She was sitting on
the edge of a grabat, hard as wood, comfortless as a truss of straw, and
looking down the long hospital room, with its endless rows of beds and
its hot sun shining blindingly on its glaring, whitewashed walls.
She was well known and well loved there. When her little brilliant-hued
figure fluttered, like some scarlet bird of Africa, down the dreary
length of those chambers of misery, bloodless lips, close-clinched in
torture, would stir with a smile, would move with a word of welcome.
No tender-voiced, dove-eyed Sister of Orders of Mercy, gliding gray and
soft, and like a living psalm of consolation, beside those couches of
misery, bore with them the infinite, inexpressible charm that the
Friend of the Flag brought to the sufferers. The Sisters were good, were
gentle, were valued as they merited by the greatest blackguard prostrate
there; but they never smiled, they never took the dying heart of a man
back with one glance to the days of his childhood, they never gave a
sweet, wild snatch of song like a bird's on a spring-blossoming bough
that thrilled through half-dead senses, with a thousand voices from
a thousand buried hours. "But the Little One," as said a gaunt,
gray-bearded Zephyr once, where he lay with the death-chill stealing
slowly up his jagged, torn frame--"the Little One--do you see--she is
youth, she is life; she is all we have lost. That is her charm! The
Sisters are good women, they are very good; but they only pity us.
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