There he lay, in that secluded Burmese village, struggling between life and death for a long time. His constitution had been severely tried by his early excesses, and had he not passed some months upon enforced abstinence from alcohol on board the poor Pelican of the North, so that he had, in some measure, been restored to a more healthy state of body, it is doubtful whether it would have been possible for him to have fought through the terrible fever, which had been induced by hardship and exposure to malaria.
His chief chance of life lay in the continuance of the impossibility of obtaining stimulants where he was. The Burmese are a water drinking race; and although they do distil a pernicious fiery liquor from rice, it is not much used, or easily procured, in such out-of-the-way places as those into which he had wandered.
Medical science is very imperfectly understood among this people; and when his host fetched a native doctor for the sick stranger, he brought with him such strange-looking compounds in gaily-painted joints of bamboo canes, that Kirke could not bring himself to trust them any more than the charms, in which the village Galen evidently possessed more faith himself. Perhaps this was well for him, but he was brought to the verge of the grave before the constantly recurring attacks of ague and fever gradually subsided. And oh, how lonely he felt as he lay on his bed of sickness now!
God seemed to have forsaken him; left him to his own stubborn, hard heart, and allowed him to take his own way.
But not in reality. Lonely, suffering, weak, with no one to speak to, none to care for him, none to help him, his hour had come at last. Broken in spirit, he repented his evil courses, he sought his God in prayer, and his Father did not despise his humble and contrite heart.
Exhausted by the struggle through the morning's rigor which attended his complaint, he lay prone one day, in what was half sleep, half unconsciousness, on his mat.
A pleasant breeze had sprung up, which rustled the branches of the trees, and wafted towards him the scent of flowers, overpowering that of rotting vegetation which always seemed to pervade everything. It brought with it also the gentle tinkle of bells from a pagoda upon a rising ground in this valley. In his half awake state, he fancied he smelt the Gloire de Dijon roses that grew round the drawing-room bay window in his father's rectory, and heard the church bells ringing afar off, calling the villagers to the Sabbath service.
He remembered how, as a little child, he had been led by his gentle mother's hand through the pleasant garden and shrubbery, to the gate which opened thence into the churchyard heaped with grassy mounds. Among them was a little white marble cross, over the grave of his baby sister who had died. His mother stayed her feet at this place, and laid before it the pure white rosebud which she had plucked as they went over the lawn. A tear ran down her cheek as she did so.
"Jamie," said she, "little Leonora would have been five years old to-day if God had spared her to us. Oh, my dear little girl, my dear little lost one!"
His father had come up to them. "Not lost, wifey," said he,—"not lost, but gone before."