Anna Lombard, page 149 by Victoria Cross
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and sufferings swept one's brain clear and left it blank, like a little child's. After hours of delirium and fever, there came long hours of blank, quiet weakness; in which I lay content to be without sensation of any sort gazing out through the open jilmils into the clear, light, placid air beyond. Then I slowly began to get better; and I almost dreaded recovery. Recovery meant taking up again the burden of responsibility and anxiety that the utter helplessness of disease slips from one's shoulders. I gained strength slowly each day; and I knew that with my strength would come back desires and longings and hopes and cares without end.
In all this time I heard constantly from Anna, and her letters had always the same burden: her love for myself, her gratitude, her devotion, and her piteous longing to be free from "her bondage," as she called it. But it was a bondage that none could free her from; and no one could understand that better than I. Let there be no misunderstanding here. It was Anna's own love that held her captive. She wished to crush out that love, to annihilate it, perhaps; but she could not; and no human aid could help her. As the drunkard longs to kill the desire for drink, yet goes on drinking; so she might wish to kill her love, yet she continued loving. Had the bondage been any other than this; had she been tied to this man by the tie of marriage without love, I would and could, possibly, have freed her. But in this case, since her love was the disease and her captivity but, as it were, the symptom, it was useless to attack the latter and set her free until the disease itself, torn from its roots, was eradicated. Forcible separation from Gaida would not free her; it would simply martyrize and idealize him in her thoughts, and she would be bound to him by the chains of a thousand memories; and for the one who caused that separation she would feel nothing but resentment. Even if she gave herself to me, it would be with that memory of him standing like a shield between us. And that should n