“Ugh!” shrieked Nurse Vischet. “I think it’s dying. I wouldn’t touch it for the world!”
One of the symptoms of the human patient’s illness were agonizing headaches, during which she could scarcely bear a ray of light in the room. In spite of frequent requests, Nurse Vischet always seized the occasion to turn the ceiling electric light full on the bed, and when at last forbidden to do so, she declined to enter a room in which she could not see her way. The Signora gave her the name of her “ministering devil.” She was a rabid Socialist, and had peculiar theories, one of which we remember was that condemned criminals should be handed over to the laboratories for vivisection.
She had also to an acute degree the hospital nurse’s capacity for upsetting the household. Our butler, a hot-tempered man, happened to drop a stray “damn” in the hearing of the under-housemaid, and Vischet, hanging on the landing over the kitchen regions, as she was fond of doing, overheard the dread word. The whole establishment was turned upside down. Maggie was told that she “owed it to her womanhood” not to allow foul language in her presence. Maggie gave notice, but being, after all, an Irish girl with a sense of humour, was as easily soothed down as she had been worked up. Certainly, however, if we had kept Nurse Vischet, we should have lost, one by one, our excellent staff of servants. Besides playing on their feelings against each other, she had a horrible trick of telling them they were at the last gasp upon the smallest ailment. She did not like her patient to have symptoms; but she encouraged the domestics to fly to her with theirs.
Irish Maggie had an indigestion. Vischet declared her condition to be of extreme gravity. She rushed to the Signora with her tale. Maggie was ordered to bed. Vischet produced an immense tin of antiphlogistine with which to arrest “the mischief.”
The daughter of the house went up to visit the sick girl, and came down laughing to console her mother.
“You needn’t worry about Maggie,” she said, and gave a pleasant little description of the scene and the invalid’s remarks.
“Ah, sure I’m all right, miss. It’s all along of a bit of green apple. Sure, Mrs. MacComfort has just given me a drop of ginger, and it’s done me a lot of good already. Do you see what Nurse is after bringing me? God bless us all, wouldn’t I rather die itself than be spreading that putty on me! I’ll be up for tea, miss.”
“She looks as rosy as possible,” went on the comforter, “and ever so nice with her hair in a great thick plait tied with ribbons, grass green, for Ireland.”
Through one recollection Vischet will always remain endeared to the mind of her victim; and that was for her singular pronunciation. There was a story to which the Signora was fond of leading up relating to por-poises, (pronounced to rhyme with noises), and another connected with a tor-toise, which happened to be the pet of a recent “case.” There was also a little tale of a dog: “I was out walking on the embankment,” said Vischet, “and I saw a man coming along leading two dogs—one was a great bulldog, and the other was one of those queer creatures you call a dashun” (the Signora prides herself on her intelligence for instantly discovering that the narrator meant a dachshund). “And there was running about loose the queerest animal ever I saw,” went on the nurse; “it had the head of a bulldog and the legs of a dashun.”