"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."
Ursula Pendrill was a girl of good family who had been left a year or two ago an orphan, and with very narrow means. She was, however, a girl of high spirit and brave heart, and instead of asking a home with any of her kinsfolk, she preferred to supplement her small resources by working in various ways herself.
The field of woman"s work in those days was much narrower than it has since become; but Ursula knew a lady who had been a nurse under Miss Nightingale in the Crimean War, and had since then given much of her time to the service of the sick. She was then in charge of a hospital, and welcomed Ursula on a long visit, where she learned considerable skill in nursing, and made herself acquainted with the right treatment of most ailments.
After that she had often nursed private patients in their own houses, and had travelled a good deal with invalids going to Madeira and other places in search of health. So that she was no timid, helpless girl, but a rather experienced and resourceful woman, who would not easily be frightened or nonplussed in ordinary cases of sickness, or in the ordinary circ.u.mstances of travel. But there was nothing ordinary in the charge which she felt had been laid upon her to-day!
Yet no one expected this thing of her. Probably she would be the last person the Captain would think of for such a service. Ursula was young, and she looked younger than her years. She had not talked about herself to her fellow-pa.s.sengers. She had not told how she had been taken to India by a delicate lady to look after her and her fragile children. She had not supposed that anybody would be interested in her private affairs. She was surmised to be one of those growing-up girls sent home from the perils of the hot season to their friends in England. n.o.body would expect a young thing like herself to volunteer for such a deadly and terrible service.
But the more Ursula thought of it, the more resolved she was to make this sacrifice. It seemed to her that she had received a message from on high; that she had been shown it was for her to take up the cross and carry it, and that if she did so in fearless faith and obedience, she would receive help and blessing and strength for the task.
At dusk she left her cabin and went on deck, and asked where she could find the Captain. The officer she addressed looked at her keenly for a moment, and then pointed to where the Captain was standing alone, save for the presence of the big Irish-Australian with whom he was often in company.
Ursula slowly approached, and the two men stopped talking and looked at her. The Captain stepped forward.
"Did you wish to speak to me, Miss Pendrill?"
"Just for a minute, please," answered Ursula, with a beating heart, but with outward self-possession. "I came to say that I will go ash.o.r.e to-morrow with Mrs. Varden, and take care of her."
"You, child?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the Captain incredulously.
"I am not a child," answered Ursula steadily, "I am older than I look, and I know a great deal about nursing. Once I lived in a hospital for a year. I have often taken care of sick people since. I understand about fevers, though I was only once with a small-pox case, and that only for a little while, as she was taken away when the symptoms declared themselves. But I have been vaccinated quite recently. I have never taken anything from a patient yet. I am not afraid. I will go with poor Mrs. Varden--if there is n.o.body more suitable and more efficient."
The Captain paced once or twice up and down the s.p.a.ce between the rails, and came back to where Ursula was standing.
"There is n.o.body else at all. I have had the husbands one after the other--or the relations and friends. n.o.body can bear to face the awful task--or be spared to do it----"
"Yes, I understand. Other people have ties--so many to cling to them--to miss them, so many depending on them. If it were so with me perhaps I could not offer. But it is not. I have no very near relations. I have no parents or brothers and sisters. If anything happened there would be a few to be sorry; but n.o.body would feel life to be shadowed. I am the sort of person who can do this thing."
"You are the sort of person from whom the world"s saints and heroines are made!" cried Captain Donaldson, with a most unwonted outbreak of emotion. "My dear young lady, I do not know how to accept the sacrifice, nor yet how to decline it. G.o.d will bless and reward you, I truly believe; for He only can reward such a deed as the one you are about to do."
"I do not want any reward," answered Ursula simply; "I only want to do what is right. Suppose it were somebody very dear to me, it would be no sacrifice; and Mrs. Varden is very near and dear to somebody--to her poor young husband. I saw him as he went off the vessel."
"Poor fellow--yes. I fear----" but the Captain pulled up short, and kept the fear to himself. Ursula moved away towards her own cabin.
"I have a few preparations to make; but I shall be ready to-morrow when you send for me. I think I shall not come up any more till then."
She disappeared in the gathering gloom, and the Captain stood looking after her, till a hand was laid upon his arm, and the deep voice of his Australian pa.s.senger said in his ear:
"Is that girl going ash.o.r.e with Mrs. Varden?"
"Yes; she has volunteered, she has all the qualifications for the task; but I don"t know now how to let her,--that lonely leper-house,--that awful fear before her eyes. Mrs. Varden will not live the week out. But I dare not keep her on board. My duty to my pa.s.sengers and to the company prevents it. But those two frail young creatures--set down alone----"
"Look here, Captain, you may make your mind easy there. They won"t be alone. I shall get off there too. I shall see them through!"
"You, Mr. Kelly? Why, man, what do you mean? There is no accommodation in the Arab settlement--nothing but the squalid place, and the leper-house beyond. You cannot be in there----"
"No; I shall pitch my tent just beyond, but within sight and sound.
Jehoshaphat, man! Do you think I have never roughed it in a tent before this? Do you think I can"t speak the primitive language, common to all races, enough to get those dirty Arabs to do all I want of them? Do you think British gold will ever fail to work the will of its master in any quarter of the globe? You go and make all your palaver with the heathen Chinee, or blackguard Arab, or whatever he may be. I"ll pitch my tent, and I"ll be there as long as any British woman is, and I"ll see the thing through. As a nurse I"m no good, even if a rough fellow could volunteer for the task where a lady is in the case. But I"ll be hanged, Captain, if Brian Kelly will stand by and see that brave young girl and that poor dying wife left alone in a place like that without a countryman near them. I"ve n.o.body specially waiting me in the old country. They"ve done without me all these years; they can do without me a few weeks longer. I"ll see this bit of business through. If those poor creatures die there, I"ll stop and give them such Christian burial as is possible; if they live through it, I"ll be there to bring them home--one or both. Confound it all, Captain, d"ye think I"d ever know another night"s sleep in my bed if I looked on at a bit of heroic devotion like that--and walked on with me hands in me pockets!"
The Captain put out his h.o.r.n.y hand and wrung that of his Irish pa.s.senger. He had liked Kelly from the first; now he felt a new and warmer feeling towards him.
"Heaven bless you!" he said rather hoa.r.s.ely; "you"ve rolled a ton"s burden from my heart to-day."
Before sunrise next morning, but while the sky was beginning to lighten in that wonderful way one sees in desert countries, a tap came at Ursula"s cabin door. She was quite ready: dressed in her cool, linen garb, with her white ap.r.o.n concealed by the folds of the long cloak. The things she wanted to take with her were ready in a modest valise. The rest were to go on to England under the care of the Captain.
Her face was quite calm and serene as she came up on deck; a few gentlemen pa.s.sengers were about to see her off and wish her well. The Captain made his way towards her and took her hand.
"Mrs. Varden has been carried to the boat already. We are ready for you.
Mr. Brian Kelly is going ash.o.r.e too. He is, in fact, there already with my steward, bargaining about a tent in which he means to live for a time within hail of the leper-house. So you will have a friend at hand in case of need. He, like you, is one of the lonely ones of the earth, who can do these things. I am very thankful not to leave you quite alone with your patient! There yonder you see your future home--or prison. You will be quite safe there,--you would have been safe even without Kelly,--but I am thankful he remains too. I shall leave word at the nearest station what has happened. You will have friends looking after you, in a sense, whom you will never see. But Mr. Kelly will be at your beck and call. Now we must be going."
It was all like a dream to Ursula: the confused sound of voices, the earnest pressure of farewell hand-clasps, the words of praise and blessing lavished upon her; then the sight of the swathed white figure in the bottom of the boat that looked almost like a corpse in its graveclothes, the vivid golden glow over sea and land, the stretches of yellow sand, the white domes of the Arab settlement, and the square stone walls of the place to which she was bound.
She only seemed to awaken to the realities of life when the Captain held her hands in a last farewell, and just stooped and touched her forehead with his lips.
"I have a little girl at home--about your age!" he said huskily, as if in explanation. "Pray G.o.d she may be as brave a girl as you--though may she never be so sorely tried!"
Then he was gone,--they were all gone,--and Ursula was left alone in this strange, silent place, with that sad sight before her eyes--poor Mrs. Varden, stricken down with that most terrible malady, and in its most malignant and deadly form.
The patient was quite unconscious, and lay upon the narrow bed which Ursula found already neatly made up, muttering in the delirium that knew no lucid intervals. She was not violent--had never been violent, the doctor told her--and there was little enough to be done for her. But the thirst was constant, and Ursula seldom left her side for long. Although there was something so terrible in the poor young wife"s disfigured face, yet it seemed to Ursula that she was the one link between her and the unknown. She did not shrink from her. She was as tender as though it had been her mother or sister. She shrank from no task that would bring relief or ease. She knew what to do and she did it unflinchingly.
And then as the day went by and the shadows of evening began to steal over her, she went to the door, to look at the sea and the sands, and see whether it was a dream what the Captain had said of that big Mr.
Kelly staying behind too.
No, it was no dream: there was the stalwart figure pacing to and fro; there was the tent, picturesque and cheerful, with its fire close beside it, and a couple of turbaned Arabs cooking something over the red glow.
"Miss Pendrill, I have been hoping you would come out for a mouthful of fresh air. And how goes your patient?"
"Very, very ill; but always in a stupor. I can leave her for a few minutes sometimes----"
"Ah, good; then we will have supper together out here on the sand; it will eat better to you than in there, and----"
"Oh, but, Mr. Kelly, I am infectious----"
"Stuff and nonsense!--as though I cared for that! We are in the same boat as to that, for I helped to carry her ash.o.r.e. But we needn"t be more doleful than circ.u.mstances make us. I am peckish, if you are not.
Do let us have supper here together!"
That was the first of many such meals, taken just in those moments when Ursula could leave her patient, and run out into the fresh air. It seemed as though those Arabs must be cooking all day long, for there was always some appetising dish ready; and oh, the blessed relief of those odd minutes spent with one who could give word for word, and whose eyes shone with friendly sympathy and kindly concern! Ursula said in her heart every day as it went by, that but for this she must have died or gone mad.
The Captain had been right in his prognostication. Mrs. Varden sank gradually, and by the end of the week pa.s.sed away in her sleep; and it was Ursula and Mr. Kelly who bore her to her narrow grave upon those spreading sands; and it was he who filled up the grave that he had dug, and, bringing out a well-worn Prayer-book from his pocket, read over that lonely resting-place those words of hope and promise that have been the consolation of Christian mourners for all time.
Ursula did not take the fell disease. She was unnerved and unstrung for a time; but the quiet days went by one by one, and the consciousness of that watchful presence without kept her from any of those fears and tremors which must otherwise have made this period of waiting an agony to her.
They met every day. They took their meals together, and walked up and down beside the margin of the sea in company. They had to wait till the time of quarantine had gone by; but at last there came the blessed day when a steamer stopped and dropped its boat to fetch them; and the two exiles from humanity looked one at the other, and then at the great vessel awaiting them, and they knew that their time of trial was over.
The pa.s.sengers on that vessel were disposed to make much of them, and laud the girl"s heroism to the skies; but she shrank from praise, and kept herself quietly aloof from the little world of the ship, till at last the day came when they steamed slowly into the beautiful harbour at Southampton, and dropped anchor there.
Ursula"s few possessions were quickly gathered together; she stepped alone into the bustle of the great world, where welcomes were being bandied about on every side, and every pa.s.senger seemed to have some loving friend or relative to greet him.