This aspect of Miss Nightingale's life and character has already been illustrated sufficiently in the case of her relations with Matrons, Superintendents, and Nurses. It may be discerned clearly enough, too, in the account of her official work with Sidney Herbert and other of her earlier allies. But it was as marked in her later as in her earlier years, and in relation to the men as to the women with whom she was brought into touch. In reading her collection of letters from various doctors and officials of all sorts, I have been struck many times with a quick change of atmosphere. The correspondence begins on a formal note. Her correspondent will be “pleased to make the acquaintance of a lady so justly esteemed,” etc., etc. The interview has taken place, or a few letters have passed, and then the note alters. Wives or sons or daughters have been to see her, or kindly inquiries and messages have been sent, and the correspondence becomes as between old family friends. Young and old alike felt the sympathetic touch of Miss Nightingale's manner. The name of Mr. J. J. Frederick has been mentioned in earlier pages. He was a junior clerk in the War Office when Miss Nightingale first made his acquaintance. Not many months had passed before she was helpfully interested both in his family and in various good works to which he devoted his spare time. There is much correspondence, during the years with which we were concerned in the last chapter, with Mr. (now Sir Robert) Morant, at that time tutor in the Royal Family of Siam. Miss Nightingale had made his acquaintance before he left for Siam; and he came to see her when he was on leave in England, “leave apparently meaning,” she wrote (Sept. 24, 1891), “working on his Siamese subjects 23 hours out of the 24.” She became almost as much interested in Siamese affairs as in those of India itself; but the letters show that the public interest was combined with a personal, and almost motherly, affection. Mr. J. Croft, on the staff at St. Thomas's, who had for many years been medical instructor to the Nightingale Probationers, resigned that post in 1892, and in returning thanks for a testimonial described the pleasure he had found in working under “so lovable and adorable a leader as Miss Nightingale.” Colonel Yule had first made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance in an official capacity as the member of the India Council charged with sanitary affairs, but he soon came to love her as a friend. In 1889 he was ill, and wrote her a valedictory letter (May 2), in which, after giving advice about some official matters, he said: “As long as I live, but I am not counting on that as a long period, it will be a happiness to think that I was brought into communication with you—useless as I fear I have been in your great task: in fact my strength had already begun to fail. And so, dear Miss Nightingale, I take my leave: let it be with the words of the 4th Book of Moses, ch. vi., and those that come after us will put in your mouth those of Job, xxix.”[238] His strength failed more rapidly; and in his last illness he craved to know that Miss Nightingale had not forgotten him. She sent him a message of fervent gratitude. “I will look at it not as misapplied to myself,” he answered (Dec. 17, a few days before his death), “but as part of the large and generous nature which you are ready to apply to others who little deserve it. I praise God for the privilege of having known you. I am sunk very low in strength, and cannot write with my own hand, so use that of one of my oldest and dearest friends. God bless and keep you to the end, as you have been for so many years, a pillar in Christ's Kingdom of Love and of this state of England. Ever, with the deepest affection and veneration, your faithful servant, H. Yule.” The strength of her older friend and fellow-worker, Dr. Sutherland, ebbed rapidly, and he did not long survive his retirement. He died in July 1891. He was in great weakness at the end, and was hardly able to read or to speak; but his wife said that she had received a letter from Miss Nightingale with messages for him. To her surprise he roused himself once more, read the letter through, and said, “Give her my love and blessing.” They were almost his last words.
II
The affectionate sympathy which Miss Nightingale gave to her friends was not lacking to her relations. In 1889 one of the dearest of them, her “Aunt Mai,” had died at the age of 91. Her husband, the “Uncle Sam” of earlier chapters, had died eight years before; and the widow's bereavement seems to have done away with such estrangement as there had been between her and her niece. They resumed their former affectionate correspondence on religious matters, and Miss Nightingale was again the “loving Flo” of earlier years. “Dearest friend,” she wrote on the card sent with flowers when her aunt died; “lovely, loving soul; humble mind of high and holy thought.”
Miss Nightingale was not one of those persons who keep their tact and kindly consideration for the outside world and think indolent indifference or rough candour good enough for the family circle. I have been told a little anecdote which is instructive in this connection. Miss Irby came into the garden hall at Lea Hurst one day, fresh from an interview with Miss Nightingale. “I must tell you,” she said, laughing, to one of Miss Nightingale's younger cousins, “what Florence has just said; it's so like her. She said to me, ‘I wonder whether R. remembered to have that branch taken away that fell across the south drive.’ I said, ‘I will ask her.’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Florence, ‘don't ask her that. Ask her whom she asked to take the branch away.’” This is only a trifle; but the method of the thing was very characteristic. Miss Nightingale was a diplomatist in small affairs as in great. She was careful not to run a risk of making mischief through intermediaries. She took real trouble to that end, and never seemed to find anything in this sort too much to do. Her influence with every member of her family was used to make relations between them better and more affectionate. With many of the younger generation of her cousins and other kinsfolk she maintained affectionate relations. She regulated her hours very strictly, as we have heard, but she found time, especially in her later years, to see some of these young friends repeatedly. When she did not see them, she liked to be informed of their comings and goings, their doings and prospects, their marriages and belongings. She held in deep affection the memory of Arthur Hugh Clough, and she loved tenderly her cousin, Mr. Shore Smith. She entertained a generous solicitude for Mr. Clough's family; and the family of her cousin, Shore, were especially close to her. A little note to Mrs. Shore Smith—one of hundreds—illustrates incidentally Miss Nightingale's love of flowers and their insect friends:—
10 South Street, April 24, 1894. Dearest, I feel so anxious to know how you are. Thank you so much for your beautiful Azaleas which have come out splendidly, and the yellow tulips.[389] The smell of the Azaleas reminds me so of Embley. On a tulip sat a poor little tiny, tiny, pretty little snail of a sort unknown to me. He said: “I was so happy in my garden on my tulip, and I was kidnapped into that horrid box. And whatever am I to do?” So we carried him out and carefully put him among the shrubs in the boxes on the leads (lilacs). But my opinion is that he is very particular about his diet and that his opinion was that he could find nothing worthy of his acceptance there. He must either have been drowned in the water-spout, or dree'd the penalty of being particular. Now I return to our brutality in letting you go without even partaking of “Baby's bottle.” My kindest regards to Baby and its Mama. Ever your loving F. N.
Miss Nightingale was godmother to Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Bonham Carter's son, Malcolm. With Norman, an Indian Civilian, a younger son of Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, she kept up a correspondence. She was much attached to Miss Edith Bonham Carter,[239] who had taken up nursing, and there were several other relations who saw her and in whom she was much interested. The number of family letters which she preserved is very large; and among them those relating to the family into which her sister had married are almost as numerous as those relating to her own kith and kin. For Margaret Lady Verney, in particular, Miss Nightingale entertained a deep admiration and a most tender affection. She was attached also to Sir Harry's younger son, Mr. Frederick Verney, who in these later years helped her in many of her undertakings, and whom she in turn helped greatly in his. A few of her own family letters, covering a large space of time, will best show the pleasantly affectionate terms, now grave, now gay, on which she placed herself with her relations:—
(To Mrs. Clough.) 35 South Street, Jan. 2 [1873]. I lit upon the edition of Byron (without Don Juan) which we wished for. There are two vols. more than in our edition, which may be trash. But Childe Harold,—the descriptions of Greece in the Tale: Poems,—Chillon,—but above all Manfred: there is nothing like it in the world, especially the last scene. The Spirit there is really a spirit—the only spirit out of Job and Saul. The[390] Ghost in Hamlet is surely a very gross unpleasant dead-alive unburied man, with the most vulgar full-bodied sentiments, clamouring for vengeance on his murderer (not even so spirit-like as a dying man), quite unlike what his son describes him—a Thief and Impostor, I am sure, going to take the spoons. Manfred, to my mind, stands alone, and is the most spiritual view of immortality, of what hell and heaven really are, of any poetry in the world. One only wonders how Byron ever wrote it.
(To a niece,[240] who was going to College.) 10 South Street, August 22 [1881]. My very dearest R.—Aunt Florence is filled with you and your going to Girton. I can say nothing I would and, saying nothing, I would ask those greatest of the “heathens”—Plato, Aeschylus, Thucydides—to say much to you. Aeschylus, whose Prometheus is evidently a foreshadowing of, or, if you like it better, the same type (with Osiris of Egypt) as, Christ: the one who brought “gifts to men,” who defied “the powers that be” (the “principalities” and “powers” of evil), who suffered for men in bringing them the “best gifts” (the “fire from heaven”), who could only give by suffering himself, and who finally “led captivity captive.” It seems to me that I see in nothing so much the history of God—in the religions of the world which M. Mohl learnt Oriental languages to write—as in these great “heathens”—Persian, Chinese, Indian, Greek also, and Latin too, but specially Aeschylus and Plato; and perhaps, too, in Physiology—the greatness of His work, the silence of His work, what spirit He is of. His “glory” and poorness of spirit—and that to be “poor of spirit” constitutes His glory, if to be poor of spirit means utter unselfishness, perfect freedom from self and from the very thought of self, and from affectations and from “vain glory.” My very dearest child, fare you very well—very, very well is the deepest prayer of Aunt Florence.
(To a niece who had taken up vegetarianism.) 10 South Street, Nov. 8 [1887]. Dearest—I send you two “vegetables” in their shells. We shall have some more fresh ones to-morrow. A new potato is, I assure you, not a vegetable. It is a mare's egg, laid by her, you know, in a “mare's nest.” No vegetarian would eat it. I send you some Egyptian lentils. I have them every night for supper, done in milk, which I am not very fond of. The delicious thing is lentil soup, as made every day by an Arab cook in Egypt, over a handful of fire not big enough to roast a mosquito.… Ever your loving Aunt Florence.
(To a niece, who was full of the co-operative movement.) 10[391] South Street, July 14 [1888]. Dearest—Your co-operative usefulness is delightful. If it is not in the lowest degree vulgar, I should ask if I might give them some books. But I suppose this is contrary to all Co-operative principle. Lady Ashburton is gone to Marienbad, to distribute Bibles and Tracts in Czech-ish. There is a very large Co-operative Estate about 20 miles distant on the borders of the Forest, which she has seen and believes to be entirely successful. And I have charged her to send me home (for you) details—and of course to prove its success. You see how my manners and principles have been corrupted by you, the youthful prophet. If you observe aberration, do not lay it at my door. It is sad how youth corrupts old age. Your faithful and loving old (co-operative) Aunt, Florence Nightingale.