“Rather what a compliment you had paid her,” exclaimed Mrs. Vernon, effusively. “What a sweet girl she is! So simple and kindly. You are staying there, are you not?”
“Yes, for the Sunday,” said Jack, with allhis teeth on edge. “I knew Arthur well at Oxford.”
“And did Miss Avesham talk to you about the portrait?” continued Mrs. Vernon. “I am told she is so artistic.”
“Oh, yes, she spoke about it,” said Jack. “Indeed, it was a curious coincidence, for just as I arrived she was out in the garden, and again the puppy was shaking himself, having fallen into the fountain.”
Mrs. Vernon gave a titter of laughter, like a chromatic scale.
“There seems to be a fate in such things,” she exclaimed. “How exciting, and how romantic! Thank you,onemore cup of this delicious tea.”
Before long the others left, and shortly after Canon Collingwood retired to the garden. Jack and his mother spoke of indifferent things till the tea-table was cleared; and after the servant had gone:
“I wanted to talk to you, Jack, before you went. You received my letter?”
“Yes, this morning. I tore it up, as you asked me to, without reading it.”
Mrs. Collingwood was silent a moment.
“Thank you,” she said at length, simply. “My reason was this—I wrote hastily. I could not but think that Miss Avesham would consider your painting of that portrait as a great liberty. It appears she did not, and that you are excellent friends. So I was wrong about her attitude.”
Mrs. Collingwood took a chair closer to Jack.
“Jack, you were right in what you said yesterday,” she went on. “You and I are made very differently. We must accept it. I have been too much given to judging you, to disapproving, and disapproval does no good. But you must not judge me either. You have your own life to live. You can not grasp my point of view, and if I am tempted to disapprove of you, I will be careful in the future not to do that, but to simply say that I do not understand.”
Jack looked up; his mother’s voice was trembling.
“Ah, my dear,” she went on, “in the Father’s house are many mansions, and it is likely there are many mansions of His on earth. And if the windows of some look outon to beautiful things and others on to austere surroundings, suffering perhaps, and sin, those in the different chambers must not judge each other. That is what I wanted to say to you. But I have to go on in my own way. We can only do what we think right. There, that is all. But tell me, what do you intend to do about this baby?”
“I shall have it to live with me, I think,” said Jack; “that is, unless something else turns up. Mother, you don’t know how you have touched me, and how glad you have made me that you have spoken, and how ashamed.”
“No, Jack, not ashamed,” she said. “But I had to talk to you about it. I have thought of nothing else since I saw you yesterday. You go back to-morrow, do you not?”
“Yes.”
“Then say good-bye to your father before you go. I must leave you; I have an evening class. Good-bye, my dear.”
She kissed him with a tenderness that was new to her, and left him.
But it is not in the nature of those who have lived in a groove lightly to get out of it.Habit becomes nature, and to look permanently at one view would, no doubt, if continued for forty years, tend to make the observer believe that the world contained no other.
This was the case with Mrs. Collingwood. Her humanized interview with Jack had jolted her as a stone on the line may jolt a train for a moment without causing it to leave the metals. The direction in which it had been running, its speed, and its weight have all to be overcome, and with her long-continued convictions had given her great momentum, and an address she delivered three days afterward at a Mothers’ Union showed no speck of apostasy.
Jeanniethrew herself into the life of the place with amazing energy, and she had her hands very full. In the first place, the house in Bolton Street had a new inhabitant—none other than the baby of Frank Bennett. It had occurred to Arthur when Jack was telling him about it that here was a possible situation, at any rate for the present, and before a week had elapsed he had written to Jack to say that if he wished they would give the child a home as long as the presentrégimeof Bolton Street continued. Jack had accepted the offer with the most thankful alacrity: to live there was much better for the child; also (this he hardly admitted to himself) he could run down with reasonable frequency to see how it throve.
Jeannie had wanted no persuading, and Miss Fortescue hardly more. She had opposed the scheme at first on the same groundsas she opposed everything, in order to see how the thing looked from the other side. That such a plan was somewhat out of the way, and that it would give Wroxton a good deal to talk about, she did not consider at all a disadvantage to them, and a distinct benefit to Wroxton.
“We shall hear less of the S. P. C. K.,” she remarked.
The baby was to Jeannie of absorbing interest. The same instinct which had led her when a child to make dramatic the lives of her dolls, and to watch over them with an anxious benignity of which saw-dust and wax were really not worthy, had here a sort of fruition. A doll had come to life, the inventions of her childhood were being played over again in the theatre of living, her play was become true. Arthur, who was the youngest of them, was only a year younger than herself; she had thus never known a baby in the house, and she found an ineffable charm in it.
But the baby, in being at least, was only a relaxation to be enjoyed in odds and ends of time, for the solid hours were full. Sheseemed to have taken on her shoulders the responsibility for the whole of Wroxton. She had already written a paper for the Literary Ladies, which had caused a kind of revolution in that gentle society, and Mrs. Collingwood had left the room in a marked manner in the middle. It is true that she came back again, and spoke venomously about it, but that was an after-thought, for by going away she expressed her silent disapproval, which she repeated not at all silently in the discussion that followed. Indeed, she might well be horror-struck, for Jeannie, taking as her text that notorious and scandalous novel, The Sheltered Life, had made remarks about “realism” and artistic treatment which made Mrs. Collingwood not exactly blush, but bristle. In the first place, the hero of the work was a professed unbeliever, and though, if we are to believe the author, he sought for light, and lived a sober and innocent life, there was no doubt about his religious opinions. It is unnecessary to go into details of the rest of the story; that one fact was enough for Mrs. Collingwood. But Jeannie seemed hardly to have noticed it. Instead, she spoke of theadmirable development of his characters, of the sobriety and reticence of the narrative; of the skilled surgical dissection of the man’s actions, and the exhibition of the real forces that swayed them, partly the result of heredity, partly of early training and circumstance, and the one thing that, according to Mrs. Collingwood, condemned the book, even had it been written by Shakespeare and corrected by Milton, she passed over with the remark that the description of the struggle of the reason against a faith his reason could not accept was wonderfully rendered.
Dead silence followed her reading; and the Literary Ladies, who for the most part had followed her with great interest, saw Mrs. Collingwood enter again (she came in so punctually as Jeannie sat down that it seemed almost as if she had been listening at the door) and cowered. Most of them looked guilty, but it was noticed that Miss Clara, in her place as president, sat bolt upright, and looked as brave as a lion. Indeed, several times during the lecture she had applauded with her silver pencil-case on the table. Miss Fortescue, who sat next Jeannie, also appeared unterrified, but, as her niece sat down, she said in a whisper to her:
“You’ve done it now, dear. There’s war in that woman’s eye. But I’ll see you through.”
Miss Fortescue was right. There was war in Mrs. Collingwood’s eye; there was crusade in her eye, and she marched out to attack the hosts of the infidel like Cœur de Lion. She made no parleying with the enemy, and though she alluded to Jeannie’s speech as “most suggestive and clever,” it was only to point out to her hearers how dangerous cleverness was. She hurled texts at their heads: the house built on sand, the kings who did evil, the captivity, the fall of Babylon, the mark of the beast, the seven foolish virgins, the man who put his hand to the plough and looked back, the seed on the dry ground, the pitcher broken at the well, the woman of Samaria—all these, if rightly understood, proclaimed how abhorrent was The Sheltered Life! Jeannie as she listened was first angry, and ended by being amused. There had been a seven days’ storm; Mrs. Collingwood had sent in her resignation, andJeannie, hearing of it, sent in hers, provided that Mrs. Collingwood would remain. It ended in Jeannie’s calling on Mrs. Collingwood, in answer to the almost tearful request of Miss Clifford, and talking it out with her. She explained that she had not been criticising the data of the book, but the treatment of certain data, and made her points with such sweetness of temper and apparent inability to take offence that Mrs. Collingwood was charmed in spite of herself.
“But these things are the most serious in the world, Miss Avesham,” she had said at parting. “You do not, I now believe, take them lightly, but that was the impression your very clever speech made on me. I was wrong, I am willing to confess that.”
Then Jeannie started a musical society, at the meetings of which the Miss Cliffords quavered an uncertain alto, and Colonel Raymond thundered an approximate bass. They met originally once a week at Bolton Street, to sing glees for an hour, under the severe guidance of Miss Fortescue, who taught them by degrees not so much what good part singing was, as what it was not. Then they wontheir way to the passable. Her teaching seemed almost hair-splitting at first, especially when she insisted on the middle of a note being sung, and allowed nothing which to the ordinary mind was allowable enough, and insisted on the existence of notes intermediate between semitones.
“Because a piano has black notes and white notes,” she observed once, “you think that there is no interval between. If you think you are lower than A flat, and higher than G sharp, you must be singing A. The chances are strongly against it. The basses again, please.”
But in spite of, or perhaps because of, this severity the club prospered. The instinct for perfection is commoner than one thinks, even among those who never attain more than mediocrity, and those new facts about intervals were as fascinating as X-rays. Mrs. Collingwood even joined, for she valued music among the higher relaxations. The apostles of this art she held were Mendelssohn and Handel—these were the moons. And the greater stars were Barnby, Stainer, and the Rev. P. Henley, whose chant in E flat sheranked among the noblest productions of the world of art. A memorable evening indeed came, when Mrs. Collingwood sang also in a drinking-song, without turning a hair. She professed her willingness in a spuriously fugal passage “to drink a bowl wi’ thee” fortissimo, though there was no foot-note stating specifically that the bowl contained a non-alcoholic beverage. A charity performance was to be given at Christmas, in which the drinking-song would be performed, and Mrs. Collingwood knew it. But she made no protest, and practised “drinking her bowl” every Tuesday evening with gusto.
And Jeannie had classes of all sorts. She interested herself in the girls of the soap manufactory at Wroxton, and taught them that there were more things in the world than factory and followers. Some showed botanical tendencies, and she would bury herself in Sowerby’s Plants in order to be able to take them further in their hobby. Two others had violins, and Jeannie made night hideous by bringing them to Bolton Street two evenings in the week and accompanying their vagrant strains. There was another who sang, and afifth who had a mania for wood-carving. Jeannie weaned her from the reproduction of imagining ferns tied together by amorphous ribbons, and persuaded her to copy the lines of real leaves and flowers. All these various elements were amalgamated on Sunday afternoon, when a large room over the stables, which she had appropriated for her purposes, was thronged with the wood-carvers, the musicians, and the botanists. On these occasions she read to them and gave them tea. The readings were not strictly Sabbatical, and Arthur, spying out the land one Sunday after they had gone, found a large number of perfectly secular books with markers in them. Jeannie, when confronted with them, only laughed.
“The point is to interest them in something,” she said. “Look what lives they live. But the dreadful difficulty is that two of Mrs. Collingwood’s Sunday afternoon class seceded to me. I didn’t know what to do.”
Arthur laughed.
“You should have tried to interest them in Mrs. Collingwood,” he said.
Jeannie frowned.
“I know. But it is so difficult,” she said. “I read them a story out of Plain Tales from the Hills instead.”
The girls’ class led on to a boys’ class, and Wroxton was again convulsed. For it was known that Jeannie allowed her boys, if they were allowed to smoke at home, to smoke when they came to her class, and her rule that not more than four might smoke simultaneously, for the sake of the atmosphere, was clearly not directed against smoking in general. This class was held on Saturday evening, in order to keep them out of the public-houses, for “the boys” were for the most part grown men, and several fathers of families had tried to steal surreptitiously into it. This Jeannie had stopped with good-humoured firmness.
“Go and sit with your wives,” she said, “and help to amuse the children.”
But the smoking was the root of offence, and Mrs. Collingwood stumbled heavily over it. She and her husband were dining at the Aveshams one Saturday evening, and Jeannie, who had dressed before the class in order not to break it up sooner than usual, came in,and, Mrs. Collingwood said, “reeking of the pot-house.” But even Mrs. Collingwood, who had been accustomed all her life to express things strongly, felt that her expression fully met the enormities of the case.
The ramifications of the boys’ class and the girls’ class were innumerable. There was the case of the girl who played the violin, and the boy who professed to do the same. It was natural that they should be taken together. But when it appeared that the boy in question was a follower of the girl in question, Jeannie’s indignation knew no bounds. “I would not play gooseberry to the Czar of Russia,” she exclaimed.
Then it happened that between the Literary Ladies and the glee club, the boys’ class and the girls’ class, the violins, botany, and singing lessons, Jeannie had not any hour of her own. There were also, as Miss Fortescue said, several hours a week to be devoted to the suppression of scandal. An instance of this occurred when Mrs. Vernon overheard an animated conversation between Jeannie and a draper’s assistant in the High Street.Jeannie’s voice carried, and the tones were audible to passers-by.
“Do come round this evening about nine,” she said, “because the others are dining out, and I shall be alone. Mind you come.”
He came.
One evening, about the end of October, Jeannie had had an unexpected respite. The policeman who was learning botany had to go on unexpected duty, owing to the illness of one of the staff, and she had an evening free. It would be false to say that she was relieved, for the patient was another of her boys, and she was anxious about him; but she certainly ran up the stairs, two at a time, to the nursery, where the evening toilet of the baby was going on. The baby was in his bath, worshipping his toes. He crowed with delight when he saw Jeannie, and when the bath was over the warm, wet body was blanketed and hoisted into her lap. Jeannie was long ago initiated into the mysteries of the evening meal, and the nurse, having mixed the patent food, went by Jeannie’s request to her own supper, without any sense of shifting responsibility on to untrustworthy shoulders.
It was a brisk, frosty evening, and the fire prospered in the grate. Jeannie drew the nurse’s rocking-chair close to the fender and adjusted the bottle. The baby was warm and hungry, and her thoughts turned inward, soothed and driven there by the dear, helpless presence, and she meditated nonsensically, so she told herself, as if she had been talking alone to the baby.
“What do you know,” she thought, “of to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow? Boys’ class to-morrow, and girls’ class the day after. Somebody will play the violin a little less villainously, and some one will perhaps not cut his finger at all. Oh, baby, it is a world where things go slow. First the seed, and then the stalk, and who knows about the corn? Supposing a storm comes in June? Ah, when will June come? How I long for June!
“Poor little fatherless mite, are we so much better off than you? Oh, baby, Heaven prevent us from getting morbid! Yes, those toes are quite beautiful, and all your own.Nobody has any more toes than you, and what a consolation that ought to be. But nobody has any less. There is always that. We are all very average, and we have no right to expect extraordinary happiness. Yet I do, and so do you; you think that you will always have some one to hold you like this, and have a fire to look at. But what if the fire goes out, and somebody drops you?”
Jeannie’s face had got quite grave over these unconsidered possibilities. But her brow unclouded quickly.
“You tell me that there is the other side of the question,” she went on, “and that somebody else whom you like better may come and sit here, ready to take you when the first person is tired. So they may, so they may. And if ever you prefer anybody else to me I will bite you.”
She closed her lips gently on a little pink shell ear that peeped out from the blanket.
“I will bite you,” she went on, “and I will not hurt you. How should I hurt you? You would have your avengers if I did. Many of them, many of them, and myself among the first. Others also, one other particularly. Oh, baby, I assure you that you are not in bad hands. That is a very good man who comes to see you sometimes, that man whom I think you recognise. He is clever, too, and once he painted a picture of a girl and a puppy dog, which was quite extraordinarily like.”
Jeannie paused a moment, and adjusted the bottle again.
“What an impertinence, was it not? And I was very angry. You should have seen us meet! He walked into the garden one day not long after, and I told him what I thought. I said he was a cad; I troubled him not to do that sort of thing again. I said it stamped a man, and he would have done better to take example by his blessed mother, and write tracts for the G. F. S., instead of spoiling good canvas and wasting his time in trying to paint. He had no idea of line, I told him, and less of colour. Did I really say all these things? I can not be quite sure: it is so long ago.”
There was a step on the stairs, and the moment after the door opened gently.
“May I come in?” said a voice.
Jeannie turned round quickly.
“Yes, come in, Mr. Collingwood,” she said. “I didn’t expect you till the later train. Baby and I are having a talk, and I can’t get in a word edgeways.”
“I caught the earlier train,” he said. “But I, too, didn’t expect to find you here. Isn’t it the policeman’s night?”
Jeannie laughed.
“What an awful memory you have!” she said. “Isn’t it a great responsibility? How did you think, to begin with, that it was the policeman’s night?”
“I came a fortnight ago, you remember,” he said, “and you were late for dinner because of the policeman.”
“Yes, that is quite true,” said Jeannie; “but poor Williams has a bad headache and a touch of fever, and so Rankin is on duty.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jack. “But baby and I are the gainers.”
Jeannie pointed to the little pink face.
“Fast asleep, do you see,” she said, “two minutes after a heavy meal. He always does that. Fancy falling fast asleep over dessert,and sleeping on till eight next morning over the dinner-table. I must put him to bed.”
Jack stood by the fire watching Jeannie tuck the baby into its cot with deft fingers. All her movements were sharp and decided; her fingers seemed to have an intelligence of their own.
“I must sit here till nurse comes up from her supper,” she said. “Look at that seraph!”
“I think he has his share of luck, after all,” said Jack.
Jeannie sat down again in the rocking-chair.
“Oh, but the responsibility!” she sighed. “We all share it. I believe so much of the happiness of one’s life depends on the happiness of one’s babyhood. The first glimpses of consciousness are what make the temperament.”
“He has a good chance, then.”
“It is a crying shame if he doesn’t,” said Jeannie. “It is the easiest thing in the world to make that child crow with delight. If you laugh, he laughs. Oh, we mustn’t talk so loud. We’ve awoke him.”
Jeannie slipped softly to the side of the cot and began crooning a little baby-song:
“Black grow the blackberries,Cherries are red,But golden are the curlsThat grow on baby’s head.“All the ladies in the landCome to see the show,But baby went on sleepingAnd baby did not know.”
“Black grow the blackberries,Cherries are red,But golden are the curlsThat grow on baby’s head.“All the ladies in the landCome to see the show,But baby went on sleepingAnd baby did not know.”
“Black grow the blackberries,Cherries are red,But golden are the curlsThat grow on baby’s head.
“All the ladies in the landCome to see the show,But baby went on sleepingAnd baby did not know.”
Jack watched her intently, and a sudden thrill of passion throbbed in him. There was something in the sight of the girl bending over the baby and crooning in that low voice that stirred all his nature. Her exquisite fitness there, her absorbing joy in the young thing was a flash of revelation to him. Her dormant potential motherhood suddenly became divine and real to him. Every vein in his body seemed to have sent all the blood it contained in one great bound to his heart, and it stood still on the top of its beat. A long-drawn breath hung suspended in his lungs, and it was as if every particle of the warm, brisk air of the nursery was bubblingintoxicating fire. The next moment all that was within him bowed and fell and worshipped.
That moment of incorporeal existence must have been short, for Jeannie had not got to the end of the second silly little verse when he was aware of himself again, like a man who has come round after an anæsthetic, feeling as if he had travelled swiftly from very far away. But he did not come back to his normal consciousness; the world he awoke to was different, and Jeannie filled it.
Almost simultaneously the nurse came softly in, and Jeannie got up quietly.
“He is sleeping again now,” she said; “step gently, Mr. Collingwood.”
It was long past dressing time, and they went straight to their rooms. During dinner Miss Fortescue was unusually vitriolic, and afterward they played a game called Adverbs. Jack had only a confused recollection of going out of the room, and being totally unable to guess what was required of him on his return. Soon after this Jeannie and her aunt went upstairs. Jack must have been really idiotic about the game, for Miss Fortescue looked at him anxiously as she shook hands.
“I think you must have overworked yourself,” she said. “Be careful.”
She took several turns up and down her bed-room before ringing for her maid. As she pulled the bell:
“Head over ears,” she remarked.
Long-continueddrought had marked this summer-time, and when in September no rain fell the papers had been full of acrimonious comments on the ways of water-companies. The water-company at fault was really no earthly controller, and the most intelligent body of men can not milk the clouds. But the British public is not happy without its grievance, and just now it was certainly enjoying itself immensely.
Wroxton had hitherto suffered less than other towns, but by the beginning of October the supply began to cause uneasiness. But the water-company had another spring up its sleeve, and, to quiet complaints, about the second week in the month it was drawn upon, and the intelligent public was deprived of its right to grumble.
The weather was hot and unseasonable, with the heat not of an invigorating sun, butof the closed and vitiated atmosphere of a packed room. Day after day a blanket of gray cloud covered the earth as with a lid, yet the rain came not. A windless, suffocating calm environed the earth; it was rank weather for man and beast. The perennial green of the great downs faded to an unwholesome yellow, like a carpet that is losing its colour from the sun, and the nights were dewless. The heavenly forces that temper the frosts of winter with a benigant sun and the heats of summer with the cool dews of night seemed to have been struck dead. Clouds overset the earth, but neither dispersed nor discharged. It was as if the vitality of the seasons had failed, as if the earth was abandoned to decay.
Jeannie was immune from the assaults of climate, and Miss Fortescue went out so seldom that she found no great disagreeableness in the stagnation of the air. But Colonel Raymond felt it acutely, and said it was like waiting for the rains in India. Miss Clara Clifford could no more write poetry than she could play the mandolin, and Miss Phœbe would have as soon thought of playing themandolin as of embarking on an epic. But the Colonel gave up the brisk walks while such dispiriting weather lasted, and though Mrs. Raymond dwindled and paled, she found her consolation in seeing the children play hide-and-seek among the gooseberry bushes.
Ten days after the new spring had been drawn upon certain ill-defined cases of illness began to appear in the town. For the most part they were among children, and the doctors for a day or two considered them as only a natural outcome of this long-continued sultriness and inclement air. But they were not wholly at their ease about it, and as the cases increased day by day it was no longer possible to exclude the idea that this was an epidemic. By this time some of the first cases, which were now five or six days old, began to look grave, and before the week was out it was generally known that typhoid had appeared in many houses.
Several of Jeannie’s various classes were ill with the hitherto unspecified fever, and she had been visiting them daily at their homes. She was up in the nursery makingherself agreeable to the baby one morning when Miss Fortescue came in, looking grave.
“Jeannie, some of your girls have been ill, have they not?” she asked.
“Yes, four or five of them and several of the boys. I am just going out to see them.”
“Leave the child,” said Miss Fortescue, “and come.”
Jeannie followed her, and a howl followed Jeannie.
“What is it, Aunt Em?” she asked, when they were outside.
“It is typhoid,” said Miss Fortescue.
Jeannie dropped her eyes for a moment, and then looked up.
“Is it infectious?” she asked; “I mean, can I carry it?”
“I don’t know,” said Miss Fortescue. “Jeannie, what is the matter with you?”
Jeannie had sat down on a chair in the landing, and was looking in front of her with wide, unseeing eyes.
“I may have given it to the baby,” she said.
“Jeannie, don’t be foolish,” said Miss Fortescue. “Oh, my dear, be sensible. Ihave already written to Dr. Maitland saying that you had been with probable typhoid cases, and asking what precautions one ought to take. I thought it probable that you would be uneasy about the baby, so I also asked whether it was possible that you had carried infection. That was about half an hour ago; I expect the answer every moment.”
“Oh, Aunt Em,” said Jeannie, coming close to her, “you think it is all right, don’t you? You don’t think I have been stupid or incautious?”
“I think you are being very stupid now,” said Aunt Em. “Ah, here is Pool.”
The butler came upstairs and handed Miss Fortescue a note; she glanced at it quickly.
“Such a risk of carrying typhoid as the one you mention is inconceivable,” she read, “and a baby of a few months old having it at all is unknown to the medical profession.”
She passed the note to Jeannie, who glanced at it.
“Oh, thank God, thank God!” she cried. “Aunt Em, I am going to see Dr. Maitland at once.”
“The Avesham nerves,” sighed Miss Fortescue. “Surely the note is clear enough.”
“Yes, it is not that,” said Jeannie; “but if this increases they will be short of hands. I heard that all the nurses in the hospital were working double time. I am going to say that I wish to help in any way that he will allow me.”
Miss Fortescue looked at her a moment, and neither surprise nor criticism was in her eye.
“We will go together,” she said; “let us go at once.”
“Why should you come?” asked Jeannie.
“Because I wish to. I know something about nursing, though I have never nursed typhoid, which is more than you do, Jeannie.”
Jeannie looked surprised.
“I didn’t know—” she began.
“You know very little about me, dear,” said Miss Fortescue, “and that’s a fact. Go and get on your hat. I suppose I ought to forbid you to visit or help in any way, even forbid you suggesting it. But there are certain risks on certain occasions which every one is bound to run. Whether the risk inyour case is too great to be allowed I do not know. That is what we are going to Dr. Maitland to find out. I remember only that people who are fortunate enough to be as old as I are practically immune. I hear there are fifty fresh cases this morning.”
They found that Dr. Maitland was out and up at the hospital, where they followed him. After they had waited for a few minutes in a bare, dismal room, of which the principal furniture was a weighing-machine, a stethoscope, and a bottle labelled “poison,” he came in, looking grave, florid, and anxious.
“Yes, it is typhoid beyond a doubt,” he said, “and epidemic. Please sit down. Personally I am disposed to think it may be traced to the water-supply of the town, which has come since the drought was so bad from an open spring in the Gresham fields. I am making a bacteriological examination of it. Till that is settled I should advise you not to drink it, or even use it for washing, except after boiling.”
“Are you very short of nurses?” asked Miss Fortescue.
“Yes, I am at my wit’s end to know whatto do. My wife has volunteered to help, and, I hear, two other ladies. There are some coming from London and Shrewsbury to-day, but we have fifty fresh cases reported this morning, and there will be certainly more I have not yet heard of.”
“Miss Avesham and I have come to offer our help,” said Miss Fortescue. “I have been six months in a London hospital, and know something about it, though I have never nursed typhoid.”
“That is very kind of you,” said Dr. Maitland, “and I accept your offer most gladly. But it is right to tell you that you run some risk. As far as we can see, the disease is of the most malignant type. Several have died already, which is rare in the first week. In your case, Miss Fortescue, the risk is light, but for younger people it must not be disregarded. There is a risk.”
Miss Fortescue looked at Jeannie.
“I suppose many of the nurses are quite young,” said Jeannie.
“No doubt; but it is their profession.”
“Aunt Em, there is really no choice,” said Jeannie. “I am afraid I may not be ofmuch use, Dr. Maitland, but please let me do what I can.”
Dr. Maitland was not given to gushing any more than Miss Fortescue.
“I will certainly do so,” he said. “But you must remember that the work is tiring and demands incessant watchfulness and patience, for typhoid, above all other diseases depends on nursing. Please remember what I told you about boiling and filtering water. If you cannot trust your servants, see it done yourselves. There is no precaution half so necessary.”
“And the baby?” asked Jeannie. “Is it quite safe that it should remain here?”
Dr. Maitland had a merry eye.
“Perfectly,” he said. “But you will probably not think so. If you are in any way likely to worry about it, send it away at once. I can not have my nurses thinking about any thing but their patients. That is all, I think. If you will be here again by half past two I will have arranged about your duties.”
He shook hands with them, and went hurriedly back to his work. Miss Fortescue and Jeannie came out again into the hot, drowsyatmosphere, and walked a little way in silence.
“Think it over, Jeannie,” said the other at length. “I quite understand that you are not frightened for yourself, and I never expected you would be. But you have to consider your duty toward your brother and other people who are fond of you. Me, for instance,” she added, with an unusual burst of emotion.
“There is no choice,” said Jeannie. “I must help if I can, and I am sure you see that. But what about the baby? Shall we send it away? No doubt it is stupid of me, but I think I should be happier if it was not here.”
“It shall go this afternoon,” said Miss Fortescue. “We will telegraph to Jack Collingwood.”
“Don’t alarm him,” said Jeannie, and stopped abruptly.
Miss Fortescue devoted several seconds to the consideration of this remark, and then smiled on the side of her mouth away from Jeannie.
“How could he be alarmed?” she asked.“I shall say, of course, what Dr. Maitland said, that typhoid is unknown in babies.”
“Yes, that will be all right,” said Jeannie, rather absently. “But don’t make the outbreak too serious.”
And her enigmatic aunt smiled again.
Arthur had got in to lunch when they got back. He, too, had heard the news about the typhoid.
“They told me you had both gone to the hospital,” he said. “What do they say there? Is it very serious?”
“Yes,” said Miss Fortescue. “The baby goes to Jack Collingwood this afternoon. Not that there is the least risk, but Jeannie is foolish. She and I are going to help in nursing.”
He had not expected anything else, for he knew Jeannie. Aveshams were not demonstrative, and he only looked at her quietly a moment.
“I supposed you would,” he said. “I suppose it is right. Is there much risk?”
“Ordinary risk,” said Jeannie. “Dr. Maitland allowed it.”
“Yes, one wants to be of some use in suchcases,” said Arthur. “I hear the state of things in the lower part of the town is awful. The brewery stops working to-day; there are over twenty men down with it. I wonder if I could help?”
“No, Arthur, you mustn’t,” said Jeannie, quickly. “I wish you would go away. Go up to Mr. Collingwood’s with the baby for a week or two. Dr. Maitland said that for younger people the risk was greater.”
“Then we will ask him whether a man of twenty-three is much more liable to infection than a girl of twenty-four,” he said. “It sounds highly probable. Let’s come in to lunch. I am famished.”
Miss Fortescue went upstairs to tell nurse to pack and be ready to start in the afternoon, and write a telegram to Jack Collingwood; and having written it she paused for a moment, looking out of her window.
“It is a fine breed,” she said, “and it is not in my heart to stop either of them. They will walk into the wards and feverful houses as if they were going out to tea.”
Directly after lunch the two women turned out their wardrobes to find some thinwashing stuff suitable for their dresses. Jeannie could only lay her hands on a pale-blue cotton, and though she was still in deep mourning she put it on without question. As Miss Fortescue had said, neither she nor Arthur regarded any possible risk for themselves any more than they would have reckoned on the danger of a ceiling falling on them as they sat at dinner. Personal fear was unknown to them, though they both heartily wished the other would stop securely at home or go with the baby. The three went up together to the hospital. Dr. Maitland was there, and came to them at once, looking a little less florid, and a little graver.
“Twenty more cases,” he said, “and two have died in hospital in the last three hours, Miss Fortescue. Ah, how do you do, Mr. Avesham? What can I do for you? I hope you haven’t come to get your temperature taken?”
Arthur laughed.
“No, not yet,” he said; “I only came with my aunt and sister to see if you could find anything for me to do.”
“Certainly I can, and any one else alsowho comes. Start with Cowley Street this afternoon—all that district is the worst—and see that all the drinking-water in the houses is boiled. It is no use giving them advice. See the pot on the fire. Don’t frighten them; encourage them, and tell them they are perfectly safe if they will do what you tell them. Go first to the dispensary here, and say I sent you, and tell the man to give you plenty of bicarbonate of mercury, and instruct you how it is to be used. Distribute it at the houses you visit, and show them how to use it. Be sure they don’t put it into their drinking-water. By the way, have you a room to spare?”
“Yes; at your disposal.”
“You see, I take you at your word when you offer to help,” said Dr. Maitland. “Two friends of mine are coming from Guy’s to assist me, but I can’t put them both up. May I send one on to you?”
“By all means,” said Arthur.
“Thank you very much,” said he. “There is no time nor need, I think, to tell you how grateful I feel for your kindness. By the way, Mr. Avesham, can you use a clinicalthermometer? No? That’s bad. When you go to the dispensary tell them to give you one, and take your own temperature and the dispensary man’s temperature several times, under the tongue. Get a thirty-second thermometer, and your temperature is 97·6°. Take it until it is right. Then you know how to use one. In the houses you visit, if you see a man, woman, or child ill, insist on taking their temperature. If the thermometer registers as much as half a degree over 99 take their names and addresses and tell me when you come back. Also, after taking each temperature, if there is any fever, dip the thermometer into a solution of the mercury and wipe it carefully. Good-bye, and many thanks. The dispensary is the second door on the right.”
As soon as he was gone Dr. Maitland turned to the others.
“A fine absence of nervousness,” he said; “he looked as if he was going to pay a call. And I don’t see any nervousness here, either. Miss Fortescue, I think you said you knew something about nursing, so I have put you with Nurse James in charge of the first ward.In a day or two she will have put you in the way of your work, and then probably I shall ask you to look after certain houses, or take charge of patients by yourself. Miss Avesham also is under her in the same ward. You have about forty cases, some very serious. Please put yourselves entirely in her hands: she is admirable. There is no need to tell you that on your care and watchfulness many lives depend. You will both have day nursing only. This way, please.”
Theweeks that followed were the most terrible and most wearing that Jeannie had ever known. During the first day or two she showed a real aptitude for her work; she was gentle, firm, and untiring, and as the epidemic increased Miss Fortescue was soon moved to help in a larger ward, and a dozen cases in a smaller ward, off the one under Nurse James, were put under Jeannie. The head nurse was thus always at hand in case she wanted her, but otherwise Jeannie had to manage her patients alone. It was a constant matter of anxiety to Jeannie as to whether she ought or ought not to summon the other. At first the slightest rise in a patient’s temperature seemed to her enough grounds on which to ask the inspection of the elder woman, for she had been told she could not be too careful. Nurse James herself was worked almost to death; and on Jeannie’s calling her one dayto look at a patient she had exclaimed, snappishly:
“It would be less trouble to look after them myself.”
Jeannie flushed slightly, but said nothing, and went back to her work. Nurse James hurried out of the room, but returned a moment later.
“You must forgive me, Miss Avesham,” she said, “but I am worried to death. What we should do without you and Miss Fortescue I don’t know. But the temperature always goes up a little in the afternoon; it is only the very sudden rise or sudden falls, particularly the latter, which need alarm you.”
Jeannie smiled.
“I see; I will try to remember,” she said. “You are very patient with me.”
The work was terribly severe to any one unaccustomed to it. In her ward were women and girls only, who were easier to manage than the men, but who were more hopeless and apathetic, and Jeannie often thought that she would sooner have them fretful and irritable if they only would be less despondent. One woman, who was having the attack very slightly, and getting through with it very well, would spend half the day in sulky tears, pitying herself, and moaning over the cruelty of Jeannie, who, in obedience to her orders, did not, of course, let her have a crumb of any solid food. Sometimes when she was giving her a wash in the morning she would be called away by another trying to raise herself in bed or wanting to be attended to in some way, and when she came back there would be nothing but querulous complaints of the time she had been left; she felt sure she would catch a cold; Jeannie had not dried her properly before she went. At another time she would beg for food with tears, saying how she had read a story in which was described an epidemic of typhoid, where a charitable lady in the village had sat by her patients and fed them with cooling fruits. Jeannie had laughed at this, out of the superiority of her ten days’ knowledge.
“My good woman,” she said, “if I wanted to kill you I should give you a cooling fruit.”
“You are killing me with starvation,” cried the woman. “Look how thin I have grown with a fortnight of this. Oh, for God’s sake, Miss, give me just a crust of bread!”
Jeannie had finished washing her, and covered her up gently.
“Now I am leaving you, and I shall come again to you in two hours with your milk,” she said. “Look, you have two hours before you. Just say your prayers, and thank God for getting over this. And ask Him to make you more sensible and more patient. You are more trouble than all the rest of the ward put together.”
Jeannie took down the woman’s temperature-chart, which hung over her bed, and put down the ten o’clock register.
“You are doing very well,” she said. “Just think over what I have said.”
The next case was as bad as a case can be. It was a girl not more than sixteen years old, and even now, when the second week of the fever was only just beginning, her strength was terribly exhausted by the continued high fever. The afternoon before Jeannie had spent two hours sponging herwith iced water, and had only succeeded in bringing it down to 102°. She came on duty herself at eight in the morning, and as she put the thermometer into the child’s mouth she looked at the temperature-chart. It had been 102° again at six in the morning, when it should have been lowest, and she looked anxiously at the face. It was very wan and thin, and the skin looked hard and tight as if it had been stretched. Below the eyes were deep hollows, and though they were wide open it was clear that the girl was scarcely conscious. She waited a full half minute, and then drew the thermometer gently out of her mouth and looked at it. It registered only 98°. She frowned and put it into her mouth again, hoping there might have been some mistake. Then when she saw it a second time she hurried into the next ward.
“That girl, Number 8,” she said to Nurse James, “had a six-o’clock temperature of 102°. It has sunk to 98°.”
Nurse James hardly looked up; she was watching a man who lay quite still, but tried every other moment to get up in bed.
“Dr. Maitland is in the next ward,” shesaid; “go and tell him at once. It may be perforation. Then, when you have finished your round, if all the rest are doing well, I wish you would come here while I finish. I can’t leave this man alone. You can hear any sound in your ward from his bed.”
Jeannie hurried on and told Dr. Maitland. He came at once, looked at the girl, and shook his head.
“You did quite right to send for me, Miss Avesham,” he said. “Yes, she is as bad as she can be. I can do nothing.”
At moments like these Jeannie felt sick and utterly helpless, and almost inclined to say that she could bear it no longer. But she said nothing, and went on to the next bed.
The next patient was a robust woman of about thirty with a baritone voice. She proclaimed loudly that she was perfectly well, and was being starved. Her gray Irish eyes used to plead with Jeannie for something to eat, and she badly resented being washed. But this morning she took it in silence, and thanked Jeannie.
“She’s bad?” she asked, looking hard to the next bed.
“Yes, very bad,” said Jeannie, hardly able to speak. She took the woman’s chart down from the wall and indicated the ten-o’clock temperature on it.
“You’re nearly through, I hope,” she said. “Yes, quite normal this morning. Now all you have to do is to lie very quiet, and you will get stronger every day. The doctor said you might have beef-tea this morning instead of milk.”
She smiled at her rather sadly, and was passing on, but the woman seized her hand.
“It’s cruel hard on ye,” said she; “but don’t mind so, don’t mind so. An’ me worrying you and all. I’ll bite out me tongue before I say another hasty word to ye.”
Then came two or three very bad cases. One was a frail, tired-looking woman, who glanced at Jeannie wistfully as she examined the thermometer.
“I’m no better?” she asked.
Jeannie smiled, but with a heavy heart. The woman, she felt sure, could not last through very many days of this.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“Weak and tired—oh, so tired! And I have a pain in my back.”
“Do you cough at all?” asked Jeannie.
“I couldn’t sleep for it last night,” said the woman, “and that makes a body weary.”
“Keep yourself warm, then,” she said, “and lie still.”
“But I’m no better?” she asked again.
“That was one of the questions which we settled not to ask,” said Jeannie. “When you are quite well you will get up. Till then, nothing, nothing.”
Half an hour more sufficed to finish the round, and she went into the next ward to watch the man who was so restless. For nearly an hour she had to sit close by his bedside, with her hands continually pressing on his shoulders to prevent his getting up. He was more than half unconscious and wandering in his talk, saying things now and then which ten days ago would have made Jeannie turn from him in horror and disgust. But now she had nothing of that left, only pure pity and the one great end in view to let none of these poor people die.
Then when Nurse James had finished herround she came back to her, and by then it was time to get the patients’ food. Some of the more advanced and progressing cases were already allowed Mellin’s Food, but for the most it was still only milk and beef-tea.
At mid-day she had a couple of hours’ interval, usually returned home to lunch, and went afterward for a walk. But to-day she felt too fagged and too sick at heart to do more than sit in the garden and beneath the pitiless leaden cowl of the sky. The effort of appearing cheerful and remaining cheering was too great, and when alone she abandoned herself to a sort of resigned hopelessness. Just before leaving the ward she had seen the terrible screen put up round the bed of the girl who was dying. That was all the privacy that could be given her. She almost hoped that when she got back the end would have come; only two days before she had sat in the still and awe-struck ward while a woman passed through her last hours. She had heard the wandering, inarticulate cries; she had counted her breaths through the long, pitiless silences; she had shut her teeth hard to bear, without screaming audibly, that onelast exclamation in which the spirit clutches with unavailing hands not to be torn away from the inert body, the one last convulsive breath in which the body tries to retain it, and she thought she could hardly bear it again. Then she cudgelled and contemned herself for her paltry, selfish cowardice. Was there ever, she thought, a girl so puny-spirited?
During these ten days in which she had been nursing the epidemic had showed no signs of abatement. Sometimes for a couple of days the return of the fresh cases was suddenly diminished, and once when Jeannie went to the hospital at eight in the morning to take up her duties they told her that there had been no fresh cases reported since the night before. But on all these occasions the lull was only temporary, and in the next twelve hours there would perhaps be seventy more reported. She pictured the disease to herself like some hideous monster which would lie down to sleep for a few hours after one of its gigantic meals, and then, when the victims were digested, would rise up again and clutch at them with his hot hands.Once as she was leaving the hospital Dr. Maitland had called her into his consulting-room to ask her a question about one of her patients, and as she rose to go he had said:
“Would you like to see what is the matter with all these people?”
He pointed to a microscope which stood on the table, and Jeannie looked through it at the drop of water which was beneath the lenses.
“There are a quantity of typhoid bacilli in that,” he said; “they are long and black, with one pointed end, rather like pencils.”
He adjusted the light for her, and among the infinitesimal denizens of the water she saw five or six little dark lines seemingly as lifeless as the rest. She drew back with a shudder.
“I thought of it as some terrible beast with claws and teeth,” she said; “but this is the more terrible.”
Never before had she realized on what a hair-breadth path this precarious life of ours pursues its way. The strength and the wit and the beauty of man were slaves and puppets in the hands of this minute organism.A king on his throne mixes one day a little water with the wine in his golden cup, and with it one of these black pencils, invisible but to a high power of lens, and thereafter he ascends his throne no more, but another sits in his place, before whom they sing “God save the King.” And the father is but one among the uncounted dead.
This afternoon, as she sat under the trees in the garden after her lunch, thoughts like these flitted bat-like through the gloomy chambers of the brain. How insignificant and insecure was life! It was like some ill-constructed clock which might stop any moment. And how mean and trivial were all its best aims. Here was she, with a fair average of birth and brains and heart, and life held for her no more heroic task than to wage war—and, oh, how hopelessly!—with an infinitesimal atom. The peace and sheltered security of Wroxton, the busy tranquility she had fashioned for herself here, were all knocked in the dust. Everything was at the mercy of the bacillus.
Luckily for her peace of mind these unfruitful imaginings were interrupted byPool. She did not hear his step on the soft grass, and his voice spoke before she knew he was there.
“Mr. Collingwood is here, Miss,” he said, “and wants to know if you can see him.”
Jeannie did not move, but her voice trembled a little.
“Yes, ask him to come out here,” she said; “and bring another chair.”
She rose to meet him.
“Ah, how do you do?” she said. “Tell me, the baby is quite well?”
“Quite well,” he said, and then there was silence.
Pool brought out another chair, and still in silence they sat down. Jeannie’s heart had suddenly begun to beat furiously.
“I heard from Arthur this morning,” he said, “and that is why I am here. I knew, of course, from the papers that there was an epidemic of typhoid here, and I was frightened. But his letter told me more. It told me that you spent all your days in nursing at the hospital. And I could not bear it.”
Jeannie said nothing, but a great, pervading peace took possession of her troubledsoul. It was as if she had suddenly passed from a stormy, mountainous sea round into a harbour, and the bacilli resumed their real dimensions.
“I could not bear it,” he said, again looking at her.
No word of explanation passed between them. His right to question what she did Jeannie did not dispute, and he did not miss the significance of that.
“I could not help myself,” she said. “It was impossible for me not to do what I could. Oh, it has been a terrible time, and we are not at the end of it yet. Oh, these poor people!”
“Leave the place, come away,” he began, suddenly and passionately, but then stopped, for he saw in Jeannie’s face the light of pity, divine and human and womanly, and all that was selfish in his love for her, all that said “I cannot live without her,” died.
“Do not leave the place,” he resumed. “Do all that your heart prompts you to do. But promise me this—promise that you will leave no precaution untaken to minimize the risk to yourself. I know there is no need toask you that, because that is your duty as much as the other, but it will comfort me to hear you say it.”
“I promise you that,” said Jeannie, simply.
The divine deed was done, and the word yet unspoken had changed all. Three minutes before there had been only a leaden sky, the withered, drought-yellowed grass round her, but the grass was become the paved sapphire of the courts of heaven, and the sky was the sky. Each of them was so utterly in tune with the other that Jack felt no desire to speak directly, nor did Jeannie wish it. The pause out of which music should issue was theirs.
“And what is to be done with me?” he asked, in a lighter tone. “May I stop here?”
“No, Jack,” she said, and the utter unconsciousness with which she spoke his name smote him with sweetness. “No, you are to go back to your work, too. We have all got our work; nothing can refute that. Tell me about the baby.”
“He cries for you,” said Jack.
“Kiss him for me then, and pray for us. Oh, let me tell you about it all. It will do me good, and I am too heart-sick to talk it over with the others. If I tell Aunt Em about my cases it is a double burden for her, and if she tells me about hers it is double for me. Arthur behaves splendidly. He goes his rounds all day, like a milkman, he says, with cans of disinfectants.”
“Ah, he helps too, does he?” said Jack. “He never mentioned that in his letter.”
“No? That is so like the dear boy. He has found lots of cases which they were trying to keep dark, for they hate going to hospital, and he alone of us all remains perfectly cheerful. But it is terrible at the hospital. I have about a dozen cases almost entirely under me. One died two days ago; another, I am afraid, will die to-day. It is so awful to work and work and work, and with what result? Oh, I am a stupid, ungrateful little fool! Is it not enough to find that little silver line on the thermometer a little lower than it was at the same time yesterday, and perhaps a degree lower than it was the day before? But one feels so helpless. And it isall on account of a little invisible demon which the carelessness of dirty people allowed to get into the water-supply. People talk of the horror of war. The horror of water-companies seems to me the more frightful.”
Jeannie paused a moment.
“But I would not have gone through it, and I would not be now going through it for the kingdoms of the world,” she said. “The mischief has been done, and it is an inestimable privilege to be allowed to help in minimizing the results. It is giving me a new view of life, Jack. Here in this sheltered, peaceful town I was in danger, I think, of becoming a sort of ruminating animal, sleek, and living in the meadows like a sort of cow.”
“I didn’t gather you were in danger of that,” remarked Jack. “You did happen to hold some classes in your meadow, did you not?”
“Yes, classes of other cows. We were all cows together—at least I was. But out of all this suffering there comes, I know not what—certainly despondency; but I do not believe that that is the permanent net result. One learns what a little thing is life, and how great. Also it seems as if I was learning to be egoistic.”
She got up out of her chair.
“Oh, you have done me good!” she cried. “Look, what was that?”
Jack had seen it, too; it was as if the sky had winked. They waited in silence, and in a few minutes came the growl of answering thunder. Jeannie stretched out her arms with a great sigh.
“Thunder!” she cried. “Perhaps there will be rain. How I have prayed for that. You don’t know what it may mean to us. Well, what is it, Pool?”
“Mrs. Raymond is here, Miss,” said he, “and would like to speak to you.”
“Very well, I will come in. Wait here, Mr. Collingwood; I will see what she wants.”
Jeannie went indoors with a new briskness of step and found Mrs. Raymond standing helplessly in the middle of the drawing-room.
“Oh, Miss Avesham,” she said, “will youcome? Maria is ill, and I can’t find any doctor in. So I thought, if you would be so kind, you would come and look at her, as I heard you have been working at the hospital.”
“When was she taken ill?” asked Jeannie.
“She wasn’t well yesterday at lunch, and had no appetite. And my husband said it was all nonsense and took her out for a walk. She was very bad last night, but he said she would be all right in the morning, and now she’s no better.”
Jeannie gave a little exclamation of impatience, and looked at her watch.
“Yes, I’ve just got time before I go back to the hospital,” she said. “Have you a carriage here?”
“Yes, it’s waiting,” said Mrs. Raymond.
“Very good; get in. I’ll follow you in a moment.”
She went quickly into the garden again.
“I must go,” she said to Jack. “I have to see a girl before I go back to the hospital.”
“And I am to go back to paint my silly little pictures?” he asked.
“Yes; you don’t paint badly, you know!”
“I will try and paint better. But I may come again?”
Jeannie shook hands with him.
“Yes, do come again,” she said.