Mr. Jervis, Volume II by B. M. Croker

Mark Jervis had resisted all Mrs. Brande's invitations to "take him home and nurse him. " He would be far better, quoth she, in her comfortable spare room, with the best of fresh eggs and new milk, than in that smoky Haddon Hall, at the mercy of his bearer, his meals irregular, and no comforts. She was well accustomed to nursing young men. How many junior civilians, brought to the verge of the grave by India's new scourge, typhoid, had owed their lives to Sara Brande -- young men in her husband's district, who, just out from home, had scorned such precautions as the purchase of a filter and a cow! What tales, if she had chosen, could Mrs. Brande have related of these same reckless invalids! How, at their first weak, but convalescent and ravenous stage, they had been so happy, so amazed, to find themselves yet in the land of the living, that they had babbled freely to their kind sympathetic nurse, forgetting how often they had laughed at "old Sally Brande. " She seemed an angel, a more than mother to them now. Reclining on sofas and long chairs, in clothes much too large, twilight, or especially moonlight, often found them murmuring experiences and confidences into their nurse's attentive ear -- "of girls at home," of debts, of scrapes, of good resolutions, of "new leaves" that were about to be turned over; -- were not all these things written in the chronicles of Mrs. Brande's memory? Afterwards, when restored to life and vigour, with a sharpened appetite for life's enjoyments, these patients marvelled at themselves, their poor weak wagging tongues, their indiscretions! They felt _hot_ as they thought of the secrets which were buried in Mrs. Brande's bosom; but they were always polite to her, never would suffer a word in her disfavour, and many of them loved her.

The cards, letters, and mementoes she received at Christmas were astonishing in variety, and in the difference of post-marks; from Tongoo to Suakim, from Kohat to Galle, these tokens of affectionate remembrance poured in from what Mrs. Brande was wont to term "her boys. " She (_very_ low be it whispered) was fond of young men! She liked Mark Jervis particularly, and would gladly have enrolled him in her brigade; for her boys were not merely Indian civilians -- she had her recruits in the police, the opium department, the army, and the law.