She went to bed, feeling full her age that night.
XXI
The next day the rain was coming down in swirls. A strong wind drove it. It beat against the window-pane like little fingers drumming with sharp nails. Down the chimneys it beat, spattering into the fires which were kindled everywhere. The Park was a grey-green clustered shadow. The lawns looked soggy like moss. The huge house was gloomy as a decorated cave. The furniture and stair-rail sweated with moisture.
Chesney kept his bed, as always in the morning. He had waked with a dull headache from the unaccustomed dose of brandy on an empty stomach. Waking too early, in the iron-grey, streaming dawn, he had lain there between the sheets that felt so clammy to his nervous skin which again craved morphia—unable to get it until Gaynor should have left the room—racked mentally, also, by a nauseating shame for the part that he had played last evening. In this interval between dose and dose, worse than the physical malaise which amounted to torment, was the sense of his own vileness. Now he hated Gerald for running to fetch the brandy. For the same thing which he had loved him for last night, he hated him this morning. Fool! If he hadn't been so damnably officious, perhaps they might not have given him the brandy. Yes, he wished heartily now that his will had been denied him by force. Besides, he would have to see Bellamy sometime this morning, and he was all to bits—he could feel that his face looked unnatural, deathly. And at the same time the craving for stimulant came over him again. He asked for a cup of black coffee. "Make it yourself," he said to Gaynor. "In that French machine of mine. I don't want the filth an English cook calls coffee."
While Gaynor was thus engaged he managed to crawl from bed and take a quarter grain of morphia in addition to the other quarter that Gaynor had just given him. He found a place for the needle on his thigh far up near the hip-bone. It was too near the head of the sciatic nerve, and hurt him unusually. He almost broke the needle in his flesh, from irritation and the awkwardness of using the syringe so high up on his leg. He had no time to put the wire through the needle or to clean it properly before the man came back with the coffee.
"Damned nuisance," he thought. "Some day I shall be giving myself an abscess." But the extra dose and the coffee together braced and calmed him. He looked tolerably normal after he had had a tub and Gaynor had shaved him.
"I'll put on a dressing-gown and sit in that armchair with a rug over me," he said. One felt such a helpless carcass in bed when those brutes of quacks came peering and asking their impudent questions.
Sophy felt encouraged when she saw him thus established in the big chair. She had passed a wretched night. Her doubt of him—of the genuineness of his attack—had seemed so shameful to her—yet she could not help doubting. And if her doubt were justified—what abysms opened before her—before them both! What salvation could there be for one so deliberately, cunningly false?
"You look so much better," she said. "Perhaps this is the best thing for you, really—the country—the perfect quiet of it."