Shadows of Flames Part 34

"D'you think I'm afraid of you? Not much I ain't! Just look at me and tell me what you think about it."

Chesney sat hypnotised. Here was the Mongoose to his Serpent with a vengeance. Something began to rise slowly up in him--something clear and clean rising from the dregs of his stupefied better nature. It was that unwilling meed of admiration that the conquered pay to a courageous foe.

Suddenly he laughed. It was a shocking sight and sound, this hoa.r.s.e, weak laughter issuing from that grey, sweating face.

"By G.o.d! You little Bush-Ranger, you've got guts!" he gasped.

Anne was changed, as St. Paul says the redeemed will be changed, in the twinkling of an eye. It was the psychological moment. It came differently to different patients, and she arrived at it by varying methods, but it always came when Nurse Harding was on a case.

Her rigid figure relaxed, her little face softened with her childlike smile.

"See here. I'm your _friend_," she said. "Your _friend_, man; not your enemy. Now you just 'fess up, as the children say. Tell me _really_ how much of the stuff you're in the habit of taking, and I'll make you comfy with a dose in proportion, right away--this very minute. I won't wait for doctor's orders or anything. Will you tell me? Eh?"

Her voice was too pretty for words, thus wheedling and coaxing the huge man. So might Jenny Wren chuck and chirp to some big Cuckoo-b.a.s.t.a.r.d, to venture from the nest that her kind step-motherhood had provided.

Chesney was at that point in the fight when even a great lad will sob sometimes from sheer rage and exhaustion. He sank back, pulling up the sheet about his face so as to hide it from her.

Anne slipped the hypodermic case from her pocket, opened it, and went over beside him.

"Now, then ... now, then," she coaxed, like some one gentling a fractious horse. "See--here's the blessed, devilish old stuff. _I_ know how you're craving it--d.a.m.n it for a nasty half-breed of saint and fiend! It's here--right here in my hand. Only tell me--_the truth_--about how much you've been giving yourself, and I swear to you as I'm an honest human, I'll give you enough to ease you."

There was a silence. Then from under the lifted sheet came the words:

"Twelve grains a day."

"In the twenty-four hours?"

"Yes."

"That's really all?... I'm asking for your own sake, mind you. The dose will be in proportion, you know."

"As near as I can tell--it's all. Maybe now and then it's more----"

Suddenly he started up, flinging off the sheet.

"d.a.m.n you! You little h.e.l.l-cat! d.a.m.n you!" he cried. "You're worming it out of me for your own ends. You're lying!"

"_You're_ lying, and you know it!" said Anne Harding sternly.

"Here--keep still while I prepare this. You'll soon know whether I'm lying or not when I've given it to you. _It_ doesn't lie."

He closed his eyes, feeling that he lay in the very bilge-water of existence. A woman--a scrawny little hireling--had him, Cecil Chesney, in her power. Had made him confess. Was about to deal mercy out to him with a drug. He could have howled with the Chaldean: "Cursed be the day that I was born and the hour wherein I was conceived!"

Then into his loathed flesh slipped suddenly the little sting of steel--sweeter than the kiss of first love to the innocent.

XXIV

Sophy was amazed when she learned what had happened. So was Bellamy, though he had more knowledge than she of the singular powers exerted by the highest type of trained nurse. They both agreed that there was something weird, almost legendary, about the conquest of the huge, domineering, self-willed man by the wee nurse--a feminine echo, as it were, of the fable of Jack the Giant Killer. But this little Jill had climbed the bean-stalk of her wits with no axe to help her--only that keen blade of her sane, fearless will and knowledge.

Things went on smoothly for two weeks after that. Chesney, hating the nurse with a bitter, feverish hatred, yet submitting to her control, clung to her with that distorted pa.s.sion of the man who knows that his well-being depends on what he hates. Temporarily he was in their power--the power of those whom he called his "well-wishers" with that ferocious sneer of helpless anger. He was too weak from the lack of the accustomed doses which he had been taking surrept.i.tiously to "fight a good fight!" for his freedom just then. But let them wait! Just let them wait till he got back his strength. He was afraid now that if he rebelled against Anne Harding they would get another nurse for him, one less independent and intelligent, who would not take things in her hands as Anne did, who would follow the directions of that soft fool Bellamy blindly, and keep him agonising on doses too rapidly diminished. Anne had promised that she would not let him suffer overmuch.

"I'm not a doctor-run machine," she had said, in her brisk, blunt way.

"I'll give you _what_ I think best, _when_ I think best. If Doctor Bellamy don't like it, he can chuck me. But he won't. He knows I've had experience and he hasn't. 'Tisn't likely _he'll_ fuss with me, when men like Doctor Carfew and Doctor Playfair have trusted me and been satisfied with my work. Just you be a good sport, and keep straight with me. And I'll not let you reach the h.e.l.l point. Just a peep of purgatory, maybe--for the salvation of your soul. But you're plucky. You'll stand a bit of purgatory to get to paradise--health is really paradise, you know. Eh?" She had wound up, with that engaging, little-girl smile of hers.

Chesney grinned rather feebly, and said:

"All right, Bush-Ranger. '_En voiture, pour le purgatoire, messieurs, mesdames._'"

"That's good!" Anne said heartily. "I always know they're mending when they crack jokes."

"You've a hard nut to crack in _me_, colonial snippet!" retorted Chesney, with another grin.

Anne grinned a cheerful little grin back at him.

"No, _you're_ soft enough, old sport," said she; "it's your husk of morphia that's hard."

They exchanged this rough, free speech when alone. In the presence of others, Anne was most respectful, almost demure.

"What a hypocritical little demi-semi-savage you are, Bush-la.s.s," he said to her one day. "You give me the rough of your tongue like a slangy lad when we're '_enfin seul_'--and before the Chief Eunuch and the rest, b.u.t.ter would congeal upon it, by Gad!"

"There's a time for everything," replied Anne Harding sedately. "If you _prefer_ it, sir, I'll be b.u.t.tery with _you_ from this moment."

Chesney laughed outright. He was feeling quite happy just then, under the effects of a sixth of morphia.

"Just you try it on," he said, with feigned grimness. When she had just given him the drug he really liked her. Her funny, brisk little ways and speech amused him. He longed sometimes to romp with her, as if she had been the child that she looked when her elfish smile stirred her face.

Once when she had bent over him as she withdrew the needle from his arm, he had tweaked one of the black curls that hung near. He had not believed that her little lean hand could give such a stinging smack as she bestowed upon his.

"You little spitfire!" he had exclaimed angrily. "Don't dare to take liberties with me because I'm ill."

"Don't _you_ dare to take liberties with _me_, ill or well," Anne Harding had replied, red with anger. "You treat me with proper respect, or I'll go back to London by the next train. Suit yourself."

She wouldn't talk or jest with him for the rest of that day, but by the next morning she seemed to have regained her usual cool poise, and remarked, as she served his early cup of cocoa:

"I surmise from your pretty behaviour that you've decided to keep me and your self-respect."

"Thou hast said, O Bush-Bully," replied he gravely. "I'll even address your Bullyship in the third person if it be required."

"Oh, no! There's no need of _that_ much distance between us, my pretty-spoken gentleman!" came the tart rejoinder. "'Hands off!' is my motto. Just so you remember that I live up to it, and your part is to live up to it, too, while I'm with you--I'm hunky-dory."

"Does that mean 'cheeky' in your native lingo?" grinned Chesney. She was giving him his morning dose (one-seventh to-day) as he spoke; so for the time being he liked her again.

"No, Mr. Smart," said Anne. "It's United States for 'all right.'"

Thus they chaffed amicably when she had just given him his allowance of morphia, or during the first hour after; but as the effects gradually wore off--which they did rapidly, the doses being so reduced by now--his mood changed. As he felt that stark, indescribable _malaise_ stealing over him--that horrid unearthly suffering which is not nausea, or acute pain, or the hot ache of fever, or the shivered ice of chills, but something more subtle, more deathly, as it were an illness drifted down from another darker, crueller, more demoniacal planet than the earth--as there crept through him this nameless, terrible, hideously fatiguing feeling that seemed to rack the finer substance of a body within his body--to strain and fray these more delicate fibres of being, until the torture was far more horrible than if it had been the brutal work-a-day anguish of a fractured bone, or the frank throes of cholera--when these hours were upon him, then he hated the little nurse. He hated her quiet, practical composure as she sat crocheting near the window, or reading aloud to him words that had no meaning--hated her for sitting there calm and healthy--while the discomfort arising from the lack of the usual poison surged into billows of physical distress that flowed over him, one upon another, as he lay sweating, tossing on what seemed the oozy bed of an ocean of _malaise_. He hated her so that he imagined breaking her to bits with his bare hands, as he had once threatened her. He could feel her little hard, pointed chin denting the hollow of his gripped hand, as he held her thin body between his knees, and pressed her head backwards till the spine snapped. He imagined her naked in his grasp--a little dark, lean, pitifully ugly body--and he was beating her with a stout wand of ash; whipping the flesh in ribbons from her writhing bones. He startled even himself with these savageries--felt afraid sometimes. Was his brain going? Had the stuff attacked his brain?

Once, meeting his smouldering eyes fixed avidly upon her during one of these silent rages, Anne had put down the book and come over to him.