What is that shiver which tells us, spite of fires and closed doors, that the turn of the night has come; that chill which creeps through the body, even in the summer time, if we are keeping our solitary watch by the sick-bed, or travelling hour after hour through the darkness?
Some people say that the hour before dawn is the coldest, and this is possible; but it is not cold with the peculiar chilliness of which I am now speaking, and which produces precisely the same effect upon the nerves as the sudden withdrawal of pressure at the gas-works produces in a room.
In a moment the lights of the soul seem to burn dim, while that strange cold crosses the threshold and takes possession of the watcher’s spirit.
None perhaps, save those who have habitually watched through the night, worked at a trade or a profession, or sat in attendance on the sick, will understand exactly what I am trying to write about, and yet the effects of this atmospheric change must have been felt some time or other by all men and all women to whose fate it has fallen ever to keep a solitary vigil, or to walk alone at night either through London or the country, or beside the desolate sea-shore.
It is at that hour they come fully to comprehend why intramural burials are so pernicious—it is then the sewers give forth their effluvia, and the scent of flowers grows heavy and oppressive—it is then we close the window to keep the smell of the seringa from entering our chamber, and cast away the lilies that seemed once so sweet—then we take desponding views of sickness and of the future, and shrink alike from the work of this world, and the rest of the unseen!
Through the night, Mr. Aggland and Phemie and the nurse watched Basil Stondon, and when the hour to which I have referred came, Phemie arose, and, wrapping her shawl more closely round her, moved to the side of the sleeper and took up her position there.
As she did so, the lights in her heart were burning dim. She feared the worst—she believed he would not recover, and that the end was very near. She had persuaded Georgina to lie down, promising to call her should there be any decided change for the worse. The nurse was dozing on a sofa behind the door; Mr. Aggland, seated by the fire, was reading Jeremy Taylor’s sermon concerning the “Foolish Exchange;” and there was a great stillness in the room as well as that peculiar cold, while Phemie softly drew a chair to the bedside in order to watch the sleeper more closely.
Eighteen years, or thereabouts, have elapsed since first in the church at Tordale, when the summer sun was shining on the earth, you, reader, were introduced to Phemie Keller. Should you care in that which is the darkest and coldest hour of all the night to gaze upon her again?
Those authors who, commencing with heroines of eighteen, take leave of them when they quit the church-door at twenty, have a great advantage over the other members of their craft who are compelled to talk of women when they have passed the Rubicon of female attractiveness.
Youth is so pretty, so fresh, so engaging, so full of poetry and romance and gaiety! And once youth is gone, when there are lines on the brow, and memories in the heart, and graves in the past, how shall the interest of the story be kept up—the reader led on to follow the path of maid, or wife, or widow into middle age?