“Oh, my father, my father! There is no man in the world like you, none that knows me, that loves me as you do! If you only knew how my heart yearns every moment for you! Why could not this man have the least of your qualities,—your iron will, your scorn of weak things in human nature, your dominating, achieving power It is in comparing this man with you that I find him so small, so pusillanimous, so different from the standard of manhood that you have made me adopt, so different from me, so infinitely far from me. It is good that it is so, but it makes me lonely beyond all expression. I would rather be alone in a desert than with this strange mirage of a man, this male with an infinite capacity for the little things that only little women are suited to do. He tortures me with his goodness, his self-sacrifice to me, his making me feel that he lives only to make me comfortable and bring me back to health. Where are you, my father? I know that you will come to me when you can. That much I know, I know! Come, father, and take me from this awful prison!...
“I think I have done remarkably well to be as patient as I have been. This horrid food is enough to kill a healthy woman,—tinned meats and vegetables, tinned everything, and hardly any flour, but sea-biscuits instead! Of course my poor slave does his best to prepare things in such a way that it will be possible for me to eat them, for he seems to realize that I am a human being....
“I am determined to bring this man to an acquaintance with his tongue. The loneliness that I feel is unbearable. He must be as lonely as I, and, like me, he is probably too proud to make a sign. Of course he talks to me now when I make him, but about things in Asia or Africa that I am certain are as dull to him as to me. He is maintaining this distance, I am certain, just to guard his history and true character, and to keep me in a position where it will remain impossible for me to find out what is going forward on the other side of that door. I will talk to him about myself; that will compel him to talk about himself. I can’t bear this isolation. It is inhuman. And I have no fears that he will presume. They passed long ago.
“I have just two more things to record at present. One is that my host is growing thinner and more hollow-eyed, and the other is that several times lately I have dreamed of hearing the strangest and sweetest music. It sounded like the playing of a violin by a master hand. I have been unable to determine whether I was really dreaming. One singular thing in connection with it is that when I looked for him the other night on his rugs before the fire after I had heard the music, or dreamed I heard it, he was not there. I tried to remain awake until he returned, for I wondered where he could be in the middle of the night, with the snow heaped up to the roof of the house and a fearful gale blowing cold outside, and I felt lonely and uneasy. But I went to sleep before he returned. I have no doubt, however, that he was on the other side of the rear door.”
This ends, for the present, the extracts from the lady’s journal.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE patient had so far recovered that she could be propped up in bed, where she straightened out the bungling work of her inexperienced hair-dresser, and made her glorious hair a fit embellishment of her beauty. She was pale, and her cheeks had lost the roundness and her eyes the brilliancy of their wont. But she was regaining the flesh that she had lost, and the brightness of spirit that her afflictions had dimmed; and her pallor only softened and refined a beauty that likely had been somewhat too showy in health.
Something even better than that had been accomplished. It was not conceivable that her strong and rebellious spirit had been ever before brought under other than the ordinary restraints of a conventional life. She had developed the good sense to make the most of her present uncomfortable situation, and the will to bear its hardships. In the eyes of her host the superiority of her character entitled her to admiration, which he gave her simply and unconsciously, without any regard to her sex and beauty. Her acute insight had informed her of this admiration, and her spirit chafed under its character. One day she said,—