"All right; all right, Psyche," he murmured, and he knew it wasn't quite what he intended to say, yet in his flippancy he was taking refuge from something; from the flood of suffering that had broken over him the other night after he had seen that dead face with white roses over its ears. This queer face, half dissolved in blue and yellow, was not dead and the white coiffe came closely down about it. If he obeyed her he knew that she would keep the other faces away and he closed his eyes obediently and lay very still, seeing himself again as the good little boy being praised. This was Psyche; not Ariane. "Ariane ma soeur," he murmured. It was Ariane who had the white roses--or was it wet ivy? and after her face pressed all the other dying faces. "You'll keep them away, won't you?" he murmured, and he heard her say: "Yes; I'll keep them quite away," and, softly, a curtain of sleep fell before his eyes crossed by a thin drift of mythological figures.
"I thought it was you who sent me to sleep," he said to the English nurse next day. He could hardly, in the morning light, believe it was not a dream.
She smiled with an air of vicarious pride. "No indeed. I can't send people to sleep. It's our wonderful Mrs. Chadwick. She does a good deal more than put people to sleep. She cures people--oh, I wouldn't have believed it myself, till I saw it--who are at death's door. It's lucky for you and the others that we've got her here for a little while."
"I thought I heard the sea sometimes. It's for cases too bad, then, to be taken home. Get her here from where?"
"From her hospital in the firing-line. Now that we're advancing at the front everything there is changed and she could come away for a little. Sir Kenneth's been begging her to come ever since he saw her. He knew she would work marvels here, too." The nice young nurse was exuberant in her darkness and rosiness with a Jewish streak of fervour in her lips and eyes. "It's a sort of rest for her," she added. "She's been badly wounded once. You can just see the scar, under her cap, on her forehead. And she nearly died of fever out in Salonika. She had a travelling ambulance there before she came to France."
"It must be very restful for her," Oldmeadow remarked with a touch of his grim mirth, "if she has to sit up putting all your bad cases to sleep. Why haven't I heard of her and her hospital?"