The Old Homestead Part 27

They should see her again--stand by her bedside. She would look at them--speak to them. They clung to each other, the sobs they could not suppress filled the room. The Poor House! They were going to the Poor House! What was that to them? She was there, and with her they could lie down and sleep once more. It was better thus. The landlord had taken possession of their home. He determined to keep the scant furniture, for his rent, and after that the home of those poor children was the street. The Alms House! It had a pleasant sound to them. That was a home from which no landlord could send them forth.

They went gladly with Judge Sharp before the Commissioner.

"You will not let them take us away from her--we may all be together!"

pleaded Mary.

The Commissioner mused; it was unusual, but he resolved to request of the superintendent that these children might not be taken from Bellevue until the mother was p.r.o.nounced out of danger, or should be no more. He wrote to this effect, and with his own hands placed the children in the carriage that was to convey them to Bellevue.

CHAPTER XV.

THE FEVER WARD AND ITS PATIENTS.

Rest--give me rest--my forehead burns, Hot fires are kindled in my brain!

Oh, give me rest, till he returns, Rest--rest from all this racking pain.

Poor Mrs. Chester, half dying and quite insensible, was borne into the fever ward of that close and crowded Hospital. Number ten was a large airy room, capable of holding twenty patients with comparative comfort, but now the fever was raging fiercely. Nearly six hundred patients crowded those gloomy walls, and in the room where twenty persons might have been almost comfortable, eighty poor creatures were huddled together, breathing the infected air over and over again till their struggling lungs were poisoned and saturated with the deadly atmosphere.

Close together, along the walls, were ranged narrow wooden cots, with their straw beds and coverings of coa.r.s.e cotton check. And close together on those contracted couches--the meagre causeway from which many of these poor creatures were lifted to a pauper's grave, the patients were huddled, suffering in all the stages of that fierce and terrible disease, the malignant typhus.

There the sufferers lay, their death-couches jostling, the hot poison of their breaths mingling together, and spreading a dank miasma from bed to bed.

Some were in the first creeping stages of the disease flattering themselves that it was only a little cold they had taken. Others were s.h.i.+vering with that deathly chill that glides like the icy trail of a serpent down the back; the limbs aching as with severe toil, and the brain literally on fire with seething poison. Others were fierce and mad with delirium; their faces, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and arms had turned of a dull copper color, the strongest and unmistakable sign of the deadly form which typhus takes when it is called malignant s.h.i.+p fever.

The poor creatures rolled to and fro on their narrow couches, tearing out the straw with their hot and quivering fingers, or twisting the soiled sheets with a feeble and shaking grasp. Some were calling for water, and praying in piteous tone for mountains of ice, cold bright ice to fall down and bury them.

Others were still further advanced in the terrible disease, and lay with the last heavy clouds of delirium resting upon the brain. Pale, emaciated and motionless, they spoke in whispers of the husbands and children whom they had left, it seemed to them years before, and of whom they faintly pleaded for tidings. It was piteous to see those weaker still, that lay more helpless than infants, the tears rolling mournfully from their eyes, unable to utter the inquiries that kept their white lips in constant motion, but gave out no sound.

More than one stretched back upon the meagre pillow, was in her death-throe groping in the air, with glazed eyes rolled upward to the ceiling, while the under jaw dropped lower, lower, leaving the mouth half open never to be closed again, save by a penitentiary nurse.

One lay dead upon her couch stiffening, there unheeded, the G.o.d of heaven only knowing at what moment the breath left her body.

Scant and miserable as were those pauper beds, enough for all to die upon could not be found at the Hospital; so blankets had been cast upon the floor, and on them were laid the sick, till the whole ward was completely littered with human misery. Over this scene came the glaring daylight, for the windows had neither blinds nor shutters, nothing but a valance of gingham through which the suns.h.i.+ne poured upon the aching eyes of the sick.

They laid Mrs. Chester among those who moaned and writhed upon the floor. Nothing but the rough folds of a blanket lay between her delicate limbs and the hard boards. Amid the groans, the ravings of delirium, the faint death rattle that rose and swelled upon the horrid atmosphere, they laid her down. The student physician had been his rounds that day, and so she was left to the care of the nurses. Thus she remained quite unconscious of the horrors that surrounded her, till the nurse came back from her interview with Judge Sharp. This woman grasped the money in her palm, and the touch seemed to give a glow of animal pleasure to her features, as she threaded her way through the prostrate sick.

A nurse some years younger than herself, but with less of character in her face, stood near the door. She approached this woman, and softly unclosing her hand revealed the money.

"What! there have but four died to-day--you did not find that about them? I searched thoroughly myself, and none of them had a cent."

"Never mind where it came from. You shall have a share, but remember I have got to work for it yet. Where is the woman they have just brought in?"

"What, the slender woman with all that beautiful hair? She is about here, on the floor, I believe."

"She must have a cot, I am determined on it," said the elder nurse, resolutely. "Those who pay us shall be first served," and the woman went on through the prostrate sick, searching eagerly for Mrs.

Chester. "Yes, here she is, sure enough," talking softly to herself--"now let us see what can be done about a bed."

The woman moved from cot to cot, gazing on the inmates, not with pity, she was used to their moans, but eagerly searching for a bed that promised soon to be empty. Her eyes fell upon the corpse that lay within a few paces of Mrs. Chester, and she approached the cot with gleeful alacrity, saying to her companion:

"Oh, here is an empty bed--I thought it would not be long before we found something for her to lie on besides the floor. Go and call Crofts."

The younger nurse went out, and directly there came two men into the ward, bearing a rude pine coffin between them. They trod heavily along the floor, knocking the coffin now and then against a cot till it jarred the helpless inmate, and thus they carried it down the whole length of the ward. They deposited the rude thing close by the blanket on which Mrs. Chester lay, and then went out, leaving the women to relieve the bed of its mournful burden.

The younger nurse had brought with her a scant shroud, of the coa.r.s.est muslin, and there in the midst of the sick, one of the women put this grave garment on, while the other stealthily searched in the bosom of the corpse and under the pillow for any little valuable that the poor woman might have h.o.a.rded in her death-bed. After groping about awhile, the young nurse drew forth her hand with a low chuckle. It contained a bit of tissue paper, soiled and crumpled in a heap. A bank note! what else could it be? The two women looked at the paper and their eyes gleamed. It was not often that they found bank notes about the Bellevue paupers! How they longed to examine it then and there! But the sick were not all insensible, and the young woman thrust the treasure into her bosom, whispering as she stooped down to smooth the shroud:

"By and by--of course we go halves to-day!"

"That is fair and above board!" replied the other, folding the arms of the dead upon the pulseless bosom they had robbed, "there now, call in the men!"

Again those two men came tramping heavily among the sick. There was some bustle and a little joking as they placed the pauper corpse in its pine coffin; and when they bore it out one of the men inquired, in a voice that might have been heard half over the room, if there was much chance of their being wanted again within an hour or two.

The elder nurse looked around upon the cots, and answered that it was very likely, but that the next coffin must be longer--at least four inches longer!

The two women followed the coffin out, and when quite alone in the pa.s.sage, fell to examining the value of their prize.

"There must be two bills," said the younger, beginning to unfold the little parcel, "what if each of them should be a five, now!"

These words were followed by a short and scornful laugh, accompanied by an oath, that most fearful thing on the lips of a woman. The sc.r.a.p of soiled tissue paper unfolded a lock of grey hair.

"Never mind, mine is here all in hard c.h.i.n.k!" said the elder nurse, striking her bosom. "Here will be enough, with what the doctor allows for the patients, to give us one glorious night. Just help me lift the woman into bed, then slide round to the consumption wards; or, what's better, whisper a word to the orderly, and ask him to come; we'll make the old shanty shake again before midnight."

The young woman, after appeasing her disappointment by casting the lock of hair upon the floor, and grinding it fiercely beneath her heavy shoe, became somewhat consoled. But she sullenly expressed a determination to find her share of the drink, if she were obliged to rob every patient in the ward.

After this conference the nurses returned to the ward. One took off Mrs. Chester's outer garments, while the other proceeded to arrange the empty cot. In the same cot, the same sheets, and on the very pillow from which the dead had just been removed, they laid the helpless woman. Upon her fair hands and face still rested the dust that had been gathering upon her from the street. But under our benignant Common Council, the largest hospital in America contained no bath for its patients, though the Croton water gushed everywhere around the building. There was a shower bath for punishment of the penitentiary women, but for the suffering---not even that.

They laid her down, therefore, unrefreshed in that death couch; and there she remained moaning like the rest, lifting her sweet voice louder and louder in her excitement; for the noise, the atmosphere and the horrid sights everywhere in the room drove her wild. She flung up her hands and laughed as the nurses pa.s.sed to and fro before her bed. She called them angels--those two besotted creatures--and besought them with wild, sweet energy to cherish and care for Chester while she was so far away. These women promised her cajolingly, patting her head with their bloated hands, which, in her madness, she would gather to her bosom or kiss eagerly with her hot lips.

The ordinary course of her disease might not have arrived so early to the fierce virulence that it had now obtained; but the day had been one of fearful turmoil, even for a healthy person, and this fever, in a single hour, grows fierce and strong upon such causes. Fuel for a death-fire had been heaped up in that one miserable day. Now the poor creature began to rave--her child, her husband, and little Mary. She shrieked for them louder and louder, that her voice might rise above the wild, strong cries that swelled as she thought in defiance of her feebleness.

CHAPTER XVI.

JANE CHESTER AND HER LITTLE NURSES.

As the starbeams come earthward, and smile on the night, Awaking the blossoms that drooped in the day, And kindling their hearts with a dewy delight, They came to the couch where the sufferer lay.

All at once, in the very height and fury of her delirium, Mrs. Chester fell back upon the pillow smiling; the hot tears rolled from her eyes, and her shaking hand was outstretched. She knew them--for one minute, that woman's heart grew stronger than her frenzied brain, She knew those two little girls who crept hand in hand to her couch, holding back their tears, and striving to look cheerful; though each smile that they forced broke away in a quiver upon their lips, and the very effort to be calm made their grief more visible.

"Children--_my_ children!" whispered the poor woman, softly, for, after they came in, she never once lifted her voice as she had done, "come, I will make room--the bed is cool and broad--better, so much better than that in which they shook and jostled me--come, my little tired birds--here is pillow enough for us all; when he comes home again it will please him to see us here, so comfortable. Ah, here come my angels; sit close, little ones, till they sweep by. You cannot see their wings now--they are furled close under those comical dresses, but that is because we are not good enough to look upon them. Some day, when he comes, my angels will throw off those blue clothes, and then their wings will unfurl and scatter soft, sweet air all over us.

You shall see them then, so beautiful--fringed and starred and spotted with gold and purple and bright green--with suns.h.i.+ne melting through, and the scent of violets dropping around--hush, girls, don't cry, you shall have a good sight at my angels then--see, see, I am beckoning them here. Now, hold your breath and wait; hus.h.!.+"

The two nurses, who had been at another end of the ward, came that way, and with her hand quivering in the air, the poor invalid beckoned them. They came on, loitering heavily along, and talking to each other. The young woman turned away to another side, and the elder nurse moved forward, grumbling.

"See, one is coming. I have been bad to-day, you know, and only this angel will appear," whispered the invalid, pointing with her unsteady finger toward the nurse.