The next day the rain was coming down in swirls. A strong wind drove it.
It beat against the window-pane like little fingers drumming with sharp
nails. Down the chimneys it beat, spattering into the fires which were
kindled everywhere. The Park was a grey-green clustered shadow. The
lawns looked soggy like moss. The huge house was gloomy as a decorated
cave. The furniture and stair-rail sweated with moisture.
Chesney kept his bed, as always in the morning. He had waked with a dull
headache from the unaccustomed dose of brandy on an empty stomach.
Waking too early, in the iron-grey, streaming dawn, he had lain there
between the sheets that felt so clammy to his nervous skin which again
craved morphia--unable to get it until Gaynor should have left the
room--racked mentally, also, by a nauseating shame for the part that he
had played last evening. In this interval between dose and dose, worse
than the physical _malaise_ which amounted to torment, was the sense of
his own vileness. Now he hated Gerald for running to fetch the brandy.
For the same thing which he had loved him for last night, he hated him
this morning. Fool! If he hadn't been so damnably officious, perhaps
they might not have given him the brandy. Yes, he wished heartily now
that his will had been denied him by force. Besides, he would have to
see Bellamy sometime this morning, and he was all to bits--he could
_feel_ that his face looked unnatural, deathly. And at the same time the
craving for stimulant came over him again. He asked for a cup of black
coffee. "Make it yourself," he said to Gaynor. "In that French machine
of mine. I don't want the filth an English cook calls coffee."
While Gaynor was thus engaged he managed to crawl from bed and take a
quarter grain of morphia in addition to the other quarter that Gaynor
had just given him. He found a place for the needle on his thigh far up
near the hip-bone. It was too near the head of the sciatic nerve, and
hurt him unusually. He almost broke the needle in his flesh, from
irritation and the awkwardness of using the syringe so high up on his
leg. He had no time to put the wire through the needle or to clean it
properly before the man came back with the coffee.
"Damned nuisance," he thought. "Some day I shall be giving myself an
abscess." But the extra dose and the coffee together braced and calmed
him. He looked tolerably normal after he had had a tub and Gaynor had
shaved him.
"I'll put on a dressing-gown and sit in that armchair with a rug over
me," he said. One felt such a helpless carcass in bed when those brutes
of quacks came peering and asking their impudent questions.
Sophy felt encouraged when she saw him thus established in the big
chair. She had passed a wretched night. Her doubt of him--of the
genuineness of his attack--had seemed so shameful to her--yet she could
not help doubting. And if her doubt were justified--what abysms opened
before her--before them both! What salvation could there be for one so
deliberately, cunningly false?
"You look so much better," she said. "Perhaps this is the best thing for
you, really--the country--the perfect quiet of it."
"The brandy is what did this bit of improvement," he replied calmly. He
must brave it out. Besides, there was that only half-stilled craving
deep underneath the caution of his present mood. He added reasonably:
"You can't cut a chap off from a thing that he's as used to as I am to
spirit of some sort without making him suffer rather severely."
"It's only that the doctor said it was so bad for you, Cecil."
"Pf! That ass Hopkins! Now Bellamy has to bray his little bray. We'll
see what _he_ says."
Giles Bellamy came at ten o'clock He was a good-looking man of about
forty, with short-sighted, intelligent brown eyes that were rather too
large for a man, and a pale, clever face set in a Vandyke beard. This
beard and his large eyes, that looked almost womanishly soft at times,
had gained him the nickname of O. P. from Cecil (the initials of the
term "Old Portrait"). Sometimes he called him thus; sometimes, when in
an especially ironical mood, by the full title. He had known the
physician from boyhood.
"_Wie gehts_, Old Portrait?" he greeted him this morning from the
vantage of the easy chair. "The tender passion still unroused? When are
we to have some little new portraits for your family picture gallery?"
Bellamy took these pleasantries urbanely, though he was aware of a
certain savagery underneath them. He understood Chesney's character
fairly well, and felt rather sorry for him in his present predicament.
It was rather like seeing a trapped lion. Even though the lion had been
indulging in man-eating, he still felt compassion for the great, baffled
brute-force. His confirmed bachelorhood had always been the subject of
more or less caustic jesting on Chesney's part. In an evil mood, he
seemed to enjoy nothing better than baiting his brother and Bellamy,
turn and turn about.
Bellamy was a Baliol man and so was Gerald. Cecil used to say that
Baliol bred what Byron called "excellent persons of the third-sex." He
used to harangue the two celibates rather brilliantly on the subject of
sex in mind--quoting Mommson and other authorities to prove that "genius
is in proportion to passion."
But Bellamy was an able man in his way. He had studied medicine in
Edinburgh and Vienna. He was far better posted than his London confrere,
Hopkins, on the vagaries of the morphia habit. Besides, Lady Wychcote
had had a talk with him in her private sitting-room before sending him
upstairs. Now as he sat, parrying Cecil's rather ill-tempered thrusts
with imperturbable good-humour, he was watching him narrowly out of his
large, vague looking eyes, though he seemed casual enough. He saw
clearly that Cecil was getting more morphia than Gaynor's record showed.
He had decided, before talking to him for twenty minutes, that a trained
nurse was indispensable--one, moreover, who had been on such cases
before, and had nerve and character. Hopkins had not engaged a nurse
because the only one of whom he knew, perfectly suited for the purpose,
had still ten days on a similar case before she would be free. In his
pocket Bellamy had the address of this nurse--Anne Harding--Hopkins had
sent it to him the day before. She would be free to accept another
engagement on the twelfth--that was to-morrow.
He determined, with Mrs. Chesney's and Lady Wychcote's approval, to wire
her that afternoon.
However, Bellamy made a serious mistake in not speaking openly to
Chesney about his intention of sending for the nurse. Sophy had to break
this news to him, and he received it with a burst of appalling fury
against the doctor.
"Damned little sneak!" he cried, his face convulsed. "Why the devil
didn't he say so to _me_?" His language became so outrageous that Sophy
rose, saying:
"I must leave you, if you talk like this."
Something in her white face--a sort of smothered loathing--checked him.
"See here," he said, mastering himself by a violent effort--a vein in
the middle of his forehead stood out dark and purplish; "now just try to
take this in, all of you--my well-wishers. To do anything with me
whatever, you've got to be straight with me, by God! I'll not have
sneaking, and confabulations in dark corners. And make that little
eunuch Bellamy understand it, or I'll pitch him out of window, neck and
crop, the next time he sets foot in this house!"
Sophy felt that he was to a certain extent justified in his anger. She
promised for Bellamy that he would say things directly to Cecil himself
in future.
Then she went away to the nursery for solace, sick at heart, sick at
brain, sick in spirit.
To her amazement she found Lady Wychcote there, seated in a chair before
the fire with Bobby on her knee. He was babbling excitedly, and his
grandmother was smiling at him with that appraising look in her eyes
which Sophy so resented. The boy tried to snap his soft, curled fingers
at his mother as soon as he caught sight of her, in his eagerness to
have her come near.
"Muvvah!" he cried. "Oh, _Muvvah_! Ganny div Bobby gee-gee!"
"Yes. I'm going to give him a Shelty," said Lady Wychcote. "It's high
time the boy learned how to ride."
"It's very good of you," said Sophy, pleased for the child's delight.
"But he's only two, you know."
"Quite old enough," Lady Wychcote said firmly. "I wonder you never
thought of it yourself."
"We couldn't have afforded it in town," Sophy said with some stiffness.
Her mother-in-law's tone was supercilious.
"Pf!" said Lady Wychcote. "You know Gerald has a _faible_ for you. You'd
only to hint it."
Sophy reddened.
"I don't hint for things," she said still more stiffly.
"Well, well! Don't let's tiff over it," Lady Wychcote retorted loftily.
"We're not congenial, but I've taken a fancy to my grandson. Let that
mollify you."
Sophy gazed out at the bleared landscape, that looked wavy like a bad
print thus seen through the streaming window-pane. She realised in that
moment that unhappiness filled her to the least crevice of her being.
She needed kindness so bitterly, and here as her only companion was this
frigid, acrid woman who disliked her for having married Cecil, and
grudged her Gerald's friendship. Then she glanced back at the familiar
group before the fire. Bobby was leaning forward against the beautifully
corseted figure of his grandparent, eagerly demanding to know more about
his "gee-gee."
A terror seized Sophy--a sort of blind fear. Was this the beginning of a
new misery? Would Lady Wychcote try to get her son from her? Was she
laying plans behind that smooth, narrow brow? Insidiously, little by
little, as the dreary years crept by, would she try to wean Bobby from
her, influence him against her? Did she lust for him to make of him what
she had failed to make of Cecil and Gerald? She felt as if she must
snatch Bobby from that well-preserved breast, and run to hide with him
in the nethermost parts of the earth. It was a feeling stronger than
reason, one of those presentiments which seized her sometimes--which so
often came true. A powerful, eerie feeling of _knowing_ without being
able to say why--like the knowledge that had come to her when she told
Olive Arundel that she would meet Amaldi in a room with three windows.
Then she shook the feeling off. The very instance that she had recalled
calmed her. There had been three windows, true. But evidently Amaldi
was to play no important part in her life. She might not see him for
years, if ever. Olive had told her that he was returning to Italy in
July.
Miller came to give Bobby his luncheon and the two ladies left the
nursery together. As they passed through the baize door that shut the
corridor leading to the nursery from the rest of the house, Lady
Wychcote said, "Come to my room a moment, please. I've something to show
you that may interest you."
She unlocked a little ivory box on her dressing-table and took out a
miniature, framed as a locket. "My father, when he was a child," she
said briefly. "Do you see the likeness?"
Sophy gazed down at the miniature, and the dark fear stole over her
again. It was certainly strangely like her Bobby. The same dark-red
curls, and imperious little cleft chin. The eyes in the miniature were
brown, Bobby's were grey--that was the most noticeable difference.
"Yes--it's very like Bobby," she said with an effort.
"My father was Chancellor of the Exchequer at seven-and-thirty," said
Lady Wychcote. "You see now the chief reason of my interest in my
grandson."
Sophy saw indeed. Then she gathered up her courage.
"But it's a pity, I think, to count on the tendencies of such a mite,"
she said. "He may not show the least inclination for politics."
"That," said Lady Wychcote rather grimly, "is a matter of education."
Sophy looked into the hard eyes.
"I think not," she said, but her tone was gentle.
"Allow me--as one having more experience--to disagree with you," replied
her mother-in-law.
Sophy still looked at her.
"You forget one thing," she said finally, "the fact that he probably
inherits something of my nature. I have to a hopeless degree what is
called the artistic temperament."
Locking away the miniature again, Lady Wychcote permitted herself a
_sourire fin_. "It would not have annoyed you had you been _my_
daughter," was what she said.
It was useless to bicker with her. Sophy merely changed the subject by
giving her an account of Cecil's indignation over Bellamy's lack of
directness with him. Lady Wychcote, who could be reasonable enough when
she wished, agreed to speak with Bellamy herself on the subject.
* * * * *
The next day, by the first morning train, Anne Harding arrived at
Dynehurst. She was a small, slight but wiry woman of about thirty-five,
and her curly black hair was still short, having been cropped some
months previous during an attack of typhoid. This short, curling hair
and a smile of singular ingenuousness, gave her an almost childlike air
at times. Sophy, as she took in the nurse's appearance, wondered where
in that small body lurked the courage and determination necessary for
such a profession. She wondered how Nurse Harding would strike Cecil.
Would he take one of his rough-and-ready fancies to her, or detest her
from the first. She talked plainly and quietly to her. When she had
finished, she said:
"How do you think it will be best for you to meet Mr. Chesney, Nurse?
Shall I tell him that you are here first? Shall I go in with you?"
Anne Harding consulted the little watch in its leather bracelet on her
thin, sinewy dark wrist. She had black eyes full of fire and subdued
laughter. Sophy realised suddenly that she looked something like the
pictures of Hall Caine as a young man--and incidentally that she also
resembled a very alert, large-eyed insect of some sort. This made her
smile. Anne Harding, catching the glimmer of this smile as she looked up
from her watch, thought:
"What a perfectly lovely woman! Of course a woman like this had to go
and marry a morphinomaniac."
Then she asked practically, before herself answering Sophy's question:
"How does Mr. Chesney take his nourishment? Every two hours?"
"Oh, no," said Sophy, astonished. "He has meals when we do--all except
breakfast. Why? Should he eat every two hours?"
"It depends, of course, on the doctor's orders," said Anne cautiously.
"But has he an appetite? The drug kills the appetite as a rule."
"Well--I don't think he does eat much."
"You see," explained the nurse, "I was thinking that I might take his
tray in--as soon as I'd changed to my uniform and cap. A simple way like
that would be the best."
Sophy rose.
"Oh, I forgot----" she said.
"It won't take me fifteen minutes," said Anne cheerfully. "That's my box
now, I fancy."
The small black box was brought in, and Sophy left her to change her
dress.
Bellamy was due in half an hour now. She went to report her impression
of the nurse to Lady Wychcote, who had asked her to do so. She was still
in her bedroom being made up for the day by her French maid. Louise was
dismissed and Sophy sketched a little picture of the nurse for her
mother-in-law. Lady Wychcote was dissatisfied that Anne Harding was so
small.
"However," she said on second thoughts, "those eft-like creatures have
the sharpest brains sometimes. Perhaps it's just as well."
Sophy, looking at her "morning face," realised that she was using less
rouge than usual, though she always used it with discretion. To-day she
was almost pale. This harmonising of her complexion with the
circumstance struck Sophy as drearily droll.
A servant knocked at the door to say that Dr. Bellamy had come. They
sent word to Nurse Harding, and went down together.
It was still raining.