God of mercy, I thank thee! I thank thee!
Once more we sat on the steps. The bewitching beauty of the August night lay around us. The yellow harvest moon sailed on as calmly as though it were used to beholding lovers. I held her hand in a kind of stupefied satisfaction, feeling as though under the spell of some powerful opiate. She was so close to me!—the skirt of her gingham gown had fallen over one of my feet. I touched her hair, so tenderly, and smoothed it back from her pure forehead. How could it be? This young creature, so full of life and health, encompassed with all that wealth and love could give—to love me!—me, a simple bookworm and lover of Nature, who had come into her life by chance. The golden hours of that enchanted night still glow like letters of fire upon the web of memory. It was the one perfect period in my quiet and uneventful existence,—the one brief time when life was full, and I held to my lips the cup of all earthly happiness. And the changing years cannot rob me of the recollection.
XV
The next day Salome was seized with a severe headache. She did not leave the house, and of course I did not see her, as she stayed in her room upstairs. We felt no especial concern, although she was not accustomed to such attacks, and with the coming of night her head grew easier. I went out after supper to pace up and down the avenue, to smoke my pipe, and to watch the windows of her room. I remained in the yard till nearly eleven, and the light was still burning when I went in. The next morning Mrs. Grundy told me that Salome had some fever, and that a doctor had been sent for. I heard the news in silent fear, and my heart sank. I longed to tell this good old woman what her daughter was to me; but Salome had said nothing about it, and I could not speak without her consent.
The doctor came, an important-looking young fellow whom I felt inclined to kick off the porch the moment he set foot on it. When he descended from the sick room he pompously announced that it was only an ordinary cold, which would quickly disappear before the remedies which he had left. But the days went by, and she grew no better, and I never saw her. How my heart hungered for a glance of her sweet face; how my eyes longed to look into the clear, brown depths of hers. One morning I was told that a leading physician from Louisville had been summoned. Dr. Yandel came—and stayed. Typhoid fever is a grim foe which requires vigilance as well as medical skill.
I went about like one distraught with a cold hand gripping my heart. It was then she asked to see me. I went to her room for a few moments, and came out with my face gray, and a pitiful, broken prayer to God. Two weeks—and one night they came for me. Like a broken, shattered lily she lay, but her lips smiled with their last breath, and whispered—"Abner."
Blinded and weak, I groped my way out into the night, and sat down. My yellow dog found me, and crept, whining, between my knees. When I lifted my stricken face to the sky, I thought I saw a misty shallop touch the strand of heaven, and a slender white figure with brown hair step onto the plains of Paradise.