The very morning that Mrs. Lyndsay was able to leave her bed, her husband got a note from Mr. Gregg, informing him that the Anne was to sail at four o’clock the next day.
“My dear Flora,” said Lyndsay, tenderly, “I fear you are not able to go in your present weak state.”
“Oh yes, I shall be better for the change. This frightful cholera is spreading on all sides. The sooner, dear John, we can leave this place the better. Two persons, Mrs. Waddel told me, died last night of it, only a few doors off. I know that it is foolish to be afraid of an evil which we cannot avoid; but I find it impossible to divest myself of this fear. I look worse than I feel just now,” she continued, walking across the room, and surveying her face in the glass. “My colour is returning—I shall pass muster with the doctors yet.”
The great business of packing up for the voyage went steadily forward all day; and before six in the evening, trunks, bedding, and little ship stores, were on board, ready for a start.
Flora was surprised in the afternoon by a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Gregg, and the two rosy girls, who expressed the greatest regret at their departure. They had made a plum-cake for Mrs. Lyndsay to eat during the voyage; and truly it looked big enough to have lasted out a trip to the South Seas, while Mrs. Gregg had brought various small tin canisters filled with all sorts of farinaceous food for the baby.
Abundant as their kindness was, the blessings and good wishes they heaped upon the emigrants were more abundant still; the kind-hearted mother and her bonnie girls, kissing them at parting, with tears coursing down their rosy cheeks. Mr. Gregg, who was terribly afraid of the cholera, tried to raise his own spirits, by describing all the fatal symptoms of the disease, and gave them a faithful catalogue of those who had died of it that morning in the city. He had great faith in a new remedy, which was just then making a noise in the town, which had been tried the day before, on a relation of his own—the injection of salt into veins of the sufferer.
“Did it cure him?” asked Flora, rather eagerly.
“Why no, I canna jest say that it did. But it enabled him to mak’ his will an’ settle a’ his worldly affairs, which was a great point gained.”
“For the living,” sighed Flora. “Small satisfaction to the dying, to be disturbed in their last agonies, by attending to matters of business, while a greater reckoning is left unpaid.”
“You look ill yoursel, Mistress Lyndsay,” continued the gude man. “Let’s hope that it’s not the commencement of the awfu’ disease.”