Without more ado--for I was just then too much occupied with a passing change in my patient--the matter was decided. When I next looked for her, she had slipped round the foot of the bed, and taken her place behind the curtain on the other side. There we both sat, hour after hour, in total silence.
I tell everything, you see, just as minutely as I remember it--and shall remember--long after every circumstance, trivial or great, has faded out of every memory except mine. If these letters are ever read by other than myself, words and incidents long forgotten may revive: that when I die, as in the course of nature I shall do, long before younger persons, it may be seen that it is not youth alone which can receive impressions vividly and retain them strongly.
I could not see her--I could only see the face on the pillow, where a dim light fell; just enough to shew me the slightest change, did any come. But, closely as I watched, none did come. Not even a twitch or quiver broke that blank expression of repose which was neither life nor death.
I thought several times that it would settle into death before morning. And then?
Where was all my boasted skill, my belief in my own powers of saving life. Why, sitting here, trusted and looked up to, depended upon as the sole human stay--my countenance examined, as I felt it was, even as if it were the index and arbiter of fate--I--watching as I never watched before by any sick bed, this breath which trembled in the balance, felt myself as ignorant and useless as a child. Nay, I was “as a dead man before Thee,” O Thou humbler of pride!
Crying to myself thus--Job's cry--I thought of another Hebrew, who sought “not unto the Lord, but unto the physicians;” and died. It came into my mind, May there not be, even in these days, such a thing as “seeking the Lord?”
The candle went out. I had sat with my eyes shut, and had not noticed it, till I heard her steal across the room, trying to get a light. Afraid to trust my own heavy step--hers seemed as soft as snow--I contrived to pull the window-blind aside, so that a pale white streak fell across the hearth where she was kneeling--the cheerless hearth, for I had not dared to risk the noise of keeping up a fire.