The storms continued. Ten days passed. Anne was not sure that he even slept in the daytime. He ceased to speak at all, although he managed to convey to Anne his gratitude that she was good enough to let him alone. Once she suggested a trip to England as soon as they could get a packet for Barbadoes, but he merely shook his head, and Anne knew that he would not stir from Nevis.
There came a night when Anne too gave up all attempt to sleep. Even after her illness she had found no difficulty in resuming the long unbroken rest of youth, but youth had taken itself off in a fright.
“Then she left the room again”
On this night she wandered about and faced the truth. It was a night to assist the least imaginative to face an unhappy crisis. A small hurricane raged, seeming to burst in wild roars from Nevis itself. The streams on the mountain were cataracts. The sea threatened the island. At another time, Anne, like other West Indians, would have paid incessant visits to the barometer, but to-night she cared nothing for the threat of the elements. A storm raged within her, and she had a perfect comprehension of the madness and despair in the library.
She was out of her fool’s paradise at last. She knew that he would never write his drama without the aid that marvellous but rotten spot in his brain demanded. And its delivery was in her hands. He was the soul of honour, unselfish, high-minded. He had taken the woman he loved better than himself into his life and he would keep the promise he had voluntarily made her unless she released him. He would conquer and kill the best part of him.
Anne had no apprehension of his physical death. No doubt his mere bodily well-being would go on increasing after the struggle was over; but what of his maimed and thwarted intellect, the mind-emptiness of a man who had known the greatest of mortal joys, mental creation? What of the haunting knowledge throughout a possibly long life, of having deliberately done a divine gift to death?
Anne felt like a murderer herself. She went suddenly out into the gallery, and stood for a moment with her arms rigidly upraised to the black rolling sky. There was no response in the fury of the rain that drowned her face, and compelled her to bend her head.