Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 05, March, 1858

I looked at Eben;—his jaw had fallen; his hands were rigid and locked together; his eyes were rolled upward, fixed and glassy; a stream of scarlet blood trickled over his gray beard from the corner of his mouth;—he was dead! As I laid him back on the pillow and turned to restore some quiet to the ward, a Norther came sweeping down the Gulf like a rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon's track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from torrid to temperate zone.

Vainly did I endeavor to calm the terror of my patients, excited still more by the elemental uproar without; vainly did I harangue them, in the plainest terms to which science is reducible, on atmospheric vibrations, acoustics, reverberations, and volcanic agencies; they insisted on some supernatural power having produced the recent fearful sounds. Neither common nor uncommon sense could prevail with them; and when they discovered, by the appearance of the extra nurse I had sent for, to perform the last offices for Jackson, that he was dead, a renewed and irrepressible horror attacked them, and it was broad day before composure or stillness was regained in any part of the building except my own rooms, to which I betook myself as soon as possible, and slept till sunrise, too soundly for any mystical visitation whatever to have disturbed my rest.

The next day, in spite of the brief influence of the Norther, the first case of yellow fever showed itself in the hospital; before night seven had sickened, and one, already reduced by chronic disease, died. I had hoped to bury Jackson decently, in the cemetery of the city, where his vexed mortality might rest in peace under the oleanders and china-trees, shut in by the hedge of Cherokee roses that guards the enclosure from the prairie, a living wall of glassy green, strewn with ivory-white buds and blossoms, fair and pure; but on applying for a burial-spot, the city authorities, panic-stricken cowards that they were, denied me the privilege even of a prairie grave, outside the cemetery hedge, for the poor fellow. In vain did I represent that he had died of lingering disease, and that nowise contagious; nothing moved them. It was enough that there was yellow fever in the ward where he died. I was forthwith strictly ordered to have all the dead from the hospital buried on the sand-flats at the east end of the island.

What a place that is it is scarcely possible to describe. Wide and dreary levels of sand, some four or five feet lower than the town, and flooded by high tides; the only vegetation a scanty, dingy gray, brittle, crackling growth,—bitter sandworts and the like; over and through which the abominable tawny sand-crabs are constantly executing diabolic waltzes on the tips of their eight legs, vanishing into the ground like imps as you approach; curlews start from behind the loose drifts of sand and float away with heartbroken cries seaward; little sandpipers twitter plaintively, running through the weeds; and great, sulky, gray cranes droop their motionless heads over the still salt pools along the shore.

To this blank desolation I was forced to carry poor Jackson's body, with that of the fever-patient, just at sunset. As the Dutchman who officiated as hearse, sexton, bearer, and procession, stuck his spade into the ground, and withdrew it full of crumbling shells and fine sand, the hole it left filled with bitter black ooze. There, sunk in the ooze, covered with the shifting sand, bewailed by the wild cries of sea-birds, noteless and alone, I left Eben Jackson, and returned to the mass of pestilence and wretchedness within the hospital walls.

In the spring I reached home safely. None but the resident on a Southern sand-bank can fully appreciate the verdure and bloom of the North. The great elms of my native town were full of tender buds, like a clinging mist in their graceful branches; earlier trees were decked with little leaves, deep-creased, and silvery with down; the wide river in a fluent track of metallic lustre weltered through green meadows that on either hand stretched far and wide; the rolling land beyond was spread out in pastures, where the cattle luxuriated after the winter's stalling; and on many a slope and plain the patient farmer turned up his heavy sods and clay, to moulder in sun and air for seed-time and harvest; and the beautiful valley that met the horizon on the north and south rolled away eastward and westward to a low blue range of hills, that guarded it with granite walls and bristling spears of hemlock and pine.

This is not my story; and if it were, I do not know that I should detail my home-coming. It is enough to say, that I came after a five years' absence, and found all that I had left nearly as I had left it;—how few can say as much!

Various duties and some business arrangements kept me at work for six or seven weeks, and it was June before I could fulfil my promise to Eben Jackson. I took the venerable old horse and chaise that had carried my father on his rounds for years, and made the best of my way out toward Simsbury. I was alone, of course; even Cousin Lizzy, charming as five years had made the little girl of thirteen whom I had left behind on quitting home, was not invited to share my drive; there was something too serious in the errand to endure the presence of a gay young lady. But I was not lonely; the drive up Talcott Mountain, under the rude portcullis of the toll-gate, through fragrant woods, by trickling brooks, past huge boulders that scarce a wild vine dare cling to, with its feeble, delicate tendrils, is all exquisite, and full of living repose; and turning to descend the mountain, just where a brook drops headlong with clattering leap into a steep black ravine, and comes out over a tiny green meadow, sliding past great granite rocks, and bending the grass-blades to a shining track, you see suddenly at your feet the beautiful mountain valley of the Farmington river, trending away in hill after hill,—rough granite ledges crowned with cedar and pine,—deep ravines full of heaped rocks,—and here and there the formal white rows of a manufacturing village, where Kühleborn is captured and forced to turn water-wheels, and Undine picks cotton or grinds hardware, dammed into utility.

Into this valley I plunged, and inquiring my way of many a prim farmer's wife and white-headed school-boy, I edged my way northward under the mountain side, and just before noon found myself beneath the "great ellum," where, nearly twenty years ago, Eben Jackson and Hetty Buel had said good-bye.

I tied my horse to the fence and walked up the worn footpath to the door. Apparently no one was at home. Under this impression I knocked vehemently, by way of making sure; and a weak, cracked voice at length answered, "Come in!" There, by the window, perhaps the same where she sat so long before, crouched in an old chair covered with calico, her bent fingers striving with mechanical motion to knit a coarse stocking, sat old Mrs. Buel. Age had worn to the extreme of attenuation a face that must always have been hard-featured, and a few locks of snow-white hair, straying from under the bandanna handkerchief of bright red and orange that was tied over her cap and under her chin, added to the old-world expression of her whole figure. She was very deaf; scarcely could I make her comprehend that I wanted to see her grand-daughter; at last she understood, and asked me to sit down till Hetty should come from school; and before long, a tall, thin figure opened the gate and came slowly up the path.

I had a good opportunity to observe the constant, dutiful, self-denying Yankee girl,—girl no longer, now that twenty years of unrewarded patience had lined her face with unmistakable graving. But I could not agree with Eben's statement that she was not pretty; she must have been so in her youth; even now there was beauty in her deep-set and heavily fringed dark eyes, soft, tender, and serious, and in the noble and pensive Greek outline of the brow and nose; her upper lip and chin were too long to agree well with her little classic head, but they gave a certain just and pure expression to the whole face, and to the large thin-lipped mouth, flexible yet firm in its lines. It is true, her hair was neither abundant, nor wanting in gleaming threads of gray; her skin was freckled, sallow, and devoid of varying tint or freshness; her figure angular and spare; her hands red with hard work; and her air at once sad and shy;—still, Hetty Buel was a very lovely woman in my eyes, though I doubt if Lizzy would have thought so.