“I do not know,” he answered, “but he said that pride went before a fall. And when I looked a bit surprised he added, ‘you have been eaten up with vanity and puffed up with pride all your life, because of your great strength,’ and oh, lass! lass! I was sore ashamed! Ah, well, I have no strength to sin with now—I am just naught but a useless, old hulk, or what is worse, ‘a derelict!’”
“No,” I said, “a ‘derelict’ is a menace and a floating danger to many men—you are no derelict!”
But he, shaking his clenched hand above his head in impotent sorrow, went on: “Worse! I’m worse than a danger to men! Men are strong and can save themselves, but here I hang like a mill-stone about the neck of that poor woman there—my wife, and she’ll have to bear the dragging and the weight for years and years. For, mind you, I’m not like to die. The doctors say these things inside of me that they call ‘organs’ are all sound and strong, and that a man lives by them, not his legs, and so I’m to sit here rusting away, and watching her grow sick at the sight of me!”
Two slow, difficult tears stood chill and unshed in his eyes, and I felt, with a pang, how great must be the storm of sorrow that could cast its spray into those stern, old eyes.
“I don’t suppose,” he went on, “that she realizes it yet; she’s good as gold. She takes care of me, helpless as I am, always just as smiling and pleasant, and sets right by me, and don’t even go to church—just talks a little over the fence with the neighbors, so she can come and tell me what’s going on. Why, she even offered to give up gum, and she a needing it for her digestion so, ’cause she thought it might make me restless-like (and there is a kind of gum, you know, that squeaks a good deal when it’s new); but I ain’t so selfish as all that. But, oh, if I could just die decently, as a man should when he’s no more use, and not be a burden and a drag! For, you see, Emily’s a mighty fine figure of a woman, and she might easily find a new home, with some good, sound man for a husband—who would protect her, and not sit, as I do, waiting for the day to come when his wife will look at him with loathing.”
“Mr. Brockwell,” I cried, “do you know that you are cruel to yourself and unjust to your wife?” He looked hard at me, but made no answer. “Your wife was always proud of you!” His face quivered—I had struck a wrong note—I hurried on: “proud of your character and standing, and of the pretty, little home you had so hardly earned, and now, oh, believe me, dear old friend, I know her heart better than you do yet—now she is proud to be the world for you, to be your feet, your nurse, your companion, your friend as well as wife.”
He sadly shook his head: “She is a slave,” he said. “Yes, if you will, she is a slave to her love for you, therefore she is a happy slave. You have said, yourself, that she smiles on you constantly. She never looked better in her life, and why does she call you ‘father’ now?”
His face brightened a little. “Yes,” he answered, “she has called me ‘father’ ever since the—the—(how he shrank from the word) since the paralysis came upon me—yes, ever since.”
“And,” I went on, “can’t you see what that means? She used to call you Mr. Brockwell—but when your cruel affliction came upon you she felt the absolute need of some term of endearment, because she loved you.” Still, with the perversity of unhappiness, he exclaimed: “But Emily didn’t say that. She never told me that she—she—”
“Oh, indeed,” I broke in, “and have you given her a chance to tell you? Have you ever asked her if she loved you still?” And the old man, with a mind full of clean and wholesome memories, blushed at the question with a swift swirl of color in his cheeks that a girl of eighteen might have envied. “Have you?” I persisted. “Come, now, let us have a little fair play. You know she can’t speak first. You know that, like every other modest, self-respecting woman, she must be dumb about her feelings—her emotions, until the man breaks the silence. You know she has been trained to silence from her earliest girlhood. Yet, knowing all that, you gnaw your heart in bitterness, because she does not dare lay her arms about your neck and assure you of her faithful love.”