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 quantities 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 surpassed 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 passed 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 worship.
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.