Эдвард Бенсон
The House of Defence. Volume 2

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.

“What is the matter, Thurso?” she said. “What have you come to me for?”

He could not meet her eye, just as he had feared, but looked away.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I kept thinking you were in the room. I came to see if you were all right.”

She gave a long sigh, and shook her head.

“Oh, Thurso, you’ve been taking laudanum again,” she said. “But, anyhow, anyhow, you came to tell me, did you not?”

He looked back fiercely at her, knowing that he was going to stammer, and furious at himself.

“I – I haven’t,” he said. “Wh – what do you mean? I – ” And then his voice failed him; his lips stuttered, trying to say something, but no sound came. She seemed not to have heard his denial.

“No wonder you thought I was in your cabin,” she said. “All my soul was there. Oh, Thurso, don’t despair, there’s a good fellow!”

Then something seemed to break within him. He could not go on telling lies to her. Perhaps it was because he was tired, and could not summon up the energy to protest; perhaps it was that for very shame he could not. It was simpler, too, to tell the truth. He cared so little.

“No, it is hopeless,” he said. “I am tired of trying and failing. As soon as my strength came back to me a little to-day the craving came back. I brought a bottle of the stuff with me. Oh yes, I told you I hadn’t; I lied – I lied gorgeously; you never suspected it. All the time we were talking this afternoon I wanted only one thing – to get away to my cabin. I didn’t care what I said to you in order to secure that. Now I suppose you’ll want me to give up the rest of the stuff. Well, I can’t. I don’t want anything in the world except it. And it’s no use your thinking that I can ever get better. I have given up all hope. You had better do the same.”

For one moment Maud felt that he spoke the truth, that he was beyond power of recall. But the next her whole soul and strength was up in arms, fighting, denying that thought, passionately reversing it. There was nothing in the world that could be compared with the reality of Infinite Love; she had known that so well to-day, and already she was letting error obscure it. Vehemently, vigorously, she fought that error, and then suddenly she wondered what she had been fighting. For there was nothing there; her blows were rained upon emptiness. It was as if she had dreamed she was fighting. And she spoke to Thurso as she might have spoken to a child who was afraid of the dark, while in her hands she carried the Great Light.

“You silly boy!” she said. “What can you mean by such nonsense? How can I give you up? How is it possible for me to give up one whom I love? You can’t give up love. You are frightened, you know, and there’s nothing in the world to frighten you. You said this afternoon things that made me unutterably happy, and now you come and tell me they were lies, that you didn’t mean them. I’m sorry you didn’t mean them, but they weren’t lies. They were all perfectly true.”

That sombre smouldering of despair in his eyes faded.

“Do you mean you can possibly ever trust me again?” he asked. Then he added quickly: “But I can’t give you the bottle – I can’t.”

Maud almost laughed.

“Well, if you can’t, you can’t,” she said. “And now I’m going to see you back to your cabin, and you are going to bed. You’ve had a dreadful evening, dear, over these nightmare errors. I am so sorry. And if you feel I am in the room with you again, you mustn’t be frightened or think there is anything wrong. I can’t help being with you.”

He said nothing to this, and they went down the creaking white passage to his cabin in silence.

“And you’ve had dinner?” she asked. “You won’t be hungry before morning? It’s only a little after one, you know. I could get you something.”

“No; nothing, thanks,” he said.

He stood irresolute in the middle of his cabin, and Maud watched him with shining eyes, knowing and telling herself that she knew that her desire was going to be given her. Then he took a bunch of keys from his pocket, detached one, and flung it on the ground.

“That’s the key,” he said. “You will find the bottle in my despatch-box. You may take it if you like.”

But Maud made no movement to pick up the key.

“My dear Thurso,” she said, “where are your manners? That really is not the proper way to give me a key.”

“I won’t give it you in any other way,” he said.

She longed so to pick it up herself that she could scarcely restrain herself from doing it, but she longed also that, strengthened by this first effort, he should make another, give her the key voluntarily. But what if he picked it up himself, and refused to give it her? No; that could not happen.

“Then, I’m afraid it must stop where it is,” she said. “Good night.”

He turned with a frown to her.

“Oh, Maud, you fool!” he said. “Why don’t you take it while I can just manage to allow you to?”

“Because you must give it me like a pretty gentleman, of course,” she said.

Ah! how pleasant and human were the dealings of love! Half an hour ago tragedy, sordid, bitter, and heart-breaking, had been hers, and now not only was comedy here, but sheer farce, mirthful and ridiculous, productive of childish laughter. Thurso laughed, too, as he bent down and picked up the key.

“You are an obstinate woman,” he said.

“I know. Thank you, darling. Oh, Thurso, how much better it is than the time I threw the bottle away without your knowing! Now you give it me.”

She unlocked the despatch-box.

“Thurso, what a big bottle!” she said; “and half empty. How greedy!”

But the sight of it kindled his desire again, and it flamed up.

“Ah! give it me back!” he cried. “I can’t let you have it. I told you I couldn’t.”

Maud did not feel bound to demonstrate over this, and she simply ran out of the cabin with the bottle. She made not half a dozen steps of it across the deck, and before ten seconds were over a large, half-empty bottle of laudanum was sinking forlornly into the abysmal depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

“That’s the end of you,” she observed viciously.

But in spite of this piece of gained ground, she knew well that there must be many uphill battles to fight before recovery could be assured. Cochrane had told her that in the letter she had received from him just before she left England. He had answered at once to her cable, merely saying that “he would cure Thurso,” and had written fully afterwards. The letter ended thus:

“I know that you believe in the Infinite and Omnipotent Mind, which is the sole and only cause and origin of all the world; and though you are not a member of our Church at present, yet, since you believe the Gospel on which every cure that Christian Science has ever made is based, begin treating him at once yourself. Combat in your mind every sign of error that you see in him, and never allow yourself to be discouraged, because to be discouraged means that for the moment you doubt. Of course, good must triumph, but when error is so firmly rooted in a man it wants some pulling up. It won’t come away as a mere shallow-rooted weed will. You may have to face apparent failure again and again, but it is a comfort to know that one is on the winning side.”

The days that followed amply illustrated the truth of this, and many were the hours in which Maud was tempted to despair. Every evil, erring mood that had made up Thurso’s record for the last six months was condensed into the few days of that voyage. Sometimes his will would flicker in a little dim flame, so that she knew it was not quite quenched; but the flame was so feeble, and so dense was the blackness that surrounded it. One day he secretly went to the ship’s doctor, taking with him the prescription that was so familiar, which he had himself written out and signed with Sir James Sanderson’s name, asking him to have it made up.

The doctor looked at it. It was all in order.

“Certainly, Lord Thurso,” he said. “I will have it sent to your cabin. It is rather a strong solution, you know. You must be careful not to exceed the dose.”

Thurso almost smiled at this.

“Oh, I am very careful,” he said. “I suffer from terrible neuralgic headaches. Thank you very much.”

He left the surgery, his heart beating with exhilarated anticipation, when suddenly the doctor, who was looking at the prescription again, gave a little whistle, and then called him. Thurso had hardly left the room, and came back at once.

“Lord Thurso,” he said, “this is rather odd. Sir James Sanderson is not on board, for I saw him leave the ship at Liverpool. Yet the prescription is written on the ship’s paper.”

Thurso made a furious gesture of impatience.

“Oh, for God’s sake give it me!” he said. “I shall go mad without it. It was Sir James’s prescription. I – I copied it out. I have taken it many times.”

Then a sudden thought struck him, and he could have screamed at his own stupidity in not having thought of it a second sooner.

“I don’t know what I am saying,” he said. “I didn’t copy it out at all. Sir James wrote it for me before he left the ship.”

The doctor looked at him in silence. It was sufficiently plain to him what the case was.

“I am very sorry,” he said, “but it is quite impossible for me to give you this. I will with pleasure give you a bromide mixture or phenacetin if your head is bad. Of course, the matter shall go no farther.”

Thurso merely walked away. There was nothing more to be said. And then suddenly the little flicker of will and of outraged self-respect shot up again, and he saw how mean it all was. He, Thurso, had not only forged this, but his forgery had been detected: that was bitter. He must not do this kind of thing. This powerlessness against his desire was intolerable, degrading; his pride rebelled against the hideous strength of his weakness.

He leaned against the bulwarks of the ship, looking at the hissing wreaths of foam that bubbled forty feet below, in despair at himself; yet, since for the moment he was ashamed, since he wished he was not such a despicable fellow, the despair was not total. Yet would it not be better if he ceased to struggle, ceased to be at all? One moment of bravery, one leap into those huge grey monsters of waves that were making even this leviathan of the seas rock and roll, and it would be all over. But even at the moment of thinking this he knew he had not the courage to do it. No moral quality seemed to be left to him. They had all been eaten up and transformed into one hideous desire, even as a cancer turns the wholesome blood and living tissues of the body into its own putrefying growth. And what if that doctor told somebody? He had said that it should go no further, but there was small blame to him if he could not resist so savoury a bit of scandal. “The Earl of Thurso forges Sir James Sanderson’s name in order to get laudanum, to which he is a slave!” That would make an alluring headline, if tastefully arranged, for some New York paper.

Or, again, he would rail at Maud, laying tongue to any bitter falsehood he could invent, telling her, for instance, that she had stolen his bottle of laudanum, and that he was tortured with neuralgia. Or, which hurt her more, he would tell her the truth, and say that he had tried forgery on the ship’s doctor, and had been caught, asking her how she liked to have a forger for a brother. Or, hardest of all, he would sit for hours in idle despair, so deep, so abandoned, that it was all she could do not to despair also. She knew it was all error. It was the unreal, the mortal part of him that suffered, but it was very hard to cling to the truth of what she believed, and not let these seas sweep her away.

But after this not very brilliant attempt to get laudanum from the ship’s doctor, Thurso made no further efforts in that direction, and now and then there were little rifts in those clouds and storms that were so dark and grey above him. More than once, when for an hour, perhaps, he had sat and been voluble with bitter things in order to wound her, he would cease suddenly and sit in despairing, sorry silence.

“I’m an utter, utter brute!” he would say; “but try to cling to your belief that it isn’t me.”

Then she would look at him with lips that quivered and eyes that were brimming with unshed tears.

“Oh, Thurso, I know that,” she said. “And if I forget it now and then, and feel hurt and wounded, thinking that it is you who have been saying bitter things to me, I know it is not so really.”

Throughout the voyage his bodily health and strength were steadily, though slowly, on the mend. He put on a little flesh; there was a little more brightness in his eye and more clearness of skin than when he left England, and this, too, seemed to her a visible sign of the truth of what she believed. With all her heart, too, she set herself to reverse and forget the warning that Sir James had given her, that as his strength began to return so the strength of his craving would grow also. It had, indeed, seemed that this was true on that first evening when he had taken the drug again – or, at least, he had felt and said that it was so – but she set herself to fight that. With heart lifted high in faith and hope, she denied it, affirming that, his health being a good thing, it could not let itself give aid and be a slave to an evil thing, for thus evil would be mastering good – a thing unthinkable. No; the strength that was coming back to him, slowly indeed, represented the efforts against, and the repulses of, that deadly habit which had become so intimate a guest of his soul. Into the house of his soul he had admitted it, a hideous, dwarfish shape, but of terrible strength, blear-eyed, and with trembling hands, clothed in the shroud and cerements of sensuality. But now he was pushing it away again, dragging it out of the home of his spirit. It was hard work – none knew that better than she – for the thing clung as tenaciously as a limpet; but failure was impossible, and well she knew that, when at last they got it to the door of his soul, and got that door open so that the sunshine of Infinite Love poured in, with what cry of joyful amazement would he see that the dreadful figure that in the dark seemed so real was nothing, had no existence apart from his belief in it. It was cheating him all the time. It was only in the twilight of his soul that what was a shadow seemed to be real.

Now and then, too, the real Thurso – the kindly, courteous gentleman who had been to her so well-loved a brother – came back, and he and Maud would talk about old days before ever this shadow blackened his path. And then in the serene light of memory, which often lends a vividness to that which is remembered that it did not have in life, they would live over again some windy, notable day on the hill when Thurso shot three stags, or some memorable morning by the river when Maud killed four salmon before lunch.

“Oh, Thurso, and I should have killed the fifth, do you remember? but I let the line get round that rock in the Roaring Pool, and he broke me.”

“By gad! yes,” he said. “And you very nearly cried. Lord, what good days they were! I was awfully happy all that summer. Funny – I had hideous neuralgia, and it spoiled my pleasure a good deal, but it didn’t spoil my happiness. What do you make of that?”

“Why, nothing can spoil one’s happiness,” she said, “if one thinks right. All happiness – ”

But he got up suddenly.

“I get the heartache to think of it all,” he said.

She rose, too, laying her hand on his shoulder.

“Ah, Thurso, it will come back,” she said – “it will come back and be better than it ever was.”

He looked at her with a sudden face of gloom.

“And you?” he asked. “And Catherine? How can she forget? It is absurd to say that things can be the same as before. Not God can put the clock back and say it is yesterday.”

“No, dear; but the sun will rise on a to-morrow that will be ever so bright. Joy comes in the morning.”

The bitter mood was coming over him again.

“Ah! a phrase,” he said.

“Yes; but a true one,” she answered.

But these hours were short and rare, and it was but seldom that he was able to think even regretfully or longingly of the past. For the most part he was suspicious and bitter, full only of the one deadly desire and the longing for its gratification. Yet as the days went by, and the remainder of their voyage began to be reckoned by the smaller scale of hours, his despair and dispiritedness were sensibly lessened. Maud noticed that, but when – as sometimes he did – he spoke hopefully of the new cure that was going to be tried, his voice rang as false as a cracked bell, and she knew that it was not to the treatment and hope of salvation that he looked forward, but to the escape from this prison of a ship, where his desire was denied him, to the freedom of land, of the towns, where there were chemists, drug-stores. It was that really, so she felt, that animated him.

Yet with his returning strength his craving did not seem to grow proportionately. At times she thought there was some check on it, unanticipated by Sir James. He wanted the drug: his brain, she made no doubt, was often full of the schemes that could be effected on shore. But no madness and raving of desire had appeared, and already they were within Sandy Hook, steaming slowly up to the relentless city.

Thurso and she were standing on the top deck together when they were arriving, on a morning of crystalline brightness. The land was white with snow, but the air was windless, and she felt that even the town which has the credit or discredit of possessing the vilest climate yet discovered in the world had its beautiful days. Higher and higher, as they drew near, rose the abominable, many-storied buildings, and from the pale blue of the winter sky they passed into the region of grey smoke which overhung the town. From the lonely and splendid places of the untenanted seas they slid into more populous waters. Stately liners were leaving for Eastern ports, and from the beautiful desert of the ocean they passed into the jostling waterways, full of broad-beamed ferry-steamers, and the hootings of innumerable syrens. Yet, somehow, her heart welcomed it all. She felt the stimulus of keen air and the intense throbbing activity which the town exhaled, that atmosphere of continuous, unremitting effort which makes all other places seem dronish and lazy.

But it did not strike Thurso thus.

“It is damnable! it is hell!” he said.

Maud scarcely attended to him.

“Oh, I rather like it,” she said.

The huge bulk of their ship, helpless in these narrow waters as some spent whale, sidled up to her berth, towed, as if by microscopical harpooners’ boats, by two or three tiny, bustling tugs; and on the quay Maud saw a figure she knew, tall and serene and smiling, with no greatcoat on in spite of the chilliness of the morning, and for that moment she forgot Thurso and his troubles, and her heart leaped lightly to him across the narrowing space of water that separated them.

That was unconscious, unpremeditated, and on the moment conscious thought came back, and she thought, not of herself and him, but only of him and Thurso. He was there, the man who had flicked across the ocean the message that he “would cure him.” And she turned to her brother.

“Look! there is Mr. Cochrane,” she said, “and he sees us. How kind of him to have come down to meet the ship.”

It was yet a long time before they were berthed, and the landing-bridges put in place, and Maud did not know how his heart, too, had leaped when he saw them standing on the deck. To him, also, had come, as to her, that first unpremeditated leap, when it was to her that he leaped. Then with his conscious self he saw her brother, him whom he longed to save from mortal error.

But the flame of human love, in spite of himself, had been the first to blaze.

Then they met, all three.