‘It is an order—as they say in India. When shall we start?’
‘Not before next week. I am not going to hurry you off. I have a fortnight’s leave of absence, which we must spend at Perth Water. Then I return to my post, to leave everything in order, and say good-bye to my patients. Dear souls! what should I have done without them—or some of them without me—I am proud to say.’
. . . . . . . . .
When it was bruited abroad throughout Pilot Mount, and to the West Australian world at large, that Nurse Lilburne had gone to Perth to meet her husband—had indeed met him on the incoming Carl Schiller, and was returning to resume her position at the Pilot Mount hospital,—also, after putting everything straight, to give up her [209] ]appointment, and probably ‘go home,’ great was the excitement, general the regrets, sincere indeed the sorrow which was openly displayed by her more intimate friends and fellow-workers. Never would they get such another Matron—so wise, so tender, yet so firm, and clever too as an organiser. She had redeemed their hospital from comparative confusion and chaos; now it was as well managed as any of the metropolitan ones. The Health Officer, the Inspector General, the great doctor M‘Diarmid, every one, had said so. And now, when it was the pride and joy of ‘the field,’ here was her husband turning up from nobody knew where, and, of course, to take her away with him. It was most discouraging.
As for the local press—a journalistic flood of wonder and admiration, congratulation and grief, poured over the bars and lodging-houses, the hotel parlours, the stores—the churches even, and flowed and surged, and eddied, throughout the wide regions of ‘the field’ and its dependencies. The name and fame of Nurse Lilburne, the modern revival of the ‘lady with the lamp,’ had spread far and wide. The fever-stricken miner, the inexperienced tourist, the youthful governess, the toil-encumbered matron, all owned to deep debts of gratitude, all joined in a chorus of congratulation and heartfelt thanksgiving. ‘Heaven had had mercy,’ said the devout. ‘It is the Lord’s doing.’ ‘First man ever I knowed to come back from where he’s been,’ said South Sea Jack.
It had not generally transpired, nor had it been thought necessary to advertise the fact of his [210] ]detention at so evil-reputed a locality. It was generally supposed that pecuniary losses had resulted in his trying to redeem his fortunes in South America, whence he had now returned, having at length fallen upon a ‘bonanza’ in silver. The environments of the country not being favourable to the habitudes of a refined Englishwoman, it had been decided that she should make a home in Western Australia.
She had formerly elected to take the work temporarily, as the member of a nursing sisterhood; and coming to Pilot Mount in the worst period of an epidemic of typhoid and pneumonia, she had accepted the position of Matron in the newly organised hospital, partly from motives of Christian charity, but chiefly as a means of allaying the torturing anxiety which afflicted every waking hour, and, at times, denied her even necessary sleep.
When it was known, indeed promulgated by the press, that Nurse Lilburne, the devoted, the beloved, the Angel of the Lord (as the Cornish Wesleyans called her), had in the dark hours of fever watched by the bedside of so many a ‘Cousin Jack,’ and (as was believed) had restored the father or husband to the weeping wife and babes, the enthusiasm thus aroused seemed boundless, uncontrollable.
That she should permanently leave ‘the field’ was too sorrowful for words—a public calamity, a disaster. Still, if man and wife had come together after years of separation, who would be mean enough to put their loss in the scale against the crowning joy of her happiness?
[211]
]The situation was not new to them. Many a miner’s family, in humbler life, had gone through the same experience. How often had they clubbed together to help to build and furnish the modest cottage, in which the long-separated man and wife could again set up the altar of domestic life, and reinstate the household gods! But in this case it appeared to the leaders—the representative men of the city and the mining community—that an effort should be made to render the recognition of the benefits derived from Mrs. Lilburne’s devoted, unselfish labours, worthy of the great principle which she represented: of the invaluable services which she had rendered to all the classes of the community, ‘without fear, favour, or affection,’ making no distinction between rich and poor—the lowly and those of exalted station.