Chapter VII: Cynthia Tries to Be Useful

March had come; the anemones were white in the woods, the gummy chestnut-buds were bursting in sheltered corners of the land, there was a perfume of violets in the lanes, and primroses began to peep out like pale earth-stars, amidst tender green tufts fringed with the ragged disorder of last year’s leaves. The gaudy daffodils were flaunting everywhere. March was growing old, but Naomi Haggard’s wedding had not yet come to pass. The date had been fixed, and all things had gone prosperously till within a week of the appointed day, when the Squire, returning on horseback from Barnstaple, where he had been to take counsel with his lawyer as to the ejectment of a troublesome tenant, had been overtaken by a heavy fall of rain, which lasted with a cruel persistency throughout his homeward journey. Instead of immediately resorting to a hot bath and dry clothes as a cure, Mr. Pentreath had sat by the dining-room fire, while he solaced himself with a tumbler of hot brandy-and-water, before changing his raiment. The consequences of the wet ride and of his imprudence showed themselves next morning in a sharp attack of bronchitis, which speedily degenerated into inflammation of the lungs. Before the week was out the Squire’s life was in danger, and Naomi’s wedding was deferred to an indefinite period.

Oswald was in much distress about his father’s state. They had not loved each other tenderly, but the son was soft-hearted, and felt a curious aching pity for the lonely old man lying on his deathbed, more friendless than the lowliest hind on his estate. The family surgeon and sole doctor of Combhaven, who attended all the families round about, and killed or cured by the Pharmacopœia without let or hindrance from any opposing practitioner, declared that the Squire’s only chance of recovering lay not in medicine, or blood-letting, or blistering, but in good nursing. And who was to nurse this peevish, cantankerous old man, who, while groaning in the agonies of mortal disease, would grudge the nurse her food and feel an extra pang at every meal she ate? The professional nurses of Combhaven were ancient females of the sibyl or witch type, women one might expect to meet on solitary moors, or in fever-haunted swamps, gathering simples under a stormy moon, and whose ignorance was only matched in degree by their cunning and cruelty. The housemaid at the Grange, who had such a conscientious regard for the oak panelling that she would begin beeswaxing at six o’clock in the morning, was not so deeply attached to her old master. When Oswald appealed to her for aid she told him she had never been where there was sickness, and did not know much about invalids’ ways, and that she should scream if any one asked her to handle a leech. The housekeeper was old and purblind, and cooked her dinners by the aid of habit and memory rather than by any existing sense. Oswald could not trust his father’s life to her.

In this difficulty he naturally applied to Miss Haggard as a person likely to have all the resources of Combhaven at her fingers’ ends.

‘Do I know any woman that would go out sick-nursing?’ she exclaimed, repeating Oswald’s question. ‘If I know one such I know twenty. There’s nothing people won’t undertake to do if you’ll pay them for it. But if you ask me to recommend you a nurse for your father, Mr. Pentreath, that’s quite another thing. There isn’t a woman who goes out nursing in Combhaven that I’d trust with the life of a kitten, if I wanted the kitten to grow up to a cat.’

‘That’s conclusive,’ said Oswald despondently. ‘Yet I suppose people in Combhaven get nursed somehow when they’re ill.’

‘Somehow; yes, that’s about it. Sometimes they die, and sometimes Providence is extra kind to them, and pulls them through their troubles, nursing and all.’

This was depressing. Oswald sat looking at the fire gloomily, wondering what he ought to do. It was tea-time. Aunt Judith was in her accustomed place before the tea-tray. Naomi stood by the mantelpiece looking at her lover, too much disturbed by his despondency to obey that rigorous code of etiquette which her aunt had imposed upon the household, and in which sitting down to meals the instant they were ready was a stringent article. Cynthia had taken her place and was cutting bread-and-butter for Jim, with a calm matronly air which became her fair young face. She was always pleased to be useful, were it in the smallest detail.

‘I wish I could nurse your father, Oswald,’ said Naomi earnestly.

‘But you can’t,’ exclaimed Judith with prompt severity. ‘A pretty thing indeed for you to go and live in the Squire’s house before you’ve any right. A nice scandal there’d be in Combhaven. You a minister’s daughter too! You ought to have more sense than to talk of such a thing.’

‘I can’t see that it would be wrong,’ cried Oswald, with some show of heat. ‘Who has a better right to be at home in my father’s house than my future wife?’

‘If young men like you were able to draw a line between right and wrong, right and wrong wouldn’t get mixed up so often as they do,’ replied Judith sententiously. ‘As to Naomi making herself at home at the Grange till she’s Mrs. Pentreath, it’s out of the question, and she ought to have known it. Besides which, she knows about as much of sick-nursing as a baby in its cradle.’

‘God would teach me,’ said Naomi, ‘and my love for Oswald would make me strong to help his father.’

‘I believe that, Naomi,’ exclaimed Oswald, with a grateful look.

‘Let me nurse the Squire,’ said Cynthia, with a subdued eagerness. ‘I have so little to do at home, I should hardly be missed. And I do know something about sickness. I nursed Miss Webling, a lady who had the quinsy very badly. The doctor thought she would die; and I put on leeches and blisters, and sat up with her fifteen nights. And I have nursed the poor people here, haven’t I, Joshua?’ she asked, looking up at her husband, who had this moment entered the room.

‘Yes, love; you have been a ministering angel by many sick-beds, and you would have done more if I had suffered you. But what is all this talk about nursing?’

‘If some of you will sit down,’ remonstrated Judith, ‘I’ll pour out the tea. But I don’t feel as if anybody wanted it while you’re standing about higgledy-piggledy.’

Thus reproved, Naomi took her seat meekly, and Oswald, feeling that the reproof applied with double force to him as a visitor, seated himself in a desponding attitude at a corner of the table.

‘I want to nurse old Mr. Pentreath, Joshua,’ said Cynthia. ‘Miss Haggard says there is no nurse to be trusted in Combhaven, and the doctor says the old gentleman must have good nursing. Will you let me go to the Grange for a little while and sit up with him, as I did with Miss Webling?’

Joshua watched her earnest face with a tender smile.

‘Why, my love, how anxious you are! And do you think you know enough about sickness--that you would have strength for such a task?’

‘It would be a good work, and I should do it with all my heart. God would give me strength and knowledge. I have no fear. I feel often that my life here is of very little use. I am never happier than when you let me visit the sick people. Let me go to the Grange, Joshua, and nurse poor Mr. Pentreath.’

‘You are too good to offer such a thing,’ cried Oswald, wondering at the ardour of this delicate, flower-like creature. ‘It would be a troublesome task. You have no notion how cross my poor old father is. He abuses the doctor in a most ferocious style--accuses him of picking his pocket. Our housemaid will scarcely go near him. There is a scrub of a girl who works about the house under every one else, a stupid good-natured thing, too much accustomed to hard words to mind them, and she is the only creature I can get to stay in my father’s room; but she is clumsy and sleepy.’

‘Do you really wish to go, Cynthia?’ asked Joshua seriously.

To his mind there was nothing unnatural in this desire of his young wife’s. He belonged to a community in which to minister to the sick was a paramount duty, in which affliction was a period of closer brotherhood, a drawing together of those links which bound the little flock to one another at all times. True, that the Squire was an ungodly person, outside that circle; but he had been in a manner united to Joshua’s household by his son’s choice of Naomi. Here was a sick man to be snatched from the jaws of Death; here was something higher and nobler, a soul to be saved from the clutch of Satan. That the Squire’s body must perish was, in all probability, inevitable--an event not to be staved off by leechings and blisterings, or all the resources of medicine; but there was a great battle to be fought for that immortal part of him, that impalpable, indestructible spark destined for an eternal future of good or evil.

What had the Church of England--of those slumberous days--done for the Squire? Well, it had taken tithe of his substance, and thereby secured to itself his antipathy; it had preached diluted Tillotson, South, and Barrow over his head while he dozed in the noontide sun; it had christened and married him, and held itself in readiness to bury him; and for the rest it had civilly and obligingly let him alone.

It seemed to Joshua Haggard that if his wife succoured the Squire in his fight with disease and death he too could be by the bedside to defend the sinner against the onslaughts of his invisible foe; for Joshua’s positive theology had never been troubled by any doubt of the reality and personality of man’s first tempter and perpetual adversary.

‘If you really feel that you have a call for this good work, Cynthia, I should be sorry to forbid your obeying it,’ he said, after a thoughtful pause.

‘It seems too bold to say that I am called to do it,’ answered his wife humbly, ‘but indeed, Joshua, my heart is drawn towards the poor lonely old man in his sickness and pain.’

‘Then you shall go, my dear,’ said Joshua decisively.

Cynthia rose as if to depart that moment.

‘God bless you for that permission!’ cried Oswald.

‘You may as well wait till tea’s finished,’ exclaimed Judith tartly; ‘other people want their teas, if you don’t. We didn’t use to have tea in such a fashion.’

Whereupon Cynthia resumed her seat meekly, and begged pardon of the authorities for this breach of the household law.

‘I don’t know how to thank you both,’ said Oswald,--‘you for your generous offer, Mrs. Haggard, or your husband for his goodness in letting you obey your benevolent inclination; but I am more grateful than I can say. I will take care that you are not over-fatigued by your task. Phœbe--that’s the girl I spoke of just now--will do anything you want. She’d work till she dropped, I believe, poor girl, and only requires to be taught. My poor father was delirious last night. That won’t frighten you, I hope--if his mind wanders?’

‘No,’ said Cynthia; ‘I was sitting with a poor woman yesterday who was light-headed. She talked of all kinds of strange things. Yet every now and then she spoke quite clearly, and followed the sense when I read to her. I shall not be frightened.’

After tea, when the bondage of etiquette was loosened a little, Naomi stole to her young stepmother’s side and kissed her tenderly.

‘I am so grateful to you, Cynthia,’ she said.

‘Dear Naomi, there’s no reason for gratitude or praise. I am only doing my duty. I am sorry you were not permitted to perform this task, dear, as I know it would have seemed sweet to you, for Oswald’s sake.’