Naturally there must have been exceptions; and naturally, too, this state of affairs could not have applied to some of the more miserable quarters of the towns. Nevertheless, the Ireland of a quarter of a century ago had not forgotten she had once been called the Island of Saints; and her mothers and daughters kept very preciously the vestal flame alive in their pure breasts.
Times have changed, and more’s the pity, as we have said. But now and again a flower blooms as if upon the old roots, and though Mary O’Toole is transplanted to England, we trust that she may keep her infantile innocence and her exquisite—there is no English equivalent—pudeur.
It was a picture to see her in her cornflower-blue cotton frock, with her irrepressible hair tucked as tidily as nature would allow beneath her white cap, staggering under the weight of a tray charged with refreshments for the wounded. She is about five-foot nothing, with a throat the average male hand could encircle with a finger and thumb, but among the twenty soldiers, all of different ages, classes, and, of course, dispositions, who visited us that day, there was not one but regarded her with as much respect as if she had been six foot high and as ill-favoured as Sally Brass—we hope, however, with considerably more pleasure.
When the blue-coat boys have been duly refreshed, they wander out into the garden. They remind one irresistibly of a school, and there is something tenderly droll in their complete submission to the little plump sister, who orders them about with a soft voice and certain authority.
“No. 20, come out of the sun. No. 15, I’d rather you didn’t sit on the grass.”
Then she turns apologetically to us: “It isn’t that I don’t know it’s quite dry.” (We should think it was, on our sandy heights, after five weeks’ drought!) “But I never know quite where I am with the gassed cases. That’s the worst of them. They’re perfectly well one day, and we say, ‘Thank goodness, that’s all over,’ and the next day its up in his eyes, perhaps!”
“I’ll never be the same man again,” suddenly exclaims a short, saturnine young Canadian, who has not—a marked exception to the others—once smiled since he came, and who keeps a dark grudge in his eyes. He seems perfectly well, except for that curious expression, to our uninitiated gaze, but his voice is weak and there is a languor about his movements extraordinarily out of keeping with his build, which is all for strength, like that of a young Hercules.
“I’ll never be the same man again; I feel that. It’s shortened my life by a many years. So it has with them over there.” He jerks his thumb towards his comrades in misfortune. “They’ll none of them ever be the same men again.”
The Signora tries feebly to protest, but the nurse acquiesces placidly. It is the hospital way, and not a bad way either; misfortunes are not minimized, they are faced.