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Page 20
A carriage, its fine lacquered flanks gleaming in the sunlight, rolled
through the square, on its way, no doubt, to the very fashionable
quarter of the City just beyond. Lloyd had a glimpse of the girl leaning
back in its cushions, a girl of her own age, with whom she had some
slight acquaintance. For a moment Lloyd, ridden with her terrors, asked
herself if this girl, with no capabilities for either great happiness or
great sorrow, were not perhaps, after all, happier than she. But she
recoiled instantly, murmuring to herself with a certain fierce energy:
"No, no; after all, I have lived."
And how had she lived? For the moment Lloyd was willing to compare
herself with the girl in the landau. Swiftly she ran over her own life
from the time when left an orphan; in the year of her majority she had
become her own mistress and the mistress of the Searight estate. But
even at that time she had long since broken away from the conventional
world she had known. Lloyd was a nurse in the great St Luke's Hospital
even then, had been a probationer there at the time of her mother's
death, six months before. She had always been ambitious, but vaguely so,
having no determined object in view. She recalled how at that time she
knew only that she was in love with her work, her chosen profession, and
was accounted the best operating nurse in the ward.
She remembered, too, the various steps of her advancement, the positions
she had occupied; probationer first, then full member of the active
corps, next operating nurse, then ward manager, and, after her
graduation, head nurse of ward four, where the maternity cases were
treated. Then had come the time when she had left the hospital and
practised private nursing by herself, and at last, not so long ago, the
day when her Idea had so abruptly occurred to her; when her ambition, no
longer vague, no longer personal, had crystallised and taken shape; when
she had discovered a use for her money and had built and founded the
house on Calumet Square. For a time she had been the superintendent of
nurses here, until her own theories and ideas had obtained and prevailed
in its management. Then, her work fairly started, she had resigned her
position to an older woman, and had taken her place in the rank and file
of the nurses themselves. She wished to be one of them, living the same
life, subject to the same rigorous discipline, and to that end she had
never allowed it to be known that she was the founder of the house. The
other nurses knew that she was very rich, very independent and
self-reliant, but that was all. Lloyd did not know and cared very little
how they explained the origin and support of the agency.
Lloyd was animated by no great philanthropy, no vast love of humanity in
her work; only she wanted, with all her soul she wanted, to count in the
general economy of things; to choose a work and do it; to help on,
_donner un coup d'epaule_; and this, supported by her own stubborn
energy and her immense wealth, she felt that she was doing. To do things
had become her creed; to do things, not to think them; to do things, not
to talk them; to do things, not to read them. No matter how lofty the
thoughts, how brilliant the talk, how beautiful the literature--for her,
first, last, and always, were acts, acts, acts--concrete, substantial,
material acts. The greatest and happiest day of her life had been when
at last she laid her bare hand upon the rough, hard stone of the house
in the square and looked up at the facade, her dull-blue eyes flashing
with the light that so rarely came to them, while she murmured between
her teeth:
"I--did--this."
As she recalled this moment now, leaning upon her elbows, looking down
upon the trees and grass and asphalt of the square, and upon a receding
landau, a wave of a certain natural pride in her strength, the
satisfaction of attainment, came to her. Ah! she was better than other
women; ah! she was stronger than other women; she was carrying out a
splendid work. She straightened herself to her full height abruptly,
stretching her outspread hands vaguely to the sunlight, to the City, to
the world, to the great engine of life whose lever she could grasp and
could control, smiling proudly, almost insolently, in the consciousness
of her strength, the fine steadfastness of her purpose. Then all at once
the smile was struck from her lips, the stiffness of her poise suddenly
relaxed. There, there it was again, the terror, the dreadful fear she
dared not name, back in its place once more--at her side, at her
shoulder, at her throat, ready to clutch at her from out the dark.
She wheeled from the window, from the sunlight, her hands clasped before
her trembling lips, the tears brimming her dull-blue eyes. For
forty-eight hours she had fought this from her. But now it was no longer
to be resisted.
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