She brought alcohol lamps and chafing-dishes. She seldom came without
fruit or flowers. She set fire-screens and adjusted window-shades. She
went deeply into the subject of opiates, and she talked by the hour with
Jane and her mother about symptoms and remedies.
Marshall, while grateful for her attentions, was almost embarrassed
by them--not that they should come from her rather than from his wife (or
at least more copiously and spontaneously), but that they should come at
all. Never before in his life had he received such minute and solicitous
ministrations; he felt with a shy self-depreciation that he must be
making himself a great burden. If Susan Bates threw back her
bonnet-strings and suggested to Jane a lowering of the window-shades,
he would almost protest against the girl's laying aside her book or her
sewing; and the preparation of any special dish, such as is an invalid's
due, would even now still cause him that sense of guilt which he had
always felt on breaking in upon the household routine of his wife. "Poor
man!" Susan Bates would say; "how must he have lived all these years!
Why, I could hardly get him even to let me oil the door-hinges!"
She would sit by his bedside and try to soothe and divert this wan and
weary and half-desperate old man. He enjoyed but the most fitful slumber,
and even that only by the action of narcotics. Through the lagging hours
of the day and through the maddening watches of the night his mind,
ticking like an unstillable clock, beat for him an incessant rhythmical
reminder of the impending ruin of his house and of his own powerlessness
to avert it.
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