After Anne Harding had been twenty-four hours on the case, she came to
Sophy, who was writing letters in the library. Just to address the
envelope to Charlotte, which she did beforehand, comforted her. How real
and home-like looked the familiar names! There was her house of refuge
when--if ever--she could escape. But she told nothing of her husband's
condition to Charlotte.
"Can we go where it's quite private, Mrs. Chesney?" said Anne Harding.
"I've some things I must talk to you about."
Sophy took the nurse up to her bedroom and locked the door.
"What is it?" she asked, fixing her dilated eyes on the shrewd black
ones.
"Please don't look so frightened," said Anne kindly. "It's just the
usual worries in a case like this. I've talked with Dr. Bellamy already;
but I must have your help."
"Go on, please," said Sophy.
Anne took up the poker, and began breaking the big lump of coal in the
grate as she said this. Little spirals of greenish-yellow smoke escaped
from the cracks made by the poker, then jetted into flame. She was so
sorry for this beautiful, scared woman, that she looked doggedly at the
lump of coal all the time that she was speaking.
"It's just that Mr. Chesney is getting extra morphia--I mean taking it
himself--lots of it----" she began bluntly.
"Oh!" cried Sophy. It was a sort of gasp. Then she said hurriedly: "But
it's impossible, nurse. How can he get it? Gaynor, his valet, and I had
all there is. Now we've turned it over to you--with both the syringes."
"He's getting it, ma'am," said Anne firmly. "And he's taking it
hypodermically, too."
"Oh, don't you think you are mistaken?"
"No, Mrs. Chesney. I couldn't be."
"But--but---- Have you----"
She could not bring it out. She could not ask this little stranger woman
whether she had searched Cecil's things for the stuff--for another
syringe.
"Yes, I've hunted--thoroughly--through everything," Anne said quite as a
matter of course, guessing what she had meant to ask. "He sleeps so
heavily, when he does sleep--from the accumulated effects, you
know--that I've even been able to feel between the mattresses. I've
searched the edges for a rip where he might have stuffed it inside. I've
looked through everything--but his letter-box."
She shattered the lump of coal quite as she said this.
"That's why I've come to you. He's in one of those heavy sleeps. I've
got the letter-box and the key in my room. I want you to open it and
look for me. I didn't quite like to do that."
Sophy gulped shame. Its tang was bitterer than wormwood. Then she felt a
sudden anger against this cool, white-capped little creature who
summoned her suddenly to violate her husband's private property.
"No. I can't do that, Nurse," she said coldly. "Not on an uncertainty."
"But it's quite certain," said Anne Harding patiently. "Wait-- I'll
prove it to you."
She turned at last and looked at Sophy.
"In order to be quite sure," she said--"you know, ma'am, Dr. Bellamy had
told me _he_ felt pretty sure that Mr. Chesney was getting more than the
chart showed. Well, to be _quite_ sure, I substituted salt and water for
_four_ out of the six doses I've given in twenty-four hours. Now you
see, ma'am, to cut a patient down suddenly in the doses like that would
make him suffer something awful if he was really not getting more
himself."
Sophy sat gazing at her.
"How would it make him suffer?" she said at last. Her voice was almost a
whisper.
"Oh, nerves--terrible--we've no way of imagining what they go through
when the drug's taken away sudden. I nursed a case once where the doctor
had that method. But I'd never do it again, ma'am. The patient twisted
the bars at the foot of the bed in his agony like they had been paper.
It was a brass bed. No, ma'am. I'd never be party to a thing like that
again."
Sophy felt as if she were ill herself.
"Don't!" she said. She put up her hand over her face, as she leaned sick
and weak in her chair. "Don't tell me things like that--please."
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Chesney," said the nurse in her kind, blunt way. "But
you see I had to prove my point to you. It's a most important one. That
box _must_ be searched, ma'am. And you see I don't like to go into Mr.
Chesney's private papers. Now you, as his wife, can do it without its
being any harm. Wait a minute, though--are you sure of this man,
Gaynor?"
"Absolutely."
"It's very hard to be sure of people in a morphia case, Mrs. Chesney.
Sometimes just pity makes 'em give the drug to the patient."
"I am quite sure of Gaynor. I'll tell you why," Sophy added, feeling
that it was due the nurse to do so. And she told her of the part that
Gaynor had played in the tragic story.
"Well, I should say _he's_ safe then," admitted Anne, when Sophy had
finished. "And now that I feel sure of that, won't you let me bring you
that box, Mrs. Chesney? You want to save Mr. Chesney, and that's the
only way to do it--to help me and the doctor," she added shrewdly.
Sophy could scarcely have grown paler than she was.
"Go ... bring it...." she said in a faint voice.
Anne brought the red morocco box, with C. G. C. stamped on it in worn
gold letters, and handed it with the key to Sophy.
As the nurse set the box upon her knees, Sophy looked so ghastly that
Anne exclaimed:
"Oh, pray, _pray_, Mrs. Chesney, don't take it so hard! It's for his
good we're doing it--to save him."
"Yes," said Sophy.
With a firm gesture she thrust the key suddenly into the small
spring-lock and turned it. As she felt the lid rise beneath her
hand, it seemed to her as though she had by this act shared his
degradation--drawn part of it into her own blood. With her slender,
nobly shaped hands she began to search among the letters and
documents.--Nothing. The colour began to rise again into her white face.
Eagerly she turned the contents out upon her lap. Nothing. Nothing.
"You see!" she cried, her tone was almost joyous. "There's nothing of
the kind--you were mistaken! There's nothing--nothing!"
Anne frowned. Then she said soberly:
"Well, I've _got_ to find it--somehow. It's wonderful their cleverness
at hiding the stuff."
"But, Nurse Harding," said Sophy reproachfully, that vivid colour still
in her face, "a hypodermic syringe-case isn't a thing that can be hidden
away easily. You've told me that you've looked everywhere. Isn't it
rather cruel to be suspicious to this extent?"
"Mrs. Chesney," said Anne Harding, her black eyes like little gems with
hard, cruelly-kind astuteness. "If the angel Gabriel was given me for a
morphia patient, _I'd pluck his wings_--for fear he'd hide the nasty
stuff among the feathers!"
She was a character, was Anne Harding, so utterly unlike any English
nurse that Sophy had ever seen before, that she wondered whether indeed
she could really be English. Anne was very quick at following the
probabilities of thought-sequence, for she smiled suddenly her childish
smile, that contrasted so oddly with the almost elf-like shrewdness of
her eyes, and said:
"Pray forgive my speaking that way. I come from the Bush, you know. I'm
an Australian. We've a blunt sort of way of speaking out there."
Chesney was quite amiable with the little nurse. He knew of course that
she suspected him, but the very fact that he had so entirely outwitted
her made him feel a sort of grim pleasure in her presence.
"She's a good little rat," he said to Sophy. "Not over-burdened with
brains, though."
And he smiled his secretive smile.
"Give me just one week longer, Doctor Bellamy, and I'll find it-- I'll
find it or give up nursing!" Anne Harding pleaded. But Bellamy
determined to speak with frankness to Chesney himself. He went to his
room that day and said without preliminary ado:
"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.'"