"Add to that wretched state of things that I am engaged to be married. The hardest disappointment which can fall on a man, falls on me. The happiness of my life is within my reach—and I am forbidden to enjoy it. It is not only my health that is broken up, my prospects in life are ruined as well. The woman I love is a woman forbidden to me while I suffer as I suffer now. Realize that—and then fancy you see a man sitting at this table here, with pen, ink, and paper before him, who has only to scribble a line or two, and to begin the cure of you from that moment. Deliverance in a few months from the horror of the fits; marriage in a few months to the woman you love. That heavenly prospect in exchange for the hellish existence that you are enduring now. And the one price to pay for it, a discolored face for the rest of your life—which the one person who is dearest to you will never see? Would you have hesitated? When the doctor took up the pen to write the prescription—tell me, if you had been in my place, would you have said, No?"
I still sat silent. My obstinacy—women are such mules!—declined to give way, even when my conscience told me that he was right.
He sprang to his feet, in the same fever of excitement which I remembered so well, when I had irritated him at Browndown into telling me who he really was.
"Would you have said, No?" he reiterated, stooping over me, flushed and heated, as he had stooped on that first occasion, when he had whispered his name in my ear. "Would you?" he repeated, louder and louder—"would you?"
At the third reiteration of the words, the frightful contortion that I knew so well, seized on his face. The wrench to the right twisted his body. He dropped at my feet. Good God! who could have declared that he was wrong, with such an argument in his favor as I saw at that moment? Who would not have said that any disfigurement would be welcome as a refuge from this?
The servant ran in, and helped me to move the furniture to a safe distance from him, "There won't be much more of it, ma'am," said the man, noticing my agitation, and trying to compose me. "In a month or two, the doctor says the medicine will get hold of him." I could say nothing on my side—I could only reproach myself bitterly for disputing with him and exciting him, and leading perhaps to the hideous seizure which had attacked him in my presence for the second time.
The fit on this occasion was a short one. Perhaps the drug was already beginning to have some influence over him? In twenty minutes, he was able to resume his chair, and to go on talking to me.
"You think I shall horrify you when my face has turned blue," he said with a faint smile. "Don't I horrify you now when you see me in convulsions on the floor?"
I entreated him to dwell on it no more.
"God knows," I said, "you have convinced me—obstinate as I am. Let us try to think of nothing now but of the prospect of your being cured. What do you wish me to do?"