"What is the debt?"
"Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller's account, I
think."
"What is to be done?"
"You had better come to my house," said the man. "I keep a very nice
house."
I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next attended
to them, they were standing a little off from the bed, looking at me. I
still lay there.
"You see my state," said I. "I would come with you if I could; but
indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall die
by the way."
Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me to
believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang in
my memory by only this one slender thread, I don't know what they did,
except that they forbore to remove me.
That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that
I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I
confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a
brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the
giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a
vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored
in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered
off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own
remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time. That I sometimes
struggled with real people, in the belief that they were murderers, and
that I would all at once comprehend that they meant to do me good, and
would then sink exhausted in their arms, and suffer them to lay me
down, I also knew at the time. But, above all, I knew that there was a
constant tendency in all these people,--who, when I was very ill, would
present all kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face,
and would be much dilated in size,--above all, I say, I knew that there
was an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later, to
settle down into the likeness of Joe.
After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice that
while all its other features changed, this one consistent feature did
not change. Whoever came about me, still settled down into Joe. I opened
my eyes in the night, and I saw, in the great chair at the bedside, Joe.
I opened my eyes in the day, and, sitting on the window-seat, smoking
his pipe in the shaded open window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling
drink, and the dear hand that gave it me was Joe's. I sank back on
my pillow after drinking, and the face that looked so hopefully and
tenderly upon me was the face of Joe.