But shall I tell you what made you write to me? I have no second sight, I do not see visions nor dream dreams. It was my sister. Or rather I will tell you that I have second sight. I have been greatly harassed by seeing my poor owl[269] lately, without her head, without her life, without her talons, lying in the cage of your canary (like the statue of Rameses II. in the pool at Memphis[270]), and the little villain pecking at her. Now, that's me. I am lying without my head, without my claws, and you all peck at me. It is de rigueur, d'obligation, like the saying something to one's hat, when one goes into church, to say to me all that has been said to me 110 times a day during the last three months. It is the obbligato on the violin, and the twelve violins all practise it together, like the clocks striking 12 o'clock at night all over London, till I say like Xavier de Maistre, Assez, je le sais, je ne le sais que trop. I am not a penitent; but you are like the R.C. Confessor, who says what is de rigueur, what is in his Formulary to say, and never comes to the life of the thing,—the root of the matter.

(Dr. Sutherland to Miss Nightingale.) Highgate, Sept. 7.[370] What can I say, my dear friend, to your long scold of a letter?… You are decidedly wrong in passing yourself off for a dead owl, and in thinking that I have joined with other equally charitable people in pecking at you. It is I that have got all the pecking, altho' I hope that I am neither an owl, nor dead; and your little beak is one of the sharpest. But like a good, live hero, I bear it all joyfully because it is got in doing my duty to you. I want you to live, I want you to work. You want to work and die, and that is not at all fair. I admire your heroism and self-devotion with all my heart, but alas! I cannot forget that it is all within the compass of a weak, perishing body; and am I to encourage you to wear yourself in the vain attempt to beat not only men, but time? You little know what daily anxiety it has cost me to see you dying by inches in doing work fit only for the strongest constitution.…

Dr. Sutherland urged her to take at any rate a week's complete rest. But she would not. Her cause was her life, and she could not for the sake of life lose what alone made life worth living. While they were delaying, the soldiers were dying. Her work would not wait. She begged him to come down to Malvern and work with her in order that they might have everything ready to put before Mr. Herbert in London by the time he returned from his fishing. Dr. Sutherland wrote pretty excuses. Mrs. Sutherland made counter-suggestions. Why should not Miss Nightingale stay on at Malvern altogether? “Would not Mr. Herbert,” she wrote (Sept. 11), “go to you for a few days, settle all the points, and then communicate daily by letter? You have so much tact that you would be able to maintain your influence. Do think if this be possible. It is quite against my own interest to desire it, for if you come to London, I may get a glimpse of your dear face.” But Miss Nightingale persisted, and Dr. Sutherland surrendered. He went down to Malvern, was himself ill there, and Miss Nightingale reported progress of “the sick baby” to his wife. But the two invalids, we may be sure, talked of other things than their ailments.

III

So little was Miss Nightingale in a mood to succumb to her physical weakness, that she had offered to go out to India, where her friend Lady Canning was at the Viceroy's side during the Mutiny. “Miss Nightingale has written to me,” wrote Lady Canning to her mother (Nov. 14); “she is out of health and at Malvern, but says she would come at twenty-four hours' notice if I think there is anything for her to do in her ‘line of business.’ I think there is not anything here, for there are few wounded men in want of actual nursing, and there are plenty of native servants and assistants who can do the dressings. Only one man, who was very ill of dysentery, has died since we went to the hospital a fortnight ago. The up-country hospitals are too scattered for a nursing establishment, and one could hardly yet send women up.”[271] Miss Nightingale was very serious in the offer, for she had made it twice; first through Mr. Herbert, and then in a personal letter, carried by her cousin, Major Nicholson, who had been ordered to India at this time. She thought of herself as a soldier in the ranks; and absorbed intently though she was in her work for the Army at home, she would have considered active service in the field a superior call. Had the Viceroy felt the need of accepting Miss Nightingale's offer, it is possible that her power of will and the excitement of activity might have carried her through the ordeal; but she had barely strength for the work on which she was already engaged.

Of her daily life during this period, at Malvern and in London successively, her sister's letters give a vivid description:—

(Lady Verney to Madame Mohl.) [September 1857.] The accounts of F. have been very anxious. Aunt Mai says she does not sleep above two hours in the night, and continues most feverish and feeble, and cannot eat. She never left that room where you saw her, was scarcely off her sofa for a month. Now she goes down for half an hour into a parlour, to do business with a Commissioner who has been there to see her. Aunt Mai says it throws her back more to put off work for “the cause” she lives for than to do a little every day—so we reconcile ourselves. Tuesday, she says, was a very uneasy day, and F. said she felt as she had done when recovering from the fever at Balaclava. Still both doctors say there is no disease, that it is only entire exhaustion of every organ from overwork, and that rest will alone[372] restore her—rest for much longer than she will give herself, I fear. She has two “packs” a day; this is all the water-curing; it seems to bring down the pulse, and she lies at that open window the chief part of the day, not reading or writing, only just still. She cannot be better anywhere, no one can get at her; Aunt Mai is a dragon, and the Commissioner is the only person who has seen her. Aunt M. says, “I cannot disguise to myself that she is in a very precarious state.”

(Lady Verney to M. Mohl.) [Dec. 5, 1857.] Aunt Mai's bulletin is generally the same: “Mr. Herbert for 3 hours in the morning, Dr. Sutherland for 4 hours in the afternoon, Dr. Balfour, Dr. Farr, Dr. Alexander interspersed.” They are drawing up the new Regulations (but this you must not tell. F. is as nervous of being known to have anything to do with it as other people are of getting honour).… Dr. Sutherland burst out to Aunt Mai the other day that F.'s “clearness and strength of mind, her extraordinary powers, her grasp of intellect and benevolence of heart struck him more and more as he worked with her—that no one who did not see her proved and tried as he did could conceive the extent of both.” “The most gifted of God's creatures,” he called her. And the determined way in which she will not let any one know what she is about is so curious. She will not even tell us; we only hear it from these men. She is killing herself with work (which they all say no one else can do, no one else has the threads of it, or the perseverance for it), and yet no one will ever know it. Others will have all the credit of the very things she suggested and introduced, at the cost one may say of life and comfort of all kinds, for it is an intolerable life she is leading—lying down between whiles to enable her just to go on, not seeing her nearest and dearest, because, with her breath so hurried, all talking must be spared except what is necessary, and all excitement, that she may devote every energy to the work.… Aunt Mai says again to-day how Mr. Herbert is in sometimes twice a day and Dr. Sutherland the whole day (but please don't tell any one), because she alone can give facts which no one else hardly possesses, because she knows the bearings of the whole which no one else has followed, has both the smallest details at her fingers' ends and the great general views of the whole—what is to be gained and what avoided.

While Miss Nightingale was lying ill at Malvern, she was being courted in counterfeit at Manchester. Her parents and sister were visiting Manchester to see the “Art Treasures Exhibition,” and the newspapers had included Florence in the party. The sightseers, wrote Lady Verney, took Lady Newport, “a very sweetlooking woman in black,” for Florence and “treated her like a saint of the Middle Ages. ‘Let me touch your shawl only,’ they said as they crowded round, or ‘Let me stroke your arm.’ Mrs. Gaskell told me we could have no idea how deep the feeling is for you in the hearts of the people.”

The feeling would perhaps have been yet deeper if the people had known the work which Miss Nightingale was still doing, and the delicate health from which she was suffering. At the end of 1857 she thought that death might overtake her in the middle of her work with Sidney Herbert, and she wrote this letter to him “to be sent when I am dead”:—