Those who know India best, and know Miss Nightingale best, are those who are most aware of the mighty tree of ever-widening health improvement that grew from this little seed, and of the care with which Miss Nightingale helped to guard and foster it.
“She was a great Indian,” her friend General Evatt repeated to me more than once, “and what a head she had! She was the only human being I have ever met, for instance, man or woman, who had thoroughly mastered the intricate details of the Bengal land-purchase system. She loved India, and she knew it through and through. It was no wonder that every distinguished Indian who came to England went to see Miss Nightingale.”
She bore her ninety years very lightly, and made a vision serene and noble, as will be seen from our picture, though that does not give the lovely youthful colouring in contrast with the silvery hair, and we read of the great expressiveness of her hands, which, a little more, perhaps, than is usual with Englishwomen, she used in conversation.
It was a very secluded life that she lived at No. 10 South Street; but she was by no means without devotees, and the bouquet that the German Emperor sent her was but one of many offerings from many high-hearted warriors at her shrine.
And when she visited her old haunts at Lea Hurst and Embley she delighted in sending invitations to the girls growing up in those village families that she had long counted among her friends, so that to her tea-table were lovingly welcomed guests very lowly, as well as those better known to the world.
Her intense and sympathetic interest in all the preparations for nursing in the South African campaign has already been touched upon, as well as her joy that some of her own nurses from among the first probationers at St. Thomas’s were accepted in that enterprise with praise and gratitude.
It would be a serious omission not to refer my readers to a very moving letter which she wrote to Cavaliere Sebastiano Fenzi, during the Italian War of Independence in 1866, of which a part is given in Mrs. Tooley’s book, and from which I am permitted to quote the following:—
“I have given dry advice as dryly as I could. But you must permit me to say that if there is anything I could do for you at any time, and you would command me, I should esteem it the greatest honour and pleasure. I am a hopeless invalid, entirely a prisoner to my room, and overwhelmed with business. Otherwise how gladly would I answer to your call and come and do my little best for you in the dear city where I was born. If the giving my miserable life could hasten your success but by half an hour, how gladly would I give it!”
How far she was ahead of her time becomes every day more obvious; for every day the results of her teaching are gradually making themselves felt. For example, it can no longer, without qualification, be said, as she so truly said in her own day, that while “the coxcombries of education are taught to every schoolgirl” there is gross ignorance, not only among schoolgirls, but also even among mothers and nurses, with regard to “those laws which God has assigned to the relations of our bodies with the world in which He has put them. In other words, the laws which make these bodies, into which He has put our minds, healthy or unhealthy organs of those minds, are all but unlearnt. Not but that these laws—the laws of life—are in a certain measure understood, but not even mothers think it worth their while to study them—to study how to give their children healthy existences. They call it medical or physiological knowledge, fit only for doctors.”
In her old age, loved and honoured far and wide, she toiled on with all the warm enthusiasm of a girl, and the ripe wisdom of fourscore years and ten spent in the service of her one Master, for she was not of those who ever tried to serve two. And when she died at No. 10 South Street, on August 10, 1910—so peacefully that the tranquil glow of sunset descended upon her day of harvest—the following beautiful incident was recorded in Nursing Notes, to whose editor I am specially indebted for bringing to my notice the verses in which the story is told[26]:—