A Houseful of Girls

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It was one of Annie's out-days, and as a matter of duty, but by no means
of enjoyment, she braced herself to change her hospital dress for a
walking dress. After she felt chilled to the bone, she started for a
walk, either to be jostled and forced along in a crowded thoroughfare,
where she too might have said--

"Although so many surround me,
I know not one I meet"--

or to creep the length of the cleanest side of the pavement in a
depressingly empty street, where the varying arrangement of the shabby
window curtains and the cards in the dingy windows, offering an endless
supply of rooms to the absent lodging hunter, furnished the sole
entertainment to the listless passer-by.

Annie had been afraid that she would miss Rose on her way to her
classes, and the fear was amply fulfilled--not the most distant glimpse
of Rose was forthcoming. Instead, at a crossing, Ella Carey, in her Aunt
Tyrrel's carriage, whirled by the pedestrian and administered a slight
spattering of mud to her dress. "It ought to have been the other way,"
said Annie bitterly to herself, while she stood still to wipe the sleeve
of her jacket. Yet she knew very well all the time that Ella's offence
had been quite involuntary, and that she had not for a moment recognized
Annie. If it had been so, Ella's round girlish face under its smart hat,
leaning back among the soft cushions not discontentedly, would have
brightened immensely. She would have stopped the carriage and been down
in the street at Annie's side in a moment, for the girl was as
warm-hearted as she had been docile. There was nothing she would have
liked better than to hail a Redcross face, and hear the last news about
Phyllis and May, and Ella's father and mother.

When Annie re-entered the hospital colder and more unrefreshed than she
had left it, she thought that she was at last going to be compensated
for life's rubs--beyond her deserts, she told herself a little
remorsefully. She had been longing all the morning for a letter from
Redcross, small reason as she had to complain of the negligence of her
correspondents there, and a letter with the Redcross post-mark was
awaiting her. She saw before she opened it that it was not from any of
her family. None of them used such creamily smooth and thick note-paper,
or exhibited such a cunningly contrived, elegantly designed monogram.
But even a slight communication from the merest acquaintance was welcome
as a flower in spring, when the acquaintance dwelt in dear old Redcross.
Annie had been thinking fondly of it all day as a place of human
well-being and geniality, free from continual sights and sounds of pain
and sorrow, where everybody got up and sat down, went out and came in,
worked and read, even dawdled and dreamt at will, subject to a few
simple household rules. There was no unyielding iron discipline at
Redcross. There was no hard and fast routine entering through the flesh
and penetrating into the very soul. It was just, dear, deliberate,
mannerly, yet comfortable and kindly Redcross. The writer was Thirza
Dyer, and the reason why one of the Dyers, who had hesitated about
shaking hands with one of the Millars after she was guilty of proposing
to earn her livelihood, wrote a letter to a nurse probationer and
addressed it to a public hospital, calls for an explanation. The Dyers,
in their unceasing efforts to gain by their wealth and its liberal
expenditure a footing in the county circle, had got one foot within the
coveted precincts, and there Thirza found to her own and her sisters'
amazement that nursing, not the rich and great, but common poor people,
was a curious fashion of the day. Lady Luxmore had a cousin who was a
nurse. General Wentworth's wife had a friend professionally engaged in a
London hospital for nine months out of the twelve, who was visiting the
Wentworths this winter. Of course it had begun with the Crimean War, and
the _eclat_ with which lady nurses went out to attend on the wounded
soldiers in the exceptional hospital at Scutari. But whatever was its
origin, the rule was established that nursing even day-labourers and
mechanics with their wives and children, was something very different
from being a drudging governess or broken-down companion. It was like
being a member of the Kyrle Society, with which one of the princes had
to do, or like singing in an East of London concert-room, quite _chic_,
perfectly good form, anybody might take it up and gain rather than lose
caste by the act.

Accordingly, it became an obvious obligation on the Dyers to cultivate
and not to cut the only nurse on their visiting list. With unblushing,
well-nigh naive suddenness, Thirza Dyer, to Annie Millar's bewildered
astonishment, proceeded to start and maintain a correspondence with her.
Two are required for a bargain-making, and Annie was not altogether
disinterested in scribbling the few lines occasionally which warranted
the continuance of the correspondence on Thirza's part. For if Thirza
had lived anywhere else than where she did live, near Redcross, the
answer to her first letter might have been different. Therefore Annie
did not perhaps deserve much solace from these letters, and certainly
this one did not contribute to her exaltation of spirit. It was chiefly
occupied with an account of several _recherchee_ afternoon teas which the
Dyers had held lately at the Manor-house, together with a full
description of the tea-gowns of salmon, canary, and cherry-coloured
plush, lined with _eau-de-nil_ satin, which the Miss Dyers had worn on
these occasions.

Now poor Annie was rather above hankering unduly after tea-gowns, or for
that matter "smart" or "swell" dress of any kind. She liked pretty
things, and things which became her charming person, at their proper
time and season, well enough, but she was not greatly discomposed by
the lack of such adornment, and hardly at all troubled when her
neighbours displayed what she did not possess.

It was because the foolishly exultant gorgeous description, which ought
to have been set to a fashion-plate, carried Annie back with a flash to
one winter's day last year, that it made her heart sore. On the day in
question Annie and Dora, and for that matter Rose and May, acting as
deeply interested assistants, had been tremendously busy and merry in
the old nursery, travestying national and historic costumes in calico.
It was all on behalf of a certain scenic entertainment given in the
Town-hall for the delectation of the scholars in the Rector's
Sunday-school and night classes. It had been a very simple and
intentionally inexpensive affair, and the principal charm to the
performers had lain in the contriving of their costumes. Annie and Dora
had appeared in magnificent chintz sacques--which might have represented
tea-gowns--and mob caps, and had been declared by Cyril Carey, who was
supposed to be no mean judge, a most satisfactory eighteenth century
pair. Cyril himself had broken the rule as to material, and had figured
in the black satin trunk hose, velvet doublet, and lace collar of a
Spanish grandee. But Ned Hewett had stuck to Turkey-red cotton for a
Venetian senator or a Roman cardinal, nobody had been quite certain
which. And Tom Robinson had been a Scotch beggarman, Sir Walter Scott's
immortal Edie Ochiltree, in a blue cotton gown and a goatskin beard,
which she (Annie) had wickedly pretended must have been manufactured out
of tufts purloined from the stock of boas at "Robinson's." Lucy Hewett
had been shrouded in white cotton wool, to represent the Empress Matilda
escaping from Oxford, "through the lines of King Stephen's soldiers,"
under shelter of a snowstorm. Fanny Russell had never looked better than
she looked that night as a Norman peasant girl. It was all very well for
Cyril Carey to condescend to the deceit of praising Annie and Dora up to
the skies, when everybody knew whom he admired most, with reason. That
was Fanny Russell, with her splendid black eyes and hair, and the Norman
strength and fineness of her profile.

What was Nurse Annie, in her holland gown, apron, and cap, recalling and
revelling in? The silly vanities and child's play of the past. Well,
what harm was there in them? These had been blithe moments while they
lasted, which had set young hearts bounding, young feet skipping, and
young voices laughing and singing in a manner which was natural, and not
to be forbidden lest worse came of it.

Annie was roused from her pleasant reverie and plunged into another of
a totally different description. The last was made up of garbled
reality, but with what truth was in it tending to a false, doleful
vision. It would represent St. Ebbe's as a gloomy, ghastly prison-house
of suffering and death, and she in her tender youth and sweet beauty
immured in it by an error of judgment, a fatal mistake incidental to
rash enthusiasm and total inexperience. If Annie ever arrived at that
rueful conclusion, how could she bear the penalty she must pay?

Annie had heard and read of young women on whom the world did not cry
shame, who turned from the decay and death they had not gone to seek,
which Providence had brought to their doors, in paroxysms of repugnance
and rebellion. They could not bear that their perfection of health and
life should come into contact with something so chillingly, gruesomely
different, that their glowing youth should be wasted in the dim shadows
of sick-rooms or amidst the dank vapours hovering over the dark river
which all must ford when their time comes. Those standing round who
heard or read the outcry called it natural, piteous, well-nigh
praiseworthy, it was so sincere. How could Annie realize for herself in
a moment that such heroines(!) are the daughters in spirit of the women
who, in outbreaks of mediaeval pestilence and latter-day cholera, have
literally abandoned their nearest and dearest, fleeing from spectacles
of anguish and risks of infection? How could she guess that such women
are the spiritual sisters of poor heathen and savage Hottentot and Malay
mothers and daughters, who, sooner than be burdened with the wailing
helplessness of infancy and the mumbling fatuity of age, will expose the
children dependent on these murderesses, and the hoary heads that once
planned and prayed for the welfare of their slayers, to perish of cold
and hunger?

It was Annie's hour for resuming work, and it was well for her, though
she went but languidly into the spotlessly white and clean ward, among
its rows of beds with the flower-stand, illuminated texts and
oleographs, which generous supporters of the hospital sent to brighten
its cold bareness and soften and cheer what was harsh and subdued in its
atmosphere. Annie was not even greatly affected by the greeting of one
of her patients, an elderly man recovering from an operation, and still
slightly off his head when the fever rose on him. She went to him with a
cooling, soothing application, and he told her incoherently to come
again and give him his dinner and his tea. He liked a young lass or
lady, be she which she liked, with red cheeks and shining eyes to wait
upon him. It minded him of a bit wench of a daughter of his he had lost
when she was twelve years--the age of the little wench in the Bible, for
parson had preached about her the Sunday after his lass's funeral. It
broke her mother's heart for all that, and he buried her too within
three months. Then the place got lonesome, and he took what was not good
for him, till he had come to this; though whether it were the House or
just an hospital he was lying in he could not clearly say.

Then there happened what Annie was wont to describe as a miracle of
mercy to bring her to a better mind. A young boy whose leg had been
crushed by a waggon was carried into the operating theatre for an
immediate operation. It was the lecture hour, and a great professor of
surgery with his class of students, together with several of the other
doctors connected with St. Ebbe's, was in attendance. But it was also
customary, especially where a female patient or a patient so young as
the boy in question was concerned, for a nurse, generally the sister of
the ward, to be present to hold the sufferer's hand if it were wished,
or when it was possible to support the poor head against her breast. It
so chanced that the sister was out, and other available nurses were
engaged, so in circumstances which would admit of no delay Annie was for
the first time called to the front and summoned to undertake the
responsibility of the situation. Already she had lost sight of herself,
and was standing looking so calm, firm, and prepared for every
emergency, that the operating surgeon, with a glance at her, put her
youth and position as a probationer aside, and accepted what help she
could give.

It was a critical case, and for some medical reason no anaesthetic could
be administered. The boy was past the unconsciousness of childhood, and
though nearly fainting with fright, pain, and weakness, remained quite
sensible of the further ordeal he had to undergo. He was keenly alive to
the humane motive which induced the surgeon to turn his back upon him in
selecting his instruments. He even heard, with ears morbidly acute, the
low words addressed to the interested spectators, "Now, gentlemen, I am
about to begin."

With a stifled sob the poor little fellow suddenly managed to raise
himself from the table on which he was stretched. He looked round wildly
on the circle of men's faces, controlled and expectant, with a certain
every-day expression in anticipation of what, in its blind terror and
life and death importance to him, was a familiar occurrence to them, and
on the one woman's face, controlled too, but with an indescribable
wistfulness under the control. Then he made his childish appeal, shrill
with misery, "Oh, gentlemen, will you not stop till I say my prayers?"

There was an instant pause of surprise, commiseration, constraint--the
peculiar awkwardness which in Englishmen waits on any provocation to
betray feeling. Nobody liked to look at his neighbour to see how he
looked, lest there should be the most distant sign of emotion in his own
face. Some strong men there had ceased to pray or to believe in prayer,
yet all were more or less touched by the lad's implicit faith.

As for Annie she had been praying at that very moment, praying fervently
in the silence of her heart, that she might be saved from breaking down
and allowed to be of some service to the boy.

"Certainly, certainly, my little chap; but you must be quick about it,"
said the great surgeon a little hoarsely.

"Our-Father-which-art-in-Heaven," began the boy, running the words
together and speaking with a parrot-like monotony in an unnaturally
high-pitched key. Then his voice began to quaver a little till he
stopped short with a cry of despair--"I cannot mind the words, I cannot
say my prayers. Oh! will nobody say them for me? If mother, as is not in
Lon'on, were here, she would do it fast," he ended, flinging out one
thin arm and clutching convulsively at the air in a kind of
panic-stricken terror.

There was another second's dead silence. It was broken by a woman's
voice. Annie had taken a step forward close to the boy's elbow, so that
her voice was in his ear. She could not kneel, but instinctively she
clasped her hands and bent her head reverently as she said in low but
clear tones which were carried throughout the length and breadth of the
room, and thrilled in every ear, the Lord's Prayer. At its close she
went on without hesitation in the same wonderfully audible voice: "God
bless this little boy. Forgive him every wrong he has ever done. Keep
him safe, and raise him up again, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen."

Another voice--a deeper one--responded to the "Amen." It was said by the
famous operator's enemies that he was lax in his religious opinions, and
that he rarely found time to go to church. Nevertheless it was he who
with grave heartiness repeated the Amen.

The little lad had sunk back when she began to speak, and there he lay
without giving her a word or sign of thanks--his best acknowledgment of
her compliance with what might be his last wish being his quaking
submission. He could not keep still his quivering flesh, or hold back
altogether his piercing cries and piteous moans, but he bit his tongue
in seeking to stifle them. For he was not fighting with his Maker and
his fate; he was trying in his boyish way, with his small fortitude and
resignation, to endure, in the might of the support which had been asked
for him.

Annie too clenched her teeth, while she opened her eyes to take in
everything that passed before them, as a mirror may be turned to receive
the minutest impression from the scene it reflects. But she did not hear
a single shriek or wail, because her ears were filled with the higher
harmonies which she had called forth. She clasped one of the boy's
trembling hands in her own warm one, which did not grow cold in the
contact. She was on the alert to meet his only half-seeing gaze, and to
give back a glance of tender sympathy and protection--the true mother's
look that is to be found when occasion calls for it in every good
woman's face,--ay, it may even be seen in the precociously earnest,
kindly eyes of many a loving woman-child.

There were plenty of other helpers to render the surgeon all the
assistance he needed in his work, with far more celerity and ability
than Annie could have supplied. But while sense lingered in the little
patient's eyes, it was to the woman he turned for the pity and aid which
did not fail him; it was through her that he drew from One mightier than
all, the spiritual strength for his terrible bodily conflict. In a sense
Annie and he were both on their trial, they served their novitiate
together, and helped each other to bear and overcome. When the operation
was over he lay, with the sweat drops of agony which Annie was gently
wiping off, not gone from his forehead, but also with the reflection
still lingering on his white face of the courage and patience with which
he had been ready to meet death.

"You have behaved remarkably well, and shown no want of pluck, my lad,"
said the surgeon as a parting word of encouragement and cheer. "Lie
still and you'll be able to see your friends by and by. I believe you'll
do famously, and we'll see whether a substitute cannot be found for the
limb you have lost."

He turned to Annie who had done all, and more than all, that was
required of her, probably because she had entirely forgotten herself.
She was not even then sensible of a swift reaction, an overwhelming
tide of embarrassment. She continued more than half unconscious of the
number of eyes which, now that the operation was over, were fixed upon
her, marvelling, admiring, condemning, or ridiculing. For what act is
there, let it be ever so disinterested or self-sacrificing, against
which no voice will rise in condemnation or in mockery?

But it was not the operating surgeon who either condemned or scoffed at
Annie's conduct. He drew her aside, not speaking to her on the religious
side of the episode, which he did not conceive that he had the smallest
right or title to do, but addressing her on the purely medical aspect of
the incident, on which he considered that he was entitled, nay, even
bound to speak. His manner was a little blunt and brusque rather than
suave, like that of a man who had no time to waste in paying compliments
or making soft speeches, but it was thoroughly approving.

"You did quite right, nurse; I'm much obliged to you. That poor boy
wanted all the comfort he could get. If he had gone on and worked
himself into a frenzy before I had taken up the knife, I do not know
that I could have done my work, and certainly the probability of his
recovery would have been greatly lessened."

"I am glad," said Annie simply, with a little gasp of returning
consciousness. "It is good of you to say so, doctor," but it was
doubtful whether she knew what she was saying. She was penetrated
through and through with thankfulness, yet thanks to herself seemed so
irrelevant that she did not care to hear them.

There was more than Annie who thought that thanks to her were out of
place and superfluous. This was specially so with one among the group of
younger men, who at the moment of entering the ward had been fully alive
to the circumstance that "the pretty nurse," as she was known to them,
was on active duty. They had speculated on whether she would stand an
operation, and what a disturbance and nice mess there would be if she
fell flat on the small of her back on the floor, or went off in a fit of
hysterics in the middle of it; and how their "boss" would endure such a
disconcerting interruption to the proceedings. As it happened, the
speculators were in their turn startled, abashed, or irritated,
according to their respective temperaments and frames of mind, by what
followed.

But there was a young giant, with a blonde beard, who let his blue eyes
fall on the floor, drew back till he leant against the wall, and
thrusting his hands into his pockets, asked himself in a dazed, humbled
way, if an angel had come down among them, and where was the good of
presuming to thank an angel? It was a thousand times more officious and
audacious than to disregard the hackneyed quotation about the folly of
painting a lily and perfuming a rose.

Annie, the moment she could be spared, went to her own room, fell down
on her knees, and cried as if her heart would break. Yet they were not
unhappy, but blissful tears, though they were as much for her own
unworthiness as for God's unmerited goodness.

Then she snatched up a sheet of paper and wrote home. "I was so
discontented--such a peevish wretch, this morning, but I have had a
tonic, and now I am so unspeakably satisfied with my lot in life that I
believe I am the happiest girl in England to-night. I would not change
places with a hundred old Aunt Pennys, only I know, alas! that I am not
half good enough to be a nurse. Yet I would rather be a nurse than any
other character in the world, and I would not go back for a permanency
to dear old Redcross, after which I was hankering this very morning, and
live at home with you all again, leading the aimless, self-seeking life
I led, not though Mr. Carey's bank were to rise out of its ashes and
flourish to an extent that its greatest upholders never dreamt of--not
though I were to get a pension or an earl's ransom, or whatever else
people count magnificent compensations and rewards. But you must not
think that it is because I do not love you all as well and a thousand
times better than I ever loved you, for that would be a great mistake,
since I am just beginning to know your true value. But don't you
understand it would break my heart to think that I should no longer be a
nurse and never have such another experience as I have had this
afternoon." And then she told them in a very few words what had happened
and what the surgeon had said to her. How the sister of the ward, and
the matron, and everybody she knew in St. Ebbe's had congratulated her.
They had all united in promising that the poor little fellow should be
her patient in future; they had begun already to call him "Miss Millar's
boy."

The little Doctor not only wiped his spectacles, he held his head
higher. Mrs. Millar read the letter again and again, appropriating it
and carrying it in her pocket till it was worn to fragments. These were
still religiously preserved and portions read to select and sympathetic
audiences. And every time she read the lines herself with a full heart,
she called on God to bless her good Annie, and thought she was honoured
among mothers in having such a daughter.

As for Dora and May they were long of ceasing to talk with bated breath
and the height of loving enthusiasm of how Annie had mastered herself,
and what a stay she had been in the hour of need to the lad. They
planned and carried out their plans at every spare moment, in the
manufacture of knitted socks and cravats for his benefit. But their
great achievement was a quilted dressing-gown which Dora contrived to
cut out, and May, in spite of her bad sewing, to help to sew together,
that in his convalescence he might sit up in bed like a little sick
prince.

CHAPTER XI.

MRS. JENNINGS AND HER DAUGHTER HESTER.

Rose Millar had made up her mind to like everything, if possible, in her
new surroundings, and when she came up to town it was not only by a
piece of good fortune, it was to the girl's credit, that she found so
much she could appreciate, and so little, comparatively, that it was
difficult to put up with.

In the first place, and as of primary consequence to Rose's well-being,
Mrs. Jennings, the lady with whom Rose was boarded, turned out an
excellently-disposed gentlewoman. She had a well-ordered house, pervaded
with the spirit of a gentlewoman. The whole establishment was full of
the self-respect which showed itself in a scrupulous consideration for
the rights and claims, the doings and feelings, of others.

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