"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.
"I know how you're hating me," she said, crisp and practical as usual. "But don't get scared over it. It's natural. This drug breeds murder. Just you remember it's not you, but the morphine that hates me. Keep that well in mind. I do. Don't you worry about going crazy, and suchlike. It takes years and years for morphine really to injure the brain. It's your nerves that are yapping and yowling 'murder!'—your brain's all right."
"I do hate you!" Chesney had said, with weak but dreadful intensity. "I could give Cain points on murder. But there's a part of me that says you're a damned good sort, all the same."
"Hate away," Anne replied serenely. "You're getting on first-rate—that's all I care about."
So it went, and Chesney slowly improved; now weaker, now stronger, as the capricious drug sheathed its claws or gripped him tight again.
"Damnation! I'm like the frog in the well!" he would groan. "I crawl up one foot and slip back two."