The curse of gold

by Ann S. Stephens

Other faces met your view, coarse and shameless, or haggard with long suffering; and some turned upon you eyes so full of gentle submission, that you wondered why human beings so opposite in their nature should be crowded together in one room, even by the terrible leveller Poverty.

Sounds, in painful harmony with the scene, greeted your entrance. Murmurs of sharp impatience, imprecations suppressed only by fear, and open complaints from the coarser and ruder inmates, drowned the sighs and timid whispers of maternal love that gave a breath of heaven even to that miserable place.

Two cots in the room, both standing in a remote corner, were occupied like the rest, but gave forth no signs of life. They stood close together, and of the occupants it seemed impossible to say which was living, or which was actually dead, so coldly pale were the two faces that gleamed upon you from the pillows. Both were young, and one was wondrously beautiful even in that deathly state, when forehead, hands and lips were blanched to the whiteness of a corpse.

The other was less beautiful, but very young, and so fragile that you wondered why death had waited to find her in that miserable place, for she was dying. The gray shadows, settling like a mist upon her face, the locked whiteness of her features, the imperceptible stiffening of her white hand upon the coverlet, all proclaimed this truth with terrible distinctness. But there was yet a breath of life close to her heart, a faint flutter as if a wounded bird had folded its wings forever, and then all was quiet as if sleep were there, or death had come twice.

The gray shadows of a winter’s morning crept through the checkered curtains of a neighboring window, and hung coldly around that pauper couch; and amid the muttering of patients restless with fever, or clamorous for nourishment, the wail of sickly infants, and the outcries of healthy ones, this poor young creature died and grew cold, unwatched and unwept.

The other, she who lay so like an exquisite statue on the neighboring couch, would no life ever return to her? There was a faint motion of the bed-clothes, as if breath still lingered there; but did it exist in that fair young mother or in the child, for she, poor thing, was a mother, and even in the chill of insensibility she held the little being into which her own seemed to have merged, clasped to her bosom.

Just as the day dawned, a nurse came into the ward, not with her usual dauntless step, but stealthily, and casting sidelong glances from cot to cot, like a panther fearing to arouse his prey. She stopped once or twice and arranged the pillows of her patients, with a sort of cajoling attention, always leaving their faces turned from the corner where those two young creatures suffered. Then she stole softly between the two cots, and bending down her face till her soiled curl-papers almost touched the dead, listened, felt the cold hand on the coverlet, and cautiously turned down the clothes.

At the head of each cot a square wooden label was hung against the wall, on which was painted the name and number of the occupant. The nurse took down these labels when quite sure that one of these young women was dead, and replaced them again, looking furtively around as she did so.

After making herself busy with the labels a while, the nurse stood over the cot of the dead woman and took a rapid survey of the ward.

All was quiet, save the murmurs of a child, far down the room, who was struggling to keep its place in the arms of a drowsy mother.