Presently the door opened once again.
Rachel stood there, with Mary Pascoe behind her and Seecombe also.
She came towards me.
“Seecombe says you are ill,” she said to me.
“What is the matter?”
I stared up at her.
Nothing of what was happening was real at all.
I hardly knew that I was sitting there, in my office chair, but thought myself to be upstairs in my room cold in my bed, as I had been the night before.
“When will you send her home?” I said.
“I won’t do anything to harm you.
I give you my word of honor.”
She put her hand on my head.
She looked into my eyes.
She turned swiftly to Seecombe.
“Get John,” she said. “Both of you, help Mr. Ashley to bed.
Tell Wellington to send the groom quickly for the doctor…”
I saw nothing but her white face and her eyes; and then over her shoulder, ludicrous somehow, out of place and foolish, the startled, shocked gaze of Mary Pascoe fixed upon me.
Then nothing.
Only the stiffness, and the pain.
Back in my bed again, I was aware that Seecombe stood by the windows, closing the shutters, drawing the curtains, bringing the room to darkness which I craved.
Possibly the darkness would ease the blinding pain.
I could not move my head upon the pillow, it was as though the muscles of my neck were taut and rigid.
I felt her hand in mine.
I said again,
“I promise not to harm you.
Send Mary Pascoe home.”
She answered,
“Don’t talk now.
Only lie still.”
The room was full of whispers.
The door opening, shutting, opening once again.
Soft footsteps creeping on the floor.
Chinks of light coming from the landing, and always this furtiveness of whispers, so that it seemed to me, in the sudden sharp delirium that must be sweeping me, that the house was filled with people, a guest in every room, and that the house itself was not large enough to contain them, they stood shoulder to shoulder in the drawing room and in the library, with Rachel moving in the midst of them, smiling, talking, holding out her hands.
I kept repeating, over and over again,
“Send them away.”
Then I saw the round spectacled face of Dr. Gilbert looking down on me; he too, then, was of the company.
When I was a lad he had come to treat me for the chickenpox, I had scarce seen him since.
“So you went swimming in the sea at midnight?” he said to me.
“That was a very foolish thing to do.”
He shook his head at me as if I were still a child, and stroked his beard.
I closed my eyes against the light. I heard Rachel say to him,
“I know too much about this kind of fever to be mistaken.
I have seen children die of it in Florence. It attacks the spine, and then the brain.
Do something, for God’s sake…”
They went away.
And once again the whispering began.
This was followed by the sound of wheels on the drive, and a departing carriage.
Later, I heard someone breathing, close to the curtains of my bed.
I knew then what had happened.
Rachel had gone.