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THE HOUSE OF DEFENCE. BY E. F. BENSON.
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THE
HOUSE OF DEFENCE
BY
E. F. BENSON
AUTHOR OF "DODO," "THE CHALLONERS," "THE IMAGE IN THE SAND,"
"THE ANGEL OF PAIN," "PAUL," ETC.
_COPYRIGHT EDITION_
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1907.
DEDICATION
TO
C. E. M.
MY DEAR FRIEND,
It is with your permission that I dedicate this book to you, and with
your permission and by your desire that I explain the circumstances of
its dedication. You were cured, as both you and I know, of a disease
that medical science had pronounced incurable by a certain Christian
Science healer, who used neither knife nor drugs upon you.
I, a layman in medical affairs, think, as you know, that your disease
was nervous in origin, and you will readily admit that the wise and
skilful man who figures here as Sir James thought the same. But it was
already organic when you went to him, and, after consultation with
others, he pronounced it incurable. At the same time, he acknowledged
its nervous origin, and you will acknowledge that with the utmost
frankness he confessed entire inability to say _how_ a nervous affection
entered the more obviously material world of organic trouble. He had
instances in plenty: fear, anxiety, he said, affected circulation and
digestion, and that, of course, is patent to everybody. So, too, is the
cure: remove the anxiety or fear, and you will get gastric affairs to go
smoothly again, _unless_ organic trouble has begun.
I suppose it is because we are all so used to that sort of mental
healing (do not contradict me yet) that we no longer see any mystery
attaching to it. But in such a cure there is no doubt whatever that the
mind acts on the body, even as it acted before, when fear produced the
imperfect action of the digestion, and heals just as it hurt. To go a
step farther, I see no reason why the mind should not heal the disease
of drinking or drug-taking, for in these, too, it is the brain that is
the seat of the trouble, and its disease and desire is the real cause of
the damage done to bodily tissue. But when--still logically, though in a
scale that swiftly ascends--you tell me that some power not surgical can
heal a compound fracture, then I must part company. At least, I do not
believe that any man living upon this earth can make it happen that
bones that are broken should join together (especially when the fracture
is compound and they stick out of the skin) without assisting Nature by
what you call "mere manipulation," but by what I call, "setting the
bone."
It is here we join issue.
We have often discussed these points before, and the discussion has ever
ended in laughter. But the discussion ends this time in the book which I
have written.
You have read these pages, and you know that in some points you seem to
me to be very like Alice Yardly, but those are the points on which we
agree to differ. I think Alice Yardly and you are often too silly for
words. But you are much more essentially like Bertie Cochrane, and it is
to you, in the character of him, that I dedicate this book. You, sick
with a mortal disease, found healing in Christian Science, and in it
found happiness. And now you yourself heal by the power that healed you.
For I hope I shall never forget that which I with my own eyes saw you
do--that which is the foundation of the last scene of the healing in
"The House of Defence." To save that drug-logged wreck, who was our
friend, when you saw no other way of convincing him of the beastliness
of his habit, you drank that which by all that is known of the drug
should have killed you, and you drank it with complete and absolute
confidence that it could not possibly hurt you. It is true--at least,
Sir James tells me so--that it is not quite easy to poison oneself with
laudanum, because the amateur will usually take too much, and be sick,
or too little, and thus not imbibe a fatal dose. But you drank a good
deal--I can see now the brown stuff falling in your glass--and it
appeared to have no effect whatever on you. I will go further: it had no
effect whatever on you. But it had the effect you foresaw on your
patient: it cured him.
Now, again and again I ask myself, how did it cure him? He was very fond
of you; he saw you, in the desire to save him, apparently lay down your
life for him. I believe that his brain, his will-power, received then so
tremendous and bracing a shock that laudanum for that moment became to
him a thing abhorrent and devilish, as no doubt it is. The sight of you
swallowing the deadly thing gave a huge stimulus to his will. That seems
to me not only possible, but natural. Only, if this is the case, it was
again his own mind, on which your action acted, that healed him.
That, however, does not explain why the drug had no effect on you. There
again we part company. I believe it to have been your absolute
confidence that it could not hurt you that left you unharmed and
unaffected. You said, with a faith that to me is transcendent, "This
thing shall not hurt me, because it is necessary for me to drink it."
And your body obeyed the orders of your mind, and was not harmed. But
you will have none of that explanation. You say it could not harm you,
because there is neither healing nor hurt in material things.... And
here we are again!
Let me cease to argue with you. Let me only say that to me that evening
was an epoch. I have seen and heard of cheerful and serene heroism
before, but it never before came so close to me as then, when the storm
bugled outside, and the fire spluttered, and you drank your deadly
glass.
Affectionately yours,
E. F. BENSON.
THE HOUSE OF DEFENCE.
CHAPTER I.
The little travelling-clock that stood on the broad marble
chimney-piece, looking strangely minute and insignificant on the slab
supported by two huge Caryatides, had some minutes ago rapped out the
hour of eight in its jingling voice, but here, in these high latitudes
of Caithness, since the time of the year was close on midsummer, the sun
still swung some way above the high hills to the north-west. It shone
full, with the cool brightness of the light of Northern evenings, into
the deep-seated window where Maud Raynham was sitting, waiting, without
impatience, for impatience was alien to her serene habit of mind, but
with a little touch of anxiety, for her brother's return. The anxiety,
the wish that he would come, could not be absent, since affection and
all its kindred cares were the hearth-side inhabitants of her heart.
Also, it must be confessed, she was extremely hungry, and wanted dinner
quite enormously.
The window in which she sat was one of six, for the room was of great
extent, and looked, perhaps, even larger than it really was owing to its
half-dismantled condition, while the shining parquetted floor, almost
bare of carpets, was like a surface of dim looking-glass, multiplying
the area. In one corner was a small table, laid for two, where they
would belatedly dine when he came in; near it was a man's table,
littered with correspondence and the apparatus of tobacco, while close
by the fireplace was a low easy-chair, with a basket disgorging
needlework beside it, which indicated where she herself had been making
her nest until she had strolled across to the window, when the clock
struck eight, to enjoy the last half-hour of sunlight, and also to catch
sight of her brother when his figure should appear coming up the
straight riband of the road towards the house, from the village below,
where he had been all day. Though the month was mid-June, a gay sparkle
of fire, born of the delectable mixture of peat and coal, burned on the
hearth between the two marble Caryatides, making an agreeable brightness
for the eye, and destined after sunset to make a warmth not less
agreeable; for nights even now were not often without the chill that
turned to frost before morning, and this evening, in spite of the clear
shining of the low sun, there was in the air that crystalline brightness
that portended cold when the direct rays were withdrawn. For the house
stood high and exposed on these grey and purple-heathered hills of
Caithness, without protection from neighbouring tops or screen of
wind-swept trees, and the full vigour of the temperatures both of noon
and midnight was felt there without abatement.
This table laid for dinner in one corner, the man's littered desk, and
the woman's nook near the fireplace, all planted together in one big
room out of the many big rooms that this great grey house contained,
gave the note as of gipsy and unpremeditated encampment, and this was
borne out also by the holland sheetings that had not been removed from
the two big glass chandeliers which hung from the ceiling, and which
loosely enveloped certain large articles of furniture, and made a pall
in front of a bookcase. All this pointed to a sudden and temporary
occupation, as if those who had taken possession of the house were
content with the mere necessities of life, and gave no thought to its
adornments and decorations. Such was indeed the case, for Lord Thurso
and his sister, Lady Maud Raynham, had arrived here a few days ago only,
preceded by a telegram to the caretaker to make habitable a bedroom for
each of them, and a living-room for them together. They had come, in
fact, suddenly and in mid-season, for in the village of Achnaleesh, over
which Maud's eyes now looked, a mile below the house, there had broken
out, virulent and appalling, an epidemic of typhoid fever; and since
Achnaleesh, like everything else within those wide horizons, was part of
Lord Thurso's immense Scotch property, it had been clear to him, without
debate or question on the subject, that it was his business to leave
town at once and come up here to see how far human efforts could avail
to check this pestilence, and relieve the sufferings of those homes
already stricken with it. His wife, however, though not her heart only,
but her efforts and active support, were ever at the service of
charitable schemes, had not in the least seen her way to accompanying
him. If Thurso thought he had better go, by all means let him do so, but
she failed to see what object there could be in her accompanying him
which would compensate for the inconvenience of leaving town just now.
For herself, she could see nothing gained by the journey of either of
them, since he was in hourly communication with his agent, a reliable
and careful man, who would see that everything medically desirable was
carried out. But she was not aware how either his presence or hers would
be conducive to the effectiveness of sanitary measures; yet, since she
knew that her husband looked on many questions with a different eye from
hers, she had no more attempted to dissuade him from going than he had
tried to persuade her to come up with him. But it had seemed quite
obvious to Maud that Thurso must not go by himself, and without either
publicly or privately criticising his wife's refusal to go, she had
simply taken her place. Indeed, she had not even felt the inclination to
criticise; the things that kept Catherine in London were such as could
ill be cancelled. Maud had hardly offered her brother her companionship;
she had just joined him at an early dinner, and driven to King's Cross
with him. Perhaps it seemed almost equally natural to him that she
should come.
* * * * *
In any case, the state of things which they found on their arrival
seemed to them both to have rendered his coming imperative. Even in the
last twenty-four hours there had been a portentous increase of cases,
and a panic terror, such as is only possible among folks ignorant for
the most part of all illness except such as shadows old age, and
naturally of rude health, had seized the village at this sudden smiting
down of the strongest and healthiest among them. Mixed with this panic,
too, was the fear and distrust of doctors, and the inability to believe
that it could be right, when a man was prostrate with the exhaustion of
long-continued fever, to deny him a morsel of meat or a crust of solid
food. Doctors were there and nurses, as Thurso had ordered, but it was
the obedience to their orders which, till he came, had been so hard to
enforce. For this alone he knew he had been right in coming himself,
apart from the reason of sentiment which forbade him to be absent, since
a word from him, his expressed wish, was more potent than all the orders
that doctors might give. For feudal obedience to that long and kindly
race of landlords was far more paramount than medical advice; and since
the laird ranged himself on the side of the doctors, who ordered windows
to be opened when all other folk of commonsense would be inclined to
shut every chink and cranny by which air might enter and give cold to
the patient, and forbade solid food even to those "puir bodies who had
been crying out half the nicht for a bit of bread," it was necessary to
follow these inscrutable decrees, though wise heads were shaken over
such unreasonable treatment. Lady Maud, too, had had the fever, and with
her own mouth testified that even she, when all delicacies were within
the reach of her purse, had been content with nothing but milk, and no
bite of solid food. That, too, carried weight.
* * * * *
Thurso had brought his valet up with him, but Maud's maid had so clearly
shown that she regarded the journey to the plague-stricken spot as
equivalent to a sentence of death that she had left her behind in town,
and the caretaker and his wife were the only other servants in the huge
house that in autumn buzzed with attendance. Upstairs there was a
bedroom for each of them, and below just this one half-shrouded room, in
a corner of which they encamped, leaving the rest to holland sheeting.
Otherwise the great house was at siesta, and to Maud, who only knew it
hitherto when it was a kaleidoscope of guests, there was something
attractive in its repose. She had come straight from the whirl of
mid-season in London, at the time of the year when every day consists of
forty-eight hours, and each hour of that day of a hundred and twenty
minutes, all immensely occupied; and the contrast between the hour now,
while she sat in the late evening sun in the window-seat waiting for
Thurso to return, and the corresponding hour which was going on in
London, when she would have been hurrying out to dinner, with a busy day
behind her, and the opera and a ball to make short work of the night,
gave her food for a certain quiet contentment. The contrast was so
pleasantly violent; it was like that moment when one steps suddenly, out
of the blare and brilliance of a ball-room, where one has enjoyed the
waltz quite immensely, onto some quiet, tented balcony, with the trees
of the park in front, and above the serenity of starlight. On a slightly
larger scale that contrast was hers now. She had stepped out from London
into the tranquillity of these Caithness moors. To say that she had not
regretted leaving town would be untrue; she had, at any rate, regretted
the clear necessity of leaving it, and coming up here with her brother.
But it had been necessary for her to go; she could not possibly have
done otherwise, and though she was sorry (if she allowed her mind to
dwell on that) to have cut herself off from all the delightful things
that were going on in town, from the ceaseless stream of friends whom
one met all day and all night, and who were amusing themselves so
diligently, even as she had been amusing herself, it was still quite
clear that somebody must come up here with Thurso, and that, since
Catherine did not propose to come, she was the obvious person to do so.
But she no more wasted sighs over what she was missing in town than she
wasted sighs when she lost a fish. That particular fish was off; she
would angle for another fish instead. There were fish everywhere; there
was no situation, as far as she knew, out of which nothing was to be
captured. Here, indeed, she had her fish already hooked for her; she had
come to keep house for Thurso, to make things cheerful for him as far as
she could, to prevent his being a prey to boredom and depression when
he came home in the evening after a long day spent in the fever-stricken
village. She had already found that there was room for her skill.
* * * * *
Nature had for many generations adopted a very reasonable plan with
regard to the gifts she devoted to the Raynhams. As a family they were
extremely prolific, so with regard to them she had certainly said to
herself, "There is not enough beauty at my disposal to go round. What
shall I do about them? Shall I divide all the beauty which I feel
justified in investing in each generation, among all the children, or
shall I endow one of them with it all, and leave the rest to look after
themselves?"
She had adopted the latter and most sensible alternative, and now for
six or seven generations of Raynhams one of the many children had always
been endowed with extraordinary beauty, while the others had to be
content with a certain air of distinction and pleasantness which, after
all, made their plainness of feature a matter of small account.
Sometimes Nature had made an error of judgment, as anyone seeing the
family portraits must feel, in investing the beauty of a generation in a
boy instead of a girl; but in this instance she had made no such
mistake, and here in the window, waiting for her brother, was the bank
in which the physical fortunes of the family were, for this generation,
invested. Like them all, Maud was tall, and charm in her had not been
sacrificed to perfection of feature. For violet eyes, rare in
themselves, are so often no more than violet eyes, just pieces of
exquisite colour. But here the myriad moods of the girl's mind that
chased each other like cloud and shadow on some windy day of spring
across dark seas, lit wonderful lights in those violet pools, or made
them dark as sapphires at night, and through these beautiful windows of
her soul a beautiful soul looked forth. Humour and an alert sense of
the ludicrous, so valuable as weapons in that arsenal of the mind from
the stores of which we have ever to be arming ourselves against the
assaults of tiresome and aggressive circumstance, gleamed there, ready
to set the mouth smiling; eager and kindly interest in the spectacle of
life was there, like a friendly face in the theatre; and deep down in
those eyes you would say that something not yet awake or aware of itself
slept and perhaps dreamed in its slumber of twenty years. And a man
might find his breath catch in his throat at the thought of awakening
it.
Being a Raynham, she was very fair of complexion, but her hair was not
of that vague straw colour which loosely passes for gold, provided only
that the skin is white and pink, but of that tint which has been touched
and proved by assay to be of the veritable metal. It grew low on her
forehead and abundantly, but not in those excessive quantities that
instantly call to the mind of the observer those ladies who stand all
day with their backs to the windows of populous thoroughfares in order
to display the riotous excess of capillary covering which the use of
some advertised unguent results in. Nor did her mouth ever so faintly
resemble the "Cupid's bow" which is so dear to the fashion-plates of
feminine loveliness. It was not like a bow at all; it was rather large,
rather full-lipped, but, like her eyes, or like aspen-leaves in spring,
it was ever a-quiver to the breeze of the moment, instinctively obeying
the kindly mind that prompted it. Nor were her lips vermilion--a hue
that Nature happily does not employ in the colouring of the human mouth,
leaving its employment to art--but they were of that veiled blood-tint,
blood below something like oiled silk, that speaks of youth and vitality
as surely as vermilion speaks of the desire to be vital and young.
The window faced north-west, and the rays of the sun, near its setting,
poured full onto her, so that she half closed her eyes as she looked
out across the golden haze of its level beams, while the breeze from the
open sash just stirred her hair. The lawn, so pleasant to walk on, that
carpet of grass woven with moss, and so impossible to use for the
desecrating games which in England demand that a lawn be hard and flat,
lay below the windows, enclosed in a riband of flower-bed, brilliant
with the strong colours that distinguish the North and the South from
the more temperate zone. Beyond ran a wall of grey stone, some four feet
high, where tropæolum was rampant, but outside the untamed moor broke
against it, as against a sea-wall, so that, going out from the
garden-gate, set in the middle of it, one foot might still be on the
soft tameness of the lawn, while the other was on the primeval heather.
Just these few acres of garden and land for the house had been captured
and tamed out of the moorland, while outside and all round, ragged and
prehistoric as the ocean, there flowed, like the sea round some sand
castle erected by children playing on the shore, the hills and heather
of Caithness, tossing and tumbling there, as they had tumbled and tossed
before ever the foot of man had set his tread on this waste land. Stone
Age and what-not had gone to their making, and in so short time
again--reckoning as the stones and the vegetable life of these
transitory things number the years--these little puny efforts of man,
the lawns and the terraces, would be swallowed up again, and smothered
in the effervescence and fever of the world. Even now, how the
infinitesimal microbe of disease was prevailing against the fragile life
of the poor bewildered peasants in the village set down there in a
wrinkle of the hill, invisible itself, but over which hung the blue
smoke of the fires kindled at sunset!
These thoughts were of sombre texture, and Maud, through whose head they
were passing unbidden, like scenes involuntarily presented, never
consciously allowed herself indulgence in sombre thought, unless from
the shadows she expected the birth of something bright. Yet even after
she had acknowledged the sombreness and inutility of it, she let her
mind dwell on it all a little longer, searching, though vaguely, for
some bracing counterblast. Of course, God was over all: she knew that
quite well, and actively believed it. But when a plague like this,
caused, no doubt, by the carelessness and uncleanliness of man, was
snapping off lives like dried stalks, she would have liked to be able to
think of some image that reconciled the beneficence of God with these
hideous phenomena. It was impossible to see what ultimate good could
come of letting people die like this. If from it all came some sign,
some signal evidence of Divine power, it would be intelligible, or at
least salutary. As it was, they died; the place was stricken.
Then the instinct of youth, of health, of exuberant vitality, came to
her aid, and she dismissed these questionings altogether. For her
instinct told her, though the thought did not quite reach the coherence
of definite words, how paralysing to oneself, and how infectious as
regards others, is the indulgence of all dispiriting and depressing
thought. Its microbes were as truly existent in the emotional and
spiritual world as were the fever bacilli in Achnaleesh. But equally
existent and even more potent and infectious were the sun-loving germs
of confidence and the cheerful outlook. Already had she proved the truth
of that in connection with Thurso, who had come home about this hour
last night in a state of the blackest gloom and despair over the plight
of this village of fever-stricken homes, but whose deadly depression had
been quickly dispersed by her steady optimism. Thurso was naturally of
extremely impressionable and imaginative mind, and the day, spent, as it
had been, in going from house to house, finding everywhere the apparatus
of illness, or the simpler and grimmer apparatus of death, had been like
some hideous and real nightmare to him. Then, too, he tortured himself
with a hundred unfounded suppositions. The epidemic seemed to him,
though how he knew not, to be primarily his fault. Clearly, if
everything--drains, water-supply, sanitary arrangements--had all been in
perfect order, typhoid could not have come. The people were his tenants;
it was his business to make sure that the conditions under which they
lived were absolutely healthy.
* * * * *
Now Thurso, as a matter of fact, was the most conscientious and careful
of landlords, and these suppositions, though they had seemed hideously
real to him yesterday evening, were but morbid creations of his brain,
and on them Maud, with her cheerfulness and serenity of spirit, had
acted like a charm. She knew well that he had in no detail been
neglectful or culpable, and that being certain, she had set herself, not
directly to combat his doubts and questionings, but to turn his
attention resolutely away from them, just as a wise nurse will direct a
patient's attention to some interest alien to his pain, and not, by
attempting to prove that pain is only an impression conceived by the
brain, let his mind dwell on it. She had said to herself, "Darling old
Thurso is terribly depressed. So I must distract his mind by being
foolish."
So foolish she had been, but yet with art, so that it did not occur to
him that she was playing the part of a nurse. And as when David played
before Saul to exorcise the evil spirit, so she had played till for the
time he forgot his troubles, both real and imaginary, in the charm and
gaiety which, though she made deliberate use of them, were yet natural
to her.
* * * * *
To-night, however, the obsession of his fears and despondency seemed to
have descended on and infected her, and it needed a long and conscious
effort to rid herself of them. For--this might be unreasonable too--she
knew at the back of her mind she was very anxious about him. Terrible
as the epidemic was, it was producing a disproportionate effect on him;
he was taking it too hard and far too self-consciously. From her
intimate knowledge of him, and from that instinct which common blood
possesses, which can enable a sister to know precisely what a brother is
feeling, though to a wife even the knowledge would be vague, she felt
that he was strung up almost to breaking-point. But she knew also, with
a glow of secret pride in his courage, that nobody but she would have
guessed that, unless, perhaps, some skilled observer of nervous
symptoms. That from childhood had been the danger of his constitution:
he was balanced on so fine an edge, ready to topple over into the gulfs
of black despondency; but, with the courage of high breeding, he ever
concealed his private hell from the world, turning a brave and tranquil
aspect to it, even though he must wear a mask. But for her he wore none,
and she often saw his inward torture, when others knew only of a
pleasant, courteous man--not gay, but of a manner that denoted quiet
enjoyment of the world and habitual serenity.
Maud got up from her seat in the window and closed the sash--for the air
grew instantaneously chilly, and the sun had dropped behind the hills to
the north-west, leaving her in shadow--still looking down the grey
riband of road that led to the lodge and crossed the moor to the village
beyond. Her mind was decidedly not at ease about her brother. How
inextricably soul and body were mixed and mingled! how instantaneously
they acted and reacted on each other! For Thurso's anxiety about his
people, a purely mental or spiritual condition, had kept him awake last
night, and he had come down this morning with one of those excruciating
neuralgic headaches to which he had been liable all his life. His
suffering mind had called in his body to suffer with it, and the bodily
pain had reacted back on his mind, making the poor fellow--not to put
too fine a point upon it--most abominably cross to Maud at breakfast.
Then, since there was the day's work in front of him, for the sake of
which he had come up here--and in his racking pain he was really
incapable of doing it--he had taken the remedy which he had always by
him, but which, in theory, he disliked having recourse to, as much as
Maud disliked his taking it. But when after breakfast he had said to
her, "Maud, I simply can't go down there, and if I did, I couldn't help
in any way, unless I get rid of this agony," she had agreed that it was
an occasion for laudanum.
She strolled across to the fire, and held out her hands to the blaze,
which shone through her fingers, making them look as if they were redly
luminous in themselves and lit from within. Then suddenly, with a little
dramatic gesture, as if she carried her trouble, a palpable burden, in
her hands, she threw it into the fire, and, having consigned it to
destruction, walked back to the window again. Yet she knew in herself
that it was not thus easily got rid of, for it went very deep. There
must be some explanation of all this undeserved suffering, but what was
it? How could it be just that a child should be cursed with inherited
disease? How could it be just that Thurso's very kindness and concern
for his tenants should give him hours of blinding torture?... But there
at last was a figure on the road, and, without putting on her hat, she
went out to meet him.
* * * * *
She saw at once, before she could clearly see his face, by a limpness
and dejection in his walk, that he was horribly tired and in pain. But
that, since now there was something for her to do, enabled her to get
rid of her own dejection, since her cheerfulness, her serenity, must be
brought into action. So, before they actually met, she called to him.
"Oh, Thurso, how late!" she said. "Have you any idea that it is after
half-past eight, and I've got such a sinking inside as is probably quite
unparalleled? Don't let us dress; then we can dine at once. I'm sure
dinner is ready, because I distinctly smelled soup, and something roast,
and baked apples, all rolling richly out of the kitchen windows. I
nearly burst into tears because I wanted them so much. Well, how has the
day gone?"
He looked at her in a sort of despair.
"Oh, Maud, it is too awful," he said. "Twelve fresh cases to-day; I
don't know what to do. And when my head is like this I'm worse than
useless. I can't think; I can't face things."
Maud took his arm.
"Poor dear old boy!" she said. "Has it been bad all day?"
"No; it was all right in the morning after the laudanum, but it came on
worse than ever after lunch. Well, not exactly after lunch, because I
didn't have any."
Maud gave a little exclamation of impatience.
"Thurso, you are too bad!" she said. "You know perfectly well that if
you go without food too long, you always get one of these headaches. And
it isn't the slightest use your saying that there wasn't any time for
lunch, because the biggest lunch that ever happened can be eaten in ten
minutes, whereas a headache takes hours. I hate you to be in pain; but
what a fool you are, dear! You are wicked also, knave and fool, because
you make yourself of absolutely no use to anybody when you are like
this."
He smiled at her; the infection of her energy put a little life into
him.
"Well, I forgot about lunch till the pain came on," he said; "and it was
turned full on at once. After that I simply couldn't eat; it was no use
trying."
"If that is meant to imply that you are not going to have any dinner
either," she said, "you make a grave error. You are going to have soup
and meat and roast apples. And if you attempt to deny it, I shall
instantly add toasted cheese. In fact, I think I will in any case."
Thurso was silent a moment.
"Ah, these poor wretched people----" he began.
But Maud rudely and decisively interrupted.
"I am not going to hear one word about them till you have finished
dinner," she said. "Afterwards, because you will be better then, we will
talk. Don't you remember how, if we weren't quite well, nurse always
said that we would be better after dinner? And we always were, unless we
ate too much. I wonder whether it was dinner that did it, or mere
suggestion--don't they call it--from the omnipotent and infallible
nurse."
"Dinner," said he. "Oh, damn my head!" he added in a sudden burst of
tired irritability and pain, which was rare with him, even to Maud.
"Yes, with pleasure, if that will make it better. But I wonder if it was
entirely dinner. You know, there is something in suggestion, though I
prefer supplementing suggestion with some practical measure. Who are
those people who are always quite well because they think they are?"
"I should think they are fools," said he.
"Yes, but that is not their official title."
"I can't think of a better one," said he. "By the way----"
"Well?"
"No, nothing," he said.
Maud withdrew her arm from his with dignity.
"That is extremely ill-bred," she said. "Mind, I don't in the least want
to know what you were going to say--in fact, I would much sooner you did
not tell me--but having begun, you would, if you had decent manners, go
on."
Thurso laughed; sharp though his neuralgia still was, he was already
beginning to think of things apart from himself.
"How can you say that?" he asked. "You are bursting to know."
"Well, yes, I am. Do tell me."
"I sha'n't Maud, I think I will change, though it is so late, as I have
been in and out of those houses all day. But you needn't; you can begin
without me, if you like."
Maud put her nose in the air.
"Did you _really_ imagine I was going to wait for you?" she asked.
* * * * *
Thurso went upstairs, still smiling at Maud's unbridled curiosity,
especially since there was no mystery or reason for secrecy about that
which he had stopped himself telling her. He merely was not quite sure
whether or no he wanted to do that which he had been on the point of
proposing, and which in itself was of a perfectly unexciting nature. The
bare, dull facts of the matter were these. He had let the
salmon-fishing of the river here until the end of July to an American,
whose name at the moment he could not remember, and this afternoon, as
he came out of one of the cottages, he had passed one of his gillies
carrying rod and gaff, and walking with a young man of clearly
transatlantic origin, whom he felt sure must be the American in
question; and the remark he had refrained from making to Maud was that
it might be neighbourly to ask him to dinner. But as he made his hurried
toilet, he found himself debating the reasons for and against doing this
with a perfectly unaccountable earnestness, as if the decision this way
or that was one that could conceivably be of importance. On the one
side, the reasons against asking him were that the hospitality they
could offer him was of the plainest and most baked-apple kind, served in
a shrouded room, and that he would probably get a much better dinner at
the inn where he was quartered. Also, he himself felt that if he had
come up to Caithness to fish, he would much sooner that his landlord did
not ask him to dinner, since his hospitality, if accepted, would mean
the curtailment of the cream of the evening rise. So perhaps the truer
hospitality would be shown in not burdening his tenant with the
necessity of inventing an excuse or of accepting a tiresome invitation.
Then suddenly the man's name, Bertie Cochrane, flashed into his mind.
Thurso had thought it so odd to sign a lease by an abbreviated name. In
any case, it would be kinder not to ask Mr. Bertie Cochrane to come
three miles in order to eat Scotch broth with a tired landlord, who
would probably be suffering from severe neuralgia.
But, on the other hand, Thurso felt a perfectly unaccountable desire to
see him. He had just met and passed him in the village street, after
coming out from one of those fever-stricken cottages where a young
stalker of his was lying desperately ill. At the moment he, too, was
screwed down to the rack with this hideous unnerving pain, and feeling
utterly dispirited and beaten and hopeless. But for half a second his
eyes had met Cochrane's, and just for that half-second--by chance,
perhaps, or perhaps by reason of that subtle animal magnetism which some
people possess--Thurso had suddenly felt both soothed and encouraged.
Maud, he knew, had something of this magnetic quality, and to be with
her always braced him to a livelier optimism; but in this case the
effect had been magical. There was nothing particularly remarkable about
the man: he was rather tall, young, clean-shaven, with a pleasant boyish
face that suggested plenty of cold water and open air. That was all, but
at the moment Thurso had felt almost inevitably inclined to speak to him
and thank him; to tell him how bitterly his head ached and how miserably
dispirited he felt; to tell him also that he had made him feel better.
The impulse had been quite absurdly strong, but in another moment they
had passed, going their respective ways. But all the afternoon,
subsequent to that chance encounter, the remembrance of Mr. Cochrane
strolling down to the river, and talking in so pleasant and friendly a
manner to the gillie, had never been wholly out of his mind. Cochrane
had seemed an incarnation of health and contentment, and the other all
day had found it scarcely possible to believe in the existence of such
qualities, so remote were they from him. Then antagonism to Mr. Cochrane
had begun to take root in him: he seemed a millionaire in happiness,
leaving pauperism all round him. Well, it was unlikely they would meet
again; reasons of hospitality were sufficient for not asking him to
accept it.
He finished dressing without any severe return of pain, but just as he
was ready to go downstairs it came suddenly back again in such stabs and
spasms of anguish that for a moment he held on to his dressing-table
with clenched hands, bitten lips, and a dripping forehead. Then his eye
fell on the bottle of laudanum which stood by his looking-glass, and
though never before had he taken two doses on the same day, yet never
before after one dose had he suffered pain so agonising and excruciating
as this. But to-day the impulse was incontrollable: he could no longer
reason about the expediency of it, and next moment, with shaking hand,
he poured a full dose into the graduated glass, and drank it. Those few
moments had made him feel faint and sick with pain, and after drinking
he sat down to wait for the divine relief that would come so quickly. On
his very sensitive and excitable nerves the drug exercised an almost
instantaneous effect--not soporific at all, but tranquillising and at
the same time immensely stimulating. The pain would fade like the
melting away of the vapour of breath on a frosty morning, till it became
an incredible memory, while even as it faded a warm tingling glow began
to invade him. It was as if after some frost-bitten Arctic night the
sun of the South would pour its beams upon his brain; happiness and
content would unfold, and, like some magic rose miraculously opening its
rosy petals in the luminous peace of a summer morning, a sense of
unspeakable well-being would sprawl and blossom over his consciousness.
He had not to wait long: before the seconds on the watch which he had
just taken up when the agony seized him had ticked themselves into a
minute, the divine remission of pain began, and, increasing as it
increased, there came that extraordinary glow of content, so that a
couple of minutes afterwards it was not so much in the utter relief of
pain that his body revelled as in the ecstasy of this supreme,
harmonious sense of health. And then, as always, this spread like some
tide of warm incoming waters to his mind. The horror and suffering he
had seen that day in the fevered village ceased to weigh upon him and
darken him with the sense of his possible responsibility and certain
helplessness. Instinctively, his mind ceased to dwell on the thought of
the stalker whose life was nearly despaired of, but went to another
bedside where a life that had been almost despaired of yesterday had
seemed to pause at the very entrance of the valley of the shadow, and
had crawled back a little way into life again. The shadow from the
valley still lay over it, but its face was set towards the living.
Already this divine drug had done that for him: it stopped pain of the
mind, it seemed, even as it stopped the torture of an anguished nerve.
He had sat down for a moment to recover from the physical faintness
which had seized him at that savage assault of pain, but he had sat down
also in order to abandon himself with greater receptiveness to the
rapture of the effect that he knew would come with that remission. Then,
after a few minutes more, he got up, remembering two things--the first
that Maud was probably waiting for him, though she had scorned the
notion; the second that this evening for the first time he was
consciously revelling and delighting in the bodily and mental sensations
that the opium produced, apart from its anodynic qualities. Hitherto he
had taken it purely medicinally, sparingly also, in order to relieve
pain, when the pain was frankly intolerable, or when it paralysed his
power of making exertions that he was clearly called upon to make; and,
having taken it like a medicine, he had in intention done no more than
profit by the medicinal advantage of its restorative qualities. But
to-night he knew, if he honestly looked at the spring of motive, that he
had done something different--had drunk with a different desire. True,
the pain had been in itself almost demoralising in its intensity, but
when he drank he had waited for and desired, not only the remission of
that, but the glow of exquisite well-being and that harmony of sensation
which the drug gave him. That was even more heavenly than the cessation
of the acutest pain.
But after a minute or so he got up, thereby interrupting the
blissfulness of sensation, for Maud would wonder why he tarried. And as
he went downstairs a third thought, suggested by that secret friend in
the brown bottle, occurred to him. He must not let his sister know that
he had taken a second dose to-day, and, arising from that, he must
conceal from her how suddenly and completely the pain had gone, lest she
should guess or suspect. Already he felt half ashamed of the mixed
motive which had led to his taking it, yet ... yet the supreme sense of
physical well-being that was his just now prevented him from feeling
acutely anything but that. And if Maud suspected up to the point of
asking him if he had dosed himself again? Well, in that case it would be
wise to follow the example of Sir Walter Scott. She had no business to
ask such a question; his answer, whatever it might be, was her
responsibility, not his. Perhaps it would be better to minimise the
possibility of her asking; he had better appear silent and suffering
till dinner was nearly over, and then confess that dinner had done him
good. She had told him that it would; she would be delighted to see the
efficacy of her prescription. And that the pain left him suddenly would
be no surprise to her. Often it left him as suddenly as it came on--as
if it was the turning of a tap.
All this flashed instantaneously into his mind, just as a man takes in a
landscape at a glance, though it may take him many words to describe
what a moment's vision has conveyed to him. Another thought flashed
there too. There was authentic Paradise in that little bottle; whether
one had been in pain or not, there was the Garden of Eden. He felt that
he would willingly endure tortures if at the end he could push open
those golden gates again, and walk past the flaming sword of its
guardian. Pain weighed light compared to those pleasures, and surely
half an hour of Paradise now and then could not hurt him, a drop of
water on the lips of Dives. He felt perfectly willing, weighing the two
in the balance of his mind, to pass through hells of torture for that
compensation. Then faintly and far away came the suggestion that even
without the hours in hell there was Paradise still open.
* * * * *
Maud had been very hungry, and had already finished soup when he came
downstairs, and, according to his plan, he said little or nothing till
he had caught her up on the "something roast." Indeed, his first
question had been the demand for a second supply of that, and Maud gave
him an approving nod. He had eaten no lunch, and now, as soon as he
began to eat, he was conscious of being extremely hungry, and the second
supply vanished with the same briskness as the first. Then he leaned
back in his chair as plates were changed.
"I don't like telling you that you are right," he said, "because it will
only confirm your belief in your own wisdom. But I am nothing if not
honest. Dinner or suggestion or both have certainly done the trick. The
Lady Neuralgia has turned off the tap--turned it off with the same firm
hand as she turned it on. It doesn't even drip. I will allow, even, that
it was your suggestion that made her do it. Who cares how it happened? I
will allow anything. Yes, two roast apples, please, and I think we will
have toasted cheese. I had no lunch, you must remember."
"Oh, Thurso, I am so glad," she said. "And I so often wish I could take
some of it--no, not toasted cheese, you silly--for you."
"I don't think you would wish it so much when you had got it," he
remarked.
"Oh, I don't say I should like it. But I know I could bear lots of pain
if I knew that otherwise it would be somebody else's. The difficulty
would be if it was only your own. And, I tell you frankly, you bear it
most awfully well. You are cross with me because you know I don't
mind----"
"At breakfast, do you mean?" he asked. "I know I was. I am sorry, but I
was mad with it. You don't think I show it to other people, do you?"
"No, dear, only to me, or I shouldn't have mentioned it."
He looked at her a moment in silence, then he laughed, but grew grave
again before he spoke.
"No; you understand," he said, and then the poisonous fumes of the drug
stirred and recommended caution in his brain. "I think you would always
understand," he said. "I think I would always tell you everything."
"About to-day, then," said she. "You may tell me about it now. Oh, how
wise I was not letting you talk before dinner! I'm sure you were taking
a neuralgic view."
"I was. I was thinking only of poor Sandie, who, they are afraid, is
dying, instead of thinking about Donald Fraser's wife, who seems to be
a little better, though yesterday they thought she could not live. It
was the Lady Neuralgia who made me remember the one and forget the
other. There was something else, too, I wanted to talk about with you.
It's this, Maud. I made the plan only this morning: I couldn't have told
you before."
He paused a moment. That last sentence, again, was, though absolutely
true, an effort of self-justification. He had acquiesced in deceiving
Maud on one point, should that point come forward; he felt as if he had
to tell not only her, but himself, that he was showing the whole truth
about this.
"I know you will feel with me," he said, "though no doubt Catherine will
make a fuss when she knows, if she ever does, and will probably paint
everything with carbolic. But I must turn this house into a hospital for
all those poor folk--for all, at least, who can be moved here. Think of
it! A case appears in one of those tiny houses, and what happens? There
are three, or perhaps four, rooms in them, and the whole of the family
has to live in two rooms, or at the most three. The sick-room, too,
where it is most important that there should be plenty of air--it is ten
feet by twelve, and one small window! Dr. Symes agrees with me. He
thinks, at any rate, that any case would have a much better chance up
here. The moving is easy. They have one ambulance bed, and I have
ordered more to-day from Inverness."
He lit a cigarette, and saw Maud looking at him with shining eyes. This
was the Thurso whom she knew and loved. Then he went on:
"There's the big dining-room here," he said: "it will hold a dozen beds.
There is the hall: it will hold eighteen, I should think. There are all
the bedrooms; there is the billiard-room. Also, up here every nurse can
look after twice the number of patients that she can attend to in
scattered cottages, and look after them all much better. So I have
given orders. Dr. Symes will move up here to-morrow all those whom he
thinks can be moved without undue risk. All fresh cases will come up
here at once. Of course, you will go back to town. I--I appreciate
tremendously your coming here at all, but now it will be impossible for
you to stop in the house."
Maud laughed.
"And you, dear?" she asked.
"Me? Oh, I shall stop here, of course. I can't leave."
Maud left her place, and dragged a chair up beside him.
"Thurso, you are admirable," she said. "It's an excellent idea moving
them up here, so excellent that I wonder I did not think of it first.
But as for my going back to town----"
"But how on earth can you stop here with the house crammed full of
typhoid patients?"
"Same way as you can. I leave here when you leave."
"But, Maud----"
"There isn't any 'but, Maud.' I don't go unless you turn me out into the
cold bleak night--oh, let's poke up the fire, I am sure there is a
frost!--in which case I shall die of exposure on the lawn. To begin
with, there is no risk of infection, and, to go on with, I shouldn't
catch it if there was."
"Oh! Why not?"
"Because one is mercifully allowed to get through the day's work. I came
up here as your 'pal.' And if I went to bed with typhoid I couldn't be
anybody's 'pal.' Besides, I've had typhoid already. At the present
moment I am going to play you at picquet, and you owe me nine shillings
from last night."