The Blithedale Romance - Page 26/170

Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations

of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen

cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and

thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose

vocation I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever

and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?

In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my

head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,

yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into

the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time,

when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.

"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer!

Don't you mean to get up to-day?"

"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly. "I doubt if I ever

rise again!"

"What is the matter now?" he asked.

I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in

a close carriage.

"No, no!" said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness. "If you are

really sick, we must take care of you."

Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to

do while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse. A

doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much medicine,

in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have laid on the

point of a needle. They fed me on water-gruel, and I speedily became a

skeleton above ground. But, after all, I have many precious

recollections connected with that fit of sickness.

Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible

comfort. Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one of

the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely

hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity

of any kind causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our

selfish existence. The education of Christianity, it is true, the

sympathy of a like experience and the example of women, may soften and,

possibly, subvert this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is

originally there, and has likewise its analogy in the practice of our

brute brethren, who hunt the sick or disabled member of the herd from

among them, as an enemy. It is for this reason that the stricken deer

goes apart, and the sick lion grimly withdraws himself into his den.