CHAPTER XVIII.
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.
