Twilight - Julia Frankau (free novels to read .txt) 📗

“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 haemorrhage 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 haemorrhage 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 wellbeing.

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 haemorrhage 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 a I’americaine she stood by my side for hours trying every conceivable remedy. And without a word of reproach.

After my haemorrhage 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