Only a day or two since, a poor Greek inhabitant of Therapia was suddenly attacked with sickness, and, thinking that he recognised the symptoms of the malady, he immediately proceeded to his cottage; and, stopping ere he touched the threshold, called to his wife, who, astonished on seeing him at so unwonted an hour, and struck by the change in his appearance, was about to approach him, when he desired her to stand back; and then, calmly telling her that he was unwell, though he knew not from what cause, and that he was unwilling during a time of Plague to run the risk of infecting his family, or of compromising his house, he desired her to throw him his furred pelisse. “If it be a mere passing sickness,” he added, as he prepared to depart, “it will only cost me a night in the open air—If it be the Plague, you will at least save our few articles of clothing, and the few comforts of the cottage—Recommend me to the Virgin and St. Roch.”
And thus he left his home; and wandered, weak and heart-sick, to the mountains. He felt that the brand was on him; and he went to die alone, he knew not how—whether as a wild and frantic maniac, gathering strength from the fever which would turn his blood to fire, and howling out his anguish to the winds of midnight, without one kind voice to comfort, or one fond hand to guide him, until at length he dropped down to die upon the damp earth—or, as a shivering and palsied wretch, fainting from thirst, and quivering with sickness, to gaze hour after hour from his bed of withered leaves, or parched-up turf, upon the blue bright sky, and the myriad stars, until they went out one by one as his sight failed, and his pulse ebbed——
On the morrow the wife hastened to the mountains with food, in search of her husband. She had not taught herself to believe that the Plague had touched him, and she feared that he might suffer from hunger. She led one of her children by the hand—his favourite child—and they were long before they found him—for although the young clear voice of the boy shouting out his name was borne far away upon the elastic air of the mountain, there was no answer to the call—alas! there could be none—the father lay cold and stiff in a gully of the rock,-the Plague-smitten had ceased to suffer!
The anguish of the unfortunate woman may be conceived—In her first agony she sprang towards the body, but the shriek of her child recalled her to a sense of her peril, and the fate that she would entail upon her little ones. The struggle was long and bitter; and at length she turned away with the weeping boy, and returned into the village to proclaim her widowhood.
I have already mentioned the fact of my having on one occasion inadvertently ridden into the midst of a Plague-encampment. Such occurrences are, however, rare; as, in the event of several families being compromised and sent to the mountains, there is generally a military guard stationed at every avenue leading to their temporary dwellings, to prevent the approach of strangers, and to form their medium of subsistence.
A melancholy tale was related to me by a lady at Therapia, who had watched from day to day the proceedings of one of these little mountain colonies through a telescope. It consisted of a miserable family; the father gray-haired and feeble, and the mother bent and palsied—The children died first, one by one, for the disease drank their young blood more eagerly than the chill stream which moved sluggishly through the veins of the aged parents; and at length the old couple were left alone.
They used to sit side by side for hours under a tree facing their village—the birth-place of their dead ones, whom they had put into the earth with their own hands—but within a week the childless mother sickened in her turn and the gray old man dragged a wretched mattress to the foot of the tree from beneath which his stricken wife had no longer power to move; and he held the water to her lips, and he put the bread into her grasp; but all his care availed her nothing—and with his lean and trembling hands he scratched her a grave under the shadows of the tree that she had loved in life; and, when the earth had hidden her from his sight, he lay down across the narrow mound to die in his turn. His worldly toils were ended!
Scarcely less affecting was the devotion of a young Greek girl, whose lover, smitten with plague, was conveyed to the temporary hospital at the Seven Towers. No sooner had she ascertained whither they had carried him, than without saying a word to her parents, who would, as she well knew, have opposed her design, she left her home, and presented herself at the portal of the infected fortress as the nurse of the young Greek caïquejhe who had been received there on the previous day. In vain did the governor, imagining from her youth, and the calm and collected manner in which she offered herself up an almost certain victim to the pestilence, that she was not aware of her danger, endeavour to dissuade her from her project. She was immoveable; and was ultimately permitted to approach the bedside of the dying sufferer.
Not a tear, not a murmur escaped her, as she took her place beside his pillow, and entered upon her desperate office. In the paroxysms of his madness, as the poison was feeding upon his strength, and grappling at his brain, he spoke of her fondly—he talked to her—he stretched forth his arms to clasp her—and then he thrust her from him as he yelled out his agony, and his limbs writhed beneath the torture of the passing spasm.
And she bore it all unshrinkingly; and even amid her misery she felt a thrill of joy as she discovered that pain and madness had alike failed to blot her image from his memory. But there were moments less cruel than these, in which reason resumed her temporary sway, and the devoted girl was pressed to the fevered bosom of her fated lover; and in these, brief as they were, she felt that she was over-paid for all.