Was it a dream?
Was it Louie? Or was it only some one of the tormenting phantoms that for
so many burning days had haunted him? He tried in vain to ask: his tongue
clove to the roof of his mouth; he seemed to be in the power of one of
those fierce nightmares where life depends on a word and the word is not
to be spoken. Only a vision, then: he closed his lids thinking it would be
gone when he lifted them, but he did not want it to be gone, and looked
again to find it as before. And by and by it seemed to him that long
since, in a far-off dream, he had gathered strength and uttered the one
thought of his fever, "Louie, what do you do now?" and she had answered
him, as though she thought aloud, "I stroke the dead;" and he had cried
out, "Then presently me too, me too! And let the shroud be shotted heavily
to bury me out of your sight!" And he was crying it out again, but while
he spoke a mouth was laid on his--a warm, sweet mouth that seemed to
breathe fresh spirit through his frame--his head was lifted and pillowed
on a breast where he could hear the heart beneath flutter like a happy
bird, and he was wrapped once more in slumber, but this time slumber sweet
as it was deep.
Morning was dawning over the vessel's side, a dream of rosy lustre sifting
through the purple and pearly mist, behind which the stars grew large and
lost while it moved away to the west in one great cloud, and out of which
the river gleamed as if just newly rolled from its everlasting
fountains,--morning was dawning with the sweet freshness of its fragrant
airs stealing from warm low fields, when Andrew once more lifted his eyes
only to find that tranquil face above him still, that happy heart still
beating beneath his pillowed head.
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