All was dark again; the merciless pain in loins and thighs had returned with sharp consciousness of the fever, and the insufferable heat and skull-splitting headache—heavy blankets and miserable helplessness—and the recollection of the very, very small pill-box on the table. Then it seemed to him there were other pill-boxes—three! nine! twenty-seven! eight-one! one hundred and sixty-two! one hundred and sixty-two very small pill-boxes.
He seemed to be wandering in a cemetery, under blazing sunlight and in a blinding glare of white-washed washed tombs, whose skeletons of brick were left bare in leprous patches by the falling away of the plastering. And, wandering, he came to a deep wall, catacombed from base to summit with the resting-places of ten thousand dead; and there was one empty place—one black void—inscribed with a name strangely like his own. And a great weariness and faintness came upon him; and the pains, returning, carried back his thoughts to the warmth and dimness of the sick-room.
It seemed to him that this could not be death—he was too weary even to die! But they would put him into the hollow void in the wall!—they might: he would not resist, he felt no fear. He could rest there very well even for a hundred years. He had a gimlet somewhere!—they would let him take it with him;—he could bore a tiny little hole in the wall so that a thread of sunlight would creep into his resting-place every day, and he could hear the voices of the world about him. Yet perhaps he should never be able to leave that dark damp place again!—It was very possible; seeing that he was so tired. And there was so much to be arranged first: there were estimates and plans and contracts; and nobody else could make them out; and everything would be left in such confusion! And perhaps he might not even be able to think in a little while; all the knowledge he had stored up would be lost; nobody could think much or say much after having been buried. And he thought again of the pill-boxes—one hundred and sixty-two very small pill-boxes. No; there were exactly three hundred and sixty-six! Perhaps that was because it was leap year.
Everything must be arranged at once!—at once! The pill-boxes would do; he could breathe his thoughts into them and close them tightly—recollections of estimates, corrections of plans, directions to the stair-builders, understanding with contractors, orders to the lumber dealers, instructions to Texan and Mississippi agents, answers to anxious architects, messages to the senior partner, explanations to the firm of X and W. Then it seemed to him that each little box received its deposit of memories, and became light as flame, buoyant as a bubble;—rising in the air to float halfway between floor and ceiling. A great anxiety suddenly came upon him;—the windows were all open, and the opening of the door might cause a current. All these little thoughts would float away!—yet he could not rise to lock the door! The boxes were all there, floating above him light as motes in a sunbeam:—there were so many now that he could not count them! If the nurse would only stay away!... Then all became dark again—a darkness as of solid ebony, heavy, crushing, black, blank, universal...
All lost! Brutally the door opened and closed again with a cruel clap of thunder.... Yellow lightnings played circling before his eyes.... The pill-boxes were gone! But was not that the face of the doctor, anxious and kindly? The burning day was dead; the sick man turned his eyes to the open windows, and beheld the fathomless purple of the night, and the milky blossoms of the stars. And he strove to speak, but could not! The light of a shaded lamp falling upon the table illuminated a tiny object, blood-scarlet by day, carmine under the saffron artificial light. There was only one pill-box.
A RIVER REVERIE[31]
An old Western river port, lying in a wrinkle of the hills—a sharp slope down to the yellow water, glowing under the sun like molten bronze—a broken hollow square of buildings framing it in, whose basements had been made green by the lipping of water during inundations periodical as the rising of the Nile—a cannonade-rumble of drays over the boulders, and muffled-drum thumping of cotton bales—white signs black-lettered with names of steamboat companies, and the green lattice-work of saloon doors flanked by empty kegs—above, church spires cutting the blue—below, on the slope, hogsheads, bales, drays, cases, boxes, barrels, kegs, mules, wagons, policemen, loungers, and roustabouts, whose apparel is at once as picturesque, as ragged, and as colorless as the fronts of their favorite haunts on the water-front. Westward the purple of softly-rolling hills beyond the flood, through a diaphanous veil of golden haze—a marshaled array of white boats with arabesque lightness of painted woodwork, and a long and irregular line of smoking chimneys. The scene never varied save with the varying tints of weather and season. Sometimes the hills were gray through an atmosphere of rain—sometimes they vanished altogether in an autumn fog; but the port never changed. And in summer or spring, at the foot of the iron stairway leading up to a steamboat agency in the great middle building facing the river, there was a folding stool—which no one ever tried to steal—which even the most hardened wharf thieves respected—and on that stool, at the same hour every day, a pleasant-faced old man with a very long white beard used to sit. If you asked anybody who it was, the invariable reply was: "Oh! that's old Captain-; used to be in the New Orleans trade;—had to give up the river on account of rheumatism;—comes down every day to look at things."
Wonder whether the old captain still sits there of bright afternoons, to watch the returning steamers panting with their mighty run from the Far South—or whether he has sailed away upon that other river, silent and colorless as winter's fog, to that vast and shadowy port where much ghostly freight is discharged from vessels that never return? He haunts us sometimes—even as he must have been haunted by the ghosts of dead years.