that was when I fell asleep, but I did not want to keep awake always, or hear her talking. She was inclined to be melancholy, or cynical, and so jarred my mood, my sense of well-being.
Night and morning they gave me my injections of morphia, until the morning when I refused it, to Dr. Kennedy’s surprise and against Benham’s remonstrance.
“It is good for you, you are not going to set yourself against it?”
“I can have it again tonight. I don’t need it in the daytime. The hæmorrhage has left off.” Dr. Kennedy supported me in my refusal. I will admit the next few days were dreadful. I found myself utterly ill and helpless, and horribly conscious of all that was going on. The detail of desperate illness is almost unbearable to a thinking person of decent and reticent physical habits. The feeding cup and gurgling water bed, the lack of privacy, are hourly humiliations. All one’s modesties are outraged. I improved, although as I heard afterwards it had not been expected that I would live. The consultants gave me up, and the nurses. Only Dr. Kennedy and Ella refused to admit the condition hopeless. When I continued to improve Ella was boastful and Benham contradictory. The one dressed me up, making pretty lace and ribbon caps, sending to London for wonderful dressing-jackets and nightgowns, pretending I was out of danger and on the road to convalescence, long before I even had a normal temperature. Benham fought against all the indulgences that Ella and I ordered and Dr. Kennedy never opposed. Seeing visitors, sitting up in bed, reading the newspapers, abandoning invalid diet in favour of caviare and foie gras, strange rich dishes. Benham despised Dr. Kennedy and said we could always get round him, make him say whatever we wished. More than once she threatened to throw up the case. I did not want her to go. I knew, if I did not admit it, that my convalescence was not established. I had no real confidence in myself, was much weaker than anybody but myself knew, with disquieting symptoms. It exhausted me to fight with her continually, one day I told her so, and that she was retarding my recovery. “I am older than you, and I hate to be ordered about or contradicted.”
“But I am so much more experienced in illness. You know I only want to do what is best for you. You are not strong enough to do half the things you are doing. You turn Dr. Kennedy round your little finger, you and Mrs. Lovegrove. He knows well enough you ought not to be getting up and seeing people. You will want to go down next. And as for the things you eat!”
“I shall go down next week. I suppose I shall be exhausted before I get there, arguing with you whether I ought or ought not to go.”
By this time I had got rid of the night nurse, Benham looked after me night and day devotedly. I was no longer indifferent to her. She angered me nevertheless, and we quarrelled bitterly. The least drawback, however, and I could not bear her out of the room. She did not reproach me, I must say that for her. When a horrible bilious attack followed an invalid dinner of melon and homard à l’américaine she stood by my side for hours trying every conceivable remedy. And without a word of reproach.
After my hæmorrhage I had a few weeks’ rest from the neuritis and then it started again. I cried out for my forsaken nepenthe, but Peter Kennedy and Nurse Benham for once agreed, persuaded or forced me to codein. Dear half-sister to my beloved morphia, we became friends at once. Three or four days later the neuritis went suddenly, and has never returned. One night I took the nepenthe as well, and that night I saw Margaret Capel again.
“When are you going to begin?” she asked me at once.
“The very moment I can hold a pen. Now my hand shakes. And Ella or nurse is always here—I am never alone.”
“You’ve forgotten all about me,” she said with indescribable sadness. “You won’t write it at all.”
“No, I haven’t. I shall. But when one has been so ill …” I pleaded.
“Other people write when they are ill. You remember Green, and Robert Louis Stevenson. As for me, I never felt well.”
The next day, before Dr. Kennedy came, I asked Benham to leave us alone together. He still came daily, but she disapproved of his methods and told me that she only stayed in the room and gave him her report because she thought it her duty. They were temperamentally opposed. She had the scientific mind and believed in authority. His was imaginative, desultory, doubtful, but wide and enquiring. Both of them were interested in me, so at least Ella told me. She was satisfied now with my doctoring and nursing. At least a week had passed since she suggested a substitute for either.
Dr. Kennedy, when we were alone, said, as he did when nurse was standing there:
“Well! how are you getting on?”
“Splendidly.” And then, without any circumlocution, although we had not spoken of the matter for weeks, and so much had occurred in the meantime, I asked him: “What did you do about that packet? I want it now. I am quite well enough.”
“You have not seen her since?”
“Over and over again. She thinks I am shirking my responsibilities.”
“Are you well enough to write?”
“I am well enough to read. When will you bring me the letters?”
“I brought them when I said I would, the day you were taken ill.”
“Where are they?”
“In the first drawer, the right-hand drawer of the chest of drawers.” He turned round to it. “That is, if they have not been moved. I put the packet there myself, told nurse it was something that was not to be touched. The morphia things are in the same place. I don’t know what she thinks it is, some new and useless drug or apparatus; she has no opinion of me, you know. I used to see it night and morning, as long as you were having the injections.”
“See if it is there now.”
He went over and opened the drawer:
“It is there right enough.”
“Oh! don’t be like nurse,” I said impatiently. “I am strong enough to look at the packet.”
He gave it to me, into my hands, an ordinary brown paper parcel, tied with string and heavily, awkwardly, splotched and protected with sealing-wax. I could have sworn to his handiwork.
“Why are you smiling?” he asked.
“Only at the neatness of your parcel.” He smiled too.
“I tied it up in a hurry. I didn’t want to be tempted to look inside.”
“So you make me guardian and executrix. …”
“Margaret herself said you were to have them,” he answered seriously.
“She didn’t tell you so. You have only my word for it,” I retorted.
“Better evidence than that, although that would have been enough. How else did you know they were in existence? Why were you looking for them?”
The parcel lay on the quilt, and all sorts of difficulties rose in my mind. I would not open it unless I was alone, and I was never alone; literally never alone unless I was supposed to be asleep. And, thanks to codein, when I was supposed to be asleep the supposition was generally correct! Thinking aloud, I asked Dr. Kennedy:
“Am I out of danger?”
He answered
