All summer long, Clatterbuck's dancing-pavilion was as silent in its
grove of oaks as a temple of the Druids, and his pleasure-boat nestled
in its moorings, with no hand to feather an oar in the little lake. All
summer long, no athletic young Kentuckians came to bathe their white
bodies in Hugh Lonney's new bath-house for twelve and a half cents,
and no one read Daukins Tegway's advertisement that he was willing
to exchange his Dunstable bonnets for flax and feathers. The likely
runaway boy, with a long, fresh scar across his face, was never found,
nor the buffalo bull roasted for Daniel Webster, and Peter Leuba's
guitars were never thrummed on any moonlit verandas. Only Dewees and
Grant were busy, dispensing, not snuff, but calomel.
Grass grew in the deserted streets. Gardens became little wildernesses
of rank weeds and riotous creepers. Around shut window-lattices roses
clambered and shed their perfume into the poisoned air, or dropped
their faded petals to strew the echoless thresholds. In darkened rooms
family portraits gazed on sad vacancy or looked helplessly down on
rigid sheeted forms.
In the trees of poplar and locust along the streets the unmolested
birds built and brooded. The oriole swung its hempen nest from a bough
over the door of the spider-tenanted factory, and in front of the old
Medical Hall the blue-jay shot up his angry crest and screamed harshly
down at the passing bier. In a cage hung against the wall of a house in
a retired street a mocking-bird sung, beat its breast against the bars,
sung more passionately, grew silent and dropped dead from its perch,
never knowing that its mistress had long since become a clod to its
full-throated requiem.
Famine lurked in the wake of the pestilence. Markets were closed. A
few shops were kept open to furnish necessary supplies. Now and then
some old negro might have been seen, driving a meat-wagon in from the
country, his nostrils stuffed with white cotton saturated with camphor.
Oftener the only visible figure in the streets was that of a faithful
priest going about among his perishing fold, or that of the bishop
moving hither and thither on his ceaseless ministrations.
But over all the ravages of that terrible time there towered highest
the solitary figure of that powerful grave-digger, who, nerved by the
spectacle of the common misfortune, by one heroic effort rose for the
time above the wrecks of his own nature. In the thick of the plague,
in the very garden spot of the pestilence, he ruled like an unterrified
king. Through days unnaturally chill with gray cloud and drizzling
rain, or unnaturally hot with the fierce sun and suffocating damps
that appeared to steam forth from subterranean caldrons, he worked
unfaltering, sometimes with a helper, sometimes with none. There were
times when, exhausted, he would lie down in the half-dug graves and
there sleep until able to go on; and many a midnight found him under
the spectral moon, all but hidden by the rank nightshade as he bent
over to mark out the lines of one of those narrow mortal cellars.
What weaknesses he fought and conquered through those days and nights!
Out of what unforeseen depths of nature did he draw the tough fibre of
such a resolution! To be alone with the pestilential dead at night--is
not that a test of imperial courage? To live for weeks braving swift
death itself--is not that the fierce and ungovernable flaring up of the
soul in heroism? For all the mockery and derision of his name, had it
not some fitness? For had he not a royal heart?