Chapter VI: Part 6

"Chesney, for your own sake I'm going to take the liberty of being brutally frank. What I think you're doing is only a regular symptom of your ailment. Here goes, then: Haven't you another hypodermic and morphia in your possession?"

Chesney eyed him cruelly.

"It's a queer profession--yours," he said. "It gives a little chap like you courage to insult a big man--just because he happens to be ill and therefore weak, for the moment."

Bellamy looked at him without changing countenance.

"I was afraid you'd take it this way-- I wish you wouldn't. The very way you're acting now is a symptom."

"You don't seem able to remove these symptoms," said Chesney, with his slight, mocking grin.

"I can't--unless you help me. It's in your own hands, you know. You've always reminded me of a lion, Chesney. Now you make me think of a lion that gnaws off its own paw to get out of a trap."

"On the contrary," said Cecil, laughing that silent laugh of his, "I'm in fine fighting trim, I assure you. Wait--here's a bit of verse on the subject:

"'The lion and the eunuch were fighting for a prize,
The lion beat the eunuch, for all he was so wise.'"

Bellamy looked at him with undiminished composure.

"Ah, Chesney--you're in a bad way," he said regretfully.

"What the hell do you mean by that?" demanded Cecil, flaring up.

"You try to insult the man who's trying to help you," replied Bellamy. "But an ill man can't insult a physician. Good-morning."

And he went away.

Three days passed. Chesney was very reasonable for him. Drank the "slops" that were served him without demur--went for drives when the weather permitted. The days were murky with ravelled cloud held up in a network of pale sunshine. Nearly every afternoon and in the night fine showers came hissing on the leaves and over the roof of Dynehurst. He read a great deal. He had given up his heavy political reading, and begun a course of Wilkie Collins.

"It's odd how illness makes a chap take to trash in literature," he said to Sophy, whose eyes he saw wondering over the title of the book he had put down when she came in. "It's as if the mind got weak, too, and needed slops like the body."

But this odd deterioration in taste was due to the morphia, which at times gave such a deliciously false sense of interest in the most trivial things. Deep, serious thinking was impossible under its disintegrating glamour. It gave rather gay, fleeting fantasies--a sense of delicate mental power as though thought were a sort of glittering toy, to amuse oneself with. After Wilkie Collins he took up the French detective novels--then shifted to "Ouida." These works filled him with glee. "Crewel-work Ruskin," he called them. "But damned amusing for all that. She dips her coat-of-many-colours in her brother's blood every now and then. She might have been great," he declared, "if she hadn't had haemorrhages of the imagination. That made her mind anaemic--but she could spin darned good yarns, by Jove!"

He was much amused by his mother's sudden interest in Bobby.

"The Mater's vaulting ambition has gone clean over my head and landed on Bobkins," he told Sophy, chuckling. "I bet she'll live to ninety-and-nine, just for the pleasure of speaking of 'my grandson, the Prime Minister.'"

He took to calling Bobby "Little William Pitt."

"Come here, little William Pitt; you're going to be It, as they say in the States," he would say when the child was brought in to see him. "I hope you'll approve of me for a father when you're in office."

This strange name by which his father called him confused the child and displeased him. He felt that he was being made fun of. Children and dogs dislike the people who laugh at them. He hated to go into his father's room, and resisted so strenuously that Sophy took him there less and less.

As the days went by, and still Anne Harding had not found any morphia or hypodermic syringe in Cecil's possession, Sophy began to grow more hopeful. Cecil was certainly far quieter than he had been for some time. She began again to think that Bellamy and the nurse must surely be mistaken.

On the afternoon of the fourth day she called Anne into her room, and spoke to her about it.

"Don't you think you must be mistaken, this time, Nurse?" she asked eagerly.

Anne Harding shook her stubborn, wise little head.

"No, Mrs. Chesney," she said.

"But where _could_ it be? Mr. Chesney is never long enough anywhere but in his own room to have it hidden about the house."

"It isn't hidden about the house," said Anne. "It's hidden in his own room. _I know it_--as if I'd seen it through the wall, or floor, or wherever it is," she added firmly, seeing Sophy's look of doubt. But this doubt could not withstand such authoritative conviction. Sophy sighed wearily.

"I suppose you must be right," she said; "but it seems impossible."

She sat looking out of window at the waving mantle of rain which was again blown grey and wild over the swelling breasts of pasture land. Then she turned vehemently.

"Think of it!" she exclaimed. "The beauty of a field of poppies! The passionate loveliness of all those scarlet cups full of sunlight. And all the while their hearts are bitter with this evil--this horrible poison! Oh, why don't men wipe them from the earth!"

Anne looked at her with that wise kindliness. "You forget all the good that opium does," she said brusquely tender, after her fashion. "It's like so many other things--this fire on your hearth for instance. A good servant but a bad master."

Just after this conversation Sophy went to read aloud to Cecil at his request. This also was a new phase. He could never endure reading aloud in former days. Now he would lie, dozing off now and then, evidently soothed agreeably by the sound of her low, rich voice.

The weather had turned raw and chilly again with the renewed rain. Sophy shivered suddenly as she sat reading. Anne Harding, who was tidying a little medicine chest on a table near by, noticed this.

"Can't I fetch you a shawl, Mrs. Chesney?" she asked, looking up with her alert black eyes.

"Thanks; but wouldn't you like a fire lit, Cecil?" Sophy asked. "You're so fond of a fire in your bedroom. I can't think why Gaynor hasn't seen to it."

"I don't care for a fire," said Chesney curtly. "Being in bed is stuffy work as it is."

He lay nearly always in bed now.

"But, Cecil, you're so used to it. I'm afraid being in a damp room like this may give you cold. It isn't as if you were accustomed to doing without fire. Please let Nurse----"

"Don't nag!" he said, quite roughly this time. "I can look after my own wants. I'm not quite incompetent yet."

Sophy glanced at the nurse, still anxious. She thought Anne Harding's eyes had a rather queer expression--startled.

"Don't you agree with me, Nurse?" she asked.

Anne lowered her eyes and busied herself again with the little chest.

"I don't think it matters," she said, "if Mr. Chesney really prefers it this way."

"Do get on with your reading, Sophy," broke in Cecil impatiently.

Sophy took up the book again, and Anne Harding went to Tilda for a scarf, which she returned with and put over Sophy's shoulders.

As she left the room, finally this time, she glanced keenly at the empty fireplace. She thought she had a clue.

XXIII

That night, about one o'clock, as Chesney lay heavily asleep under the influence of two grains of morphia (he only dared to take these large doses when night was coming on), the little nurse, Brownie-like and cat-foot in her grey flannel wrapper and felt shoes, stole into the room. Gaynor slept in his master's dressing-room on a cot. Anne had been given a room just opposite. The night-light burned behind a screen as in London, and over the ceiling spread huge, grotesque shadows from chairs and tables--shadows that were a horror to Chesney, in the gruesome intervals between dose and dose. They seemed solid then, those shadows--informed with a weird life. They hung bat-like from his ceiling, waiting to drop down on him. Morphia gives the sick, unreasoning fear that comes only in dreams--the kind of fear that will seize one in such dreams--at the sight of a grey, spotted leaf shaken by a wind--or the slow opening of a door upon a void.

The little figure stood motionless a moment, listening towards the bed. Then it stole over, bending close to the sleeping man. With skilful light fingers Anne lifted one of the sleeper's heavy hands, then let it drop again upon the bedclothes. Chesney did not stir--his breathing did not change.

With a brisk movement of satisfaction, the nurse now drew a black, oblong object from the pocket of her dressing-gown, and going swiftly over to the fireplace, put the fender noiselessly aside, and knelt down on the hearth. She was sure, quite sure now, as sure as one could be of anything theoretically divined, that the hypodermic syringe and morphia were concealed somewhere in that chimney-place. She had looked there before, but not in the exhaustive way that she meant to look now. She had even felt along the shelf of the chimney-throat with her hands, but there had been nothing. Now, inch by inch, like a little Miss Sherlock Holmes, she meant to examine that cold, sooty cavity. The black tube in her hand was a small electric pocket-light, such as had just come in about that time. When she had looked before, she had used her bedroom candle. Now she meant to turn that bright, electric gleam on every inch of the brickwork and metal. Slowly she drew the pencil of light from side to side, lying flat, and beginning her search under the bars of the grate; then, crouching, she directed the ray higher, towards the bend of the chimney-throat, feeling, tapping, with her free hand as she did so. A fire had evidently been made there recently, probably on the day of Chesney's arrival; for, though the grate had been freshly polished only that morning and the housemaid's broom had swept the back of the chimney, yet a slight fluff of soot clung to it higher up. Anne touched this soot, pressing down her fingers firmly, delicately, feeling for some crevice, some loose bit of brick or iron. All was firm and cold. She sat back on her heels, disappointed. She looked--crouching there in her grey wrapper, with the short, black curls framing her thin, baffled little face--like some determined child who had decided to watch and surprise Santa Claus in his descent from the roof--and who had watched in vain. Then suddenly she knelt up again. Something had caught her clever eyes. She noticed--and at this, the well-regulated little timepiece of her heart began to tick hurriedly--yes, she had noticed that in one corner of the chimney-throat there was a broad, smooth place where the soot was quite worn away. The dark-red fire-brick showed plainly through. Anne passed the bright glow of light across this smooth patch very slowly. No; the bricks were not loose here. She held the light closer, gazing with eyes narrowed to the utmost intensity of vision. There was a little spot, or excrescence, on the brick near the seam of the corner. She had felt it with her finger-tips as she drew them lightly back and forth. She had thought this roughness merely a defect in one of the bricks. Now she touched it again--scraped it with her nail. Her nail made no sound against it. Then she pressed upon it. The nail sank in. It was perhaps a bit of putty left by the work-men. But then putty isn't used for building fireplaces; besides, the fire would have melted it long ago----

She began to feel all around it. Suddenly something in the angle, in the seam where the chimney-throat squared, caught her eye. It looked like a bit of black wire. She picked at it with her nail, and it yielded--like the string of a tightly strung guitar. All at once it flashed over the little detective. That rough lump was wax; it fixed the end of this black string in place. The string was taut, because it was held so--held by a weight at the other end probably. Anne did not know anything about the construction of chimney-throats--had she done so, the solution would have come to her sooner. But she guessed now that there must be a hollow behind the brickwork that faced her. She slid her hand up and forward. Yes, there was an empty space behind--the usual air-chamber in all well-built chimneys of which she had not known. Ah, now she had it! Carefully, very daintily, little by little, she began to pull up the fine black silk cord which, as she had guessed, passed from where its end was fixed in place by that lump of wax or putty down the back of the chimney-throat. It answered readily. She felt the weight on its other end scraping against the wall as she drew it up. In another moment she had it in her hand--a little parcel, wrapped in oiled paper. As she broke open the paper and looked down at the object in her hand, her face was a study of elfish triumph and unwilling admiration.

"What couldn't they do to the world, if they were as hideously clever at everything else as they are at hiding this stuff!" thought Anne Harding, referring to the tribe of morphinomaniacs as known to her experience.

She set the fender back, and getting stiffly to her feet, cramped by nearly an hour's crouching, returned to her own room and locked the just-found hypodermic case safely away in the bottom of her travelling-box.

* * * * *

By five o'clock next morning Anne was fully dressed, capped, and aproned. She made herself a cup of strong black tea over her little spirit lamp, nibbled two biscuits, and, glancing at her bracelet-watch, went out with her light, quick step. She passed Chesney's door and entered the dressing-room. Gaynor, who slept as lightly as a cat, started wide awake when the nurse entered. He drew the bedclothes to his chin, feeling with his other hand for his dressing-gown which lay on a chair near by. He could never get used to the unceremonious entrances of this little stranger woman into his bedroom. She came to him, her finger against her lips, bent down, and whispered:

"I've found the morphia and the syringe Mr. Chesney has been hiding, Gaynor. I'm going to tell him of it myself. He'll be rousing about now. No matter what you hear, don't get frightened. I'm going to lock his door inside and put the key in my pocket. Don't try to interfere--will you? Don't come to the door or answer, even if he calls you?"

Gaynor had flushed deeply on hearing of his master's detected falsehood. Now he turned pale. "Ain't you afraid, Miss?" he asked. He was always punctiliously civil to the nurse. He felt that it would not be respectful for one in his position to call her "Nurse"--the little woman who was trying to save his master. He had a sense of gratitude and of fitness rare, not only in a servant.

"No!" Anne whispered vigorously. "No; I'm not a bit afraid. I've had much worse cases than this. I'll manage him."

"He's a gentleman with a very high spirit, Miss."

"I'm not afraid of his high spirit. Maybe it won't be so high when I'm through with him. I'm an Australian, you know, Gaynor. I don't think Australians are as afraid of their menfolk as Englishwomen. You must keep quiet till I'm through. That's all."

She turned and went out, passing through the connecting door into Chesney's bedroom. She locked the door as she had said, pocketing the key. Shrewdly she glanced at the still sleeping man. He had been asleep for ten hours now. She knew that at the stage of morphinomania that he had reached the effect of a dose lasted only about four hours when the victim of the habit was awake, though the heavy, drugged sleep resulting from it might drag on for some hours after. The least sound or touch was sufficient to rouse him now. After lighting the coffee machine, she decided to open the shutters. The cold, raw daylight would have a wholesomely chilling effect, should he show a tendency to become violent. Braver than many soldiers, the little nurse went from one window to the other of the large bedroom, throwing wide the shutters and fastening them back. A gale was whipping the great boughs of the trees, the rain blew in upon her, spotting the bosom of her dress and her fresh apron-bib and cap. It was like a bleak September day, and it seemed strange to see green leaves instead of yellow ones flying through the air.

"And this is June. What a beastly climate!" thought the little Australian.

Then she turned, drying her face and hands with her handkerchief. As she expected, Chesney was watching her from his pillow. His face, grey with morphia and glistening like wet clay with the odious sweat that follows on an exhausted dose, looked more deathly than a corpse's clear, waxen mask.

"What o'clock is it?" he asked, speaking thickly with his pasty tongue and dried lips.

"Ten after five," said Anne Harding briskly. "You'll be wanting a cup of coffee, I fancy, sir."

"Isn't it time for ... for the ... er ... usual ... thing, yet?" He could never bring himself, in these moments of weakness and horrible, faint desire, to name the drug plainly.

"Your allowance of morphia?"

Anne did not mean to spare him. She glanced down at her bracelet. How Chesney hated that tyrannical watch on the nurse's thin wrist! It seemed like some horrible wen, or tumour, to him. Until she had fussed over him and gone he could not get the stuff out of the chimney-place--the stuff which was now simply and literally life to him.

"Not due for twenty minutes yet, sir," she said cheerfully, glancing up again. "But I'll just bathe your face and hands and bring you the coffee. It'll be ready by then. I'll tidy you a bit, sir, then fetch it."

There was nothing for it but submission. Sometimes, on these occasions, Chesney ran over in his mind horrid ways in which he would "pay back" this little woman for the misery she made him endure in such moments, should he ever get her wholly in his power.

She "tidied" him deftly, plumped up his pillows as he liked them, and fetched the coffee. When he had drunk it (black and strong Anne made it, and let him have it without insisting on cream or sugar--she had her compassions for these poor, mad-willed beings), she lifted the tray from the bed, and, glancing at her watch again, drew up a chair and sat down facing him.

"Ten minutes yet, sir, to wait," she said. "And I've something I want to say to you."

"Well, say it, then," said Chesney drily. He was too weak just then to feel fury, but what he felt resembled it as furious action in a nightmare sometimes resembles real action--as when, for instance, one tries to swim after an enemy and finds that one is cleaving one's way through thick, clogging waves of treacle.

Anne looked straight at him.

"It's this," she said: "I want to tell you myself that I've found your extra hypodermic and supply of morphia."

She rose as she said this and stood on her guard. Chesney stared blankly for a second; then he gave a sort of animal outcry, and half sprang from the bed.

"Steady, Mr. Chesney!" called the nurse, sharp and clear. "_I'm not afraid of you!_"

Chesney sat, with half-suffocated, soblike sounds breaking from his great, naked, hairy chest. His hands clenched and unclenched. The bedclothes half torn from the bed by his sliding bound were tangled about his feet.

He gasped out the words--spat them at her:

"You little civet-cat. You damned little skunk! You----"

He could not articulate. His teeth ground together. He half rose, as though to leap on her.

"Keep _still_!" said she, in a fierce, low little voice. "You're not ready for murder--yet--I hope. Nor you've not sunk low enough to strike a woman----"

"Strike you! You little b----h, I could break you in bits with my bare hands!"

They stayed glaring at each other. It was the glare that a huge dog and a dauntless little cat exchange when death is in the air. Then Anne spoke:

"Be a man ... for Gawd's sake ... _pretend_ to be a man!" she said.

Chesney blinked and gasped with fury and weakness, as though she had spat in his face.

Anne followed it up.

"Look here," said she; "I'm trying with all my might to save you from hell ... yes, _hell_, sir!" She pounded her little brown fist against her other palm. "And you want to kill me for it. But I'm stronger than you are. Yes, I am! For why? For why my nerves ain't rotten with that filthy poison you love like mother's milk. And I'm going to save you whether you will or no! God or the devil helping me--I don't much care which--I'm going to save you! You hear that?"

She went closer to him--a little, furious figure, quivering with righteous rage.

"D'you think I'm afraid of you? Not much I ain't! Just look at me and tell me what you think about it."

Chesney sat hypnotised. Here was the Mongoose to his Serpent with a vengeance. Something began to rise slowly up in him--something clear and clean rising from the dregs of his stupefied better nature. It was that unwilling meed of admiration that the conquered pay to a courageous foe. Suddenly he laughed. It was a shocking sight and sound, this hoarse, weak laughter issuing from that grey, sweating face.

"By God! You little Bush-Ranger, you've got guts!" he gasped.

Anne was changed, as St. Paul says the redeemed will be changed, in the twinkling of an eye. It was the psychological moment. It came differently to different patients, and she arrived at it by varying methods, but it always came when Nurse Harding was on a case.

Her rigid figure relaxed, her little face softened with her childlike smile.

"See here. I'm your _friend_," she said. "Your _friend_, man; not your enemy. Now you just 'fess up, as the children say. Tell me _really_ how much of the stuff you're in the habit of taking, and I'll make you comfy with a dose in proportion, right away--this very minute. I won't wait for doctor's orders or anything. Will you tell me? Eh?"

Her voice was too pretty for words, thus wheedling and coaxing the huge man. So might Jenny Wren chuck and chirp to some big Cuckoo-bastard, to venture from the nest that her kind step-motherhood had provided.

Chesney was at that point in the fight when even a great lad will sob sometimes from sheer rage and exhaustion. He sank back, pulling up the sheet about his face so as to hide it from her.

Anne slipped the hypodermic case from her pocket, opened it, and went over beside him.

"Now, then ... now, then," she coaxed, like some one gentling a fractious horse. "See--here's the blessed, devilish old stuff. _I_ know how you're craving it--damn it for a nasty half-breed of saint and fiend! It's here--right here in my hand. Only tell me--_the truth_--about how much you've been giving yourself, and I swear to you as I'm an honest human, I'll give you enough to ease you."

There was a silence. Then from under the lifted sheet came the words:

"Twelve grains a day."

"In the twenty-four hours?"

"Yes."

"That's really all?... I'm asking for your own sake, mind you. The dose will be in proportion, you know."

"As near as I can tell--it's all. Maybe now and then it's more----"

Suddenly he started up, flinging off the sheet.

"Damn you! You little hell-cat! Damn you!" he cried. "You're worming it out of me for your own ends. You're lying!"

"_You're_ lying, and you know it!" said Anne Harding sternly. "Here--keep still while I prepare this. You'll soon know whether I'm lying or not when I've given it to you. _It_ doesn't lie."

He closed his eyes, feeling that he lay in the very bilge-water of existence. A woman--a scrawny little hireling--had him, Cecil Chesney, in her power. Had made him confess. Was about to deal mercy out to him with a drug. He could have howled with the Chaldean: "Cursed be the day that I was born and the hour wherein I was conceived!"

Then into his loathed flesh slipped suddenly the little sting of steel--sweeter than the kiss of first love to the innocent.

XXIV

Sophy was amazed when she learned what had happened. So was Bellamy, though he had more knowledge than she of the singular powers exerted by the highest type of trained nurse. They both agreed that there was something weird, almost legendary, about the conquest of the huge, domineering, self-willed man by the wee nurse--a feminine echo, as it were, of the fable of Jack the Giant Killer. But this little Jill had climbed the bean-stalk of her wits with no axe to help her--only that keen blade of her sane, fearless will and knowledge.

Things went on smoothly for two weeks after that. Chesney, hating the nurse with a bitter, feverish hatred, yet submitting to her control, clung to her with that distorted passion of the man who knows that his well-being depends on what he hates. Temporarily he was in their power--the power of those whom he called his "well-wishers" with that ferocious sneer of helpless anger. He was too weak from the lack of the accustomed doses which he had been taking surreptitiously to "fight a good fight!" for his freedom just then. But let them wait! Just let them wait till he got back his strength. He was afraid now that if he rebelled against Anne Harding they would get another nurse for him, one less independent and intelligent, who would not take things in her hands as Anne did, who would follow the directions of that soft fool Bellamy blindly, and keep him agonising on doses too rapidly diminished. Anne had promised that she would not let him suffer overmuch.

"I'm not a doctor-run machine," she had said, in her brisk, blunt way. "I'll give you _what_ I think best, _when_ I think best. If Doctor Bellamy don't like it, he can chuck me. But he won't. He knows I've had experience and he hasn't. 'Tisn't likely _he'll_ fuss with me, when men like Doctor Carfew and Doctor Playfair have trusted me and been satisfied with my work. Just you be a good sport, and keep straight with me. And I'll not let you reach the hell point. Just a peep of purgatory, maybe--for the salvation of your soul. But you're plucky. You'll stand a bit of purgatory to get to paradise--health is really paradise, you know. Eh?" She had wound up, with that engaging, little-girl smile of hers.

Chesney grinned rather feebly, and said:

"All right, Bush-Ranger. '_En voiture, pour le purgatoire, messieurs, mesdames._'"

"That's good!" Anne said heartily. "I always know they're mending when they crack jokes."

"You've a hard nut to crack in _me_, colonial snippet!" retorted Chesney, with another grin.

Anne grinned a cheerful little grin back at him.

"No, _you're_ soft enough, old sport," said she; "it's your husk of morphia that's hard."

They exchanged this rough, free speech when alone. In the presence of others, Anne was most respectful, almost demure.

"What a hypocritical little demi-semi-savage you are, Bush-lass," he said to her one day. "You give me the rough of your tongue like a slangy lad when we're '_enfin seul_'--and before the Chief Eunuch and the rest, butter would congeal upon it, by Gad!"

"There's a time for everything," replied Anne Harding sedately. "If you _prefer_ it, sir, I'll be buttery with _you_ from this moment."

Chesney laughed outright. He was feeling quite happy just then, under the effects of a sixth of morphia.

"Just you try it on," he said, with feigned grimness. When she had just given him the drug he really liked her. Her funny, brisk little ways and speech amused him. He longed sometimes to romp with her, as if she had been the child that she looked when her elfish smile stirred her face. Once when she had bent over him as she withdrew the needle from his arm, he had tweaked one of the black curls that hung near. He had not believed that her little lean hand could give such a stinging smack as she bestowed upon his.

"You little spitfire!" he had exclaimed angrily. "Don't dare to take liberties with me because I'm ill."

"Don't _you_ dare to take liberties with _me_, ill or well," Anne Harding had replied, red with anger. "You treat me with proper respect, or I'll go back to London by the next train. Suit yourself."

She wouldn't talk or jest with him for the rest of that day, but by the next morning she seemed to have regained her usual cool poise, and remarked, as she served his early cup of cocoa:

"I surmise from your pretty behaviour that you've decided to keep me and your self-respect."

"Thou hast said, O Bush-Bully," replied he gravely. "I'll even address your Bullyship in the third person if it be required."

"Oh, no! There's no need of _that_ much distance between us, my pretty-spoken gentleman!" came the tart rejoinder. "'Hands off!' is my motto. Just so you remember that I live up to it, and your part is to live up to it, too, while I'm with you--I'm hunky-dory."

"Does that mean 'cheeky' in your native lingo?" grinned Chesney. She was giving him his morning dose (one-seventh to-day) as he spoke; so for the time being he liked her again.

"No, Mr. Smart," said Anne. "It's United States for 'all right.'"

Thus they chaffed amicably when she had just given him his allowance of morphia, or during the first hour after; but as the effects gradually wore off--which they did rapidly, the doses being so reduced by now--his mood changed. As he felt that stark, indescribable _malaise_ stealing over him--that horrid unearthly suffering which is not nausea, or acute pain, or the hot ache of fever, or the shivered ice of chills, but something more subtle, more deathly, as it were an illness drifted down from another darker, crueller, more demoniacal planet than the earth--as there crept through him this nameless, terrible, hideously fatiguing feeling that seemed to rack the finer substance of a body within his body--to strain and fray these more delicate fibres of being, until the torture was far more horrible than if it had been the brutal work-a-day anguish of a fractured bone, or the frank throes of cholera--when these hours were upon him, then he hated the little nurse. He hated her quiet, practical composure as she sat crocheting near the window, or reading aloud to him words that had no meaning--hated her for sitting there calm and healthy--while the discomfort arising from the lack of the usual poison surged into billows of physical distress that flowed over him, one upon another, as he lay sweating, tossing on what seemed the oozy bed of an ocean of _malaise_. He hated her so that he imagined breaking her to bits with his bare hands, as he had once threatened her. He could feel her little hard, pointed chin denting the hollow of his gripped hand, as he held her thin body between his knees, and pressed her head backwards till the spine snapped. He imagined her naked in his grasp--a little dark, lean, pitifully ugly body--and he was beating her with a stout wand of ash; whipping the flesh in ribbons from her writhing bones. He startled even himself with these savageries--felt afraid sometimes. Was his brain going? Had the stuff attacked his brain?

Once, meeting his smouldering eyes fixed avidly upon her during one of these silent rages, Anne had put down the book and come over to him.

"I know how you're hating me," she said, crisp and practical as usual. "But don't get scared over it. It's natural. This drug breeds murder. Just you remember it's not _you_, but the morphine that hates me. Keep that well in mind. _I_ do. Don't you worry about going crazy, and suchlike. It takes years and years for morphine really to injure the brain. It's your nerves that are yapping and yowling 'murder!'--your brain's all right."

"I do hate you!" Chesney had said, with weak but dreadful intensity. "I could give Cain points on murder. But there's a part of me that says you're a damned good sort, all the same."

"Hate away," Anne replied serenely. "You're getting on first-rate--that's all _I_ care about."

* * * * *

So it went, and Chesney slowly improved; now weaker, now stronger, as the capricious drug sheathed its claws or gripped him tight again.

"Damnation! I'm like the frog in the well!" he would groan. "I crawl up one foot and slip back two."

"No, you don't--not really," Anne assured him. "Up you're coming; slow, maybe, but sure. A nice nurse I'd be to let you slip back two feet for one!"

And she sniffed with her little blunt nose that reminded him of an intelligent pug's.

The worst of it, the thing that aggravated him almost to frenzy at these times, was that he still had morphia in his possession--a large supply of that and cocaine, utterly unsuspected by Anne, for all her shrewdness. He almost chuckled aloud sometimes as he lay watching her during one of his black fits. His spirit did chuckle, as he thought how he had outwitted even her, the little "Bush-Sleuth," in this matter. But he did not dare to take an extra dose, even by mouth. She would have seen instantly--and nosed out the precious stuff that was his dearest earthly possession. He was quite sure of that. It cowed him from taking the morphia that he had secreted, even during those times of anguish, when sometimes she stepped into the next room for a moment to fetch something and he could have swallowed a tablet easily--it was within reach always. No; he did not dare for the sake of one moment's self-indulgence, to run the risk of still greater sufferings. So he lay there, enduring, cursing silently, waiting, ever waiting, for the time to come when he should be his own man again. Then hey! for some distant country--a long journey _en garcon_--with a glittering, brand-new needle, and package on package of the little flat, white, innocent-looking tablets that dissolved so easily in a teaspoonful of warm water.

There were no more drives now: he was too weak. Anne said that in about six weeks he would begin to feel more normal, though he would still be weak. He would feel depressed and weak for a long time after his system was rid of the poison, she warned him with her admirable frankness. Six weeks more of it! Good God! He wondered that he could keep his hands from her when she said such things to him in that matter-of-fact, casual way. But he waited. Chance was a good deity for such as he to pray to. One never knew what might happen. So he lay there and said curt, impious prayers to Chance that the God of Whimsy would help him to his own undoing.

Chance himself serves sometimes one Overlord, sometimes another. Sometimes he plays henchman to Ormuzd, sometimes to Ahriman. This time he elected to do the bidding of Ahriman.

On the fifteenth day after Chesney's enforced confession to the little nurse, there came a wire from London for Anne Harding. It said:

"_Your mother ill--pneumonia. Come at once._"

There was nothing else for it. She had to go, and by the next train. She loved her mother, whom she supported by her cleverness, very dearly; yet there was almost an equal grief in her strongly professional little heart at leaving a case so difficult, which she had managed with such skill.

She tried to get Chesney to promise her on his word of honour to "act straight" with the nurse who would supplant her, promising that if he did so she would return as soon as her mother was well enough, and take up his case again. But he would only smile at her that faintly jeering smile, which she felt in the marrow of her small bones meant mischief.

"Your word of honour--your word of honour as a gentleman that you'll play fair," she urged vehemently, "or I swear I'll not come back!"

"You forget, my little Bush-Queen," Chesney said, still smiling, "there's no such thing as honour among morphinomaniacs. You've told me that yourself, often enough, my Poppet, have you not?"

"Shame! Shame!" she cried, with passion. "Here you are, through the worst--and you won't even promise that you'll keep on! My word! I don't believe I'll come back, no matter _how_ you act!"

"'Suit yourself,' Bush-lass," Chesney returned coolly, quoting one of her favourite expressions.

* * * * *

Anne went to Sophy before leaving--went to her bedroom and under the unusual excitement of her double anxiety over parent and patient, seized the slender white hands in her little skinny brown ones, wringing them eagerly to accentuate her passionate words of warning.

"Watch him yourself--_yourself_!" she begged. "Don't trust him a moment--not though he swore on the head of his own son. He means mischief. I know him by now. I know him as only a nurse who's tussled through the worst of the morphia craze with a man _can_ know him. Don't leave him to Gaynor, or his mother, or even Doctor Bellamy. I don't know what sort of nurse they'll send you. She may be good, or she may be a chump. But"--the little spurt of very human vanity became her eager, cocky face--"but there's not many Anne Hardings," she wound up. "I give you that for what it's worth, Mrs. Chesney. Forgive my tooting my own trumpet."

Sophy promised, feeling scared and forlorn again, now that this strong little being was going. She had come to depend on her as the one means of Cecil's salvation. Now she was going. Menace, dark and formless, seemed to waver like an evil shadow on the dreary walls of Dynehurst. How could one grapple with a shadow? Only Anne Harding knew the magic tune to which evil shadows danced obedience.

The little nurse left within an hour after receiving the telegram, and Sophy went to her husband as soon as the carriage drove from the door. Anne had turned over her charts to her, with the hypodermic syringes and morphia. As the nurse had instructed, she locked everything away before leaving her room. Between every dose they must be locked away again. No slightest risk must be run, in the interval between Anne's departure and the arrival of the new nurse.

When Sophy had faltered that she did not know how to give a hypodermic injection, Anne had exclaimed almost impatiently: "Oh, he can do that, himself--only too well! All you've got to do is to clean it thoroughly the way I've showed you, each time afterwards. I don't want Gaynor to begin it, because one at a time is enough in such things, and _you_ are the one to leave in charge. You've got character--grit." She looked at Sophy impartially out of her shrewd, black eyes. "I don't believe you know, yourself, _how_ much character you _have_ got," she said. "You're too young and beautiful to have had much chance yet--but this is forming you. Forgive my Bush-girl bluntness--but there's no better character-maker than a husband one's trying to save from morphia. You'll come out of it a sort of soldier-saint. Mark my words: _Happiness_ is _mush_," said the little nurse, running her words together in her excitement. "One can't get strong on mush. Now life's feeding you meat--a bit raw and bloody, maybe--but it'll build up brawn--soul-brawn. I'm mixing things; but you understand, I know. And, my word! Just think, Mrs. Chesney: if a woman forgets her travail for joy that a man is born into the world, what must she feel when a man--_her_ man--is reborn through her pangs! Forgive me--I'm being too free. But you're so rare--oh, I've watched you, same as I've watched him! And I want you to win out--I _lust_ for it--for you to win out with him. You'll feel you've got the world in a sling then--I give you my word you will, Mrs. Chesney. Only keep a stiff upper lip. Don't give in to him. Don't let him fool you. The watchword is 'Suspicion.' Don't trust him--not if he seems dying. _Let_ him die before you trust him for one second! Bless you, dear lady! I do _hate_ to leave you all alone with it.... Good-bye."

And she was gone before Sophy could even utter some kind wishes about Mrs. Harding's recovery.

XXV

When Sophy went to Cecil's room, he was lying back quietly reading. He put down his book as she entered, and smiled at her. It was his own, good smile--the smile that she remembered far back in their lover-days. Tears rushed to her eyes. She was not a woman who wept easily; but now, to see his face so purified of poison, to meet the smile that also shone in the eyes--that glimpse of a resurrected soul in the face that had so long been but a blurred mask of exotic passions--this brought her tears.

She went over, kneeled down beside him, and laid her face to his.

"I've got you back!" she whispered. "You've come back to me!"

He lay still, stroking her hair, kissing it, looking out over her head at the flicker of leaves beyond his window, at the dim green of air-veiled pastures, and the far-away blur of brownish haze that hung over the mining town, chief source of the Wychcote riches. A bird streaked like a black arrow against the faint blue sky. The weather had cleared within the last few days. There was sunshine, pale but plenteous--filtering through a veil of moony clouds. A sort of eclipse-light, it seemed to Sophy; but she welcomed it for Bobby's sake--the child had been fretting at the prolonged rain. He had lost his sturdy, lady-apple cheeks. Now he could be out all day pottering at the out-of-door things that children love.

She knelt there with her cheek against her husband's, just resting, soul and body. She was too tired with the long strain to vibrate to a keener joy. Her thankfulness was deep rather than exultant. And Chesney, gazing out at the summer landscape, thought:

"After all--what if I go on with it? I'm lower than brutes if I deceive her."

Weariness and a distaste of life crept over him at the mere thought of keeping up the dreadful, nerve-wearing effort.

"I must. There's no way out of it--with decency," said part of him. "Fate's against me," said another part. "Why was the little Bush-Ranger whipped away like that, if there are gods that care? It's too much to ask a man to keep up alone. I'm sickening for the stuff this moment. Between the lips of this woman--beautiful as she is--and one grain of morphia--would I hesitate?" "No," answered the first self, grimly honest. "You wouldn't. Try to tell her you have the stuff at hand. Give it up to her. You won't. You can't."

"I _will_!" he thought, setting his teeth.

She felt the swell of his cheek-muscles as he did so, and looked up.

"Sophy...." he said; then stopped short.

"What is it, dear?" she asked. "Can I do something for you?"

He continued looking at her an instant, then closed his eyes.

"No," he said.

She thought his expression had been strange. It hurt her. It was as if he _had_ wanted something, but did not dare ask her for it. She flushed suddenly--it was for him she flushed. She thought that he had been about to coax her for the morphia before the time for giving it. Was he going to "try it on with her," as little Anne had feared? Her limbs seemed to turn to water at the mere thought of that possible struggle.

But he said quietly the next moment:

"Sophy, the little Harding says that she'll come back here, when her mother is well enough. That being so, I want to ask you a favour."

"Yes--do!" she said eagerly.

"I want to ask you to take me in hand yourself. You have all the--the stuff." The lie choked him somehow. He hastened to correct its literalness though not its import. "I mean nurse said that she was going to turn it over to you."

"Yes--I have it," said Sophy. Why should her heart beat so? He was only asking her to do what Anne had asked her.

"Well, then, there _is_ something you can do for me--you can spare me the humiliation of having some strange wench pottering about, and bulldozing me with her dirty little professional airs and graces. If you'll take me in hand yourself, and spare me that, you'll find me amenable. Will you? Wait a moment," he added, before she could answer. "It's only fair to give you warning that I will _not_ submit in any case to having another of these hussies round me. The Harding was bad enough, but I've got used to her--I rather like her--tough little specimen! She amuses me. But another--I'll wring her neck before I'll submit to it! That's my last word on the subject."

* * * * *

Bellamy was much perturbed at this fiat of Chesney. Yet, when he had thought over it a while, realising the stubborn fixedness of the man's will and fearing to irritate him unnecessarily, he came to the conclusion that it was not so dangerous a situation as he had at first thought. He could trust Sophy, he felt sure, not to be moved by any pleading on the part of her husband. All the morphia was now in her possession. There was no other possible means by which Chesney could obtain the drug. All parcels were opened by Mrs. Chesney or his mother. Besides, Chesney wrote no letters. He seemed perfectly indifferent about the post. Such letters as did come for him only bored him. They were all answered by his wife and Gaynor. Then, too, it was a great concession on Chesney's part to be willing for Anne Harding's return.

When after two days she wrote that her mother had passed the crisis and was rapidly improving, that she (Anne) hoped to be able to return to Dynehurst within three weeks, he felt quite reconciled to the present arrangement. Sophy reported that Chesney never asked for a dose before the regular hours, or for an increase of the amount. She, too, was cheered and hopeful.

For a week this happy state of things lasted. Then one morning, after his daily visit to Chesney's room, Bellamy came to her with an harassed face.

"Mrs. Chesney," he said, "don't take it too hard--but your husband has got hold of morphia in some way. The symptoms are marked this morning. It's inconceivable, I know; but there's the fact."

Sophy's air-castle broke in upon her in smothering vapours. She sank down on the nearest chair, and gazed out before her with blank eyes.

"Are you sure?" she asked mechanically, after a moment.

"Quite sure."

"Since when?"

"Only recently--during the night, probably. But the eyes show it unmistakably--and the dryness of the mucous membrane."

"I know," said Sophy. So well she knew that she felt as if her own mouth were like an ash, merely from her vivid realisation of the doctor's words.

"Have you taxed him with it?" she then asked.

"Yes. He only jeers. Asks me how he could have got it--says that he's not a wizard. It's terrible, Mrs. Chesney, terrible! If Nurse Harding were only here!"

"Yes. It seems as if Fate were against him."

"Fate!" cried Bellamy. "Himself, you mean! How he could descend to this when----"

He broke off abruptly, shocked by the white hopelessness of the young face.

"Forgive me," he said. "Besides, one should never judge too harshly in these cases. I've heard of men, anxious to be cured, getting well over the cursed thing, getting quite free of it for as much as a year, then, in some sudden moment of weakness, returning to it."

Suddenly a vigorous, alert look replaced Sophy's passive expression. She stood up, facing the perturbed physician.

"What must we do?" she asked. "I am ready to do anything to save him. Anything that I may do with self-respect--anything that will not put my boy in danger. Explain to me. Whatever it is, I will do it--if it is in my power."

She shone white and vivid against the grey, rain-strung frame of the hall window. She dazzled there in the dark, grim hall, flashing something free and Amazonian into the staid discreetness of the sober, conventional house. Bellamy watched her, without being quite able to translate into clear thought the impression that she produced on him at that moment.

She put it into words for him herself: "I mean that I will fight for him like a comrade--not like a submissive wife--a slave," she said.

She stood for a moment looking down at her shoe-tip which she moved slightly to and fro. Then she said abruptly:

"How is my boy? Does his paleness mean that he is not well really--or is it only a passing thing?"

"No, no," he hastened to reassure her. "The boy feels the confinement of the house, of course, but a week of sunny weather would have him right as a trivet."

"And if it keeps on raining?"

"I hardly think it will. We are nearly in July now. Rainy Junes are frequent in England, you know; but July is apt to show some fine weather."

"But in case it does not?" she persisted.

"Then I think a little outing to the Isle of Wight or the south of France might be the thing."

She pondered this.

"I see," she said at last. "And will you promise to tell me, the moment that you think Bobby needs such a change?"

"I do, indeed," he replied earnestly.

"Thank you. Now I feel free to give all my attention to my husband--for the present. I shall go to him myself now. It seems to me the last hope that we have."

"You mean that you will try to persuade him to--to--er--be frank with you?"

"Yes."

Bellamy looked at her in genuine distress.

"I'm afraid you must prepare yourself for disappointment, Mrs. Chesney."

"I am prepared for it," she said. Her voice was grave, but under the gravity there was depth on depth of bitterness.

"Well--God be with you!" said Bellamy, with much feeling.

"Thank you," she said gently.

She passed out of his sight, going upstairs towards her husband's room.

XXVI

To do Chesney justice, he had not taken that first dose of the extra morphia in his possession with any calm determination of deceit. The craving for it, the constant temptation so close at hand, had led him into that subtle, false reasoning so common to all people in like case. He had deceived himself as well as others. It happened in this way: Sophy, burning with all the over-ardour of a novice, with all the exaggerated zeal of the amateur nurse, put on her mettle, as it were, by the warnings and conjurations of Anne Harding, acted with the precision of clockwork. Showed, in fact, to its nth power the very quality which Anne prided herself on lacking--the precision of a "doctor-run machine." It could not have been otherwise. She had neither the knowledge nor the experience which allowed Anne to vary the regularity of the hours of assuagement, those hours when the fractional doses of the drug were to be given him, and to which he looked forward as to bits of life in the slow, grey deathliness that enfolded him. At times his nervousness, the anguish of morbid desire, was far more acute than at others. On these occasions Anne had been used, after observing him narrowly, to give him the prescribed amount, sometimes even an hour before the due time. Again, she would say with rough kindliness:

"Well, will you brace up and go without for, say two extra hours next time, if I give you a crumb more than you really ought to have?"