A large copper kettle was ejecting clouds of steam from the vast cheerful fire in the vast brass and steel grate, with the Cupids in the chimneypiece. There were medicine bottles on the little table and not only Nurse Murphy stood grave but brave on the other side of the bed, but, even still more Irish Nurse O’Brien also. Now, the more solemn she looked the more her face appeared to be creased up in a gentle grin.
Miss Rawlings panted as she looked at them all. Her eye was a little absent, but she too was smiling. For if there was one thing Miss Rawlings was certain to do, it was to be cheerful when most other people would be inclined to be depressed. As she knew she was ill she felt bound to be smiling. She even continued to smile when Sir James murmured, “And the tongue?” And she assured Sir James that though it was exceedingly kind of him to call it wasn’t in the least necessary. “I frequently have bronchitis,” she explained, “but I never die.” Which sounded a little like “rambling.”
When Sir James and the family physician had gone downstairs and were closeted together in the gilded Library, Sir James at once asked this question: “What, my dear sir, was our excellent patient remarking about a Miss Barbara Allan? Has she a relative of the name?”
At this Miss Rawlings’s family physician looked a little confused. “No, no; oh dear no,” he exclaimed. “It’s merely a little fancy, a caprice. Miss Rawlings has a notion there is a little girl belonging to her somewhere—probably of that name, you know. Quite harmless. An aberration. In fact, I indulge it; I indulge it. Miss Rawlings is a most able, sagacious, energetic, philanthropic, practical, generous, and—and—humorous lady. The fancy, you see, has somehow attached itself to the name Barbara Allan—a heroine, I believe, in one of Sir Walter Scott’s admirable fictions. Only that. Nothing more.”
Sir James, a tall man, peered down at Miss Rawlings’s family physician over his gold pince-nez. “I once had a patient, my dear Dr. Sheppard,” he replied solemnly in a voice a good deal deeper but not so rich as Miss Rawlings’s, “who had the amiable notion that she was the Queen of Sheba and that I was King Solomon. A most practical woman. She left me three hundred guineas in her will, for a mourning ring.” He thereupon explained (in words that his patient could not possibly have understood, but that Dr. Sheppard understood perfectly), that Miss Rawlings was in no immediate danger and that she was indeed quite a comfortable little distance from Death’s Door. Still, bronchitis is bronchitis; so let the dear lady be humoured as much as possible. “Let her have the very best nurses, excellent creatures; and all the comforts.” He smiled as he said these words, as if Dr. Sheppard was a long-lost brother. And he entirely approved not only of the nice sago puddings, the grapes, the delicious beef-juice (with toast or a rusk), the barley water and the physic, but of as many Barbara Allans as Miss Rawlings could possibly desire. And all that he said sounded so much like the chorus of “Yeo, ho, ho,” or “Away to Rio,” or “The Anchor’s Weighed,” that one almost expected Dr. Sheppard to join in.
Both gentlemen then took their leave, and Dr. Sheppard having escorted Sir James to his brougham (for this was before the days of machine carriages), the two nurses retired from the window and Miss Rawlings sank into a profound nap.
In a few days Miss Rawlings was much, much, much better. Her temperature was 97.4. Her breathing no more than twenty-four or five to the minute—at most. The flush had left her cheeks, and she had finished three whole bottles of medicine. She devoured a slice from the breast of a chicken and said she enjoyed her sago pudding. The nurses were pleased.
Now, naturally, of course, Miss Rawlings’s illness increased her anxiety to find Barbara Allan as quickly as ever she could. After all, you see, we all of us have only a certain number of years to live, and a year lasts only twelve calendar months, and the shortest month is only twenty-eight days (excluding Leap Year). So if you want to do anything badly it is better to begin at once, and go straight on.
The very first day she was out in Mr. Dubbins’s invalid chair she met her dear friend Mr. Moffat in Combermere Grove, and he stood conversing with her for a while under the boughs of almost as wide a spreading chestnut-tree as the village blacksmith’s in the poem. Mr. Moffat always looked as if he ought to have the comfort of a sleek, bushy beard. If he had, it is quite certain it would have wagged a good deal as he listened to Miss Rawlings. “What I am about to do, my dear Mr. Moffat, is advertise,” she cried, and in such a powerful voice that the lowest fronds of the leafing chestnut-tree over her head slightly trembled as they hung a little listlessly on their stalks in the spring sunshine.
“Advertise, my dear Felicia?” cried Mr. Moffat. “And what for?”