The Parched Mouth Is A Sign - His Mouth
Is Parched; The Throbbing Brain - His Brain DOES Throb; The Rapid
Pulse
- He touches his own wrist (for he dares not ask counsel of
any man lest he be deserted), he touches
His wrist, and feels how
his frighted blood goes galloping out of his heart; there is
nothing but the fatal swelling that is wanting to make his sad
conviction complete; immediately he has an odd feel under the arm -
no pain, but a little straining of the skin; he would to God it
were his fancy that were strong enough to give him that sensation.
This is the worst of all; it now seems to him that he could be
happy and contented with his parched mouth and his throbbing brain
and his rapid pulse, if only he could know that there were no
swelling under the left arm; but dare he try? - In a moment of
calmness and deliberation he dares not, but when for a while he has
writhed under the torture of suspense, a sudden strength of will
drives him to seek and know his fate. He touches the gland, and
finds the skin sane and sound, but under the cuticle there lies a
small lump like a pistol-bullet, that moves as he pushes it. Oh!
but is this for all certainty, is this the sentence of death? Feel
the gland of the other arm; there is not the same lump exactly, yet
something a little like it: have not some people glands naturally
enlarged? - would to Heaven he were one! So he does for himself the
work of the plague, and when the Angel of Death, thus courted, does
indeed and in truth come, he has only to finish that which has been
so well begun; he passes his fiery hand over the brain of the
victim, and lets him rave for a season, but all chance-wise, of
people and things once dear, or of people and things indifferent.
Once more the poor fellow is back at his home in fair Provence, and
sees the sun-dial that stood in his childhood's garden; sees part
of his mother, and the long-since-forgotten face of that little
dead sister (he sees her, he says, on a Sunday morning, for all the
church bells are ringing); he looks up and down through the
universe, and owns it well piled with bales upon bales of cotton,
and cotton eternal - so much so that he feels, he knows, he swears
he could make that winning hazard, if the billiard table would not
slant upwards, and if the cue were a cue worth playing with; but it
is not - it's a cue that won't move - his own arm won't move - in
short, there's the devil to pay in the brain of the poor Levantine,
and perhaps the next night but one he becomes the "life and the
soul" of some squalling jackal family who fish him out by the foot
from his shallow and sandy grave.
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