You have a purpose now in life, which, like the messenger of the king, that every morning knocked at his bedroom door to say, "Oh king, remember all this day that you are mortal," hourly brings to mind the bright reward of every toil and every aspiration. Besides a physical frame there is a mental constitution hinging on your own. There's a long life far beyond your own brief years of breath to provide for. Your name is to be perpetuated. In the very evening of your life there is to be a star that is now in its morning of existence, which will cheer and enliven. You feel all this as in some sad hour of the sickly night; you pace your room with the little sufferer wrestling with disease, and you feel that in the future will be found ample rewards for all your present bitter draughts of anxiety.
Wrestling with disease!
The thought is ugly to the mental sight. I pause to brush its cobweb from my August Reverie as an idle vaporish thing. But the shadowy form, in the edge of the distant cloud, over the far off waters of the lake, hisses the words back into my brain. And then it comes nearer. And then the atmosphere grows more dreamy and hazy about. And I half feel the mountain breezes, and half miss them from off my temples. And next I feel my thoughts less concentrate, as the shadowy form I know so well seems to be looking under my half-closed lids, and dwelling on the words I brushed like cob-webs—"wrestling with disease."
And I think of the still chamber, with the blue edge of the bracket, as it is rimmed with the faintest glimmer of the turned-down gas. And I see the half-closed shutters. And the tumbler with its significant spoon on the mantel. And the pale watcher by the ghostly curtains of the bed. And I am bending silently and almost pulseless over the sleeping boy, upon whose face each minute the fever-flushes play like summer lightning under a satin cloud.
And days go by. There is a strange hush in the household, with a horridly sensitive jarring from the vehicles in the street, which never, never were before so noisy, neither have the thronging passengers from the pavements ever gossipped so discordantly, as they go under the windows of the silent house. There's a strange echo of infantile prattle by the niches on the landings of the stairs, and from the couches, and behind the curtains; but the substantive music, whence the conjured-up echo came, is nowhere found. Then the echo itself becomes but an illusion. And Memory is strangely and impassionately chid for its creation.
I pass into a little room scarcely wide enough to wheel a sofa within. It seems as boundless in its desolation as an untenanted temple-ruin. There are mournful spirits in the little atmosphere which sting me to the heart—not to be torn away. The little cotton-dog, and morocco-ball, and jingling-bells, and coral-toys, so strangely scattered all about, are prodigious ruins to the sight. There's a gleeful laugh, a cunning smile, an artless waving of the hands, which should be here as tenants of the room. All gone! all gone into that hushed and silent chamber where yet the patient-watcher is by the snowy curtains; and the sickly blue still edges the rim of the bracket light, and the fever-flushes still play about the wasted cheek.
How long to last? What next to come? And the shadowy form no longer can peep under the all-closed eyelids, but enters its whisperings through the delicate passages of the ear into the brain, which tortures in a maze of bitter conjecture and horrid contemplation. And my reverie becomes a painful nightmare dream.
But the mountain-breezes, and the uprising-to-meridian sun, are merciful. The shadowy form my reverie hinged itself upon is blown away. The open eyes once more glance upon the glassy waters of the lake close by the shore, and onward to the dancing ripples far away. And a merry prattling voice, from out of loving arms, is coming nearer and nearer over the velvety lawn—a voice so full of spirit, and life, and health, and sparkling innocence of care, that in a moment the frightful nightmare-dream is quite forgotten.
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