“‘Bad constitutions and complications,’ the book says, I have it; and he has a complication in some sort of sunstroke.”
“Gwen!”
“Yes,” she went on in a quiet level voice. “He missed the last mail by some idiocy of the blacks, and he walked ten miles all through a swamp to catch it, with the fever still on him; when he got home he was half delirious. He lay and it seems turned his heart inside out, both audibly and on paper, see, I have it all here in these sheets!” she said, with bitter irony, catching her breath, as she took them out of the drawer.
“Gwen, my Gwen, what do you mean?”
“I mean he lay there and told out into words—blatant awful English words—on to these sheets, how he loves me, me! but in words no other man ever before used, or dared to use, or the soul of every loved woman would have been annihilated long ago, they are not fitted to bear such magnificent burdens!—He told, too, in precisely the same uncompromising way what he wants of me, and what he considers I am capable of in this line. Mrs. Fellowes, I know just exactly what it cost him to go away! Nothing is hid. Then yesterday—”
She stood up rather wildly—
“Do you know that yesterday I learned in one choking gulp the grinding truth of my mother’s poor tragedy of life, I learned too,” she said slowly, throwing out her arms softly, with a pathetic gesture of appeal, “all in one blinding second my own infinite love for her; but there was no time to tell, she died first. I am crushed with knowledge, I am spared nothing, and then—ah, sickness is degrading! Delilah’s shears are nothing to it! To think that here in my hands I hold the whole unsuppressed heart of a man!”
“But, Gwen, I cannot grasp it—how came you by all this knowledge? Humphrey was too ill to write all that big bundle of sheets.”
“He wrote, as he spoke, in delirium, part of it is absolutely maniacal, but my God! there is truth enough in it! I see Humphrey’s poor sick naked soul in every line!”
She hid her face and moaned softly.