Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale - Annie Matheson - Страница 7

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While Florence Nightingale and her sister were working hard at history and languages and all useful feminine arts, romping in the sunny Hampshire gardens, or riding amongst the Derbyshire hills, the big world outside their quiet paradise was heaping fuel for the fires of war, which at last, when after a quarter of a century it flared up out of its long-prepared combustibles, was “to bring to death a million workmen and soldiers, consume vast wealth, shatter the framework of the European system, and make it hard henceforth for any nation to be safe except by sheer strength.” And above all its devastation, remembered as a part of its undying record, the name of one of these happy children was to be blazoned on the page of history.

Already at the beginning of the century the first Napoleon had said that the Czar of Russia was always threatening Constantinople and never taking it, and by the time Florence Nightingale was twelve years old, it might be said of that Czar that while “holding the boundless authority of an Oriental potentate,” his power was supplemented by the far-reaching transmission of his orders across the telegraph wires, and if Kinglake does not exaggerate, “he would touch the bell and kindle a war, without hearing counsel from any living man.”

The project against Constantinople was a scheme of conquest continually to be delayed, but never discarded, and, happen what might, it was never to be endured that the prospect of Russia’s attaining some day to the Bosphorus should be shut out by the ambition of any other Power. Nicholas was quite aware that multitudes of the pious throughout his vast dominions dwelt upon the thought of their co-religionists under the Turkish rule, and looked to the shining cross of St. Sophia, symbol of their faith above the church founded by Constantine, as the goal of political unity for a “suppliant nation.”

And Kinglake tells us with an almost acid irony of Louis Napoleon, that he who was by the Senatus-Consulte of 1804 the statutory heir of the great Bonaparte, and after his exile and imprisonment had returned to France, laboured to show all men “how beautifully Nature in her infinite wisdom had adapted that same France to the service of the Bonapartes; and how, without the fostering care of these same Bonapartes, the creature was doomed to degenerate, and to perish out of the world, and was considering how it was possible at the beginning of the nineteenth century to make the coarse Bonaparte yoke of 1804 sit kindly upon her neck.”

The day was drawing near when a great war would seem to him to offer just the opportunity he wanted.

Far away as yet was that awful massacre of peaceful citizens in Paris in 1851, with which the name of Louis Napoleon was associated as responsible for the coup d’état—a massacre probably the result of brutal panic on the part of the soldiers, the civilians, and that craven president, Louis Napoleon himself, whose conscience made a coward of him, and whose terror usually took the form of brutality—but long before that date, by his callous plotting and underhand self-seeking, he was preparing forces which then made for death and terror, and by that time had more or less broken the manhood of his beautiful Paris.

Yet all over the world at all times, while the enemy is sowing tares in the field, the good seed is ripening also in the ground for the harvest; and through these same years far-off threads were being woven, ready to make part of the warp and woof of a life, as yet busied with the duties and joys of childhood, but one day to thrill the hearts of Europe and be remembered while time shall last.

Elizabeth Fry, who was to be one of its decisive influences, was bringing new light and hope into the noisome prisons of a bygone century, and we shall see how her life-work was not without its influence later on the life of the child growing up at Embley and Lea Hurst.

And a child nearly of Florence Nightingale’s own age, who was one day to cross her path with friendly help at an important crisis, was playing with her sister Curlinda—Sir Walter Scott’s nickname for her real name of Caroline—and being drilled in manners in French schools in Paris and Versailles, before her family moved to Edinburgh and her more serious lessons began. This was Felicia Skene, who was afterwards able to give momentary, but highly important help, at a critical moment in Florence Nightingale’s career. Like Florence herself, she was born amid romantic surroundings, though not in Italy but in Provence, and was named after her French godmother, a certain Comtesse de Felicité. Her two earliest recollections were of the alarming and enraged gesticulations of Liszt when giving a music lesson to her frightened sisters, and the very different vision of a lumbering coach and six accompanied by mounted soldiers—the coach and six wherein sat Charles the Tenth, who was soon afterwards to take refuge in Holyrood. That was in Paris, where her family went to live when she was six years old, but at the time of Cap’s accident they had already moved to Edinburgh, where her chief friends and playmates were the little Lockharts and the children of the murdered Duc de Berri. It was there that Sir Walter Scott, on the day when he heard of his bankruptcy, came and sat quietly by the little Felicia, and bade her tell him fairy stories, as he didn’t want to talk much himself. He was an old and dear friend of her father, one link between them being the fact that Mr. Skene was related by marriage to the beautiful Williamina Stuart with whom Scott in his early days had fallen deeply and ardently in love.

The little Felicia was at this time a very lively child and full of innocent mischief. Her later devotion to the sick and poor did not begin so early as was the case with Florence Nightingale, though there came a time when she and Florence met in after life as equals and fellow-soldiers in the great campaign against human suffering. Her travels and adventures in Greece and her popularity at the Athenian court were still hidden in the future, and while Florence at Embley and Lea Hurst was gradually unfolding a sweetness of nature that was by no means blind to the humorous side of things, and a highly practical thoroughness in all she undertook, Felicia was enjoying a merry home-life under the governorship of Miss Palmer, whom she nicknamed Pompey, and being prepared for confirmation by her father’s friend, Dean Ramsay. We are told of her that she might have said with Coppée, “J’ai eu toujours besoin de Dieu.” Full of fun and of interest in life’s great adventure, for others quite as much as for herself, religion was the moving force that moulded the soul of her to much unforeseen self-sacrifice as yet undreamed.