Pimpernel and Rosemary

By Baroness Orczy.

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Prologue

I

This was in July 1916.

The woman sat alone in the room downstairs, stitching, stitching, by the flickering light of a small oil-lamp that stood on a rickety deal table close beside her. By the side of the lamp there were some half-dozen khaki tunics, and the woman took up these tunics one by one, looked them over and patted them and turned them about and about: then she took up the scissors and undid a portion of the lining. After which she stitched that portion of the lining up again, but not before she had inserted something—something that was small and white and crisp and that she took out from a fold in the bosom of her dress—between the lining and the cloth.

And this she did to each of the half dozen tunics in turn.

The room was small and bare, the paper hung down from the walls in strips, but it happened to have a ceiling that had only partially fallen in during the last bombardment, and so it might be termed a luxurious room, seeing that there were very few ceilings left in Guillaumet now. There was no roof to the house, and not a pane of glass anywhere, but as it was very hot this July, this was really an advantage. Quite a pleasant draught stirred the tattered curtain that masked the broken window and fanned the woman’s dark, unruly hair about her damp forehead.

She sat in ragged bodice and petticoat, her sleeves tucked up above her elbows, her bodice open, showing throat and breasts that were not unshapely.

“You are kind to those English fellows, Alice,” a dry, sarcastic voice said suddenly, close behind her.

The woman gave a start, and the hand that patted and folded the last of the tunics shook ever so slightly. Her pale, wan face looked almost ashen in hue in the dim light of the lamp. She turned and looked at the newcomer, a tall, lean fellow with tousled dark hair and unshaven chin, who lolled under the lintel of the door, chewing the stump of a cigar and gazing at her with a kind of indulgently sarcastic expression in his deep-set eyes. At sight of him she seemed reassured. It was only Lucien—Lucien the vagrant, the picker-up of unconsidered trifles, attached as porter to one of the American hospitals somewhere close by. So everybody round about here understood. But no one ever inquired further than that; everyone was too busy to trouble about other people’s affairs; and Lucien was useful and willing. Though he had a game leg he would do anything he was asked—run errands, repair a derelict car, clean boots, anything. Lucien l’Américain they called him. “The Yank” the English flying boys from the aerodrome at Guillaumet had nicknamed him.

And they rather liked the Yank. Though he was as ugly as sin, swarthy, most days unshaved and dirty, he was very amusing, had a fund of good stories to relate, and was always ready for a gamble or a bit of fun. He seemed plentifully supplied with money, too—tips, probably, which he collected from the French or English officers over at the hospital—and was very free with it in the way of drinks and cigarettes for the boys. Latterly his open courtship of Alice Gerbier had caused considerable amusement in Guillaumet. Alice was a good sort, of course, but so jolly ugly, and not so young as she once was. It was difficult to imagine any man wanting to make love to Alice Gerbier. But Lucien l’Américain must have done it after a fashion of his own, before Alice became his abject slave, fetching and carrying for him, working her fingers to the bone, and sitting up half the night sewing shirts and knitting socks for him. He took it all as a matter of course, and treated her as if she were so much dirt.

“The only way to treat women,” he would remark cynically, whenever his harshness toward poor Alice roused the indignation of one of the men.

It was a curious courtship, and the boys who were quartered in old mother Gerbier’s house often wondered how it would end. Poor Alice! It was her one chance. If she lost this undemonstrative admirer of hers she would never get another. No doubt she felt that, poor thing, for at times her eyes would look pathetically wistful, when she caught sight of Lucien making himself agreeable to other women.

Lucien l’Américain lolled into the room and came to a halt close beside Alice’s chair; with the air of a condescending pasha he patted her thin shoulders.

“You are kinder to these fellows,” he said, “than you are to me. Why the dickens you should work so hard for them I don’t know. You look dog-tired, and it’s swelteringly hot tonight. We shall have a storm, I think.”

“The boys were saying they thought a storm was coming on,” Alice said in a tired, toneless voice, “and they were hoping it would soon be over.”

“Off as usual in the morning, I suppose,” Lucien remarked curtly.

The woman nodded.

“And like a good soul you are putting a few stitches to their clothes, eh?” the man went on, and jerked a grimy thumb in the direction of the pile of tunics.

“There’s no one else to do it for them,” the woman rejoined in the same toneless, listless voice.

“Rather a futile task,” he rejoined drily. “What is a hole more or less in a tunic? How many of these fellows will come back from their raid tomorrow do you suppose? Most of these carefully mended tunics will supplement the meagre wardrobes of our friend Fritz over the way, I’m thinking.”

“Perhaps,” the woman assented with a weary sigh.