ITwas a chill November afternoon in the autumn of the same year, and Catherine was seated at the table in her sitting-room at Thurso House, surrounded by a plentiful litter of letters and telegrams, writing busily, fiercely almost, as if to absorb herself in what she was doing to the exclusion of other thoughts. Her secretary, to whom she had just finished dictating a pile of business correspondence and letters less private than those she was occupying herself with, had just left her, and Catherine had begun to tackle this great heap of letters which she felt she had better answer herself—inquiries, mainly, from personal friends. She knew she had given herself more to do than it was really needful that sheshould, but what to her mind was needful was that she should be occupied in writing, and leave herself no leisure to think. At present there was nothing to be gained by thinking; she could take no step.
Outside the day was utterly dispiriting; there had been a dense yellow fog all morning, and though it had cleared a little about midday, so that from her window she could see the lilac-bushes of the garden that bordered the Green Park, it hovered still overhead, and though the hour was still not yet three in the afternoon, and her table was in the window, she had to light the shaded electric candle that stood on it to enable her to write. A big fire burned in the open hearth, compounded of logs and coal, that hissed and whistled cheerfully as they blazed, and the room was warm and fragrant. But so dense had been the fog this morning that it had penetrated a little through the joinings of the windows, and a haze, visible now that theelectric lights were burning, hung in the atmosphere.
The room where she sat was one of her own private suite, which she had fitted up not long ago for occupation in those numerous flying visits she had to pay to town, when she intended to stop only a day or two and do some necessary business. On these occasions it was not worth while to open the whole house, and so she had established herself here on the third-floor, with just the one sitting-room, and a bedroom and bathroom adjoining. Until half-way through November she had been paying a series of visits at different country houses ever since she came down from Scotland, while Thurso, so she then believed, had been doing the same at other houses. This week they were to have had the first big shoot at their place in Norfolk, but all that had been put off. Ten days ago now she had arrived here for a couple of days’ stay before going down to Norfolk, and had found her husband was in thehouse. He had been there ever since they came down from Scotland, alone with his valet and a couple of maidservants, one to cook and one to clean, having excused himself from the various houses where he had told her he should be staying, in order to live here in the hell-paradise of opium. Catherine had at once telegraphed for Maud, who was of more use than anybody with her brother, and the two had been here now for ten days. It was just better that they should be with him than that he should be alone; he still occasionally felt ashamed of himself if they were there.
Since last June the habit had gained on him with appalling rapidity, though for a few months he had, as she knew, made frantic, agonising efforts to throw it off. He had seen doctors, he had done apparently all that lay in his power to do. But now it seemed that a sort of atrophy of his will had set in; he no longer actively desired to be a free man again, though sometimes a sort ofshame and remorse seemed to visit him; and though his will had been so completely dominated and destroyed by the drug, it had left the calculating, scheming part of his brain untouched, and he had a thousand devices for obtaining it after the chemists with whom he habitually dealt had been warned not to give it him. Indeed, it was ten days now since he made what appeared to be the very last effort of will, when, on Catherine’s appearance here, he had burned the prescription which enabled him to obtain it. But within twenty-four hours he had himself forged it again, and Lord Thurso, calling suddenly at some big pharmacy with a prescription bearing an eminent doctor’s name, was naturally not refused the blue bottle with its red poison label.
Yet busily as Catherine occupied herself with her correspondence, striving, since at the moment she could do nothing for her husband, to engage her mind rather than let it dwell on the hideous realities that were going on, and so vitally concerningher, she was alert for the interruption she expected. For yesterday afternoon Thurso, undermined and weakened as he was by this habit, had had an attack of syncope, and for an hour or two they thought he could not live. But the doctor had pulled him round out of immediate danger, and he had regained a little strength during the last twenty-four hours. Sir James Sanderson had, in fact, just come back for his afternoon visit, and was with him now. He had promised to make his report to Lady Thurso before he left the house. The news of Thurso’s sudden illness had been in the evening papers last night, and had appeared again this morning. She was answering the inquiries of her huge circle of friends.
Her pen went rapidly from the top to the bottom of her sheets, and envelope after envelope was directed and thrown on her pile. Awful as the present moment was, yet, in a sense, now that a crisis like this had come, it was almost morebearable than the hideous growth of the anxieties and torments she had suffered before. For as the habit gained on him, his moral perception, like his will, seemed to wither and vanish. He had conceived wholly baseless suspicions against his wife; he had uttered them to her; he had told her in what relation he believed her to stand towards Villars. Worse even than that, he did not seem to mind it. He had spied on her; he had opened her letters, both those which she received and those which she wrote—in a word, he seemed to hate her, and to delight in his hate. He made long absences, when he was not at his club or in the house, and gave elaborate, palpably false accounts of his movements when he returned. Finally, all sense of decency seemed to have left him, and he had brought to Thurso House, while his wife was in it, a common woman off the street. How it would all end she dared not think. If he lived, it seemed impossible to her that she should go on living withhim. What would happen to the children? what would happen to Maud? And the shame, the atrocious shame and publicity that must follow!
But the crisis which had occurred yesterday afternoon, the crisis that concerned life and death, had somewhat mitigated the horror of these things. It had also blunted the acuteness of another question that did not concern her less. Since June last she had known that Villars loved her now just as he had always loved her, and though, since he was a gentleman, to put the matter broadly, he had not traded on her growing disgust at the man who was her husband, it was impossible for her not to know that her lover had moved closer. She had no moral House of Defence to take refuge in—nothing of that nature prevented her letting the man who loved her, the lover whom she was sure now she loved, become in deed what both he and she knew that he wasin all else but that. Nothing, except a blind determination, which she often told herself was irrational, that this should not be so, stood in her way. Again and again Thurso had taunted her with a lie; he could not taunt her more if it had been a truth. Indeed, to taunt her, as he had done, with what was not true was more unbearable to her than if it had been. Had Villars been her lover, she almost felt as if she would have hurled that fact in his face. For her actions never ran away with her; she was not in the habit of doing what she was ashamed of afterwards; and certainly if she had taken a step so momentous, so vitally affecting her life, as that of having a lover, she was sure she would not have done so blindly or in any sudden flash of passion. Had she meant to live the double life she would have done so deliberately, and for reasons which seemed to her excellent—namely, that her husband was opium-drenched, and had vilely insulted her; secondly, that she loved Villars; and, thirdly,that she did not think it wicked for her in this position to do so. And yet, though in judging others she had no moral code, she judged herself and made her decision in obedience to some stricter law, though all-unformulated, than she applied to others. She knew she was irrational and inconsistent, but she knew she could not be otherwise.
It is probably difficult for those of high and complex moral organisation to appreciate the workings of a nature which, on analysis, seems so rudimentary as hers, and the most rigid sort of moralist may easily say that after all there was extremely little difference between her and people of no morals whatever. But that is where the higher moralist would go astoundingly astray. There are plants so sensitive that they seem to have organic life; there are amœbæ so apparently immobile and unsensitive that to a creature so immensely distant from them in point of organisation as man they may seem to be much lower inthe scale of life than the highly sensitive plant. But to the trained biologist the amœbæ are so transcendently higher than the other that he despairs of finding a bridge that can ever link up the two. And in the same way, though Catherine could formulate no moral code at all, and would unhesitatingly let any friend of hers lead any life he pleased, and yet not abate one jot of her friendship, provided only he did not do things which were mean; the fact that when “it came to” in her own case she utterly refused to contemplate doing this, made the classification of her with the moral inorganic an abysmal error. She was far stricter with herself than with others, which shows a moral generosity, and she blindly followed the more difficult way, which shows a faith that is perhaps the finer since it is conscious of no leading.
And, poor soul, she knew but too well that her trials in this respect had not really begun; she had only been told to look at the rack whereshe was soon to be placed. For Rudolf Villars was her real stand-by in these dark passages in her life. Maud was splendid, too: she felt she could not have got through the days without her; but Maud was a woman, and she was a woman, and Villars was a man. Therefore he could help her in a way that Maud could not. For humankind is created male and female, and those of different sex can and must help each other in a manner impossible for those of the same sex. That is the glory of the world and its shame.
Villars had known about this drug habit on the Sunday he had spent with them in June, for he had seen Thurso by chance when the ecstasy of the dose was on him; and since then, day by day, she owed more to him, till the debt was mounting up into huge figures. And though she knew well that to him the debt was non-existent—he never would add it up, that is to say, and present the bill—it was fearfully existent to her. In payment of it she could only give him onething—herself; and that she would not. True, he had made no absolutely direct declaration of his love, but in a hundred ways he showed it, and day by day, as she saw, it was getting harder for him to be silent. And what would happen then? She had made her determination. She would have to declare it. That was all ... oh yes, that was all.
For the time, however, the acuteness of these perplexities had lost its sharpness, since Thurso’s attack yesterday, and such thoughts, the summary of her inner life for the last two or three months, did not get between her pen and her paper. She had to answer these letters and telegrams inquiring about him, and to regret her unavoidable absence from the various engagements of the next few weeks. She knew, too, that it had become a matter of common knowledge what was the matter with him; she had even talked to certain friends about it, and she had to word her answers carefully. But it was no use any longerto pretend that nothing was wrong; the whole world knew that something was wrong.
But the interruption for which she had been waiting soon came, and Sir James Sanderson was shown in. He looked extraordinarily unlike an eminent doctor, and resembled nothing so much as a captain on some respectable line of steamers. He had a toothbrush of a moustache, a plump, bronzed, and ruddy face, and wore a black frockcoat, with yellow boots and a red tie. He was awkward, cheerful, embarrassed, and nautical, and played golf whenever possible, which was not often, with boyish enthusiasm and remarkable inability. But, incidentally, he had saved more lives and restored more health, which he personally considered of greater importance, than any other two doctors put together.
He shook hands with Catherine, and sat down on a small chair, which broke into fragments beneath his extremely ponderous frame, leaving him couched in splinters on the floor.He said “Damn!” quite distinctly, and struggled to his feet.
“Oh, I am so sorry,” said Catherine. “I hope you are not hurt?”
“Not in the least, but the chair is,” he said. “Yes, I have been with your husband for the last hour.”
He found a more reliable seat.
“Now, be brave,” he said.
Then his wonderful skill in dealing with people, whether the sick or the whole, showed itself. There was dreadful news he had to tell to this beautiful woman, but in spite of the obsoleteness of the phrase “breaking the news,” news could still be prepared for. It was wise to start like that, to say “Be brave,” and then, since he knew he was dealing with a brave woman, to wait for her bracing herself up to it.
“I know I am allowed to smoke a cigarette,” he said, thus securing his moment’s pause, “though it is most unprofessional.”
Catherine’s courage had sunk for a moment, like the mercury in a thermometer exposed to zero, but in that pause she recalled it again. It was that he had been waiting for.
“Lord Thurso has lived through twenty-four hours,” he said, “and immediate danger is really over. The attack he had was enough to kill most people. It has not killed him, and he will not now die of this attack. He may have others, but I don’t see why he should, unless he provokes them himself.”
He flicked the charred end of his cigarette.
“That is the bright side,” he said. “Now we must talk about the other. He came to me in July, you know, and told me about it. Probably he did not tell me all. You must do that, my dear lady. I guess a good deal from what I have seen to-day. I want to know all. Has he lost the power of will, do you think? There is nothing, I may say, that you can tell me which will be worse than what I conjecture.”
Catherine required no further stimulus to enable her to brace herself to this hideous recital, and she began at once, telling Sir James the whole history of the case as far as she knew it. Once only did he interrupt her, and that early in the tale, when she told him that the original cause of Thurso’s taking opium was those frightful attacks of neuralgia to which he was subject. To that Sir James said:
“Quite so. I gave him the authorisation myself.”
Then, month by month, she went through the tragic history; she spoke of that week up in Scotland when he began to take it more frequently, when, too, Maud began to suspect that he was taking it not only for relief of pain, but for the effects of it on his nerves and brain. Then came the stealthy dose in the train, then the scenes at Bray. But as she spoke, though he attended very carefully to all she said, he watched hernot for that reason alone. It was not so unlikely, he saw, that he might have another patient on his hands, for it was as much as she could do to get through with what she was saying.
Then the tale became harder of telling: from that day he had seemed to have begun to hate her, and with hate there grew and flourished in his mind ignoble suspicions. He had taken to spying on her, to opening her letters; then came the infamous taunts he had levelled at her, and the final insult. And when she had finished there was silence.
She had spoken quite calmly, arranging and reviewing the events of those hideous months in orderly manner, and stopping only when she could not quite command her voice. And without any long pause after she had done, Sir James went on with what had to be told her.
“The opium habit,” he said, “even when onebegins to treat it quite early, is the most difficult thing in the world to cure. Give me ten drunkards who want to get over the habit, and I will very likely cure eight, but give me ten opium-eaters or laudanum-drinkers—for the two, of course, are exactly the same—who are equally desirous to amend, and I may cure one of them. God knows why it is so, Lady Thurso, but this particular drug, this poppy of the fields, binds body and soul in a way that no other habit binds, not alcohol, nor sensualism, nor anything. And your husband’s case has not been taken early. He is completely undermined by it. It is impossible to imagine a more serious case.”
Catherine shifted her chair a little; she was so overwhelmingly tired, now that she had ceased writing, that it was something of an effort to meet the doctor’s eye.
“And now you need your bravery again,” he said. “He might have died any minute duringthose first six hours after his attack. And, dear lady, it might have been better if he had. It might have saved God knows what suffering and misery to himself and others. Sometimes I think that we doctors do a cruel kindness in snatching poor folk out of death’s jaws. Of course, one cannot, and I do not, say that any case is incurable, because, thank God, miracles still happen. But I cannot see how he can be cured. As he gets stronger from this attack, his craving for the drug will get stronger also; he has already asked for it. Unless you absolutely shut him up he will find means of getting hold of it. He will probably begin with smaller doses, for the poison will have more effect when he is still weak, and he will increase them and increase them until this or something like it happens again. His digestion, too, is in the most feeble condition. I do not suppose he has eaten a pound of nourishing food in the last week.
“No; he has hardly touched it,” said she.“He says it gets in the way. But if we could succeed in keeping him away from the drug by—by any means, would there not be hope?”
The kind old doctor gave a long sigh. He hated this part of his business, and the braver people were, the more cruel he seemed to himself.
“No,” he said; “I think he would probably go off his head without it. One can’t tell, but I should fear that. You see, it is not the time for me to keep anything from you. And you are bearing it splendidly: you are bearing it in the way we are meant to bear these terrors of life. We may get white with pain, as you did just now, we may feel sick with the anguish of it all, but we ought still to be able to clench our teeth and not cry out. And, do you know, that is such a sound policy. Being brave carries its dividends quicker than any investment I know. For every effort of the sort that we make strengthens us, exactly as gymnastics strengthen our muscles.”
Something in this arrested her attention very strongly; for the moment she was led away from the thought of Thurso to another matter that concerned her quite as vitally. She turned round to him again.
“Do you mean that if—if we resist anything our powers of resistance are increased?” she asked. “Resistance seems to tire me, to make me less able to make an effort.”
Sir James took this in also; his eye, trained to observe obscurities, saw that for the moment she was not thinking of her husband.
“Temporarily it tires you,” he said, “just as exercise does. But you are really the stronger for it. The opposite holds, too, as you and I and poor Lord Thurso know very well; not to resist, to yield, weakens our power of resistance. The body is built up and made strong by effort, and so, I am sure, is the soul.”
She thought over that for a space of silence,noting down in her mind how it concerned that of which the doctor knew nothing.
“Tell me all you fear about Thurso,” she said. “I want to know what you think the end will be, and when, since I gather that, as far as you know, you regard him as incurable. I want to hear from you, quietly and fully, what I must bring myself to expect, the thoughts which I have got to get used to.”
“I have told you the worst,” he said, “and I think you understand it. But, more in detail, it will be this: He will be very weak for a few days, and will, of course, be in bed. But I fully expect that his recovery from this attack will be rapid, because he will be properly fed, and not allowed to make the smallest exertion, but chiefly because opium, which was the direct cause of it, will be cut off. As he gets stronger the craving will get stronger.”
“Then, you advise——”
“I advise nothing till I see how he pulls round.What I most fear is that his whole will-power, his very capability to form a resolution, has been atrophied, made ineffective, by this drug. He—I am telling you all my worst fears, of course, because this is not a time to buoy you up with false hopes—he is, I fear, from what you tell me, incapable of resistance. That is the real and fatal danger. Now, is there any motive, any thought, or aim, or desire that was his, which we can make use of, on which, so to speak, we can prop up and train the will-power, which is lying like a creeper that has been torn from its supports? His devotion to you, for example? His love for his children?”
Catherine turned on him a perfectly hopeless look, and shook her head. The waters of Marah were in that gesture.
The doctor spoke again, gently, tenderly.
“Then, who has the most influence over him?” he asked.
“Oh, Maud,” said she—“his sister, you knowI have no doubt whatever about that. I think,” she added quietly—“I think he hates me.”
She spoke quite quietly, as if stating the most commonplace of facts, and the very simplicity of the words were intensely pathetic to the kind man. But they were best passed over without comment.
“Then, may I consult with her before I go,” he said, “as to anything she can suggest which can appeal to him, support him? He is drowning, he must drown as far as purely medical skill can help him, and we want—do we not?—to throw any sort of life-buoy to him which may keep him afloat.”
“Hypnotism? That sort of thing?” she asked.
“I do not think it possible that hypnotism or suggestion can help him,” he said. “There must be something to hypnotise, something to suggest to, and that something is will-power. One cannot say it is wholly destroyed, because I suppose thatwould mean death, but it is in so feeble and impotent a state that I know of nothing which can touch it.”
Though Catherine had taken all this very quietly, her quietude was partly that of someone who is stunned, and now her mind recurred, as she recovered herself, to one of those sentences which, so to speak, had dealt the blow.
“You mean that only a miracle can restore him?” she said.
“Yes, but I believe in miracles,” said he, “though, unfortunately, you cannot produce a miracle as you can produce a bottle of medicine.”
Catherine got up.
“How strange that you should say that!” she said. “Because Maud believes in them, as you do, but she thinks them most accessible. Only she no longer calls them miracles—she calls them Christian Science!”
Sir James could not have looked cynical orsneering if he had tried, and he certainly did not try. But there was an uncommon dryness in his tone.
“The lady in Boston?” he inquired.
“No; a man in Caithness,” said Catherine. “I will ring; she shall come and tell you if she is in.”
He put up his hand to stop her.
“Ah, one moment, please,” he said. “I want to have two words with you about yourself. My dear lady, you are not well: you are very much overwrought. You have had, you know, a terrible and trying time, and if you had finished with it, I should tell you to go to bed for a week. But you can’t do that. Now, it has told on you more than you guess. Do not give yourself more tasks than you need; for instance, are you not over-taxing yourself unnecessarily here?”
He pointed to the crowded writing-table and the pile of answered letters, which she had been working at when he came in.
“You mean I had better sit down and think over all this terrible tragedy,” she said, her voice beginning to break a little, “rather than find relief and rest in employment?”
“No; I do not actually say that you must not answer your letters, especially if you find it more bearable to work than to do nothing, but I strongly advise you to rest yourself as much as you can, and to avoid anything agitating beyond that which you must bear. There is plenty that, as your husband’s wife, you have got to bear. But if there are other things that worry you, I entreat you to shut the door in their faces. Exercise your will-power over that, and make it strong by resistance. Save yourself from anything harassing or troubling. I speak, of course, quite at random, but I feel sure that there are other things which are trying you most acutely.”
Then, without warning, the breaking-point came for her. All these months of ceaseless anxiety about Thurso had been a greater drainon her nerve force than she had known, and of set purpose she had not abated one jot of the numerous activities of her life, and had not allowed herself to consider how tired and drained she was. And simultaneously with that had come this storm and tempest into the secret life of her soul.
She gave a sudden shriek of laughter that did not sound like mirth.
“Oh, you conjurers!” she cried. “You doctors are like X rays! They see right into one’s inside. Good heavens! I should think I had enough to try me, and you don’t guess the half. If it was only Thurso it would be quite a holiday. Oh, how very funny——”
Sir James got up quickly, placed himself directly in front of her, and clapped his hands violently close to her face.
“Now, none of that!” he cried. “I haven’t come here to listen to hysterical ravings. Makean effort; pull yourself together. I’m ashamed of you.”
Catherine checked suddenly in the middle of her sentence; two or three tears, the precursors of the hysterical storm that had been on the point of bursting forth, had found their way onto her cheeks, and she wiped them off. The attack was arrested as suddenly as it had begun, and she stood silent a moment, still hearing the reverberation of his clapped hands.
“Yes, quite right,” she said. “Thank you very much.”
Sir James waited till he felt certain of her. Then he took up one of her hands and kissed it.
“You dear, brave woman!” he said. “But that shows you the truth of what I said. Be kind to your fine nerves and senses. Treat them well.”
She was quite quiet again now, and sat down in the chair from which she had jumped up.
“Never mind me,” she said. “I can manage my own affairs, and I promise you I will be as sensible as I find it possible. Oh yes, there are other worries. You are perfectly right.”
He paused a moment.
“Now about this man in Caithness,” he said. “He was there, I suppose, when Lord Thurso and Lady Maud were up during the typhoid. Now, I am not bigoted on the subject; I know quite well that these Christian Scientists have got hold of a big truth, but many of them mix such floods of nonsense up with it that it is quite dissolved. They tell me that if you have a compound fracture, and only say to yourself that compound fractures don’t exist, the bones will join. That, of course, is silly. But where you deal with the will, or the nerves, or the imagination, it is a different sort of thing altogether.”
Lady Thurso got up again, quietly this time.
“I will see if Maud is in,” she said. “Therewas very virulent typhoid up there, you know, in the summer, and Mr. Cochrane is believed by her to have cured one or two extremely grave cases—in fact, she believes more than that.”
She rang the bell, and in the interval, before it was answered, only a couple of words passed.
“And you will spare yourself?” said Sir James.
Maud had come in half an hour ago, but hearing that her sister-in-law was with the doctor, she had not interrupted them. As she entered now, Catherine shook hands with Sir James.
“Maud, this is Sir James Sanderson,” she said. “He wants to talk to you. Good-bye, Sir James. I shall see you, of course, to-morrow morning.”
She left the room, and Maud was alone withthe doctor. She had no idea what he wanted to talk to her about, and waited, wondering why Catherine had left them.
But he instantly approached the subject.
“Lady Maud,” he said, “I want to hear about Caithness and the typhoid and Mr. Cochrane.”
Maud was taking off her gloves, but stopped in sheer surprise. There was nothing that she expected less than this.
“What for?” she said.
“For your brother,” said he.
He asked but few questions in her story, for it was a plain and simple narrative. She described just what had passed in connection with Duncan’s wife; she described all that she had seen with regard to Sandie Mackenzie; she mentioned the curious and complete cessation of the epidemic itself.
“And I think I believe exactly what Mr. Cochrane told me,” she said. “Indeed, it seemsthe simplest explanation to suppose that it was the direct power of God, in whose presence neither sickness, nor disease, nor pain can exist.”
“You say you think so only,” said he. “You are not sure?”
“No, not quite.”
“But Mr. Cochrane is?”
She smiled.
“I should say it was the only thing he was absolutely sure of,” she said.
He thought in silence over this for some time, and then spoke as if he had suddenly made his mind up.
“Medical science, as far as I am acquainted with it,” he said, “can do nothing for Lord Thurso—at least, I fear not. Therefore, if there was a man outside in the Park there with a barrel-organ and a monkey who said he could cure the opium habit, I should welcome him in. Personally, I don’t believe in Christian Science for cases of compound fracture, but it doesn’t matter what I believe. It is my duty to try everything I can. Now, you must let me have a consultation with you about it all.”
Again he paused. He wanted to put his thoughts clearly, not only to her, but to himself.
“We are situated like this,” he said. “I have no notion how to cure your brother, and all that I feel myself able to do is to palliate his sufferings. But the moment—assuming, that is, which I feel justified in doing, that he gets over this attack—that I begin to make his days painless, I aggravate his disease. You, Lady Maud, I know, believe that there is a chance for him: I do not; but since I cannot professionally suggest any other chance, all I can say is, ‘Do what you can, and God be with you.’ Now, as regards practical details, what are we to do? Where is this Mr. Cochrane? But I suppose there are plenty of these healers, are there not? If he is not handy, we can get another.”
Maud strove for a moment to separate the strands of her two desires, that seemed inextricably intermingled. The one was to see Thurso delivered from this drug-possession, the other to put him in the hands of Mr. Cochrane—him only.
“I have knowledge of only one Christian Scientist whom I really believe in,” she said, “and that is Mr. Cochrane. You see, I saw him with my own eyes restore to life a man who was dying. I know there are plenty of others. I could ask Mrs. Yardly.”
Sir James laughed suddenly.
“Why that?” asked Maud.
“She came to me a few months ago for a tonic,” he said. “She had been suffering from general catarrh. She explained to me why this was not inconsistent, but I failed to follow her.”
Maud laughed too.
“Oh, Alice!” she said to herself.
“But Mr. Cochrane, you think, is not like her,” said Sir James.
“You can’t imagine a more totally different personality,” she said. “He gives confidence, anyhow, and he is not silly. I think there is a great deal of what is silly about the whole thing, but I believe that the direct power of God can come and heal people. That is about the biggest thing possible, isn’t it?”
Sir James nodded quietly.
“Yes, my dear young lady,” he said. “I believe in that possibility, too, and that is why I am consulting you. Oh, but compound fracture,” he said suddenly—“what ridiculous nonsense!”
He was silent for a moment after this irrepressible burst of professional indignation.
“And this Mr. Cochrane,” he asked—“where is he?”
“In America,” said Maud. “I heard from him two days ago. He is in New York.”
“I have read some of their literature,” said Sir James, “and I have heard about some of their cures. Now, as a doctor, I can’t recommend your employing Mr. Cochrane, but you can, if you choose, send him a telegram acquainting him with the state of affairs. You see, I don’t think he can hurt your brother, and we doctors can’t benefit him.”
“Am I to get Mr. Cochrane to come here, then?” asked Maud.
“No; in the first place it is a good deal to ask, and in the second, if only you or Lady Thurso could persuade Lord Thurso to go, I am convinced that a sea-voyage, though it will not in the smallest degree cure him, will be generally beneficial. Now, do you think it is in your power to persuade him to go? You needn’t say anything about a Christian Science healer waiting for him at the other end; there will be plenty of time for that when you get him on board ship.”
Maud thought over this. There was a suggestion that she felt she had better make, which was rather difficult for her to put to him.
“Yes; I think I might be able to persuade him,” she said, “because certainly he used often to listen to me when he would listen to no one else. And would you think it odd if I suggested that he and I went alone, without Lady Thurso?”
“I should have suggested it if you had not,” said the doctor. “But tell me why you did.”
“Ah! poor Thurso is mad,” said she. “He is not in the least himself. But ever since the summer he has been behaving to Catherine as if he hated her.”
The doctor nodded.
“I know; she feels that, too. Now, you cannot see your brother to-day, but to-morrow, if he goes on well, I think you might. We shall see. I shall be back early to-morrow to look at him.”
For a man who had passed through so dangerous an attack, weakened, too, as he was, by months of the opium habit, Thurso showed extraordinary recuperative power, and next day he asked of his own accord whether Maud might come and see him. This Sir James at once allowed.
“I will let her know when I go,” he said. “It will do you good.”
He waited for a moment, but Thurso said nothing about wishing to see Catherine, and shortly after the doctor left him, and told Maud she might pay him a short visit. The nurse was with him when Maud entered, but went to her room next door, leaving brother and sister alone. He was still lying flat, without pillows, but he smiled a welcome at Maud when she came in.
“Come close, Maud,” he said in a minute. “I want to talk to you.”
His voice was still no more than a whisper from weakness, but his words were quite audible.
“I don’t want to see Catherine,” he said, “and you must keep her away from me. I think the sight of her would send me off my head. It’s she who has brought me to this. It was she who ruined my nerves by always rushing and flying about in every direction——”
Maud interrupted him gently.
“Ah! never mind that,” she said. “At present all you have to do is to lie quiet, and not worry about anything, and get well.”
But Thurso broke in again.
“Oh, don’t imagine I don’t know how atrociously I have behaved to her,” he said; “but she drove me mad. She despised me; I saw that. Well, I gave her something to despise me for.”
“Oh, dear Thurso, don’t talk like that,” she said. “If you don’t want to see Catherine, ofcourse you shall not. But your saying that reminds me of a plan you and I might think of when you get better.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve already spoken to Sir James about it, and he approves. You will have to go somewhere to pick up again, so how about you and me going on a voyage together? We both like the sea, so why not go to America on one of those big liners that are so comfortable? We could stay at that house of Catherine’s on Long Island for a week or two, if you liked.”
“Without Catherine, you mean?” he asked.
“She loathes the sea, you remember. You couldn’t expect her to come.”
His eye brightened.
“Yes; I should like that,” he said. “You and I have had jolly times together by ourselves. But I won’t go if she goes.”
His voice had risen sharply over this, and he was silent afterwards, breathing rather quickly.Then he looked at Maud as she sat beside the bed, and something in her youth and beauty stirred some chord of vibrating memory in him, and his mind, which, for all the deadly weakness of his body, was quite clear, went back to early days when he and she had been together so much, bound in an intimacy and affection that seldom exists between brother and sister. She had always been such a good friend to him, such a capital quick-sympathising comrade, and now, he felt, there must for ever stand between them the horror of these last months. For the moment he got outside himself and judged himself, and saw how hideous he had been.
“I’ve made a pretty good mess of it all,” he said.
She laid her hand on his. It was no time to preach: she could only console.
“Yes, dear Thurso,” she said. “We’ve all made mistakes. But, thank God! it is never too late.”
Then that moment of regret, that nearly amounted to contrition, passed from him. It had been brief as a sudden ray of sun piercing through some unconjectured rent in blinding storm-clouds.
“But it’s Catherine’s fault,” he said.
But the ray had been there. His soul, though sick to death, still lived. And that was the only piece of consolation that Maud could carry away with her.
THURSO’Srecovery, though he had had no relapse of any kind, and no hint of a second attack, had been slow, and it was more than three weeks from the time of his collapse when he and Maud were sitting together on the deck of theCeltic, Westward-bound, watching the shores of Ireland fade into blurred outlines of grey, as they were fused with the horizon. They had embarked the day before at Liverpool, and though they had been at sea only twenty-four hours, there was already some semblance of colour beginning to come back to his face. But if Maud had met him now after a year’s absence, she felt that she would scarcely have known who he was. Thosemonths of indulgence in the drug had altered the whole character of his face: it was not of the same man. It had made him look strangely wan and old, too. The heavy dint of crows’ feet was planted on the outer corners of his eyes, and the lids were slack, baggy, and pendulous. His eyes had changed; they looked stale and dead, but it was his mouth, perhaps, that had deteriorated most: all power and force were gone from it; it drooped feebly and weakly at its corners, and the lower lip hung flabby and loose. It was the mouth of a man ruined by self-indulgence. His hair, too, had become very thin, and streaks of grey had appeared in it. And all this was but the shadow of the real wreck within.
Sometimes, when during these last three weeks she had seen him thus, she had felt her courage and hope for the future dwindle almost to the vanishing-point. It was not only his body which had so aged and fallen away: it was his soul that had grown decrepit. He had fits of black despair and depression,when he could bear to see nobody, not even her, and would lock himself up in his room, giving orders that his meals were to be left outside, and that under no circumstances was he to be disturbed. Then, when he emerged from one of these, remorse—but no more than a maudlin, querulous remorse—for the wreck he had made overtook him, and he would ask her to sit with him while he unloaded himself of tons of a washy despair. Half a dozen times he had said that he would not go to America at all. What could a week or two of sea air do for a man in his case? Yet there was no decision or determination in these refusals; next moment he would be talking of the books he would take with him. Then the pendulum would swing further, and that about which alone he seemed to have retained any force would come into his mind: namely, his bitterness against Catherine, his belief—almost strong enough to be called conviction—that it was she who was morally responsible for hiswreck. It was that, indeed, that was the real cause of his having consented to leave England. The day before they sailed he had a fit of the darkest despair, and had altogether refused to think of going. But as that drew off, his own desire was to get away from his wife, to leave her neighbourhood, to be geographically widely separated from her. She was in England, therefore any place was more tolerable to him. And just before they left the house he had asked to see her, for the first time in all these weeks, to say:
“You are responsible for all this.”
It was all black enough, and there had been at present but one smoky ray of comfort. He had not taken laudanum again, nor, as far as could be ascertained, had he tried to procure any. But Sir James cautioned Maud against thinking that this ray was the promise of a coming dawn.
“He is still extremely weak,” he had said,“and it will not be till his strength really begins to come back that he will crave for the drug. At present he is not strong enough to want anything at all keenly.”
Sir James had come down with the brother and sister to Liverpool, to see his safe bestowal on board, for even now he was not allowed to walk upstairs, and their cabin was on the top deck. In ten minutes the shore-going passengers would have to leave the ship, but the doctor had still a few words more to say. Thurso had not yet been told what the ulterior object of his going to America was, for it was thought that if he knew that he might refuse to stir.
“There is a psychological moment for telling him that,” he said to Maud, “which has not yet arrived. But it will arrive, I think, and I feel no doubt that you will recognise it when it does. At present your brother shows no desire for anything, neither for the drug—at least, he has taken us all in if he has—nor for the return tohealth. He does not even, I think, want to die; he does not want anything. But as he begins to get back his strength he will begin to desire also. He will want the drug; he will want to get well. That is the moment for telling him.”
Three days later Maud and he were seated again in the sheltered nook behind the smoking-room on the top deck where they had sat two days before watching the fading of the Irish shores. There was a bright winter’s sun overhead and a tumbling sea around them, for all yesterday there had been half a gale from the west, which had stirred the hoary giants of the Atlantic. But the enormous ship was but little conscious of them, and glided without inconvenient movement across this wonderful grey sea, that broke into dazzling white against her burrowing bows. Something of the pale, crystalline blue above was reflected in the great joyous hills and valleys of water that rose and fell round them, and the greyness of the wintry waters was shotwith delicate azure and aqueous green, as if, though it was yet barely mid-winter, there was the promise of spring in the air, and a hint of the summer days when these hills and valleys should be level, a shining desert of astounding blue. Above their heads the wind thrummed and whistled in the rigging, and the clean, unbreathed odour of the sea was salt and bracing. In spite of the sun, however, it was chilly to the unprotected, and both Thurso, lying on his long deck-chair, and Maud, seated beside him, wore thick fur-coats, and were tucked in with rugs. They had sat some little time in silence, for speech easily tired him still, and then he turned to her.
“I feel better,” he said, “and it is so long since I felt better.”
“Oh yes, dear, you are much better,” she said. “You have been picking up every day on the sea. Wasn’t it a good plan?”
“But there is a difference between beingbetter and feeling better,” he said, “and the second means the most to the man who is ill. Now, I suppose we shall have to talk things out some time, so why not now? I do feel better. I feel as if I could nearly wish to be well again.”
Maud felt that the moment of which Sir James had spoken to her, when it would be right to tell Thurso of the real object of their voyage, was very near, but not quite arrived yet. He would give her a better opportunity for what she had to say than that, and she wanted the very best possible.
“But I daresay I am beginning to wish that too late,” he said. “How bad have I been exactly? How bad am I?”
“Do you mean your heart attack?” she asked.
“No; the other thing. I may tell you that for weeks before the attack itself I felt perfectly incapableof resistance. I could no more resist than I could resist breathing. Now, what does that mean medically? What chance have I?”
“You were as bad as you could be,” she said. “In a way, Sir James told me, that heart attack saved your life. It prevented you wanting the stuff for awhile. It made a break.”
“But does Sir James really think that a week or two at sea will cure me?”
“No; but he thinks that it will do your general condition good.”
Thurso threw back his head, and drew in a long breath of this cold, pure air. It was extraordinarily invigorating. And at the same moment he suddenly felt his mouth water at a thought that had come into his mind. He was beginning to want again.
“But he has no idea that it will cure me?” he asked, with a certain suspicious persistence.
Then Maud knew her time had come.
“No; he never thought it would cure you, and he doesn’t profess to be able to cure you himself. But, Thurso, there is another chance, perhaps. He sanctioned our trying it.”
“What chance? Some American doctor? I’ll go to anybody—doctor, quack, hypnotist—what you please.”
“It isn’t a quack I want you to go to. I want you to see if a Christian Science healer cannot do anything for you.”
Thurso was silent a moment.
“It has been a plot, then?” he asked, in that dreadful cold tone in which he spoke of his wife.
“Yes, dear; but don’t speak like that,” said Maud. “You speak as if it was a plot against you instead of a plot for you. I didn’t tell you in England, because I was afraid you might refuse to come. That is frank, is it not? I have been responsible for it all.”
Suspicion and hate were awaking in Thurso’s brain. He felt so much better and stronger to-day, and his brain was working again after weeks of torpidity. He told himself he was becoming wonderfully acute and far-sighted.
“I don’t think I quite believe that,” he said. “I believe Catherine had a hand in it. Surely it is clear. She wanted to be left alone with Villars.”
Maud made a gesture of despair.
“Oh, you are mad,” she said. “It isn’t you who speak when you say dreadful false things like that: it’s the demon that possesses you, Thurso—that horrible drug. It has poisoned your body, and it has poisoned your soul.”
Then, with that bewildering rapidity that she knew and dreaded, his mood changed again. But the change, though he was still in the darkness of abysmal despair, was for the better. Anything was better than that vile hate, those incredible suspicions.
“Yes, I am poisoned—I am altogether poisoned,” he said quietly.
Maud turned an imploring face to him.
“No, dear, you are not altogether poisoned,” she said; “and the fact of your saying that you are shows there is some little sound piece left. If you were altogether poisoned, you wouldn’t know it; there would be nothing left to tell you that you were poisoned. But there is: you feel regret still. I saw it in your eyes just now, and though it cuts me to the heart, I love and rejoice to see it there. It is just your regret, your desire to do better, which is the precious soil out of which your salvation must spring.”
Her voice died on the last words, and she spoke in a whisper barely audible.
“Oh, Thurso, if you only knew how I cared!” she said.
For that moment he was touched. He looked at her with pity.
“Poor Maud!” he said.
“Ah! but it is not going to be ‘poor Maud!’” she said. “You are going to get the poison out of your soul and body. Oh, Thurso, there are going to be many happy days yet.”
Once again the genial thrill of convalescence, that inflowing tide of strength and recovery, broke like a ripple a little further up the long dry beach, and once again desire stirred within him. But by an effort he detached himself from that, and turned his mind to her and to his own rescue.
“And do you really believe Icanbe cured?” he said. “Is an appalling young person to come and sit by me and sing doggerel hymns? I read something of the sort in a book I found at home the other day. It was yours, I suppose, or Alice’s?”
“Alice’s, I expect,” said she. “No; we shall have no appalling young person sitting by you. You know the healer I want you to go to, and you like him.”
Thurso frowned. He seemed to be able to remember nothing. His memory, he felt, was there, but all that it contained was locked up, and he could not find the key.
“That—that fellow in Scotland?” he asked.
Then for a moment he got a glimpse, a flash, vivid but brief, connected with him.
“I met him in the village street one day,” he said, “in Achnaleesh, and he made me feel better. I had an awful headache at the time. I say, that is something gained, you know, because I never have headaches now. What was his name, by the way?”
“Mr. Cochrane,” said the girl.
“Of course, yes. And he dined one night, and played hokey-pokey among the typhoid patients. So he and I are going to sing hymns, are we?”
But Maud did not smile now. Thurso was himself in a way that he had not been for weeks.There might only be a minute or two of this, for his mood changed so quickly: it was as if he was not strong enough to remain steady in one attitude for more than a few seconds. And since any moment might see him back again in the hells of despair and hate, she wanted to make the most of this first forward outlook which he had shown. The creeper—his will—was in her hand for a second. She must make some beginning at training it up.
“Ah, Thurso, that is right,” she said; “look forward, and make an effort to realise where you stand to-day. Sir James says he is helpless; he says you have no will left which he can touch or strengthen. That may be so medically, but I am sure it is there still, and you are going to get God—not any mortal physician—to lay His hand on you. Try to believe, if only for a moment, that all power is His, and that He is all love, all health, all life; that evil and illness and everything of that kind cannot exist in Hispresence. Don’t hang back; don’t reserve any part of yourself, for you can help or hinder your cure. We have been hindering it, so I believe, by trusting to the power of man to cure you, because we have kept on wondering if man can cure you. But about God there is no doubt whatever. It is quite beyond question.”
For one moment, as she spoke, he sat straight up in his chair, looking suddenly awake and revivified. But with that revivification there came far more strongly than before the revivification of desire of another kind. All day a certain power and vitality, born of the huge sea, the golden sun, and the singing breezes, had been throbbing back into him; but, as must always happen, until the will is set and centred on the higher and Immortal Mind, and does not, as through some sieve, strain off all that is of mortal and corruptible thought, this returning tide of vitality made more real and more coveted that on which his mind and his degraded desire had dwelt allthese months. And this time it took more definite shape.
How clever he had been, too, about it! He almost giggled aloud to think of it. Little did they suppose that a couple of days before he left England he had got one of the footmen—not his valet, who had probably been warned—to go out with the prescription he had forged, just before his attack, and get a bottle of his drug. He had not wanted it, but he felt the time might come when he should, and there it lay, the bottle of dark-blue glass, with its red poison label, in the private despatch-box in his cabin, of which he alone had the key. But he had determined that that should be his last supply, and having got it, he again threw away the prescription. How wise, too, to have brought that one bottle, for to-day he was beginning to want it again; and though he wanted also to get well, to break this infernal chain that was wound so closely about him, yet that which had been the only real desire of hislife for all these months pounced, tiger-like, to-day on the little morsel of added strength that had been thrown within reach. The higher side of him, feebler and all but paralysed, had no chance to reach that morsel before the other seized it.
Cunning began to return, too. There was something to scheme and plan about again. Already he thought over the coming hours of the day and their usual occupations, so as to devise when he should be able with safety from detection to satisfy this growing desire. And even as he turned his mind to this, the desire itself swelled, nightmare-like. It must be soon, it must almost be now. Just a taste was all he wanted—a quarter-dose to satisfy himself that opium still existed, that there was something worth living for, worth getting better for—that warm thrill and vibration spreading from the head down through his neck, andinvading every limb with its quivering, serene harmonies! Or ... should he tantalise himself, let himself get thirstier for it, before indulging in it? He wanted it dreadfully, but he was capable of keener want than this, and the more he wanted it, the more ecstatic was the quenching of that infernal thirst. Even the want of it was pleasurable, when he knew that he could satisfy that want when he chose. He felt sure, too, that in moderation it could do him no harm. One had to break with a habit of this kind by degrees. And then he remembered when he had last said that to himself—the day on which Catherine and Maud had thrown his bottle away down at Bray. That had been an unwise thing to do; they had defied him, and he had resented that. Very likely he would not have taken the drug at all that day had they not unwarrantably tried to put it out of his power to do so. You could drive some people: others had to be led.
And all this seemed such logical, reasonable stuff to his poor brain!
But now he had been without it for three weeks, and he had not even desired it. That was an immense gain; it showed any sensible man that he had made great steps towards the breaking himself of the habit and the extinction of the desire. But he wanted it now. That instinctive swallowing movement of the throat and tongue had begun, and that was the signal he always waited for. But he must still be cunning. He must make some reasonable pretext for going to his cabin, and prevent the possibility of suspicion conveying itself to Maud. That, however, was not difficult. It was as easy as lying—just as easy, in fact. There was no difference at all between them. But it was as well to do the thing handsomely, and he looked at her, at her big violet eyes, just moist with tears, at her mouth just trembling a little with the emotion that had inspired her words, and spoke without hesitation or bungling.
“Yes, I believe that,” he said. “I am goingto God direct, as you say. I am not a Christian Scientist, but I do believe in the omnipotent power of God, and that nothing evil can exist in His presence. You are quite right, too. I should probably have refused to leave England if I had known why I was being brought here. But I thank you, dear, for bringing me.”
He paused a moment, wondering, as a bystander who knew his heart might wonder, at the profanity and wickedness of what he was saying, since all the time he attached no meaning to these solemn things, and wanted only to kill any possible suspicions in her mind which might lead to his being interrupted when he went to his cabin to get at the despatch-box. It really was terrible, deplorable, that he should have to be so deep a hypocrite, but nothing mattered compared to the accomplishment of his craving. But he had said dreadful things, and a quarter of a dose, such as he had planned to take, would notbe enough to banish them from his mind ... it was no good taking opium at all if anything scratched and whined at the closed door of conscience. Half a dose, surely, would not hurt him—a liberal half of those very liberal doses which he had prescribed for himself. But he had better say a few words more yet. Incomplete lying was a tactical error of which he must not be guilty.
“Sir James is a very clever doctor, no doubt,” he said, “but he certainly made a mistake when he thought my will-power to resist was dead, or something to that effect. I am glad he said that, and I am glad you told me, because that sort of opinion acts as a tonic—an irritant, shall we call it? I will show him if my will-power is dead!”
Then an extraordinarily ingenious perversion occurred to him.
“Did Sir James really suppose I should consent to go to sea for a week without opium, if Idid not mean to be cured in spite of him?” he asked.
Thurso almost laughed over the irony of this; he was getting supernaturally cunning. Yet he detected a possible error in those last words; he had protested a little too much. But that was easily rectified.
“I don’t quite mean ‘in spite of him,’” he said, “because that makes it appear as if I thought that, having given me up, he did not wish me to get well. But, my goodness, how his prescription of sea air is acting already! I was a flabby log, if you imagine such a thing, when I started, and now am I not totally different? And yet I am impatient to get to America to begin the treatment. My recovery, if I am to recover, is in other hands—the best, the only ones. With all the power of will that is in me I elect to leave myself there. And if that is not to be, I want you to know that, though it was too late, I was willing.”
Again he wondered at his wickedness, but without regretting it. He hugged it to him, feeling that the mere prospect of opium had so quickened his intelligence, his power of planning. And nothing else was of any importance compared to the one necessity that he must get to his cabin without any further delay, and leave Maud unsuspicious, and giving thanks in her fool’s heart. He only wanted to dream dreams and see visions; he wanted to see the sky, as he had seen it one evening up at Achnaleesh, covered with blue acanthus-leaves, with the dewdrops of stars upon them, and the big sun a golden centre of the blue flower. Nor did Maud’s words shake his desire, solemn though they were. They just went by him, like a light summer breeze wandering by some square-built house.
“Oh, thank God, thank God, dear Thurso!” she said. “You will get well, I know it, if youfeel like that. And now let us dismiss altogether all that lies in the past. It was not you who have done these things: it was an evil possession. But that is driven out now; your words assure me of it.”
Bells for times of refreshment were very frequent on this ship, and Maud was thoroughly pleased with their frequency, for she had, when at sea, that huge sense of bodily health that requires much to eat and many hours for sleep. The desire for sleep was shared by Thurso, and when, just as she finished speaking, the bell for tea tinkled up and down the decks, she went down to the saloon, and he to his cabin, with the expressed intention of reposing till dinner, and not pledging himself to appear even then unless he felt inclined. This desire for sleep, Sir James had said, was one that he should gratify to the full; and when they parted in the vestibule, that led in one direction to his cabin,and downstairs to the saloon in another, it was a possible good night that Maud wished him. His valet would bring his dinner to his cabin if he decided not to move again that evening.
Till that afternoon, when at length Thurso had shown that his will was not dead yet, that his face was still set forwards and upwards, that something of spring, of the power to resist, was in him yet, Maud had not known how near despair she had been, nor how forlorn did she in her inmost self feel that this hope was for which she was bringing him over the sea. Slender and dim as it had been, she had just still clung to it; but now that Thurso responded to it too, and acknowledged its validity, it suddenly became firm and strong. He was willing, eager (he who had felt eagerness for only one thing for so many months), to put himself into the hands of Infinite, Omnipotent Love, which would workfor him the miracle which the utmost skill of finite and mortal treatment despaired of accomplishing. In that great upspringing of hope and courage which had come to her that afternoon at Thurso’s words the confined walls of the dining-saloon could not hold her long; her instinct urged her to be up on deck again with the huge sea and the huge sky to be her only companions, so as to let her soul go forth, without the distraction of near objects and the proximity of other human beings, that seemed to impede and clog the immortal sense, into the limitless presence of Divine Love. All this autumn she had been realising slowly and haltingly—for when evil and ruin were so close about her it was hard not to believe in the reality of them—that only one power, that of God, had any true existence, and that all else was false. But now that realisation was being poured into her like a flood, the dawn was growing dazzlingly bright, for already the miracle had begun, and hope and the will-powerhad begun to spring from what the doctors had declared was soil utterly barren, incapable of bearing fruit.
The top deck was quite empty when she came up again, the sun had already set, and in the darkening skies the stars had begun to blossom like flowers of gold, and she walked forward to the bows of the ship in order to be quite alone. The very rush of air round her, as the great ship hissed forward into the west, where light still lingered, seemed to her typical of what was happening spiritually to her. All round her lay the tossed darkness and evanescent foam of these unquiet seas, but just as this mighty ship went smoothly and evenly through them, so through the waves and fretful tumults of human trouble her soul went tranquilly towards the brightness in the west. She had doubted before, and often and often she had vainly striven to realise what her inmost soul believed, but she had tossed and been buffeted instead of going ontranquilly without fear. Though she had believed, her unbelief still wailed. But now the wailing was hushed.
“Yes, it is so; it cannot be otherwise,” she said to herself. “There can be nothing but the real, the infinite.”
She stayed there long between the sea and the stars, and at the end walked back along the decks that were beginning to shimmer with dew, unconscious of all else in the wonder and glory of the truth that rained like the filtering starlight round her. Thurso, she expected, was asleep, and she paused outside his cabin window for a moment, as if linking him into the golden chain of her thoughts. And so few feet away he was indeed lying on his berth, not asleep, but very vividly awake, in the full blaze of his hell-paradise.
He looked no longer on the bare white walls of his cabin, for though it was dark a heaven of blue acanthus-leaves covered them, and the starsshone like dewdrops there, and the sun was the golden heart of the marvellous blue flower. No quarter-dose, nor half-dose, had sufficed to enable his brain to paint there that celestial imagery, but it was there now blazing in unearthly glory. One thing only troubled him, and that not very much, for it was only like a very distant echo and no authentic voice; he wished vaguely that it had not been necessary to say so much to Maud in order to purchase security. He could not remember exactly what his words had been, but they had had a sort of gravity and seriousness about them. That was necessary, however; she might not have thoroughly trusted him otherwise. But the memory of them just detracted from the bliss of his vision; they came between him and it like a little film of grey.
As a rule he slept very well, especially after he had taken the drug. But to-night, when, soonafter he had eaten the dinner which his valet brought him, he undressed and went to bed, he felt very wide-awake—not staringly so, but thoroughly so. It was now about eleven, and since the effects of the opium usually wore off after five or six hours, leaving him, as the vividness of its sensation began to fade, very drowsy and languid, he could not account for his inability to sleep. Then his disquiet began to take more definite form; he felt as if Maud was in the cabin looking at him with that bright face of joy which she had turned on him at the end of their interview on deck. Gradually this conviction became so vivid that he spoke to her, calling her by name. There was no answer, and he fumbled for the electric switch, and turned on his light in order to convince himself that she was not there.
He put the light out, and lay down again, but no sooner had he closed his eyes and tried to compose himself to sleep than the same certaintyof her presence, definite and conclusive as actual ocular vision, again visited him. She was close to him, and as if actual words had been spoken by her in bodily presence, he knew what filled her brain, what she wanted. It was all about him; she was saying to him again and again: “You are not only feeling better and stronger, but you are better. God is making you better. You are in His presence now, and no evil, drug, or suspicion, or hate can exist there.” And together with this came the revivified memory of his own words to her—words which were utterly false, and which he had spoken to make his own private proceedings secure. Now he remembered what he had said; he had used the strongest and most solemn phrases that he could think of in order that he might go to his cabin without fear of interruption, and—do what he had done.
This great travelling hotel of a ship had grown quite quiet during this last hour or two.When he went to bed there had been the sound of music still going on in the saloon, and to that there had succeeded the voices and steps of those going to their cabins; but now there was no sound, except the external hiss and gurgle of the divided waters, and the little chucklings and tappings which at sea are never silent. But in the darkness and quiet he was more than ever conscious of Maud’s presence, and of what was going on in her brain, and he began to wonder whether this was not some drug-born hallucination. Whatever it was, its vividness still grew, so also did the memory of what he had said to her, till he could all but hear himself saying those blasphemous things again. Often and often he had said dreadful and intolerable things to Catherine, but never, so far as he knew, had he been quite so mean a liar as he had been this afternoon to Maud. He had lied sacredly to-day in order to secure uninterruption for the enjoyment of that whichhe had renounced. Now in the darkness and quietude his words came back to him. And all the time Maud was here; her whole soul was filled with thankfulness to hear him speak these despicable falsehoods.
This lying here became intolerable; he was growing more acutely awake every moment, and every moment grew more aware of the reality of Maud’s presence. Was it some warning, did some occult sense whisper to him that she was in imminent danger of some kind, and that, as at the hour of death, her soul sought his so vehemently that it produced this confirmed belief in her actual presence? And next moment he had jumped out of bed, and put on a few hasty clothes, in order to go to her cabin and see that she was all right. Yet at the door he hesitated, feeling he could not face her. He would betray himself, his eyes would betray him, so that he could not meet hers; or his mouth would betray him, so that he could give but stuttered answers,and she would guess what he had been doing. But anxiety for her overmastered this, and he went and tapped at her door.
She answered at once, and he went in. Though it was so late, she was still fully dressed, and seated on a chair by her berth, her face radiant with happiness.
“Not in bed yet?” he said.
“No; I was too happy to go to bed.”
Then, as she looked at him, she paused.