Эдвард Бенсон
The House of Defence. Volume 2

CHAPTER III

THURSO’S recovery, 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 the Celtic, 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. Those months 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 his wreck. 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 to health. 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 shot with 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 being better 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 incapable of 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 I can be 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 His presence. 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 all these 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 his life 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, and invading 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 going to 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 not be 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 I did 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 you feel 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 work for 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-power had 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 on tranquilly 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 stars shone 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, soon after 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 certainty of 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 which he 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.