Page:The Lady's Book Vol. V.pdf/28

 THE DANCE OF DEATH.

separate my other sisters from the already fast declining Regina; but the obstinacy of age, and his deep conviction of the vanity of all such efforts, rendered my efforts and pleadings una- vailing.

«It was only after great difficulty that I was prevailed upon to part with my youngest sister, then a mere child, who, from the close connexion in which her life seemed to stand with myself in that sin dream, had become my favourite, and on whom felt impelled to lavish all that love, which a certain involuntary shuddering sensation that I felt in the presence of my other sisters, as beings on whom Death had already set his seal, prevented me from bestowing fully upon them. It was only on my assuring my father that my peace, nay, my life, depended on his granting me this request, that he consented that she should be brought up in the capital, under my eye. I accompanied her thither myself. I watched over her with an anxiety proportioned to my love. She was not so tall as her sisters had been at the same age. She seemed to un- fold herself more slowly, and in all things, as well as her education, she was the reverse of them. Her gaiety, her liveliness, her enjoyment of life, which often inspired me with a deep melancholy, gaye additional bloom to her personal appear- ance; I could trace in her no appearance of weakness of the breast; but she was still a ten- der, delicate nature, the blossom, as might say, of a higher clime,

“Tt was long before I returned to my father’s house; but his sickness, which rendered a dan- gerous operation necessary, brought him to the capital with my two remaining sisters. What I had foreseen was now fulfilled. Jacoba had be- come Regina, Lucia Jacoba. I knew it would be so, and yet it struck me with horror; the more so when I obServed, as already hinted, that during the bloom of their ephemeral existence, all my sisters successively acquired a strong re- semblance to their mother, and consequently to the portrait; though not so close as may have

to your excited imagination, who saw but for a moment and after a long interval. t tell how the daily sight of these devoted , who inspired at once pity and terror, wrought upon my heart. It brought back my old despair, my old fears, which at such moments reasoning could not subdue, that I and all of us, my darling with the rest, would become the vic- tims of this hereditary plague. My situation was the more trying, that I was obliged to invent a thousand stratagems and little falsehoods to keep the sisters, then living in the same city, apart. I could not altogether succeed, and the misery I felt at such moments how shall I describe! Your coming, your mistake, filled up the measure of my despair. When you wrote, I found it for a long time impossible to answer your affectionate letter. #

1t was only long after the return of my family to their home that I regained my compo- sure. The theory of medicine had long been hateful to me; though in the course of my researches into that fatal disorder, to which our family seemed destined, I had more than once met with instances in which the disease, after a certain period seemed to concentrate itself on its victim, so as not to be transmitted to her sub- sequent offspring. My father too, who, during his residence in the capital, had perceived my distracted state of mind, took the opportunity of giving me, as he thought, a word of comfort, though it only wrung from me a bitter smile. He told me of a dream which he had had after my mother’s death, and which he had hitherto concealed, because its import seemed to be of a threatening nature for me; although at the same time it seemed to give him the assurance, that at least I should not perish by the same fate which had overwhelmed my sisters. He thought he saw me, whether young or old he could not say, for my face was covered, lying asleep or dead in some foreign country. My baggage was heaped about me, and on fire; but the thick smoke which arose from the pile prevented him from perceiv- ing whether I was burnt or not.

“ Though at first much shocked at this dream, yet, viewed in the light already mentioned, it had on the whole a consoling tendency; and for this reason he had communicated it to me, though still with some shrinking sensations at its recol- lection. It was now my turn to afford him con- solation, by pointing out to him that this dream, vague and indistinct in its meaning, like most others, had probably been already fulfilled, since my effects. had in fact been all burnt about me during the bombardment of Copenhagen, and I myself, in a diseased and scarcely conscious state of mind, only extricated from danger by the ex- ertions of my friends. He seemed struck with this observation, and was silent; but I saw that his confidence in the certainty of dreams was in no shape abated. But my chief source of con- solation lay in the slow and natural growth of my Amanda, who did not, like her sisters, resemble a mere hot-house plant, but a sweet natural flower, though her light and ethereal being would render her equally unable to encounter the rude breath of earthly sorrow, or the influence of a rugged clime;—and you, whether accidentally or not—(and this gives me, I confess, new hope and courage)—you have a second time been the preserver of her life, by sheltering her from the blight of a stormy and freezing autumnal night, which would have been enough to blast at once this delicate production of a more genial clime. You, like a protecting angel, conducted her to her paternal home; that home where the ange? of death has now, I trust, marked the threshold with blood for the last time, since the scythe that swept away my venerable father, with the same stroke mowed down {he last declining life of his daughters.

“In truth, I begin to cherish the best hopes of the future. In her mild eye that beams with no unearthly light, her cheek that glows with no concealed fever, there are no traces of the con- suming worm within; only, as I have already said, the delicacy of her frame requires the ten-