“I heard weeping, and I thought they appeared much tendered; a very solemn quiet was observed; it was a striking scene, the poor people on their knees around us, in their deplorable condition.”
And the Times goes on to say, “nothing appears but those qualities of helpfulness, sympathy, and love which could tame the most savage natures, silence the voice of profanity and blasphemy, and subdue all around her by a sense of her common sisterhood even with the vilest of them in the love of God and the service of man.... But the deepest note of her nature was an intense enthusiasm of humanity. It was this which inspired and sustained all her efforts from first to last—even in her earlier and more frivolous days—for the welfare and uplifting of her fellow-creatures; and it is only right to add that it was itself sustained by her deep and abiding conviction that it is only by the love of God that the service of man can be sanctified and made to prosper.” A letter followed next day from Mr. Julian Hill, who actually remembers her, and tells how the Institution of Nursing Sisters which she organized grew out of her deep pity for the victims of Sairey Gamp and her kind.
All this was preparing the way for the wider and more successful nursing crusade in which her memory and influence were to inspire the brave young soul of Florence Nightingale. Speaking of all the difficulties that a blindly conventional world is always ready to throw in the way of any such new path, her old friend writes: “Such difficulties Mrs. Fry and Miss Nightingale brushed contemptuously aside.”
But in our story Miss Nightingale is as yet only lately out of the schoolroom. And Elizabeth Fry’s life was by no means alone, as we have seen, in its preparation of her appointed path, for about the time that Florence Nightingale was taking her place in the brilliant society that met about her father’s board, and Felicia Skene was “coming out,” a new experiment was being made by a devout member of the Lutheran Church, an experiment which was to play an important part in the world’s history, though so quietly and unobtrusively carried out.
We must not anticipate—we shall read of that in a later chapter.
CHAPTER V.
Home duties and pleasures—The brewing of war.
Florence was very happy as her mother’s almoner, and in her modest and unobtrusive way was the life and soul of the village festivities that centred in the church and school and were planned in many instances by her father and mother. It is one of the happy characteristics of our time that much innocent grace and merriment have been revived in the teaching of beautiful old morris dances and other peasant festivities that had been banished by the rigour of a perverted Puritanism, and the squire of Lea Hurst and his wife were before their time in such matters. There was a yearly function of prize-giving and speech-making and dancing, known as the children’s “Feast Day,” to which the scholars came in procession to the Hall, with their wreaths and garlands, to the music of a good marching band provided by the squire, and afterwards they had tea in the fields below the Hall garden, served by Mrs. Nightingale and her daughters and the Hall servants, and then ended their day with merry outdoor dancing. For the little ones Florence planned all kinds of games; the children, indeed, were her special care, and by the time the evening sun was making pomp of gold and purple in the sky above the valley of the Derwent, there came the crowning event of the day when on the garden terrace the two daughters of the house distributed their gifts to the happy scholars.
Mrs. Tooley in her biography calls up for us in a line or two a vision of Florence as she was remembered by one old lady, who had often been present and recalled her slender charm, herself as sweet as the rose which she often wore in her neatly braided hair, brown hair with a glint of gold in it, glossy and smooth and characteristic of youth and health. We have from one and another a glimpse of the harmonious simplicity also of her dress—the soft muslin gown, the little silk fichu crossed upon her breast, the modest Leghorn bonnet with its rose. Or in winter, riding about in the neighbourhood of Embley and distributing her little personal gifts at Christmas among the old women—tea and warm petticoats—her “ermine tippet and muff and beaver hat.”