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.
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.