Kitabı oku: «Nurse Elisia», sayfa 16
“Thank you,” he said quickly; “thank you. You and I have worked together long now, and have had some triumphs of which we might boast. Where is Sir Denton? He ought to come, and we could chat over all of my projects. I shall write to you, of course, and tell you all I am doing, and you can give me a word or two of advice, perhaps. Why, nurse – I beg your pardon – Lady Cicely – your name sounds strange to me, I have so lately heard it from Sir Denton – how grateful we all ought to be for your devotion to our good cause. Forgive me for speaking so.”
She seemed plunged in thought, and not to hear his words, and he started, as she spoke now in alow, soft, dreamy way, as if uttering the thoughts that had occupied her for the past few minutes.
“You are going out possibly to your death, Neil Elthorne,” she said.
“That is the worst that can happen.”
“No,” she said softly, “not the worst. You are going yonder to fight with disease, forsaking all who love you, offering up your own life as a sacrifice, that yonder poor stricken creatures may live.”
“Heaven only knows,” he said solemnly.
“You are going alone, to face the horrors of a pestilence without the help such as you find here.”
“Yes, but I shall soon get assistance, and till then I must do my best.”
She looked across at him where he stood, and again that dim room was silent, so that the slightest sound would have been a relief.
“Are you fixed upon going?” she said at last; and then she started, for his voice rang out now strongly. “Yes,” he cried, “I must.”
“Alone, with no hand to help you to fight this good fight? No: you must not go alone. Take me with you. I will go.”
He started from the chimney-piece, for a wildly delirious thought made his brain reel; but she stood there before him, pale and calm, as if the words she had uttered were of the simplest kind.
He made almost a superhuman effort over self as he felt that the mad thought within him must be crushed.
“No,” he said coldly; “your love for the profession you embraced leads you astray. I shall find nurses there. What, you?” he cried almost fiercely. “Woman, your place is here.”
She took a step toward him, and held out her hands, and her voice was very low.
“I thought all that was dead for me,” she almost whispered, “that the past had burned my heart to ashes, and I have fought long and hard to do my duty in the path that I had marked out for my own through life. I did not know. Neil, how could you misjudge me so!”
He seemed to stagger at her words; his lips moved, but no sound came, and when at last he spoke, his voice sounded hoarse and strange.
“But Alison – my brother?” he cried.
“Alison – your brother!” she said softly, and with a trace of scorn in her tones. “How could you be so blind!”
Neil started violently, and gazed at the pained face before him.
“Am I mad?” he muttered; and then aloud: “Be so blind – I blind? What do you mean? In Heaven’s name, speak!”
She looked at him fixedly, with her eyes contracting, but she spoke no word.
“Do you hear me?” he cried fiercely. “You do not answer, Elisia – my brother? No, no, I am not blind. I knew – I saw – he loved you from the first hour he saw you. You cannot deny it. Is that false? Am I blind?”
“In that, no,” she said coldly. “Well, what is that to me? Could I help the insane folly of the man who persecuted me, as you say, from the hour of my arrival at your house?”
“But,” he cried in a low, hoarse whisper, “I have seen and believed – believed, but not without seeing. Elisia, for pity’s sake, tell me – have I been so blind?”
“In reading me, yes. Neil, how could you think that I could ever love your brother? You ought to have known it was impossible.”
“Hush! What are you saying?” he cried, as he eagerly caught her hands.
“The simple truth,” she said gently. “I have crushed it down, but I have loved you long and well.”
“No, no,” he cried, “for Heaven’s sake! You will drive me mad.”
“No,” she whispered; “it cannot be unwomanly at a time like this.”
“Too late – too late!” and he drew back, covered his face with his hands, and let his head fall upon the cold marble at his side.
“No,” she whispered, as she clasped her hands, and laid them on his shoulder, “it is not too late. Mine was but a girlish love for one unworthy of a thought, and in my youthful weakness I thought that all the world was base. I did not know. Take me, Neil, husband, as your faithful wife. It is not too late. We will go there hand in hand, side by side, to fight this pestilence.”
“What? Take you there – you?” he cried, as he raised his head, and caught her hands – “take you to face that awful scourge?”
“Yes,” she cried, raising her head proudly, “side by side with you in the awful strife. God with us, Neil – our faith in his protecting shield, as I place mine in you, my brave, true hero – my love – my life.”
“Till death do us part,” cried Neil, as he clasped her to his breast.
“Amen!” said a solemn voice, and Sir Denton came forward out of the darkness, and stopped by their side. “I thought I was going to the grave a childless man,” he continued in a broken voice – “my son – my daughter. You have given me afresh lease of life – to live till I see you once again. I say it, children, I, the old prophet: I shall see you before I die.”
Chapter Thirty Two.
Peace at Hightoft
Neil Elthorne had not been a month at the West Coast settlement before he began to find that the funds placed at his disposal by the home authorities would be utterly inadequate for the great work on hand. He was already crippled, and upon taking the sharer of his enterprise into his confidence he fully realised for the first time that he had married a wealthy wife, and that the accumulations of years of her large income were waiting to be utilised as he thought best.
This gave the necessary impulse to his task, and for the next five years the warfare was carried on. With wonderful success? Yes. To achieve all that he and Lady Cicely desired? No. But they fought on, unscathed by disease, which swept away its hundreds, leading, as it were, a charmed life, till reason forced it upon his busy brain that the time had come when he must return.
He had done far more than the most sanguine had expected, and thousands lived to bless his name, and that of the brave, true woman ever working at his side.
His departure was sudden. Weakness and a strange languor had attacked his wife. She had hidden her sufferings from him lest she should hinder him in his work, but his practiced eye detected her state; and as soon as the necessary arrangements could be made, the low, miasmatic tropical shore was left behind, and in a vessel rapidly making its way north, the change was almost magical.
“So well, dear,” said Lady Cicely one bright morning, as the vessel rushed onward into purer air, and beneath brighter skies, “that I feel as if we ought to return.”
“No,” he said, taking her hand; “we have done our work there. We have laid the foundation of a new régime of comparative health for our colonies, and the inhabitants of that dreadful place; other hands must carry on the work. I shudder now as I think of all that we have gone through, and wonder that we are still alive to begin some other task at home.”
There had been plenty of changes since they had left England, but Sir Denton Hayle, apparently not a day older, still paid his visits to the ward which bore his name; while Ralph Elthorne, vigorous in health, though helpless as a child, was at the station to welcome back his children, as he called them, to the old home, where Aunt Anne, grown more grey and placid, still kept house, and ignored all the past as she took her niece in her arms.
Alison was no longer there. He had consoled himself a year after his brother’s departure by marrying Saxa Lydon, instead of Dana, and residing at the Grange. For the younger sister preferred her outdoor life, spending half the year at her old home, the other half in travelling in so strong-minded a manner that Aunt Anne declared she was quite shocked. As for Saxa, when she decided to be Alison’s wife, she endowed him with her masculine habits as well as her fortune, for a couple of sturdy little facsimiles of her husband brought her to the way of thinking that an English wife should be motherly and wise, so that on Neil’s return a wonderfully warm intimacy sprang up between the brothers’ wives.
There was another couple at the old home to welcome the sun-burned travellers, for Sir Cheltnam Burwood never entered Ralph Elthorne’s doors again, but passed out of sight entirely, living, it was said, in Paris and Baden. So that when the vicar’s son came to Hightoft as Captain Beck, his welcome was warm as he could wish, and his patience met with its reward.
“That’s the worst of it, my dear,” said Ralph Elthorne, wrinkling up his brow, as he wheeled himself along the drive in the bright sunshine. “I don’t want nursing, only helping about, and yet, now you are here, I feel sometimes as if I should like to be ill again, to wake up and see your dear face watching by my side. And so Sir Denton resigns his post at the hospital to Neil, eh?”
“Yes; and we must go up at once.”
“Tut, tut, tut! you seem only just to have come. Here is Neil. I say, my dear boy: about this hospital. You don’t want money?”
“No, father; certainly not.”
“Then throw it up. Come and settle down here. I can’t spare Cicely. I can’t, indeed.”
“I’m afraid you must, sir,” said Neil, laughing, “unless she says I am to go to work alone. Not a habit of hers, eh, my dear?”
“Bah! You two are children. Anyone would think you had been married five days ago, instead of five years. Then look here: I shall give up the old place and come and live in town.”
“No,” said Neil; “only to visit us now and then. You could not exist healthily away from your gardens and your farm. Besides, Isabel and Saxa.”
“And your grandchildren,” said Lady Cicely. “There again,” the old man cried testily, “that’s the worst of you two: you are always right. Is a man never to have his own way here?”
“Never, father,” said Neil, taking his wife’s hand. “Nature says it is not to be done.”
“And somehow, my boy, in spite of all our planning, and vexation at being thwarted,” said the old man, almost in a deprecating way, “things do happen for the best.”
“That has long been my faith, father, which means my dear wife’s too.”
“Yes, my boy, and mine too, now at last. Here, hi! Ralph, you young rascal, come and push grandpa’s chair.”
Alison’s curly-headed little fellow came scampering up, to begin batting hard behind the light wheeled chair in which the old man sat; and as Neil and his wife saw the old man’s glee, there was a faint touch of sorrow in the husband’s heart, as he thought that it might have been his son who was sturdily pushing along the old man’s chair.
He turned and looked half shrinkingly at his wife, as he saw that her deep eyes were fixed on his, and the next moment he knew that she could read the very secrets of his heart.
For she laid her hand on his, and said softly:
“Our children are waiting yonder, Neil, under the black clouds of the great city – our children, love – the poor, the suffering, and the weak, waiting, waiting for the healing touch of my dear husband’s hand.”
“And for their pillows to be smoothed by their tender nurse – true woman – dearest wife.”
