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Of course, there were many topics which we might have discussed to divert our minds from morbidly watching the cloud of impending mutiny spread and grow inky. But the cloud was present and human, and the diary was present and human, and we were present and human. Whether or not we were creatures of atrophied brains and distorted vision is an academic question. The fact remains.
The great mediæval German poem of Tristram and Yseult remained for centuries a unique phenomenon; only John Ford perhaps, that grander and darker twin spirit of Gottfried von Strassburg, reviving, even among the morbidly psychological and crime-fascinated followers of Shakespeare, that new theme of evil the heroism of unlawful love.
He had never really understood her nature; he should have gone to her in the beginning and trusted to her love and her insight; he should have let her share the aftermath of the fire; that fierce experience would have taught her that he was forever mortgaged to a life of noble reparation, and even the terror of it all would have been better than shutting her out, to brood morbidly alone.
The meeting, which he had morbidly dreaded, had brought him no comfort. It had not removed the invisible barrier between Peggy and himself. But Peggy seemed so unconscious of it that he began to wonder whether it only existed in his diseased imagination. Though by his silences and reserves he had given her cause for resentment and reproach, her attitude was nothing less than angelic.
He even heard, with ears morbidly acute, the low words addressed to the interested spectators, "Now, gentlemen, I am about to begin." With a stifled sob the poor little fellow suddenly managed to raise himself from the table on which he was stretched.
Indeed, I know of no more sublime figure than Colonel Starbottle rising superior to a long-withstood craving for a "cocktail," morbidly conscious also of the ridiculousness of his appearance to any of his old associates who might see him drinking luke-warm tea and pecking feebly at his bread and butter at a small table, beside his little tyrant.
We live in an age when every uttered sentiment of charity toward the insane is applauded to its remotest echo; an age in which the chains and locks and bars and dismal dungeon cells and flagellations and manifold tortures of the less humane and less enlightened past are justly abhorrent; an age which measures its magnificent philanthropy by munificent millions, bestowed without stint upon monumental mansions for the indwelling of the most pitiable and afflicted of the children of men, safe from the pitiless storms of adverse environment without which are so harshly violent to the morbidly sensitive and unstable insane mind; an age in which he who strikes a needless shackle from human form or heart, or removes a cause of human torture, psychical or physical, is regarded as a greater moral hero than he who, by storm or strategy of war taketh a resisting fortress; an age when the Chiarugis and Pinels, the Yorks and Tukes, of not remotely past history, and the Florence Nightingales and Dorothea Dixes of our own time, are enshrined in the hearts of a philanthropic world with greater than monumental memory.
"You could not be," was his reply; "but I do not understand what you mean." She had grown graver, and leaned back in her chair with downcast eyes. "I hardly know how to say it," she began slowly, "but you seem to me to be feeling rather morbidly about the virtue of personal discomfort.
Never did wife or sister surround husband or brother with such loving care as she had for me. Her nature was morbidly open to all impressions and accessible to all sentiments. She had broken equally with her friends and with her ways, with her words and with her extravagances.
At last we stop and propose to find rest in bed. Not so, says the ill-used brain, now morbidly wide awake; and whether we will or not, the mind keeps turning over and over the work of the day, the business or legal problem, or mumbling, so to speak, some wearisome question in a fashion made useless by the denial of full attention.
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