Nurse Elisia Part 34

"What would you like to-day?"

"Anything. Who's that? Go and see. So tiresome, disturbing me like this."

Nurse Elisia went to answer the light tap at the door, and as she opened it Aunt Anne appeared, and was sweeping by her, when her brother cried, "Stop!"

"But I have some business to transact with you, Ralph," said the lady pleadingly.

"I cannot help it. Go away now. I cannot be disturbed."

"Oh, very well, Ralph. I will come up again," said Aunt Anne in an ill-used tone.

"Wait till I send for you," said her brother sourly.

"It's all that woman's doing," said Aunt Anne to herself, as she swept down the corridor. "Oh, if I could find some means of sending her away."

"It seems as if it were my fate to make enemies here," said Nurse Elisia to herself, as she stood waiting with a book in her hand. "It is time I left, and yet life seems to have been growing sweeter in this quiet country home."

Her eyes were directed toward the window, by which a little bookcase had been placed; and, as she looked out on the beautiful garden, there was the faint dawn of a smile upon her lip, but it pa.s.sed away directly, leaving the lips white and pinched, while a curiously haggard and strange look came into her face. She craned forward and gazed out intently; there was a cold dew upon her forehead, and the hand which took out her kerchief trembled violently.

She drew back from the window, but, as if compelled by some emotion she still gazed out. Ralph Elthorne did not notice the change in the nurse's aspect, but illness had made his hearing keen, and he said sharply:

"Who is that coming up to the front?"

"Miss Elthorne, sir."

"But I can hear two people."

"A gentleman is with her."

"What gentleman? what is he like?"

There was a strange singing in Nurse Elisia's ears, as, with her voice now perfectly calm, and her emotion nearly mastered, she described the appearance of the visitor so vividly that Elthorne said at once:

"Oh, it's Burwood."

She looked at him quickly, to see that he lay back with his eyes half closed, musing, with a satisfied expression upon his face, while her own grew wondering of aspect and strange.

For her life at Hightoft had been so much confined to the sick chamber, that she knew very little of the neighbours. The Lydons had often been mentioned in her presence, and, from a hint or two let fall, she had gathered that Isabel was engaged to some baronet in the neighbourhood; but she had not heard his name, which came to her now as a surprise, while the fact of his being in company with the daughter of the house, and the satisfied look upon the father's countenance, left no doubt in her mind that this was the suitor of his choice.

The current of her thoughts was broken by her patient, who seemed to wake up from a doze.

"Ah, you are there?" he said. "I must have dropped asleep, and was dreaming that you had gone out for your walk, and I could not make anybody hear. Have I been asleep long?"

"Very few minutes, sir. In fact, I did not know you were asleep."

"Ah, one dreams a great deal in a very short time. You were going to read to me, weren't you?"

"Yes, sir. Shall I begin?"

"You may as well, though I would as soon think." There was a gentle tap at the door.

"Come in. No; see who that is, nurse. Why am I to be so worried! I'm not ill now," he cried peevishly.

She crossed to the door and opened it, to find Isabel standing there, flushed and evidently agitated.

"May I come in and sit with you a little while, papa?" she said.

Elthorne shook his head.

"No," he cried shortly, "and I will not be interrupted so. Your aunt was here just now. Pray do not be so tiresome, my dear child. I will send for you if I want you. Why have you left Burwood?"

A sob rose to Isabel's throat, and as she saw the nurse standing there, book in hand, a feeling of dislike began to grow within her breast.

For why should not this be her task? Why was this strange woman to be always preferred to her? It should have been her office to read to the sick man, and she would gladly have undertaken the duty.

"I am very sorry I came, papa, but I see you so seldom," she said softly. "Papa, dear, let me come and read to you."

"No, no," cried Elthorne peevishly. "Nurse is going to read. Besides, you have company downstairs. Burwood has not gone?"

"No, papa."

"And you come away and leave him? There, go down again, and do, pray, help your aunt to keep up some of the old traditions of the place. What will Burwood think?"

Isabel gave a kind of gasp, her forehead wrinkled up, and the tears rose to her eyes, but at that moment she saw those of the nurse fixed upon her inquiringly, and in an instant she flushed up and darted a look full of resentment at "this woman," who appeared to be gratifying a vulgar curiosity at her expense.

"Did you hear me, Isabel?" cried her father, querulously. "Pray, go down. You fidget me. Go down to Burwood, and if he asks, tell him I am very much better, and that I shall be glad to see him soon."

"Yes, papa," she said faintly; and turning back to the door, she had her hand upon it, when, moved by an affectionate impulse, she ran back quickly, bent down and kissed him.

"Good girl!" he said. "Good girl! Now make haste down."

She glanced quickly at the nurse, and the resentful flush once more suffused her cheeks, for those eyes were still watching her, and this time there was a smile upon the slightly parted lips.

The girl's eyelids dropped a little and she replied with a fixed stare before once more reaching the door and pa.s.sing out.

"How dare she!" thought Isabel, trembling now with indignation. "She quite triumphs over one. Aunt is right; she is not nice. She seems to contrive to stand between me and papa. It is not prejudice, and I shall be very, very glad when she is gone." The door had hardly closed upon her, when, in a fretful way, Ralph Elthorne exclaimed:

"Now, go on; go on!"

The nurse began reading directly, an Old World poem of chivalry, honour, and self-denial; and as the soft, rich, deep tones of her voice floated through the room, Ralph Elthorne's head sank back, his eyes closed, and his breath came slowly and regularly.

But the reader had grown interested in the words she read. The story of the poem seemed to fit with her own life of patient long-suffering and self-denial, and she read on, throwing more and more feeling into the writer's lines. At last, in the culminating point of the story, her voice began to tremble, her eyes became dim, the book dropped into her lap, and a low faint sob escaped from her lips, as the pent up, long suppressed agony of her heart now broke its bounds, and, as her face went down into her hands, she had to fight hard to keep from bursting into a fit of hysterical weeping.

For, only a short hour before, the deep wound of the past had suddenly been torn open, and memory had come with a rush of incidents to torture her with the recollections of the bygone, of the rude awakening from the golden dream of her girlhood's first love to the fact that the man who had first made her heart increase its pulsations, the man she had believed in her bright, young imagination to be the soul of chivalrous honour, was a contemptible, low-minded _roue_. How she had refused to believe it at first, and insisted to herself that all she had heard was base calumny; and she had gone on defending him with indignation till the cruel facts were forced upon her, and in one short minute she had turned from a trustful, pa.s.sionate, loving girl, to the disillusioned woman, with no hope but to find some occupation which would deaden the misery of her heart.

Since then her life had been one of patient self-denial, at first in toiling among the suffering in the sordid homes of misery in one of the worst parts of London. Here, while tending a woman dying of neglect and injuries inflicted by some inhuman brute, it had struck her that she might enlist the sympathies of the great surgeon whose name had long been familiar, and ask him to come and try to save the woman's life.

To think with her was to act, and she waited on him humbly and patiently, all the time trembling for the consequence to the injured woman left almost alone. But at last her turn came, and she was ushered into Sir Denton's presence.