“How dare she!” thought Isabel, trembling now with indignation. “She quite triumphs over one. Aunt is right; she is not nice. She seems to contrive to stand between me and papa. It is not prejudice, and I shall be very, very glad when she is gone.” The door had hardly closed upon her, when, in a fretful way, Ralph Elthorne exclaimed:
“Now, go on; go on!”
The nurse began reading directly, an Old World poem of chivalry, honour, and self-denial; and as the soft, rich, deep tones of her voice floated through the room, Ralph Elthorne’s head sank back, his eyes closed, and his breath came slowly and regularly.
But the reader had grown interested in the words she read. The story of the poem seemed to fit with her own life of patient long-suffering and self-denial, and she read on, throwing more and more feeling into the writer’s lines. At last, in the culminating point of the story, her voice began to tremble, her eyes became dim, the book dropped into her lap, and a low faint sob escaped from her lips, as the pent up, long suppressed agony of her heart now broke its bounds, and, as her face went down into her hands, she had to fight hard to keep from bursting into a fit of hysterical weeping.
For, only a short hour before, the deep wound of the past had suddenly been torn open, and memory had come with a rush of incidents to torture her with the recollections of the bygone, of the rude awakening from the golden dream of her girlhood’s first love to the fact that the man who had first made her heart increase its pulsations, the man she had believed in her bright, young imagination to be the soul of chivalrous honour, was a contemptible, low-minded roué. How she had refused to believe it at first, and insisted to herself that all she had heard was base calumny; and she had gone on defending him with indignation till the cruel facts were forced upon her, and in one short minute she had turned from a trustful, passionate, loving girl, to the disillusioned woman, with no hope but to find some occupation which would deaden the misery of her heart.
Since then her life had been one of patient self-denial, at first in toiling among the suffering in the sordid homes of misery in one of the worst parts of London. Here, while tending a woman dying of neglect and injuries inflicted by some inhuman brute, it had struck her that she might enlist the sympathies of the great surgeon whose name had long been familiar, and ask him to come and try to save the woman’s life.
To think with her was to act, and she waited on him humbly and patiently, all the time trembling for the consequence to the injured woman left almost alone. But at last her turn came, and she was ushered into Sir Denton’s presence.
He heard her patiently, and shook his head.
“It is impossible, my dear young lady,” he said sharply. “I can but battle with a few of the atoms of misery in the vast sands of troubled life. From your description of the case, I fear I can do no good, and my time for seeing patients here at home is over, while a score of poor creatures are lying in agony at my hospital waiting their turn.”
She looked at him despairingly, and he spoke more gently.