Omnia tum vero vitai claustra
lababant;+ and soon the cold was mounting with sure pace from the dead
feet to the head.

And now Marius began more than to suspect what the issue must be, and
henceforward could but watch with a sort of agonised fascination the
rapid but systematic work of the destroyer, [117] faintly relieving a
little the mere accidents of the sharper forms of suffering. Flavian
himself appeared, in full consciousness at last--in clear-sighted,
deliberate estimate of the actual crisis--to be doing battle with his
adversary. His mind surveyed, with great distinctness, the various
suggested modes of relief. He must without fail get better, he would
fancy, might he be removed to a certain place on the hills where as a
child he had once recovered from sickness, but found that he could
scarcely raise his head from the pillow without giddiness. As if now
surely foreseeing the end, he would set himself, with an eager effort,
and with that eager and angry look, which is noted as one of the
premonitions of death in this disease, to fashion out, without formal
dictation, still a few more broken verses of his unfinished work, in
hard-set determination, defiant of pain, to arrest this or that little
drop at least from the river of sensuous imagery rushing so quickly
past him.

But at length delirium--symptom that the work of the plague was done,
and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy--broke the coherent
order of words and thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony,
found his best hope in the increasing dimness of the patient's mind. In
intervals of clearer consciousness the visible signs of cold, of sorrow
and desolation, were very painful. No longer battling with the
disease, he seemed as it were to place himself [118] at the disposal of
the victorious foe, dying passively, like some dumb creature, in
hopeless acquiescence at last. That old, half-pleading petulance,
unamiable, yet, as it might seem, only needing conditions of life a
little happier than they had actually been, to become refinement of
affection, a delicate grace in its demand on the sympathy of others,
had changed in those moments of full intelligence to a clinging and
tremulous gentleness, as he lay--"on the very threshold of death"--with
a sharply contracted hand in the hand of Marius, to his almost
surprised joy, winning him now to an absolutely self-forgetful
devotion. There was a new sort of pleading in the misty eyes