第51章

"Orderly," he said, to the soldier who responded, "conduct this young woman to Dr.Denslow.Inform him that she is to be with us as a nurse, and ask him to be kind enough to assign her suitable quarters.Good afternoon, ma'am."In another office, much smaller and far less luxuriously furnished, she found Dr.Denslow, a hazel-eyed, brown-bearded man of thirty, whose shoulder-straps bore the modest bars of Captain.The reader has already made his acquaintance.He received her with the pleasant, manly sympathy for her sex, which had already made him one of the most popular of family physicians in the city where he was practicing at the outbreak of the war.

Rachel's depressed spirits rose again at his cordial reception.

"I am so busy," he said, after a brief exchange of commonplaces, "that I'll not have the time to give you much information this afternoon as to your duties, and I know that you are so fatigued with your journey and the heat that you will not care to do anything but rest and refresh yourself.I will therefore show you immediately to your quarters.""This will be your field of labor," he said, as he led her down the long aisle between rows of cots toward her room."It's not a cheerful one to contemplate at first.Human suffering is always a depressing spectacle, and you will see here more of it and more varied agony than you can find anywhere outside of an army hospital's walls.But as the deed is so is the duty, and the glory of doing it.To one who wants to serve God and his fellow-creatures--which I take it is the highest form of religion--here is an opportunity that he may bless God for giving him.Here he can earn a brighter crown than is given them who die at the stake for opinion's sake."So earnest was his enthusiasm that Rachel felt herself lifted up by it, in spite of her discomforts.But then she turned her eyes away from his impassioned face, and looked over the array of white beds, each with its pale and haggard occupant, his eyes blazing with the delirium of fever, or closed in the langor of exhaustion, with limbs tossing as the febrile fire seethed the blood, or quivering with the last agonies.Groans, prayers, and not a few oaths fell on her ears.The repulsive smell of the disinfectants, the nauseating odor of the sick room where hundreds of invalids were lying, the horrible effluvia of the typhus rose on the hot air, and seemed part of the misery which so strongly assailed her other senses.

She was sick at heart, and with every feeling in active revolt, but without a word she turned and followed Dr.Denslow to a hot, close, little room which had been cut off one end of the hospital, though not so separated from it but that the sounds and odors from the sick wards continually filtered in through the wide cracks in its plank sides.An iron bedstead, of the same pattern as that upon which the sick lay, stood in one corner, and in another was a rudely-fashioned stand, upon which was a tin-basin, a cake of yellow bar-soap, and a bucket of water for washing.This was all the furniture.

As the door closed behind the Doctor, Rachel threw herself upon the cot, in a fit of despair at the wreck of all her fancies, and the repulsiveness of the career upon which she had embarked.

"I can not--I will not--live here a week," she said to herself, over and over again."I will die for the lack of comforts--of the decencies of life, even--to say nothing of being poisoned by these horrible smells, or driven distracted by the raving sick and that boor of a Surgeon.But I can not draw back; I would rather die than go back to Sardis with a confession of failure at the very outset of my attempt to play the heroine."Then she remembered her last words to Harry Glen: "I only know that you have failed where a number of commonplace men have succeeded, and that is sufficient."Would she subject herself to having him throw these words in her teeth? No.Any shape of trial and death, rather.