Marcella had a quick struggle with two sides of her nature. The Kelt in her hugged the thought that these were secret service papers to be guarded with her life for his sake, his country's sake. There was nothing extraordinary to her in the thought that, in the reign of George V, torturing enemies were abroad with knife and bastinado and poison cup. She saw herself standing over his prostrate body, with countless slain enemies before her, and a dripping spear in her hand. She got a glimpse of King George, with ringlets, velvet suit and Vandyke lace collar gravely smiling as he received the papers from her hands. She was still in the romantic stage of kingship! And then the stolidly common-sense Puritan ancestress in her made her laugh. It was hard for her to disbelieve a romantic and perilous tale. But these letters! They were simply the pathetic love-letters of a mother to her boy, bringing an atmosphere of a commonplace, peaceful English home into all this madness. With that the truth dawned on her. There were eight of them, each mentioning money! Louis had admitted not writing to his father to put a stop to his remittance. She had forgotten to insist that it was done. Here was the explanation of his present orgy!
He was kneeling on the floor now, trying to grip his bitten, bleeding fingers into the wall and crawl upwards. He thought he was in a well, drowning. As she bent over him the well vanished, and she became his enemy. He made a desperate lunge at her and tried to grab his papers from her. But his body was unco-ordinated; murder was in his brain, but it could not be transferred to his shaking hands with which he menaced her.
She was very much stronger than he, and all the stronger now that her acquired fear of unknown enemies had been laughed away. The thing she realized most was that he must go to bed, that his wet clothes must come off for fear they gave him pneumonia; that, even if they were not wet, they must still come off and be locked up to keep him once again a prisoner. Only, it seemed, in imprisonment, lay peace. And peace was certainly not salvation!
As she realized that, all the strength was taken from her, but only for a moment. She felt that there was something in living from day to day and trusting that somehow good would come to him; she thought for a mad moment of being drastic, and breaking his leg to make him an honourable prisoner, but realized with self-contempt that she was too soft to do that to him. Instead, she fought him to get his clothes off, and by shaking him till all his breath went, perhaps saved his reason by crystallizing his intangible fears of enemies into physical fear of her, whom he could see and guard against. But he dared not sleep. As soon as he had ceased to be afraid of her rather hard, very strong hands he became afraid again of the Germans and Chinks; and, seeing him there, so weak now, so sick, so shaky she could not shake fear into him any more.
As the night wore on his delusions changed. He was still being persecuted, but now she was the persecutor. Once he cried out that he had been drinking sulphuric acid, and his throat and mouth were completely burnt away, leaving a gaping wound. She made tea for him, guessing that this was merely a picturesque way of telling her he was thirsty. But he thought she was poisoning him, and dared not drink the tea. She had only married him for his money and his position, for his enemies had told her he was a duke's son. She was a second Mrs. Maybrick—but this conveyed nothing to newspaperless Marcella. She had been unfaithful to him many times, he told her: Mr. King, Dutch Frank, Ole Fred and the Chinese greengrocer from whom she bought granadillas every day, were the objects of her transferred affections.
Unused to the ravings of delirium she was first wildly indignant and then coldly despairing; at first she thought he was cruel; then she realized, with a softening to pity, that he was only mad. He won back the pity by telling her that his mouth and throat were now in an advanced state of decomposition, having been dead many months; maggots were crawling over them, choking him. The overwhelming beastliness of this suggestion was almost more than she could bear until she realized that it must be even more overwhelming for him. By chance she hit upon the sort of treatment a doctor would most likely have given a man suffering from alcoholic poisoning. She spoke to him quietly, as if asking his advice, though she could scarcely control her voice.
"The best thing is to poison the maggots, don't you think, Louis?"
He looked at her craftily, his mind switching on to a less horrifying thought.
"Ha! I knew you had poison. Where is it?"
"I gave you all the poison in that tea, dear. What is there we can use to poison maggots? Surely they taught you that at the hospital?"