The House of Defence. Volume 2

Sir James could not have looked cynical or sneering if he had tried, and he certainly did not try. But there was an uncommon dryness in his tone.

“The lady in Boston?” he inquired.

“No; a man in Caithness,” said Catherine. “I will ring; she shall come and tell you if she is in.”

He put up his hand to stop her.

“Ah, one moment, please,” he said. “I want to have two words with you about yourself. My dear lady, you are not well: you are very much overwrought. You have had, you know, a terrible and trying time, and if you had finished with it, I should tell you to go to bed for a week. But you can’t do that. Now, it has told on you more than you guess. Do not give yourself more tasks than you need; for instance, are you not over-taxing yourself unnecessarily here?”

He pointed to the crowded writing-table and the pile of answered letters, which she had been working at when he came in.

“You mean I had better sit down and think over all this terrible tragedy,” she said, her voice beginning to break a little, “rather than find relief and rest in employment?”

“No; I do not actually say that you must not answer your letters, especially if you find it more bearable to work than to do nothing, but I strongly advise you to rest yourself as much as you can, and to avoid anything agitating beyond that which you must bear. There is plenty that, as your husband’s wife, you have got to bear. But if there are other things that worry you, I entreat you to shut the door in their faces. Exercise your will-power over that, and make it strong by resistance. Save yourself from anything harassing or troubling. I speak, of course, quite at random, but I feel sure that there are other things which are trying you most acutely.”

Then, without warning, the breaking-point came for her. All these months of ceaseless anxiety about Thurso had been a greater drain on her nerve force than she had known, and of set purpose she had not abated one jot of the numerous activities of her life, and had not allowed herself to consider how tired and drained she was. And simultaneously with that had come this storm and tempest into the secret life of her soul.

She gave a sudden shriek of laughter that did not sound like mirth.

“Oh, you conjurers!” she cried. “You doctors are like X rays! They see right into one’s inside. Good heavens! I should think I had enough to try me, and you don’t guess the half. If it was only Thurso it would be quite a holiday. Oh, how very funny – ”

Sir James got up quickly, placed himself directly in front of her, and clapped his hands violently close to her face.

“Now, none of that!” he cried. “I haven’t come here to listen to hysterical ravings. Make an effort; pull yourself together. I’m ashamed of you.”

Catherine checked suddenly in the middle of her sentence; two or three tears, the precursors of the hysterical storm that had been on the point of bursting forth, had found their way onto her cheeks, and she wiped them off. The attack was arrested as suddenly as it had begun, and she stood silent a moment, still hearing the reverberation of his clapped hands.

“Yes, quite right,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

Sir James waited till he felt certain of her. Then he took up one of her hands and kissed it.

“You dear, brave woman!” he said. “But that shows you the truth of what I said. Be kind to your fine nerves and senses. Treat them well.”

She was quite quiet again now, and sat down in the chair from which she had jumped up.

“Never mind me,” she said. “I can manage my own affairs, and I promise you I will be as sensible as I find it possible. Oh yes, there are other worries. You are perfectly right.”

He paused a moment.

“Now about this man in Caithness,” he said. “He was there, I suppose, when Lord Thurso and Lady Maud were up during the typhoid. Now, I am not bigoted on the subject; I know quite well that these Christian Scientists have got hold of a big truth, but many of them mix such floods of nonsense up with it that it is quite dissolved. They tell me that if you have a compound fracture, and only say to yourself that compound fractures don’t exist, the bones will join. That, of course, is silly. But where you deal with the will, or the nerves, or the imagination, it is a different sort of thing altogether.”

Lady Thurso got up again, quietly this time.

“I will see if Maud is in,” she said. “There was very virulent typhoid up there, you know, in the summer, and Mr. Cochrane is believed by her to have cured one or two extremely grave cases – in fact, she believes more than that.”

She rang the bell, and in the interval, before it was answered, only a couple of words passed.

“And you will spare yourself?” said Sir James.

Maud had come in half an hour ago, but hearing that her sister-in-law was with the doctor, she had not interrupted them. As she entered now, Catherine shook hands with Sir James.

“Maud, this is Sir James Sanderson,” she said. “He wants to talk to you. Good-bye, Sir James. I shall see you, of course, to-morrow morning.”

She left the room, and Maud was alone with the doctor. She had no idea what he wanted to talk to her about, and waited, wondering why Catherine had left them.

But he instantly approached the subject.

“Lady Maud,” he said, “I want to hear about Caithness and the typhoid and Mr. Cochrane.”

Maud was taking off her gloves, but stopped in sheer surprise. There was nothing that she expected less than this.

“What for?” she said.

“For your brother,” said he.

He asked but few questions in her story, for it was a plain and simple narrative. She described just what had passed in connection with Duncan’s wife; she described all that she had seen with regard to Sandie Mackenzie; she mentioned the curious and complete cessation of the epidemic itself.

“And I think I believe exactly what Mr. Cochrane told me,” she said. “Indeed, it seems the simplest explanation to suppose that it was the direct power of God, in whose presence neither sickness, nor disease, nor pain can exist.”

“You say you think so only,” said he. “You are not sure?”

“No, not quite.”

“But Mr. Cochrane is?”

She smiled.

“I should say it was the only thing he was absolutely sure of,” she said.

He thought in silence over this for some time, and then spoke as if he had suddenly made his mind up.

“Medical science, as far as I am acquainted with it,” he said, “can do nothing for Lord Thurso – at least, I fear not. Therefore, if there was a man outside in the Park there with a barrel-organ and a monkey who said he could cure the opium habit, I should welcome him in. Personally, I don’t believe in Christian Science for cases of compound fracture, but it doesn’t matter what I believe. It is my duty to try everything I can. Now, you must let me have a consultation with you about it all.”

Again he paused. He wanted to put his thoughts clearly, not only to her, but to himself.

“We are situated like this,” he said. “I have no notion how to cure your brother, and all that I feel myself able to do is to palliate his sufferings. But the moment – assuming, that is, which I feel justified in doing, that he gets over this attack – that I begin to make his days painless, I aggravate his disease. You, Lady Maud, I know, believe that there is a chance for him: I do not; but since I cannot professionally suggest any other chance, all I can say is, ‘Do what you can, and God be with you.’ Now, as regards practical details, what are we to do? Where is this Mr. Cochrane? But I suppose there are plenty of these healers, are there not? If he is not handy, we can get another.”

Maud strove for a moment to separate the strands of her two desires, that seemed inextricably intermingled. The one was to see Thurso delivered from this drug-possession, the other to put him in the hands of Mr. Cochrane – him only.

“I have knowledge of only one Christian Scientist whom I really believe in,” she said, “and that is Mr. Cochrane. You see, I saw him with my own eyes restore to life a man who was dying. I know there are plenty of others. I could ask Mrs. Yardly.”

Sir James laughed suddenly.

“Why that?” asked Maud.

“She came to me a few months ago for a tonic,” he said. “She had been suffering from general catarrh. She explained to me why this was not inconsistent, but I failed to follow her.”

Maud laughed too.

“Oh, Alice!” she said to herself.

“But Mr. Cochrane, you think, is not like her,” said Sir James.

“You can’t imagine a more totally different personality,” she said. “He gives confidence, anyhow, and he is not silly. I think there is a great deal of what is silly about the whole thing, but I believe that the direct power of God can come and heal people. That is about the biggest thing possible, isn’t it?”

Sir James nodded quietly.

“Yes, my dear young lady,” he said. “I believe in that possibility, too, and that is why I am consulting you. Oh, but compound fracture,” he said suddenly – “what ridiculous nonsense!”

He was silent for a moment after this irrepressible burst of professional indignation.

“And this Mr. Cochrane,” he asked – “where is he?”

“In America,” said Maud. “I heard from him two days ago. He is in New York.”

“I have read some of their literature,” said Sir James, “and I have heard about some of their cures. Now, as a doctor, I can’t recommend your employing Mr. Cochrane, but you can, if you choose, send him a telegram acquainting him with the state of affairs. You see, I don’t think he can hurt your brother, and we doctors can’t benefit him.”

“Am I to get Mr. Cochrane to come here, then?” asked Maud.

“No; in the first place it is a good deal to ask, and in the second, if only you or Lady Thurso could persuade Lord Thurso to go, I am convinced that a sea-voyage, though it will not in the smallest degree cure him, will be generally beneficial. Now, do you think it is in your power to persuade him to go? You needn’t say anything about a Christian Science healer waiting for him at the other end; there will be plenty of time for that when you get him on board ship.”

Maud thought over this. There was a suggestion that she felt she had better make, which was rather difficult for her to put to him.

“Yes; I think I might be able to persuade him,” she said, “because certainly he used often to listen to me when he would listen to no one else. And would you think it odd if I suggested that he and I went alone, without Lady Thurso?”

“I should have suggested it if you had not,” said the doctor. “But tell me why you did.”

“Ah! poor Thurso is mad,” said she. “He is not in the least himself. But ever since the summer he has been behaving to Catherine as if he hated her.”

The doctor nodded.

“I know; she feels that, too. Now, you cannot see your brother to-day, but to-morrow, if he goes on well, I think you might. We shall see. I shall be back early to-morrow to look at him.”

For a man who had passed through so dangerous an attack, weakened, too, as he was, by months of the opium habit, Thurso showed extraordinary recuperative power, and next day he asked of his own accord whether Maud might come and see him. This Sir James at once allowed.

“I will let her know when I go,” he said. “It will do you good.”

He waited for a moment, but Thurso said nothing about wishing to see Catherine, and shortly after the doctor left him, and told Maud she might pay him a short visit. The nurse was with him when Maud entered, but went to her room next door, leaving brother and sister alone. He was still lying flat, without pillows, but he smiled a welcome at Maud when she came in.

“Come close, Maud,” he said in a minute. “I want to talk to you.”

His voice was still no more than a whisper from weakness, but his words were quite audible.

“I don’t want to see Catherine,” he said, “and you must keep her away from me. I think the sight of her would send me off my head. It’s she who has brought me to this. It was she who ruined my nerves by always rushing and flying about in every direction – ”

Maud interrupted him gently.

“Ah! never mind that,” she said. “At present all you have to do is to lie quiet, and not worry about anything, and get well.”

But Thurso broke in again.

“Oh, don’t imagine I don’t know how atrociously I have behaved to her,” he said; “but she drove me mad. She despised me; I saw that. Well, I gave her something to despise me for.”

“Oh, dear Thurso, don’t talk like that,” she said. “If you don’t want to see Catherine, of course you shall not. But your saying that reminds me of a plan you and I might think of when you get better.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve already spoken to Sir James about it, and he approves. You will have to go somewhere to pick up again, so how about you and me going on a voyage together? We both like the sea, so why not go to America on one of those big liners that are so comfortable? We could stay at that house of Catherine’s on Long Island for a week or two, if you liked.”

“Without Catherine, you mean?” he asked.

“She loathes the sea, you remember. You couldn’t expect her to come.”

His eye brightened.

“Yes; I should like that,” he said. “You and I have had jolly times together by ourselves. But I won’t go if she goes.”

His voice had risen sharply over this, and he was silent afterwards, breathing rather quickly. Then he looked at Maud as she sat beside the bed, and something in her youth and beauty stirred some chord of vibrating memory in him, and his mind, which, for all the deadly weakness of his body, was quite clear, went back to early days when he and she had been together so much, bound in an intimacy and affection that seldom exists between brother and sister. She had always been such a good friend to him, such a capital quick-sympathising comrade, and now, he felt, there must for ever stand between them the horror of these last months. For the moment he got outside himself and judged himself, and saw how hideous he had been.

“I’ve made a pretty good mess of it all,” he said.

She laid her hand on his. It was no time to preach: she could only console.

“Yes, dear Thurso,” she said. “We’ve all made mistakes. But, thank God! it is never too late.”

Then that moment of regret, that nearly amounted to contrition, passed from him. It had been brief as a sudden ray of sun piercing through some unconjectured rent in blinding storm-clouds.

“But it’s Catherine’s fault,” he said.

But the ray had been there. His soul, though sick to death, still lived. And that was the only piece of consolation that Maud could carry away with her.

CHAPTER III

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.”