One bright morning in November, here the sweetest month of all the
twelve, Mr. Cornelius called at my office, and informed me that his
daughter had been sick, confined to her bed for the past two days, and
had expressed a wish to see me. He said her indisposition was but
slight, attributed it to some frivolous cause, and expressed a hope that
it would soon pass off. I looked up into his face; he was honest; still
blind to his daughter’s decay; death stood palpably before him, robed in
the freshness of youth. Death! How should he see death? Gold was ever in
his thoughts; gold filled his vision; his taste, his scent were gold;
and gold ran clinking into his ears: death had walked his house a year
unrecognized.
I laid aside my papers, and accompanied Mr. Cornelius home. He passed
into his own room, with the little table and the two chairs; I ascended
to his daughter’s chamber. What a mockery was there of all that this
world loves so much, strives after, and wins, with loss of body and of
soul! Upon a bed, canopied with rich stuffs of woven silk and gold, with
curtains of satin, rose-colored, and tugged with tassels of silver,
spread with the finest linen, and covered with flowers, worked upon a
ground of velvet, lay Anne, the miser’s daughter, pale and emaciated,
and with her eyes, to whatever point they might turn, resting upon some
new evidence of her father’s wealth and worldliness, upon some new
evidence of the cause of all her sorrow. Her physician stood at her
bed-side; as I entered he raised his finger to his lips, and came to me.
“She is passing away,” he whispered. I approached the bed slowly, and on
tiptoe. Anne felt my presence in the air, and turning her face toward
me, held out her hand. I took it in mine. “I have called you,” said she,
in a voice scarcely audible, “to take leave of you. You have been my
good friend since the day that we first met in your office; I a poor
woman, striving for that which I have long since found to be of little
worth; when I am gone, transfer your friendship to my father. Tell him
where I may be found, and bid him there seek for me. Oh, God! how long
have I wrestled with thee, in bitter prayer, for this favor; thou wilt
not, in the end, deny it to me. Farewell! We shall meet again! I go to
my mother. Now bring my father to me, and let us be alone together.”
The physician pressed her hand in silence, turned to the wall, and went
out. I followed, and we both hastened to call Mr. Cornelius. We found
him counting over a bag of silver, which he had just received from a
tenant.
“How is my daughter? Better—well?” he asked, still continuing to count,
and to test the genuineness of the metal by ringing it upon the table.
“Sir—your daughter is dying.”
“Dying!” and the coin rolled merrily upon the floor. “Dying—doctor?
Tut, tut. You jest.”
“Mr. Cornelius, your daughter wishes to speak with you, to give you her
last words in life.”
“_Charlatan_—quack—driveler—you lie!” cried the miser with livid
lips, starting to his feet, and shaking his clenched hands in the
physician’s face. “Die!—my daughter shall not die—she cannot die—the
children of the rich never die—what would you have? Gold!—here is a
bill for fifty thousand—save my daughter—ay, I will make it a hundred
thousand—but save my daughter—poor, poor, poor Anne!” and his head
fell, and rested upon his breast. The old man stood before us
motionless, transfixed with grief.
“Mr. Cornelius.”
“Oh, I am sick with much sorrow! Lend me your arm? Did you not say
something of twenty per cent?”
I led him away to his daughter’s chamber. As we entered, her face was
turned toward us.
“Who said that my daughter was dead?” asked Mr. Cornelius.
Anne feebly smiled.
“We shall all spring upward from the ground, winged; and with a power
which will bear us swiftly to the throne, which endureth forever and
forever.”
I hastened to bear her father to her bed-side. The last breath had
parted from her lips, and as he questioned her, and she returned no
answer; as he called to her, and she called not back again, he fell upon
her, and his moan filled the room.
“Gone! oh my daughter; my jewel of great price—the heir to all my
riches—my second life! Is the breath of man unbought! Can no one bribe
death? Is there joy in the cold grave? O, come to me, my child, and
sleep in my bosom, and fare sumptuously every day.” And he drew much
gold from his pockets, and heaped it upon the bed beside her, and
wondered that she should die.
And the world wondered, also, that she should die. And idle curiosity
poured in to look upon her dust; and was shocked, and shrugged its
shoulders, and exclaimed—“what a pity! In the morning of life—and so
rich!” And again the world forgot her year of mourning, and her gradual
decay, and carried its thoughts back to the hours when that small,
pinched face was radiant with health, and a new-found happiness; and
laughter rang from those thin lips, and merriment sparkled in the closed
eye, and whispered and coined suggestions, and said that “after all she
was not the miser’s daughter, and had died suddenly with the coming of
that certainty.”
Fools and Idiots! Is not the grave open to all? And did she not well to
love her father’s soul better than his wealth? And did she not well to
labor for it, unceasingly; and then, the crowning of that labor, to lie
down and die?