Faith Gartney's Girlhood Part 10

Faith would not be put by. Her mother sat on one side of the bed, while the nurse busied herself noiselessly, or waited, motionless, upon the other. Down by the fireside, on a low stool, with her head on the cus.h.i.+on of an easy-chair, leaned the young girl--her heart full, and every nerve strained with emotion and suspense.

She will never know, precisely, how those hours went on. She can remember the low breathing from the bed, and the now and then half-distinct utterance, as the brain wandered still in a dreamy, feverish maze; and she never will forget the precise color and pattern of the calico wrapper that Nurse Sampson wore; but she can recollect nothing else of it all, except that, after a time, longer or shorter, she glanced up, fearfully, as a strange hush seemed to have come over the room, and met a look and gesture of the nurse that warned her down again, for her life.

And then, other hours, or minutes, she knows not which, went by.

And then, a stir--a feeble word--a whisper from Nurse Sampson--a low "Thank G.o.d!" from her mother.

The crisis was pa.s.sed. Henderson Gartney lived.

CHAPTER X.

ROUGH ENDS.

"So others shall Take patience, labor, to their heart and hand, From thy hand and thy heart, and thy brave cheer, And G.o.d's grace fructify through thee to all."

MRS. BROWNING.

"M. S. What does that stand for?" said little Hendie, reading the white letters painted on the black leather bottom of nurse's carpetbag. He got back, now, often, in the daytime, to his old nursery quarters, where his father liked to hear his chatter and play, for a short time together--though he still slept, with Mahala, upstairs. "Does that mean 'Miss Sampson'?"

Faith glanced up from her stocking mending, with a little fun and a little curiosity in her eyes.

"What does 'M.' stand for?" repeated Hendie.

The nurse was "setting to rights" about the room. She turned round at the question, from hanging a towel straight over the stand, and looked a little amazed, as if she had almost forgotten, herself. But it came out, with a quick opening and shutting of the thin lips, like the snipping of a pair of scissors--"Mehitable."

Faith had been greatly drawn to this odd, efficient woman. Beside that her skillful, untiring nursing had humanly, been the means of saving her father's life, which alone had warmed her with an earnest grat.i.tude that was restless to prove itself, and that welled up in every glance and tone she gave Miss Sampson, there were a certain respect and interest that could not withhold themselves from one who so evidently worked on with a great motive that dignified her smallest acts. In whom self-abnegation was the underlying principle of all daily doing.

Miss Sampson had stayed on at the Gartneys', notwithstanding the doctor's prediction, and her usual habit. And, in truth, her patient did not "get well _too_ fast." She was needed now as really as ever, though the immediate danger which had summoned her was past, and the fever had gone. The months of overstrained effort and anxiety that had culminated in its violent attack were telling upon him now, in the scarcely less perilous prostration that followed. And Mrs. Gartney had quite given out since the excessive tension of nerve and feeling had relaxed. She was almost ill enough to be regularly nursed herself. She alternated between her bed in the dressing room and an easy-chair opposite her husband's, at his fireside. Miss Sampson knew when she was really wanted, whether the emergency were more or less obvious. She knew the mischief of a change of hands at such a time. And so she stayed on, though she did sleep comfortably of a night, and had many an hour of rest in the daytime, when Faith would come into the nursery and const.i.tute herself her companion.

Miss Sampson was to her like a book to be read, whereof she turned but a leaf or so at a time, as she had accidental opportunity, yet whose every page rendered up a deep, strong--above all, a most sound and healthy meaning.

She turned over a leaf, one day, in this wise.

"Miss Sampson, how came you, at first, to be a sick nurse?"

The shadow of some old struggle seemed to come over Miss Sampson's face, as she answered, briefly:

"I wanted to find the very toughest sort of a job to do."

Faith looked up, surprised.

"But I heard you tell my father that you had been nursing more than twenty years. You must have been quite a young woman when you began. I wonder--"

"You wonder why I wasn't like most other young women, I suppose. Why I didn't get married, perhaps, and have folks of my own to take care of?

Well, I didn't; and the Lord gave me a pretty plain indication that He hadn't laid out that kind of a life for me. So then I just looked around to find out what better He had for me to do. And I hit on the very work I wanted. A trade that it took all the old Sampson grit to follow. I made up my mind, as the doctor says, that _somebody_ in the world had got to choose drumsticks, and I might as well take hold of one."

"But don't you ever get tired of it all, and long for something to rest or amuse you?"

"Amuse! I couldn't be amused, child. I've been in too much awful earnest ever to be much amused again. No, I want to die in the harness. It's hard work I want. I couldn't have been tied down to a common, easy sort of life. I want something to fight and grapple with; and I'm thankful there's been a way opened for me to do good according to my nature. If I hadn't had sickness and death to battle against, I should have got into human quarrels, maybe, just for the sake of feeling ferocious."

"And you always take the very worst and hardest cases, Dr. Gracie says."

"What's the use of taking a tough job if you don't face the toughest part of it? I don't want the comfortable end of the business.

_Somebody's_ got to nurse smallpox, and yellow fever, and raving-distracted people; and I _know_ the Lord made me fit to do just that very work. There ain't many that He _does_ make for it, but I'm one. And if I s.h.i.+rked, there'd be a st.i.tch dropped."

"Yellow fever! where have you nursed that?"

"Do you suppose I didn't go to New Orleans? I've nursed it, and I've _had_ it, and nursed it again. I've been in the cholera hospitals, too.

I'm seasoned to most everything."

"Do you think everybody ought to take the hardest thing they can find, to do?"

"Do you think everybody ought to eat drumsticks? We'd have to kill an unreasonable lot of fowls to let 'em! No. The Lord portions out b.r.e.a.s.t.s and wings, as well as legs. If He puts anything into your plate, take it."

Dr. Gracie always had a word for the nurse, when he came; and, to do her justice, it was seldom but she had a word to give him back.

"Well, Miss Sampson," said he gayly, one bright morning, "you're as fresh as the day. What pulls down other folks seems to set you up. I declare you're as blooming as--twenty-five."

"You--fib--like--sixty! It's no such thing! And if it was, I'd ought to be ashamed of it."

"Prodigious! as your namesake, the Dominie, would say. Don't tell me a woman is ever ashamed of looking young, or handsome!"

"Now, look here, doctor!" said Miss Sampson, "I never was handsome; and I thank the Lord He's given me enough to do in the world to wear off my young looks long ago! And any woman ought to be ashamed that gets to be thirty and upward, to say nothing of forty-five, and keeps her baby face on! It's a sign she ain't been of much account, anyhow."

"Oh, but there are always differences and exceptions," persisted the doctor, who liked nothing better than to draw Miss Sampson out. "There are some faces that take till thirty, at least, to bring out all their possibilities of good looks, and wear on, then, till fifty. I've seen 'em. And the owners were no drones or do-nothings, either. What do you say to that?"

"I say there's two ways of growing old. And growing old ain't always growing ugly. Some folks grow old from the inside, out; and some from the outside, in. There's old furniture, and there's growing trees!"

"And the trunk that is roughest below may branch out greenest a-top!"

said the doctor.

The talk Faith heard now and then, in her walks from home, or when some of "the girls" came in and called her down into the parlor--about pretty looks, and becoming dresses, and who danced with who at the "German"

last night, and what a sc.r.a.pe Loolie Lloyd had got into with mixing up and misdating her engagements at the cla.s.s, and the last new roll for the hair--used to seem rather trivial to her in these days!

Occasionally, when Mr. Gartney had what nurse called a "good" day, he would begin to ask for some of his books and papers, with a thought toward business; and then Miss Sampson would display her carpetbag, and make a show of picking up things to put in it. "For," said she, "when you get at your business, it'll be high time for me to go about mine."

"But only for half an hour, nurse! I'll give you that much leave of absence, and then we'll have things back again as they were before."

"I guess you will! And _further_ than they were before. No, Mr. Gartney, you've got to behave. I _won't_ have them vicious-looking accounts about, and it don't signify."

"If it don't, why not?" But it ended in the accounts and the carpetbag disappearing together.

Until one morning, some three weeks from the beginning of Mr. Gartney's illness, when, after a few days' letting alone the whole subject, he suddenly appealed to the doctor.

"Doctor," said he, as that gentleman entered, "I must have Braybrook up here this afternoon. I dropped things just where I stood, you know. It's time to take an observation."