The Royal Pension Fund for Nurses also, in which Queen Alexandra was so specially interested, helped to crown the fulfilment of Miss Nightingale’s early dream and long, steadfast life-work.
But equally important, though less striking, has been the growing harvest of her quiet, courteous efforts to help village mothers to understand the laws of health, her pioneer-work in regard to all the dangers of careless milk-farms, her insistence on the importance of pure air as well as pure water, though she had always been careful to treat the poor man’s rooftree as his castle and never to cross his doorstep except by permission or invitation.
After the death of her father at Embley in 1874—a very peaceful death, commemorated in the inscription on his tomb, “In Thy light we shall see light,” which suggests in him a nature at once devout and sincere—she was much with her mother, in the old homes at Embley and Lea Hurst, though Lea Hurst was the one she loved best, and the beech-wood walk in Lea Woods, with its radiant shower of golden leaves in the autumn, for which she would sometimes delay her leaving, is still specially associated with her memory: and her thoughtfulness for the poor still expressed itself in many different ways—in careful gifts, for instance, through one whom she trusted for knowledge and tact; in her arrangement that pure milk should be sent daily from the home dairy at Lea Hurst to those in need of it.
With faithful love she tended her mother to the time of her death in 1880, and there seems to be a joyous thanksgiving for that mother’s beauty of character in the words the two sisters inscribed to her memory: “God is love—Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”
After her mother’s death, when the property had passed into the hands of Mr. William Shore Nightingale, she still visited her kinsman there and kept up her interest in the people of the district.
Among the outward events of her life, after her return from the Crimea, one of the earliest had been the marriage of her sister Parthenope, who in 1858 became the second wife of Sir Harry Verney,[20] and her home at Claydon in Buckinghamshire was thenceforth a second home to Miss Nightingale. It need hardly be said that in Sir Harry Verney’s various generous schemes for the good of the neighbourhood, schemes in which his wife cordially co-operated, Miss Nightingale took a warm and sympathetic pleasure. His keen interest in army reform was, of course, a special ground of comradeship. Miss Nightingale divided her time chiefly between her own home in South Street, Park Lane, and visits to the rooms that were reserved for her at Claydon. One of her great interests while at Claydon, soon after her sister’s marriage, had been the building of the new Buckinghamshire Infirmary in 1861, of which her sister laid the foundation; and her bust still adorns the entrance hall.
Mrs. Tooley reminds us that not only was Lady Verney well known in literary and political circles, but also her books on social questions had the distinction of being quoted in the House of Commons. She gives many interesting details with regard to the philanthropic and political work of Sir Harry Verney and his family, but it is hardly necessary to duplicate them here, since her book is still available. Lady Verney’s death in 1890, after a long and painful illness, following on that of her father and mother, bereaved Miss Nightingale of a lifelong companionship, and might have left her very lonely but for her absorbing work and her troops of friends.
How fruitful that work was we may dimly see when we remember that—to instance one branch of it only—in ten years the death-rate in the army in India, which her efforts so determinately strove to lessen, fell from sixty-nine per thousand to eighteen per thousand.[21] She strove—and not in vain—to improve the sanitary conditions of immense areas of undrained country, but she also endeavoured to bring home to the rank and file of the army individual teaching.
She gives in one of her pamphlets a delightful story of men who came to a district in India supposed to be fatal to any new-comer, but, strong in their new hygienic knowledge, determined not to have cholera. They lived carefully, they grew their own garden produce, they did not give way to fear, and all, without exception, escaped.
To return for a moment to Britain, since a separate chapter is reserved for India. She was before her day in contending that foul air was one of the great causes of consumption and other diseases. And her teaching was ever given with courtesy and consideration. How strongly she felt on this and kindred subjects, and how practical her help was, we see clearly in her letters and pamphlets. She delighted in making festivities for companies of nurses and of her other hard-working friends. And in St. Paul’s fine sense of the phrase, she was no “respecter of persons”: she reverenced personality, not accidental rank. She had no patience with those visiting ladies who think they may intrude at all hours of the day into the homes of the poor, and her quick sense of humour delighted in many of the odd speeches which would have shocked the prim and conventional. She thought the highest compliment ever paid to her staff of nurses who visited in the homes of the poor was the speech of the grubby ragamuffin, who seemed to think they could wash off even the blackness of the Arch-fiend and, when being scrubbed, cried out, “You may bathe the divil.”