When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"Oh!" said Gwen incredulously. "Now suppose you tell me what your letter said!"

"You are sure you understand?"

"Oh dear, yes! It doesn't want much understanding. What did your letter say?"

Dr. Dalrymple's reply was substantially that it said what Gwen had anticipated. The patient was in no danger whatever, at present, and with reasonable precautions would infect nobody. He knew that her ladyship's impulse to come to her friend would be very strong, but she could do no good by coming. The wisest course would be for her to keep away, and rely on his seeing to it that the patient received the utmost care that skill and experience could provide. "I knew that if I said I should not allow you to see her, you would come by the next train. Excuse my having taken the liberty to interpret your character on a very slight acquaintance."

"Quite correct. Your interpretation did you credit. I should have come immediately. The letter you did write might have made me hesitate. Now I want to see her."

The doctor acquiesced in the inevitable. "It's rash," he said, "and unnecessary. But I suppose it's no use remonstrating?"

"Not the slightest!" said Gwen. And, indeed, the supposition was a forlorn hope, and a very spiritless one. Also, other agencies were at work. A tap at the door, that was told to come in, revealed itself as an obliging nurse whose upper front tooth was lifting her lip to look out under it at the public. Her mission was to say that Miss Grahame had heard the visitor's voice and she might speak to her through the door, but on no account come into the room. A little more nonsense of this sort, and Gwen was talking with her cousin at a respectful distance, to comply with existing prejudices; but without the slightest belief that her doing so would make any difference, one way or the other. The dreadful flavour of fever was in everything, and lemons and hothouse grapes were making believe they were cooling, and bottles that they contained sedatives, and disinfectants that they were purifying the atmosphere. It was all their gammon, and the fiend Typhus, invisible, was chuckling over their preposterous claims, and looking forward to a happy fortnight, with a favourable outcome from his point of view; or, at least, the consolation of sequelæ, and a retarded convalescence.

There is a stage of fever when lassitude and uncertainty of movement and eyesight have prostrated the patient and compelled him to surrender at discretion to his nurses and medical advisers, but before the Valkyrie of Delirium are scouring the fields of his understanding, to pounce on the corpses of ideas their Odin had slain. That time was not due for many hours yet, when Gwen got speech of her cousin. She immediately appreciated that the patient was anxious to impress bystanders that this illness was all in the way of business. Also, that she was watching the development of her own symptoms as from a height apart, in the interest of Science.

"I knew I should catch it. But somebody had to, and I thought it might as well be me. I caught it from a child. A mild case. That would not make much difference. Being a woman is good. More men die than women. It's only within the last few years that typhus has been distinguished from typhoid...." After a few more useful particulars, she said:—"It was very bad of you to come. I telegraphed to you not to come, last week.... Wasn't it last week?... Well then—yesterday.... They ought never to have let you in.... There!—I get muddled when I talk...." She did, but it did not amount to wandering.

Gwen made very fair essays towards the correct thing to say; the usual exhortations to the patient to rely upon everything; acquiesce in periodical doses; absorb nourishment, however distasteful it might be on the palate, and place blind faith in everyone else, especially nurses. It was very good for a beginner; indeed, her experience of this sort of thing was almost nil. But all she got for it was:—"Don't be irritating, Gwen dear! Sit down there, where you are. Yes, that far off, because I've something to say I want to say.... No—more in front, so that I needn't move my head to see you.... Oh no—my head's all right in itself; only, when I move it, the pain won't move with it, and it drags.... Suppose I shuffle off this mortal coil?"