The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Magdalen, by Wilkie Collins

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Title: The New Magdalen

Author: Wilkie Collins

Posting Date: October 28, 2008 [EBook #1623]
Release Date: February, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW MAGDALEN ***

Produced by James Rusk

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 communi