Somebody I knew was there--a woman....
Heat, motionless and ponderous, as in some feverish colonial city
rising from the venomous swamps of the Ivory Coast. The sky-blue seemed
to bleach from the horizon's furnace edges--even sounds were muffled
and blunted by the heaviness of that air--vaguely, as to a dozing
brain, came the passing reverberation of footsteps;--the river-current
was noiseless and thick and lazy, like wax-made fluid.... Such were the
days--and each day offered up a triple hecatomb to death--and the faces
of all the dead were yellow as flame....
Never a drop of rain:--the thin clouds which made themselves visible of
evenings only, flocking about the dying fires of the west, seemed to
dwellers in the city troops of ghosts departing with the day, as in the
fantastic myths of the South Pacific.
...I passed the outer iron gate--the warm seashells strewing the way
broke under my feet with faint saline odors in the hot air:--I heard
the iron tongue of a bell utter ONE, with the sinister vibration of a
knell--signaling the eternal extinction of a life. Seven and seventy
times that iron tongue had uttered its grim monosyllable since the last
setting of the sun. The grizzled watcher of the inner gate extended
his pallid palm for that eleemosynary contribution exacted from all
visitors;--and it seemed to me that I beheld the gray Ferryman of
Shadows himself, silently awaiting his obolus from me, also a Shadow.
And as I glided into the world of agony beyond, the dead-bell moved its
iron tongue again--once....
Vast bare gleaming corridors into which many doors exhaled odors of
medicines and moans and sound of light footsteps hurrying--then I
stood a moment all alone--a long moment that I repass sometimes in
dreams. (Only that in dreams of the past there are no sounds--the dead
are dumb; and the fondest may not retain the evanescent memory of a
voice.) Then suddenly approached a swift step--so light, so light that
it seemed the coming of a ghost; and I saw a slight figure black-robed
from neck to feet, the fantastically winged cap of a Sister, and
beneath the white cap a dark and beautiful face with very black
eyes. Even then the iron bell spake again--once! I muttered--nay, I
whispered, all fearful with the fearfulness of that place, the name of
a ward and--the name of a Woman.
"Friend, friend! what do you want here?" murmured the Sister, who saw
that the visitor was a stranger. Hers was the first voice I had heard
in that place of death, and it seemed so sweet and clear--a musical
vibration of youth and hope! And I answered, this time audibly. "You
are not afraid?" she asked. "Come!"
Taking my hand, she led me thither--through spaces of sunlight and
shadow, through broad and narrow ways, and between rows of beds white
like rows of tombs. Her hand was cool and light as mist--as frost--as
the guiding touch of that spirit might be whom the faithful of many
creeds believe to lead their dead out of the darkness, into some vast
new dawning beyond.... "You are not afraid?--not afraid?" the sweet
voice asked again. And I suddenly became aware of the dead, lying
between us, and the death-color in her face, like a flare of sunset....
Then for an instant everything became dark between me and the Sister
standing upon the other side of the dead--and I was groping in that
darkness blindly, until I felt a cool hand grasp mine, leading me
silently somewhere--somewhere into the light. "Come! you have no claim
here, friend! you cannot take her back from God!--let us leave her with
Him!" And I obeyed all voicelessly. I felt her light, cool hand leading
me again between the long ranks of white beds, and through the vast,
bare corridors, and the shining lobbies, and by the doors of a hundred
chambers of death.
Then at the summit of the great stairway, she turned her rich gaze
into my eyes with a strange, sweet, silent sympathy, pressed my hand
an instant, and was gone. I heard the whisper of her departing robe;
I saw the noiseless fluttering of her white cap;--a great door opened
very silently, closed inaudibly; and I was all alone.--(Some one told
me, only a few days later, that the iron bell had also spoken for her,
the little Sister of Charity--in the middle of the night--once!)
And I, standing alone upon the stairs, felt something unutterably
strange within me--the influence of that last look, perhaps still
vibrating, like an expiring sunbeam, a dying tone. Something in her
eyes had rekindled into life something long burned out within my
heart--the ashes of a Faith entombed as in a sepulchral urn.... Yet
only a moment; and the phantom flame sank back into its ashes; and I
was in the sunlight again, iron of purpose as Pharaoh after the death
of his first-born. It was only a dead emotion, warmed to resurrection
by the sunshine of a woman's eyes.
...Nevertheless, I fancy that when the Ringer is preparing to ring for
me--and the great darkness deepens all about me--when sounds sink to
their whispers and questions must remain eternally unanswered--when
memory is fading out into the infinite blackness, and those strange
dreams that precurse the final dissolution marshal their illusions
before me--I fancy that I might hear again the whisper of a black
robe, and feel a hand, light as frost, held out to me with the sweet
questioning--"_Come! You are not afraid?_"