He felt rather jealous of the attentions she might bestow on others; but this selfish feeling lasted only for awhile. She had several Highlanders, three hussars, and two artillery officers on her list: some of the latter were minus legs and arms. Next day when she visited Stuart she was weeping, for three of her patients had died of their wounds.
The whole of Brussels had been converted into a vast hospital: every house, without distinction, was crowded with wounded and sick. The officers and soldiers, in some places, were lying side by side on the same floor; and the humanity, kindness, and solicitude displayed towards these unfortunates by the ladies, and other females of every class, are worthy of the highest praise. They were to be seen hourly in the hospitals, distributing cordials and other little comforts to the wounded soldiers of all nations,—friend and foe alike. They were blessed on every side as they moved along, for the poor fellows found sisters and mothers in them all.
Ronald took a deep and, perhaps for so young a man, a dangerous interest in the fair Antoinette de la Misericorde. He deplored that so charming a creature should be condemned to dwell in a dreary cloister,—her fine features shaded and lost beneath the hideous lawn veil and mis-shapen hood of the sisters; and that her existence was doomed to be one of everlasting prayer, penance, fast, humiliation, and slavery in hospitals, surrounded continually by the fetid breath of the sick, by distempers and epidemics, scenes of want, woe, and misery, and in the hearing sometimes of sorrow, blasphemy, and horrid imprecations,—for her duty led her into the dens and prisons of the police, and the inmost recesses of the infamous _Rasp-haus_. Whether her own wish, or her parents’ tyranny and superstition, had consigned her to this miserable profession, he never discovered; but the life of a galley-slave or a London sempstress would have been preferable.
Antoinette was evidently a lady by manner, appearance, and birth. None but a lady could have owned so beautiful a hand. She had all the natural vivacity and buoyant spirits of a French girl, and, at times, her sallies and clear ringing laughter contrasted oddly with the sombre garb and her half real, half affected demureness.