She helped in the training of young voices in the village, and was among the entertainers when the carol-singers enjoyed their mince-pies and annual coins in the hall. The workhouse knew her well, and any wise enterprise in the neighbourhood for help or healing among the poor and the sad was sure of her presence and of all the co-operation in the power of her neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert, with whom for some years before the Crimea she shared much companionship in such work. This friendship was an important influence in our heroine’s life, for Mr. Herbert was of those who reveal to the dullest a little of the divine beauty and love, and his wife was through all their married life his faithful and devoted friend, so that they made a strong trio of sympathetic workers; for “Liz,” as her husband usually called her in his letters to their common friend Florence Nightingale, seemed to have fully shared his unbounded faith in the noble powers and high aims of the said Florence, whom she too loved and admired. She was a daughter of General Charles Ashe à Court, and she and Sidney Herbert had known one another as children. Indeed, it was in those early days, when she was quite a little child, that Elizabeth, who grew up to be one of the most beautiful women of her day, said of Sidney, then, of course, a mere boy, that that was the boy she was going to marry, and that she would never marry any one else. Many a long year, however, had rolled between before he rode over to Amington from Drayton, where he often met her, though no longer such near neighbours as in the early Wiltshire days, and asked the beautiful Elizabeth to be his wife. The intimacy between the two families had never ceased, and General à Court, himself member for Wilton, had worked hard for Sidney’s first election for the county. We shall hear more of these dear and early friends of Florence Nightingale as her story unfolds, but let us turn now for a moment to herself.
Her life was many-sided, and her devotion to good works did not arise from any lack of knowledge of the world. She was presented, of course, like other girls of her order, and had her “seasons” in London as well as her share in country society. A young and lovely girl, whose father had been wise enough to give her all the education and advantages of a promising boy, and who excelled also in every distinctive feminine accomplishment and “pure womanliness,” had her earthly kingdom at her feet. But her soul was more and more deeply bent on a life spent in service and consecrated to the good of others. Her Sunday class, in the old building known as the “Chapel” at Lea Hurst, was but one of her many efforts in her father’s special domain in Derbyshire, and girls of every faith came to her there without distinction of creed. They were mostly workers in the hosiery mills owned by John Smedley, and many of them, like their master, were Methodists. She sang to them, and they still remember the sweetness of her voice and “how beautifully Miss Florence used to talk,” as they sat together through many a sunny afternoon in the tiny stone building overlooking Lea Hurst gardens. Cromford Church, built by Sir Richard Arkwright, was then comparatively new, and time had not made of it the pretty picture that it is now, in its bosoming trees above the river; but it played a considerable part in Florence Nightingale’s youth, when the vicar and the Arkwright of her day—old Sir Richard’s tomb in the chancel bears the earlier date of 1792—organized many a kind scheme for the good of the parish, in which the squire’s two daughters gave their help.
But Miss Nightingale was not of a type to consider these amateur pleasures a sufficient training for her life-work, and that life-work was already taking a more or less definite shape in her mind.
She herself has written:—
“I would say to all young ladies who are called to any particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it as a man does for his work. Don’t think you can undertake it otherwise. Submit yourselves to the rules of business as men do, by which alone you can make God’s business succeed, for He has never said that He will give His success and His blessing to sketchy and unfinished work.” And on another occasion she wrote that “three-fourths of the whole mischief in women’s lives arises from their excepting themselves from the rules of training considered needful for men.”
It has already been said that her thought was more and more directed towards nursing, and in various ways she was quietly preparing herself to that end.
Her interview with the Quaker-saint, Elizabeth Fry, though deliberately sought and of abiding effect, was but a brief episode. It was about this time that they met in London. The serene old Quakeress, through whose countenance looked forth such a heavenly soul, was no doubt keenly interested in the ardent, witty, beautiful girl who came to her for inspiration and counsel. They had much in common, and who knows but the older woman, with all her weight of experience, her saintly character, and ripened harvest, may yet in some ways have felt herself the younger of the two; for she had come to that quiet threshold of the life beyond, where a soul like hers has part in the simple joys of the Divine Child, and looks tenderly on those who are still in the fires of battle through which they have passed.
Her own girlhood had defied in innocent ways the strictness of the Quaker rule. Imagine a young Quakeress of those days wearing, as she had done on occasion, a red riding habit!
She had been fond of dancing, and would have, I suspect, a very healthy human interest in the activities of a girl in Society, though she would enter into Florence Nightingale’s resolve that her life should not be frittered away in a self-centred round, while men and women, for whom her Master died, were themselves suffering a slow death in workhouses and prisons and hospitals, with none to tend their wounds of soul and body.