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Julia Frankau

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TWILIGHT

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

• PIGS IN CLOVER
• BACCARAT
• THE SPHINX’S LAWYER
• THE HEART OF A CHILD
• AN INCOMPLEAT ETONIAN
• LET THE ROOF FALL IN
• JOSEPH IN JEOPARDY
• DR. PHILLIPS
• A BABE OF BOHEMIA
• CONCERT PITCH
• FULL SWING
• NELSON’S LEGACY
• THE STORY BEHIND THE VERDICT
• TWILIGHT

TWILIGHT

BY

FRANK DANBY

AUTHOR OF “PIGS IN CLOVER,” “THE HEART OF A CHILD,” “THE STORY BEHIND THE VERDICT,” ETC.

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1916

Copyright, 1916, by

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

TWILIGHT

CONTENTS

• CHAPTER I
• CHAPTER II
• CHAPTER III
• CHAPTER IV
• CHAPTER V
• CHAPTER VI
• CHAPTER VII
• CHAPTER VIII
• CHAPTER IX
• CHAPTER X
• CHAPTER XI
• CHAPTER XII
• CHAPTER XIII
• CHAPTER XIV
• CHAPTER XV
• CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER I

A couple of years ago, on the very verge of the illness that subsequently overwhelmed me, I took a small furnished house in Pineland. I made no inspection of the place, but signed the agreement at the instance of the local house-agent, who proved little less inventive than the majority of his confrères.

Three months of neuritis, only kept within bounds by drugs, had made me comparatively indifferent to my surroundings. It was necessary for me to move because I had become intolerant of the friends who exclaimed at my ill looks, and the acquaintances who failed to notice any alteration in me. One sister whom I really loved, and who really loved me, exasperated me by constant visits and ill-concealed anxiety. Another irritated me little less by making light of my ailment and speaking of neuritis in an easy familiar manner as one might of toothache or a corn. I had no natural sleep, and if I were not on the borderland of insanity, I was at least within sight of the home park of inconsequence. Reasoned behaviour was no longer possible, and I knew it was necessary for me to be alone.

I do not wish to recall this bad time nor the worse that ante-dated my departure, when I was at the mercy of venal doctors and indifferent nurses, dependent on grudged bad service and overpaid inattention, taking a so-called rest cure. But I do wish to relate a most curious circumstance, or set of circumstances, that made my stay in Pineland memorable, and left me, after my sojourn there, obsessed with the story of which I found the beginning on the first night of my arrival, and the end in the long fevered nights that followed. I myself hardly know how much is true and how much is fiction in this story; for what the cache of letters is responsible, and for what the morphia.

The house at Pineland was called Carbies, and it was haunted for me from the first by Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton. Quite early in my stay I must have contemplated writing about them, knowing that there was no better way of ridding myself of their phantoms, than by trying to make them substantial in pen and ink. I had their letters and some scraps of an unfinished diary to help me, a notebook with many blank pages, the garrulous reticence of the village apothecary, and the evidence of the sun-washed God’s Acre by the old church.

To begin at the beginning.

It was a long drive from Pineland station to Carbies. I had sent my maid in advance, but there was no sign of her when my ricketty one-horse fly pulled up at the garden gate of a suburban villa of a house “standing high” it is true, and with “creeper climbing about its white-painted walls.” But otherwise with no more resemblance to the exquisite and secluded cottage ornée I had in my mind, and that the house-agent had portrayed in his letters, than a landscape by Matise to one by Ruysdael.

I was too tired then to be greatly disappointed. Two servants had been sent in by my instructions, and the one who opened the door to me proved to be a cheerful-looking young person of the gollywog type, with a corresponding cap, who relieved me of my hand luggage and preceded me to the drawing-room, where wide windows and a bright fire made me oblivious for the moment of the shabby furniture, worn carpet, and mildewed wallpaper. Tea was brought to me in a cracked pot on a veneered tray. The literary supplement of The Times and an American magazine were all I had with which to occupy myself. And they proved insufficient. I began to look about me; and became curiously and almost immediately conscious that my new abode must have been inhabited by a sister or brother of the pen. The feeling was not psychic. The immense writing-table stood sideways in the bow-window as only “we” know how to place it. The writing-chair looked sufficiently luxurious to tempt me to an immediate trial; there were a footstool and a big waste-paper basket; all incongruous with the cheap and shabby drawing-room furniture. Had only my MS. paper been to hand, ink in the substantial glass pot, and my twin enamel pens available, I think I should then and there have abjured all my vows of rest and called upon inspiration to guide me to a fresh start.

“Work whilst ye have the light” had been my text for months; driving me on continually. It seemed possible, even then, that the time before me was short. I left the fire and my unfinished tea. Instinctively I found the words rising to my lips, “I could write here.” That was the way a place always struck me. Whether I could or could not write there? Seated in that convenient easy-chair I felt at once that my shabby new surroundings were sympathetic to me, that I fitted in and was at home in them.

I had come straight from a narrow London house where my bedroom overlooked a mews, and my sitting-room other narrow houses with a roadway between. Here, early in March, from the wide low window I saw yellow gorse overgrowing a rough and unkempt garden. Beyond the garden more flaming gorse on undulating common land, then hills, and between them, unmistakable, the sombre darkness of the sea. Up here the air was very still, but the smell of the gorse was strong with the wind from that distant sea. I wished for pens and paper at first; then drifted beyond wishes, dreaming I knew not of what, but happier and more content than I had been for some time past. The air was healing, so were the solitude and silence. My silence and solitude were interrupted, my content came abruptly to an end.

“Dr. Kennedy!”

I did not rise. In those bad neuritis days rising was not easy. I stared at the intruder, and he at me. But I guessed in a minute to what his unwelcome presence was due. My anxious, dearly beloved, and fidgetty sister had found out the name of the most noted Æsculapius of the neighbourhood and had notified him of my arrival, probably had given him a misleading and completely erroneous account of my illness, certainly asked him to call. I found out afterwards I was right in all my guesses save one. This was not the most noted Æsculapius of the neighbourhood, but his more youthful partner. Dr. Lansdowne was on his holiday. Dr. Kennedy had read my sister’s letter and was now bent upon carrying out her instructions. As I said, we stared at each other in the advancing dusk.

“You have only just come?” he ventured then.

“I’ve been here about an hour,” I replied—“a quiet hour.”

“I had your sister’s letter,” he said apologetically, if a little awkwardly, as he advanced into the room.

“She wrote you, then?”

“Oh yes! I’ve got the letter somewhere.” He felt in his pocket and failed to find it.

“Won’t you sit down?”

There was no chair near the writing-table save the one upon which I sat. A further reason why I knew my predecessor here had been a writer! Dr. Kennedy had to fetch one, and I took shallow stock of him meanwhile. A tall and not ill-looking man in the late thirties or early forties, he had on the worst suit of country tweeds I had ever seen and incongruously well-made boots. Now he sprawled silently in the selected chair, and I waited for his opening. Already I was nauseated with doctors and their methods. In town I had seen everybody’s favourite nostrum-dispenser, and none of them had relieved me of anything but my hardly earned cash. I mean to present a study of them one day, to get something back from what I have given. Dr. Kennedy did not accord with the black-coated London brigade, and his opening was certainly different.

“How long have you been feeling unwell?” That was what I expected, this was the common gambit. Dr. Kennedy sat a few minutes without speaking at all. Then he asked me abruptly:

“Did you know Mrs. Capel?”

“Who?”

“Margaret Capel. You knew she lived here, didn’t you? That it was here it all happened?”

“What happened?”

“Then you don’t know?” He got up from his chair in a fidgetty sort of way and went over to the other window. “I hoped you knew her, that she had been a friend of yours. I hoped so ever since I had your sister’s letter. Carbies! It seemed so strange to be coming here again. I can’t believe it is ten years ago; it is all so vivid!” He came back and sat down again. “I ought not to talk about her, but the whole room and house are so full of memories. She used to sit, just as you are sitting now, for hours at a time, dreaming. Sometimes she would not speak to me at all. I had to go away; I could see I was intruding.”

The cynical words on my lips remained unuttered. He was tall, and if his clothes had fitted him he might have presented a better figure. I hate a morning coat in tweed material. The adjective “uncouth” stuck. I saw it was a clever head under the thick mane of black hair, and wondered at his tactlessness and provincial garrulity. I nevertheless found myself not entirely uninterested in him.

“Do you mind my talking about her? Incandescent! I think that word describes her best. She burned from the inside, was strung on wires, and they were all alight. She was always sitting just where you are now, or upstairs at the piano. She was a wonderful pianist. Have you been upstairs, into the room she turned into a music room?”

“As I told you, I have only been here an hour. This is the only room I have seen.”

My tone must have struck him as wanting in cordiality, or interest.

“You didn’t want me to come up tonight?” He looked through his pocketbook for Ella’s letter, found it, and began to read, half aloud. How well I knew what Ella would have said to him.

“She has taken ‘Carbies’; call upon her at once ... let me know what you think ... don’t be misled by her high spirits....” He read it half aloud and half to himself. He seemed to expect my sympathy. “I used to come here so often, two or three times a day sometimes.”

“Was she ill?” The question was involuntary. Margaret Capel was nothing to me.

“Part of the time. Most of the time.”

“Did you do her any good?”

Apparently he had no great sense or sensitiveness of professional dignity. There was a strange light in his eyes, brilliant yet fitful, conjured up by the question. It was the first time he seemed to recognize my existence as a separate entity. He looked directly at me, instead of gazing about him reminiscently.

“I don’t know. I did my best. When she was in pain I stopped it ... sometimes. She did not always like the medicines I prescribed. And you? You are suffering from neuritis, your sister says. That may mean anything. Where is it?”

“In my legs.”

I did not mean him to attend me; I had come away to rid myself of doctors. And anyway I liked an older man in a professional capacity. But his eccentricity of manner or deportment, his want of interest in me and absorption in his former patient, his ill-cut clothes and unlikeness to his brother professionals, were a little variety, and I found myself answering his questions.

“Have you tried Kasemol? It is a Japanese cure very efficacious; or any other paint?”

“I am no artist.”

He smiled. He had a good set of teeth, and his smile was pleasant.

“You’ve got a nurse, or a maid?”

“A maid. I’m not ill enough for nurses.”

“Good. Did you know this was once a nursing-home? After she found that out she could never bear the place....”

He was talking again about the former occupant of the house. My ailment had not held his attention long.

“She said she smelt ether and heard groaning in the night. I suppose it seems strange to you I should talk so much about her? But Carbies without Margaret Capel.... You do mind?”

“No, I don’t. I daresay I shall be glad to hear all about her one day, and the story. I see you have a story to tell. Of course I remember her now. She wrote a play or two, and some novels that had quite a little vogue at one time. But I’m tired tonight.”

“So short a journey ought not to tire you.” He was observing me more closely. “You look overdriven, too fine-drawn. We must find out all about it. Not tonight of course. You must not look upon this as a professional visit at all, but I could not resist coming. You would understand, if you had known her. And then to see you sitting at her table, and in the same attitude....” He left off abruptly. So the regard I had flattered myself to be personal was merely reminiscent. “You don’t write too, by any chance, do you? That would be an extraordinary coincidence.”

He might as well have asked Melba if she sang. Blundering fool! I was better known than Margaret Capel had ever been. Not proud of my position because I have always known my limitations, but irritated nevertheless by his ignorance, and wishful now to get rid of him.

“Oh, yes! I write a little sometimes. Sorry my position at the table annoys you. But I don’t play the piano.” He seemed a little surprised or hurt at my tone, as he well might, and rose to go. I rose, too, and held out my hand. After all I did not write under my own name, so how could he have known unless Ella had told him? When he shook hands with me he made no pretence of feeling my pulse, a trick of the trade which I particularly dislike. So I smiled at him. “I am a little irritable.”

“Irritability is characteristic of the complaint. And I have bored you horribly, I fear. But it was such an excitement coming up here again. May I come in the morning and overhaul you? My partner, Dr. Lansdowne, for whom your sister’s letter was really intended, is away. Does that matter?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

“He is a very able man,” he said seriously.

“And are you not?” By this time my legs were aching badly and I wanted to get rid of him.

“In the morning, then.”

He seemed as if he would have spoken again, but thought better of it. He had certainly a personality, but one that I was not sure I liked. He took an inconceivable time winding up or starting his machine, the buzz of it was in my ears long after he went off, blowing an unnecessary whistle, making my pain unbearable.

I dined in bed and treated myself to an extra dose of nepenthe on the excuse of the fatigue of my journey. The prescription had been given to me by one of those eminent London physicians of whom I hope one day to make a pen-and-ink drawing. It is an insidious drug with varying effects. That night I remember the pain was soon under weigh and the strange half-wakeful dreams began early. It was good to be out of pain even if one knew it to be only a temporary deliverance. The happiness of a recovered amiability soon became mine, after which conscience began to worry me because I had been ungrateful to my sister and had run away from her, and been rude to her doctor, that strange doctor. I smiled in my drowsiness when I thought of him and his beloved Margaret Capel, a strange devotee at a forgotten shrine, in his cutaway checked coat and the baggy trousers. But the boots might have come from Lobb. His hands were smooth, of the right texture. Evidently the romance of his life had been this Margaret Capel.

So this place had been a nursing-home, and when she knew it she heard groans and smelt ether. Her books were like that: fanciful, frothy. She had never a straightforward story to tell. It was years since I had heard her name, and I had forgotten what little I knew, except that I had once been resentful of the fuss the critics had made over her. I believed she was dead, but could not be sure. Then I thought of Death, and was glad it had no terrors for me. No one could go on living as I had been doing, never out of pain, without seeing Death as a release.

A burning point of pain struck me again, and because I was drugged I found it unbearable. Before it was too late and I became drowsier I roused myself for another dose. To pour out the medicine and put the glass down without spilling it was difficult, the table seemed uneven. Later my brain became confused, and my body comfortable.

It was then I saw Margaret Capel for the first time, not knowing who she was, but glad of her appearance, because it heralded sleep. Always before the drug assumed its fullest powers, I saw kaleidoscopic changes, unsubstantial shapes, things and people that were not there. Wonderful things sometimes. This was only a young woman in a grey silk dress, of old-fashioned cut, with puffed sleeves and wide skirts. She had a mass of fair hair, blonde cendré, and with a blue ribbon snooded through it. At first her face was nebulous, afterwards it appeared with a little more colour in it, and she had thin and tremulous pink lips. She looked plaintive, and when our eyes met she seemed a little startled at seeing me in her bed. The last thing I saw of her was a wavering smile, rather wonderful and alluring. I knew at once that she was Margaret Capel. But she was quickly replaced by two Chinese vases and a conventional design in black and gold. I had been too liberal with that last dose of nepenthe, and the result was the deep sleep or unconsciousness I liked the least of its effects, a blank passing of time.

The next morning, as usual after such a debauch, I was heavy and depressed, still drowsy but without any happiness or content. I had often wondered I could keep a maid, for latterly I was always either irritable or silent. Not mean, however. That has never been one of my faults, and may have been the explanation. Suzanne asked how I had slept and hoped I was better, perfunctorily, without waiting for an answer. She was a great fat heavy Frenchwoman, totally without sympathetic quality. I told her not to pull up the blinds nor bring coffee until I rang.

“I am quite well, but I don’t want to be bothered. The servants must do the housekeeping. If Dr. Kennedy calls say I am too ill to see him.”

I often wish one could have dumb servants. But Suzanne was happily lethargic and not argumentative. I heard afterwards that she gave my message verbatim to the doctor: “Madame was not well enough to see him,” but softened it by a suggestion that I would perhaps be better tomorrow and perhaps he would come again. His noisy machine and unnecessary horn spoiled the morning and angered me against Ella for having brought him over me.

I felt better after lunch and got up, making a desultory exploration of the house and finding my last night’s impression confirmed. The position was lonely without being secluded. All round the house was the rough garden, newly made, unfinished, planted with trees not yet grown and kitchen stuff. Everywhere was the stiff and prickly gorse. On the front there were many bedrooms; some, like my own, had broad balconies whereon a bed could be wheeled. The place had probably at one time been used as an open-air cure. Then Margaret Capel must have taken it, altered this that and the other, but failed to make a home out of what had been designed for a hospital. By removing a partition two of these bedrooms had been turned into one. This one was large, oak-floored, and a Steinway grand upon a platform dominated one corner. There was a big music stand. I opened it and found no clearance of music had been made. It was full and deplorably untidy. The rest of the furniture consisted of tapestry-covered small and easy-chairs, a round table, a great sofa drawn under one of the windows, and some amateur water colours.

On the ground floor the dining-room looked unused and the library smelt musty. It was lined with open cupboards or bookcases, the top shelves fitted with depressing-looking tomes and the lower one bulging with yellow-backed novels, old-fashioned three-volume novels, magazines dated ten years back, and an “olla podrida” of broken-backed missing-leaved works by Hawley Smart, Mrs. Lovett Cameron, and Charles Lever. Nothing in either of these rooms was reminiscent of Margaret Capel. I was glad to get back to the drawing-room, on the same floor, but well-proportioned and agreeable. Today, with the sun out and my fatigue partly gone, its shabbiness looked homely and even attractive. The position of the writing-table again made its appeal. Suzanne had unpacked my writing-things and they stood ready for arrangement, heaped up together on the green leather top. I saw with satisfaction that there were many drawers and that the table was both roomy and convenient. The view from the window was altered by the sunlight. The yellow gorse was still the most prominent feature, but beyond it today one saw the sea more plainly, a little dim and hazy in the distance but unmistakable; melting into the horizon. Today the sky was of a summer blue although it was barely spring. I felt my courage revive. Again I said to myself that I could write here, and silently rescinded my intention of resting. “Work whilst ye have the light.” I had not a great light, but another than myself to work for, and perhaps not much time.

The gollywog put a smiling face and a clean cap halfway into the room and said:

“Please, ma’am, cook wishes to know if she can speak to you, and if you please there is no....”

There tumbled out a list of household necessities, which vexed me absurdly. But the writing-chair was comfortable and helped me through the narrative. The table was alluring, and I wanted to be alone. Cook arrived before Mary had finished, and then the monologue became a duet.

“There’s not more than half a dozen glasses altogether, and I’m sure I don’t know what to do about the teapot. There’s only one tray....”

“And as for the cooking utensils, well, I never see such a lot. And that dirty! The kitchen dresser has never been cleaned out since the flood, I should think. Stuffed up with dirty cloths and broken crockery. As for the kitchen table, there’s knives without handles and forks without prongs; not a shape that isn’t dented; the big fish kettle’s got a hole in it as big as your ’and, and the others ain’t fit to use. The pastry board’s broke....”

I wanted to stop my ears and tell them to get out. I had asked for competent servants, and understood that competent servants bought or hired whatever was necessary for their work. That was the way things were managed at home. But then my cook had been with me for eight years and my housemaid for eleven. They knew my ways, and that I was never to be bothered with household details, only the bills were my affair. And those my secretary paid.

“It was one of them there writing women as had the place last, with no more idea of order than the kitchen cat,” cook said indignantly, or perhaps suspiciously, eyeing the writing-table. I had come here for rest and change, to lead the simple life, with two servants instead of five and everything in proportion. Now I found myself giving reckless orders.

“Buy everything you want; there is sure to be a shop in the village. If not, make out a list, and one of you go up to the Stores or Harrod’s. If the place is dirty get in a charwoman. Some one will recommend you a charwoman, the house-agent or the doctor.” I reminded cook that she was a cook-housekeeper, but failed to subdue her.

“You can’t be cook-housekeeper in a desert island. I call it no better than a desert island. I’d get hold of that there house-agent that engaged us if I was you. He said the ’ouse was well-found. Him with his well-found ’ouse! They’re bound to give you what you need, but if you don’t mind expense....”

Of course I minded expense, never more so than now when I saw the possibility before me of a long period of inaction.... But I minded other things more. Household detail for instance, and uneducated voices. I compromised and sanctioned the appeal to the house-agent, confirming that the irreducible minimum was to be purchased, explaining I was ill, not to be troubled about this sort of thing. I brushed aside a few “buts” and finally rid myself of them. I caught myself yearning for Ella, who would have saved me this and every trouble. Then scorned my desire to send for her and determined to be glad of my solitude, to rejoice in my freedom. I could look as ill as I liked without comment. I could sit where I was without attempting to tidy my belongings, and no one would ask me if I felt seedy, if the pain was coming on, if they could do anything for me. And then, fool that I was, I remember tears coming to my eyes because I was lonely, and sure that I had tired out even Ella’s patience. I wondered how any one could face a long illness, least of all any one like me who loved work, and above all independence, freedom. I knew, I knew even then that the time was coming when I could neither work nor be independent; the shadow was upon me that very first afternoon at Carbies. When I could see to write I dashed off a postcard to Ella telling her I was quite well and she was not to bother about me.

“I like the place, I’m sure I shall be able to write here. Don’t think of coming down, and keep the rest of the family off me if you can....”

I spent the remainder of the evening weakly longing for her, and feeling that she need not have taken me at my word, that she might have come with me although I urged her not, that she should have understood me better.

That night I took less nepenthe, yet saw Margaret Capel more vividly. She stayed a long time too. This time she wore a blue peignoir, her hair down, and she looked very young and girlish. There were gnomes and fairies when she went, and after that the sea, swish and awash as if I had been upon a yacht. Unconsciousness only came to me when the yacht was submerged in a great wave ... semi-consciousness.

But I am not telling the story of my illness. I should like to, but I fear it would have no interest for the general public, or for the young people amongst whom one looks for readers. I have sometimes thought nevertheless, both then and afterwards, that there must be a public who would like to hear what one does and thinks and suffers when illness catches one unawares; and all life’s interests alter and narrow down to temperatures and medicine-time, to fighting or submitting to nurses and weakness, to hatred and contempt of doctors, and a dumb blind rage against fate; to pain and the soporifics behind which its hold tightens.

Pineland did not cure me, although I spent hours in the open air and let my pens lie resting in their case. Under continual pains I grew sullen and resentful, always more ill-tempered and desirous of solitude. Dr. Kennedy called frequently. Sometimes I saw him and sometimes not, as the mood took me. He never came without speaking of the former occupant of the house, of Margaret Capel. He seemed to take very little personal interest in me or my condition. And I was too proud (or stupid) to force it on his notice. I asked him once, crudely enough, if he had been in love with Margaret Capel. He answered quite simply, as if he had been a child:

“One had no chance. From the first I knew there was no chance.”

“There was some one else?”

“He came up and down. I seldom met him. Then there were the circumstances. She was between the Nisi and the Absolute, the nether and the upper stone....”

“Oh, yes, I remember now. She was divorced.”

“No, she was not. She divorced her husband,” he answered quite sharply and a little distressed. “Courts of Justice they are called, but Courts of Injustice would be a better name. They put her to the question, on the rack; no inquisition could have been worse. And she was broken by it....”

“But there was some one else, you said yourself there was some one else. Probably these probing questions, this rack, were her deserts. Personally I am a monogamist,” I retorted. Not that I was really narrow or a Pharisee, only in contentious mood and cruel under the pressure of my own harrow. “Probably anything she suffered served her right,” I added indifferently.

“It all happened afterwards. I thought you knew,” he said incoherently.

“I know nothing except that you are always talking of Margaret Capel, and I am a little tired of the subject,” I answered pettishly. “Who was the man?”

“The man!”

“Yes, the man who came up and down to see her?”

“Gabriel Stanton.”

“Gabriel Stanton!” I sat upright in my chair; that really startled me. “Gabriel Stanton,” I repeated, and then, stupidly enough: “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. But I won’t talk about it any more since it bores you. The house is so haunted for me, and you seemed so sympathetic, so interested. You won’t let me doctor you.”

“You haven’t tried very hard, have you?”

“You put me off whenever I try to ask you how you are, or any questions.”

“What is the good? I’ve seen twelve London doctors.”

“London has not the monopoly of talent.” He took up his hat, and then my hand.

“Offended?” I asked him.

“No. But my partner will be home tomorrow, and I’m relinquishing my place to him. It is really his case.”

“I refuse to be anybody’s case. I’ve heard from the best authorities that no one knows anything about neuritis and that it is practically incurable. One has to suffer and suffer. Even Almroth Wright has not found the anti-bacilli. Nepenthe gives me ease; that is all the doctoring I want—ease!”

“It is doing you a lot of harm. And what makes you think you’ve got neuritis?”

“What ailed your Margaret?” I answered mockingly. “Did you ever find that out?”

“No ... yes. Of course I knew.”

“Did you ever examine her?” I was curious to know that; suddenly and inconsequently curious.

“Why do you ask?” But his face changed, and I knew the question had been cruel or impertinent. He let go my hand abruptly, he had been holding it all this time. “I did all that any doctor could.” He was obviously distressed and I ashamed.

“Don’t go yet. Sit down and have a cup of tea with me. I’ve been here three weeks and every meal has been solitary. Your Margaret”—I smiled at him then, knowing he would not understand—“comes to me sometimes at night with my nepenthe, but all day I am alone.”

“By your own desire then, I swear. You are not a woman to be left alone if you wanted company.” He dropped into a chair, seemed glad to stay. Presently over tea and crumpets, we were really talking of my illness, and if I had permitted it I have no doubt he would have gone into the matter more closely. As it was he warned me solemnly against the nepenthe and suggested I should try codein as an alternative, a suggestion I ignored completely, unfortunately for myself.

“Tell me about your partner,” I said, drinking my tea slowly.

“Oh! you’ll like him, all the ladies like him. He is very spruce and rather handsome; dapper, band-boxy. Not tall, turning grey....”

“Did she like him?” I persisted.

“She would not have him near her. After his first visit she denied herself to him all the time. He used to talk to me about her, he could never understand it, he was not used to that sort of treatment, he is a tremendous favourite about here.”

“What did she say of him?”

“That he grinned like a Cheshire cat, talked in clichés, rubbed his hands and seemed glad when she suffered. He has a very cheerful bedside manner; most people like it.”

“I quite understand. I won’t have him. Mind that; don’t send him to see me, because I won’t see him. I’d rather put up with you.” I have explained I was beyond convention. He really tried hard to persuade me, urged Dr. Lansdowne’s degrees and qualifications, his seniority. I grew angry in the end.

“Surely I need not have either of you if I don’t want to. I suppose there are other doctors in the neighbourhood.”

He gave me a list of the medical men practising in and about Pineland; it was not at all badly done, he praised everybody yet made me see them clearly. In the end I told him I would choose my own medical attendant when I wanted one.

“Am I dismissed, then?” he asked.

“Have you ever been summoned?” I answered in the same tone.

“Seriously now, I’d like to be of use to you if you’d let me.”

“In order to retain the entrée to the house where the wonderful Margaret moved and had her being?”

“No! Well, perhaps yes, partly. And you are a very attractive woman yourself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It is quite true. I expect you know it.”

“I’m over forty and ill. I suppose that is what you find attractive, that I am ill?”

“I don’t think so. I hate hysterical women as a rule.”

“Hysterical!”

“With any form of nerve disease.”

“Do you really think I am suffering from nerve disease? From the vapours?” I asked scornfully, thinking for the thousand and first time what a fool the man was.

“You don’t occupy yourself?”

“I’m one of the busiest women on God’s earth.”

“I’ve never seen you doing anything, except sitting at her writing-table with two bone-dry pens set out and some blank paper. And you object to be questioned about your illness, or examined.”

“I hate scientific doctoring. And then you have not inspired me with confidence, you are obsessed with one idea.”

“I can’t help that. From the first you’ve reminded me of Margaret.”

“Oh! damn Margaret Capel, and your infatuation for her! I’m sorry, but that’s the way I feel just now. I can’t escape from her, the whole place is full of her. And yet she hasn’t written a thing that will live. I sent to the London Library soon after I came and got all her books. I waded through the lot. Just epigram and paradox, a weak Bernard Shaw in petticoats.”

“I never read a word she wrote,” he answered indifferently. “It was the woman herself....”

“I am sure. Well, good-bye! I can’t talk any more tonight, I’m tired. Don’t send Dr. Lansdowne. If I want any one I’ll let you know.”

Margaret came to me again that night when the house was quite silent and all the lights out except the red one from the fire. She sat in the easy-chair on the hearthrug, and for the first time I heard her speak. She was very young and feeble-looking, and I told her I was sorry I had been impatient and said “damn” about her.

“But you are all over the place, you know. And I can’t write unless I am alone. I’m always solitary and never alone here; you haunt and obsess me. Can’t you go away? I don’t mean now. I am glad you are here now, and talking. Tell me about Dr. Kennedy. Did you care for him at all? Did you know he was in love with you?”

“Peter Kennedy! No, I never thought about him at all, not until the end. Then he was very kind, or cruel. He did what I asked him. You know why I obsess you, don’t you? It used to be just the same with me when a subject was evolving. You are going to write my story; you will do it better in a way than I could have done it myself, although worse in another. I have left you all the material.”

“Not a word.”

“You haven’t found it yet. I put it together myself, the day Gabriel sent back my letters. You will have my diary and a few notes....”

“Where?”

“In a drawer in the writing-table. But it is only half there.... You will have to add to it.”

“I see you quite well when I keep my eyes shut. If I open them the room sways and you are not there. Why should I write your life? I am no historian, only a novelist.”

“I know, but you are on the spot, with all the material and local colour. You know Gabriel too; we used to speak about you.”

“He is no admirer of mine.”

“No. He is a great stylist, and you have no sense of style.”

“Nor you of anything else,” I put in rudely, hastily.

“A harsh judgment, characteristic. You are a blunt realist, I should say, hard and a little unwomanly, calling a spade by its ugliest name; but sentimental with pen in hand you really do write abominably sometimes. But you will remind the world of me again. I don’t want to be forgotten. I would rather be misrepresented than forgotten. There are so few geniuses! Keats and I.... Don’t go to sleep.”

I could not help it, however. Several times after that, whenever I remembered something I wished to ask her, and opened dulled eyes, she was not there at all. The chair where she had sat was empty, and the fire had died down to dull ash. I drowsed and dreamed. In my dreams I achieved style, an ambient, exquisite style, and wrote about Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton so glowingly and convincingly that all the world wept for them and wondered, and my sales ran into hundreds of thousands.

“We have always expected great things of this author, but she has transcended our highest expectations....” The reviews were all on this scale. For the remainder of that night no writer in England was as famous as I. Publishers and literary agents hung round my doorsteps and I rejected marvellous offers. If I had not been so thirsty and my mouth dry, no one could have been happier, but the dryness and thirst woke me continuously, and I execrated Suzanne for having put the water bottle out of my reach, and forgotten to supply me with acid drops. I remember grumbling about it to Margaret.

CHAPTER II

I began the search for those letters the very next day, knowing how absurd it was, as if one were still a child who expected to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I made Suzanne telephone to Dr. Kennedy that I was much better and would prefer he did not call. I really wanted to be alone, to make my search complete, not to be interrupted. If it were not true that I was better, at least I was no worse, only heavy and dull in body and mind, every movement an almost unbearable fatigue. Nevertheless I sat down with determination at the writing-table, intent on opening every drawer and cupboard, calling to Suzanne to help me, on the pretence of wanting white paper to line the drawers, and a duster to clean them. In reality, that she should do the stooping instead of me. But everywhere was emptiness or dust. I crawled to the music room after lunch and tried my luck there, amid the heaped disorderly music, but there too the search proved unavailing. It was no use going downstairs again, so I went to bed, before dinner, passing a white night with red pain points, beyond the reach even of nepenthe. I had counted on seeing Margaret Capel again, getting fuller instructions, but was disappointed in that also.

The next day and many others were equally full and equally empty. I looked in unlikely places until I was tired out; dragging about my worn-out body that had been whipped into a pretence of activity by my driving brain. Dr. Kennedy came and went, talking spasmodically of Margaret Capel, watching me, I thought sometimes, with puzzled enquiring eyes. My family in London was duly informed how well I was, and the good that the rest and solitude were doing me. I felt horribly ill, and towards the end of my second week gave up seeking for Margaret Capel’s letters or papers. I was still intent upon writing her story, but had made up my mind now to compile it from the facts I could persuade or force from Dr. Kennedy, from old newspaper reports, and other sources. It was borne in upon me that to go on with my work was the only way to save myself from what I now thought was mental as well as physical breakdown. I saw Margaret elusively, was never quite free from the sense that I was not alone. The chills that ran through me meant that she was behind me; the hot flushes that she was about to materialise. In normal times I was the most dogmatic disbeliever in the occult; but now I believed Carbies to be haunted.

When I was able to think soundly and consecutively, I began to piece together what little I knew of these two people by whom I was obsessed. For it was not only Margaret, but Gabriel Stanton whom I felt, or suspected, about the house. Stanton & Co. were my own publishers. I had not known them as Margaret Capel’s. Gabriel was not the member of the firm I saw when I made my rare calls in Greyfriars’ Square. He was understood to be occupied only with the classical works issued by the well-known house. Somewhere or other I had heard that he had achieved a great reputation at Oxford and knew more about Greek roots than any living authority. On the few occasions we met I had felt him antagonistic or contemptuous. He would come into the room where I was talking to Sir George and back out again quickly, saying he was sorry, or that he did not know his cousin was engaged. Sir George introduced us more than once, but Mr. Gabriel Stanton always seemed to have forgotten the circumstance. I remembered him as a tall thin man, with deep-set eyes and sunken mouth, a gentleman, as all the Stantons were, but as different as possible from his genial partner. I had, I have, a soft spot in my heart for Sir George Stanton, and had met with much kindness from him. Gabriel, too, may have had a charm—they were notoriously a charming family,—but he had not exerted it for my benefit. He and all of them were so respectable, so traditionally and inalienably respectable, that it was difficult to readjust my slowly working mind and think of him as any woman’s lover; illegitimate lover, as he seemed to be in this case. I wrote to my secretary in London to look up everything that was known about Margaret Capel. Before her reply came I had another attack of pleurisy—I had had several in London,—and this brought Ella to me, to say nothing of various hungry and impotent London consultants.

As I said before, this is not a history of my illness, nor of my sister’s encompassing love that ultimately enabled me to weather it, that forced me again and again from the arms of Death, that friend for whom at times my weakness yearned. The fight was all from the outside. As for me, I laid down my weapons early. I dreaded pain more than death, and do still, the passing through and not the arrival, writhing under the shame of my beaten body, wanting to hide. Yet publicity beat upon me, streamed into the room like midday sun. There were bulletins in the papers and the Press Association rang up and asked for late and early news. Obituary notices were probably being prepared. Everybody knew that at which I was still only guessing. It irked me sometimes to know they would be only paragraphs and not columns, and I knew Ella would be vexed.

When the acuteness of this particular attack subsided I thought again of Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton, yet could not talk of them. For Ella knew nothing of the former occupants of the house, and for some inexplicable reason Dr. Kennedy had left off coming. His partner, or substitute, whose Cheshire-cat grin I easily recognised, made no secret, notwithstanding his cheerfulness, of the desperate view he took of my condition. I hated his futile fruitless examinations, the consultations whereat I was sure he aired his provincial self-importance, his great cool hands on my pulse and smug dogmatic ignorance. “The pain is just here,” he would announce, but not even by accident did he ever once hit upon the right spot.

Fortunately Ella was there. She must have arrived many days before I recognised her. The household was moving on oiled wheels, my meals were brought me now on trays with delicate napery and a flower or two. Scent sprays and early strawberries, down pillows and Jaegar sheets, a water bed presently, and all the luxuries, told me undeniably she was in the vicinity. I had always known how it would be. That once I admitted to helplessness she would give up her home life and all the joys of her well-filled days, and would live for me only. Because her tenderness for me met mine for her and was too poignant for my growing weakness, I had denied us both. Her the joy of giving and myself of taking. Now, without acknowledgment or word of gratitude, I accepted all.

“Don’t go away,” were the first words I said to her. I! who had begged her so hard not to come, repudiated her anxiety so violently.

“Of course not. Why should I? I always like the country in the early spring,” she answered coolly. “Do you want anything?” She came nearer to the bed.

“What has become of Dr. Kennedy?” I asked.

“I thought you did not like him. Suzanne told me that often you would not see him when he called. And you were quite right. It was evident he did not know what was the matter with you.”

“No one does.”

“You have not helped us.” Her eyelids were pink, but otherwise she did not reproach me.

“And now I am going to die, I suppose.”

“Die! You are not going to die; don’t be so absurd. I wouldn’t let you, for one thing. And why should you? People don’t die of pleurisy, or neuritis. You are better today than you were yesterday, and you will be better still tomorrow. I know.”

Outside the room she may have wept, for, as I said, her eyelids were pink. Inside it she was all quiet confidence and courage.

“I want Dr. Kennedy. Get him back to me.” I did not argue with her whether I would live or die, it was too futile.

“This man Lansdowne is F.R.C.S. and M.D. London,” she reminded me.

“I don’t care if he’s all the letters of the alphabet. He grins at me, talks smugly, patronises me, pats my shoulder. He will send his carriage to follow the funeral. I see in his face that he has made up his mind to it.”

Nurse interfered and said that Dr. Lansdowne was most able.

“Send her out of the room.” I was impatient at her interference.

“All right, nurse, I’ll sit with Mrs. Vevaseur until you’ve had your dinner. You won’t talk too much?” she said to me imploringly.

“Perhaps,” I answered, and smiled. It was good to have Ella sitting with me again.

“The doctor did not wish her to speak at all, nor to see visitors.”

I don’t know how Ella managed to get that authoritative white-capped female out of the room, but she did; she had infinite tact and resource.

“Shall I get my needlework? Or would you rather I read to you? You really mustn’t talk.”

“Neither. You are not going away?”

“I am staying as long as you want me.”

Not a word about the times when I had told her brutally to let me alone, when I had almost turned her out of the house in London, finally fled from her here. That was Ella all over, and characteristic of me that I could not even thank her. When she said she would stay it seemed too good to be true. I questioned her about her responsibilities.

“What about Violet and Tommy, the paper?” For Ella, too, was bound on the Ixion wheel of the weekly press.

“It’s all right; everything has been arranged, in the best possible way. I am quite free. I shan’t go away until you ask me to go.”

Then I began to cry, in my great weakness, but hid my eyes, for I knew my tears would hurt her. I gave way only for a moment. It was such a relief to know her there, to feel I was being cared for. Paid service is only for the sound.

Ella pretended not to notice my little breakdown, although she was not far off it herself. She began to talk of indifferent things. Who had telegraphed, or rung up; she told me that the news of my illness had been in the papers. All my good friends whom I had avoided during those dreary months had forgotten they had been snubbed and came forward with genuine sympathy and offers of help. I soon stopped her from telling me about them. It made me feel ashamed and unworthy. I could not recollect ever having done anything for anybody.

“About getting Dr. Kennedy back?”

“He neglected you disgracefully; wrote me lightly. I don’t wonder you told him not to call.”

“I want him back.”

“Then you shall have him back. You shall have everything you want, only go on getting better.” She turned her face away from me.

“Have I begun?”

She made no answer, and I knew it was because she could not at the moment command her voice.

So I stayed quiet a little while. Then I began again to beg her to rid me of Lansdowne.

“After all, he is independent of his profession,” she said at length thoughtfully, thinking of his feelings and how not to hurt them. “He married a rich woman.”

“He would. And I am sure he has no children,” I answered.

“Good heavens! How did you know? You are cleverer when you are ill than other people when they are well.”

That is like Ella, too, she has an exaggerated and absurd opinion of my talent. Just because I write novels which are paid for beyond their deserts!

I don’t know how she did it, I don’t know how she accomplished half of the magical wonderful things she did for my comfort all that sad time. But I was not even surprised, a few days later, when I really was better and sitting up in bed; propped up by pillows, I admit, but still actually sitting up; that Dr. Kennedy, tall and unaltered, with the same light in his eye, even the same dreadful country suit, lounged in and sat on the chair by my side. Ella went away when he came in, she always had an idea that patients like to see their doctors alone. She flirts with hers, I think. She is incurably flirtatious in her leisure hours.

“You’ve had a bad time,” he said abruptly.

“You didn’t try to make it any better,” I answered weakly.

“Oh! I! I was dismissed. Your sister turned me out. She said I hadn’t recognised how ill you were. I told her she was quite right. I didn’t tell her how often you had refused to see me.”

“Did you know how ill I was?”

“I’m not sure.” He smiled, and so did I. “Were you so ill?”

“I know now what Margaret Capel felt about Dr. Lansdowne.”

“He is a very able fellow. And you’ve had Felton, Shorter, Lawson.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Anyway you are getting better now.”

“Am I? I am so hideously weak.”

“Not beginning to write again yet! You see, I know all about you now. I’ve taken a course of your novels.”

“Thinking all the time how much better Margaret Capel wrote?”

“You haven’t forgotten Margaret, then?”

“Have you?” He became quite grave and pale.

“I! I shall never forget Margaret Capel.”

Up till then he had been light and airy in manner, as if this visit and circumstance and poor me, who had been so near the Gates, were of little consequence.

“Did you think how much worse I wrote than she did, that I was no stylist?”

“Why do you say that?”

I was glad to see him and wished to keep him by my side. I thought what I was going to tell him would secure my object.

“She told me so herself” I shot at him, and watched to see how he would take it. “The last time I saw you, the night the pleurisy started, she sat over there by the fireside. We talked together confidentially, she said she knew I would write her story, and was sorry because I had no style.” There was a flush on his forehead, he looked to where I said she sat.

“What else did she say?” He did not seem to doubt me or to be surprised.

“You believe I saw her, that it was not a dream?”

“There is an unexplored borderland between dreams and reality. Fever often bridges it. Your temperature was probably high. And I, and you, were so full of her. Go on. Tell me what she wore.”

“She was dressed in grey, a white fichu over her shoulders.”

“And a pink rose.”

“Her hair....”

“Was snooded with a blue ribbon.” He finished my sentences excitedly.

“No. It was hanging in plaits.”

“Oh, no! Not when she wore the grey dress.” He had risen and was standing by the bed now, he seemed anxious, almost imploring. “Think again. Shut your eyes and think again. Surely she had the blue ribbon.”

I shut my eyes as he bade me. Then opened them and stared at him.

“But how did you know?”

“Go on. There was a blue ribbon in her hair?”

“The first time I saw her. The next time her hair was hanging down her back, two great plaits of fair hair, and she had on a blue dressing-gown.”

“With a white collar like a fine handkerchief, showing her slender throat.”

“How well you knew her clothes.”

“There was a sense of fitness about her, an exquisite sense of fitness. She would not have worn her hair down with that grey dress.”

“You know I really did see her.”

“Of course. Go on. Tell me exactly what she said, word for word.”

“About my bad style.”

“About your good sense of comradeship with her.”

“She said I would write the story. Hers and Gabriel Stanton’s.”

I told him all she had said, word for word as well as I could remember it, keeping my eyes shut, speaking slowly, remembering well.

“She told me of the letters and diary, the notes, chapter headings, all she had prepared....”

I turned my head away, sank down amongst the pillows, and turned my head away. I didn’t want him to see my disappointment, to know that I had found nothing. Now I recognised my weakness, that I was spent with feverish nights and pain.

“I can’t talk any more.” He put his hand upon my pulse.

“Your pulse is quite strong.”

“I am not,” I said shortly. I wished Ella would come back.

“You looked for them?” I did not answer.

“I am so sorry. Blundering fool that I am. You looked, and looked ... that is why you kept me at arm’s length, would not see me, wanted to be alone. You were searching. Why didn’t I think of it before? But how did I know she would come to you, confide in you?”

He was talking to himself now, seemed to forget me and my grave illness. “I might have thought of it though. From the first I pictured you two together. I have them. I took them ... didn’t you guess?” I forgot the extreme weakness of which I had complained, and caught hold of his coat sleeve, a little breathless.

“You took them ... stole them?”

“Yes. If you put it that way. Who had a better right? I knew everything. Her father, her people, nothing, or very little. And she had not wished them to know.”

“She was going to write the story, whatever it was; to publish it.”

“No! not immediately, not until long afterwards, not until it would hurt no one. They were in the writing-table drawer, the letters, in an elastic band. She was not tidy as a rule with papers, but these were tidy. The diary was bound in soft grey leather, and there were a few rough notes; loose, on MS. paper. You know all that happened there; the excitement was intense. How could I bear her papers, his letters, her notes to fall into strange hands. I was doing what she would wish, I knew I was carrying out her wishes. The day she ... she died I gathered them all together, slipped them into my greatcoat pocket; the car was at the door. I hurried away as if I had been a thief, the thief you are thinking me.”

“Got home quickly, gloated over them all that evening.”

“I swear to you, I swear to you I have never opened the packet. I have never looked at them. I made one parcel of them all, of the letters, diary, notes; wrapped them all together in brown paper, tied it up with string, sealed it.

“You’ve got it still!” I was in high excitement, all my pulses throbbing, face flushed, hands hot, breathless.

“In the safe at my bank. I took it there the next morning.”

“You are going to give me the packet?”

“But of course.” He seemed suddenly to recollect that I was an invalid, that he was supposed to be my doctor. “I say, all this excitement is very bad for you. Your sister will turn me out again. Can’t you lie down, get quiet,—you’ve jumped from 90 to 112.” His hand was on my pulse again. I knew I was going beyond my tether and cursed my weakness.

“You won’t change your mind!” I was lying on my back now, quite still, trying to quiet myself as he had told me. “Promise!”

“I’ll get the packet in the morning, as soon as the bank is open, and come straight on here with it. You must find some place to put it. Where you can see it, know it’s there all the time. But you mustn’t open it, you must get stronger first. You know you can’t use it yet.”

“Yes, I can.”

“It would be very wrong. You wouldn’t do it well.”

“I’m sick of being ordered about.” But I could barely move and breathing was becoming difficult to me, I had a sense of faintness, suffocation, the room grew dark. He opened the door and called nurse. Ella came in with her. I was conscious of that.

“What does she have when she is like this? Smelling salts, brandy?” Nurse began to fan me; my cheeks were very flushed.

Ella opened the windows, wide, quietly; the scent of the gorse came in. I did not want to speak, only to be able to breathe.

Nurse telegraphed him an enquiring glance. Strychnine? her dumb lips asked. He shook his head.

“Oxygen. Have you got a cylinder of oxygen in the house?” He took the pillows from under my head.

I don’t know what they tried or left untried. Whenever I opened my eyes I sought for Ella’s. I knew she would not let them do anything to me that might bring the pain back. I was only over-tired. I managed to say so presently. When I was really better and Dr. Kennedy gone, Ella said a bitter word or two about him. Nurse too thought she should have been called sooner. A good nurse, but dissatisfied up to now with all my treatment, with my change of doctors, with my resistance to authority, and Ella’s interference.

“Ella.” She had been sitting by the fire but came over to me at once.

“What is it? I am only going to stop a minute. Then I shall leave you to nurse. That man stopped too long, over-excited you. We mustn’t have him again, he doesn’t understand you.”

“Yes he does; perfectly.” My voice may have been faint, but I succeeded in making it urgent. “Ella, I want to see him again in the morning, nothing must prevent it, nothing. Don’t talk against him, I want him.”

“Then you shall have him,” she decided promptly. Notwithstanding my terrible weakness and want of breath I smiled at her.

“I suppose you’ve fallen in love with him,” she said. Love and love-making were half her life, the game she found most fascinating. They were nothing to do with mine.

“See that he comes. That’s all. However ill I am, whether I’m ill or not, he is to come.”

“You noticed his clothes?”

“Oh, yes!”

Nurse I suppose thought we had both gone mad. But she came over to me and lifted me into a more comfortable position, fanned me again, and when the fanning had done its work brought eau de Cologne and water and sponged my face, my hot hands. She told Ella that she ought to go, that I ought to be alone, that I should have a bad night if I were not left to myself. Ella only wanted to do what was best for me.

“I am sure you are right, nurse. I shan’t come in again. Sleep well.”

“You are sure?”

“Quite sure that Dr. Kennedy shall come in the morning, if I have to drag him here. It’s a pity you will have an executioner instead of a doctor; he seems to do you harm every time he comes. You had your worst attack when he was here before. Good-night. I do wish you had better taste.”

She kept her light tone up to the last, although I saw she was pale with anxiety and sympathy. Days ago she had asked me if the nurses were good and kind to me, and if I liked them, and had received my assurance that this one at least was the best I had ever had, clever and untiring. If only she had not been so sure of herself and that she knew better than I did what was good for me, I should have thought her perfect. She had a delightful voice, never touched me unnecessarily, nor brushed against the bed. But she was younger than I, and I resented her authority. We were often in antagonism, for I was a bad invalid, in resistance all the time. I had not learnt yet how to be ill! The lesson was taught me slowly, cruelly, but I recognised Benham’s quality long before I gave in to her. Now I was glad that Ella should go, that nurse should minister to me alone. I wanted the night to come ... and go. But my exhaustion was so complete that I had forgotten why.

CHAPTER III

I seem to be a long time coming to the story, but my own will intervene, my own dreadful tale of dependence and deepening illness. Benham was my day nurse. At ten o’clock that night she left me, considerably better and calm. Then Lakeby came on duty, a very inferior person who always talked to me as if I were a child to be humoured: “Now then be a dear good girl and drink it up” represents her fairly well. Then she would yawn in my face without apology or attempt to hide her fatigue or boredom. Nepenthe and I were no longer friends. It gave me no ease, yet I drank it to save argument. Lakeby took away the glass and then lay down at the foot of the bed. I thought again, as I had thought so many times, that no one ever sleeps so soundly as a night nurse. I could indulge my restlessness without any fear of disturbing her. Tomorrow’s promised excitement would not let me sleep. Their letters, the very letters they had written to each other! I did not care so much about the diary. I had once kept a diary myself and knew how one leaves out all the essentials. I suppose I drowsed a little. Nepenthe was no longer my friend, but we were not enemies, only disappointed lovers, without reliance on each other. As I approached the borderland I wished Margaret were in her easy-chair by the fireside. I did not care whether she was in her grey, or with her plaits and peignoir. I watched for her in vain. I knew she would not come whilst nurse snored on the sofa. Ella would have to get rid of the nurse from my room. Surely now that I was better I could sleep alone, a bell could be fixed up. Two nurses were unnecessary, extravagant. I woke to cough and was conscious of a strange sensation. I turned on the light by my side, but then only roused the nurse (she had slept all day) with difficulty. I knew what had happened, although this was the first time it had happened to me, and wanted to reassure her or myself. Also to tell her what to do.

“Get ice. Call Benham; ring up the doctor.” This was my first hæmorrhage, very profuse and alarming, and Lakeby although she was inferior was not inefficient. When she was really roused she carried out my instructions to the letter. Once Benham was in the room I knew at least I was in good hands. I begged them not to rouse the house more than necessary, not to call Ella.

“Don’t you speak a word. Lie quite still. We know exactly what is to be done. Mrs. Lovegrove won’t be disturbed, nor anybody if you will only do what you are told.”

Benham’s voice changed in an emergency; it was always a beautiful voice if a little hard; now it was gentle, soft, and her whole manner altered. She had me and the situation completely under her control, and that, of course, was what she always wanted. That night she was the perfect nurse. Lakeby obeyed her as if she had been a probationer. I often wonder I am not more grateful to Benham, failed to become quickly attached to her. I don’t think perhaps that mine is a grateful nature, but I surely recognised already tonight, in this bad hour, her complete and wonderful competence. I was in high fever, very agitated, yet striving to keep command of my nerves.

“It looks bad, you know, but it is not really serious, it is only a symptom, not a disease. All you have to do is to keep very quiet. The doctor will soon be here.”

“I’m not frightened.”

“Hush! I’m sure you are not.”

A hot bottle to my feet, little lumps of ice to suck; loose warm covering adjusted round me quickly, the blinds pulled up, and the window opened, there was nothing of which she did not think. And the little she said was all in the right key, not making light of my trouble, but explaining, minimizing it, helping me to calm my disordered nerves.

“I would give you a morphia injection only that Dr. Kennedy will be here any moment now.”

I don’t think it could have been long after that before he was in the room. In the meantime I was hating the sight of my own blood and kept begging the nurses or signing to them to remove basins and stained clothes.

Nurse Benham told him very quietly what had happened. He was looking at me and said encouragingly:

“You will soon be all right.”

I was still coughing up blood and did not feel reassured. I heard him ask for hot water. Nurse and he were at the chest of drawers, whispering over something that might be cooking operations. Then nurse came back to the bed.

“Dr. Kennedy is going to give you a morphia injection that will stop the hæmorrhage at once.”

She rolled up the sleeve of my nightgown, and I saw he was beside her.

“How much?” I got out.

“A quarter of a grain,” he answered quietly. “You’ll find it will be quite enough. If not, you can have another.”

I resented the prick of the needle, and that having hurt me he should rub the place with his finger, making it worse, I thought. I got reconciled to it however, and his presence there, very soon. He was still in tweeds and they smelt of gorse or peat, of something pleasant.

“Getting better?”

There was no doubt the hæmorrhage was coming to an end, and I was no longer shivering and apprehensive. He felt my pulse and said it was “very good.”

“The usual cackle!” I was able to smile.

“I shouldn’t talk if I were you.” He smiled too. “You will be quite comfortable in half an hour.”

“I am not uncomfortable now.” He laughed, a low and pleasant laugh.

“She is wonderful, isn’t she?” he said to Benham. Benham was clearing away every evidence of what had occurred, and I felt how competent they both were, and again that I was in good hands. I was glad Ella was asleep and knew nothing of what was happening.

Dr. Kennedy was over at the chest of drawers again.

“I’ll leave you another dose,” he said, and they talked together. Then he came to say “good-bye” to me.

“Can’t I sleep by myself? I hate any one in the room with me.” I wanted to add, “it spoils my dreams,” but am not sure if I actually said the words.

“You’ll find you will be all right, as right as rain. Nurse will fix you up. All you have to do is to go to sleep. If not she will give you another dose. I’ve left it measured out. You are not afraid, are you?”

“No.”

“The good dreams will come. I am willing them to you.” I found it difficult to concentrate.

“What did you promise me before?”

“Nothing I shan’t perform. Good-night....”

He went away quickly.

I was wider awake than I wished to be, and soon a desire for action was racing in my disordered mind. I thought the hæmorrhage meant death, and I had left so many things undone. I could not recollect the provisions of my will, and felt sure it was unjust. I could have been kinder to so many people, the dead as well as the living. It is so easy to say sharp, clever things; so difficult to unsay them. I remembered one particular act of unkindness ... even now I cannot bear to recall it. Alas! it was to one now dead. And Ella, Ella did not know I returned her love, full measure, pressed down, brimming over. Once, very many years ago, when she was in need and I supposed to be rich, she asked me to lend her five hundred pounds. Because I hadn’t it, and was too proud to say so, I was ruder to her than seems possible now, asking why I should work to supply her extravagances. But she was never extravagant, except in giving. Oh, God! That five hundred pounds! How many times I have thought of it. What would I not give not to have said no, to have humbled my pride, admitted I could not put my hands on so large a sum? Now she lavishes her all on me. And if it were true that I was dying, already I was not sure, she would be lonely in her world. Without each other we were always lonely. Love of sisters is unlike all other love. We had slept in each other’s bed from babyhood onward, told each other all our little secrets, been banded together against nurses and governesses, maintained our intimacy in changed and changing circumstances, through long and varied years. Ella would be lonely when I was dead. A hot tear or two oozed through my closed lids when I thought of Ella’s loneliness without me. I wiped those tears away feebly with the sheet. The room was very strange and quiet, not quite steady when I opened my eyes. So I shut them. The morphia was beginning to act.

“Why are you crying?”

“How could you see me over there?” But I no longer wanted to cry and I had forgotten Ella. I opened my eyes when she spoke. The fire was low and the room dark, quite steady and ordinary. Margaret was sitting by the fireside, and I saw her more clearly than I had ever seen her before, a pale, clever, whimsical face, thin-featured and mobile, with grey eyes.

“It is absurd to cry,” she said. “When I finished crying there were no tears in the world to shed. All the grief, all the unhappiness died with me.”

“Why were you so unhappy?” I asked.

“Because I was a fool,” she answered. “When you tell my story you must do it as sympathetically as possible, make people sorry for me. But that is the truth. I was unhappy because I was a fool.”

“You still think I shall write your story. The critics will be pleased....” I began to remember all they would say, the flattering notices.

“Why were you crying?” she persisted. “Are you a fool too?”

“No. Only on Ella’s account I don’t want to die.”

“You need not fear. Is Ella some one who loves you? If so she will keep you here. Gabriel did not love me enough. If some one needs us desperately and loves us completely, we don’t die.”

“Did no one love you like that?”

“I died,” she answered concisely, and then gazed into the fire.

My limbs relaxed, I felt drowsy and convinced of great talent. I had never done myself justice, but with this story of Margaret Capel’s I should come into my own. I wrote the opening sentence, a splendid sentence, arresting. And then I went on easily. I, who always wrote with infinite difficulty, slowly, and trying each phrase over again, weighing and appraising it, now found an amazing fluency come to me. I wrote and wrote.

De Quincey has not spoken the last word on morphia dreams. It is only a pity he spoke so well that lesser writers are chary of giving their experiences. The next few days, as I heard afterwards, I lay between life and death, the temperature never below 102 and the hæmorrhage recurring. I only know that they were calm and happy days. Ella was there and we understood each other perfectly, without words. The nurses came and went, and when it was Benham I was glad and she knew my needs, when I was thirsty, or wanted this or that. But when Lakeby replaced her she would talk and say silly soothing things, shake up my pillows when I wanted to be left alone, touch the bed when she passed it, coax me to what I would do willingly, intrude on my comfortable time. I liked best to be alone, for then I saw Margaret. She never spoke of anything but herself and the letters and diary she had left me, the rough notes. We had strange little absurd arguments. I told her not to doubt that I would write her story, because I loved writing, I lived to write, every day was empty that held no written word, that I only lived my fullest, my completest when I was at my desk, when there was wide horizon for my eyes and I saw the real true imagined people with whom I was more intimate than with any I met at receptions and crowded dinner-parties.

“The absurdity is that any one who feels what you describe should write so badly. It is incredible that you should have the temperament of the writer without the talent,” she said to me once.

“What makes you say I write badly? I sell well!” I told her what I got for my books, and about my dear American public.

“Sell! sell!” She was quite contemptuous. “Hall Caine sells better than you do, and Marie Corelli, and Mrs. Barclay.”

“Would you rather I gave one of them your MS.?” I asked pettishly. I was vexed with her now, but I did not want her to go. She used to vanish suddenly like a light blown out. I think 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 lightly and evasively:

“No one is ever really out of danger. I take my life in my hands every time I go in my motor.”

“Oh, yes! I’ve heard about your driving,” I answered drily.

He laughed.

“I am supposed to be reckless, but really I am only unlucky. With luck now....”

“Yes, with luck?”

“You might go on for any time. I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you. You are getting better.”

“I am not worrying, only thinking about Mrs. Lovegrove. She has two children, a large house, literary and other engagements. Will you tell her I am well enough to be left alone?” He answered quickly and surprised:

“She does not want to go, she likes being with you. Not that I wonder at that.”

He was a strange person. Sometimes I had an idea he was not “all there.” He said whatever came into his mind, and had other divergencies from the ordinary type. I had to explain to him my need of solitude. If Ella went back to town, Benham would soon, I hoped, with a little encouragement, fall into the way of ordinary nurses. I had had them in London and knew their habits. Two or three hours in the morning for their so-called “constitutionals,” two or three hours in the afternoon for sleep, whether they had been disturbed in the night or not; in the intervals there were the meals over which they lingered. Solitude would be easily secured if Ella went away and there was no one to watch or comment on the amount of attention purchased or purchasable for two guineas a week. I misread Benham, by the way, but that is a detail. She was not like the average nurse, and never behaved in the same way.

My first objective, once that brown paper parcel lay on the bed, was to persuade Ella to go back to home and children. Without hurting her feelings. She would not have left the house for five minutes before I should be longing for her back again. I knew that, but one cannot work and play. I have never had any other companion but Ella. Still.... Work whilst ye have the light. One more book I must do, and here was one to my hand.

I made Dr. Kennedy put the parcel back in the drawer. Then I lay and made plans. I must talk to Ella of Violet and Tommy, make her homesick for them. Unfortunately Ella knew me so well. I started that very afternoon.

“How does Violet get on without you?”

“She is all right.”

But soon afterwards Ella asked me quietly whether there was any one else I would like down.

“God forbid!” I answered in alarm, and she understood, understood without showing pang or offence, that I wanted to be alone. One thing Ella never quite realised, my wretched inability to live in two worlds at once, the real and the unreal. When I want to write there is no use giving me certain hours or times to myself. I want all the days and all the nights. I don’t wish to be spoken to, nor torn away from my story and new friends. For this reason I have always had to leave London many months in the year, for the seaside or abroad. London meant Ella, almost daily, at the telephone if not personally.

“You don’t write all day, do you? What are you pretending? Don’t be so absurd, you must go out sometimes. I am fetching you in the car at....”

And then I was lured by her to theatres, dinners, lunches. She thought people liked to meet me, but I have rarely noticed any interest taken in a female novelist, however many editions she may run through. My strength was returning, if slowly. Ella of course had duties to those children of hers that sometimes I resented so unreasonably. I always wished her early widowhood had left her without ties. However, the call of them came in usefully now; it was not necessary for me to press it. I came first with her, I exulted in it. But since I was getting better....

I wished to be alone with that parcel. I did make a tentative effort before Ella left.

“I don’t want to settle off to sleep just yet, nurse, I should like to read a little. There is a packet of letters....”

“No! No! I wouldn’t hear of such a thing. Starting reading at ten o’clock. What will you be wanting to do next?”

“It would not do me any harm,” I answered irritably. “I’ve told you before it does me more harm to be contradicted every time I make a suggestion.”

“Well, you won’t get me to help you to commit suicide. Night is the time for sleep, and you’ve had your codein.”

“The codein does not send me to sleep, it only soothes and quiets me.”

“All the more reason you should not wake yourself up by any old letters.” She argued, and I.... At the end I was too tired and out of humour to insist. I made up my mind to do without a nurse as soon as possible, and in the meantime not to argue but to circumvent her. At this time, before Ella went, I was getting up every day for a few hours, lying on the couch by the window. I tested my strength and found I could walk from bed to sofa, from sofa to easy-chair without nurse’s arm, if I made the effort.

“You will take care of yourself?” were Ella’s last words, and I promised impatiently.

“I don’t so much mind leaving you alone now, you have your Peter, and nurse won’t let you overdo things.”

“You have your Peter.” Can one imagine anything more ridiculous! My incurably frivolous sister imagined I had fallen in love, with that lout! I was unable to persuade her to the contrary. She argued, that at my worst and before, I would have no other attendant. And she pointed out that it could not possibly be Peter Kennedy’s skill that attracted me. I defended him, feebly perhaps, for it was true that he had not shown any special aptitude or ability. I said he was quite as good as any of the others, and certainly less depressing.

“There is no good humbugging me, or trying to. You are in love with the man. Don’t trouble to contradict it. And I am not a bit jealous. I only hope he will make you happy. Nurse told me you do not even like her to come into the room when he is here.”

“Don’t you know how old I am? It is really undignified, humiliating, to be talked to or of in that way....”

“Age has nothing to do with it. A woman is never too old to fall in love. And besides, what is thirty-nine?”

“In this case it is forty-two,” I put in drily, my sense of humour not being entirely in abeyance.

“Well! or forty-two. Anyway you will admit I took a hint very quickly. I am going to leave you alone with your Corydon.”

“Caliban!”

“He is not bad-looking really, it is only his clothes. And if anything comes of it you will send him to Poole’s. Anyway his feet and hands are all right, and there is a certain grace about his ungainliness.”

“Really, Ella, I can’t bear any more. Love runs in your head; feeds your activities, agrees with you. But as for me, I’ve long outgrown it. I am tired, old, ill. Peter Kennedy is just not objectionable. Other doctors are. He is honest, simple....”

“I will hear all about his qualities next time I come. Only don’t think you are deceiving me. God bless you, dear.” She turned suddenly serious. “You know I would not go if you wanted me to stop or if I were uneasy about you any more. You know I will come down again at any moment you want me. I shall miss my train if I don’t rush. Can I send you anything? I won’t forget the sofa rug, and if you think of anything else....” Her maid knocked at the door and said the flyman had called up to say she must come at once. Her last words were: “Well, good-bye again, and tell him I give my consent. Tell him he gave the show away himself. I have known about it ever since the first night I was here when he told me what an interesting woman you were....”

“Good-bye ... thanks for everything. I’m sorry you’ve got that mad idea in your silly head....” She was gone. I heard her voice outside the window giving directions to the man and then the crunch of the fly wheels on the gravel as she was driven away.

CHAPTER IV

That night, the very night after Ella had gone, I tested my slowly returning strength. Benham gave me my codein, and saw that I was well provided with all I might need for the night; the lemonade and glycerine lozenges, a second codein on the table by my side, the electric bell to my hand. This bell had been put up since the night nurse left; it rang into Benham’s bedroom. I waited for a quarter of an hour after she had gone, she had a habit of coming back to see if I had forgotten anything, or to show me how thick and abundant her hair was without the uniform cap. I should have felt like a criminal when I stole out of bed. But I did not, I felt like an invalid, and a feeble one at that. It was only a couple of steps from the bed to the chest of drawers and I accomplished it without mishap, then was back again in bed, only to remember the seals were still unbroken and the string firm. A pair of nail scissors were on the dressing-table. I was disinclined for the journey, but managed it all the same. I was then so exhausted I had to wait for a quarter of an hour before I was able to use them. Only then was my curiosity rewarded. A small number of letters, not more than fifteen or sixteen in all, a bound diary, a very cursory glance at which showed me the disingenuousness, and half a dozen pages of MS. notes or chapter headings with several trial titles, “Between the Nisi and the Absolute,” “Publisher and Sinner,” headed two separate pages. “The Story of an Unhappy Woman” the third. The notes were all in the first person, and I should have known them anywhere for Margaret Capel’s.

Small as the whole cache was, I did not think it possible I could get through it all that night. Neither did it seem possible to get out of bed again. The papers must remain where they were, or underneath my pillow. I should be strong enough, I hoped, by the morning to put up with or confront any wrath or argument Benham would advance.

I had got up because I chose. That was the beginning and end of it. She must learn to put up with my ways, or I with a change of nurse.

The letters were in an elastic band, without envelopes, labelled and numbered. Margaret’s were on paper of a light mauve, with lines, like foreign paper. Her handwriting, masculine and square, was not very readable. She rarely dotted an i or crossed a t, used the Greek e and many ellipses. Gabriel’s letters were as easy to read as print. It was a pity therefore that hers were so much longer than his. Still, once I began I was sorry to leave off, and should not have done so if I could have kept my eyes open or my attention from wandering. I am printing them just as they stand, those that I read that night, at least. Here they are:—

No. 1.

211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

January 29th, 1902.

Dear Sirs:—

Would you care to publish a book by me on Staffordshire Pottery? What I have in my mind is a limited édition de luxe, illustrated in colours, highly priced. I may say I have a collection which I believe to be unique, if not complete, upon which I propose to draw largely. Of course the matter would have to be discussed both from your point of view and, mine. This is merely to ask if you are open.

My name is probably not unknown to you, or rather my pseudonym.

The critics have been kind to my novels, and I see no reason why they should be less so to a monograph on a subject I thoroughly understand. Although perhaps that will be hard for them to forgive. For it will be reviewed, if at all, by critics less well informed.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Capel (“Simon Dare”).

Author of “The Immoralists,”

“Love and the Lutist,” etc.

Messrs. Stanton & Co.

No. 2.

117–118 Greyfriars’ Square, E.C.,

January 30th, 1902.

Dear Madam:—

I have to thank you for your letter of yesterday with its suggestion for a book on Staffordshire Pottery.

The subject is outside my own knowledge, but I find there is no comprehensive work dealing with it, a small elementary booklet published in the Midlands some three years ago being the only volume catalogued.

In any case there can hardly be a large public for so special an interest, and it will probably be best, as you indicate, to issue a limited edition at a high price and appeal direct by prospectus to collectors. The success of the publication would be then largely dependent on the beauty of the illustrations and the general “get up” of the volume, for although I have no doubt your text will be excellent and accurate—it must be properly “dressed” to secure attention.

Indeed I have the privilege of knowing your novels well. They have always appealed to me as having the cardinal qualities of courage and actuality. Complete frankness combined with delicacy and literary skill is so rare with modern-day writers that your work stands out.

Could you very kindly make it convenient to call here so that we may discuss the details and plan for the Staffordshire book? This would save a good deal of correspondence.

I will gladly keep any appointment you make—please avoid Saturday, as I try to take that day off at this time of year to go to a little fishing I have in Hampshire.

Yours faithfully,

Gabriel Stanton.

Mrs. Capel.

No. 3.

211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

February 1st, 1902.

Dear Sir:—

I am obliged by your courteous letter, and will be with you at four o’clock whichever day suits you. I propose to bring with me a short synopsis of “The Staffordshire Potters, Their Inspiration and Results,” and also a couple of specimens from which you might make experiments for illustrations. I want to place the book definitely before writing it.

Domestic circumstances with which I need not trouble you, they are I fear already public property, make it advisable I should remain, if not sequestered, at least practically in retreat for the next few months. I find I cannot concentrate my mind on a novel at this juncture. But my cottages and quaint figures, groups and animals, jugs and plates, retain their attraction, and I shall do a better book about them now, when I am dependent on things and isolated from people, than I should at any other time.

It is good of you to say what you do about my novels, but I doubt if I shall ever write another. My courage has turned to cowardice, and under cross-examination I found my frankness was no longer complete. I have taken a dislike to humanity.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Capel.

No. 4.

211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

February 6th, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:—

The agreement promised has not yet arrived; nor your photographer; but I have made a first selection for him, and I think you will find it sufficiently varied according to your suggestion. Thirty illustrations in colour and seventy in monochrome will give the cream of my collection, and be representative, although of course not exhaustive. I have 375 specimens, no two alike! Ten groups, with the dancing dogs for the half-title, six cottages, six single figures, and the rest animal pieces will all look well in the process you showed me. I propose the large so-called classical examples in monochrome; their undoubted coarseness will then be toned down in black or brown and none of their interest destroyed. Julia, Lady Tweeddale, has one piece of which I have never been able to secure a duplicate, and so has Mr. Montague Guest. Do you think it advisable to ask permission to photograph these for inclusion, or would it be better to use only my own collection, and keep to the personal note in the letterpress?

Our brief interview gave me the feeling that I may ask you for help in any difficulty or perplexity that occurs in the preparation of a work so new to me. You were very kind to me. I daresay I seemed to you nervous and uncertain of how I meant to proceed. I felt like a trembling amateur in that big office of yours. I have never interviewed a publisher before; my novels always went by post—and came back that way too, at first! I had a false conception of publishers, based on—but I must not tell you upon whom it was based. Although why not? Perhaps you will recognise the portrait. A little pot-bellied person, Jewish or German, with a cough, or a sniff, or a sneeze, a suggestion of a coming expectoration, speaking many languages badly and apparently all at once; impressed with his own importance, talking Turgenieff and looking Abimelech. Why Abimelech I don’t know; but that is the hero of whom he reminds me. I met him at a literary garden party to which I was bidden after “The Immoralists” had been so favourably reviewed. It was given by a lady who seemed to know everybody and like no one, a keen two-bladed tongue leapt out among her guests, scarifying them. She told me Mr. Rosenstein was not only a publisher but an amorist. He looked curiously unlike it; but an introduction and a short interview turned me sceptic of my own impression, inclined me to the belief in hers.

I have wandered from my theme—your kindness, my nervousness. I shall try to do credit to your penetration. You said that you were sure I should make a success of anything I undertook! I wonder if you were right. And if my Staffordshire book will prove you so? I am going to try and make it interesting, not too technical! But my intentions vary all the time. A preliminary chapter on clays was in my first scheme, I now want instead to tell of the family history of half a dozen potters. From this I begin to dream of stories of the figures; the short-waisted husband and wife a-marketing with their basket of fruit and vegetables, the clergyman in the tithe piece, a benignant villain this, with a chucking-his-parishioners-under-the-chin expression. Dear Mr. Stanton, what will happen if it turns out that I cannot write a monograph, but am only a novelist? You said I could trust you to act as Editor and blue-pencil my redundancies. But what if it should be all redundancy? Put something about this in the agreement, will you? I want to make money, but not at your expense. I am nervous. I fear that instead of a book on Staffordshire Pottery I shall give you an illustrated volume of short stories published at five guineas!! What an outcry from the press! Already I have been called “precious.” Now they will talk of “pretentiousness”; the “grand manner” without the grand brain behind it! Will you really help and advise me? I have never felt less self-confident.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Capel.

No. 5.

118 Greyfriars’ Square, E.C.,

February 6th, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Capel:—

As we arranged at our interview yesterday I now enclose a draft contract for the book.

If there is any point not entirely clear to you please do not hesitate to tell me, and I shall be glad also of any suggestion or criticism that may occur to you in regard to possible alteration of the various clauses, and will do my best to meet your wishes. For I am more than anxious that we shall begin what I hope will prove a long and successful “partnership” with complete understanding and confidence.

Further enquiry makes me sanguine that the scheme is a good one, and we will do everything we can to produce a beautiful book.

May I say that it was a great pleasure and privilege to me to meet you here yesterday? I hope the interest you will find in this present work will afford you some relief during this time of trouble and anxiety you are passing through; and counteract to some extent at least the pettiness and publicity of litigation. I only refer to this with the greatest respect and sympathy.

There are many details, not only of the contract, but for the plan of the book, which we could certainly best arrange if we discussed them, rather than by writing.

Could you make it convenient to lunch with me one day next week? I shall be in the West End on Wednesday, and suggest the Café Royal at two o’clock.

It would be good of you to meet me there.

Yours sincerely,

Gabriel Stanton.

No. 6.

211 Queen Anne’s Gate,

February 7th, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:—

Our letters crossed. Thanks for yours with agreement. The greater part seems to me to be merely technical, and I have no observations to make about it.

Par. 2: guaranteeing that the work is in no way “a violation of any existing copyright,” etc. I think this is your concern rather than mine. You say there is a book existing on Staffordshire Pottery, perhaps you can get me a copy, and then I can see that ours shall be entirely different.

Par. 7: beginning “accounts to be made up annually,” etc., seems to give you an exceptionally long time to pay me anything that may be due. But perhaps I misunderstand it.

Therefore, and perhaps for other reasons, I very gladly accept your kind invitation to lunch with you on Wednesday at the Café Royal, and will be there at two, bringing the agreement with me.

With kind regards,

Yours very truly,

Margaret Capel.

No. 7.

118 Greyfriars’ Square, E.C.,

February 13th, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Capel:—

I am breaking into the commonplace routine of a particularly tiresome business day, to give myself the pleasure of writing to you, and you will forgive me if I purposely avoid business—for indeed it seems to me today that life might be so pleasant without work. That little grumble has done me good. I want to say what I fear I did not express to you yesterday—how greatly I enjoyed our talk. It was good of you to come and more good of you to tell me something of your present difficulties. I wish I could have been more helpful—but please believe I am more sympathetic than I was able to let you know, and I do understand much of what must be trying and unhappy for you during these weeks. Counsels of perfection are poor comfort, but perhaps that some one is most genuinely in accord with you—and anxious to help in any way possible—may be of some little value.

I beg you to believe that this is so, and I should welcome the chance of being of any service to you. This all reads very formal I fear, but your kindness must interpret the spirit rather than the letter.

Last evening I went into an old curiosity shop to try and find a wedding-present for a niece who is also my god-daughter, and I secured six beautiful Chippendale chairs. Curiously enough the man showed me what he said was the best specimen of Staffordshire he had ever had. A group of musicians—seeming to my inexperienced eye good in colour and design. I know not what impulse persuaded me to buy the piece. Today I am fearing that my purchase is not genuine. May I bring it to you on Sunday for approval or condemnation? Don’t trouble to answer if you will be at home—I will call at five o’clock.

Now I must return to less pleasant business affairs—the telephone is insistent.

Yours very sincerely,

Gabriel Stanton.

No. 8.

211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

14th February, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:—

Thank you so much for your kind letter, it made a charming savoury to that little luncheon you ordered. Did I tell you how much I enjoyed it? If not, please understand I am doing so now. The mousse was a dream of delight, the roses were very helpful. I have a theory about flowers and food, and how to blend them. Which reminds me that my father wants to share with me in the pleasure of your acquaintance and bids me ask if you will dine with us on the 24th at eight o’clock. This of course must not prevent your coming Sunday afternoon with your pottery “find.” I am more than curious, I am devoured with curiosity to see it. I don’t know a Staffordshire “group of musicians,” it sounds like Chelsea! Bring it by all means, but if it is Staffordshire and not in my collection, I warn you I shall at once begin bargaining with you, spending my royalties in advance! Yes! I think I hate business too, as you say, and should like to avoid it. We were fairly successful, by the way, in the Café Royal! Our talk ranged over a large field, became rather personal—I think I spoke too freely; it must have been the Steinberger! or because I am really very worried and depressed. Depression is the old age of the emotions, and garrulousness its distressing symptom.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Capel.

No. 9.

118 Greyfriars’ Square, E.C.,

15th February, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Capel:—

I am so glad to have your letter and look forward to Sunday. Should my little pottery “find” prove authentic I have no doubt we can arrange for its transfer to you, on business or even un-business lines!

I accept with pleasure your invitation to dinner on the 24th. I have heard often of your father from my friend Wilfrid Henning, who attends to what little investments I make—and who meets your father in connection with that big Newfoundland scheme for connecting the traffic from the Eastern ports to Lake Ontario. I should value the opportunity to hear of it, first hand.

Yours most sincerely,

Gabriel Stanton.

No. 10.

211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

16th February, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:—

I am no longer puzzled about the “musicians”; it is Staffordshire, I was convinced of that from the first but had to confirm my impression. I will tell you all about it when we meet again (on the 24th), I am sure you will be interested. I want you to let me have it. Whatever you paid for it I will give you, and any profit you like. I won’t bargain with you, but I really feel I can never part with it again. It was a wonderful chance that you should find it. Wasn’t Sunday altogether strange? Such a crowd, and so difficult to talk. I shall have to get out of London, I have a sense of fatigue all the time, of restless incoherent fear. I dread sympathy, and scent curiosity as if it were carrion. In that little talk I had among the tea-things I said none of the things I meant. I believe you understood this, although you only said yes, and yes again to my wildest suggestions. I am only epigrammatic when I am shy; it is the form taken by my mental stammer. Epigrams come to me too, when I have a scene in my head too big to write. I find my hand shaking, heart beating, tremulous. Then my queer brain relieves the pressure on my feelings and stammers out my scene in short cryptic sentences. That is why, although I am an emotional thinker, I am what you are pleased to call an intellectual writer.

And now for the agreement, in which I have ventured to make alterations, and even additions. Will you return it to me with comments if you think I have been too difficult or exacting. My father tells me I have inherited his business ability. He means to pay me a compliment, but I gather your point of view is that business ability is but deformity in an intellectual woman? I’m sorry for this deformity of mine, realising the unfavourable impression it may create. Try and forgive me for it, won’t you? You need not even remember it when you are telling me what I am to give you for the Staffordshire piece!

With kind regards,

Yours very sincerely,

Margaret Capel.

No. 11.

118 Greyfriars’ Square, E.C.,

17th February, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Capel:—

What good news about the little “Staffordshire” piece! I am really delighted. Please don’t mar my pleasure in thinking of it happily housed with you by questions of price or bargaining. Rather add to my pride in my “find” by accepting it as a small recognition of my great good fortune in having made your acquaintance.

Out of the chatter and clatter of the tea on Sunday the things you said remain with me; if they were epigrams they were vivid and to me very real.

I hated everything that interrupted—and hated going away. Quite humbly I say that I think I did understand, and was longing to tell you so. But I have never had the tongue of a ready speaker, and as I left your beautiful home I was choked with unspoken words a cleverer man would have found more quickly.

How much I wished I could have expressed myself. I wanted to say that I had no hateful curiosity, but only an overwhelming sympathy and desire for your confidence, a bedrock craving for your friendship. May I be your friend? May I? Or am I presuming on your kindness and too short an acquaintanceship?

Anyhow, I can’t write on business, the contract is to go through with all your alterations.

Looking forward to the 24th, I need only sign,

Au revoir,

Yours very truly,

Gabriel Stanton.

No. 12.

211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

18th February, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:—

I don’t know what to say about “The Musicians,” that is why I have not already written to say it! I have not put the group into my collection, it is on my bedroom mantelpiece. I see it when I first wake in the morning, it is the last thing upon which my tired eyes rest before I turn off the light at night. Sometimes I think those musicians are playing the prelude to the friendship of which you speak.

I wonder why you are so curiously sympathetic to me, and why I mind so little admitting it. Friendship has been rare in my life. You offer me yours, and I am on the point of accepting it; thinking all the time what it may mean, what I can give you in return. An hour now and again of detached talk, a great deal of trouble with my literary affairs ... there is not much in that for you; is there? Are the Musicians really a gift? They must go on playing to me softly then, and the prelude be slow and long-drawn-out. I am afraid even of friendship, that is the truth. I’m disillusioned, disappointed, tired. Nothing has ever happened to me as I meant it. When I first came from America with my father, I was full of the wildest hopes, and now I have outlived them all. It is not an affectation, it is a profound truth, and at twenty-eight I find myself worn out, dimmed, exhausted. I have had fame (a small measure of it, but enough for comparison), wealth, and that horrid nightmare, love.

My father spoiled me when I was small, believed too much in me. He thought me a genius, and I ... perhaps I thought so too. I puzzled and perplexed him, and he felt overweighted with his responsibilities, with character-studying an egotistic girl of sixteen. The result was a stepmother. Can you imagine what I suffered! She began almost immediately to suffocate me with her kindness. She too admitted I was a genius. Do you know we had the idea, these besotted parents of mine and I, that I was to be a great pianist! I practised many hours a day, sustained by jellies, and beef-tea and encouragement. I had the best teachers, a few weeks in Dresden with Lentheric, my father poured out his money like water. The end of that period was a prolonged fainting fit, the first of many, the discovery I had a weak heart, that the exertion of piano-playing affected it unfavourably. I came back from Dresden at eighteen, was presented the same year, the papers said I was beautiful; father put himself out of the way to be nice to pressmen; he had acquired the habit in America whilst he was building up his fortune. That I was accounted beautiful and could play Chopin and was to have a fortune, made me appear also brilliant. My father paid for the printing of my first book. My first one-act play was performed at a West End theatre. Then I met James Capel. Mr. Justice Jeune knows the story of my married life better than any one else. I was high-spirited before it began. At the end of a year I was physically, mentally, morally a wreck. I don’t know which of us hated the other more, my husband or I. Anyway, he made no objection to my returning to my father. My stepmother’s suffocating kindness descended upon me again, and now I found it healing. When I was healed I wrote “The Immoralists.” Then my father’s pride in me revived. He and my stepmother kept open house and collected celebrities to show the dimness of their light as a background for my supposed more brilliant shining! Society was pleased to come, my father growing always richer.... I wrote “The Farce of Fearlessness” and “Love and the Lutist” about this time, and my other play. When my husband made it imperative by his proved and public blackguardism I resorted to the law, and acting under advice, fought him in the arena he chose, and have now won my freedom, but at an incredible, hardly yet to be realised cost, all my wounds exposed in the market-place.

I wonder why I am recapitulating all this. I think it is to show you I am in no mood for friendship. There are times when I am savage with pain, and times when I am exhausted from it, times when I feel bruised all over, so tender that the touch of a word brings tears, times when my overwhelming pity for myself leaves me incapable of realizing anything beyond my wrongs. I say I have won my freedom, but even this is untrue: at present I have only won six months of probation, during which I am still James Capel’s wife. Sometimes I think I shall never live through them, the stain of my connection with him is like mortification.

The prelude played by the Musicians is a prelude to a dream.

And still I am grateful you gave them to me.

Yours very truly,

Margaret Capel.

When I had read as far as this the codein exerted its influence. My eyelids drooped, I slept and recovered myself. The sense of what I was reading began to escape, I knew it was time to put the bundle away. There were not very many more letters. I put all the papers on the table by my side, then dropped off. Margaret betrayed herself completely in her letters. Gabriel Stanton was still a strange unrealisable figure.

CHAPTER V

The few words I had with Nurse Benham the next morning cleared the air and the situation between us. The strange thing was that at first she did not notice the parcel at all, still loose and untidy in the paper in which Dr. Kennedy had enwrapped it. Not until I told her to be careful not to spill the tea over it did it strike her to wonder how it came there.

“Did Suzanne give you that?” she asked suspiciously.

“She has not been in my room since you left me.”

“That’s the very parcel you asked for the other night. How ever did you get hold of it?”

“After you left me I got out of bed and fetched it.”

“You got out of bed!” She grew red in the face with rage or incredulity.

“Yes, twice. Once for the parcel and once for the scissors!”

She did not speak at once, standing there with her flushed face. So I went on:

“It is absurd for you to insist on me doing this or that, or leaving it undone. You are here to take care of me, not to bully and tyrannise over me.”

“I am no good to you at all. I’d better go. You will take matters into your own hands. I never knew such a patient, never. One would think you’d no sense at all, that you didn’t know how ill you were.”

“That is no reason why I should not be allowed to get better. Believe me, the only way for that to come about is that I should be allowed to lead my own life in my own way.”

“To get up in the middle of the night with the window wide open, to walk about the room in your nightgown!”

“I should not have done so, you know, if you had passed me the things when I asked you for them.”

“You don’t want a nurse at all,” she repeated.

“Yes, I do. What I don’t want is a gaoler.”

I was on the sofa when Dr. Kennedy called, the papers on the table beside me. He asked eagerly what I thought of them:

“I see you have got at them. Are you disappointed, exhilarated? Are they illuminative? Tell me about them; I want so much to hear.”

He had forgotten to ask how I was.

“I will tell you about them presently. I haven’t read them all. Up to now they are certainly disappointing, if not dull! They are business letters, to begin with. But it is obvious she is trying to get up something like a flirtation with him.”

“Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes! I have watched Ella, my sister Mrs. Lovegrove, for years. She is past mistress of the art of flirtation. Sentiment and the appeal of her femininity, a note of unhappiness and the suggestion the man’s friendship may assuage it....”

“Mrs. Lovegrove is a very charming woman. But Margaret Capel was not in the least like her.”

“Or any other woman?”

“No.”

“You have put yourself out of court. No woman is unlike any other. Your ‘pale fair Margaret’ admits, from the first, that Gabriel Stanton attracts her. And this at a moment when she should allow herself to be attracted by no man. When she has just gone through the horrors of the Divorce Court.”

“You are not bringing that up against her?”

“I am not bringing anything up against her. But you asked me about the letters. I have only read a dozen of them, and that is how they strike me. A little dull and, on her part, flirtatious.”

“I hope you won’t do the book at all if you don’t feel sympathetic.”

“Believe me I shall be sympathetic if there is anything with which to sympathise. Do you know her early life, or history? It is hinted at, partly revealed here, but I should like to see it clearly.”

“Won’t she tell you herself?” He smiled. I answered his smile.

“She has left off coming since I have begun to get well. I shall have to write the book, if I write it at all, without further help. By the way, talking about getting better, I know that doctoring bores you, but I want to know how much better I am going to get? I am as weak as a rat; my legs refuse to carry me, my hand shakes when I get a pen in it. I shall get the story into my head from these papers,” I added, with something of the depression that I was feeling: “But I don’t see how I am to get it out again. I don’t see how I shall ever have the strength to put it on paper.”

“That will come. There is no hurry about that. As a matter of fact I believe letters are copyright for fourteen years. It isn’t twelve yet.”

It was not worth while to put him right on the copyright acts.

“You’ll be going downstairs next week, you’ll be at your writing-table, her writing-table in the drawing-room. You ask me about her early life. I only know her father was a wealthy American absolutely devoted to her. He married for the second time when she was fifteen or sixteen and they both concentrated on her. She was remarkable even as a child, obviously a genius, very beautiful.”

“She outgrew that,” I said emphatically.

“She was a very beautiful woman,” he insisted. And then said more lightly, “You must remember you have only seen her ghost.” The retort pleased me and I let the subject of Margaret Capel’s beauty drop. She interested me less when I felt well, and notwithstanding my active night I felt comparatively well this morning. Since I could not get him to take my weakness seriously I told him my grievance against nurse.

“When she hears I am to go down next week she will have a fit. I wish for once you would use your medical authority and tell her I am on no account to be contradicted or thwarted.”

“I’ll tell her so if you like, but I never see her. She runs like a rabbit when I come near.”

“You are not professional enough for her taste, there are too few examinations and prescriptions. How is my unsatisfactory lung, by the way? Give a guess, something scientific to retail. I must keep Ella informed.”

“There has not been time for the physical signs to have cleared up yet. I’ll listen if you like, but after seeing all those specialists I should have thought you were tired of saying ‘99’.”

“They varied it sometimes. ‘999’ seems to be the latest wheeze.”

“I wish you had not left off seeing Margaret,” he sighed.

“It is a pity,” I laughed at him. “You should not have dropped giving me the morphia so soon.”

“You wouldn’t have it.”

“It was dulling my brain. I felt myself growing stupid and more stupid.”

“You only had one-quarter grain twice a day for the inside of a week, and there was atropin in it. If it had really had a deadening effect upon you you would not have refused it, but just gone on. Not that I believe anything would ever dull your brain.”

I wished Ella could have heard him, it would have confirmed her in her folly and made for my amusement. He left shortly after paying me that remarkable compliment, but stopped on his way out to speak to Benham. The immediate effect of his words was to make her silent and perhaps sullen for a few hours. After which, but still under protest, she gave me whatever I asked for, and began to be more like other nurses in the time she took off duty for exercise, sleep, and meals. She even yawned in my face on the rare occasions when I summoned her in the night. I tried to chaff her back into good humour, but without much success.

“Do you find me any worse for having got out of leading strings?” I asked her. “Have pencils and MS. paper sent up my temperature?”

“You are not out of the wood yet,” she retorted angrily.

“No, but I am enjoying its umbrageous rest,” I returned. “Reading my papers in the shadows.”

“Shadow enough!”

“That’s right. Mind you go on keeping up my spirits.” She did smile then, but she was obviously dissatisfied, both with me and Dr. Kennedy. I was taking no drugs, doing a little more each day, in the way of moving about. And yet I could not call myself convalescent. My legs were stiff and my back heavy. I had no feeling of returning vigour. What little I did I forced myself to do. I had hardly the energy to finish the letters. Had it not been for Dr. Kennedy I don’t believe, at this stage, I should have finished them! Although the next two or three set me thinking, and I was again visualising the writers. Not that Gabriel Stanton betrayed himself in his letters, as Margaret did in hers. I had to reconcile him with the donnish master of Greek roots, whom I had met and been ignored by, in Greyfriars’ Square. This was his answer to her last effusion.

No. 13.

118 Greyfriars’ Square,

19th February, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Capel:—

I have read your letter ten—twenty times; my business day was filled and transformed by it. Now it is midnight and I am alone in the stillness of my room, the routine of the day and the evening over, and my brain, not always very quick, alight with the wonderment of your words, and my restless anxiety to respond. Don’t, I implore you, belittle the possibility of friendship!

Surely the value of it is only proved by its needs?

May I not say that in this crisis in your life friendship may be much to you. Can I hope that my privilege may be to fill the need?

You have been so splendidly frank and outspoken. I have suffered all my life from a sort of stupid reticence, probably cowardly. But tonight, and to you, I want to throw off the habit of years and not miss, before it is too late, the luxury of being natural.

Well, I am hot with hatred that you should have been hurt, and yet I am happy that you have told me of your wounds. Tonight I pray that it may be given to me to heal them.

I am writing this because I must—though conventionally the shortness of our acquaintance does not justify me. But I have been conventional so long—circumstance has ruled and limited my doings. And tonight it comes to me that chance and fate are, or should be, greater than environment. The Gods only rarely offer gifts, and the blackness and blankness of despair follow their refusal. So I cling to the hope that they have now offered me a precious gift, and that in spite of all your pain—all the past which now so embitters you, to me may come the chance in some small way of proving to you that in friendship there is healing, and in sympathy and understanding, at least the hope of forgetfulness.

I shall hardly dare to read over what I have written, for I should either be conscious that it is inadequate to express what I have wanted to say to you—or that I have presumed too much in writing what is in my mind.

Look upon those Musicians as playing a prelude, not to a dream but to a happier future, and then my pleasure in the little gift will be enormously increased.

It has been a sort of joke in my family that I am over-cautious and too deliberate, but for tonight at least in these still quiet hours I mean to conquer this, and go out to post this letter myself; just as I have written it, with no alteration; yet with confidence in the kindness you have already shown me.

And I shall see you at dinner on Thursday.

Yours very sincerely,

Gabriel Stanton.

A little over a fortnight passed before there was any further correspondence. Meanwhile the two must have met frequently. Her letters were often undated, and her figures even more difficult to read than her handwriting generally. The hieroglyphic over the following looks like 5, but I could not be sure. The intimacy between them must have grown apace, and yet the running away could have been nothing but a ruse. There could have been little fear of so sedate a lover as Gabriel Stanton. I found something artificial in the next letter of hers, recapitulative, as if already she had publication in her mind. Of course it is more difficult for a novelist or a playwright to be genuine and simple with a pen than it is for a person of a different avocation, but I could not help thinking how much better than Margaret Ella would have acted her part, and my sympathy began to flow more definitely toward the inexperienced gentleman, no longer young, to whom she was introducing the game of flirtation under the old name of Platonic friendship.

No. 14.

Carbies,

Pineland,

March 5th, 1902.

I have run away, you realise this, don’t you, simply turned tail and run. That long dinner which seemed so short; the British Museum the next day, and your illuminating lecture so abruptly ended—that dreadful lunch ... boiled fish and ginger beer! Ye Gods! Greek or Roman, how could you appear satisfied, eat with appetite? I sickened in the atmosphere. Thursday at the National Gallery was better. Our taste in pictures is the same if our taste in food differs. But perhaps you did not know what you were given in the refreshment room of the British Museum? I throw out this suggestion as an extenuating circumstance, for I find it difficult to forgive you that languid cod and its egg sauce. Our other two meals together were so different. That first lunch at the Café Royal was perfect in its way. As for our dinner, did I not myself superintend the ménu, curb the exuberance of the chef and my stepmother; dock the unfashionable sorbet; change Mayonnaise sauce into Hollandaise; duck and green peas into an idealised animal of the same variety, stuffed with foie gras, enriched and decorated with cherries? For you I devoted myself to the decoration of the table, interested myself in the wine list my father produced, discussed vintages with our pompous and absurd butler. I must tell you a story about that butler. You said he looked like an Archdeacon. Can you imagine an Archdeacon in the Divorce Court? No! No! No! Nothing to do with mine. Had it been I could not have written of it, the very thought sets me writhing again. Poor Burden was with the Sylvestres, you remember the case. Everybody defended and it was fought for five interminable days. The papers devoted columns to it, nothing else was discussed in the Clubs, the whole air of London—Mayfair end—was fœtid and foul with it. Burden was a witness, he had seen too much, and his evidence sent poor silly Ann Sylvestre to hide her divorced and disgraced head in Monte Carlo. And can a head properly ondulé be said to be divorced? Heavens! how my pen runs on, or away, like me. And I haven’t come to the story, which now I come to think of it is not so very good. I will tell you it in Burden’s own words. He applied for our situation through a registry office, and stood before my stepmother and me, hat in hand, sorrowful, but always dignified, as he answered questions.

“My last situation was with a Mrs. Solomon. I’m sorry, milady, to have to ask you to take up a character from such people. I’d always been in the best service before that.... I was hallboy with the Jutes, third and then second with His Grace the Duke of Richland, first footman under the Countess Foreglass. I was five years with the Sylvestres; you know, Ma’am, he was first cousin to the Duke of Trent, near to the Throne itself, as one might say. I’d never lowered myself to an untitled family before. But after the divorce I couldn’t get nothing. Ma’am, I hope you’ll believe me, but from the moment I accepted Mr. Solomon’s place all I was planning to do was to get out of it. They was Jews, if I may mention such a thing to you. I took ten pounds a year less than I’d had at his Lordship’s, but Mr. Solomon, he said in his facetious way that being in the witness box ’ad knocked at least ten pounds off my value, an’ he ground me down. But I’ll have to ask you to take up my character from him. That’s the worst of it, Ma’am, milady.”

We had to break it to him that we were without titles, but he said sorrowfully that having been in a witness box in the divorce court made it impossible for him to stand out.

Burden and I have always been on good terms. I understand him, you see, his point of view, and his descent in the social scale when he went to live with Jews. What I was going to tell you was, that notwithstanding our friendship he resented my interference in his department when I insisted on selecting the wine for your—our—dinner party. I am almost sorry I quarrelled with him on your account. He looks at me coldly now, he is remembering my American blood, despising it. And to think I have lost the priceless regard of Burden for a man who can eat boiled and tired cod, masked with egg sauce, washed down with ginger beer!

Where was I? The sculpture at the British Museum; then the next day at the National Gallery. Our spirits kneeled there; we grew small. No, we didn’t, I’m disingenuous. We said so, not meaning it in the least. After twenty minutes we forgot all about the pictures. Rumpelmayer’s, St. James’s Park, out to Coombe.

Did you realise we were seeing each other every day, how much time we spent together?

Am I eighteen or twenty-eight? You’ve a reputation for knowing more about Greek roots than any other Englishman. Should I have run away down here if you had talked about Greek roots? I’m excited, exhausted, bewildered. For three nights sleep failed me. Nothing is so wonderful as a perfect friendship between a man of your age and a woman of mine. Why did you change your mind, or your note, so quickly yesterday? I knew all the time what was happening to us. I think there is something arrogant in your humility. I am naturally so much more outspoken than you, although my troubles have made me more fearful. You are a strange man. I think you may send me a portrait. When I try to recall you, you don’t always come whole, only bits of you, inconsistent bits, a gleam of humour in your eyes, your stoop, the height that makes us so incongruous together. I like you, Gabriel Stanton, and I’ve run away from you; that’s the truth. That disingenuous aggressive humility of yours is a subtle appeal to my sympathies. I don’t want to sympathise with you overmuch, with the loneliness of your life, or anything about you. We were meeting too often, talking too freely. I curl up and want to hide when I think of some of the things we have said (I have said!!!). I know I am too impulsive.

I’m going to settle down here and start seriously on my Staffordshire Potters. I’ve taken the house for three months. If I had not already written the longest letter ever penned I’d describe it to you. Perhaps I’ll write again if you encourage me. Think of me as a novelist out of work, using up my MS. paper. Down here everything has become unreal. You and I, but especially “us”! I want everything to be unreal, I’m not strong enough for more reality. Keep unsubstantial. I don’t suppose you will understand me (I am not sure that I understand myself). But you begged me to “let myself go,” “pour myself out on you.” Can I take your strength and lean upon it, the tenderness you promise me and revel in it, all that I believe you are offering me, and give you nothing? I am mean, afraid of giving. It all came so quickly, so unexpectedly. I have never had a real companion. Never, never, never even as a child been wholly natural with anybody, posing always. The only daughter of a millionaire with more talent than she ought to have, a shy soul behind a brazen forehead, is in a difficult position. To undrape that shy soul of mine as you so nearly make me do, unwillingly—but it might happen—makes me shiver. That’s why I ran away, I want to be isolated, to stand alone. Here is the truth again, not at the bottom of a well, but at the end of an interminable letter. I am afraid of pain, and this intimacy presages it. You cannot be all I think you. I don’t want to be near enough to see your clay feet.

I am going to get some picture postcards with small space for writing; this MS. paper demoralises me.

Sincerely,

Margaret Capel.

No. 15.

Will you ever know what your dear wonderful letter has given me? I passed through moments of doubt, of bewildered unbelief into a golden trance of joy and hope. And as again and again I read it some of your far braver personality fills me, and I refuse to think this new spring of hope is a mere dream, and take courage and tell myself I am something to you—something in your life, and that to me, Gabriel Stanton, has come at last the chance of helping, tending, caring for against all the world if need be, such a woman as Margaret Capel.

Let me revel in this new strange happiness. You are too kind, too generous to destroy it! For it is all strange and marvellous to me—I’ve lived so much alone—have missed so much by circumstance and the fault of what you call my “aggressive humility.” I can help you! As I write I feel I want nothing else in life. Oh! my wonderful friend, don’t let us miss a relationship which on my part I swear to you shall be consecrated to your service, to your happiness in any and every way you decide or will ask. Let me come into your life, give me the chance of healing those wounds which have bruised you grievously, but can never conquer your brave spirit. You must let me help.

You have gone away, but your dear letter is with me—it is so much your letter—so much you that I am not even lonely any more. And yet I long to see you—hear you talk, be near you. Thoughts—hopes—ideas, crowd upon me tonight, things to tell you——It is like having a new sense—I’ve wakened up in a new and so beautiful country. Do you wish for those weeks of solitude? Only what you wish matters. But I confess I’ve looked up the trains to Pineland. I will come on any day at any moment you say. There is no duty that could keep me should you say “come.” Give me at least one chance of seeing you in your new home. Then I will keep away and respect your solitude if you wish it.

The joy of your letter and the golden castles I am building help the hours until I hear from you.

G. S.

It is my opinion still that she only ran away in order to bring him after her, to secure a greater solitude than they could enjoy in places of public resort, or in her father’s house. I don’t mean that she deliberately planned what followed, but had that been her intention she could have devised no better strategy than to leave him at the point at which they had arrived without a word of farewell other than that letter. As for me, when I had finished reading it and the answer, I had recourse to the diary and MS. notes. They would, however, have been of but little use had not a second dose of codein that night brought me again in closer relation with the writer.

CHAPTER VI

As I said, I took two codein pills instead of one that night, and in an hour or so was conscious of the comfort and phantasmagoria of morphia. I was no longer in the bedroom of which I had tired, nor in the rough garden without trees or shade. I had escaped from these and in returning health was beside the sea, happily listening to the little waves breaking on the stones, no soul in sight but those two, Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton, in earnest talk that came to me as I sat with my back against a rock, the salt wind in my face. How it was they did not see me and moderate their voices I do not know, morphia gives one these little lapses and surprises.

Margaret looked extraordinarily sedate and yet perverse, her thin lips pink and eyes dancing. I saw the incandescent effect of which Peter Kennedy had told me. It was not only her eyes that were alight but the woman herself, the luminous fair skin and the fairness of her hair stirred and brightened by the sun and the sea-wind. She talked vividly, whilst he sat at her feet listening intently, offering her the homage of his softened angularities, his abandoned scholarship, his adoring eyes.

“Why did you come? I told you not to come. Of course I meant to wire in answer to your letter that you were to stay in London. What was the use of my running away?”

I saw that he fingered the hem of her skirt, and watched her all the time she spoke.

“Tomorrow I shall have no expectation in the post. I hate not to care whether my letters come or not. And Monday too. You have spoiled two mornings for me.”

“I am not as satisfying as my letters to you.” Even his voice was changed, the musical charming Stanton voice. His had deepened and there was the note of an organ in it. She looked at him critically or caressingly.

“Not quite, not yet. I understand your letters better than I do you. And you are never twice alike, not quite alike. We part as friends, intimates. Then we come together again and you are almost a stranger; we have to begin all over again.”

“I am sorry.” He looked perplexed. “How do I change or vary? I cannot bear to think that you should look upon me as a stranger.”

“Only for a few moments.”

“When you met me at the station today?”

“I was at the station early, and then was vexed I had come, looking about me to see if there were any one I knew or who knew me. I took refuge at the bookstall, found ‘The Immoralists’ among the two-shilling soiled.” She left off abruptly, and her face clouded.

“Don’t!” he whispered.

“How quick you are!” Now their hands met. She smiled and went on talking. “I heard a click and saw that the signals were down. The train rounded the curve and came in slowly. People descended; I was conscious of half a dozen, although I saw but one. No, I didn’t see you, only your covert coat and felt hat. I felt a pang of disappointment.” Their hands fell apart. I saw he was hurt. She may have seen it too, but made no sign.

“It was not your fault, you had done nothing ... you just were not as I expected you. You had cut yourself shaving, for one thing.” He put his hand to his chin involuntarily, there was barely a scratch. “As we walked back from the station my heart felt quite dead and cold. I hated the scratch on your cheek, the shape of your hat, everything.” He turned pale. “I wondered how I was going to bear two whole days, what I should say to you.”

“We talked!”

“I know, but it was outside talk, forced, laboured. You remember, ‘How warm the weather was in London’; and that the train was not too full for comfort. You had papers in your hand, the Saturday Review, the Spectator. You spoke of an article by Runciman in the first.”

“You seemed interested.”

“I was thinking how we were going to get through the two days. What I had ever seen in you, why I thought I liked you so much.”

He was quite dumb by now, the sunken eyes were full of pain, the straight austere mouth was only a line; he no longer touched the hem of her dress.

“You left me in the garden of the hotel when you went to book a room, to leave your bag. I sat on a seat in the garden and looked at the sea, the blue wonder of the sea, the jagged coast-line, and one rock that stood out, then hills and always more hills, the sky so blue, spring in the air. Gabriel ...” she leaned forward, touched him lightly on the shoulder. A deep flush came over his face, but he did not move nor put up his hand to take hers. “You were only gone ten minutes. I could not have borne for you to have been away longer. There were a thousand things I wanted to say to you, that I knew I could say to no one but you. About the spring and my heart hunger, what it meant.”

“And when I came out I suppose all you remembered was that I had cut myself shaving?”

She seemed astonished at the bitterness of his tone.

“You are not angry with me, are you?”

“No! Not angry. How could I be?”

“When you came out and I felt rather than saw you were moving toward me across the grass I thought of nothing but that you were coming; that we were going to have tea together, on the ricketty iron table, that I should pour it out for you. That after that we should walk here together, and then you would go home with me, dine together at Carbies, talk and talk and talk....”

He could not help taking her hand again, because she gave it to him, but his face was set and serious.

“Tell me, is it the same with you as it is with me? Am I a stranger to you sometimes? Different from what you expect? Do I disappoint you, and leave you cold, almost as if you disliked me? Don’t answer. I expect, I know it is the same with you. You find me plain, gone off, you wonder what you ever saw in me.”

He answered with a quiet yet passionate sincerity:

“When I see you after an interval my heart rushes out to you, my pulses leap. I feel myself growing pale. I am paralysed and devoid of words. Margaret! My very soul breathes Margaret, my wonderful Margaret. I cannot get my breath.” Her eyes shone and exulted.

“It is not like that always?” she whispered, leaning towards him.

“It is like that always. But today it was more than that. I had not seen you for a week, a whole long week. Sometimes in that week I had not dared look forward.”

“And then you saw me.” She was hanging upon his words. He got up abruptly and walked a few paces away from her, to the edge of the sea. She smiled quietly to herself when he left her like that. He was suffering, he could not bear the contrast between what she had thought of him and he of her.

“Gabriel!” she called him back presently, called softly and he came swiftly.

“I had better go back to town by the next train. I disappoint you.”

“Silly!” She was amazingly, alluringly smiling into his dour eyes, not satisfied until he smiled too. “It is my sense of style. I am like grammar; all moods and tenses. You want me to tell you everything, don’t you?”

“Am I the man for you? that is what I want you to tell me. I don’t know what you mean by that sense of strangeness—I cannot bear it.”

“Don’t you vary? wonder, doubt?”

“I always knew from the first afternoon when you were shown into my room in Greyfriars’, your black fur framing your exquisite porcelain face, your eyes like wavering stars, that you were the only woman in the world. Since then the conviction of it grows deeper and deeper, more certain. You are never out of my mind. I know I am not good enough for you, too old and grave. But you have let me hope. Oh! you wonderful child.” For still she was smiling at him in that dazzling alluring way. He was at her feet and the hem of her dress again against his lips. “Don’t you understand, can’t I make you understand? I adore you, I worship you. I want nothing from you except that you let me tell you so sometimes.”

“It is so much nicer when you write it,” she murmured.

“Don’t.” She cajoled him.

“I can’t take it lightly,” he burst out. “Pity me, forgive me, but don’t laugh at me.”

“I am not laughing.”

“I know. You are an angel of sweetness, goodness. Margaret, let me love you!”

I was back again in bed, very drowsy and comfortable, wondering how I had got there, what had happened, what time it was. I took a drink of lemonade and thought what a bad night I was having. I remembered my dream; it had been very vivid, and I was sorry for Gabriel Stanton and tried to remember what had become of him, when I had heard of or seen him last; it must have been a long time ago. Margaret was a minx. If ever I wrote about them it would be to tell the truth, to analyse and expose the spirit and soul of a woman flirt. And again when I lay down I thought of what the critics would say of this fine and intimate study, this human document that I was to give the world. Phrases came to me, vivid lightning touches ... I hoped I should be able to remember them, but hardly doubted it, for others came, even better than these, and then in consequence, sleep....

Benham said in the morning:

“Whatever did you take another pill for? Was anything the matter with you? You could have called me up.”

“But you might have argued with me.”

“I am sure I don’t know what good a nurse is to you at all!”

“You would be invaluable if you would only get it into your head that I am not a mental case. Don’t you realise that I am a very clever woman, quite as clever as you?”

“I don’t call it clever to retard your own recovery.”

“Am I going to recover?” I asked quickly.

“Your beloved Dr. Kennedy says you are.”

“By the way, is he coming today?”

“It isn’t many days he misses.”

“He comes to protect me from you, to see I have some few privileges and ameliorations of my condition, that my confinement is not too close, my gaoler too vigilant.”

We understood each other better now, and I could chaff her without provoking anything but a difficult smile. I, of course, was a bad patient. I found it difficult to believe that I ought not to try and overcome my weakness and inertia, that it was my duty to leave off fighting and sink into invalidism as if it were a feather bed.

That afternoon she helped me to the writing-table in the drawing-room, and I sat there trying to recapture the conversation I had heard. But although I could remember every word I found it hard to write. I could lie back in the chair and look at the gorse, the distant hills, the sea, the dim wide horizon, but to lean forward, take pen in hand, dip it in the ink, write, was almost beyond that still slowly ebbing strength. I whipped myself with the thought of what weak women had done, and dying men. “My head is bloody but unbowed....” Mine was bowed then, quickly over the writing-table; tears of self-pity welled hot, but I would not let them fall. It was not because Death was coming to me. I swear that then nor ever have I feared Death. But I was leaving so much undone. I had a place, and it was to know me no more. And the world was so lovely, the promise of spring in the air. When I lifted my bowed head Peter Kennedy was there, very pitiful as I could see by his eyes, and with a new gift of silence. Silence as to essentials, at least. He did not ask what ailed me, but spoke of a breakdown to the motor, of the wonder of the April weather. I soon regained my self-possession.

“How soon after Margaret Capel came here did you make her acquaintance?” I asked him suddenly, and à propos of nothing either of us had said.

“It must have been a week or two, not more. I knew the house had been taken, but not by whom. And at first the name meant nothing to me. I am not a reading man; at least I don’t read novels.”

“Don’t apologise. I have heard of the Sporting Times, Bell’s Life.”

“Go on, gibe away, I like it. She was just the same only kinder, much kinder.”

I laughed.

“I knew she would be kind, and soft, and womanly. Didn’t she say she was lonely?”

“Yes.”

“And then say quickly: ‘But of course you are quite right. Reading is a waste of time, living everything, and you are doing a fine work, a man’s work in the world.’ She said she envied you. I can hear her saying it.” He looked ecstatic.

“So can I. Ella says the same thing.”

“Why are you so bitter?”

I could not tell him it was because I had heard other women, many women, who were all things to all men, and that I despised, or perhaps envied them, lacking their gift and so having lived lonely save for Ella and Ella’s love. Until now, when it was too late. And then I looked at him, at Dr. Kennedy, and laughed.

“Why do you laugh? You are so like and so unlike her. She would laugh for nothing, cry for nothing....”

“Tell me all about her from the beginning.” It was an excuse to rest on the cushions in the easy-chair, to cease whipping my tired conscience.

“There is little or nothing to tell. It was about a week after she came here we had the first call. Urgent, the message said. So I got on my bicycle and spun away up here. I did not even wait to get out the car.”

“What day of the week was it?” I asked, interrupting him.

“What day of the week?” he repeated in surprise.

“Yes, what day?”

“As a matter of fact it was on a Monday. What’s the point? I remember because it happens to have been my Infirmary day. I had just come home, dog-tired, but of course when the call came I had to go. I actually thought what a bore it was as I pedalled up. It’s nearly all uphill from our house to Carbies. The maid looked frightened when she opened the door.”

“Oh, sir, I am so glad you are here. Will you please come into the drawing-room? Mrs. Capel, she fainted right away. Miss Stevens has tried hartshorn an’ burnt feathers, everything we could think of.”

“Everything that had a smell?”

“Yes, sir. I perceived it as I approached the drawing-room—this room. She was on the sofa,” he looked over to it, “very pale and dishevelled, only partly conscious.”

“Who was Miss Stevens?”

“Her maid. Quite a character. Something like your nurse, only more so.”

“What did you do?”

“I felt her pulse, her heart, thought of strychnine.”

“You are not a great doctor, are you?” I scoffed lightly.

“Oh! I know my work all right; it’s simple enough. You try this drug or the other....”

“Or none, as in my case.”

“That’s right.”

“And then if the patient does not get better or her relatives get restive, you call in some one else, who makes another shot.” There was a twinkle in his eye. I always thought he knew more about medicine than he pretended. “And what did you do for Margaret?” I went on.

“Opened the window, and her dress; waited. The first thing she said was, ‘Has he gone?’ I did not know to whom she referred, but the maid told me primly: ‘Mrs. Capel’s publisher has been down for the week-end. He left this morning. She don’t know what she’s saying.’ Margaret opened her eyes, her sweet eyes, dark-irised, the light in them wavered and grew strong. She seemed to recall herself with difficulty and slowly. ‘Did I faint? I’m all right now. Is that you, Stevens? What happened?’

“‘I came in to bring your afternoon tea and you were in a dead faint, at the writing-table, all in a heap. I rang for cook and we carried you to the sofa, and tried to bring you round. Then cook telephoned for Dr. Lansdowne.’

“‘Are you Dr. Lansdowne?’

“‘He was out. I’m his partner, Dr. Kennedy. How are you feeling?’ I asked her.

“‘Better. Stevens, you can go away. Bring me some more tea. Dr. Kennedy will have a cup with me.’ She struggled into a sitting position and I helped her. Then she told me she had always been subject to these attacks, ever since she was a child, that she was to have been a pianist, had studied seriously. But the doctors forbade her practising. Now she wrote. She admitted that her own emotional scenes overcame her. Then we talked of the emotions....”

Dr. Kennedy looked at me as if enquiringly.

“Do you want to hear any more?”

“You saw her often after that?”

“Nearly every day, all the time she was here.”

“And talked about the emotions?”

“Sometimes. What are you implying? What are you trying to get at? Whatever it is, you are wrong. I was in her confidence, she liked talking to me. I did her good.”

“With drugs or dogma?” I asked.

“With sympathy. She had suffered terribly, more than any woman should be allowed to suffer. And she was ultra-sensitive, her nerves were all exposed, inflamed. You have sometimes that elusive, strange resemblance to her. But she had neither strength nor courage and as for hardness ... she did not know the meaning of the word.”

“You are wrong. Last night I heard her talk to Gabriel Stanton.”

“Did you?” His eyes lightened. “Tell me. But he was not the man for her, never the man for her. Not sufficiently flexible. He took her too seriously.”

“Can a man take a woman too seriously?”

“An emotional, nervous, delicate woman. Yes. You’ve been through all the letters?”

“No. There are a few more.”

They were on the table, and I put my hand on them. I was sure that no one but I must see them.

“The first two or three times that Gabriel Stanton came down he stayed at ‘The King’s Arms.’ She was always ill after he left, always. She made a brave effort, poor girl. Day after day I have come in and seen her sitting as you are, paper before her, and ink. I don’t think anything ever came of it. She would play too, for hours.”

“You stayed away when he was here, I suppose?”

“No! Not always. I was sent for once or twice. She had those heart attacks.”

“Hysteria?”

“Heart attacks. He did not know how to treat or calm her.”

“Poor Gabriel Stanton!”

“Poor Margaret Capel!” he retorted. “I wouldn’t try to write the story if I were you. You misjudge her, I am sure you do. She was delicate-minded.”

“Why did she have him down here at all? She knew the risk she ran. Why did she not wait until the decree was made absolute?” For by now, of course, I knew how the trouble came about.

“She was in love with him.”

“She did not know the meaning of the word. She was philandering with you at the time.” He grew red.

“She was not. I was her doctor.”

“And are not doctors men?”

“Not with their patients.”

I looked at him thoughtfully and remembered Ella. He answered as if he read my thoughts.

“You are not my patient, you are Lansdowne’s.” He gave a short uncertain laugh when he had said that. That seemed amusing to me, for I did not care whether he was a man or not, feeling ill and superlatively old and sexless, also that he lacked something, had played this game with Margaret, the game she had taught him, until his withers were all unwrung, until she had bereft him of reason, leaving him empty, as it were hollow, filled up with words, meaningless words that were part of the fine game, of which he had forgotten or never known the rules.

After he left I read her next letter, the one written after Gabriel Stanton had been to Pineland for the first time, and she had told him how she felt about him.

Carbies, Pineland.

I have been writing to you and tearing up the letters ever since you left. I look back and cannot believe you were here only two days. The two days passed like two hours, but now it seems as if we must have been together for weeks. You told me so much and I ... I exposed myself to you completely. You know everything about me, it is incredible but nevertheless true that I tried all I knew to show you the real woman on whom you are basing such high hopes. What are you thinking of me now, I wonder. That I am a little mad, not quite human? What is this genius that separates me from the world, from all my kind? My books, my little plays, my piano-playing! There is a little of it in all of them, is there not, my friend, my companion, the first person to whom I have ever spoken so frankly. Is it not true that I have a wider vision, intenser emotions than other women? Love me therefore better, and differently than any man has ever loved a woman. You say that you will, you do, that I am to pour myself out on you. I like that phrase of yours—you need never use it again, you have already used it twice.

“I shall remember while the light is yet,

And when the darkness comes I shall not forget.”

It went through me, there is nowhere it has not permeated. And see, I obey you. I no longer feel a pariah and an outcast, with all the world pointing at me. The degradation of my marriage is only a nightmare, something, as you say, that never happened. I look out on the garden and the sea beyond, on the jagged coast-line and the green tree-clad hills, all bathed in sunshine, and forget that I have suffered. I am glad to know you so intimately that I can picture each hour what you are doing. You are not happy, and I am almost glad. What could I give you if you were happy? But as it is when you are bored and wearied, with your office work, depressed in your uncongenial home, I can send you my thoughts and they will flow in upon you like fresh water to a stagnant pool. I have at times so great a sense of strength and power. At others, as you know, I am faint and fearful. Nobody but you has ever understood that I am not inconsistent, only a different woman at different times. I know I see things that are hidden from other people, not mystic things, but the great Scheme unfolded, the scheme of the world, why some suffer and some enjoy, what God means by it all. In my visions it is blindingly brilliant and clear, and I understand God as no human being has ever understood Him before. I want to be His messenger, to show the interblending marvel. I know it is for that I am here. Then I write a short story that says nothing at all, or I sit at the piano and try to express, all alone by myself, that for which I cannot find words. Afterwards I go to bed and know I am a fool, and lie awake all night, miserable enough at my futility. I have always lived like this save during those frenzied months when I thought love was the expression for which I had waited, and with my eyes on the stars, blundered into a morass. Notwithstanding we have hardly spoken of it, you know the love I ask from you has nothing in common with the love ordinary men and women have for each other, nothing at all in common. The very thought of physical love makes me sick and ill. That is still a nightmare, nothing more nor less. I want my thoughts held, not my hands. How intimate we must be for me to write you like this, and the weeks we have known each other so few.

You won’t read this in the office, you will take it home with you to the bookish and precise flat in Hampstead, and hoard it up until the little round-backed sister with her claim and her querulousness has left you in peace. She is part of that great scheme of things which evades me when I try to write it. Why should you sacrifice your freedom to make a home for her? Poor cripple, with her cramped small brain; your companion to whom you are tied like a sound man to a leper, and with whom you cannot converse and yet must sometimes talk. You cannot read or write very well in the atmosphere she creates for you, but must listen to gossip and answer fittingly, wasting the precious hours. Nevertheless you will find time to answer this letter. I shall not watch for the coming of the post and be disappointed. She does not care for you overmuch I fear, this poor sister of yours, only for herself. I am sorry she is hunchbacked and ailing. But I am sorrier still that she is your sister and burdens you. Life has given you so little. Your dreary orphaned childhood in your uncle’s large hospitable family, of which you were always the one apart, you and that same suffering sister; your strenuous schooldays. You say you were happy at Oxford, but for the cramping certainty that there was no choice of a career; only the stool at Stanton’s, and so repayment for all your uncle had done for you. My poor Gabriel, it seems to me your boyhood and your manhood have been spent. And now you have only me. Me! with hands without gifts and arid lips, an absorbing egotism, and only my passionate desire for expression. I don’t want to live; I want to write, and even for that I am not strong enough! My message is too big for me. Hold me and enfold me, I want to rest in you; you are unlike all other men because you want to give and give and give, asking nothing. And therefore you are my mate, because I am unlike all other women, being a genius. You alone of all men or women I have ever known will not doubt that I have a message, although I may never prove it. You don’t want to be proud of me, only to rest me.

Which reminds me—that book on Staffordshire Pottery will never be written. How will you explain it to your partners, and the wasted expense of the illustrations? I shall send you a business letter withdrawing; then I suppose you will say that you had better run down and discuss the matter with me. But, oh! it’s so wonderful to know that you, you yourself will know without any explaining that I cannot write about pottery just now. I have written a few verses. I will send them to you when they are polished and the rhythm is perfect. There will be little else left by then!

Write and tell me that one day you will come again to Pineland. One day, but not yet. I could not bear it, not to think of you concretely here with me again, this week or next. I want you as a light in the distance, my eyes are too weak to see you more closely.... I won’t even erase that, although it will hurt you. Sometimes I feel I am not going to bring you happiness, only drain you of sympathy.

Margaret.

Church Row, Hampstead.

My dear, dear love, you wonderful, wonderful

Margaret:—

I wish I could tell you, I wish I could begin to tell you all you mean to me, what our two days together meant to me. You ask me what I am thinking of you. If only I could let you know that, you would know everything. For your sufferings I love you, for your crucified gift and agonies. You say I am to love you better and differently than any man has ever loved woman. My angel child, I do. Can’t you feel it? Tell me you do. That is all I want, that you tell me you do know how I worship you, that it means something to you, helps you a little.

What am I to answer to your next sentence? You say you ask of me a love that has nothing in common with the love ordinary men and women have for each other, that physical love makes you sick and ill. Beloved, everything shall be as you wish between us. I would not so much as kiss the hem of your dress if you forbade it by a look, nor your delicate white hands. I love your hands. You let me hold them, you must let me hold them sometimes. Dear generous one, I will never trouble you. I am for you to use as you will, that you use me at all is gift enough. This time will pass this trying dreadful time. Until then, and afterwards if you wish it, I will be only your comrade—your very faithful knight. I love your delicacy and reserve, all you withhold from me. I yearn to be your lover, your husband; all and everything to you. Don’t hate and despise me. You say when radiant love came to you, your eyes were on the stars, and you blundered into a morass. But, sweetheart, darling, if I had been your lover—husband, do you think this would have happened? Think, think. I cannot bear that you should confuse any love with mine. I want to hold you in my arms, teach you. I can’t write any more, not now. Thank you for your letter, for my sleepless nights, for my dreams, for everything. You are my whole world.

Gabriel.

Greyfriars’.

I fear I wrote you a stupid letter last night. I had had a long evening with my sister. She insisted on reading to me from a wonderful book she has just bought. It was on some new craze with the high-sounding name of Christian Science. The book was called “Science and Health.” More utter piffle and balderdash I have never heard. There were whole sentences without meaning, and many calling themselves sentences were without verbs. I swallowed yawn after yawn. Then she left off reading and asked my opinion. I suggested the stuff might have emanated from Earlswood. She made me a dreadful scene. It seemed she had already consulted a prophetess of this new religion and had been promised she should be made whole if only she had sufficient faith! Now I was trying to “shake her faith and so retard her cure”; she sobbed. Poor woman! I tried reasoning with her, went over a few passages and asked her to note inconsistency after inconsistency, stupidity after stupidity, blasphemy and irrelevance. She cried more. Then my own unkindness struck me. She too had had a vision, seen the marvellous sun rise. To be made whole! She who had been thirty years a cripple and in pain always. I tried to withdraw all I had said, to find a strange and mystic sense and meaning in the stuff. I think I comforted her a little. I insisted she should go on with her induction, or initiation, or whatever they call it. There are paid healers; the prophets play the game for cash. I gave her money. I could not bear her thanks or to remember I had been unkind, I, with my own overwhelming happiness. If I were able I would make happiness for all the world. When at last I was alone I sat a long time with your letter in my hand, your dear, dear letter. I don’t know what I wrote; dare not recall my words. Forgive me, whatever it was. If there was a word in my letter that should not have been there forgive me. Bear with me, dear. You don’t know what you are to me, I am bewildered with the mystery.

About the book on Staffordshire Pottery. Don’t give it another thought. I can arrange everything here without any trouble. You need not write. But if you do, and suggest, as you say, that I shall come down and discuss the matter with you, why then, then—will you write? I want to come. I promise not to cut myself shaving this time. Although is it not natural my hand should have been unsteady? It shakes now. I must come and discuss the pottery book or anything. Let me. It is much to ask, but I won’t be in your way. I’ve some manuscripts to go through. I’ll never leave the hotel. But I want to be in the same place.

For ever and ever,

Your Gabriel.

CHAPTER VII

Of course she let him come. Not only that week-end but many others, until the early spring deepened into the late, the yellow gorse grew more golden, and the birds sang as they mated. It was the same time of year with me now, and I saw Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton often together in the house or garden, lying on the stones by the sea, walking toward the hills. My strength was always ebbing and I was glad to be alone, drowsily listening to or dreaming of the lovers, drugging myself with codein, seeing visions. I fancy Benham began to suspect me, counted the little silver pills that held my ease and entertainment. I circumvented her easily. Copied the prescription and sent it to my secretary in London to be made up, replaced each extra one I took. I was not getting better, although I wrote Ella in every letter of returning strength, and told her that I was again at work. My conscience had loosened a little, and I almost believed it to be true. Anyway I had the letters, and knew that when the time came it would be easy to transcribe them. Meanwhile I told myself disingenuously that I hoped to become better acquainted with my hero and heroine. I was wooing their confidence, learning their hearts. Now Gabriel’s was clear, but Margaret’s less distinct. I saw them sometimes as in a magic-lantern show, when the house was quiet, and I in the darkness of my bedroom. On the circle in the white sheet that hung then against the wall, I saw them walk and talk, he pleading, she coquetting. Whilst the slide was being changed Peter Kennedy acted as spokesman:

“Week-end after week-end Gabriel Stanton came down, and all the hours of the day they passed together. Four months of the waiting time had gone by and her freedom was in sight. Her nerves were taut and fretted. She often had fainting attacks. He never questioned me about her but once. I told him the truth, that she had suffered, was suffering more than any woman can endure, any young and delicate woman. And her love for him grew....”

I did not want to stop the show, the moving figures and changing slides, yet I called out from my swaying bed:

“No, no, she never loved him.” And Peter Kennedy turned his eyes upon me, his surprised and questioning eyes.

“Why do you say that? Do you know a better way of loving?”

“Yes, many better ways.”

“You have loved, then?”

“Read my books.”

“The love-making in your novels? Is that all you know?” A coal fell from the fire; I frowned and said something sharply. He did not go on, and I may have slept a little. When I looked up again there was no more sheet nor Peter. Instead Margaret herself sat in the easy-chair and asked me how I was getting on with her story.

“Not very well. I don’t understand why you took pleasure in making Gabriel miserable by your scenes and vapours. That first day now. What did you mean by telling him of your reaction on seeing him, that it might have been because he had cut himself shaving, or because of the shape of his hat; the hang of his coat disappointed you. Either you loved the man or you did not. Why hurt his feelings, deliberately, unnecessarily? Why did you tell him not to come and then telegraph him? Why should I write your story? I don’t know the end of it, but already I am out of sympathy with you.”

“You were that from the first,” she answered unhappily. “Don’t think I am ignorant of that. In a way, I suppose you are still jealous of me.”

“I! jealous! And of you?”

“Why did you pretend you did not know my books, and send for them to the London Library? You knew them well enough and resented my reputation. The Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Quarterly; you were dismissed in a paragraph where I had a column and a turn.”

“At least you never sold as well as I did.”

“That is where the trouble comes in, as you would say—although you are a little better in that way than you used to be. You wanted to ‘serve God and Mammon,’ to be applauded in the literary reviews whilst working up sentimental situations with which to draw tears from shopgirls....”

“I am conscious of being unfairly treated by the so-called literary papers,” I argued. “I write of human beings, men and women; loving, suffering, living. You wrote of abstractions, making phrases. The sentences of one of your characters could have been put in the mouths of any of the others. Life, it was of life I wrote. Now that I am dying....”

“You are not dying, only drugged. And you are jealous again all the time. Jealous of Gabriel Stanton, who despised your work and could not recall your personality, however often he met you. Jealous of the literary critics who ignored you and praised me. And jealous of Peter, Peter Kennedy, who from the first would have laid down his great awkward body for me to tread upon.”

I half woke up, raised myself on my arm, and drank a little water, looked over to where Margaret sat, but she was no longer there. I did not want to go to sleep again, and lay on my back thinking of what had been told me. “Jealous!” Why should I be jealous of Margaret Capel’s dead fame, of her dying memory? But perhaps it was true. I had a large public, made a large income, but had no recognition, no real reputation, was never in the “Literary Review of the Year,” was not jeered at as other popular writers, but only ignored. Well, I did not overrate my work. I never succeeded in pleasing myself. I began every book with unextinguishable hope, and every one fell short of my expectations. People wrote to me and told me I had made them laugh or cry, helped them through convalescence, cheered their toilsome day.

“I love your ‘Flash of the Footlights.’”

To repletion I had had such letters, requests for autographs, praise, and always: “I love your ‘Flash of the Footlights.’” Fifty-eight thousand copies had been sold in the six-shilling edition. I wonder what were the figures of Margaret Capel’s biggest seller. Under four thousand I knew. Little Billie Black told me, cherubic Billie, the publisher, with his girlish complexion and his bald head, who knew everybody and everything and told us even more.

I was getting drowsy again, figures, confused and confusing, passing over the surface of my mind. Billie Black and Sir George Stanton, Gabriel, then Ella, a dim glance of my long-lost husband, Dennis, a smiling flash in the foreground; my eyes were hot with tears because of this short glad sight of him. Then Peter Kennedy again; awkward in his tweed cutaway morning coat. What did she mean by saying I was jealous of Peter Kennedy? I smiled in my deepening somnolence. Then there was an organ and children dancing, a monkey, a policeman, and the end of a string of absurdities in a long narrow vista. Sleep and unconsciousness at the end.

I observed Dr. Kennedy with more interest the next few times he came to see me. A personable man without self-consciousness, some few years younger than myself, the light in his eyes was strange and fitful, and he talked abruptly. He was not well-read, ignorant of many things familiar to me, yet there was nothing of the village idiot about him such as I have found in many country apothecaries. He looked at me too long and too often, but at these times I knew he was thinking of Margaret Capel, comparing me with her. And I did not resent it, she was at least fourteen years younger than I, and I never had any pretensions to beauty. Dr. Kennedy had good hands, long-fingered, muscular; dark hair interspersed with grey covered his big head.

“What are you thinking about me?” he asked.

“What sort of doctor you are!” I answered with a fair amount of candour. “Here have I been without any one else for three or is it five weeks? You don’t write me prescriptions, nor tell me how I shall live, what to eat, drink, or avoid. You call constantly.”

“Not as often as I should like,” he put in promptly. Then he smiled at me. “You don’t mind my coming?”

“Have you found out what is the matter with me?”

“I know what is the matter with you!”

“Do you know I get weaker instead of stronger?”

“I thought you would.”

“Tell me the truth. Is there no hope for me?”

“Patients ask so often for the truth. But they never want it.”

“I am not like other patients. Haven’t I got a dog’s chance?” He shook his head.

“How long?”

“Months. Very likely years. No one can tell. You are full of vitality. If you live in the right way....”

“Like this?”

“More or less.”

“And nothing more can be done for me?”

“Rest, open air, occupation for the mind.” I thought over what he had just told me. I had known or guessed it before, but put into words it seemed different, more definite. “Not a dog’s chance.”

“You think Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton will do me good? They are part of your treatment?” I asked him.

“They and I,” he said. I was silent after that, silent for quite a long time. He was sitting beside me and put his shapely hand on mine. I did not withdraw it, my thoughts were fully occupied. “You know I shall do everything I can for you; you are a reincarnation.” He spoke with some emotion. “Some day I shall want to ask you something; you will know more about me soon. You are in touch with her.”

“Do you really believe it?” I asked him. We were in the upstairs room. Today I had not adventured the stairs.

“May I play?” he asked. It was not the first time he had played to me. I rather think he played well, but I know nothing of music. If he were talking to me through the keys he was talking to a deaf mute. I lay on the sofa and thought how tired I was, may even have slept. I was taking six grains of codein in the twenty-four hours when the prescription said two, and often fell asleep in the daytime without preparation or expectation.

“I will tell you why I would do anything on earth for you,” he said, turning round abruptly on the piano stool. “If you want to know.” I was wide-awake now and surprised, for I had forgotten of what we had talked before I went off. “It is because you are so brave and uncomplaining.”

“It isn’t true. Ask Ella. She has had an awful time with me, grumbling and ungrateful.”

“Your sister adores you, thinks there is no one like you.”

“That is merely her idiosyncrasy.”

“Well! there is another reason. You asked for it and you are going to be told. The love of my life was Margaret Capel.” He stared at me when he said it. “You remind me of her all the time.” I shut my eyes. When I opened them again his back was all I saw and he was again playing softly; talking at the same time. “When I came here, the first time, the first day, and saw you sitting in her chair, at her table, in her attitude, as I said, it was a reincarnation.” He got up from the music stool and came over to me. He said, without preliminary or excuse, “You are taking opium in some form or other.”

“I am taking my medicine.”

“I am not blaming you. You’ve read De Quincey, haven’t you? You know his theory?”

“Some of it.”

“Never mind; perhaps you’ve missed it, better if you have. In those days it was often thought that opium cured consumption.”

“Then it is consumption?”

“What does it matter what we call it? Pleurisy, as you have had it, generally means tubercle. But you will hang on a long time. The life of Margaret Capel must be written and by you. She always wanted it written. From what you tell me she still wants it. I poured my life at her feet those few months she was here, but she never gave me a thought, not until the end. Then, then at the last, I held her eyes, her thoughts, her bewildered questioning eyes. Bewildered or grateful? Shall I ever know? Will you tell me, I wonder, hear it from her, reassure me....” He stopped. “I suppose you think I am mad?”

“I have never thought you quite sane. But,” I added consolingly, “that is better than being merely stupid, like most doctors. So you regard me,” I could not help my tone being bitter, “as a clairvoyante, expectantly....”

“Does any man ever care for a woman except expectantly, or retrospectively?”

“How should I know?” He sat down by my side.

“No one should know better. Tell me more about yourself, I have only heard from Mrs. Lovegrove.”

“She told you, I suppose, that I had a great and growing reputation, had faithful lovers sighing for me, that I was thirty-eight....”

“She told me a great deal more than that.”

“I have no doubt. Well! in the first place I am not thirty-eight, but forty-two. My books sell, but the literary papers ignore them. I make enough for myself and Dennis.”

“Dennis?” His tone was surprised.

“Ella never mentioned Dennis to you?”

“No.”

I did not want to talk about Dennis. Since he had left me I never wanted to talk of him. His long absence had meant pain from the first, then agony. Afterwards the agony became physical, and they called it neuritis. Now it has pierced some vital part and I don’t even know what they call it. Decline, consumption, tuberculosis? What does it matter? In the two years he had been away my heart had bled to death. That was the truth and the whole truth. No one knew my trouble and I had spoken of it to nobody save once, in early days, to Ella. Ella indignantly had said the boy was selfish to leave me, and so closed my confidence. It is natural our children should wish to leave us, they make their trial flights, like the birds, joyously. My son wanted to see the world, escape from thraldom, try his wings. But I had only this one. And it seemed to me from his letters that he was never out of danger, now with malaria, and in Australia with smallpox. The last time I heard he had been caught in a typhoon. After that my health declined rapidly. But it was not his fault.

“And Dennis?”

“Since you know so much you can hear the rest. I married at eighteen. I forget what my husband was like. I’ve no recollection of his ever having interested me particularly. Married life itself I abhorred, I abhor. But it gave me Dennis. My husband died when I was two-and-twenty. Ever since Ella has been trying to remarry me. But when one writes, and has a son——” I could talk no more.

“You are tired now.”

“I am always tired. Why do you say years? You mean months, surely?”

“You will write one more book.”

“Still harping on Margaret?”

“Let me carry you into your room; I have so often carried her.”

“Physically at least I am a bigger woman than she was.”

“A little heavier, not much.”

“Well, give me your arm, help me. I don’t need to be carried.” I leaned on his arm. “We will talk more about your Margaret another day. I daresay I shall write her story. Not using all the letters, people are bored with letters. I am myself. And I am not sure about the copyright acts!”

“You will give them back to me when you have done with them?”

“Why not?”

Benham bullied him for having let me sit up so late. My illness was deepening upon me so quietly, so imperceptibly that I had forgotten I once resented her overbearing ways. Now I depended on her for many things. Suzanne had gone, finding the house too triste, and seeing no possibility of further emolument from my neglected wardrobe. Benham did everything for me; yawningly at night, but willingly in the day.

I was desperately homesick for Ella this evening. I wondered what she would say when she knew what Dr. Kennedy had told me. I cried again a little because he said I had not a dog’s chance, but was quickly ashamed. Why should I cry? I was so hopelessly tired. The restfulness of Death began to appeal to me. Not to have to get up and go to bed, dress and undress daily, drag myself from room to room. I had not done all my work, but like an idle child I wanted to be excused from doing any more. I was in bed and my mind wandered a little. Why was not Ella here? It seemed cruel she should have left me at such a time. But of course she did not know that I was going to die. Well! I would tell her, then she would come, would stay with me to the end. I forgot Margaret and Gabriel Stanton, two ghosts who walked at night. No extra codein for me any more. I no longer wanted to dream, only to face what was before me with courage. My writing-block was by my side and pencils, one of Ella’s last gifts, and I drew them toward me. I had to break to her that if she would be lonely in the world without me, then it was time for her to prepare for loneliness. I wanted to break it to her gently, but for the life of me I could not think, with pencil in my hand and writing-block before me, of any other way than that of the man who, bidden to break gently to a woman that her husband was dead, had called up to the window from the garden: “Good-morning, Widow Brown.” So I started my farewell letter to Ella:

“Good-morning, Widow Lovegrove.”

I never got any further. The hæmorrhage broke out again and I rang for Benham. She came yawning, buttoning up her dressing-gown, pushing back her undressed hair, but when she saw what was happening her whole note changed. This time I was neither alarmed nor confused, even watching her with interest. She rang for more help, got ice, gave rapid instructions about telephoning for a doctor.

“Will you wait for an injection until he comes, or would you like me to give it to you?”

“You.”

“Very well, lie quite quiet, I shan’t be a minute.”

I lay as quietly as circumstances would allow whilst she brewed her witches’ broth.

“What dreams may come.”

“Hush, do keep quiet.”

“Mind you give me enough.”

“I shall give you the same dose he does, a quarter of a grain.”

“It won’t stop it this time.”

“Oh, yes! it will.”

She gave the injection as well, or better than Dr. Kennedy. I hardly felt the prick, and when she rubbed the place, so cleverly and gently, she almost made a suffragist of me. Women who did things so well deserved the vote.

“Do you want the vote?” I asked her feebly.

“I want you to lie quite still,” was her inappropriate answer. I seemed to be wasting words. The room was slowly filling with the scent of flowers. When I shut my eyes I saw growing pots of hyacinth, then lilies, floating in deep glass bowls, afterwards Suzanne came in, and began folding up my clothes, in her fat lethargic way.

“I thought Suzanne went away.”

“So she did.”

“Who is in the room, then?”

“No one. Only you and I.”

“And Dr. Kennedy?”

“No.”

“You have sent for him?”

“I thought you wouldn’t care for me to give you a morphia injection.”

“Why not? You give it better than he does. I want to see him when he comes.”

“You may be asleep.”

“No! I shan’t. Morphia keeps me awake, comfortably awake. De Quincey used to go to the opera when he was full up with it.”

Peter Kennedy came in, and I followed the line of my own thoughts. I was feeling drowsy.

“I don’t want you to play for me,” I said, a little pettishly perhaps. “I should never have gone to the opera.”

“All right, I won’t.” He asked nurse in a low voice, “How much did you give her?”

“A quarter of a grain, the same as before.” The bleeding had not left off. Benham straightened me amongst the pillows and fed me with ice.

“I shall give her another quarter,” he said abruptly after watching for a few minutes. I smiled gratefully at him. Benham made no comment, but got more hot water. He made the injection carefully enough, but I preferred nurse’s manipulation.

“For Margaret?” I asked him.

“Partly,” he answered. “You will dream tonight.”

“I shall die tonight. I want to die tonight. Give me something to hurry things, be kind. I don’t mind dying, but all this!”

“Don’t. I can’t. Not again. For God’s sake don’t ask me!” There was more than sympathy in his voice. There was agitation, even tears. “You will get better from this.”

“And then worse again, always worse. I want it ended. Give me something.”

“Oh! God! I can’t bear this. Margaret!”

“Don’t call me Margaret. My name is Jane. What is that stuff that criminals take in the dock? Italian poisoners keep it in a ring. I see one now, with pointed beard, melancholy eyes, a great ruby in the ring. Is anything the matter with my eyes? I can’t see.”

“Shut them. Be perfectly quiet. The Italian poisoner will pass.”

“You will give me something?”

“Not this time.”

I must have slept. When I woke he was still there. I was very comfortable and pleased to see him. “Why am I not asleep?”

“You are, but you don’t know it.”

“You won’t tell Ella?”

“Not unless you wish it.”

“I’ve written to her. See it goes.” I heard afterwards he searched for a letter, but could only find four words “Good-morning, Widow Lovegrove ...” which held no meaning for him.

“Don’t let me wake again. I want to go.”

“Not yet, not yet....”

There followed another week of morphia dreams and complete content. I was roused with difficulty, and reluctantly, to drink milk from a feeding-cup, to have my temperature taken, my hands and face washed, my sheets changed. There was neither morning nor evening, only these disturbances and Ella’s eyes and voice in the clouded distance, vague yet comforting.

“You will soon be better, your temperature is going down. Don’t speak. Only nod your head. Shall I cable for Dennis?”

I shook it, went on slowly shaking it, I liked the motion, turning from side to side on the pillow, continuing it. Ella, frightened, begged me to leave off, summoned nurse, who took my cheeks gently between her hands. That did not stop it, at least I recollect being angry at the slight compulsion and making up my mind, my poor lost feeble mind that I should do what I liked, that I would never leave off moving my head from side to side.

That night I dreamed of water, great masses of black water, heaving; too deep for sound or foam. Upon them I was borne backwards and forwards until I turned giddy and sick, very cold. The Gates of Silence were beyond, but I was too weak to get there, the bar was between us. I saw the Gates, but could not reach them. The waters were cold and ever rising. Sometimes, submerged, my lips tasted their dank saltness and I knew that my strength was all spent. Soon I should sink deeper. I wished it was over.

Then One came, when I was past help, or hope, drowning in the dark waters, and said:

“Now I will take you with me.” We were going rapidly through air currents, soft warm air-currents and amazing space, a swift journey, over plains and mountains. At last to the North, and there I saw snow-mountains and at the foot the cold sea, frozen and blue, heaving slowly. Swimming in that slow frozen sea, I saw a seal, brown and beautiful, swimming calmly, with happy handsome eyes. They met mine. One who was beside me said:

“That is your sister Julia. See how happy she looks, and content....”

Then everything was gone and I woke up in my quiet bedroom, the fire burning low and Ella in the chair by my side.

“Do you want anything?” She leaned over me for the answer.

“I have just seen Julia.”

She hushed me, tears were in her reddened eyes. Our sister Julia had been dead two years, to our unextinguishable sorrow.

“Don’t cry, she is very happy.”

I told her my dream. She said it was a beautiful dream, and I was to try and sleep again.

“Why are you sitting up?” I asked her.

“It is not late,” was her evasive reply.

Many nights after that I saw her sitting there, I forgot even to ask her why, I was too far gone, or perhaps only selfish. I did not know for a long time whether it was night or day. I always asked the time when I woke, but forgot or did not hear the answer, drank obediently through the feeding-cup,—the feeding-cup was always there; enormously large, unnaturally white, holding little or nothing, unsatisfactory. Once I remember I decided upon remaining awake to tell poor Ella how much better I felt....

I told it to Margaret instead, and she had no interest in the news, none at all.

“I knew you were not going to die yet. Not until you had written my story.”

“It seems not to matter,” I answered feebly, “to be small and trivial.”

“Work whilst ye have the light,” she quoted. The words were in the room, in the air.

“It is not light, not very light,” I pleaded.

“There has been no biography of me. How would you like it if it had been you? And all the critics said I would live....”

“Must I stay for that?”

“You promised, you know.”

“Did I? I had forgotten.”

“No, no. You could not forget, not even you. And you will make your readers cry.”

“But if I make myself cry too?”

“Write.”

And I wrote, sick with exhaustion, without conscious volition or the power to stop. I wonder whether any other writer has ever had this experience. I could not stop writing although my arm swelled to an unnatural size and my side ached. I covered ream after ream of paper. I never stopped nor halted for word or thought. I was wearied, aching from head to foot, shaking and even crying with fatigue and the pain in my swollen arm or side, but never ceasing to write, like a galley slave at his oar. Sometimes in swimming semi-consciousness I thought this was my eternal punishment, that because I had swept so much aside that I might write, and yet had written badly, now I must write for ever and for ever, words and scenes and sentences that would be obliterated, that would not stand. I knew in these semi-conscious moments that I was writing in water and not in ink. But I was driven on, and on, relentlessly.