Then she turned, drying her face and hands with her handkerchief. As she expected, Chesney was watching her from his pillow. His face, grey with morphia and glistening like wet clay with the odious sweat that follows on an exhausted dose, looked more deathly than a corpse's clear, waxen mask.
"What o'clock is it?" he asked, speaking thickly with his pasty tongue and dried lips.
"Ten after five," said Anne Harding briskly. "You'll be wanting a cup of coffee, I fancy, sir."
"Isn't it time for ... for the ... er ... usual ... thing, yet?" He could never bring himself, in these moments of weakness and horrible, faint desire, to name the drug plainly.
"Your allowance of morphia?"
Anne did not mean to spare him. She glanced down at her bracelet. How Chesney hated that tyrannical watch on the nurse's thin wrist! It seemed like some horrible wen, or tumour, to him. Until she had fussed over him and gone he could not get the stuff out of the chimney-place—the stuff which was now simply and literally life to him.
"Not due for twenty minutes yet, sir," she said cheerfully, glancing up again. "But I'll just bathe your face and hands and bring you the coffee. It'll be ready by then. I'll tidy you a bit, sir, then fetch it."
There was nothing for it but submission. Sometimes, on these occasions, Chesney ran over in his mind horrid ways in which he would "pay back" this little woman for the misery she made him endure in such moments, should he ever get her wholly in his power.
She "tidied" him deftly, plumped up his pillows as he liked them, and fetched the coffee. When he had drunk it (black and strong Anne made it, and let him have it without insisting on cream or sugar—she had her compassions for these poor, mad-willed beings), she lifted the tray from the bed, and, glancing at her watch again, drew up a chair and sat down facing him.
"Ten minutes yet, sir, to wait," she said. "And I've something I want to say to you."