In the meantime, by a subscription raised by the well-to-do in the parish, the services of a trained nurse had been secured, and old Jimmy had been asked to give her a lodging. Everybody knew how clean and neat Milly kept everything, and it was unanimously agreed at the meeting, which had been hastily summoned, that the nurse would be as comfortable there as anywhere else in the village.
Old Jimmy at first demurred, on account his granddaughter; but Milly herself soon argued him out of his objections.
"The fever is in the air, grandfather," she said. "I take all ordinary precautions against it. I boil and filter every drop of water we drink, and I never let anything dirty lie about anywhere, and am as particular as can be about every morsel of food we eat, and I don't see as I can do no more. If I'm to catch it I shall, but not from the nurse, I know, unless she takes it herself; for this typhoid is not like scarlet fever or smallpox—you can't carry it about in your clothes, but only take it immediate one from another. I'm not afraid of the nurse if you're not."
So Jimmy gave in, and one hot evening the nurse arrived. Mrs. Crowe, the vicar's housekeeper, met her at the station, and brought her to her new quarters. The white dust lay thick on the road, and the hedges all along were choked with it. A porter from the station followed with her box on a barrow. A most formidable box it was. It quite frightened Milly when she saw it. She thought she must be having a very grand lady to stay with her. But the nurse soon explained that it was simply filled with linen.
"I've brought enough to last me a month or two," she said, "and my aprons weigh so heavy; but if we can't get it up your stairs, why, we can just unpack it in the parlour and carry the things up in our arms. You need not worry about that."
Milly had set out a cosy tea in the little front room that opened into the garden—some nice home-made bread (for Milly always did her own baking), some butter and blackberry jam, and a boiled egg and some toast—in case the traveller was hungry after her hot journey. The tea was in a brown earthenware pot—which, as everybody is not fortunate enough to know, makes the very best tea in the world—and the cloth was spotless, and the knives and spoons well polished. Nurse cast a satisfied glance round before she followed Milly to the little bedroom upstairs. She had had plenty of experience, and she knew the signs of good housekeeping almost at a glance. There was no carpet in the room, but the flooring was exquisitely clean; some white curtains of a material that Milly's grandmother, who had made them and hung up forty years ago, had called "dimity;" the little wooden bedstead stood a little out from the wall, and the sheets and pillow-cases were as white as careful washing could make them. A rush-bottomed chair and a little table, with the necessary washing apparatus, completed the furniture. A jug of hot water stood in the basin, and a pair of clean towels and a fresh piece of brown Windsor soap looked inviting.
Nurse sat down and removed her bonnet, opened her little black hand-bag, and took out a sponge and a brush and comb; and Milly, with a pleasant "hope she found all to her liking," slipped away to make the tea. She had asked Mrs. Crowe to stay and have a cup with them, for she was, not unnaturally, a little shy of her new lodger. It was her first experience of having any one but her grandfather to look after, and she felt a little anxious.
As soon as tea was over Milly put a note into the nurse's hands. It had been left there, she said, by the doctor, who would be much obliged, did not nurse feel too tired, if she would come to him in the cool of the evening, and he would explain her duties to her.
The conversation naturally turned on the prevailing topic of the typhoid epidemic. Nurse, who had been a couple of years in a London hospital, had had a good deal of experience of this fever, and she told her listeners many interesting things which were useful for them to know just then. She was a pleasant-faced, kind-looking woman of about forty years of age, with a slightly dictatorial manner, which was perhaps the result of her training; for she had worked for several years as parish nurse in poor districts, and often, as she told them, met with terrible ignorance, and that obstinacy which so often accompanies it. People would not believe in infection, she said; they would not take the most ordinary, the most simple precautions; and what was worse, when they had learned by the bitter experience of the loss of, perhaps, their nearest and their dearest, they still persisted in the utter disregard of cleanliness and health.
"And that, no doubt, is the secret of this outbreak at Willowton. I have not been told so, but I take that for granted," said the nurse.