Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/250

238 By lunch-time we, I and the landlady and the servant, that is, had the dining-room turned into a bed-room—light, airy, and comfortable.

The doctor came in the afternoon again. Further directions were given, and he left us, saying that he would leave the prescriptions at the chemist's as he went home. By tea-time everything was ready. Rosy had throughout remained quiescent, except that, as she was coming into the house, she noticed some red daisies in the bed under the window, and plucked one, saying: 'A pretty thing!' and for a moment stood looking at it, while I stood looking at her. I had everything to hand—inhaler, medicines, milk, beef-tea; and the kettle, with a long brown-paper spout to it, so as to keep the atmosphere moist with the steam, on the fire, from whose immediate heat and light she was sheltered by the bed-curtain drawn out and tucked under the mattress. I felt no fear now. The sense of her lying there as she was, seemed to admit of no feeling but calm tenderness.

The cough was very troublesome: more violent, more as it were ineffectual. She was very thirsty, and complained of the warm milk and beef-tea. Orders had been left that it was to be warm, and so of course she would have to drink it warm. I had to coax her to it like a child. The same with the inhalation. At first she, half sleepy, would not inhale, but kept moaning, and turning her mouth away from the pipe, till I bantered her into taking twenty pulls to show she was not afraid of it, and then turned the twenty into thirty, and the thirty into fifty, and so on up to a hundred, and far over (I deceiving her by dropping back the number several times). So the requisite ten minutes inhalation was achieved. The poor child could get no sleep. She kept up a low moaning all the while, occasionally sitting up with her chin on her knees, and the lower part of her hands turned round in her eyes. Once she suddenly looked up at me and said:

'Don't you believe I got this as a punishment for wanting to die?'