They were very long, pleasant days in early December. The
sunshine was pale, but it suited his hurt eyes better: it crept
slowly in the mornings over the snuff-coloured carpet on the
floor, up the brown foot-board of the bed, and, when the wind
shook the window-curtains, made little crimson pools of mottled
light over the ceiling,--curdling pools, that he liked to watch:
going off, from the clean gray walls, and rustling curtain, and
transparent crimson, into sleeps that lasted all day.
He was not conscious how he knew he was in a hospital: but he did
know it, vaguely; thought sometimes of the long halls outside of
the door, with ranges of rooms opening into them, like this, and
of very barns of rooms on the other side of the building with
rows of white cots where the poorer patients lay: a stretch of
travel from which his brain came back to his snug fireplace,
quite tired, and to Lois sitting knitting by it. He called the
little Welsh-woman, "Sister," too, who used to come in a stuff
dress, and white bands about her face, to give his medicine, and
gossip with Lois in the evening: she had a comical voice, like a
cricket chirping. There was another with a real Scotch brogue,
who came and listened sometimes, bringing a basket of undarned
stockings: the doctor told him one day how fearless and skilful
she was, every summer going to New Orleans when the yellow fever
came. She died there the next June: but Holmes never, somehow,
could realize a martyr in the cheery, freckled-faced woman whom
he always remembered darning stockings in the quiet fire-light.
Pages:
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156