"The brandy is what did this bit of improvement," he replied calmly. He must brave it out. Besides, there was that only half-stilled craving deep underneath the caution of his present mood. He added reasonably: "You can't cut a chap off from a thing that he's as used to as I am to spirit of some sort without making him suffer rather severely."
"It's only that the doctor said it was so bad for you, Cecil."
"Pf! That ass Hopkins! Now Bellamy has to bray his little bray. We'll see what he says."
Giles Bellamy came at ten o'clock He was a good-looking man of about forty, with short-sighted, intelligent brown eyes that were rather too large for a man, and a pale, clever face set in a Vandyke beard. This beard and his large eyes, that looked almost womanishly soft at times, had gained him the nickname of O. P. from Cecil (the initials of the term "Old Portrait"). Sometimes he called him thus; sometimes, when in an especially ironical mood, by the full title. He had known the physician from boyhood.
"Wie gehts, Old Portrait?" he greeted him this morning from the vantage of the easy chair. "The tender passion still unroused? When are we to have some little new portraits for your family picture gallery?"
Bellamy took these pleasantries urbanely, though he was aware of a certain savagery underneath them. He understood Chesney's character fairly well, and felt rather sorry for him in his present predicament. It was rather like seeing a trapped lion. Even though the lion had been indulging in man-eating, he still felt compassion for the great, baffled brute-force. His confirmed bachelorhood had always been the subject of more or less caustic jesting on Chesney's part. In an evil mood, he seemed to enjoy nothing better than baiting his brother and Bellamy, turn and turn about.
Bellamy was a Baliol man and so was Gerald. Cecil used to say that Baliol bred what Byron called "excellent persons of the third-sex." He used to harangue the two celibates rather brilliantly on the subject of sex in mind—quoting Mommson and other authorities to prove that "genius is in proportion to passion."
But Bellamy was an able man in his way. He had studied medicine in Edinburgh and Vienna. He was far better posted than his London confrère, Hopkins, on the vagaries of the morphia habit. Besides, Lady Wychcote had had a talk with him in her private sitting-room before sending him upstairs. Now as he sat, parrying Cecil's rather ill-tempered thrusts with imperturbable good-humour, he was watching him narrowly out of his large, vague looking eyes, though he seemed casual enough. He saw clearly that Cecil was getting more morphia than Gaynor's record showed. He had decided, before talking to him for twenty minutes, that a trained nurse was indispensable—one, moreover, who had been on such cases before, and had nerve and character. Hopkins had not engaged a nurse because the only one of whom he knew, perfectly suited for the purpose, had still ten days on a similar case before she would be free. In his pocket Bellamy had the address of this nurse—Anne Harding—Hopkins had sent it to him the day before. She would be free to accept another engagement on the twelfth—that was to-morrow.
He determined, with Mrs. Chesney's and Lady Wychcote's approval, to wire her that afternoon.
However, Bellamy made a serious mistake in not speaking openly to Chesney about his intention of sending for the nurse. Sophy had to break this news to him, and he received it with a burst of appalling fury against the doctor.