Habits and Malady

Over the many antiquated years which have informed, the rudiment of precept and conformity of government, there is not such a greater malevolence, than that which superinduces purport and accustoms fallibility. It is indeed addiction that I speak of, and the tale of which I am to pen has become too adamant of a conviction in the property of personal circumstance. My daughter was ill during that winter, and the brightness of her countenance had withered into the sunken Facies Hippocratica, so hideous when upon the portrait of a child. Her rose cheeks had turn into a morbid sallow, and her eyes, from that cerulean lustre had darkened into a lithic grey. I suppose the horror upon my wife's face presented a compliment of that abundant effect, which gave promise to the puissant oppressions of despair. We were, a family of this meagre sum yet pecuniary advantages had long been withdrawn from our province. A crippling poverty had become our portion, and the deficiencies of our sustenance, harangued our wellness and abased our ineffectual means of enterprise. I was a carpenter, of no permanent contract, and my labors profited little income. My helplessness, as it were the frame of bleak prospect fulfilled an insatiable need, for that liquid opium, which is alcohol. The drinking habits which sustained me, had began to affect the provisions which profited the avenues unto which, a stable economy would be established. It became more conspicuous, that my drinking habits had become the director of my caprice and my wife and only daughter, alas! Had been so greatly affected. In the months preceding my daughter's sickness, I had subdued this inclination and dispelled its presence from my calendar with the hopes of sustaining a healthy budget. I kept the meagre pennies in a coffer and surrendered it to a wardrobe. When it happened that from an unsuspicious residence, the symptoms of an obscure malady possessed my daughter, my temperament declined unto disconsolate woe. A violent exacerbation had now inked its signature upon her scheme, and slowly we began to regard her person with rudiments of a deficient synonym.

My wife was aghast and her eyes had swelled from a perpetuate weeping. I would stand beside her, unable to glance upon my own daughter, as she glided her dainty fingers into the webbed hairs of what here seemed to be a denizen of the sepulchre. Her lips were pallid, with no possible nourishment to gloss its appeal, her tone became raspy, as if having precociously fornicated with senescence. I remember the timber of her auburn hairs, drying and weakening from their follicle. Here I made promises, that I would elongate my working periods, to augment my income and purchase the services of a physician, one of a trusted echelon. This is indeed what I did, and I would tatter my fibre with labors far surpassing the propensities of my sinew and return at night's death, to the sight of my wife who seldom left her post. She would fall asleep beside her daughter, osculating her with an incumbent palm upon the cheek. Indeed I would weep, yet I felt my hopes embraced when I would add to my finances by the end of each night. My vision was obstinate, and my daughter would be well, such was the refined idealism of my conceptions, until I felt a profound depression ascend upon me like a demoniac spirit. My pallet was dried, and my ideations obscene. We can only hide for so long, the sins which request our faculty, from the reception of our limbs, and the attitude of sin is not so prolific and arrogant than when it is DESERVING. I went out into the night, in search for alcohol, and this custom was nourished at the expense of my budget. I would drink, a slender amount, so that detection would be nearly impossible. Ah yes! I must be cursed for the insanity I let ensconce in the parliament of my reason, but little have felt, the burden of obligation when weighed with sorrow. Nights had become weeks, and a transient oblivion from the needs of my family had become my haven. Dear lord, I worked only for drink!

One night, I had exhausted my income, with acquaintances of similar interests, until I fell unconscious on an uncharted place in the town. I awoke in the morning, to gossiping pedestrians and a slight compunction, made me lucidly sober. Shrieking as I navigated my way to my house, I found a gathering outside, where many persons of my residence glomerated successively. One of the women travelled towards me, and with a look of commiseration she said,

"Oh dear, you must be so crestfallen, your daughter was so young, and now she's gone, may the lord have mercy"