“The gentleman in charge here,” she went on, “knows nothing of his duties.”
Lady Barbara had no belief in the nobility of nursing, to her mind it was a more degrading occupation than cooking or mending clothes (work which had only occasionally, when the exigencies of travel demanded it, engaged her capable fingers) but she had found a job which was being inefficiently done when there was no one save herself to do it better, at a time when the King’s service depended in part on its being done well. She had set herself to work with the same wholehearted attention to detail and neglect of personal comfort with which one of her brothers had governed India and another had fought the Mahrattas.
“This man,” went on Lady Barbara, “has a splinter of wood under his skin here. It ought to be extracted at once.”
She displayed the man’s bare chest, hairy and tattooed. Under the tattooing there was a horrible black bruise, stretching from the breast bone to the right armpit, and in the muscles of the armpit was a jagged projection under the skin; when Lady Barbara laid her fingers on it the man writhed and groaned with pain. In fighting between wooden ships splinter wounds constituted a high proportion of the casualties, and the hurtling pieces of wood could never be extracted by the route by which they entered, because their shape gave them natural barbs. In this case the splinter had been deflected by the ribs so as to pass round under the skin, bruising and lacerating, to its present place in the armpit.
“Are you ready to do it now?” asked Lady Barbara of the unhappy Laurie.
“Well, madam —”
“If you will not, then I will. Don’t be a fool, man.”
“I will see that it is done, Lady Barbara,” interposed Hornblower. He would promise anything to get this finished and done with.
“Very well, then, Captain.”
Lady Barbara rose from her knees, but she showed no sign of any intention of retiring in a decent female fashion. Hornblower and Laurie looked at each other.
“Now, Laurie,” said Hornblower, harshly. “Where are your instruments? Here, you, Wilcox, Hudson. Bring him a good stiff tot of rum. Now, Williams, we’re going to get that splinter out of you. It is going to hurt you.”
Hornblower had to struggle hard to keep his face from writhing in disgust and fear of the task before him. He spoke harshly to stop his voice from trembling; he hated the whole business. And it was a painful and bloody business, too. Although Williams tried hard to show no weakness, he writhed as the incision was made, and Wilcox and Hudson had to catch his hands and force his shoulders back. He gave a horrible cry as the long dark strip of wood was dragged out, and then fell limp, fainting, so that he uttered no protest at the prick of the needle as the edges of the wound were clumsily sewn together.
Lady Barbara’s lips were firmly compressed. She watched Laurie’s muddled attempts at bandaging, and then she stooped without a word and took the rags from him. The men watched her fascinated as with one hand firmly behind Williams’ spine she passed the roll dexterously round his body and bound the fast-reddening waste firmly to the wound.
“He will do now,” said Lady Barbara, rising.
Hornblower spent two stifling hours down there in the cockpit going the round with Laurie and Lady Barbara, but they were not nearly such agonising hours as they might have been. One of the main reasons for his feeling so unhappy regarding the care of the wounded had been his consciousness of his own incompetence. Insensibly he came to shift some of his responsibility on to Lady Barbara’s shoulders; she was so obviously capable and so unintimidated that she was the person most fitted of all in the ship to be given the supervision of the wounded. When Hornblower had gone round every bed, when the five newly dead men had been dragged out, he faced her under the wavering light of the last lamp in the row.
“I don’t know how I can thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I am as grateful to you as any of these wounded men.”