It may be imagined how deeply this disturbed me, especially as I felt
that I was myself to blame. I had noticed that Wilbraham was ill when I
had seen him in London, and I should either have persuaded him to come
with me to Glebeshire or stayed with him in London. I was just about to
pack up and go to town when I received a letter from a doctor in a
nursing home in South Audley street saying that a certain Major
Wilbraham was in the home dying and asking persistently for myself. I
took a motor to Drymouth and was in London by five o'clock.
I found the South Audley Street nursing home and was at once surrounded
with the hush, the shaded rooms, the scents of medicine and flowers,
and some undefinable cleanliness that belongs to those places.
I waited in a little room, the walls decorated with sporting prints,
the green baize table gloomily laden with volumes of Punch and the
Tatler. Wilbraham's doctor came in to see me, a dapper, smart little
man, efficient and impersonal. He told me that Wilbraham had at most
only twenty-four hours to live, that his brain was quite clear, and
that he was suffering very little pain, that he had been brutally
kicked in the stomach by some man in the Covent Garden crowd and had
there received the internal injuries from which he was now dying.
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