Such was the cross that had suddenly been imposed upon me—a cross so gigantic and of such a character that only the most prolonged and assiduous training could have enabled me to bear it. Indeed, for some little time it seemed only too likely that it would prove too crushing even for me; and had not Nature intervened with a period of merciful unconsciousness, this would almost certainly have been the case. Fortunately I arrived home, however, as my father has assured me, in a deep though stertorous slumber, and did not awake until nearly eleven o’clock on the following Monday morning. There was thus accorded me an opportunity for the recuperation of those vital reserves that would even then, as I slowly began to realize, be desperately hard put to it to give me adequate support.
I say slowly because, when I first woke, my physical nausea was so great that I was totally unable to form a clear judgment upon the events of the previous evening. Nor was my mother, never a fluent speaker, more communicative than usual. I had been brought home, she said, by two young gentlemen, whose names she did not know, and a doctor had been called in, at my father’s request, who had made a diagnosis with which my father disagreed. Indeed my father, I gathered, had been considerably upset, and had spent a restless night in consequence, and my mother had been obliged on three separate occasions to prepare him a cup of malted milk. She then awaited my orders for breakfast. But this was a meal that I was compelled to omit. And it was only after she had left me that my memory began to recover itself and to lay its sombre offerings at the feet of my judgment. Then I rang the bell again and enquired of my mother the exact terms of the doctor’s diagnosis. But she shook her head and referred me to my father, who would be able to tell me, she said, when he returned from business.
“Not that it much matters,” she added, “for you’d be sure to disagree with it.”
“I certainly should,” I replied, “and I certainly shall. I was poisoned—deliberately poisoned—by the wicked woman with whom I had my supper.”
“An actress, I believe,” said my mother.
“Whom I was prepared to save,” I said, “from a deserved perdition.”
My mother was silent for a moment.
“Is that all?” she said.
“How do you mean, all?” I asked.
“I mean, may I go now?”