_Life at Lea Hurst and Embley._
Florence was between five and six years old when the Nightingales moved
from Lea Hall into their new home at Lea Hurst, a house commanding a
specially beautiful outlook, and built under Mr. Nightingale’s own
supervision with much care and taste, about a mile from the old home. It
is only fourteen miles out of Derby, though there would seem to be many
sleepy inhabitants of that aristocratic old town—like the old lady of
Hendon who lived on into the twentieth century without having been into
the roaring city of London hard by—who know nothing of the attractions
within a few miles of them; for Mrs. Tooley tells an amusing story of a
photographer there who supposed Lea Hurst to be a distinguished man and a
local celebrity.
To some it seemed that there was a certain bleakness in the country
surrounding Lea Hall, but, though the two dwellings are so short a
distance apart, Lea Hurst is set in a far more perfect landscape. Hills
and woodlands, stretching far away to Dovedale, are commanded by the
broad terrace of upland on which the house stands, and it looks across to
the bold escarpment known as Crich Stand, while deep below, the Derwent
makes music on its rocky course. Among the foxglove and the bracken, the
gritstone rocks jutting forth are a hovering place for butterflies and a
haunt of the wild bee.
The house itself—shaped like a cross, gabled and mullioned, and
heightened by substantial chimney-stacks—is solid, unpretending,
satisfying to the eye. Above the fine oriel window in the drawing-room
wing is the balcony pointed out to visitors where, they are told, after
the Crimea “Miss Florence used to come out and speak to the people.”
The building of the house was completed in 1825, and above the door that
date is inscribed, together with the letter N. The drawing-room and
library look south, and open on to the garden, and “from the library
a flight of stone steps leads down to the lawn.” In the centre of the
garden front an old chapel has been built into the mansion, and it may
be that the prayers of the unknown dead have been answered in the life
of the child who grew up under its shadow, and to whom the busy toiling
world has owed so much.
The terraced garden at the back of the house, with its sweet
old-fashioned flowers and blossoming apple trees, has doubtless grown
more delightful with every year of its advancing age, but what an
interest the two little girls must have had when it was first being
planted out and each could find a home for her favourite flowers!
Fuchsias were among those loved by little Florence, who, as has already
been noted, was only six years old when she and her sister and father and
mother moved into Lea Hurst, and there was a large bed of these outside
the chapel. The old schoolroom and nursery at the back of the house
look out upon the hills, and in a quiet corner of the garden there is a
summer-house where Florence and her only sister, who had no brothers to
share their games, must often have played and worked.
Lea Hurst is a quiet, beautiful home, characteristically English and
unpretending, with a modest park-gate, and beyond the park those Lea
Woods where the hyacinths bloom and where it is still told how “Miss
Florence” loved to walk through the long winding avenue with its grand
views of the distant hills and woods.
But the Nightingales did not spend the whole year at Lea Hurst. In the
autumn it was their custom to move to Embley, in Hampshire, where they
spent the winter and early spring. They usually sent the servants on
ahead with the luggage, and drove by easy stages in their own carriage,
taking the journey at leisure, and putting up at inns by the way.
Sometimes, of course, they travelled by coach. Those of us who only know
the Derby road in the neighbourhood of towns like Nottingham and Derby
now that its coaching glories are past, find it difficult to picture
its gaiety in those old coaching days, when the very horses enjoyed
the liveliness of the running, and the many carriages with their gay
postilions and varied occupants were on the alert for neighbour or friend
who might be posting in the same direction.
Whether in autumn or in spring, the drive must have been a joy. The
varied beauty of the Midlands recalls the lines in “Aurora Leigh” which
speak of
“Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew, ...
... the clouds, the fields,
The happy violets hiding from the roads
The primroses run down to, carrying gold;
The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out
Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths
’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all alive
With birds and gnats and large white butterflies
Which look as if the May-flower had caught life
And palpitated forth upon the wind;
Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,
Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills;
And cattle grazing in the watered vales,
And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,
And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,
Confused with smell of orchards.”
Derbyshire itself, with its wild lilies of the valley, its ferns and
daffodils and laughing streams, is hardly more “taking” than the country
through which winds the silver Trent, past Nottingham Castle, perched
on its rock and promontory above the fields where the wild crocus in
those days made sheets of vivid purple, and the steep banks of Clifton
Grove, with its shoals of blue forget-me-not, making a dim, tree-crowned
outline, with here and there a gleam of silver, as seen by the chariots
“on the road.” Wollaton Park, with its great beeches and limes and
glimpses of shy deer, would give gold and crimson and a thousand shades
of russet to the picture.
And farther south, at the other end of the journey, what miles of
orchards and pine woods and sweet-scented heather—what rolling Downs and
Surrey homesteads along the turnpike roads!
Though Parthenope and Florence had no brothers to play with them, they
seem to have had a great variety of active occupations, both at Lea
Hurst and at Embley. Of course they had their dolls, like other little
girls; but those which belonged to Florence had a way of falling into the
doctor’s hands—an imaginary doctor, of course—and needing a good deal of
tender care and attention. Florence seemed never tired of looking after
their various ailments. In fact, she had at times a whole dolls’ hospital
to tend. She probably picked up a little amateur knowledge of medicine
quite early in life; for the poor people in the neighbourhood used to
come to her mother for help in any little emergency, and Mrs. Nightingale
was, like many another Lady Bountiful of her generation, equipped with a
certain amount of traditional wisdom and kindly common sense, aided in
her case by wider reading and a better educated mind than the ordinary.
Florence, having somehow escaped measles and whooping-cough, was not
allowed to run into infection in the cottages, but that did not prevent
the sending of beef-teas and jellies and other helpful and neighbourly
gifts, which could be tied to her pony’s saddle-bow and left by her at
the door. She learned to know the cottagers with a frank and very human
intimacy, and their homely wit touched her own, their shrewdness and
sympathy met their like in her, and as she grew older, all this added
to her power and her charm. She learned to know both the north and
the south in “her ain countree,” and when, later in life, she was the
wise angel of hope to the brave “Tommies,” recruited from such homes,
meeting them as she did amid unrecorded agonies that were far worse
than the horrors of the battlefield, she understood them all the better
as men, because she had known just such boys as they had been and was
familiar with just such homes as those in which they grew up. According
to Mrs. Tooley’s biography, the farmhouse where Adam Bede fell in love
with Hetty was just the other side of the meadows at Lea Hurst, and the
old mill-wheel, where Maggie Tulliver’s father ground the corn of the
neighbourhood, was only two or three miles away. Marian Evans, of whom
the world still thinks and speaks by her pen-name of George Eliot, came
sometimes to visit her kinsfolk in the thatched cottage by Wirksworth
Tape Mills, and has left us in her earlier novels a vivid picture of the
cottage life that surrounded our heroine during that part of the year
which she spent in the Derbyshire home. The children, of course, had
their own garden, which they dug and watered, and Florence was so fond
of flowers and animals that that again was an added bond with her rustic
neighbours. Flower-missions had not in those days been heard of, but she
often tied up a nosegay of wild flowers for invalid villagers, or took
some of her favourites out of her own garden to the sick people whom she
visited.
The story of her first patient has already been told several times in
print, but no biography would be complete without it.
She had nursed many dolls back to convalescence—to say nothing of
“setting” their broken limbs—tempted their delicate appetites with
dainties offered on toy plates, and dressed the burns when her sister let
them tumble too near the nursery fire; but as yet she had had no real
human patient, when one day, out riding with her friend the vicar over
the Hampshire Downs near Embley, they noticed that Roger, an old shepherd
whom they knew very well, was having endless trouble in getting his sheep
together.
“Where’s Cap?” asked the vicar, drawing up his horse, for Cap was a very
capable and trusted sheep-dog.
“T’ boys have been throwing stones at ‘n and they’ve broken t’ poor
chap’s leg. Won’t ever be any good no more, a’m thinkin’. Best put him
out of ‘s misery.”
“O Roger!” exclaimed a clear young voice, “poor Cap’s leg broken? Can’t
we do anything for him?”
“Where is he?” added Florence eagerly, for the voice was that of the
future “Queen of Nurses.” “Oh, we can’t leave him all alone in his pain.
Just think how cruel!”
“Us can’t do no good, miss, nor you nayther. I’se just take a cord to him
to-night; ’tis the only way to ease his pain.”
But Florence turned to plead with the vicar, and to beg that some further
effort should be made.
The vicar, urged by the compassion in the young face looking up to his,
turned his horse’s head in the right direction for a visit to Cap. In a
moment Florence’s pony was put to the gallop, and she was the first to
arrive at the shed where the poor dog was lying.
Cap’s faithful brown eyes were soon lifted to hers, as she tenderly tried
to make him understand her loving sympathy, caressing him with her little
hand and speaking soothingly with her own lips and eyes; till, like the
suffering men whose wounds would in the far-off years be eased through
her skill, the dog looked up at her in dumb and worshipping gratitude.
The vicar was equal to the occasion, and soon discovered that the leg was
not broken at all, but badly bruised and swollen, and perhaps an even
greater source of danger and pain than if there had merely been a broken
bone.
When he suggested a “compress,” his child-companion was puzzled for a
moment. She thought she knew all about poultices and bandages, and I
daresay she had often given her dolls a mustard plaster; but a “compress”
sounded like something new and mysterious. It was, of course, a great
relief when she learned that she only needed to keep soaking cloths in
hot water, wringing them out, and folding them over Cap’s injured leg,
renewing them as quickly as they cooled. She was a nimble little person,
and, with the help of the shepherd boy, soon got a fire of sticks kindled
in a neighbouring cottage and the kettle singing on it with the necessary
boiling water. But now what to do for cloths? Time is of importance in
sick-nursing when every moment of delay means added pain to the sufferer.
To ride home would have meant the loss of an hour or two, and thrifty
cottagers are not always ready to tear up scant and cherished house-linen
for the nursing of dogs. But Florence was not to be baffled. To her great
delight she espied the shepherd’s smock hanging up behind the door. She
was a fearless soul, and felt no doubt whatever that her mother would
pay for a new smock. “This will just do,” she said, and, since that
delightful vicar gave a nod of entire approval, she promptly tore it into
strips.
Then back to Cap’s hut she hastened, with her small henchman beside
her carrying the kettle and the basin; for by this time he, the boy
shepherd, began to be interested too, and the vicar’s superintendence was
no longer needed. A message of explanation was sent to Embley that Mr.
and Mrs. Nightingale might not be anxious, and for several hours Florence
gave herself up to nursing her patient. Cap was passive in her hands, and
the hot fomentations gradually lessened the pain and the swelling.
Imagine the wonder and gratitude of old Roger when he turned up with
the rope in his hand and a leaden weight on his poor old heart! Cap,
of course, knew his step and greeted him with a little whine of
satisfaction, as if to be the first to tell him the good news.
“Why, missy, you have been doing wonders,” he said. “I never thought to
see t’ poor dog look up at me like that again.”
“Yes,” exclaimed the happy young nurse; “doesn’t he look better? Well,
Roger, you can throw away the rope. I shall want you to help me make
these hot compresses.”
“Miss Florence is quite right, Roger,” interposed the vicar; “you’ll
soon have Cap running about again.”
“I’m sure I cannot thank you and the young lady enough, yer riv’rence.
And I’ll mind all the instrooctions for he.”
As the faithful dog looked up at him, eased and content, it was a very
happy man that was old Roger. But the doctor-nurse was not prepared to
lose her occupation too quickly.
“I shall come and see him again to-morrow, Roger,” she said; “I know
mamma will let me, when I just explain to her about it all.”