“I was confined to bed a week, and suffered greatly both in mind and body. I had hurt my crippled leg, and that made my physician very anxious. During all this time it had not occurred to me, so sodden with selfishness is my nature, that he had suffered a very serious nervous shock from his outburst of mad passion, and that only by a mighty effort was he holding up to put me again on the road to recovery. A realization of the truth came when my ill turn had passed. He had hardly placed me comfortably on a chair when a ghastly pallor made a death’s-head of his face, and he reeled to the bed and fell fainting upon it, still having the thoughtfulness to say, as he reeled,—
“‘I am—a little—tired—and sleepy. I—am perfectly—well. Have no—uneasiness.’
“Except for his slight, short breathing, he lay for hours as one dead; and then I realized more fully than ever the weight of the awful burden that my presence has laid upon him. I know that I am killing him. O God! is there nothing that I can do to help him, to make it easier for him? What have I done that this horrible curse should have come upon me?
“The most wonderful of all the strange things that I have seen and learned in this terrible imprisonment is that his kindness toward me has not suffered the slightest change. He is still the soul of thoughtfulness, watchfulness, unselfishness, and yet he has denounced me to my face as a——
“Another thing I have found: All the training that I have had in cleverness goes for nothing here. He always avoids the beginning of any conversation on subjects other than those that lie immediately near us. It therefore requires a great effort on my part—and I think I deserve some praise for it—to draw him into discussions of general matters. In these discussions he never advances an opinion if he suspects that I have an opposite one, and never opposes nor contradicts me; but I cannot help feeling that his views are so much broader and deeper than mine, so much wiser, so much more charitable, so much nearer to what he calls ‘the great heart of humanity,’ as to make me seem shallow and mean. Am I really so? I try not to be.
“With indescribable tact and delicacy, he holds me at an infinite distance, and I have been unable to find any way to bridge the vast gulf.... After all, why should I try? If he despises me, I cannot help it. This miserable position in which I am placed will be at an end some time; and when I am again free, and in my own world, I will show him the gratitude that I feel. Will he let me?...
“What is there so repulsive about me? Why should I be treated as a viper? And why is it that of all the men I have known—men whom I could handle as putty—this obscure backwoods doctor sets himself wholly apart from me, remains utterly impregnable, shames and humiliates me with a veiled pity, and feels not the slightest touch of the power that I know myself to have? Is my face ugly? Are my manners crude? Is my voice repellent? Where are my resources of womanly tact that I have used successfully in the past? Why is it that I fail utterly to impress him as having a single admirable trait, a single grace of appearance, manner, or character?
“It is hard to bear all this. I try to be brave and strong and cheerful, as he always is; but it is human nature to resent his treatment, and it is cruel of him to keep me in such a position. It is the first time in my life that I have been at a disadvantage.
“I imagine that he has suffered some great sorrow. Indeed, he said so in his outburst. His distrust of me seems to indicate its character. He probably gave some heartless woman his whole love, his whole soul, and she laughed at him and cast him off. That would go hard with a man of his kind. There can be no other explanation; and now I am the sufferer for that woman’s sin: he thinks that all women are like her.
“I will write this vow, so that I may turn to it often and strengthen my purpose by reading it: