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 blustering 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 passed 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-glasses,
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 sex, 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 nobleman.