NEGLECTED RESPONSIBILITIES

“Like a prince in his cradle,” you say, “with invisible fairies and the innocent peace of childhood over him!”

What fairy stood by the cradle of Barbara’s Nikolai it would be difficult to say.  Out at the tinsmith’s, in the little house with the cracked and broken window-panes in the outskirts of the town, there was often a run of visitors, generally late at night, when wanderers on the high road were at a loss for a night’s lodging.  Many a revel had been held there, and it was not once only that the cradle had been overturned in a fight, or that a drunken man had fallen full length across it.

Nikolai’s mother was called Barbara, and came from Heimdalhoegden, somewhere far up in the country—­a genuine mountain lass, shining with health, red and white, strong and broad-shouldered, and with teeth like the foam in the milk pail.  She had heard so much about the town from cattle-dealers that came over the mountain, that a longing and restlessness had taken possession of her.

And then she had gone out to service in the town.

She was about as suitable there as a tumble-down haystack in a handsome town street, or as a cow on a flight of stairs—­that is to say, not at all.

She used to waste her time on the market-place by all the hay loads.  She must see and feel the hay—­that was not at all like mountain grass.  “No indeed!  Mountain grass was so soft, and then, how it smelt!  Oh dear no!”

But her mistress had other uses for her servant than letting her spend the morning talking to hay-cart drivers.  So she went from place to place, each time descending both as regarded wages and mistress.  Barbara was good-natured and honest; but she had one fault—­the great one of being totally unfit for all possible town situations.

Yet Society has, as we know, a wonderful faculty for making use of, assimilating and reconstructing everything, even the apparently most meaningless and useless, for its own purpose.  And the way it took, quickly enough, with poor Barbara was that she became the only thing in which she could be of any service in the town—­namely, a nurse.

It was a sad time and a hard struggle while the shame lasted, almost enough to kill her; and after that, she never thought of returning to the Heimdal mountains again.

But things were to be still harder.

The various social claims, which an age of progress increasingly lays upon the lady of the house in the upper classes of society, asserted themselves here in the town by an ever increasing demand for nurses.

“The reason,” as Dr. Schneibel explained, “was simply a law of Nature—­you can’t be a milch-cow and an intelligent human being at the same time.  The renovation of blood and nerves must be artificially conveyed from that class of society which stands nearer to Nature.”