第80章

He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie.I was not unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had lighted an astral lamp that stood on a table.--He pointed to a portrait hanging against the wall.--Look at her,--he said,--look at her! Wasn't that a pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?

The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years old, perhaps.There were few pictures of any merit painted in New England before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what artist could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from life.It was somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure and the sweetness of the expression reminded me of the angels of the early Florentine painters.She must have been of some consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy and lace with hanging sleeves, and the old carved frame showed how the picture had been prized by its former owners.A proud eye she had, with all her sweetness.--I think it was that which hanged her, as his strong arm hanged Minister George Burroughs;--but it may have been a little mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty rather than a deformity.You know, I suppose, that nursling imps addict themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these little excrescences."Witch-marks" were good evidence that a young woman was one of the Devil's wet-nurses;--I should like to have seen you make fun of them in those days! --Then she had a brooch in her bodice, that might have been taken for some devilish amulet or other; and she wore a ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone in it, that flamed as if the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;--who knows but that it was given her by a midnight suitor fresh from that fierce element, and licensed for a season to leave his couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of earthly maidens and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching kisses?

She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she and I are the last of 'em.--She will stay, and I shall go.They never painted me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me with chalk on the board-fences.They said the doctors would want my skeleton when I was dead.--You are my friend, if you are a doctor, --a'n't you?

I just gave him my hand.I had not the heart to speak.

I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill yonder.Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over the first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to keep the wolves from digging them up? I never slept easy over the sod;--I should like to lie quiet under it.And besides,--he said, in a kind of scared whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared at, as my body has been.I don't doubt I was a remarkable case;but, for God's sake, oh, for God's sake, don't let 'em make a show of the cage I have been shut up in and looked through the bars of for so many years.

I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted and indifferent to human suffering.I am willing to own that there is often a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last.It does not commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of thrusting knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with red-hot irons, any more than it improves them to hold the blinding-white cantery of Gehenna by its cool handle and score and crisp young souls with it until they are scorched into the belief of--Transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.And, to say the plain truth, I think there are a good many coarse people in both callings.A delicate nature will not commonly choose a pursuit which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so readily as some gentler office.Yet, while I am writing this paragraph, there passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me, though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval glass of his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and standing, so friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways, that, if he had not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one would have said he was of too kindly a mould to be the minister of pain, even if he were saving pain.

You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel experience.They become less nervous, but more sympathetic.They have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain and disease in the light of science.I have said this without claiming any special growth in humanity for myself, though I do hope I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older.At any rate, this was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain instincts of older date than these.

This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart.But I felt bound to speak cheerily.

--We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,--I said,--and I trust we can help it.But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see that your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and buttercups blow over you.