Lady Wychcote came again next morning about ten o'clock. She seemed much
mollified by Sophy's account of the arrangement that had been entered
into--showed a marked inclination to assume more amicable relations with
her daughter-in-law.
"I _knew_ that he would act reasonably when things were put clearly
before him. He is erratic--but a most able creature. As soon as he
realised the gravity of the situation I was convinced that he would act
with me--with us--for his own benefit."
"Yes--you were right--you knew him better than I did," said Sophy with
generous humility. She, too, felt softened towards her mother-in-law
because her maternal intuition had been right, when she, Sophy, as a
wife, had doubted.
"Very nice of you to admit it, I'm sure," said Lady Wychcote affably.
She was so highly pleased that all her ideas were by way of being
carried out, that she actually asked to see Bobby. This was a wonderful
condescension, for from the day of his birth she seemed scarcely to have
been aware of his existence.
"I will go to the nursery if you like," she said, as it were a Queen
saying with royal affectation of equality: "See, I am even prepared to
descend from my dais and walk on a level with you."
"Thanks--but there's no need," said Sophy. "I will have him brought
here."
Lady Wychcote had not seen the child, except at a distance, since he
could walk and talk. As his nurse set him upon his feet, and his sturdy
little figure came towards her, strutting mannishly, serious but
unafraid, something stirred in her chilly breast--something not exactly
warm but pungent. The child had the look of her own family. It had been
a family noted for its statesmen. What possibilities might not lie hid
in that small, firm breast under its ruffled collar! It came over her
in a sudden tingling wave of resuscitated hope and fact abruptly
realised, that in case of Gerald's dying childless--_this_ child would
be heir to the title. He was a Chesney after all. He had the name, and
her own blood in his veins. The mother was only the "incalculable
quantity" in the sum of this higher spiritual mathematics.
Inconsistently, as with all tyrants, her mind whirled about, accepting
as a pleasing possibility what had until then only occurred to her as an
insufferable one--a weapon with which to goad Gerald, when his
disinclination to marry put her beyond all patience. Now as she looked
at Bobby, who had gone straight to his mother's knee, and stood biting
his small fist, and regarding her solemnly out of grey, noncommittal
eyes, she thought, "Why not! He is my grandchild after all." She even
spoke her thought aloud.
"Has it ever occurred to you that that child may be Lord Wychcote some
day, in case Gerald dies unmarried!" she asked.
It had occurred to Sophy, for Cecil had spoken once or twice of such a
possibility--but he had spoken of it grumblingly.
"If that duffer Gerald dies without begetting a proper little
Conservative," he had said, "our little chap's chances may be knocked
out, by a seat in the Lords. Nice country this--where a political career
can be smashed to smithereens by having to wear a bally title whether
you will or no."
It never seemed to cross his mind that Bobby might desire a career other
than political--or granting that he should not, that by a sort of
figurative reversion of species, he might become a Unionist instead of a
Liberal.
But Sophy did not have political ambitions for her son. She would rather
have seen him a great artist of some sort--the great poet of his day. In
her marriage seemed to have quenched the spark of mental creation. It
was a deep grief to her that she had felt no real desire to write since
becoming Chesney's wife. Only that saddest of all emotions--the desire
to desire. It was as if mocking, satyr-hoofs had trampled her mind's
garden. The fine poetry of her imaginative mood had not been able to
withstand the shocks of such a marriage as hers. Sometimes she had felt
bitterly, as though there were the print of a goat's hoof on her heart
and that it had filled slowly with blood. It was this scar that burnt
when she was unhappy.
"Oh, Gerald is sure to marry," she now said hastily. "He was so much
better when I saw him in April."
"Pf! He goes up and down. There's no counting on him," said his mother
bitterly. "Is your boy strong? He looks very healthy."
"He's splendidly strong," said Sophy proudly. "He's never had an ill day
in his life."
She gathered the boy close to her jealously. There was such a greedy,
appraising look in Lady Wychcote's eyes. She might have been a civilised
ogress, estimating from long habit the tender flesh of a child.
"Is he clever? Quick?"
"Very," said Sophy briefly.
"I hope you won't let Cecil instil his wretched Radical principles into
the boy's mind before he's able to think for himself."
"He thinks for himself already," said Sophy, with a slight smile.
"Well--who knows? We may yet give another famous man to the Conservative
cause," said Lady Wychcote, still gazing at Bobby. Then she said to him:
"Come to your grandmother, child."
Sophy impelled him forward, and he went slowly but steadily, and stood
before the young-old lady, his hands behind him, his little stomach
thrust forward. It was the true statesman's attitude. But Bobby was only
wondering why the lady had black specks all over her face, and whether
the bird on her brown velvet hat could cry "cuckoo" like the one in the
nursery clock.
And to Sophy there came the words of Constance:
"Do, child, go to it' grandam, child:
Give grandam kingdom, and it' grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig."
For it galled her that Lady Wychcote should never have shown the least
interest in the boy, until it had occurred to her that some day he might
serve her ambition.
Chesney saw his mother for a few minutes before she went. He was languid
but apparently quite normal. He exaggerated this languor, as later on he
exaggerated a certain nervousness consequent on the fact that he dared
not take as much morphia as he really wanted, fearing that Gaynor, at
least, might suspect something, and well aware that a man under reduced
doses of the drug shows symptoms of extreme weakness and restlessness.
When she asked if he would see Craig Hopkins that afternoon, he replied
good-humouredly:
"Bring in the performing poodles as soon as you like. Since I'm in for
it, the show might as well begin promptly."
"Cecil is _most_ reasonable--I did not hope as much as this," she told
Sophy. Then she took her departure, adding:
"And now I must set the Town talking the way we wish."
It had been agreed between her and Sophy that she should spread reports
to the effect that Cecil was suffering from an attack of inflammation of
the brain. She had submitted this idea to Dr. Hopkins yesterday, and he
had agreed that it was wise and permissible under the circumstances.
Lady Wychcote was a clever woman. She set this report going with such
skill and so apt a measure of detail that even the sceptical Olive
Arundel was quite taken in by it. The people who chiefly mattered, and
those who had been present at the painful dinner, were only too glad to
accept such a solution of the disgraceful scene. Only Oswald Tyne smiled
behind Lady Wychcote's well-preserved and still girlish back, his
mocking, unctuous smile, and said: "I would rather dream of the
degrading spectacle of a British plum-pudding served in flames at an
Athenian banquet than see again at a London feast the brain of an
Englishman thus ignited. Both are too massive to burn gracefully. But
the plum-pudding has a lightness--a delicacy--a wholesomeness--which the
British cerebrum even in flames can never accomplish."
Olive, to whom Tyne made these remarks, exclaimed, much vexed:
"Oswald! You are _bwutal_. You are never funny when you are bwutal."
"On the contrary," he assured her gravely, "I am a Celt. I am always
funny when I am brutal. Your Englishman, now, is always brutal when he
is funny."
"Oh, don't try to be witty with every breath!" she cried crossly. "I
think it heartless of you, and that poor man was in danger of his life
at the very moment he said that awful thing!"
"Indeed he was," said Tyne earnestly. "I know that I had clutched my
knife with red slaughter hissing at my ear. Several men who were present
have confessed the same thing to me. The vice of self-control was all
that restrained us."
"At any rate," she said earnestly, seeing that it was hopeless to get at
his serious side through sympathy for Cecil, "at any rate, you like poor
dear Sophy, _don't_ you?"
"Yes, I burn discreetly 'with a hard, gem-like flame' for her."
"You wouldn't want to hurt her?"
"Not even for my own pleasure."
"Then _don't_ go about saying things about 'plum-puddings' and Grecian
feasts and all that when her husband is mentioned, _will_ you? Even if
you don't believe he's ill--be a good sort for Sophy's sake, and pretend
to."
"Pretence is always lovely," said Tyne dreamily. "Zeus pretended to be a
swan, and lo!--Artemis and Apollo!"
"I'm sure _you_ don't have to pretend to be a _goose_," said Olive, out
of patience, and she walked away from him, proudly carrying off the last
word.
But Tyne's native kindliness outweighed his love of drollery this time.
The memory of Sophy's beautiful, frozen profile as he had last seen it,
and which had reminded him of the drooping, white profile of the
Neapolitan Antinous, held him from further expressing his doubts of the
genuineness of Chesney's attack. As for the others, they behaved with
discreet and kindly sympathy, and carriages drew up often before the
house in Regent's Park to leave cards and inquiries.
Thus the bitterness of humiliation was lifted from Sophy's heart, and
thus, too, it came to pass that Amaldi could think of her again without
that overwhelming surge of helpless pity, and fierce, thwarted
indignation. He left cards on her and Chesney a few days later, and
meeting Bobby as he turned from the door, had the rather bitter pleasure
of holding him in his arms for a moment.
The child had not forgotten him. He gazed soberly into his eyes for a
moment, then broke into the delicious chuckle that meant delighted
affection with him, and pressing the firm little fruit of his fresh
cheek to Amaldi's, said:
"Bobby man!... Bobby _nith_ man--tome back!"
Amaldi's heart glowed and ached. He kissed the boy with passion, then
set him gently down and went away. He had found that which was lost to
him even as he found it, and the world seemed to him like a vast house
full of vacant, echoing rooms.
* * * * *
It was decided that Chesney should be taken to Dynehurst during the next
week. He affected a listless apathy, and seemed not to care whether he
went or stayed. Dr. Hopkins expressed himself satisfied with his
condition. He thought, however, that the sooner he could be moved to the
country the better it would be for him in every way. He had written
fully to Dr. Bellamy, the Wychcotes' physician at Dynehurst. For Sophy
these intervening days were peaceful but heavy. She could not recapture,
somehow, her high mood of the evening of her talk with Cecil. Things
went along evenly, monotonously. He was never either cheerful or
depressed--talked little, sometimes locked his bedroom door for hours
together. This made her curiously apprehensive. What was he doing behind
that locked door? She felt that Gaynor also was vaguely uneasy over this
new phase, but they did not mention it to each other. Apart from this
one thing, Cecil was very reasonable--submitted to having all wine
withdrawn from his diet; even put up with having his cigarettes cut down
to eight a day. Neither Sophy nor Gaynor suspected for a moment that he
had a third hypodermic syringe in his possession. With the startling and
crafty acumen of the morphinomaniac, he had secreted it in the last
place that they would have thought of--namely, in the same letter-case,
of which now he left the key carelessly on his dressing-table or the
little stand by his bed. Nor did they, in their inexperience of such
things, realise that one who had for three years been addicted to the
habit, and who, during two years of that time, had been accustomed to
large and constant doses of the drug, could not possibly have supported
its withdrawal, even gradually, with the composure shown by Chesney.
Dr. Hopkins always made his visits about ten in the morning; and, deeply
cunning, determined that no mistake on his part should prevent his
escape from the town where Algernon Carfew lived, an ever present
menace, Chesney refrained from taking his usual dose until after the
physician had seen him. These occasions of waiting for Hopkins to come
and go were very painful. Sometimes the little doctor would be half an
hour late, and each minute of this half hour seemed endless to the man,
fretting with crawling skin and muscles spasmodically twitching, for the
calming poison. So when Hopkins felt his forehead and his pulse on these
occasions, he would find the one moist and the other feeble. These
symptoms were in accord with the therapeutics of the case, hence the
inexperienced doctor's satisfaction.
But though Sophy felt saddened by the way that Cecil seemed to keep her
civilly aloof, as though what he was enduring were impossible of
comprehension to her, on the other hand she was very happy in her
surprise that this dreadful and mysterious habit should prove so easy to
cure. She recalled De Quincy's _Confessions of an Opium Eater_, and the
agonies that he described as accompanying his efforts to abstain.
Morphia, then, must differ in its effects from opium. She thanked God,
in her ignorance, that Cecil's enemy was morphia and not opium.