CHAPTER XXII. THE LAZARETTO OF BEXAR
Kind-hearted reader,—you who have sympathized with so many of the rubs that Fortune has dealt us; who have watched us with a benevolent interest in our warfare with an adverse destiny; who have marked our struggles, and witnessed our defeats,—will surely compassionate our sad fate when we tell you that when the curtain next rises on our drama, it presents us no longer what we had been!
Con Cregan, the light-hearted vagrant, paddling his lone canoe down life's stream in joyous merriment, himself sufficing to himself, his eyes ever upward as his hopes were onward, his crest an eagle's, and his motto “higher,” was no more. He had gone,—vanished, been dissipated into thin air; and in his place there sat, too weak to walk, a poor emaciated creature, with shaven head and shrunken limbs, a very wreck of humanity, pale, sallow, and miserable as fever and flannel could paint him.
Yes, gentle reader, under the shade of a dwarf fig-tree, in the Leper Hospital of Bexar, I sat, attired in a whole suit of flannel, of a pale, brown tint, looking like a faded flea, all my gay spirits fled, and my very identity merged into the simple fact that I was known as “Convalescent, No. 303,”—an announcement which, for memory's sake, perhaps, was stamped upon the front of my nightcap.
Few people are fortunate enough not to remember the strange jumble of true and false, the incoherent tissue of fact and fancy, which assails the first moments of recovery from illness. It is a pitiable period, with its thronging thoughts, all too weighty for the light brain that should bear them. You follow your ideas like an ill-mounted horseman in a hunt; no sooner have you caught a glimpse of the game than it is lost again; on you go, wearied by the pace, but never cheered by success; often tumbling into a slough, missing your way, and mistaking the object of pursuit: such are the casualties in either case, and they are not enviable ones.
Now, lest I should seem to be a character of all others I detest, a grumbler without cause, let me ask the reader to sit beside me for a few seconds on this bench, and look with me at the prospect around him. Yonder, that large white building, with grated windows, jail-like and sad, is the Leper Hospital of Bexar, an institution originally intended for the sick of that one malady, but, under the impression of its being contagious, generously extended to those laboring under any other disease. The lepers are that host who sit in groups upon the grass, at cards or dice, or walk in little knots of two and three. Their shambling gait and crippled figures,—the terrible evidence of their malady,—twisted limbs, contorted into every horrible variety of lameness, hands with deficient fingers, faces without noses, are the ordinary symbols. The voices, too, are either husky and unnatural, or reduced to a thin, reedy treble, like the wail of an infant. Worse than all, far more awful to contemplate, to him exposed to such companionship, their minds would appear more diseased than even their bodies: some evincing this aberration by traits of ungovernable passion, some by the querulous irritability of peevish childhood, and some by the fatuous vacuity of idiocy; and here am I gazing upon all this, and speculating, by the aid of a little bit of broken looking-glass, how long it is probable that I shall retain the “regulation” number of the human features.
Ah, you gentlemen of England, who live at home at ease, may smile at such miseries; but let me tell you that however impertinent you might deem him who told you “to follow your nose,” the impossibility of compliance is a yet heavier infliction; and it was with a trembling eagerness that, each morning as I awoke, I consulted the map of my face, to be sure that I was master of each geographical feature.
While all who may break a leg or cut a blood-vessel are reckoned fit subjects to expose to the risk of this contagion, the most guarded measures are adopted to protect the world without the walls from every risk. Not only is every leper denied access to his friends and family, but even written communication is refused him, while sentinels are stationed at short intervals around the grounds, with orders to fire upon any who should attempt an escape.