Kitabı oku: «Nurse Elisia», sayfa 9
Chapter Sixteen.
How Elisia became a Nurse
The bedroom was bright with flowers and the many touches given by a thoughtful woman’s hand, to which was due the sweet fragrance in the air.
“But you are better to-day, sir?”
“No, nurse, no. Perhaps better in body, but not in spirit. You cannot understand it. I seem to be a prisoner chained down. My body is here, and my mind is everywhere about the place with my old projects.”
“Shall I read to you, sir?”
“Read? Yes; I like to hear you read. You are a strange nurse, to be able to read with so much feeling. Get a book. Something good.”
“What would you like to-day?”
“Anything. Who’s that? Go and see. So tiresome, disturbing me like this.”
Nurse Elisia went to answer the light tap at the door, and as she opened it Aunt Anne appeared, and was sweeping by her, when her brother cried, “Stop!”
“But I have some business to transact with you, Ralph,” said the lady pleadingly.
“I cannot help it. Go away now. I cannot be disturbed.”
“Oh, very well, Ralph. I will come up again,” said Aunt Anne in an ill-used tone.
“Wait till I send for you,” said her brother sourly.
“It’s all that woman’s doing,” said Aunt Anne to herself, as she swept down the corridor. “Oh, if I could find some means of sending her away.”
“It seems as if it were my fate to make enemies here,” said Nurse Elisia to herself, as she stood waiting with a book in her hand. “It is time I left, and yet life seems to have been growing sweeter in this quiet country home.”
Her eyes were directed toward the window, by which a little bookcase had been placed; and, as she looked out on the beautiful garden, there was the faint dawn of a smile upon her lip, but it passed away directly, leaving the lips white and pinched, while a curiously haggard and strange look came into her face. She craned forward and gazed out intently; there was a cold dew upon her forehead, and the hand which took out her kerchief trembled violently.
She drew back from the window, but, as if compelled by some emotion she still gazed out. Ralph Elthorne did not notice the change in the nurse’s aspect, but illness had made his hearing keen, and he said sharply:
“Who is that coming up to the front?”
“Miss Elthorne, sir.”
“But I can hear two people.”
“A gentleman is with her.”
“What gentleman? what is he like?”
There was a strange singing in Nurse Elisia’s ears, as, with her voice now perfectly calm, and her emotion nearly mastered, she described the appearance of the visitor so vividly that Elthorne said at once:
“Oh, it’s Burwood.”
She looked at him quickly, to see that he lay back with his eyes half closed, musing, with a satisfied expression upon his face, while her own grew wondering of aspect and strange.
For her life at Hightoft had been so much confined to the sick chamber, that she knew very little of the neighbours. The Lydons had often been mentioned in her presence, and, from a hint or two let fall, she had gathered that Isabel was engaged to some baronet in the neighbourhood; but she had not heard his name, which came to her now as a surprise, while the fact of his being in company with the daughter of the house, and the satisfied look upon the father’s countenance, left no doubt in her mind that this was the suitor of his choice.
The current of her thoughts was broken by her patient, who seemed to wake up from a doze.
“Ah, you are there?” he said. “I must have dropped asleep, and was dreaming that you had gone out for your walk, and I could not make anybody hear. Have I been asleep long?”
“Very few minutes, sir. In fact, I did not know you were asleep.”
“Ah, one dreams a great deal in a very short time. You were going to read to me, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir. Shall I begin?”
“You may as well, though I would as soon think.” There was a gentle tap at the door.
“Come in. No; see who that is, nurse. Why am I to be so worried! I’m not ill now,” he cried peevishly.
She crossed to the door and opened it, to find Isabel standing there, flushed and evidently agitated.
“May I come in and sit with you a little while, papa?” she said.
Elthorne shook his head.
“No,” he cried shortly, “and I will not be interrupted so. Your aunt was here just now. Pray do not be so tiresome, my dear child. I will send for you if I want you. Why have you left Burwood?”
A sob rose to Isabel’s throat, and as she saw the nurse standing there, book in hand, a feeling of dislike began to grow within her breast.
For why should not this be her task? Why was this strange woman to be always preferred to her? It should have been her office to read to the sick man, and she would gladly have undertaken the duty.
“I am very sorry I came, papa, but I see you so seldom,” she said softly. “Papa, dear, let me come and read to you.”
“No, no,” cried Elthorne peevishly. “Nurse is going to read. Besides, you have company downstairs. Burwood has not gone?”
“No, papa.”
“And you come away and leave him? There, go down again, and do, pray, help your aunt to keep up some of the old traditions of the place. What will Burwood think?”
Isabel gave a kind of gasp, her forehead wrinkled up, and the tears rose to her eyes, but at that moment she saw those of the nurse fixed upon her inquiringly, and in an instant she flushed up and darted a look full of resentment at “this woman,” who appeared to be gratifying a vulgar curiosity at her expense.
“Did you hear me, Isabel?” cried her father, querulously. “Pray, go down. You fidget me. Go down to Burwood, and if he asks, tell him I am very much better, and that I shall be glad to see him soon.”
“Yes, papa,” she said faintly; and turning back to the door, she had her hand upon it, when, moved by an affectionate impulse, she ran back quickly, bent down and kissed him.
“Good girl!” he said. “Good girl! Now make haste down.”
She glanced quickly at the nurse, and the resentful flush once more suffused her cheeks, for those eyes were still watching her, and this time there was a smile upon the slightly parted lips.
The girl’s eyelids dropped a little and she replied with a fixed stare before once more reaching the door and passing out.
“How dare she!” thought Isabel, trembling now with indignation. “She quite triumphs over one. Aunt is right; she is not nice. She seems to contrive to stand between me and papa. It is not prejudice, and I shall be very, very glad when she is gone.” The door had hardly closed upon her, when, in a fretful way, Ralph Elthorne exclaimed:
“Now, go on; go on!”
The nurse began reading directly, an Old World poem of chivalry, honour, and self-denial; and as the soft, rich, deep tones of her voice floated through the room, Ralph Elthorne’s head sank back, his eyes closed, and his breath came slowly and regularly.
But the reader had grown interested in the words she read. The story of the poem seemed to fit with her own life of patient long-suffering and self-denial, and she read on, throwing more and more feeling into the writer’s lines. At last, in the culminating point of the story, her voice began to tremble, her eyes became dim, the book dropped into her lap, and a low faint sob escaped from her lips, as the pent up, long suppressed agony of her heart now broke its bounds, and, as her face went down into her hands, she had to fight hard to keep from bursting into a fit of hysterical weeping.
For, only a short hour before, the deep wound of the past had suddenly been torn open, and memory had come with a rush of incidents to torture her with the recollections of the bygone, of the rude awakening from the golden dream of her girlhood’s first love to the fact that the man who had first made her heart increase its pulsations, the man she had believed in her bright, young imagination to be the soul of chivalrous honour, was a contemptible, low-minded roué. How she had refused to believe it at first, and insisted to herself that all she had heard was base calumny; and she had gone on defending him with indignation till the cruel facts were forced upon her, and in one short minute she had turned from a trustful, passionate, loving girl, to the disillusioned woman, with no hope but to find some occupation which would deaden the misery of her heart.
Since then her life had been one of patient self-denial, at first in toiling among the suffering in the sordid homes of misery in one of the worst parts of London. Here, while tending a woman dying of neglect and injuries inflicted by some inhuman brute, it had struck her that she might enlist the sympathies of the great surgeon whose name had long been familiar, and ask him to come and try to save the woman’s life.
To think with her was to act, and she waited on him humbly and patiently, all the time trembling for the consequence to the injured woman left almost alone. But at last her turn came, and she was ushered into Sir Denton’s presence.
He heard her patiently, and shook his head.
“It is impossible, my dear young lady,” he said sharply. “I can but battle with a few of the atoms of misery in the vast sands of troubled life. From your description of the case, I fear I can do no good, and my time for seeing patients here at home is over, while a score of poor creatures are lying in agony at my hospital waiting their turn.”
She looked at him despairingly, and he spoke more gently.
“I admire and respect the grand self-denial of such ladies as yourself who devote themselves to these tasks, so do not think me unfeeling. It is that I can only attend a certain number of cases every day.”
“But you would go to some wealthy patient,” she cried imploringly, “and I will pay you whatever fee you ask.”
“You wrong me, my dear young lady,” he said gravely. “I would not go to-day to any wealthy or great patient for any sum that could be offered me. I take fees, but I hope my life is not so sordid as that.”
“Forgive me,” she said hastily. “I beg your pardon.”
“Yes,” he said, taking her hand to raise it reverently to his lips, “I forgive you, my child, and I will prove it by seeing the poor woman of whom you speak. Come.”
He led her out to the carriage waiting to take him to the hospital, and a group of the wretched dwellers in the foul street soon after stood watching the great surgeon’s carriage, while he was in the bare upstairs room of the crowded house. He stayed an hour, and came again and again, till the day came when another carriage stopped at that door, and a hushed crowd of neighbours stood around, to see Nurse Elisia’s patient carried out, asleep.
“If I only had come to you sooner!” she said.
“I could have done no more,” replied Sir Denton. “Believe me, it is the simple truth. We can both honestly say that we have done everything that human brain and hands could do.”
They were walking slowly away from the house where the woman had died.
“And now I must speak to you about yourself.”
“About myself?” she said wonderingly.
“Yes; I ask you no questions about your friends, or your reasons for taking up the life to which you have devoted yourself; but I am interested in you and your future. Do you intend to go on attending the sick and suffering?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“Good; but not like this. You are young and beautiful, and at all hours you are going about here alone.”
“I have no fear,” she said, smiling. “The poor people here respect me.”
“Yes; and, to the honour of rough manhood, I believe, my child, that there are hundreds who would raise a hand for your protection; but the time will come when you will meet with insult from some drink-maddened brute. You must give it up. Your presence is so much light in these homes of darkness, but – you have interested me, as I tell you.”
She looked at him searchingly.
He read her thoughts and smiled.
“I am speaking as your grandfather might. Let me advise you, my child. This must not go on.”
“I thank you,” she replied; “but I have devoted myself to this life, and I cannot turn back.”
“I do not ask you to turn back,” he said. “You have devoted yourself to the sick and suffering. The duties can be as well performed where you will be safe, and treated with respect.”
She looked at him doubtingly.
“Let me counsel you,” he said. “Come.”
“Where?” she asked, and he held out his hand. “You can trust me,” he said; and he led her to his carriage, and then through the ward of the hospital where he reigned supreme.
It was a few days after a terrible accident at one of the hives of industry, and among other sufferers, some ten or a dozen poor work-girls lay, burned, maimed, and in agony, longingly gazing at the door to see the face of the grey-haired man on whose words they hung for life and strength.
That day he came accompanied by his pale, sweet-faced young friend, in whose beautiful eyes the tears gathered as she went round with him from bed to bed, appalled by the amount of bodily and mental suffering gathered in that one narrow space.
“Well?” he said, a couple of hours later. “Is it too dreadful, or will you help me here?”
“Can I?” she said simply. “I am so ignorant and young.”
“You possess that,” he said gravely, “which no education can impart. Your presence here will be sunshine through the clouds. I should shrink from asking you to come among these horrors, but you have, for some reasons of your own, taken up this self-denying life, and I tell you that you can do far more good to your suffering fellow-creatures here than by seeking out cases in those vile streets. You will be safe from insult and from imposition. We have no impostors here. What do you say?”
She gave him her hand, and the next day Nurse Elisia came from her home – somewhere west, the other nurses said – and returned at night unquestioned, and after a week or two of jealousy and avoidance, as one different to themselves, the attendants one and all were won to respect and deference by acts, not words.
Chapter Seventeen.
“You Insult Me!”
And now Nurse Elisia sat in Ralph Elthorne’s chamber, her face buried in her hands, the memories of her past life rushing back and a sense of misery and despair increasing, so that she felt that the time had come when she must rise and flee from a place which had suddenly become insupportable to her.
Then a change came over her. There was a feeling of passionate resentment, and a desire to do battle against the one who had wrecked her life.
“Shall I stand by and see another’s life destroyed as mine has been?”
But her own misery and despair drove these thoughts away, and her spirit was sinking lower and lower as the complications of her position seemed to increase.
“I cannot stay here,” she said to herself. “It is impossible. I have no part or parcel with these people. I have done my duty, and I must go.”
Suddenly she started as if she had been stung, for her hand had been taken, and Neil Elthorne was bending over her.
“For Heaven’s sake,” he whispered, “don’t! I cannot bear to see you suffer. Tell me, why are you in such grief?”
“Mr Elthorne!” she cried in a low voice, as she glanced toward where the patient lay asleep.
“Yes; Neil Elthorne,” he said huskily. “I cannot bear to see you in such distress. I have fought with it; I have struggled and suffered for months and months now. I felt that it was a kind of madness and that it was folly and presumption to think as I did of one who seemed never even to give me a thought. I came down here. It was to flee from you, and try to forget you, but fate brought you here, and I have had to go on from day to day fighting this bitter fight.”
“Mr Elthorne – your father – are you mad?”
“Yes,” he said excitedly. “Mad; and you have made me so. I know that I am not worthy of you, but listen; give me some hope. Elisia, have pity on me – I love you.”
“No, no; hush, hush!” she whispered excitedly. “It is impossible; it is not true.”
“It is not impossible, and it is true,” he said. “You must have known this for long enough. You must have seen the cruel struggle I have had. Are you so cold and heartless that you turn from me like this?”
“Mr Elthorne!” she cried indignantly; “you take advantage of my helplessness here. I ought to look for your respect and protection as a gentleman, and you speak to me like this – here, with your poor father in this state.”
“Don’t reproach me,” he pleaded. “Have I ever failed in respect and reverence for you from the day we met till now? – You are silent. You know I have not. You know how my love for you has grown day by day as we have worked together yonder – here. You know how I have fought against it till now, when I see you suffering, and I can bear no more.”
“You insult me!” she said indignantly.
“It is no insult for a man to offer the woman he loves his name, and the devotion of his life,” he said proudly. “Am I such a frivolous boy that you speak to me as you do, treating me as if it were some pitiful declaration from one who has uttered the same words to a dozen women? I am a student; my life has been devoted to my profession, and I swear to you that I never gave more than a passing thought to love until you awoke the passion in my breast – and for what? To tell me, when the truth will out, that I insult you! I – I who would die to save you pain – who would suffer anything for your sake – who would make it the one aim of my life to bring happiness to yours. And you tell me I insult you!”
“Yes; it is an insult to take advantage of my position here, sir, at such a time as this. You forget yourself. I am the hospital nurse attending your father. You are the surgeon whose duty is, not only to your patient, but also to me.”
“It is no insult,” he said warmly. “It is the honest outspoken word of the man who asks you to be his wife.”
“Mr Elthorne,” she said coldly, “it is impossible.”
“Why? Can you not give me some hope? I will wait patiently, as Jacob waited for Rachel.”
“I tell you, sir, it is impossible, and you force me to quit this house at once.”
“No, no; for pity’s sake don’t say that,” he cried, catching her hand, but she drew it away, and stood back with her eyes flashing.
“How dare you!” she cried angrily. “You force me to speak, sir. Once more I tell you it is an infamy – an insult.”
“Infamy! Insult!” he said bitterly.
“Yes. Do you suppose I am ignorant of your position here? You ask me to be your wife when in a few more hours the lady to whom you are betrothed will be staying in the house.”
He drew back, looking ghastly, just as there was a soft tap at the dressing room door, and Maria appeared, looking sharply from one to the other.
“I have brought up master’s lunch,” she said. “Shall I bring it in here?”
“No; I will come and see to it first,” said the nurse quickly; and she went into the little room, while Neil walked across to his father’s couch and stood looking down at the worn, thin face as the old man still slept on.
“An insult!” he thought – “the lady to whom I am betrothed!”
He looked round wildly, and a sense of despair that was almost insupportable attacked him as he fully realised his position and the justice of the words which had stung him to the heart.
“But there is something more,” he said to himself, as, with nerves jarred and his feelings lacerated by disappointment, unworthy thoughts now crept in – “there is something more.” And throwing himself into a chair, he sat gazing down at the carpet, recalling bit by bit every look and word of his brother, beginning with the scene upon the staircase on the night of Elisia’s first arrival.
They were thoughts which grew more and more unworthy – thoughts which began to rankle in and venom his nature, as he formed mental pictures of his brother being received with smiles and kindly words.
“I would rather see her dead,” he muttered fiercely; and at that moment the object of his thoughts entered from the dressing room, bearing the little tray with his father’s lunch.
Their eyes met, and as he gazed in the pure, sweet face, the harsh unworthy thoughts passed away, to give place to a sense of misery, hopelessness, and despondency, which humbled him before her to the dust.
“And I dared to think all that!” he said to himself, as he rose and drew back from the couch to give place for her to approach.
At that moment the passion within him burned as strongly, but it was softened and subdued by the better feelings – the tender love which prevailed.
“Forgive me,” he said deprecatingly. “I was nearly mad.”
She made no reply, but stood by the couch half turned from him, and he could see that her lips were working.
“Can you not hear my words?” he continued humbly. “What more can I say? It was the truth.”
She turned to him proudly.
“Mr Elthorne,” she said, “I ask you, as a gentleman, to end this scene. If you have any respect for my position here, pray go.”
He stood looking at her for a few moments, then turned and left the room without a word, giddy with emotion, crushed by a terrible feeling of despair which drove him to his own room.
Here the bitter thoughts came back.
Alison had been impressed from the first, and he was always seeking for opportunities to speak to her. That, then, was the reason, he told himself. She had twitted him with his engagement, but she would not have cast him off for that; and in this spirit a couple of hours went by, during which he paced the room.
Unable to bear the turmoil in his brain, toward the middle of the afternoon he went down and determined on trying to calm the irritation of his nerves by a long walk.
Crossing the garden, he reached the park, and was hesitating as to the direction he should take. Then, in a motiveless way, he went on to a plantation through which a path led toward a beautiful woodland hollow, which was his father’s pride as being the loveliest bit of the park scenery.
Here, just as he reached the edge of the plantation, he caught sight of a figure walking rather quickly toward the woodland, and in a moment he was all excitement again.
“It was the time,” he said to himself. “I was mad to speak to her at such an inopportune moment. She will listen to me now. For she is all that is gentle and sympathetic at heart.”
His steps grew faster, and he was just about to turn to his right, so as to cut off a good corner, and meet the object of his thoughts about a quarter of a mile beyond where she was walking, when he caught sight of his brother going in the same direction as himself, but from another point, and he stopped short with the old sinking sense of misery coming back, and with it the host of bitter fancies.
For there could be no doubt about it, he thought, and not a single loyal honest idea came to his help. She was going toward the woodland, perhaps by appointment, and if not, Alison had seen her, and was hurrying his steps so as to overtake her as soon as she was out of sight.
A curious kind of mental blindness came over Neil Elthorne, and he stopped short in the shelter of the trees, gazing straight before him, till the figure of his brother disappeared just at the spot which Nurse Elisia had passed a few minutes before.
He might have said to himself that there was nothing unusual in the nurse taking that part of the park for the daily walk upon which he had himself insisted, but upon which he had never intruded. And again it might have been accidental that his brother was going in that direction. But, no; the woman he had idolised so long in silence had rejected him coldly, and twitted him with his position. Alison loved her he was sure, and he had gone to meet her. At that hour he was sure of this being the case, and he stood thinking.
Alison was as much engaged as he. Would she listen to him, and would she pass over it in the younger, more manly looking brother?
Human nature is strangely full of weakness as well as strength; and as these thoughts crowded through Neil Elthorne’s brain, it was of the woman he was thinking, not of Nurse Elisia, toward whom for the past two years he had looked up, almost with veneration as well as love. It was the weak woman, not the self-denying, unwearied, patient being who glided from bedside to bedside, assuaging pain and whispering hope and calming words.
Nurse Elisia with her saint-like face was no longer in his thoughts. They were filled by the beautiful woman who preferred his brother to him, and, with a hoarse cry of rage and despair, he strode away, his hands clenched, his brow rugged, and the veins in his temples swollen and throbbing.
For he was realising for the first time in his life the true meaning of the words “jealous hate”; but through it all there was a glimmering of satisfaction that he was not about to meet his brother on his way, and he shuddered as he thought that sooner or later they must encounter after all.
