Her desire for work
could now scarcely be distinguished from mania. At one moment she
was writing a 'last letter' to Sidney Herbert; at the next she
was offering to go out to India to nurse the sufferers in the
Mutiny. When Dr. Sutherland wrote, imploring her to take a
holiday, she raved. Rest!--'I am lying without my head, without
my claws, and you all peck at me. It is de rigueur, d'obligation,
like the saying something to one's hat, when one goes into
church, to say to me all that has been said to me 110 times a day
during the last three months. It is the obbligato on the violin,
and the twelve violins all practise it together, like the clocks
striking twelve o'clock at night all over London, till I say like
Xavier de Maistre, Assez, je sais, je ne le sais que trop. I am
not a penitent; but you are like the R.C. confessor, who says
what is de rigueur. ...'
Her wits began to turn, and there was no holding her. She worked
like a slave in a mine. She began to believe, as she had begun to
believe at Scutari, that none of her fellow-workers had their
hearts in the business; if they had, why did they not work as she
did? She could only see slackness and stupidity around her. Dr.
Sutherland, of course, was grotesquely muddle-headed; and Arthur
Clough incurably lazy. Even Sidney Herbert ... oh yes, he had
simplicity and candour and quickness of perception, no doubt; but
he was an eclectic; and what could one hope for from a man who
went away to fish in Ireland just when the Bison most needed
bullying? As for the Bison himself, he had fled to Scotland where
he remained buried for many months.
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