Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale - Annie Matheson - Страница 6

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Florence was between five and six years old when the Nightingales moved from Lea Hall into their new home at Lea Hurst, a house commanding a specially beautiful outlook, and built under Mr. Nightingale’s own supervision with much care and taste, about a mile from the old home. It is only fourteen miles out of Derby, though there would seem to be many sleepy inhabitants of that aristocratic old town—like the old lady of Hendon who lived on into the twentieth century without having been into the roaring city of London hard by—who know nothing of the attractions within a few miles of them; for Mrs. Tooley tells an amusing story of a photographer there who supposed Lea Hurst to be a distinguished man and a local celebrity.

To some it seemed that there was a certain bleakness in the country surrounding Lea Hall, but, though the two dwellings are so short a distance apart, Lea Hurst is set in a far more perfect landscape. Hills and woodlands, stretching far away to Dovedale, are commanded by the broad terrace of upland on which the house stands, and it looks across to the bold escarpment known as Crich Stand, while deep below, the Derwent makes music on its rocky course. Among the foxglove and the bracken, the gritstone rocks jutting forth are a hovering place for butterflies and a haunt of the wild bee.

The house itself—shaped like a cross, gabled and mullioned, and heightened by substantial chimney-stacks—is solid, unpretending, satisfying to the eye. Above the fine oriel window in the drawing-room wing is the balcony pointed out to visitors where, they are told, after the Crimea “Miss Florence used to come out and speak to the people.”

The building of the house was completed in 1825, and above the door that date is inscribed, together with the letter N. The drawing-room and library look south, and open on to the garden, and “from the library a flight of stone steps leads down to the lawn.” In the centre of the garden front an old chapel has been built into the mansion, and it may be that the prayers of the unknown dead have been answered in the life of the child who grew up under its shadow, and to whom the busy toiling world has owed so much.

The terraced garden at the back of the house, with its sweet old-fashioned flowers and blossoming apple trees, has doubtless grown more delightful with every year of its advancing age, but what an interest the two little girls must have had when it was first being planted out and each could find a home for her favourite flowers! Fuchsias were among those loved by little Florence, who, as has already been noted, was only six years old when she and her sister and father and mother moved into Lea Hurst, and there was a large bed of these outside the chapel. The old schoolroom and nursery at the back of the house look out upon the hills, and in a quiet corner of the garden there is a summer-house where Florence and her only sister, who had no brothers to share their games, must often have played and worked.

Lea Hurst is a quiet, beautiful home, characteristically English and unpretending, with a modest park-gate, and beyond the park those Lea Woods where the hyacinths bloom and where it is still told how “Miss Florence” loved to walk through the long winding avenue with its grand views of the distant hills and woods.

But the Nightingales did not spend the whole year at Lea Hurst. In the autumn it was their custom to move to Embley, in Hampshire, where they spent the winter and early spring. They usually sent the servants on ahead with the luggage, and drove by easy stages in their own carriage, taking the journey at leisure, and putting up at inns by the way. Sometimes, of course, they travelled by coach. Those of us who only know the Derby road in the neighbourhood of towns like Nottingham and Derby now that its coaching glories are past, find it difficult to picture its gaiety in those old coaching days, when the very horses enjoyed the liveliness of the running, and the many carriages with their gay postilions and varied occupants were on the alert for neighbour or friend who might be posting in the same direction.

Whether in autumn or in spring, the drive must have been a joy. The varied beauty of the Midlands recalls the lines in “Aurora Leigh” which speak of

“Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,

Fed full of noises by invisible streams;

And open pastures where you scarcely tell

White daisies from white dew, ...

... the clouds, the fields,

The happy violets hiding from the roads

The primroses run down to, carrying gold;

The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out

Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths

’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all alive

With birds and gnats and large white butterflies

Which look as if the May-flower had caught life

And palpitated forth upon the wind;

Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,

Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills;

And cattle grazing in the watered vales,

And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,

And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,

Confused with smell of orchards.”

Derbyshire itself, with its wild lilies of the valley, its ferns and daffodils and laughing streams, is hardly more “taking” than the country through which winds the silver Trent, past Nottingham Castle, perched on its rock and promontory above the fields where the wild crocus in those days made sheets of vivid purple, and the steep banks of Clifton Grove, with its shoals of blue forget-me-not, making a dim, tree-crowned outline, with here and there a gleam of silver, as seen by the chariots “on the road.” Wollaton Park, with its great beeches and limes and glimpses of shy deer, would give gold and crimson and a thousand shades of russet to the picture.

And farther south, at the other end of the journey, what miles of orchards and pine woods and sweet-scented heather—what rolling Downs and Surrey homesteads along the turnpike roads!

Though Parthenope and Florence had no brothers to play with them, they seem to have had a great variety of active occupations, both at Lea Hurst and at Embley. Of course they had their dolls, like other little girls; but those which belonged to Florence had a way of falling into the doctor’s hands—an imaginary doctor, of course—and needing a good deal of tender care and attention. Florence seemed never tired of looking after their various ailments. In fact, she had at times a whole dolls’ hospital to tend. She probably picked up a little amateur knowledge of medicine quite early in life; for the poor people in the neighbourhood used to come to her mother for help in any little emergency, and Mrs. Nightingale was, like many another Lady Bountiful of her generation, equipped with a certain amount of traditional wisdom and kindly common sense, aided in her case by wider reading and a better educated mind than the ordinary.

Florence, having somehow escaped measles and whooping-cough, was not allowed to run into infection in the cottages, but that did not prevent the sending of beef-teas and jellies and other helpful and neighbourly gifts, which could be tied to her pony’s saddle-bow and left by her at the door. She learned to know the cottagers with a frank and very human intimacy, and their homely wit touched her own, their shrewdness and sympathy met their like in her, and as she grew older, all this added to her power and her charm. She learned to know both the north and the south in “her ain countree,” and when, later in life, she was the wise angel of hope to the brave “Tommies,” recruited from such homes, meeting them as she did amid unrecorded agonies that were far worse than the horrors of the battlefield, she understood them all the better as men, because she had known just such boys as they had been and was familiar with just such homes as those in which they grew up. According to Mrs. Tooley’s biography, the farmhouse where Adam Bede fell in love with Hetty was just the other side of the meadows at Lea Hurst, and the old mill-wheel, where Maggie Tulliver’s father ground the corn of the neighbourhood, was only two or three miles away. Marian Evans, of whom the world still thinks and speaks by her pen-name of George Eliot, came sometimes to visit her kinsfolk in the thatched cottage by Wirksworth Tape Mills, and has left us in her earlier novels a vivid picture of the cottage life that surrounded our heroine during that part of the year which she spent in the Derbyshire home. The children, of course, had their own garden, which they dug and watered, and Florence was so fond of flowers and animals that that again was an added bond with her rustic neighbours. Flower-missions had not in those days been heard of, but she often tied up a nosegay of wild flowers for invalid villagers, or took some of her favourites out of her own garden to the sick people whom she visited.

The story of her first patient has already been told several times in print, but no biography would be complete without it.

She had nursed many dolls back to convalescence—to say nothing of “setting” their broken limbs—tempted their delicate appetites with dainties offered on toy plates, and dressed the burns when her sister let them tumble too near the nursery fire; but as yet she had had no real human patient, when one day, out riding with her friend the vicar over the Hampshire Downs near Embley, they noticed that Roger, an old shepherd whom they knew very well, was having endless trouble in getting his sheep together.

“Where’s Cap?” asked the vicar, drawing up his horse, for Cap was a very capable and trusted sheep-dog.

“T’ boys have been throwing stones at ‘n and they’ve broken t’ poor chap’s leg. Won’t ever be any good no more, a’m thinkin’. Best put him out of ‘s misery.”

“O Roger!” exclaimed a clear young voice, “poor Cap’s leg broken? Can’t we do anything for him?”

“Where is he?” added Florence eagerly, for the voice was that of the future “Queen of Nurses.” “Oh, we can’t leave him all alone in his pain. Just think how cruel!”

“Us can’t do no good, miss, nor you nayther. I’se just take a cord to him to-night; ’tis the only way to ease his pain.”

But Florence turned to plead with the vicar, and to beg that some further effort should be made.

The vicar, urged by the compassion in the young face looking up to his, turned his horse’s head in the right direction for a visit to Cap. In a moment Florence’s pony was put to the gallop, and she was the first to arrive at the shed where the poor dog was lying.

Cap’s faithful brown eyes were soon lifted to hers, as she tenderly tried to make him understand her loving sympathy, caressing him with her little hand and speaking soothingly with her own lips and eyes; till, like the suffering men whose wounds would in the far-off years be eased through her skill, the dog looked up at her in dumb and worshipping gratitude.

The vicar was equal to the occasion, and soon discovered that the leg was not broken at all, but badly bruised and swollen, and perhaps an even greater source of danger and pain than if there had merely been a broken bone.

When he suggested a “compress,” his child-companion was puzzled for a moment. She thought she knew all about poultices and bandages, and I daresay she had often given her dolls a mustard plaster; but a “compress” sounded like something new and mysterious. It was, of course, a great relief when she learned that she only needed to keep soaking cloths in hot water, wringing them out, and folding them over Cap’s injured leg, renewing them as quickly as they cooled. She was a nimble little person, and, with the help of the shepherd boy, soon got a fire of sticks kindled in a neighbouring cottage and the kettle singing on it with the necessary boiling water. But now what to do for cloths? Time is of importance in sick-nursing when every moment of delay means added pain to the sufferer. To ride home would have meant the loss of an hour or two, and thrifty cottagers are not always ready to tear up scant and cherished house-linen for the nursing of dogs. But Florence was not to be baffled. To her great delight she espied the shepherd’s smock hanging up behind the door. She was a fearless soul, and felt no doubt whatever that her mother would pay for a new smock. “This will just do,” she said, and, since that delightful vicar gave a nod of entire approval, she promptly tore it into strips.

Then back to Cap’s hut she hastened, with her small henchman beside her carrying the kettle and the basin; for by this time he, the boy shepherd, began to be interested too, and the vicar’s superintendence was no longer needed. A message of explanation was sent to Embley that Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale might not be anxious, and for several hours Florence gave herself up to nursing her patient. Cap was passive in her hands, and the hot fomentations gradually lessened the pain and the swelling.

Imagine the wonder and gratitude of old Roger when he turned up with the rope in his hand and a leaden weight on his poor old heart! Cap, of course, knew his step and greeted him with a little whine of satisfaction, as if to be the first to tell him the good news.

“Why, missy, you have been doing wonders,” he said. “I never thought to see t’ poor dog look up at me like that again.”

“Yes,” exclaimed the happy young nurse; “doesn’t he look better? Well, Roger, you can throw away the rope. I shall want you to help me make these hot compresses.”

“Miss Florence is quite right, Roger,” interposed the vicar; “you’ll soon have Cap running about again.”

“I’m sure I cannot thank you and the young lady enough, yer riv’rence. And I’ll mind all the instrooctions for he.”

As the faithful dog looked up at him, eased and content, it was a very happy man that was old Roger. But the doctor-nurse was not prepared to lose her occupation too quickly.

“I shall come and see him again to-morrow, Roger,” she said; “I know mamma will let me, when I just explain to her about it all.”