“Oh! nurse, I should like to come. But I can’t, not today. I am ill in bed myself. I feel most awfully dizzy. But I will send my son.”
After which Laura tied a damp towel round her head and waited for Georg.
When he came in she lay writhing on her pillows and really looked rather ill. She caught hold of his hand and pressed it violently:
“Georg dear, they have rung up from the nursing home. He wants to see me. But I can’t trail myself there. I feel so awfully bad. Will you go there and give him my love, tell him how ill I am.”
Georg stood pale, hating the thought of going to the sick bed of this feared and secretly detested stranger. But he drew himself up. It did not enter his head to say “no” on an occasion like this.
After some hours Georg came back. He had not been able to give any message as the patient was unconscious.
Laura put no questions about the nursing home, what the doctor had said, or how the patient looked. She only heaped her gratitude on Georg and fawned on him like a dog.
She probably felt she might need him again.
The next day the Count was still unconscious and then Laura ventured to be a little bit better and to get up. It was boring to stay in bed, and besides she had a superstitious fear of pretending to be ill—she might really become ill.
On the whole, she thought extraordinarily little of the man whose name she bore. It seemed as if his illness had obliterated all her memories, from the earliest society ones to the latest exquisitely sensual; it seemed as if it had made of him a remote half-hostile stranger.