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In the mansions where she enters, the inmates provide themselves black garments; the coffin-maker follows her; and the bell tolls as she comes away from the threshold. Death himself has met her at so many a bedside, that he puts forth his bony hand to greet Nurse Toothaker. She is an awful woman!
She was still fair enough to captivate a bachelor, or with a widow's cheerful gravity she might have won a widower, stealing into his heart in the very guise of his dead wife. But the widow Toothaker had no such projects.
A road, hedged with briskly-aspiring young spruces, runs for a mile northward, making a faint show at attacking the wilderness. A mile's loneliness is enough for this unsupported pioneer; he runs up a tree, sees nothing but dark woods, thinks of Labrador and the North Pole, and stops. Next morning, Mr. Toothaker returned from a political meeting below among the towns.
Her visitors, when they heard him coming, looked for the appearance of some old, old man, but he dragged his nerveless limbs into the parlor and there was Mr. Toothaker! The disease increasing, he never went into the sunshine save with a staff in his right hand and his left on his wife's shoulder, bearing heavily downward like a dead man's hand.
An American housekeeper would be invaluable, and Miss Toothaker arose before him. She would no doubt prove an excellent manager, and she was so unprepossessing in every way, she would be unlikely to be appropriated by any widowed missionary. It has been seen already that for Philip St. Leger to think and to act were but quick, consecutive steps; it was so in this case.
We have beheld her as the maid, the wife, the widow; now we see her in a separate and insulated character: she was in all her attributes Nurse Toothaker. And Nurse Toothaker alone, with her own shrivelled lips, could make known her experience in that capacity. What a history might she record of the great sicknesses in which she has gone hand in hand with the exterminating angel!
Toothaker was his name. He dwelt upon the lawn-like bank, a hundred feet above the lake. Mr. Toothaker himself was absent, but his wife received us hospitably, disposed us in her guest-chamber, and gratified us with a supper. This was Rangeley Township, the outer settlement on the west side of Maine. A "squire" from England gave it his name.
Toothaker was visited with a wearisome infirmity which settled in his joints and made him weaker than a child. He crept forth about his business, and came home at dinner-time and eventide, not with the manly tread that gladdens a wife's heart, but slowly, feebly, jotting down each dull footstep with a melancholy dub of his staff. We must pardon his pretty wife if she sometimes blushed to own him.
Such profit might be derived by a skilful observer from my much-respected friend the Widow Toothaker, a nurse of great repute who has breathed the atmosphere of sick-chambers and dying-breaths these forty years.
He leaned upon her, in his daily passage from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back again from the weary chair to the joyless bed, his bed and hers, their marriage-bed; till even this short journey ceased, and his head lay all day upon the pillow, and hers all night beside it. How long poor Mr. Toothaker was kept in misery!
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