“I am sure I don’t know what good a nurse is to you at all!”
“You would be invaluable if you would only get it into your head that I am not a mental case. Don’t you realise that I am a very clever woman, quite as clever as you?”
“I don’t call it clever to retard your own recovery.”
“Am I going to recover?” I asked quickly.
“Your beloved Dr. Kennedy says you are.”
“By the way, is he coming today?”
“It isn’t many days he misses.”
“He comes to protect me from you, to see I have some few privileges and ameliorations of my condition, that my confinement is not too close, my gaoler too vigilant.”
We understood each other better now, and I could chaff her without provoking anything but a difficult smile. I, of course, was a bad patient. I found it difficult to believe that I ought not to try and overcome my weakness and inertia, that it was my duty to leave off fighting and sink into invalidism as if it were a feather bed.
That afternoon she helped me to the writing-table in the drawing-room, and I sat there trying to recapture the conversation I had heard. But although I could remember every word I found it hard to write. I could lie back in the chair and look at the gorse, the distant hills, the sea, the dim wide horizon, but to lean forward, take pen in hand, dip it in the ink, write, was almost beyond that still slowly ebbing strength. I whipped myself with the thought of what weak women had done, and dying men. “My head is bloody but unbowed....” Mine was bowed then, quickly over the writing-table; tears of self-pity welled hot, but I would not let them fall. It was not because Death was coming to me. I swear that then nor ever have I feared Death. But I was leaving so much undone. I had a place, and it was to know me no more. And the world was so lovely, the promise of spring in the air. When I lifted my bowed head Peter Kennedy was there, very pitiful as I could see by his eyes, and with a new gift of silence. Silence as to essentials, at least. He did not ask what ailed me, but spoke of a breakdown to the motor, of the wonder of the April weather. I soon regained my self-possession.