Hetty's Strange History Part 15

"Have you ever nursed?"

"No, sir."

"What do you know about it then?"

"I have seen a great many sick people."

"How was that?"

Hetty hesitated, but with some confusion replied:

"My husband was a doctor, and I often went with him to see his patients."

"You are a widow then?"

"No, sir."

"What then?" said the physician, severely.

Poor Hetty! She rose to her feet; but, recollecting that she had no right to be indignant, sat down, and replied in a trembling voice:

"I cannot tell you, sir, any thing about my trouble. I have come here to live, and I want to be a nurse."

"Father Antoine knows me," she added, with dignity.

Father Antoine's name was a pa.s.sport. Doctor Macgowan had often wished that he could have all his nurses from the convent.

"You are a Catholic, then?" he said.

"No, indeed!" exclaimed Hetty, emphatically. "I am nothing of the sort."

"How is it that you mention Father Antoine, then?"

"He knew my father well, and me also, years ago; and he is the only friend I have here."

Dr. Macgowan had an Englishman's instinctive dislike of unexplained things and mysterious people. But Hetty's face and voice were better than pedigrees and certificates. Her confident reference to Father Antoine was also enough to allay any immediate uneasiness, and, "for the rest, time will show," thought the doctor; and, without any farther delay, he engaged Hetty as one of the day nurses in his establishment.

In after years Dr. Macgowan often looked back to this morning, and thought, with the sort of shudder with which one looks back on a danger barely escaped:

"Good G.o.d! what if I had let that woman go?"

All Hetty's native traits especially adapted her to the profession of nursing; and her superb physical health was of itself a blessing to every sick man or sick woman with whom she came in contact. Before she had been in Dr. Macgowan's house one week, all the patients had learned to listen in the morning for her step and her voice: they all wanted her, and begged to be put under her charge.

"Really, Mrs. Smailli, I shall have to cut you up into parcels," said the doctor one day: "there is not enough of you to go round. You have a marvellous knack at making sick people like you. Did you really never nurse before?"

"Not with my hands and feet," replied Hetty, "but I think I have always been a nurse at heart. I have always been so well that to be sick seems to me the most dreadful thing in the world. I believe it is the only trouble I couldn't bear."

"You do not look as if you had ever had any very hard trouble of any kind," said the doctor in a light tone, but watching keenly the effect of his words.

Dr. Macgowan was beginning to be tormented by a great desire to know more in regard to his new nurse. Father Antoine's guarded replies to all his inquiries about her had only stimulated his curiosity.

"She is a good woman. You may trust her with all your house," Father Antoine had said; and had told the doctor that he had known both her and her father twenty years ago. More than this he would not say, farther than to express the opinion that she would live and die in St. Mary's, and devote herself to her work so long as she lived.

"She has for it a grand vocation, as we say."

Father Antoine exclaimed, "A grand vocation! Ah! if we but had her in our convent!"

"You'll never get her there as long as I'm alive, Father Antoine!" Dr.

Macgowan had replied. "You may count upon that."

When Dr. Macgowan said to Hetty:

"You do not look as if you had ever had any very hard trouble of any kind," Hetty looked in his face eagerly, and answered:

"Do I not, really? I am so thankful, doctor! I have always had such a dread of looking woe-begone, and making everybody around me uncomfortable. I think that's a sin, if one can possibly help it."

And by no sudden surprise of remark or question, could the doctor ever come any nearer to Hetty's trouble than this. Her words always glanced off from direct personal issues, as subtlely and successfully as if she had been a practised diplomatist. Sometimes these perpetual evadings and non-committals seemed to Dr. Macgowan like art; but they were really the very simplicity of absolute unselfishness; and, gradually, as he came to perceive and understand this, he came to have a reverence for Hetty. He began to be ashamed of the curiosity he had felt as to the details of the sorrow which had driven her to this refuge of isolation and hard work. He began to feel about her as Father Antoine did, that there was a certain sacredness in her vocation which almost demanded a recognition of t.i.tle, an invest.i.ture of office. Hetty would have been astonished, and would have very likely laughed, had she known with what a halo of sentiment her daily life was fast being surrounded in the minds of people. To her it was simply a routine of good, wholesome work; of a kind for which she was best fitted, and which enabled her to earn a comfortable living most easily to herself, and most helpfully to others; and left her "less time to think," as she often said to herself, "than any thing else I could possibly have done." "Time to think" was the one thing Hetty dreaded. As resolutely as if they were a sin, she strove to keep out of her mind all reminiscences of her home, all thoughts of her husband, of Raby. Whenever she gave way to them, she was unfitted for work; and, therefore, her conscience said they were wrong. While she was face to face with suffering ones, and her hands were busy in ministering to their wants, such thoughts never intruded upon her. It was literally true that, in such hours, she never recollected that she was any other than Hibba Smailli, the nurse. But, when her day's work was done, and she went home to the little lonely cottage, memories flocked in at the silent door, shut themselves in with her, and refused to be banished. Hence she formed the habit of lingering in the street, of chatting with the villagers on their door-steps, playing with the children, and often, when there was illness in any of the houses, going into them, and volunteering her services as nurse.

The St. Mary's people were, almost without exception, of French descent, and still kept up many of the old French customs of out-door _fetes_ and ceremonies. Hetty found their joyous, child-like ways and manners singularly attractive and interesting. After the grim composure, and substantial, reflective methods of her New England life, the _abandon_ and unthinkingness of these French-Canadians were bewildering and delightful to her.

"The whole town is every night like a Sunday-school picnic in our country," she said once to Father Antoine. "What children all these people are!"

"Yes, daughter, it is so," replied the priest; "and it is well. Does not our good Lord say that we cannot enter into His kingdom except we become as little children?"

"Yes, I know," replied Hetty; "but I don't believe this is exactly what he meant, do you?"

"A part of what he meant," answered the priest; "not all. First, docility; and, second, joy: that is what the Church teaches."

"Your Church is better than ours in that respect," said Hetty candidly: "ours doesn't teach joy; it is pretty much all terror."

"Should a child know terror of its mother?" asked Father Antoine. "The Church is mother, and the Holy Virgin is mother. Ah, daughter! it will be a glad day when I see you in the beautiful sheltering arms."

Tears sometimes came to Hetty's eyes at such words as these; and good Father Antoine went with renewed fervor to his prayers for her conversion.

In the centre of the village was a square laid out in winding paths, and surrounded by fir trees. In the middle of this square was a great stone basin, in which a spring perpetually bubbled up; the basin had a broad brim, on which the villagers sat when they came of an evening to fill jugs and bottles with the water. On a bright summer night, the circle would often widen and widen, by men throwing themselves on the ground; children toddling from knee to knee; groups standing in eager talk here and there, until it seemed as if the whole village were gathered around the spring. These were the times when all the village affairs were discussed, and all the village gossip retailed from neighbor to neighbor. The scene was as gay and picturesque as you might see in a little town of Brittany; and the jargon of the Canadian _patois_ much more confusing than any dialect one would hear on French soil. Hetty's New England tongue utterly refused to learn this new mode of speech; but her quick and retentive ear soon learned its meanings sufficiently to follow the people in their talk. She often made one of this evening circle at the spring, and it was a pleasant sight to see the quick stir of welcome with which her approach was observed.

"Here comes the good Aunt Hibba from the Doctor's House," and mothers would push children away, and gossips would crowd, and men would stand up, all to make room for Hetty: then they would gather about her, and those who could speak English would translate for those who could not; and everybody would have something to tell her. It was an odd thing that lovers sought her more than any one else. Many a quarrel Aunt Hibba's good sense healed over; and many a worthless fellow was sent about his business, as he deserved to be, because Aunt Hibba took his sweetheart in hand, and made her see the rights of things. If a traveller, strolling about St. Mary's of a June night, had come upon these chattering groups, and seen how they centred around the st.u.r.dy, genial-faced woman, in a straight gray gown and a close white cap, he would have been arrested by the picture at once; and have wondered much who and what Hetty could be: but if you had told him that she was a farmer's daughter from Northern New England, he would have laughed in your face, and said. "Nonsense! she belongs to some of the Orders." Very emphatically would he have said this, if it had chanced to be on one of the evenings when Father Antoine was walking by Hetty's side. Father Antoine knew her custom of lingering at the great spring, and sometimes walked down there at sunset to meet her, to observe her talk with the villagers, and to walk home with her later. Nothing could be stronger proof of the reverence in which the whole village held Hetty, than the fact that it seemed to them all the most fitting and natural thing that she and Father Antoine should stand side by side speaking to the people, should walk away side by side in earnest conversation with each other.

If any man had ventured upon a jest or a ribald word concerning them, a dozen quick hands would have given him a plunge head-foremost into the great stone basin, which was the commonest expression of popular indignation in St. Mary's; a practice which, strangely enough, did not appear to interfere with anybody's relish of the waters.

Father Antoine had an old servant woman, Marie, who had lived in the Ladeau family since before he was born. She had been by the death-bed of his mother, his father, his grandmother, and of an uncle who had died at some German watering-place: wherever a Ladeau was in any need of service, thither hasted Marie; and if the need were from illness, Marie was all the happier; to lie like a hound on the floor all night, and watch by a sick and suffering Ladeau, was to Marie joy. When the young Antoine had set out for the wildernesses of North America, Marie had prayed to be allowed to come with him; and when he refused she had wept till she fell ill. At the last moment he relented, and bore the poor creature on board s.h.i.+p, wondering within himself if he would be able to keep her alive in the forests. But as soon as there was work to do for him she revived; and all these years she had kept his house, and cared for him as if he were her son. From the day of Hetty's first arrival, old Marie had adopted her into her affections: no one, not born a Ladeau, ever had won such liking from Marie. Much to Hetty's embarra.s.sment, whenever she met her, she insisted on kissing her hand, after the fas.h.i.+on of the humble servitors of great houses in France.

Probably, in all these long years of solitary service with Father Antoine, Marie had pined for the sight of some one of her own s.e.x, to whom she could give allegiance, for she was fond of telling long stories about the beautiful ladies of the house of Ladeau; and how she had attired them for b.a.l.l.s, and had seen them ride away with cavaliers.

There was neither splendor nor beauty in Hetty to attract Marie's fancy; but Marie had a religious side to her nature, almost as strong as the worldly and pa.s.sionate one. She saw in Hetty's labors an exaltation of devotion which reminded her of n.o.ble ladies who had done penances and taken pilgrimages in her own country. Father Antoine's friends.h.i.+p for Hetty, so unlike any thing Marie had seen him feel towards any woman he had met in these wilds, also stimulated her fancy.

"Ah! but it is good that he has at last a friend to whom he may speak as a Ladeau should speak. May the saints keep her! she has the good heart of one the Virgin loves," said Marie, and many a candle did she buy and keep burning on the convent's shrines for Hetty's protection and conversion.

One night Marie overheard Father Antoine say to Hetty, as he bade her good-night at the garden gate:

"My daughter, you look better and younger every day."

"Do I?" replied Hetty, cheerfully: "that's an odd thing for a woman so old as I am. My birthday is next month. I shall be forty-six."