CHAPTER XXI.
CYRIL’S NURSES.
Whilethe church bells were ringing daily in the tower above his head, and the old Bridford chimes, famous long ago, were heralding the birth of every hour with a fine old psalm tune that pealed out over the busy, money-making city, like an echo of the past, Cyril Culverhouse was lying at the bottom of a dark gulf of pain and confusion, and all the outer world, and all the life that he had lived, were cancelled and forgotten.
Strange images danced before his eyes like motes in the sunshine, yet seemed to him neither strange nor unexpected. He had a history of his own in that period of delirium, a new identity, new surroundings, a mad, wild world, peopled out of his own brain. Bishops and archbishops came and sat beside his bed, and held long arguments with him, figments of a mind distraught, theshadows that haunt fever-dreams, but to him intensely real. The dead came back to life to hold converse with him, and he was not surprised. No, he had always thought there was something in the ideas of the old necromancers. The elixir of life was not an impossibility. Here was Luther with his square solid face, and sensual humorous mouth. Here was Pascal, full of quaint sayings and far-reaching thoughts. The sick man talked for all of them. His talk was wildest raving to the ears that listened, but to his own fancy it was profoundest wisdom. There is no egotism, no belief in self, equal to that of the lunatic. For him the stars and moon have been made, for him God willingly performs miracles which overthrow all the laws of the universe. He is the axis of the world, and lets it go round.
How long those days and nights of fever were! That was the chief agony of them. The eternity of hours, so thickly peopled with distorted shapes that every quarter of an hour was an era. Of actual physical pain the sufferer had no consciousness; but weariness, almost too heavy to be borneweighed upon him in the long strange nights, when the faces of his watchers changed, and the very walls of his room seemed new and unknown to him. He fancied that his nurses had removed him into new lodgings while he slept, though it seemed to him that he had never slept.
Sometimes he fancied himself in one place, sometimes in another. He was at Oxford, in those old rooms of his looking into the college garden. He was at Little Yafford, at Culverhouse, anywhere but where he really was.
And his nurses, who were they? He faintly remembered Mrs. Podmore leaning over his bed, fat and scant of breath, with a medicine-glass in her hand, coaxing him to drink. He remembered Sarah, making believe to step softly, in creaking shoes, whose every movement was agony to him. But these things were lost in the darkness of remote ages. His present nurses seemed to have been tending him during a century.
There were two, one tall and slender, dignified of bearing, yet gracious in every movement; the other short, small, and brisk. They were dressedexactly alike, in the costume of some religious order, as he supposed. They wore long black robes and white linen caps, such as he remembered to have seen worn by the Sisters of Mercy in Breton towns that he had visited years ago in one of his long vacations. Admirable caps for ugly women, for the stiff linen borders projected a quarter of a yard beyond the face, entirely concealed the profile, and overshadowed the countenance at all times.
Cyril knew only that the taller of his two nurses had dark eyes and a pale face, and that the little woman had black eyes of exceeding sharpness, that flashed at him from the cavernous cap. They were both admirable nurses, quiet, gentle, attentive, but in some phases of his delirium he hated them, and accused them of all manner of evil designs. They were poisoning him. Yes, the medicine they made him take at stated intervals contained a slow poison—theAqua Tofanaof the Middle Ages—that horrible stuff which the wicked witch Toffania made by wholesale, and sent to all the cities of the earth as themanna of St. Nicola of Bari; or it was the hemlock that Socrates drank, or wolf’s bane, or deadly nightshade. He recognised the flavour of the murderous herb. And then he stormed at his nurses, and told them they had plotted his murder.
‘If you were honest women you would not hide your faces,’ he cried. ‘You are murderesses, and have come here to kill me.’
One night, after an age of fever and hallucination, he sank into a refreshing slumber. It was as if his spirit, newly escaped from a burning hell, had slipped unawares into Paradise. Fair meadows and flowing streams, an ineffable sense of coolness and relief, and then deep rest and stillness.
When he awoke, the summer dawn filled the room. Through the widely opened windows came the fresh breezes of the morning. A soft cool hand was on his brow, the tall nurse’s dark figure stood beside his bed.
All his delusions, all his hideous fancies, seemed to have run out of his brain, like water out of a sieve, during that one sweet sleep. Suddenly andcompletely as the leper at the Divine Healer’s bidding, he was made sound and whole. Very weak still, with a sense of utter helplessness and prostration, he yet felt himself cured. The fire that had made life a torture had burnt itself out.
He looked up at his nurse. How purely white that quaint old head-gear of hers looked in the morning sunshine. He remembered the bright freshness of just such another morning in his holiday rambles five years ago, and just such another black-robed figure and white cap, a Sister of Mercy waiting for the starting of the diligence, in the old market square at Vannes, the white dusty square, the scanty trees, that seem to have been planted yesterday, the shabby old cathedral looking down at him.
‘You are a Frenchwoman, are you not?’ he asked, the weakness of his voice startling him a little.
‘Mais si,’ she answered, gently.
He tried to get her to talk, but she answered him only in monosyllables. He tried to see her face, but the position in which she held her head always prevented him.
‘Perhaps her cap is the prettiest thing about her, and she would rather show that than her face,’ he thought.
Even that brief conversation exhausted him, and he fell asleep again. Those weary hours of delirious wakefulness had left him long arrears of sleep to make up. He slept on till dusk, and Dr. Saunders, finding him locked in that deep slumber, pronounced him out of danger.
‘Our medicines have never been able to touch him,’ he said frankly. ‘It has been an unaided struggle between nature and disease. I ought not to say unaided, though,’ he added, apologetically, to the little nursing sister in the Breton cap. ‘Your care has been a very powerful assistance.’
The little woman thanked him effusively in her broken English. The taller nurse spoke only French, and as little of that as possible.
When Cyril awoke again, just before nightfall, the small nurse was sitting by his bed.
‘Where is the other?’ he asked.
‘Gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yes. You are now much better—on the high road to recovery. You no longer want two nurses. My companion has gone home.’
‘She is wanted for some other case, perhaps.’
‘No doubt she soon will be.’
‘To what order do you belong?’
‘To a community of nursing sisters.’
‘In Brittany?’
‘Yes.’
‘What part of Brittany?’
‘We never talk about ourselves. It is one of the rules of our order. We come and go like the wind.’
‘But how was it that you came to me? Who sent for you?’
‘We were not sent for. We happened to hear of your illness—and we knew you were a good man. It was our duty to come and nurse you.’
‘What me?—a Protestant?’
‘We are not sectarian. We go wherever we are wanted.’
‘But how do you—Breton nuns—come to be in England?’
‘We are not nuns. We are a nursing sisterhood, bound by no vows. We heard of the pest raging in this town, and came here to be useful.’
‘You are very good people,’ said Cyril. ‘I am sorry the other sister is gone. I should like to have talked to her, but this morning she would answer me only in monosyllables.’
‘It is not good for you to talk, and it is one of our rules to talk as little as possible.’
For three days the figure in the loose black gown was constantly at Cyril’s bedside. He heard the little woman telling her beads in the dead of night. If she were no nun she was at any rate a staunch Roman Catholic; but she did not endeavour to convert him to her own creed. She was a modest, unobtrusive little woman; but during those three days she very often broke the rule of her order, and talked to the patient a good deal. She talked of Brittany, which she knew thoroughly, and sometimes of modern French literature, which she knew better than she ought to have done as a member of a religious sisterhood.
On the fourth day she was gone, and anotherfigure, dressed in black, with neat white cap and apron, was by Cyril’s bedside. The face of this watcher was not hidden. He knew it well, a homely English face that brought back the thought of his work in the courts and back streets of Bridford.
‘Mrs. Joyce,’ he exclaimed. ‘Have you turned nurse?’
‘What more blessed privilege can I have, sir, than to take care of you? I owe you what is a great deal more to me than my own life, the life of my beloved son. Oh, sir, if he ever comes to be a Milton or a Shakespeare, the world will bless you for your goodness, as I do now.’
Cyril smiled at her enthusiasm. Perhaps every mother whose son writes obscure verses in doubtful English believes with Mrs. Joyce that she has produced a Milton.
‘I should have come before, sir, if the two ladies hadn’t been here. But they were such good nurses I didn’t want to interfere with them.’
‘Do you know where they came from, or why they came?’
‘No, indeed, Mr. Culverhouse. They wereforeigners, and I suppose they came from foreign parts.’
‘Neither of my doctors sent for them, I believe.’
‘No, sir. Dr. Saunders told me they came and went like spirits, but he was wishful there were more like them.’
‘And your son is really recovered?’
‘Yes, sir. It is a most wonderful cure. He rallied that night, and was up and about at the end of the week. To both of us it seemed like a miracle. I have read the gospel about the widow’s son every night and morning after my prayers, and I have read it two or three times to Emmanuel. Oh, sir, I hope and believe you have wrought a double cure. I think my son’s heart is turned to holy things. He has read his Bible very often lately. I have watched him, and I think he is beginning to find out that there is truth and comfort to be found in it.’
‘He cannot read the gospel long without making that discovery. Young men are too apt to form their judgment of the Bible from what other people have written about it. When they go to the fountain head they find their mistake.’
Cyril was not satisfied till he had questioned Dr. Saunders and Dr. Bolling, the latter of whom had come to see him daily, without any fee, about the two French nurses. But neither of these could tell him more than he knew already.
‘I wish I did know more about them,’ said Mr. Saunders. ‘Whatever institution they belong to, it’s an admirable one, and I’m sorry we haven’t a few more institutions of that kind over here. I don’t think we should have pulled you through if it hadn’t been for that excellent nursing. No, upon my word I believe you owe those two women your life.’
‘And I do not even know their names, or where they are to be found,’ said Cyril, regretfully.
It worried him not a little to be under so deep an obligation, and to have no mode of expressing his gratitude. At one time he thought of putting an advertisement in theTimes, thanking his unknown nurses for their care. But on reflection this seemed idle. They were doubtless what they represented themselves, sisters of some religious order, who did good for the love of God. They had no need of his thanks. Yet he puzzled himself not a little aboutthe whole business. Why should he have been selected, above all other sufferers in the town of Bridford, as the recipient of this gratuitous care?
As soon as he was able to leave his bed, Dr. Bolling insisted on his going off to the sea-side to get strength before he went back to his work. This vexed him sorely, but he could not disobey.
‘You’ve been as near the gates of death as a man can well go without passing through them,’ said the doctor.
END OF VOL. II.
J. AND W. RIDER, PRINTERS, LONDON.
CorrectionsThe first line indicates the original, the second the correction.Contents to Vol. IIIX. ‘THOSE ARE THE KILLING GRIEFS WHICH DARE NOT SPEAK’ 138IX. ‘THOSE ARE THE KILLING GRIEFS WHICH DARE NOT SPEAK’128p.137Miss Scales eat her dinnerMiss Schalesateher dinnerp.172Yes, it’s regretable.Yes, it’sregrettable.p.268in His earthly pilgrimage did He exereise that ineffablein His earthly pilgrimage did Heexercisethat ineffablep.305Mrs. Piper no longer recived her morning visitors in itMrs. Piper no longerreceivedher morning visitors in it
The first line indicates the original, the second the correction.
Contents to Vol. II
p.137
p.172
p.268
p.305