_The weaving of many threads, both of evil and of good._
While Florence Nightingale and her sister were working hard at history
and languages and all useful feminine arts, romping in the sunny
Hampshire gardens, or riding amongst the Derbyshire hills, the big world
outside their quiet paradise was heaping fuel for the fires of war,
which at last, when after a quarter of a century it flared up out of its
long-prepared combustibles, was “to bring to death a million workmen and
soldiers, consume vast wealth, shatter the framework of the European
system, and make it hard henceforth for any nation to be safe except by
sheer strength.” And above all its devastation, remembered as a part of
its undying record, the name of one of these happy children was to be
blazoned on the page of history.
Already at the beginning of the century the first Napoleon had said that
the Czar of Russia was always threatening Constantinople and never taking
it, and by the time Florence Nightingale was twelve years old, it might
be said of that Czar that while “holding the boundless authority of an
Oriental potentate,” his power was supplemented by the far-reaching
transmission of his orders across the telegraph wires, and if Kinglake
does not exaggerate, “he would touch the bell and kindle a war, without
hearing counsel from any living man.”
The project against Constantinople was a scheme of conquest continually
to be delayed, but never discarded, and, happen what might, it was
never to be endured that the prospect of Russia’s attaining some day to
the Bosphorus should be shut out by the ambition of any other Power.
Nicholas was quite aware that multitudes of the pious throughout his
vast dominions dwelt upon the thought of their co-religionists under
the Turkish rule, and looked to the shining cross of St. Sophia, symbol
of their faith above the church founded by Constantine, as the goal of
political unity for a “suppliant nation.”
And Kinglake tells us with an almost acid irony of Louis Napoleon, that
he who was by the Senatus-Consulte of 1804 the statutory heir of the
great Bonaparte, and after his exile and imprisonment had returned to
France, laboured to show all men “how beautifully Nature in her infinite
wisdom had adapted that same France to the service of the Bonapartes;
and how, without the fostering care of these same Bonapartes, the
creature was doomed to degenerate, and to perish out of the world, and
was considering how it was possible at the beginning of the nineteenth
century to make the coarse Bonaparte yoke of 1804 sit kindly upon her
neck.”
The day was drawing near when a great war would seem to him to offer just
the opportunity he wanted.
Far away as yet was that awful massacre of peaceful citizens in Paris in
1851, with which the name of Louis Napoleon was associated as responsible
for the _coup d’état_—a massacre probably the result of brutal panic on
the part of the soldiers, the civilians, and that craven president,
Louis Napoleon himself, whose conscience made a coward of him, and whose
terror usually took the form of brutality—but long before that date, by
his callous plotting and underhand self-seeking, he was preparing forces
which then made for death and terror, and by that time had more or less
broken the manhood of his beautiful Paris.
Yet all over the world at all times, while the enemy is sowing tares in
the field, the good seed is ripening also in the ground for the harvest;
and through these same years far-off threads were being woven, ready to
make part of the warp and woof of a life, as yet busied with the duties
and joys of childhood, but one day to thrill the hearts of Europe and be
remembered while time shall last.
Elizabeth Fry, who was to be one of its decisive influences, was bringing
new light and hope into the noisome prisons of a bygone century, and we
shall see how her life-work was not without its influence later on the
life of the child growing up at Embley and Lea Hurst.
And a child nearly of Florence Nightingale’s own age, who was one day to
cross her path with friendly help at an important crisis, was playing
with her sister Curlinda—Sir Walter Scott’s nickname for her real name
of Caroline—and being drilled in manners in French schools in Paris and
Versailles, before her family moved to Edinburgh and her more serious
lessons began. This was Felicia Skene, who was afterwards able to give
momentary, but highly important help, at a critical moment in Florence
Nightingale’s career. Like Florence herself, she was born amid romantic
surroundings, though not in Italy but in Provence, and was named after
her French godmother, a certain Comtesse de Felicité. Her two earliest
recollections were of the alarming and enraged gesticulations of Liszt
when giving a music lesson to her frightened sisters, and the very
different vision of a lumbering coach and six accompanied by mounted
soldiers—the coach and six wherein sat Charles the Tenth, who was soon
afterwards to take refuge in Holyrood. That was in Paris, where her
family went to live when she was six years old, but at the time of Cap’s
accident they had already moved to Edinburgh, where her chief friends and
playmates were the little Lockharts and the children of the murdered Duc
de Berri. It was there that Sir Walter Scott, on the day when he heard of
his bankruptcy, came and sat quietly by the little Felicia, and bade her
tell him fairy stories, as he didn’t want to talk much himself. He was an
old and dear friend of her father, one link between them being the fact
that Mr. Skene was related by marriage to the beautiful Williamina Stuart
with whom Scott in his early days had fallen deeply and ardently in love.
The little Felicia was at this time a very lively child and full of
innocent mischief. Her later devotion to the sick and poor did not
begin so early as was the case with Florence Nightingale, though there
came a time when she and Florence met in after life as equals and
fellow-soldiers in the great campaign against human suffering. Her
travels and adventures in Greece and her popularity at the Athenian
court were still hidden in the future, and while Florence at Embley
and Lea Hurst was gradually unfolding a sweetness of nature that was by
no means blind to the humorous side of things, and a highly practical
thoroughness in all she undertook, Felicia was enjoying a merry home-life
under the governorship of Miss Palmer, whom she nicknamed Pompey, and
being prepared for confirmation by her father’s friend, Dean Ramsay. We
are told of her that she might have said with Coppée, “J’ai eu toujours
besoin de Dieu.” Full of fun and of interest in life’s great adventure,
for others quite as much as for herself, religion was the moving force
that moulded the soul of her to much unforeseen self-sacrifice as yet
undreamed.