She forgot that. As she came up, I sprang from the bed, put my hand on her shoulder, and forced her to the door. She shrieked and protested, but she could not resist. I put her outside and locked the door.
Then I sank down trembling with exhaustion, for I was very weak. But I rejoiced to know my strength had come back even that much. I crossed to the window after a moment and looked out. In the distance glimmered the sea, blue and joyous and beautiful. How I longed to be out near it, in its warm salt breeze! Beside my window grew the companion of my weary hours, the waving palm; beneath there was a little flagged court, shut in by small buildings belonging to the hotel. There was a well there and a banana-tree, and a man sitting down plucking alive a struggling fowl. I called to him in Spanish:
"Send the administrador to me." And he looked up.
A frightened look came into his face as he saw who it was that called him. Then he nodded, and carrying the unhappy bird by its feet, head downwards, disappeared into the hotel.
People and things move slowly with the Spaniards. I waited an hour, gazing out into the amethystine distance, wondering if Suzee"s glad, careless, irresponsible little spirit was dancing there in the sunbeams; and then a knock came at the door.
I walked to it and said: "Who is there?"
I recognised the voice of the administrador in his answer, and unlocked the door and bid him come in.
He did so, with an alarmed aspect.
"Have you seen the nurse?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied; "she told me you were again delirious and had refused to take your medicine, and that she must refuse all responsibility for you."
"I am not at all delirious, as you see," I answered; "I simply want to get well, and each time I take their stuff I get worse; so I am going to cease taking it. Now what I ask you to do is to keep that woman and the doctor and the surgeon out of my room. All I want is to be left alone, to be quiet. The surgeon took all the st.i.tches out yesterday.
There is no need for _him_ to see me again, and the others I won"t have in here."
"But the responsibility, really, Senor," the man muttered looking all ways at once, "and the good doctor--such an amiable man. What object could he have in not curing the Senor quickly?"
"The object of prolonging his fees," I answered smiling, "I should think. When I get well, his fees stop." Then it occurred to me this man had also an object in keeping me here, since my hotel bill would certainly stop, like the doctors" fees, when I got well; so I added:
"What day of the month is it? The twentieth? Well, listen to this. If I am well, perfectly well by the end of the month, I will give you a cheque for fifty pounds in addition to my bills, just to show my good-will."
Now 50 is much to a Mexican, and over this man"s face spread a look as of one who has a glimpse of Paradise. He looked down immediately, however, and said deprecatingly:
"How can I influence the Senor"s getting well? These things are as the good G.o.d wills. I can hire a Sister to pray for the Senor. That I can do."
"Thank you," I said. "But if you will keep the doctor and nurse out of my room and send me good food and water I shall get well and the fifty pounds is yours. Do you understand, if they come into this room again you lose it. I only wish to be alone."
The man bowed and bowed.
"As the Senor wishes, but the good amiable doctor, what should I say to him?"
"What you please, only don"t let him come near me."
"And when the Senor is well there are many little matters to settle.
The Consul and the Magistrate...."
I stopped him.
"Not now. I am to have ten days in peace, and alone, or you don"t get the money."
The man stood bowing and shuffling and muttering for some minutes.
Then the thought of the 50 came before him too dazzling to resist, and with a final: "It shall be exactly as the Senor wishes," he withdrew.
And so now I lay alone. Ah, what a comfort solitude is!
Freedom and solitude! Are these not two sweet Sisters of Mercy?
How few of all worldly ills and sorrows can they not either cure or a.s.suage? Or, rather, perhaps, ought one not to call them mates, from which the child, Content, is born?
I lay there, weak and suffering still, but a balm seemed poured all over me, for now I was alone.
I fell asleep after a time and did not wake till it was dark. I felt stronger, better. Sleep had nursed me in her own way through all the afternoon.
A lamp had been lighted on the table beside me and only needed turning up. There was a tray of food there and a carafe of water. I took a little of both and felt life stirring in all my veins, now that the paralysing grip of the deadly drugs they had been giving me was lifted off.
I lay still, gazing about the large, shadowy room and into the violet dusk of the square beyond the window, and then gradually sleep came over me again.
In less than an hour I started up from my bed, wide-awake. I thought I had been with Hop Lee. I looked round the room. All was just as I had seen it last. I sank back on my pillow. "It was only a vivid dream," I said to myself, and then fell to wondering what the dream had been. I could not remember. It seemed some communication had been made to my brain while I slept, that it had received very clearly, but now that I was awake it could not retain nor understand it, but it could, and did remember that I had dreamed of Hop Lee, and that it was a pleasant dream.
Yes, the man I had murdered had been with me, had spoken to me, and the impression was that of rest, of calm, of some aching self-reproach being appeased.
"Just a dream, of course," I said to myself; "but how odd that I cannot remember at all what he said." An hour perhaps pa.s.sed by while I lay quiet, strangely comforted by the dream I had forgotten; and then I lapsed back into sleep and again Hop Lee was with me, speaking, telling me something earnestly, exhorting me gently, and again I woke with a feeling of grat.i.tude, of peace; but I could recall nothing of what had been said to me.
The light burned steadily beside me, and I sat up and thought.
The feeling of tranquillity that spread through me, so different from the feverish self-reproach that had gripped me ever since I had killed Hop Lee was so marked, so wonderful in its effect on me that I could not feel it was the result of a dream. No, the spirit of the old man had been there, absolving me of my broken word, absolving me of his murder. The fact that I could not remember, could not recall or understand when awake my dream or his words, seemed to shew that in sleep a mysterious message from a hidden source had been conveyed to me, which, from its nature and the nature of my ordinary material brain, could not be received by the latter. From that hour I began to get well rapidly. Often and often in the long nights or the lonely quiet days, I tried to call up a dream to me, a vision of either of them again; often I longed to speak to Suzee once more. But never again did any shade come to my pillow. He had come that once, of that I was convinced. To others it would always seem as if I had dreamed that night. I knew, by some inner sense, I had been spoken to by the soul of the old dead Chinaman, and forgiven.
The time pa.s.sed evenly in that calm solitude. Sometimes still I was burnt with fever and racked with pain and got but poor food, and often longed for a hand to give me water in the dark nights. And I longed--ah, how I desired, infinitely, to send to Viola, tell her, and ask her to come to me!
I felt she would come then, that she would fly to me once she heard I was ill, in actual need of her.
But my pride refused to let me do this.
I had begged her to come in the name of our love, appealed to her through our pa.s.sion. I would never appeal to her pity.
Besides, I could not bear that she should see me now, wrecked in strength, a shadow, a skeleton of myself.
Fever had reduced me to the last thin edge of existence. As I stretched out my arms before me, they looked like some grim ghastly stranger"s, I did not recognise them. No, she should come back to me when I had regained the full glory of my health and strength that I knew she delighted in.
So I waited with all the patience I could command, and sleep and Nature nursed me between them till I was quite well.
Then came long-drawn-out procedure in the Mexican courts. I had doc.u.ments to write and sign, affidavits to make out, interrogations to answer; but finally the Law was satisfied. I was acquitted. I heard the decision with a curious feeling. How little it seemed to matter beside the inner knowledge of my heart, that Hop Lee himself had been with me, and knew and understood.
One afternoon then, after the satisfying of nearly endless claims upon me, I looked at the long, flat, rolling sea with its reefs of palms for the last time, and took the train northwards away from Tampico.
The year was not yet over, but I was going back to be in London, or very near it. For would she not write first to my club? and here it took at least three weeks for my letters sent on from the club to reach me.
I did not wish to live actually in town yet till Viola joined me, to advertise our separation, unnecessarily, to our friends, but I thought I would live practically hidden somewhere near, so that letters could reach me from London the same day.
Within a month I was back in London and went first of all to call for letters. Amongst them I recognised instantly there was not one from Viola. And, depressed and disappointed, I went down into the country, to work.
Work, the dear mistress of an artist"s life, the one that never leaves him but is there always waiting to receive him back to her, to console him in her arms for all the wounds that love has made.