THE following is from the lady’s journal:
“Yes, I will write it again, absurd though it may turn out to be: There
is some mystery about this cabin. I have tried over and over to convince
myself that my weakness and the unnatural situation in which I am placed
make me morbid and suspicious; but I know that I am still a hard-headed
woman, without a particle of nonsense in my composition; and I know that
I am able to see things in their proper light, and to understand them in
a way. And I say that the signs of something wrong here are growing more
and more evident, without furnishing me the least clue to the nature of
the mystery; but I feel that, whatever the mystery is, it is one to be
dreaded. I try not to think about it; but where is the sense in that?
Is it not better for me to do all the observing and thinking I can, and
thus be the better prepared for whatever may happen.
“I sometimes try to think that it is only the strangeness of this
strange man--if I may call him a man--that makes me feel a mystery in
the air. It is hard to get hold of anything tangible in his bearing, so
unobtrusively alert he is. There must be some explanation of the fact
that a physician as skilful as he is should bury himself in these
mountains--should hide himself from the different world to which he
evidently belongs.
“He is a gentleman,--I will do him the justice to admit that. He is a
great deal besides any gentleman that I have ever seen before. Let me
try to explain this to myself. Although he makes not the slightest show
of attending to my wants, I know his every thought is upon me. He sleeps
on the stone floor in front of the fireplace,--that is, if he sleeps at
all, which I sometimes doubt. Even when he is not looking at me in that
distant, abstracted way that he has, I feel that the whole cabin is
filled with his eyes, and that they are always looking at me, day and
night, but with an expression different from the veiled one of his
own eyes. They do not have the distant, thoughtful, perfunctory,
business-like expression of the eyes in his head, but a different
one,--an expression that seems to be a mixture of duty, pity, kindness,
patience, forbearance, and--it will make me feel better to write
it--_contempt_. I feel that these countless eyes are reading my deepest
thoughts, and looking over my shoulder as I write.
“Of course I do not really feel all this, else I should not be writing
thus. But I feel something. O God! when will this wretched strain be
over?...
“I have discovered that he guards most jealously the back door of the
cabin. When I first came to consciousness after my hurt, I saw what I
took to be evidence that my strength of will was greater than his. I
believe so yet; but he certainly has a way of baffling me and holding me
in a position from which I cannot escape. I am curious to know a great
many things; it is my right to know them. Why does he surround himself
with a deafness that nothing can penetrate? Why and how does he make it
impossible for me to ask him questions? And who ever heard of a man
so supremely indifferent as not to ask a woman placed as I am a single
question about herself, her life, her tastes, her family, her world? Why
has he made it impossible for me to ask him any questions? At first he
had placed my bed so that I could see the rear door by turning my head;
but when he observed that I had become curious, he found an excuse to
turn my bed so that it was impossible for me to see the door, and I was
too proud to object.
“I wish I could have respect for him. Of course he surmises that I
am wealthy, and he must know that he will be handsomely paid for his
services. I gave him to understand as much one day, and he looked at me
in a blank way that was most disconcerting. But that did not deceive me.
I do not wish to be unjust, but I know something about human nature. I
think that the man’s whole course may be to impress me with his great
solicitude and make his services appear the more valuable. Bah! he
needn’t have gone to the trouble.
“I am going to watch that door in spite of him. I know already that he
keeps it carefully locked, and that when he goes out he bars it on the
other side. Such distrust, when I am so unable to pry into his secrets,
is unwarranted and offensive. Another thing I have noted. The back door
leads into some kind of inner apartment.
“How is he going to guard it when I am able to be about? Then his life
will be a burden. I will make it so.
“Gratitude? Oh, yes! I have heard of such a thing. But this is an
obligation that money can discharge, and I will see that it does. Has
he done anything more for me than a physician ought to do? I am familiar
with the ways in which these gentry play upon the gratitude of their
wealthy patients, and present bills that they think a sense of shame
will accept. So long as the rich are the prey of the poor, the poor need
not expect sympathy from the rich. I know the power of money to secure
attendance of all sorts, and I can see its power manifested now.
“This man seems to be utterly lacking in masculine qualities. To give
an illustration: The other day, when he thought I was absorbed in
reading,--I must say that he has excellent taste in books,--I found
tears trickling down his cheeks while he was reading before the fire. I
noted from the division of the book as he held it open the approximate
place where he was reading. Afterward I asked him for the book,
and found that it opened readily at a place where the leaves were
tear-stained. It was the silliest story imaginable,--a foolish account
of true-lovers separated by designing persons and dying of a broken
heart! Imagine a grown man crying over such nonsense as that!
“Here is a queer circumstance that I have noted, and have wondered
about: In not a single one of Dr. Malbone’s books does his name appear;
and it is evident that wherever it did appear he has erased it. There
may be easy ways of accounting for this, but to me it looks suspicious.
Is it a part of the mystery of a refined and skilful physician
burying--I believe hiding--himself in these mountains? I remember to
have heard at the lakes that he never attended city people spending the
summer here if he could avoid it. I certainly know that he refused to
visit me, and that he sent me an insulting message besides. What is the
reason? Is he more or less acquainted with people of the better class,
and is he afraid of meeting some whom he may have known when he lived
somewhere else and passed under a different name? The inhabitants of
these mountains venerate him, and believe that his skill is omnipotent.
Well, I have nothing to say against his skill, for certainly he
has handled my case perfectly; but if these simple and ignorant
mountain-folk should see him in the intimacy in which I know him, and
discover what a cold, suspicious, weak, petty man he is, I think they
would reform their opinion of him.
“During the last month he has been going oftener and oftener through the
back door. What business has he there? If I did not have a feeling
that, little as he trusts me, I might safely trust him to the end of the
world, I would have a fear for my own safety. But I rest secure in the
belief that the prospect of collecting a generous fee for restoring
me safe to my father is a sufficient protection, to say nothing of the
confidence that I have in the man’s queer sense of honor. Why, he treats
me as though I were a queen, and bears himself as my humblest subject
hanging upon my smallest word--up to a certain point. Beyond that I get
bewildered.
“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.