38. CHAPTER XXXVIII.
O Death, why now so slow art thou? why fearest thou to smite?
Lamentation of Don Roderick.
When all the blandishments of life are gone,
The coward sneaks to death, the brave live on.
— Sewell.
The whispered words of the corporal kindled a spark of
hope in Morton's breast; but it was destined to fade and die.
Once he was sure that he heard the tones of his voice in the
passage without his cell; but weeks passed, months passed,
and he did not see him again.
And now let the curtain drop for a space of three years.
Morton was still a prisoner. Despair was at hand. He
longed to die. His longing at length seemed near its accomplishment.
A raging fever seized him, and for days he lay
delirious, balanced on the brink of death. But his constitution
endured the shock; and late one night he lay on his
pallet, exhausted, worn to a skeleton, yet fully conscious of
his situation.
The locks clashed, the hinges jarred, and a physician of the
prison, a bulky German, stood at his side.
He felt his patient's pulse.
“Shall I die, or not?” demanded the sick man.
“Die!” echoed the German, a laugh gurgling within him,
like the first symptom of an earthquake; “all men die, but
this sickness will never kill you. It would have killed
ninety-nine out of a hundred; but you are as tough as a rhinoceros.”
Morton turned to the wall, and cursed the hour when he
was born.
The German gave a prescription to his attendant; the
locks clashed again behind him, and Morton was left alone
with his misery.
The lamp in the passage without shone through the grated
opening above the door, and shed a square of yellow light on
the black, damp stones of the dungeon. They sweated and
trickled with a clammy moisture; and the brick pavement
was wet, as if the clouds had rained upon it. Morton lay
motionless as a dead man. The crisis of his disorder was
past; but its effects were heavy upon him, and his mind
shared the deep exhaustion of his body. Perilous thoughts
rose upon him, spectral and hollow-eyed.
“By what right am I doomed to this protracted misery?
By what justice, when a refuge is at hand, am I forbidden to
fly to it? I have only to drag myself from this bed, and rest
for a few moments on those wet, cold bricks, and all the medicines
in Austria could not keep me many days a prisoner.
And who could blame me? Who could say that I destroyed
myself? It is not suicide. It is but aiding kindly nature to
do a deed of mercy.”
He repelled the thought; but it returned. He repelled it
again, but still it returned. The insidious demon was again
and again at his ear, stealing back with a noiseless gliding,
smoothly commending her poison to his lips, soothing his
worn spirit as the vampire fans its slumbering victim with
its wings. But his better nature, not without a higher
appeal, fortified itself against her, and struggled to hold its
ground.
When the French besieged Saragossa; when her walls
crumbled before their batteries; when, day by day, through
secret mine or open assault, foot by foot, they won their way
inward towards her heart; when treason within aided force
without, and famine and pestilence leagued against her, —
still her undespairing children refused to yield. Sick men
dragged themselves to the barricades, women and boys
pointed the cannon, and her heroic banner still floated above
the wreck.
Thus, spent with disease, gnawed with pertinacious miseries,
assailed by black memories of the past, and blacker
forebodings of the future, did Morton maintain his weary
battle with despair.
