very well; our store of eggs have held on until now. We have been having them beaten up in our morning coffee instead of milk, but they are just gone, and Madame Michaud says that we must now begin upon the preserved meat. We are a long way from rats yet, though I believe they are really hunted and eaten in great numbers in the poorer quarters."

"And there is no talk of surrender?"

"No talk at all; they say we can hold on for another month yet."

"What is the news from the provinces?"

"Everywhere bad. Bourbaki has been obliged to take refuge in Switzerland and his force has been disarmed there. Chanzy has been beaten badly near New Orleans, and the Prussians have probably by this time entered Tours.

Faidherbe has gained some successes in the north, but as the Germans are pushing forward there, as well as everywhere else, that does not make very much difference to us."

"Then what on earth's the use of holding out any longer," he said. "It is sheer stupidity. I suppose the Parisians think that, as they can't fight, they will at least show that they can starve. What is the weather like? I felt very cold last night though I had plenty of blankets on."

"It is terribly cold," she said. "The snow is deep on the ground--it is one of the coldest winters that has been for years."

"What is the day of the month?"

"The 26th."

"Then yesterday was Christmas Day."

"Yes," she said, "not a merry Christmas this year to any of us--no roast beef, no plum-pudding, no mince-pies--and yet, Cuthbert, I had every reason to be thankful, for what a much more unhappy Christmas it might have been to me."

He nodded.

"I know what you mean. Yes, you would have missed me, child, cut off as we are from the world here. I am, as it were, the sole representative of your family. Of course, you have not heard from them."

She shook her head.

"I don't suppose they trouble much about me," she said, a little bitterly, "I am a sort of disappointment, you know. Of course I have been away now for nearly two years, except for the fortnight I was over there, and even before that I scarcely seemed to belong to them. I did not care for the things that they thought a great deal of, and they had no interest in the things I cared for. Somehow I don't think I have got on well with them ever since I went up to Girton. I see now it was entirely my own fault. It does not do for a girl to have tastes differing from those of her family."

"I felt that, Mary. I felt it very much. I have told myself ever since the day of dear old father's death that I have been a brute, and I wish with all my heart I had put aside my own whims and gone in for a country life. It is all very well to say I did not like it, but I ought to have made myself like it; or if I could not do that, I ought to have made a pretence of liking it, and to have stuck to him as long as I lived. I hadn't even the excuse of having any high purpose before me."

"We all make mistakes in our lives, Cuthbert," the girl said, quietly, "and it is of no use bemoaning them--at any rate you have done your best to retrieve yours, and I mean to do my best to retrieve mine. I have quite made up my mind that when this is over I shall go to London and be regularly trained as a hospital nurse, and then join a nursing sisterhood."

"What! and give up woman in general?" Cuthbert said, with a faint laugh.

"Will you abandon your down-trodden sisters? Impossible, Mary."

"It is quite possible," she said, in a business-like manner.

"Become a back-slider! Mary, you absolutely shock me. At present you have got nursing on the brain. I should have thought that this ambulance work would have been enough for a life-time. At any rate I should advise you to think it over very seriously before you commit yourself too deeply to this new fad. Nursing is one of the greatest gifts of women, but after all woman wasn't made only to nurse, any more than she was to devote her life to championing her s.e.x."

Mary did not reply but silently moved off with an air of deeply-offended dignity.

"What an enthusiastic little woman she is," Cuthbert laughed quietly to himself; "anyhow she is a splendid nurse, and I would infinitely rather see her so, than as a female spouter on platforms. I fancied the siege might have had some effect on her. She has seen something of the realities of life and was likely to give up theorizing. She looks older and more womanly, softer a good deal than she was. I think I can improve that picture now. I had never seen her look soft before, and had to trust to my imagination. I am sure I can improve it now."

Another fortnight and Cuthbert was out of bed and able to walk about in the ward and to render little services to other patients.

"Do you know, Mary," he said, one day, when she happened to be idle and was standing talking to him as he sat on the edge of his bed, "a curious thing happened to me the very day before we went out on that sortie. I saw that fellow, c.u.mming, the rascal that ruined the bank, and then bolted, you know. For a moment I did not recall his face, but it struck me directly afterwards. I saw him go into a house. He has grown a beard, and he is evidently living as a quiet and respected British resident. It was a capital idea of his, for he is as safe here as he would be if he were up in a balloon. I intended to look him up when I got back again into Paris, but you see circ.u.mstances prevented my doing so."

"Of course you will get him arrested as soon as the siege is over, Cuthbert. I am very glad that he is found."

"Well, I don't know that I had quite made up my mind about that. I don't suppose that he made off with any great sum. You see the companies he bolstered up with the bank's money, all smashed at the same time. I don't suppose that he intended to rob the bank at the time he helped them. Probably he had sunk all his savings in them, and thought they would pull round with the aid of additional capital. As far as I could make out, from the report of the men who went into the matter, he did not seem to have drawn any money at all on his own account, until the very day he bolted, when he took the eight or ten thousand pounds there was in the safe. No. I don't think I meant to hand him over or indeed to say anything about it. I thought I would give him a good fright, which he richly deserves, and then ask him a few questions. I have never quite understood how it was that dear old dad came to buy those shares. I did inquire so far as to find out it was c.u.mming himself who transferred them to him, and I should really like to hear what was said at the time.

If the man can prove to me that when he sold them he did not know that the bank was going to break, I should have no ill-will against him, but if I were sure he persuaded him to buy, knowing that ruin would follow, I would hunt him down and spare no pains to get him punished."

"Why should he have persuaded your father to buy those shares?"

"That's just what I cannot make out. He could have had no interest in involving him in the smash. Besides they were not on intimate terms in any way. I cannot imagine that my father would have gone to him for advice in reference to business investments. It was, of course, to your father he would have turned in such matters."

"How long had he been a shareholder?"

"He bought the shares only two months before his death, which makes the matter all the more singular."

"What did father say, Cuthbert?" the girl said, after a short pause. "I suppose you spoke to him about it."

"He said that my father had heard some rumors to the effect that the bank was not in a good state, and having no belief whatever in them, he bought the shares, thinking that his doing so would have a good effect upon its credit, in which as a sort of county inst.i.tution, he felt an interest."

"But did not father, who was solicitor to the bank, and must have known something of its affairs, warn him of the danger that he was running?"

"That is what I asked him myself, but he said that he only attended to its legal business, and outside that knew nothing of its affairs."

"It seems a curious affair altogether," Mary said, gravely, "But it is time for me to be at work again."

CHAPTER XVI.

While in the ambulance, Mary Brander resolutely put her conversation with Cuthbert aside, but as soon as she started for her walk home, it became uppermost in her thoughts. It was certainly a curious affair.

From time to time friends at home with whom she corresponded, sent her local newspapers, and this had especially been the case during the first few months of her stay in Germany, as they naturally supposed she would be greatly interested in the calamity of the bank failure.

She had, at the time it was issued, read the full report of the committee of investigation upon its affairs, and, although she had pa.s.sed lightly over the accounts, she had noticed that the proceeds of the sale of the Fairclose estates were put down as subject to a deduction of fifteen thousand pounds for a previous mortgage to Jeremiah Brander, Esq. The matter had made no impression upon her mind at this time, but it now came back to her remembrance.

Of course it was perfectly natural that if Mr. Hartington wished to borrow money it was to her father, as his solicitor and friend, that he would have gone. There could be nothing unusual in that, but what Cuthbert had told her about Mr. Hartington buying the shares but two months before his death was certainly singular. Surely her father could have prevented his taking so disastrous a step. Few men are regarded by members of their family in exactly the same light as they are considered by the public, and Jeremiah Brander was certainly no exception. While the suavest of men in the eyes of his fellow-townsmen, his family were well aware that he possessed a temper. When the girls were young his conversation was always guarded in their hearing, but as they grew up he no longer felt the same necessity for prudence of speech, and frequently indulged in criticisms of the colleagues, for whom he professed the most unbounded respect and admiration in public.