The Story of a Child Part 5

Her mind had become clear; she no longer mistook our names, and in a sweet calm voice she begged us to remain near her--it was doubtless the voice of other days, the one that I had never heard before.

As I stood close to my father's side I turned my eyes from my dying grandmother, and they wandered about the room with its old-fas.h.i.+oned furniture. I looked especially at the pictures of bouquets in vases that hung upon the wall. Oh! those poor little water colors in my grandmother's room, how ingenuous they were! They all bore this inscription: "A Bouquet for my mother," and under this there was a little verse of four lines dedicated to her which I could now read and understand. These works of art had been painted by my father in his early boyhood, and he had presented them to his mother upon each joyful anniversary. The poor, unpretentious little pictures bore testimony to the humble life of those early days, and they spoke of the sacred intimacy of mother and son,--they had been painted during the time which followed those great ordeals, the wars, the English invasion and the burning over of the country by the enemy. For the first time I realized that my grandmother too had been young; that, without doubt, before the trouble with her head, my father had loved her as I loved my mamma, and I felt that he would sorrow greatly when he lost her; I felt sorry for him and I was also full of remorse because I had laughed at her singing, and had been amused when she spoke to her image reflected in the looking-gla.s.s.

They sent me down stairs. On different pretexts, the reason for which I did not understand, they kept me away from the room until the day was over; then they took me to the house of our friends, the D----s, where I was to have dinner with Lucette.

When, at about half past eight, I returned home with my nurse, I insisted upon going straight to my grandmother's room.

When I entered I was struck with the order and the air of profound peace that pervaded the room. My father was sitting motionless at the head of the bed--he was in the shadow, the open curtains were draped with great precision, and on the pillow, just in its middle, was the head of my sleeping grandmother; her whole position had about it something very regular--something that suggested eternal rest.

My mother and sister were seated beside a chiffonier near the door, from which place they had kept watch over my grandmother during her illness.

As soon as I entered they signalled to me with their hands as if to say: "Softly, softly, make no noise; she is asleep." The shade of their lamp threw a vivid light upon the material they were busied with, a number of little silk squares, brown, yellow, gray, etc., that I recognized as pieces of their old dresses and hat ribbons.

At first I thought that they were working upon things which it is customary to prepare for people about to die; but when I, in a very low voice and with some uneasiness, questioned them about it, they explained that they were making sachets which were to be sold for charity.

I said that I wished to bid grandmother good night before retiring, and they allowed me to go towards the bed; but before I reached the middle of the room they, after glancing quickly at each other, changed their minds.

"No, no," they said in a very low voice, "come back, you might disturb her."

But before they spoke I came to a halt of myself, I was overwhelmed with terror--I understood.

Although fear kept me fixed to the spot I noted with astonishment that my grandmother was not at all disagreeable to look at; I had never before seen a dead person, and I had imagined until then, that when the spirit took its departure all that remained was a grinning, hideous skeleton. On the contrary my grandmother had upon her face an extremely sweet and tranquil smile; she was as beautiful as ever, and her face appeared to be rejuvenated and filled with a holy peace.

Then there pa.s.sed through my mind one of those sad flashes which sometimes come to little children and permit them to see for a moment into hidden depths, and I reflected: How can grandmother be in heaven, how am I to understand the division of the one body into two parts, for that which was left for interment, was it not my grandmother herself, ah! was it not she even to the very expression that she bore in life?

After that I stole away with a bruised heart and downcast spirit, not daring to ask a question of any one, fearful lest what I had so unerringly divined would be confirmed, I did not wish to hear the dread and terrible word p.r.o.nounced. . . .

For a long time thereafter little silken sachet bags were always a.s.sociated in my mind with the idea of death.

CHAPTER XVIII.

I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical quality.

I had the fever in March, which was cold and bl.u.s.tering and dreary that year, and every evening as night fell, if by chance my mother was not near me, a great sadness would overwhelm my soul. (It was an oppression coming on at twilight, from which animals, and beings with a temperament like mine suffer almost equally.)

My curtains were kept open, and I always had a view of the pathetic looking little table with its cups of gruel and bottles of medicines.

And as I gazed at these things, so suggestive of sickness, they took on strange shapes in the darkness of the silent room,--and at such times there pa.s.sed through my head a procession of grotesque, hideous and alarming images.

Upon two successive evenings at dusk there appeared to me, in the half delirium of fever, two persons who caused me the most extreme terror.

The first one was an old woman, hump-backed and very ugly, but with a fascinating ugliness, who without my hearing her open the door, without my seeing any one rise to meet her, stole noiselessly to my side. She departed, however, without speaking to me; but as she turned to go her hump became visible, and I saw that there was an opening in it, and there popped out from this hole the green head of a parrot which the old woman carried in her hump. This creature called out, "Cuckoo," in a thin, squeaking, far-away voice, and then withdrew again into the frightful old hag's hump. Oh! when I heard that "Cuckoo!" a cold perspiration formed on my forehead; but suddenly the woman disappeared and then I realized that it was only a dream.

The next evening a tall thin man, clothed in the black dress of a minister, appeared to me. He did not come near me, but kept close to the wall and whirled, with body all bent over, rapidly and noiselessly about the room. His miserable, thin legs and the gown of his dress stood out stiff and straight as he turned quickly. And--most horrible of all--he had for a head the skull of a large white bird with a long beak, which was a monstrous exaggeration of a sea-mew's skull, bleached by the sun and wind and waves, that I had the previous summer found upon the beach at the Island. (I believe this old man's visit coincided with the time when I was worst, almost in danger.) After he had made one or two revolutions about the room, he quickly and silently began to rise from the floor. Ever moving his thin legs he reached the cornice, then higher and higher still he rose, above the pictures and the looking-gla.s.ses, until he was lost to sight in the twilight shadows that lay near the ceiling.

And for two or three years after this event the faces of those visions haunted me. On winter evenings I thought of them with a shudder as I mounted the stairway, which at that period it was not customary to light. "If they should be there," I would say to myself; "suppose one of them is lying in wait to pursue me, and stretch out their hands and try to catch me by the legs."

And truly I will not be sure that I would not now feel, should I encourage myself, some of the old-time fear which that woman and man inspired in me; they were for some time at the head of the list of my childhood terrors, and for very long they led the procession of visions and bad dreams.

Many gloomy apparitions haunted the first years of my life which otherwise were so uncommonly sweet. I was especially addicted to indulging in sad reflections at nightfall; I had impressions of my career being cut short by an early death. Too carefully sheltered and protected at this period, and yet in some measure forced mentally, I may be likened to a flower that lacks color and vitality because it has been raised in an unwholesome atmosphere. I should have been surrounded by hardy, mischievous, noisy playmates of my own age and s.e.x, but instead of that I played only with gentle little girls. I was always careful and precise in my manners, and my curled hair and sedate bearing gave me the appearance of a little eighteenth century n.o.bleman.

CHAPTER XIX.

After that long fever, the very name of which has a sinister sound, I recall the delight I felt when they allowed me to go out into the air, when I was permitted to go down into our beloved yard. The day chosen for my first airing was a radiantly beautiful and clear morning in April. Seated under the bower of jasmine and honeysuckle I felt as if I were experiencing the enchantment of paradise, of another Eden.

Everything was budding and blossoming; without my knowledge, during the time that I was confined to my bed, this wonderful drama of the spring had enacted itself upon the earth. I had not often seen this wonderful and magical renewal which has delighted man through all the ages, and to which only the very aged seem indifferent; it ravished me and I allowed my joy to take possession of me almost to the point of intoxication.--Oh! that pure, warm, soft air; the glorious sunlight and the tender, fresh green of the young plants and the budding trees that already cast a little shade. And in myself there was an unwonted strength that bespoke recovery, and I rejoiced mightily when I breathed in the sweet air and felt the flood of new life.

My brother was a tall fellow of twenty-one who had the freedom of the house and grounds in which to work out any of his fancies. During my convalescence I entertained myself greatly speculating about something he was busy with in the garden, which something I was dying of impatience to see. At the end of the yard, in a lovely nook under an old plum tree, my brother was making a tiny lake; he had dug it out and cemented it like a cistern, and from the country round about he procured stones and quant.i.ties of moss with which to make the banks about the lake romantic looking; he also constructed rocky elevations and grottoes out of stones and mosses.

And this work was finished the day that I went out for the first time; they had even put little gold fish into the water, and they turned on the tiny fountain and it played in my honor.

I approached it with ecstasy, and I found that it greatly surpa.s.sed in beauty anything that my imagination had been able to conjure up. And when my brother told me it was mine, I felt a joy so intense that it seemed to me it must last forever. Oh! what unexpected joy to possess it for my very own! And what happiness to know that I could enjoy it every single day during the warm and beautiful months that were to come. And the thought of being able to live out of doors again, the prospect of playing in every nook of that lovely garden, as I had done the previous summer, was rapture to me.

I remained at the edge of the pond a long time, looking at it and admiring it unceasingly, and I breathed in the sweet, mild spring air, and warmed myself in the radiant sunlight so long denied to me. The old plum tree above my head, planted so long ago by one of my ancestors, and now almost at the end of its usefulness, spread its lacy curtain of new leaves to the tender blue of the sky, and the tiny fountain in its shade continued its tuneful melody as if it were a little hurdy-gurdy celebrating my return to health.

To-day that old plum tree is dead and its trunk the only thing left of it, and spared out of respect, is covered, like a ruin, with ivy vines.

But the pond, with its grottoes and islets, still remains intact; time has given it the appearance of genuine nature herself. Its greenish stones look old and decayed; the mosses, the delicate little plants brought from the river, and the rushes and wild iris have acclimated themselves, and dragon flies that stray through the town take refuge there--a bit of wild nature has established itself in that little corner and I hope it will never be disturbed.

I am more loyally attached to that spot than to any other, although I have loved many places; in no other one have I found so much peace; there I feel tranquil, there I refresh myself and acquire youth and new life. That little corner is my sacred Mecca, so much indeed is it to me that should any one destroy it I would feel as if some vital thing in my life had lost balance, would feel that I had missed my footing, or almost imagine that it presaged the beginning of my end.

The reverent feeling that I have for the place has been born, I believe, from my sea-faring life, with its long voyages to distant places and its dreary exiles during which I thought and dreamed of it constantly.

There is in particular one little grotto for which I have an especial affection: the memory of it has often, in times of depression and melancholy, during the years of weary exile heartened me.

After the angel Azrael had so cruelly pa.s.sed our way, after reverses of many sorts, and during that sad term when I was a wanderer on the face of the earth, and my widowed mother and my aunt Claire were left alone in the beloved but deserted home that was almost as silent as a tomb, I experienced many a heartache as I thought of the dear hearthstone and of the things so familiar to my childhood that were doubtless going to ruin through neglect. I felt especially anxious to know if the storms of winter and the hands of time had destroyed the delicate arch of that grotto; and strange as it may seem, if those little moss-covered rocks had fallen in I would have felt that an almost irreparable breach had been made in my own life.

At the side of the pond there is an old gray wall which is an integral part of the corner that I call my Holy Mecca; I think it is the very centre of the sacred place, and I recall the tiniest details of it. I can picture to myself the scarcely visible mosses that grow there, and the gaps made by time, which the spiders now inhabit. Growing up at the back of the wall there is an arbor of ivy and honeysuckles whose shade I sought daily every beautiful summer day for the purpose of studying my lessons. But I lounged there lazily, as a school-boy will, and allowed all my attention to be absorbed by those gray stones with their teeming world of insects. Not only do I love and venerate that old wall as the Moslems love their holiest mosque, but I regard it also as something which actually protects me; as something which conserves my life and prolongs my youth. I would not suffer any one to change it in the least, and should it be demolished I would feel as if the very supports under my life were insecure. May it not be because certain things persist, and are known to us throughout our lives, that we borrow from thence delusions in regard to our own stability and our own continuance. Seeing that they abide we suppose that we cannot change nor cease to be.

Personally I cannot explain these sentiments of mine in any other way than to regard them as some sort of fetich wors.h.i.+p.

And when I consider that those stones are very like other stones, that they have been brought from I know not where, by whom I care not, to be built into a wall by workmen who lived and died a century before I was even thought of, I realize the childishness of the illusion, which I indulge in spite of myself, that it can extend any sort of spiritual protection to me; I comprehend only too well what a frail and unstable base has that that symbolizes for me the permanency of life.

Those who have never had a permanent home, but who have from infancy been taken from place to place, living in lodgings meantime, may not be able to appreciate these sentiments.

But among those who have daily gathered about the same hearthstone, there are, I am sure, many who, without confessing it, are susceptible in varying degrees to impressions of this sort. And do not such people often, because of an old stone wall, a garden known and loved since childhood, an old terrace which has become in indestructible part of their memory, or an old tree that has not changed form within their lives, seek a warrant for their own hope of immortality?

And doubtless, alas! before their birth these objects lent the same delusive countenance to others, to those unknown now turned to dust and gone to nothingness, who may not even have been of their blood and race.