Lalage's Lovers Part 19

"I can't stop here arguing with you all afternoon," said Lalage. "Come on, Hilda."

"Don't go just yet. I promise not to mention Hilda's mother again."

"We can't possibly stay, can we, Hilda? We have our viva to-morrow."

"Viva!"

"Voce," said Lalage. "You must know what that means. The kind of exam you don't write."

I got viva into its natural connection with voce and grasped at Lalage's meaning.

"Part of the Jun. Soph. Ord.?" I said.

"Of course," said Lalage. "What else could it be?"

"In that case I mustn't keep you. You'll be wanting to look up your astronomy. But you must allow me to parcel up the rest of the cakes for you. I should like you to have them and you're sure to be hungry again before bedtime."

"Won't you want them yourself?"

"No, I won't. And even if I did I wouldn't eat them. It would hardly be fair to Mr. t.i.therington. He's doing his best for me and he'll naturally expect me to keep as fit as possible."

"Very well," said Lalage, "rather than to leave them here to rot or be eaten by mice we'll take them. Hilda, pack them up in that biscuit tin and take care that the creamy ones don't get squashed."

Hilda tried to pack them up, but the biscuit tin would not hold them all. We had not finished the wafers which it originally contained. I rang for the waiter and made him bring us a cardboard box. We laid the cakes in it very tenderly. We tied on the lid with string and then made a loop in the string for Hilda's hand. It was she who carried both the box and the biscuit tin.

"Good-bye," said Lalage. "We'll meet again on the twenty-first."

It was not until after they were gone that I understood why we should meet again on the twenty-first. That was the day of my first meeting in East Connor, and Lalage had promised to speak at it. I felt very uneasy.

It was utterly impossible to guess at what might happen when Lalage appeared in the const.i.tuency. I sat down and wrote a letter to Canon Beresford. I did not expect him to do anything, but it relieved my mind to write. After all, it was his business, not mine, to look after Lalage. Three days later I got an answer from him, which said:

"I shall not be at all surprised, if Lalage turns out to be a good platform speaker. She has, I understand, had a good deal of practice in some college debating society and has acquired a certain fluency of utterance. She always had something to say, even as a child. I wish I could run up to County Down and hear her, but it is a long journey and the weather is miserably cold. The Archdeacon told me yesterday that you meant to employ her in this election of yours. He seemed to dislike the idea very much and wanted me to 'put my foot down.' (The phrase, I need scarcely say, is his.) I explained to him that if I put my foot down Lalage would immediately tread on it, which would hurt me and not even trip her. Besides, I do not see why I should. If Lalage finds that kind of thing amusing she ought to be allowed to enjoy it. You have my best wishes for your success with the _turba Quiritium_. I am glad, very, that it is you who have to face them, not I. I do not know anything in the world that I should dislike more."

CHAPTER XII

t.i.therington took rooms for me in the better of the two hotels in Ballygore and I went down there on the day on which he told me I ought to go. I had as travelling companion a very pleasant man, the only other occupant of the compartment in which I was. He was chatty and agreeable at first and did not so much as mention the general election. After we pa.s.sed Drogheda his manner changed. He became silent, and when I spoke to him answered snappily. His face got more and more flushed. At last he asked me to shut the window beside me, which I did, although I wanted to keep it open. I noticed that he was wriggling in a curious way which reminded me of Hilda when her dress was fastened on with pins.

He fumbled about a good deal with one of his hands which he had thrust inside his waistcoat. I watched him with great curiosity and discovered at last that he was taking his temperature with a clinical thermometer.

Each time he took it he sighed and became more restless and miserable looking than before.

On the 19th of February I developed a sharp attack of influenza.

t.i.therington flew to my side at once, which was the thing, of all possible things, that I most wanted him not to do. He aggravated my sufferings greatly by speaking as if my condition were my own fault. I was too feverish to argue coherently. All I could do was to swear at him occasionally. No man has any right to be as stupid as t.i.therington is.

It is utterly ridiculous to suppose that I should undergo racking pains in my limbs, a violent headache and extreme general discomfort if I could possibly avoid it. t.i.therington ought to have seen this for himself. He did not. He scolded me and would, I am sure, have gone on scolding me until I cried if what he took for a brilliant idea had not suddenly occurred to him.

"It's an ill wind," he said cheerfully, "which can't be made to blow any good. I think I see my way to getting something out of this miserable collapse of yours. I'll call in McMeekin."

"If McMeekin is a doctor, get him. He may not be able to do me any good, but he'll give orders that I'm to be left quiet and that's all I want."

"McMeekin's no d.a.m.ned use as a doctor; but he'll----"

"Then get some one else. Surely he's not the only one there is."

"There are two others, but they're both sure to support you in any case, whereas McMeekin----"

The way t.i.therington was discussing my illness annoyed me. I interrupted him and tried my best to insult him.

"I don't want to be supported. I want to be cured. Not that any of them can do that. I simply can't and won't have another blithering idiot let loose at me. One's enough."

I thought that would outrage t.i.therington and drive him from my room.

But he made allowances for my condition and refused to take offence.

"McMeekin," he said, "sets up to be a blasted Radical, and is Vittie's strongest supporter."

"In that case send for him at once. He'll probably poison me on purpose and then this will be over."

"He's not such an idiot as to do that. He knows that if anything happened to you we'd get another candidate."

t.i.therington's tone suggested that the other candidate would certainly be my superior and that Vittie's chances against me were better than they would be against any one else. I turned round with a groan and lay with my face to the wall. t.i.therington went on talking.

"If you give McMeekin a good fee," he said, "say a couple of guineas, he'll think twice about taking the chair at Vittie's meeting on the twenty-fourth. I don't see why he shouldn't pay you a visit every day from this to the election, and that, at two guineas a time, ought to shut his mouth if it doesn't actually secure his vote."

I twisted my neck round and scowled at t.i.therington. He left the room without shutting the door. I spent the next hour in hoping vehemently that he would get the influenza himself. I would have gone on hoping this if I had not been interrupted by the arrival of McMeekin. He did all the usual things with stethoscopes and thermometers and he asked me all the usual offensive questions. It seemed to me that he spent far more than the usual time over this revolting ritual. I kept as firm a grip on my temper as I could and as soon as he had finished asked him in a perfectly calm and reasonable tone to be kind enough to put me out of my misery at once with prussic acid. Instead of doing what I, asked or making any kind of sane excuse for refusing, he said he would telegraph to Dublin for a nurse. She could not, he seemed to think, arrive until the next day, so he said he would take a bed in the hotel and look after me himself during the night. This was more than I, or any one else, could stand. I saw the necessity for making a determined effort.

"I am," I said, "perfectly well. Except for a slight cold in the head which makes me a bit stupid there's nothing the matter with me. I intend to get up at once and go out canva.s.sing. Would you mind ringing the bell and asking for some hot water?"

McMeekin rang the bell, muttering as he did so something about a temperature of 104 degrees. A redheaded maid with a freckled face answered the summons. Before I could say anything to her McMeekin gave orders that a second bed should be brought into my room and that she, the red-haired, freckled girl, should sit beside me and not take her eyes off me for a moment while he went home to get his bag. I forgot all about t.i.therington then and concentrated my remaining strength on a hope that McMeekin would get the influenza. It is one of the few diseases which doctors do get. I planned that when he got it I would search Ireland for red-headed girls with freckled faces, and pay hundreds of them, all I could collect in the four provinces, to sit beside him and not take their eyes off him while I went to get a bag. My bag, as I arranged, would be fetched by long sea from Tasmania.

That evening McMeekin and t.i.therington both settled down in my bedroom.

I was so angry with them that I could not take in what they said to each other, though I was dimly conscious that they were discussing the election. I learned afterward that McMeekin promised to be present at my meeting on the 21st in order to hear Lalage speak. I suppose that the amount of torture he inflicted on me induced a mood of joyous intoxication in which he would have promised anything. I lay in bed and did my best, by breathing hard, to shoot germs from my lungs across the room at t.i.therington and McMeekin. Their talk, which must have lasted about eighteen hours, was interrupted at last by a tap at the door.

The red-haired girl with a freckled face came in, carrying a loathsome looking bowl and a spoon which I felt certain was filthy dirty. McMeekin took them from her hands and approached me. In spite of my absolutely sickening disgust, I felt with a ferocious joy that my opportunity had at last come. McMeekin tried to persuade me to eat some sticky yellow liquid out of the bowl. I refused, of course. As I had foreseen, he began to shovel the stuff into my mouth with the spoon. t.i.therington came over to my bedside. He pretended that he came to hold me up while McMeekin fed me. In reality he came to gloat. But I had my revenge. I pawed McMeekin with my hands and breathed full into his face. I also clutched t.i.therington's coat and pawed him. After that I felt easier, for I began to hope that I had thoroughly infected them both. My recollections of the next day are confused. t.i.therington and McMeekin were constantly pa.s.sing in and out of the room and at some time or other a strange woman arrived who paid a deference which struck me as perfectly ridiculous to McMeekin. To me she made herself most offensive.

I found out afterward that she was the nurse whom McMeekin had summoned by telegraph. What she said to McMeekin or what he said to her I cannot remember. Of my own actions during the day I can say nothing certainly except this: I asked McMeekin, not once or twice, but every time I saw him, how long it took for influenza to develop its full strength in a man who had thoroughly imbibed the infection. McMeekin either would not or could not answer this simple question. He talked vague nonsense about periods of incubation, whereas I wanted to know the earliest date at which I might expect to see him and t.i.therington stricken down, I hated McMeekin worse than ever for his dogged stupidity.

The next day McMeekin said I was better, which showed me that t.i.therington was right in saying that he was no d.a.m.ned use as a doctor.

I was very distinctly worse. I was, in fact, so bad that when the nurse insisted on arranging the bedclothes I burst into tears and sobbed afterward for many hours. That ought to have shown her that arranging bedclothes was particularly bad for me. But she was an utterly callous woman. She arranged them again at about eight o'clock and told me to go to sleep. I had not slept at all since I got the influenza and I could not sleep then, but I thought it better to pretend to sleep and I lay as still as I could. After I had been pretending for a long while, at some hour in the very middle of the night, t.i.therington burst into my room in a noisy way. He was in evening dress and his shirt front had a broad wrinkle across it. I have never seen a more unutterably abhorrent sight than t.i.therington in evening dress. The nurse rebuked him for having wakened me, which showed me that she was a fool as well as a wantonly cruel woman. I had not been asleep and any nurse who knew her business would have seen that I was only pretending. t.i.therington took no notice of her. He was bubbling over with something he wanted to say, and twenty nurses would not have stopped him.

"We had a great meeting," he said. "The hall was absolutely packed and the boys at the back nearly killed a man who wanted to ask questions."

"McMeekin, I hope," I said feebly.

"No. McMeekin was on the platform--mind that now--on the platform. I gave him a hint beforehand that we were thinking of calling in another man if you didn't improve. He simply bounded on to the platform after that. It'll be an uncommonly nasty jar for Vittie. The speaking wasn't up to much, most of it; but I wish you'd heard the cheers when I apologized for your absence and told them you were ill in bed. It would have done you good. I wouldn't give tuppence for Vittie's chances of getting a dozen votes in this part of the division. We had two temperance secretaries, d.a.m.ned a.s.ses, to propose votes of thanks."

"For my influenza?"

"You're getting better," said t.i.therington, "not a doubt of it. I'll send you round a dozen of champagne to-morrow, proper stuff, and by the time you've swallowed it you'll be chirrupping like a gra.s.shopper."

"I'm not getting better, and that brute McMeekin wouldn't let me look at champagne. He gives me gruel and a vile slop he calls beef tea."

"If he doesn't give you something to buck you up," said t.i.therington, "I'll set Miss Beresford on him. She'll make him hop."