I have always the
feeling--it has never left me for an instant--that she could appear
differently if she would. I have studied her for years until I know her
like a book, and though she is only an apparition, I am perfectly
positive that she wills evil to us both. Don't you think he would change
that if he could? Don't you think he would make her kind instead of
vindictive if he had the power?"
"But if he could remember her as loving and tender?"
"I don't know. I give it up--but it is killing me."
It _was_ killing her. As the days passed I began to realize that she had
spoken the truth. I watched her bloom fade slowly and her lovely
features grow pinched and thin like the features of a starved person.
The harder she fought the apparition, the more I saw that the battle was
a losing one, and that she was only wasting her strength. So impalpable
yet so pervasive was the enemy that it was like fighting a poisonous
odour. There was nothing to wrestle with, and yet there was everything.
The struggle was wearing her out--was, as she had said, actually
"killing her"; but the physician who dosed her daily with drugs--there
was need now of a physician--had not the faintest idea of the malady he
was treating. In those dreadful days I think that even Mr. Vanderbridge
hadn't a suspicion of the truth.
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