In a year or two poor Mr. 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 . 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 . Thus , a slender woman still looking maiden-like , she supported his tall , broad-chested frame along the pathway of their little garden , and plucked the roses for her gray-haired husband , and spoke soothingly as to an infant . His mind was palsied with his body ; its utmost energy was peevishness . In a few months more she helped him up the staircase with a pause at every step , and a longer one upon the landing-place , and a heavy glance behind as he crossed the threshold of his chamber . He knew , poor man ! that the precincts of those four walls would thenceforth be his world -- his world , his home , his tomb , at once a dwelling-and a burial-place -- till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one . But Rose was with him in the tomb . 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 ! Death seemed to draw near the door , and often to lift the latch , and sometimes to thrust his ugly skull into the chamber , nodding to Rose and pointing at her husband , but still delayed to enter . `` This bedridden wretch can not escape me , '' quoth Death . `` I will go forth and run a race with the swift and fight a battle with the strong , and come back for Toothaker at my leisure . '' Oh , when the deliverer came so near , in the dull anguish of her worn-out sympathies did she never long to cry , `` Death , come in '' ? But no ; we have no right to ascribe such a wish to our friend Rose . She never failed in a wife 's duty to her poor sick husband . She murmured not though a glimpse of the sunny sky was as strange to her as him , nor answered peevishly though his complaining accents roused her from sweetest dream only to share his wretchedness .
He knew her faith , yet nourished a cankered jealousy ; and when the slow XXXXX had chilled all his heart save one lukewarm spot which Death 's frozen fingers were searching for , his last words were , `` What would my Rose have done for her first love , if she has been so true and kind to a sick old man like me ? ''
Rose Toothaker daily day deliverer disease dub landing-place months peevishness