“As soon as I could overcome the half-stupor into which his outburst had thrown me I dragged myself to the rear door, intending to barricade it against him. The effort was exceedingly painful and exhausting, and brought me great suffering for a week afterward. But my sufferings of mind and spirit were so much greater that I could bear those of the flesh. When I had crawled to the door and was trying to drag a box against it, I heard something that stopped me. I am not certain that it was anything real. There was a loud singing in my ears from the awful fright that I had suffered, and what I heard may have been that, made seemingly coherent by my over-strained imagination. What I heard sounded like the distant, smothered, awful strains of Saint-Saens’s ‘Dance of Death’ played on the violin. But wild and terrible as it sounded, it came as a pledge of my safety. Murder cannot come with music.
“I drew myself away and with great effort clambered upon the bed, where I lay a long time in complete exhaustion. Time had no meaning for me. A dull, massive, intangible weight seemed to be crushing me, and I longed—oh, how I longed!—for human sympathy.
“The hut was dark when he returned. We had been very saving with the candles, for Dr. Malbone explained that they were running low; so in the evenings we generally had only the fire-light. There seemed to be a generous supply of fire-wood in the rear apartment, and some of it was a pitchy pine that gave out a fine blaze. When he returned the fire had burned out. I felt no fear when I heard him enter. I knew by the unsteadiness of his movements that he was weak and ill, but the first sound of his voice as he called me anxiously was perfectly reassuring.
“‘I am lying on the bed,’ I answered.
“He groped to the bedside and there he knelt, and buried his face in his hands upon the coverlet. And then—I say it merely as his due, merely as the simple truth—he did the manliest thing that a man ever did. He raised his head and in dignified humility said,—
“‘I have done the most cowardly, the most brutal thing that a man can do. Will you forgive me? Can you forgive me?
“I put out my hand to stop him, for it was terrible that a man should be so humble and broken; but he took my hand in both of his and held it.
“‘Will you? Can you? he pleaded.
“It was the only time that his touch had been other than the cold and perfunctory one of the physician, and—I feel no shame in writing it—it was the first time in my life that the touch of a man’s hand had been so comforting. For a moment his hand seemed to have been thrust through the wall that hitherto had separated us so completely.
“‘You were not the one to blame,’ I said. ‘I alone was the guilty one.’