United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Women -- Social conditions -- Fiction
For several days she was too languid to move from her couch, where
she persisted in reclining, supported by pillows; still struggling
against the prostration that hourly increased, and at last the
disease asserted itself fever, ensued, bringing unconsciousness and
delirium.
Not the scorching violent type that rapidly consumes the vital
forces, but a low tenacious fever that baffled all opposition, and
steadily gained ground, creeping upon the nerve centre, and sapping
the foundations of life.
For many weeks there seemed no hope of rescue, and two physicians,
distinguished by skill and success in their profession, finally
admitted that they were powerless to cope with this typhoid serpent,
whose tightening folds were gradually strangling her.
At length most unexpectedly, when science laid down its weapons to
watch the close of the struggle, and nature the Divine Doctor quietly
took up the gage of battle, the tide of conflict turned. Slowly the
numbed brain began to exert its force, the fluttering thready pulse
grew calmer, and one day the dreamer awoke to the bitter
consciousness of a renewal of all the galling burden of woes which
the tireless law of compensation had for those long weeks mercifully
loosed and lifted.
Although guarded with tender care by the faithful pair, who had
followed her across the Atlantic, she convalesced almost
imperceptibly, and out of her busy life two months fruitful alone in
bodily pain glided away to the silent grey of the past.
Dimly conscious that days and weeks were creeping by unimproved, she
retained in subsequent years only a dreamy reminiscence of the period
dating from the moment when she essayed to utter the last words of
Queen Katherine, words which ran zigzag, hither and thither like an
electric thread through the leaden cloud of her delirium, to the
hour, when with returning strength, keen goading thrusts from the
unsheathed dagger of memory, told her that the Sleeping Furies had
once more been aroused on the threshold of the temple of her life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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