“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 hæmorrhage 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.