The House of Defence. Volume 2

“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.

CHAPTER IV

BERTIE COCHRANE had taken them straight across by ferry to their house in Long Island, near Port Washington, had seen them comfortably installed, and returned in the evening to his flat in town. As regards Thurso, the spiritual conflict of the Divine and Infinite against all that was mortal and mistaken had begun, and of the ultimate issue of that he had no doubts whatever. But there was another conflict before him, more difficult than that – a conflict of things that were all good, but yet seemed to be unreconcilable; and as he sat now, after eating the one dish of vegetables which was his dinner, he felt torn by these fine conflicting forces.

For to-morrow, at the joint request of Thurso and his sister, he was going down to stay with them. That arrangement he could not refuse. Since they were so kind as to ask him, it was better in every way, as regards the cure he was undertaking, to do so. Thus, all day and every day he would see and be with the girl whom he loved with all the intensity of his jubilant and vital soul. Yet, since he would be there only as a healer, and since, except as a healer, he would never have been there, he knew that he must entirely swamp and drown all his private concerns. He must say no word, make no sign. Even that was not enough, he feared. He must school himself to feel no longing. His love itself must be drowned – that strong and beautiful thing – while he was there; for he would be there only as one who could bring, and had promised to bring, light to this man who was obscured by error. That would be the sole reason for his presence there, and it was worth not a moment of further debate or argument. And as he sat here now, he wondered if he was strong enough to do what he knew he must do, or whether, even at the eleventh hour, it was better to refuse to go to Long Island at all, but send someone else. On the other hand, he had himself promised to cure Thurso. He and his sister had come from England on that express understanding and under promise. But would it not be better to break that rather than lead himself into the temptation of using for his own ends the opportunity that had been given to him, and accepted by him, of demonstrating the eternal truth which was more real than any human love?

He knew, too, the hourly difficulties that his position would entail. Lady Maud thirsted for more knowledge about the truth which she already believed, and it would be he, naturally, who would talk to her about it, sitting opposite her, and seeing the glowing light of the knowledge that was being unveiled in her eyes. And yet all the time he must keep his thoughts away from her – see nothing, know nothing, except what he taught her. Not a thought could be spared to anything else; he would be there to heal, and while he healed all that was his belonged to two persons only – his Master and his patient.

He fixed his mind on this till it all acquiesced, and not only all open revolt, but all covert rebellion and dissent ceased. And the moment that was done, even as, without apparent reason, a sudden surge of water in a calm sea sets the weeds waving and submerges rocks, so from the unplumbed abyss of Love a wave swept softly and hugely over his doubts and drynesses, covering them with the message from the infinite sea. What had all his doubt and rebellion been about? He did not know.

The cold outside was intense; it had come on to freeze more sharply than ever at sunset, but he got up and set his window open. The aid that gave him in the work that lay before him now was adventitious only, but he found it easier to detach himself from the myriad distractions of mortal mind if, instead of breathing the close atmosphere of a room that was full of human associations, the taintless air of out of doors, of night and of cold, came in upon him. Very possibly that feeling itself was a claim of mortal mind, but it was better to yield to such a claim when it was clearly innocent, if it told him that the realisation of truth was thereby made more complete to his sense, than to waste energy in fighting it. And then, as he had done before when he went to the bedside of Sandie Mackenzie, he called his thoughts home. Thoughts of the day and the sea, of the sunshine, and the windless frost and the virgin snow, came flocking back, and went to sleep. Other thoughts, a little more laggard, a little less willing to rest, had to obey also: he had to forget the book he had been reading during his dinner, the swift hour of skating he had enjoyed after he came back to town, the friend he had met and talked with in the street. And another thought more wide-awake yet had to be put to sleep (and, if possible, be strangled as it was sleeping) – namely, his strong physical disgust for a man who, through sheer weakness and self-indulgence, had allowed himself to get into the state in which he had found his patient: that slack lip, that sallow face, that dull, stale eye, the thinning, whitening hair, were like some voluntary and ghastly disfigurement, as if Thurso had striven with his own hands to deface and render hideous his own body, and had succeeded so well that to Cochrane this morning he had been scarcely recognisable. But all this had to sleep; all his disgust had to be done away with. You could not heal a leper by shuddering at his sores.

Slowly and with conscious effort that was done, but there was still one soaring thought abroad, stronger of wing, harder to recall than any. Maud, too, had to be called home (and the irony of the phrase struck him). Her beauty, her incomparable charm, her serene, splendid bravery with her brother, and his love for her, must now be all non-existent for him. She must cease – all thought of her must cease.

Then, like the force that turns the driving-wheel of some great engine that is just beginning to haul its ponderous freight out of the station, the power of the Divine Mind began to press within him. Once and again the wheel spun round, not biting the rail, for the load was very heavy; but soon the driving power began to move him, the engine, and the dead and heavy weight of the trucks weighted with the error and sickness he was to cure. Under the roof of the station it was dark and gloomy, but outside, he knew, was sunshine. There was only one force in the world that could bring him and his trucks out there, but that it should do that his mind had to strain and strive and grip the rail. Sometimes it seemed that the weight behind was immeasurable, sometimes that the force which drove him was so vast that he must burst and be broken under its pressure. But he knew, that little atom of agonised yet rapturous consciousness, which was all that he could refer to as himself, knew that he and his freight were in control of the one Power that cannot go wrong, that never yet made a mistake. The hands that held him were infinitely tender, even as they were infinitely strong.

*****

It was some four hours later when he got up from his chair. The fire had gone out, and the bitterness of the frost had frozen the surface of the glass of water he had poured out, and he broke the crust of ice on it and drank. Two minutes later he was undressed and asleep, having plunged into bed with a smile that had broadened into the sheer laughter of joy.

Thurso awoke next morning, feeling, so he told himself, the stimulus and exhilaration of this new climate and the bracing effect of this dry, sunny morning of frost. After the narrow berth of his cabin it was a luxury to sleep in a proper bed again, and a luxury when awake to lie at ease in it. What an excellent night he had had, too! He had slept from about half-past eleven the night before till he was called at half-past eight – slept uninterruptedly and dreamlessly, without those incessant wakings from agonised dreams of desire which had so obsessed him during the last week. No doubt this change from the sedentary and cramped life of the ship to the wider activities of the land accounted for that, and he felt that the place and the air both suited him. Yesterday had passed pleasantly, too. He, Maud, and Cochrane had been for a long sleigh-drive in the afternoon, and – there was no use in denying it, though he felt some curious latent hostility to him – Cochrane was a very attractive fellow. He had the tact, the experience, the manner of a cultured and agreeable man, and these gifts were somehow steeped in the effervescence and glow of youth. Never had Thurso seen the two so wonderfully combined. Youth’s enchantment was his still, the eager vitality of a boy.

When they returned he had had an hour’s talk with him alone, and at Cochrane’s request had told him the whole history of his slavery. And, somehow, that recital had been in no way difficult. Once again, as on the occasion of Maud’s poaching, Cochrane had made it easy not to be ashamed. Thurso felt as if he was telling it all to a man who understood him better than he understood himself, who did not in the least condone or seek to find excuses for this wretched story, but to whom these hideous happenings appeared only in the light of a nightmare, as if Thurso had had a terrible dream, and was speaking only of empty imaginings. At the end – the tale was a long one – Cochrane had still been genial.