Faith Gartney's Girlhood, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney [good e books to read .txt] 📗

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 constitute 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 shirked, there'd be a stitch 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 breasts 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 scrape Loolie Lloyd had got into with mixing up and misdating her engagements at the class, 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."

The doctor looked at his patient gravely.

"Can't you be content with simply picking up things, and putting them by, for this year? What I ought to tell you to do would be to send business to the right about, and go off for an entire rest and change, for three months, at least."

"You don't know what you're talking about, doctor!"

"Perhaps not, on one side of the subject. I feel pretty certain on the other, however."

Mr. Gartney did not send for Braybrook that afternoon. The next morning, however, he came, and the tabooed books and papers were got out.

In another day or two, Miss Sampson _did_ pack her carpetbag, and go back to her air-tight stove and solitary cups of tea. Her occupation in Hickory Street was gone.


CHAPTER XI.

CROSS CORNERS.

"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the Gods for a kingdom, wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth, the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!"--CARLYLE.

"It is of no use to talk about it," said Mr. Gartney, wearily. "If I live--as long as I live--I must do business. How else are you to get along?"

"How shall we get along if you do _not_ live?" asked his wife, in a low, anxious tone.

"My life's insured," was all Mr. Gartney's answer.

"Father!" cried Faith, distressfully.

Faith had been taken more and more into counsel and confidence with her parents since the time of the illness that had brought them all so close together. And more and more helpful she had grown, both in word and doing, since she had learned to look daily for the daily work set before her, and to perform it conscientiously, even although it consisted only of little things. She still remembered with enthusiasm Nurse Sampson and the "drumsticks," and managed to pick up now and then one for herself. Meantime she began to see, indistinctly, before her, the vision of a work that must be done by some one, and the duty of it pressed hourly closer home to herself. Her father's health had never been fully reestablished. He had begun to use his strength before and faster than it came. There was danger--it needed no Dr. Gracie, even, to tell them so--of grave disease, if this went on. And still, whenever urged, his answer was the same. "What would become of his family without his business?"

Faith turned these things over and over in her mind.

"Father," said she, after a while--the conversation having been dropped at the old conclusion, and nobody appearing to have anything more to say--"I don't know anything about business; but I wish you'd tell me how much money you've got!"

Her father laughed; a sad sort of laugh though, that was not so much amusement as tenderness and pity. Then, as if the whole thing were a mere joke, yet with a shade upon his face that betrayed there was far too much truth under the jest, after all, he took out his portemonnaie and told her to look and see.

"You know I don't mean that, father! How much in the bank, and everywhere?"

"Precious little in the bank, now, Faithie. Enough to keep house with for a year, nearly, perhaps. But if I were to take it and go off and spend it in traveling, you can understand that the housekeeping would fall short, can't you?"

Faith looked horrified. She was bringing down her vague ideas of money that came from somewhere, through her father's pocket, as water comes from Lake Kinsittewink by the turning of a faucet, to the narrow point of actuality.

"But that isn't all, I know! I've heard you talk about railroad dividends,