And flit from room to room.
“And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.”
“Ah,” said to me old John Ball, the veteran of the Crimea, who had been wounded at Alma and been at Scutari a month before her arrival, so that in his later days there he saw the changes that she wrought, “ah, she was a good soul—she was a good woman!” And through his words, and those of the other old men who remembered her, it was possible to discern a little of the glow, the humour, the homely maternal tenderness with which the Wohlgebohrene Dame had comforted young and old in their hours of patriotic wounding and pain.
For herself, in the long days of sacrificial service, was there any human solace, any dear companionship, any dawning light of love?
For us at least, the mere outsiders, to whom she is just a very practical saint and a very great woman, “there lives no record of reply.” But we know that, though hers was the solitary path, which yet was no solitude because of the outpoured love and sympathy to others, when in her presence once some one was chattering about the advantages of “single blessedness,” she, with her quick sense of humour, replied that a fish out of water might be blessed, but a good deal of effort was needed to become accustomed to the air!
None of the letters describing the Scutari life are more interesting than those of Sister Aloysius, the Irish Sister of Mercy, from whose graphic descriptions quotations have already been made.
“She and her companions had had only a few hours in which to prepare for a long and dangerous journey, with the details of which they were quite unacquainted, only knowing that they were to start for Turkey at half-past seven in the morning, and that they went for the love of God.