XXVI

To do Chesney justice, he had not taken that first dose of the extra

morphia in his possession with any calm determination of deceit. The

craving for it, the constant temptation so close at hand, had led him

into that subtle, false reasoning so common to all people in like case.

He had deceived himself as well as others. It happened in this way:

Sophy, burning with all the over-ardour of a novice, with all the

exaggerated zeal of the amateur nurse, put on her mettle, as it were, by

the warnings and conjurations of Anne Harding, acted with the precision

of clockwork. Showed, in fact, to its nth power the very quality which

Anne prided herself on lacking--the precision of a "doctor-run machine."

It could not have been otherwise. She had neither the knowledge nor the

experience which allowed Anne to vary the regularity of the hours of

assuagement, those hours when the fractional doses of the drug were to

be given him, and to which he looked forward as to bits of life in the

slow, grey deathliness that enfolded him. At times his nervousness, the

anguish of morbid desire, was far more acute than at others. On these

occasions Anne had been used, after observing him narrowly, to give him

the prescribed amount, sometimes even an hour before the due time.

Again, she would say with rough kindliness:

"Well, will you brace up and go without for, say two extra hours next

time, if I give you a crumb more than you really ought to have?"

These concessions of his little tyrant so wrought on both the gratitude

and the pride of the man, whom morphia had reduced to a certain

childlike weakness, that he, on his part, would sometimes stretch the

interval of abstinence even longer than she had required. When,

therefore, he found himself, all at once, in the unyielding straitjacket

of Sophy's conscientious care, rebellion began to glow in him like a

fever. Once he had tried to explain to her Anne's more elastic methods;

but though Sophy met him very sweetly, he saw the little shock that had

flitted through her eyes. She suspected him of trying to coax her with

plausible lies. Had not Anne warned her not to trust him? The little

nurse had chiefly meant that she must not trust him by leaving the drug

in the remotest way accessible to him; but then Anne could not have

instructed Sophy to practise her own leniency. It was one of those

situations to which the word "fatal" can be well applied.

A second time, when suffering from one of his severe headaches, in

addition to the horrid, chill, damp nervousness, Chesney had again

ventured (sullenly angry at the enforced humility of his attitude) to

suggest that she give him a slightly larger dose, skipping the next dose

entirely, if she wished.

Sophy's look had been full of frank reproach and grief this time. "Ah,

Cecil! How can you ask me such a thing?" she had exclaimed. She had come

and knelt beside him, taking his clammy hand, which resisted the clasp

of the smooth, warm fingers so full of health and love. "Don't you know

it's because I love you that I must refuse? Why do you look at me so

angrily? You asked me to do this for you, dear. I'm only doing what you

_asked_ me to...."

But he had jerked his hand roughly away. He hated her at that moment.

"She'll drive me to it, with her smug self-righteousness ... ignorant,

sentimental fool!" He feigned to drop asleep after a few minutes,

watching her all the time from under his lowered lids--detesting

her--wondering why he had ever married her. How damned prim her mouth

had looked when she refused him! Fancy kissing a mouth like that with

passion! What an ass he had been! And he had thought her such a marvel

of intelligence and sympathy! The little Bush-Ranger had more real

brains in her skinny finger-tip--her rough slang held more human

sympathy than all that other's gush of frilled, silky words! Very well.

He'd take things in his own hands. He'd "'fess up" to the little Harding

when she returned; but in the meantime he was going to do for himself

what she had so often done for him--take a slightly larger dose to ease

this damned pain that was prizing his skull asunder. Yes, by God! He was

a bally simpleton not to have done it before!

It amused him to reach stealthily for the little tablet (he had it to

his hand) and take it "under Sophy's nose," as it were--watching her all

the time from between his lashes. She was sitting near a window, chin on

hand, gazing out at the sky which seemed to her so like a vast

ground-glass cover set above the green bowl of the earth. He grew

impatient, waiting for the slow effect of the morphia, thus taken into

his stomach. He missed that pringle of the stuff when hypodermically

administered, quick through his veins. Then it occurred to him that

these were hypodermic tablets--they would naturally be weaker than those

to be taken by mouth. He took another quarter-grain tablet. Its vile

bitterness seemed delicious to him. All at once he felt that grip at his

midriff, as of a tiny claw clutching and teasing. Triumph seized him. He

looked at her mockingly, his eyes wide open now. He did not hate her any

longer. She amused him now. It was even very pleasant to watch her

sitting there in her dejected attitude of unwilling Tyrant. She was not

the stuff of which real tyrants are made. It took gritty little devils

like the Bush-Bully to tyrannise with _eclat_....

So it had begun.

But unfortunately the self-administration of morphia is not a thing that

can be moderately done. Soon Chesney began to confuse the number of

doses; could not remember exactly when he had last taken the stuff;

would swallow a tablet at the least symptom of physical _malaise_. He

seemed stronger; wished to get up. Then came the morning when the

larger dose revealed its presence clearly to Bellamy.

* * * * *

Sophy went to Cecil, all her soul in arms for him, not against him; but

he met her with easy mockery. Would not admit it. Played with her. She

had tried to tyrannise--well, let her tyrannise, then.

"If you're so damned sure I've got the stuff, why don't you find it?" he

jeered. "Why didn't the little Bush-Sleuth unearth it? She's got the

nose of a Pytchley bitch--the baggage!"

The poison was at its ugly work again. In its deadening clasp,

kindliness and fellow-feeling lay numb; the sheer brute ramped free--the

strong, coarse, primal animal which morphia rouses, at first merely to a

savage irritation but later informs with more than ape-like cunning,

with a callous cruelty lower than the brute's because moved by more than

the brute's intelligence.

And within a week from his first lapse the change in Chesney had become

alarming. Something was here that Bellamy could not understand. Dilated

pupils and violent rages, as in London. A sort of false vigour that sent

him roaming about the house at times--haranguing in his brilliant,

bitter way--insolent, vituperative, insupportable. Sick with

humiliation, Sophy told the physician of what Dr. Carfew had said: that

Chesney alternated the morphia with cocaine.

So strange and wild were his brother's moods that Gerald had to be taken

into confidence. Even Lady Wychcote agreed that Bellamy should wire to

London for a man-nurse; but she held out implacably against all idea of

committing Cecil against his will to a sanatorium.

"It's a phase," she kept saying. "It's a phase. When Nurse Harding comes

back, she will know what to do."

And all the while it rained, ever rained--now lightly, now whelmingly.

The climate was like a vast Melancholia wrapping England as in sickness.

Search was made everywhere for the concealed drugs. Sophy lay awake at

night, racking her brain for possible solutions, until it haunted her

dreams like a dark rebus, cluttering her only half-unconscious brain

with the refuse of rejected theories.

The man-nurse came. When he entered Chesney's room, he was flung out so

violently by the enraged giant (Chesney stood six-foot-four in his

socks) that he barely missed having his arm broken against the opposite

wall.

The man, white with wrath and pain, went straight to the library where

the family had gathered about Bellamy, apprehensive and anxious as to

the nurse's reception. He had chosen himself to go alone. He told them

that for no consideration would he attempt the case, unless he were

given "a free hand." When coldly required by Lady Wychcote to state what

he meant precisely by "a free hand," he had replied sullenly that he

must be given permission to use violence in return--that is, to defend

himself by a blow, if attacked, and to resort to binding the patient, if

necessary.

"In other words, you wish to introduce the methods of a lunatic asylum

into my house," said Lady Wychcote haughtily. "That will do. We shall

not need your services."

The man turned away, muttering that "madhouse methods were made for

madmen."

Bellamy tried to persuade Lady Wychcote to send for Dr. Carfew and have

Cecil placed in a sanatorium by force.

"Never shall that be done--never while I live," she said resolutely. "I

will not have such a stigma put upon a son of mine. Let him die, if he

must. Better dead than with the shame of madness put upon him."

In vain Bellamy argued with her, pointing out the difference between a

sanatorium and a madhouse. She was adamant.

"Never! Never!" she kept repeating.

In despair, Sophy herself telegraphed to Anne Harding. The answer

somewhat consoled her:

"_Mother doing well. Will come Thursday._"

This was Sunday. In three days, then, the little nurse would be in

charge again.

When Chesney heard this, that awful, blind rage shook him from within.

He felt the horror of "possession." It seemed to him that to kill was

the only thing that would relieve him. His rash excess of the last week

had ended by confining him to his bed again. He lay there after Sophy

had left him, dozing fitfully, waking with dreadful starts from the

unspeakable dreams that had begun to visit him of late, by night and

day. He, too, had read De Quincey. He remembered how the wandering Malay

had haunted "The Opium-Eater's" sweating dreams. Did the dark drug

always send such visions? For now he, Cecil, was hunted down through the

dark alleys of sleep by horrible deformed Chinamen, who squatted on

their hams, mocking him, bedizened in cruel, violent colours that filled

him with unreasoning fear; mopping and mowing at him with chattered

words that iced his blood. And one dream that came again and again

racked him with the extremity of loathing: a violin would begin playing

somewhere--harsh, Chinese music; behind a stiff, embroidered curtain it

would begin to play. Then, from under the curtain would peep a foot, the

deformed "lily foot" of a Chinese woman; then there would crawl out from

under the curtain the violin itself, like the brown carapace of some

misshapen turtle, and its head was a woman's--a little Chinese harlot's,

with gilded underlip--and in place of the turtle's flippers, the

"lily-feet" and long-nailed, tiny hands would come scratching towards

him. Then, like a luxurious cat, the little turtle-violin would begin

rubbing itself against his feet, that were glued fast with terror, till

the strings underneath its belly would give forth again that sinister

Chinese music.

Or, in another dream even worse--conscious that he was dreaming--he

would begin to sink with his bed, slowly, very slowly, through the floor

of his room; down through the library which was underneath; down, down,

into the dark cellars where were stored the liquors that he craved;

down, ever down, into the wormy earth, among dead men's bones and all

uncleanness he would sink slowly, so slowly. And his hair oozy with

terror, his flesh glazed as with a coating of thin ice, he would think:

"This is what is called 'sinking to the lowest depth'--I am sinking to

hell ... to the sewers of hell...."

Then began a reckless orgy of self-indulgence. These horrors must come

because he was not getting enough of the drug--could not take it

hypodermically. He must alter this. He must take larger, ever larger

doses. And he must have stimulant. Damn them! They locked his own

father's wine-cellar against him, did they? Well, he would outwit them.

Where there was a will there was a way. Good old adage! Made for

morphinomaniacs!

He came to these conclusions on the Sunday that Sophy received Anne

Harding's telegram.