CHAPTER XIX.
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.
