“I SEE EVERYTHING NOW,” SHE WENT ON. “HE COULD NOT STOP”
The especial agony for the sick woman was that nothing of what had happened seemed to her now in the least necessary. “Why, if I had only known—if I had only dreamed how things were—” she cried incessantly to those about her. “What did I care about anything compared with Nat! I loved my husband! What did I care—if I had only dreamed that—if I had only known what I was doing!”
Dr. Melton labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge’s death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with astonished hatred upon a world that had left her so.
“If anyone had warned me—had given me the least idea that it was so serious—I could have lived in three rooms—we had been poor—what did I care for anything but Nathaniel! I only did all those things because—because there was nothing else to do!”
Lydia tried to break the current with a reminder of the sweet memories of the past. “Father loved you so! He loved to give you what you wanted, Mother dear.”
“What I wanted! I wanted my husband. I want my husband!” the widow screamed like a person on the rack.
The doctor sent Lydia away with a hasty gesture. “You must not see her when she is violent,” he said. “You would never forget it.”
It was something he himself never forgot, used as he was to pitiful scenes in the life of suffering humanity. He was almost like a sick person himself, going about his practice with sunken eyes and gray face. His need for sympathy was so great that he abandoned the tacit silence about the Emerys which had existed between him and Rankin ever since Lydia’s marriage, and, going out to the house in the Black Rock woods, unburdened to the younger man the horror of his heart.