The Forlorn Hope: A Tale of Old Chelsea

by Mrs. S. C. Hall

“The very thing,”—said the doctor, who, with all his kindness, was one of those who think “so and so,” because “all the faculty” thought “so and so,” for such a number of years;—“its being tedious is the very thing; it is quite a FORLORN HOPE.”

“But, sir,” answered the soldier’s daughter, “Forlorn hopes have sometimes led to GREAT VICTORIES, when they have been FORLORN, but not FORSAKEN.”

The doctor pressed into her hand the latest fee he had received, and descended the stairs. “That is a very extraordinary girl, madam, in the nursery,” he said to the lady, “something very superior about her; but she will get worse and worse; nothing for her but a more genial climate, constant care, perfect rest, careful diet: if she lives through the winter she must go in the spring. Lungs! chest! blisters will relieve her; and if we could produce the climate of Madeira here for a winter or so, she might revive; but, poor thing, in her situation—”

The lady shook her head, and repeated, “Ay; in her situation.”

“It is really frightful,” he continued, “the hundreds—thousands, I may say—who drop off in this dreadful disease; the flower of our maidens; the finest of our youths; no age, no sex, exempt from it. We have only casual practice to instruct us in it; we have no opportunity of watching and analyzing it, en masse, as we have with other complaints; it is turned out of our hospitals before we do what we even fancy might be done; it is indeed, as she said just now, ‘forlorn’ and ‘forsaken.’ Why, I know not; I really wish some one would establish an hospital for the cure, or, at least, the investigation of this disease; many, if taken in time, would be saved. Suffering, the most intense, but, perhaps, the best endured, from the very nature of the complaint, would be materially lessened, and a fresh and noble field opened for an almost new branch of our profession.”

The physician prescribed for Lucy. He saw her again, and would have seen her repeatedly, but the family left town suddenly, in consequence of the death of a near relative, and the very belief that nothing could be done for her, circumstanced as she was, contributed to her being forgotten. The human mind has a natural desire to blot out from memory objects that are hopeless. Lucy went to Mary’s humble lodging, and fancied, for a day or two, she was much better. She had the repose which such illness so naturally seeks. Mary’s room was on the ground floor of a small house, in a little street leading off “Paradise-row.” The old pensioners frequently passed the window; she could hear the beat of the Asylum drums; sometimes they awoke her out of her sleep in the morning; but she liked them none the less for that. Mary put away her poor master’s hat (which she brushed every morning), his sword and sash, and his gloves, in her own box, when Lucy came, least the sight of them should make her melancholy; but Lucy saw their marks upon the wall, and begged she would replace them there. She gave her little store, amounting to a few pounds, into the nurse’s hands, who spent it scrupulously for her—and yet not prudently; for she ran after every nostrum, and insisted upon Lucy’s swallowing them all. Sometimes the fading girl would creep along in the sunshine, and so changed was she, in little more than a year, that no one recognised her, though some would look after her, and endeavour to call to mind who it was she so strongly resembled.

The only living thing that rejoiced with Mary over her return, was a lean, hungry dog, the favourite of an out-pensioner who died about six months before the sergeant-major. It was ill-favoured, but faithful, remaining many nights upon its master’s grave. Lucy coaxed it home and fed it; and though the creature’s erratic disposition prevented its accepting the refuge she then offered, he would come in occasionally for a night’s lodging, or a breakfast, and depart without a single wag of his stunted tail. When Lucy left Chelsea, Mary almost lost sight of the dog, though she met him sometimes, and then he would look to her—a sort of recognition—and walk on. The morning after Lucy’s return, while she lay upon her nurse’s bed, the door was poked open by a thick, grizzled nose, and in another instant the pensioner’s dog rushed to her, expressing his joy by the most uncouth sounds and motions, screaming while licking her hands, and, when his excitement subsided, lying down inside the door, with his eyes fixed upon her, baffling all Mary’s efforts to turn him out. Beauty, after all, has very little to do with the affections; after its first sun stroke, it loses most of its power. Lucy had the keen appreciation of the beautiful which belongs to a refined mind in every situation of life; yet the gratitude of that poor ugly dog attached her to him; through all her sufferings, when her nurse was out at work, he was a companion, something to speak to. The little store was soon expended, though Mary would not confess it; Lucy, skilled in the womanly craft of needlework, laboured unceasingly; and, as long as she was able to apply to it, Mary found a market for her industry. But as the disease gained ground, her efforts became more feeble, and then the faithful nurse put forth all her strength, all her ingenuity, to disguise the nature of their situation; the expense of the necessary medicine, inefficient as it was, would have procured her every alleviating Comfort—if there had been an Institution to supply it.

I have often borne testimony to that which I have more often witnessed—the deep, earnest, and steadfast fidelity of the humbler Irish! yet I have never been able to render half justice to the theme. If they be found wanting in all other good or great qualities, they are still true in this—ever faithful, enduring, unwearied, unmoved; past all telling is their fidelity! The woman whose character I am now describing, was but one example of a most numerous class. Well she would have known, if she had given the matter a thought, that no chance or change could ever enable Lucy to repay her services, or recompence her for her sacrifices and cares; yet her devotion was a thousand times more fervent than if it had been purchased by all the bribes that a kingdom’s wealth could yield. By the mere power of her zeal—her earnest and utterly unselfish love—she obtained a hearing from many governors of hospitals; stated the case of “her young lady,” as she called her, the child of a brave man, who had served his country, who died before his time, from the effects of that service; and she, his child, was dying now, from want of proper treatment. In all her statements, Mary set forth everything to create sympathy for Lucy, but, nothing that tended to show her own exertions; how she toiled for her, night and day; how she was pledging, piece by piece, everything she had, to support her; how her wedding-ring was gone from off her finger, and the cherished Waterloo medal of her dead husband (which, by some peculiarly Irish effort of the imagination, she said “was his very picture”) had disappeared from her box. She whispered nothing of all this, though she prayed and petitioned at almost every hospital for medicine and advice. Dismissed from one, Mary would go to another, urging that “sure if they could cure one thing they could cure another, anyhow they might try;” and if she, the beloved of her heart, was raised up from a bed of sickness, “God’s fresh blessing” would be about them, day and night. “They got up hospitals,” she would add, “for the suddenly struck for death; for the lame, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind; for the vicious! but there were none to comfort those who deserved and needed more than any! She did not want them to take her darling from her. She only asked advice and medicine.” She implored for nothing more. The Irish never seem to feel ashamed of obtaining assistance from any source, except that which the English fly to, as their legitimate refuge—the Parish; and Mary would have imagined she heaped the bitterest wrong upon Lucy, if she had consulted “the parish doctor;” thus, her national prejudice shut her out from the only relief, trifling as it might have been, which she could obtain for the poor girl she so tenderly cherished.

Mary had such an aversion to the “Poor-house” that she would go round the public road rather than pass the rambling building close to the burying-ground, where the Chelsea poor find shelter; and was never beguiled but once to look through the gate at the Workhouse in the Fulham Road. It was formerly the residence of the second Lord Shaftesbury; where Locke, and other great men of his time, congregated. “I stopped to look in at it, Miss Lucy, dear,” she said, “through a fine ould ancient gate—and the flower-pots, up the steps, were filled with beautiful flowers—and an old residenter—a blind woman, that a slip of a girl held by the hand, was standing on the top; and there came out a fine-dressed lady, for all the world like a full-blown trumpet; and the dark woman courtesied, and asked lave to ‘come out’—think of one craythur asking another for lave to breathe the air of heaven outside an ould gate!—and, I suppose she got it, for the lady in red threw some words at her, and she gave another courtesy, and came down the steps—her and the girleen. I had seen enough, and turned away, for my heart was full. I have never lived in slavery, and, plase God, I won’t die in it, Miss Lucy—and none I love shall ever be behoulden to a parish.” This was reasoning—more of the heart than of the head. And yet, who can say that poor Mary was very wrong? True, that a roof shelters, and food keeps in existence the English pauper; but all the feelings that are cherished and honoured without the workhouse walls, are insulted and uprooted within; the holy law of wedded life—the command, what God hath joined let not man separate—is there outraged; fifty years have that aged man and woman paid the tithe and the tax; half a century have they laboured honestly; the grave has closed over their children and their early friends, and they are forced to durance in the poor man’s prison; but they must no longer quench their thirst from the same cup, or pray beside the same couch; the law of man divides what can be re-united only in the presence of the Creator! No wonder then, if, like poor Mary, many turn away from unjust judgment, and resolve not to “die in slavery,” having been guilty of no sin but that of being poor. Oh! but it is a grievous augmentation of evil when sympathy is diverted from its natural channel, and the sufferer is taught daily the sad knowledge that to want is to be criminal.