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.