by Maud Diver
CHAPTER VIII.
"Ce n'est pas le mort qui separe le plus les individus." --De Coulevain.
And what of Lenox, after Honor Desmond's sympathetic exertions on hisbehalf?
He went straight from her side to the cloak-room; and thence slowlyback to his unhomelike rooms at the hotel; a dark solitary figure, withbent head, and a heart full of tumultuous hopes and fears. The eventsof the evening had stirred him as he had not been stirred since thoseearly days of torment, of undignified oscillation between yearning anddespair: and now, at last, love unsteadied for the first time thefoundations of his pride; brought home to him the cardinal truth thatall the beauty and terror of life spring from the inexorable law ofduality that links man and woman, act and consequence, with the samepassionless unconcern.
All the way up the hill, this man--who loved night and hermanifestations as most men love the morning--had no thought to sparefor the splendour of the heavens or the shrouded majesty of earth, soabsorbed was he in framing and rejecting possible letters to his wife,who, for all he knew, had already half-lost her heart to another man.
The small sitting-room where Brutus, the faithful, awaited his coming,was more or less a replica of his larger one at Dera Ishmael: thechronically disordered table, books, pipes, sketches, his inseparablefriends, the bull terrier, and the brown tobacco-jar. All these, thefamiliars of his lonely hours, gave him silent greeting as he crossedthe threshold. But for once his spirit failed to respond. Thewitchery of his wife's lips and eyes; the distracting music of herlaughter; that one poignant moment of contact with her living,palpitating self, and Honor Desmond's belief in an undreamed-ofpossibility, had kindled the man's repressed passion as a lighted matchkindles dry powder; had revived in him the common human need, whichneither ambition nor work, however absorbing, has yet been known tosatisfy.
"My God," he thought. "If I believed I had a ghost of a chance to gethold of her again, I'd go back to that infernal ballroom this minute!"
He turned, as if to carry out his resolve: but at the last, shut downthe flood-gates of emotion, fell back on years of self-discipline, andtold his heart he was a fool. He had yet to learn that there is afolly worth more than all the wisdom of philosophers, the folly of aman who loves a woman better than his own soul.
Going over to the table, he turned up the lamp, acknowledged theponderous jubilations of Brutus, and took the damaged pipe out of hispocket. Then he stood looking at it thoughtfully, as it lay in thepalm of his hand; an eloquent testimony to that which had been starved,denied, trampled upon for years,--with this result! Smilinghalf-scornfully at his new-found sentimentalism, he put the pieces intoan empty cigarette tin, and thrust it into the top drawer of his table.As he did so, a strange thought invaded his mind. Some day, perhaps,he would show it to her; and how delightfully she would laugh at himfor his pardonable foolishness!
But in the meantime the wooing and winning of her still remained to beachieved; a unique position for a husband!
Absorbed in thoughts evoked by the bare possibility of success, Lenoxmechanically drew out his empty tobacco-pouch, opened the jar, andthrust a hand into its capacious depths.
Then he started; and two lines of vexation furrowed his forehead. Forhis fingers, descending in search of the good brown leaf, that was moreto him than meat and drink, encountered only a chill hardness,--thebottom of the jar.
He had not emptied it when filling his pouch that morning; and beingmuch preoccupied had not even noticed how little was left. Evidently,during his absence, a hotel servant had helped himself to the remaininghandful, and a clear ten days must elapse before the arrival of a freshconsignment from home.
He gathered up the remaining scraps, and gazed at them blankly. Hisconsignments were carefully timed to overlap one another. By rightsthe jar should have contained quite a fortnight's supply of his elixirvitae: and it took him one or two seconds to grasp the fullsignificance of that which had befallen him.
"Great Heaven! I must have been overdoing it like blazes this lastmonth," he reflected grimly, "And how about the next ten days?"
He stood aghast before that simple question, and its obvious answer.It was as if the earth has opened under his feet; as if he had suddenlydiscovered that only a thin crust intervened between himself and thecrater of a volcano. And he had travelled hitherward blindly; goadedby the threefold necessity to work, and sleep, and forget. Thus,stealthily, inexorably, a habit creeps upon a man; enclosing him meshby mesh in a network imponderable as spun silk, tenacious as steelwire. A sudden movement, a break in the hypnotic influence of routine,and he wakes to find himself prisoned in a web of his own weaving.
Lenox pushed aside the jar impatiently, as though it were in some wayto blame; and sank into his chair, head bent, legs outstretched; thepicture of defeat. All his thoughts and hopes crashed about him inruins: and Lenox, contemplating the fragments with a numb acquiescencefar removed from resignation, saw only the old maddening irony at work;saw himself, standing yet again, on the threshold of an Eden locked andbarred against him; felt in every nerve the grip of the pitiless fact,and asked himself fiercely; "What next?"
Gradually thought penetrated the dull ache of rebellion; and Memory,that capricious handmaid of the brain, unearthed from the rubbish-heapof things forgotten, an incident of early days.
He recalled how, on a certain night, after the confiscation of theircandles, and a stern injunction from old Ailie to speak "nae word" tillmorning, his elder brother--greatly daring--had invaded his bed, andwith lips set close to his ear had startled and thrilled him with thefollowing announcement:--
"Listen, Eldred,--what do you think? I've found out at last why UncleJock won't tell about grandfather, and why there's an empty place inthe big album where he ought to be. Ailie told me. I bothered her,and bothered her, till she said I should hear it for a warning; and Ithink you ought to hear it for a warning too. She says grandfatherserved the East India Company for forty years. He was a grand soldier,and a sportsman; a great tall man, like you will be. Ailie says you'have his face.' But he went to hell"--this in an awestruckwhisper--"through eating too much opium, like some of the natives doout there. I wonder if it's nice stuff to eat; don't you?"
To the boy of ten, listening with rapt interest, his grandfather'sbacksliding had sounded only a few degrees more heinous thangormandising at Christmas; and since Ailie had proved obdurate whenpressed, and even bribed for further information, the spark ofcuriosity had died out for lack of fuel. But to the man offive-and-thirty, racked with reawakened passion, and with a restlessirritability, whose significance could no longer be ignored, the memoryof his brother's whispered revelation flashed like a lightning-streakacross his present dilemma; leaving him in the grasp of those invisibleforces that are the true masters of destiny; that must either break orbe broken by man's individual spirit and will. For some of us thestruggle is conscious; for some unconscious; for others it never arisesat all: because only the touchstone of circumstance can evoke any oneof those past lives whereof each single life is so mysteriously compact.
For Eldred Lenox, imbued with his uncle's iron creed, the fight would,of necessity, be conscious and unremitting. But he had no heart tobegin it yet. He felt as a man may feel who is suddenly struck blind.Thought, movement, life itself, seemed paralysed by a fear unnameable,and new; the fear of that other self, who is the arch-enemy of us all.
One certainty alone stood out, like a black headland from a sea ofmist; all immediate hope of ratifying his marriage was at an end.There spoke his tyrannical conscience with disconcerting directness:and Lenox had never acquired the art of disguising plain fact in agarment of high-sounding words. He told himself straightly that noright-minded man could deliberately risk handing down to others such aheritage of struggle and possible failure as was his. Yet, in the samebreath, the Devil whispered a plausible reminder that men as good as hehad taken the risk time after time; that De Quincey himself hadfollowed passion's dictates seemingly without
a twinge ofself-reproach. But Lenox was too single-minded to take shelter behindthe failures of others. For him the principle was all. For him allthought of marriage must be set aside, at least, until he knew forcertain how completely the subtle poison had entered into his blood.
"Thank God she didn't give me the chance I wanted!" he breathed in allsincerity: and flinging himself back in his chair, he lay open-eyed andstill, while night slipped silently on toward morning.
Brutus made one or two attempts to attract his master's attention bymeans of a moist nose and an urgent paw; and failing, returnedphilosophically to the hearth-rug.
The lamp burned low, and lower, till the room reeked with fumes ofkerosene. This minor discomfort roused Lenox. He lit two candles,blew out the lamp, and throwing aside his mess jacket, yawned andstretched himself extensively. By this time one craving outweighed allothers. Every nerve in him ached for the respite of sleep; and his onechance lay in succumbing to mental or physical exhaustion.
He sat down to the table, and took up his pen, determined to write tillit dropped from his fingers. But here also defeat confronted him. Foralthough his subconscious brain was discomfortably alert and voluble,ordered consecutive thought refused to come at his bidding.
He gave it up at length for the simpler expedient of pacing to and froin the measured mechanical fashion most conducive to weariness of mindand body. But though weariness came in due course, and the weight ofall time hung heavy on his eyelids, sleep held pitilessly aloof fromhis brain.
For the greater part of two hours the man held out. Then his facehardened; and he turned deliberately to a combined book-shell andcupboard that hung on the wall. From the cupboard he took a darkslender bottle labelled chlorodyne; and seating it on the table,fetched a glass and water-bottle from the bedroom.
That done, he poured himself out a dose far exceeding the normalallowance, and diluted it with the least admissible amount of water.
He drank the mixture slowly, savouring its sweetness and warmth; itsuncanny power to soothe and bless. But as he set down the glassrevulsion took hold of him; and on the heels of revulsion cameself-scorn. This last roused him like the prick of a spur: for to menof Eldred Lenox's calibre, self-respect is the oxygen of the soul. Thespirit of his grandfather had "scored a point" to-night. But such anachievement must not be risked again.
With the same deliberation that had marked all his former movements,Lenox picked up the bottle, emptied its sluggish contents down one ofthose primitive sluices that are to be found in every Indian bungalow,and returned, still absently holding it between his finger and thumb.A confession of weakness: there is no denying it. But let him who hasnot yet found the devil's chink in his own defences cast the stone.Head, heart, or heel--there is a weak spot in the strongest. Not evenAchilles' self was plunged wholesale into the waters of immunity.
Quite suddenly Lenox realised that he was still holding the bottle: andfor some unfathomable reason the trivial detail acted as a fuse thatfires the magazine. For the first time that night, unreasoning angermastered him: anger against himself; against the whole tragi-comicalscheme of things: against the man whose dead sins he was called upon toexpiate in his own living flesh.
A curse forced its way between his teeth; and he flung the unoffendingscrap of glass into the open hearth, where it clinked and shivered intoa hundred splinters, filling the room with the strong sickly odour ofthe drug.
Then he went back again to the long chair; limbs and brain weightedwith a luxury of weariness. Shattered hope; a life-and-death struggleahead:--the words held no meaning for him now. His lids fell. Thebalm of Nirvana shrouded his senses, blotting out thought, as seamists, rolling landward, obliterate all things.
The June morning broke in one sheet of gold. Creeping in through theinterstices of lowered "chicks," it emphasised the untidy, up-all-nightaspect of the room; the sharp lines, pencilled by pain and struggle, onthe sleeper's face, where he lay full length, in shirt-sleeves andscarlet waistcoat, unhooked and flung open before weariness overpoweredhim.
A deep sound, persistently repeated, at last invaded and dispelled thedrugged torpor of his brain: the voice of Zyarulla murmuring:"Sahib--Sahib," with the regularity of a minute-gun.
Lenox stirred, yawned, and looked blankly about him, as though he hadwaked in another world. Then remembrance sprang at him, like a wildthing upon its prey: and his lids fell again heavily. In that firstmoment of consciousness he understood why men of proven honour andcourage have been known to take liberties with the laws of life anddeath.
Zyarulla, entering soundlessly, set down the _chota hassri_ on a smalltable at his master's elbow without betraying his surprise and concernby so much as the flicker of an eyelash. For not even your immaculatefamily butler can excel, in dignity and true reserve, a bearer of theold school, whose Sahib stands only second to his God, and who wouldalmost as soon think of defiling his caste as of entering another man'sservice. We have educated the grand old ideal of service out of ourown land; and we are fast educating it out of India also: though itremains an open question whether the good wrought by over-civilisationcan honestly be said to counterbalance the evil. A question fewAnglo-Indians will be found to answer in the affirmative.
Lenox poured out his tea, and drank it thirstily. But the firstmouthful of toast was enough for him. He pushed the plate away; andhis hand went out instinctively to the pipe Zyarulla, had laid besideit.
"Damn!" he muttered between his teeth, almost flinging it from him; andat that instant the door opened.
"_Desmin, Sahib argya_," [1] the Pathan announced; and with a startledsound, Lenox got upon his feet, and began fastening his waistcoat.
"Good morning," he said quietly. "Made a night of it, as you see; andoverslept myself."
But beneath his quiet he was acutely aware of the contrast between hisown dishevelled aspect, and Desmond's unobtrusive neatness andfreshness.
"Hope I don't intrude," the latter apologised, smiling: but his keeneyes searched the other's face, and read tragedy there. "As you hadn'tturned up by ten-thirty, my wife was afraid something might have gonewrong. So I came over to set her mind at rest!"
"Your wife? Why, of course! And I promised to be round byten--ill-mannered cur that I am!" He sank wearily into his chair."Truth is," he added in a changed tone, "I couldn't get a wink of sleeptill near dawn; and then it came down on me like a sledge-hammer. Youknow the sort of thing."
Desmond nodded, and took a seat on the edge of the table.
"Are you often given that way?" he asked with seeming unconcern.
"Now and again."
"Ever been really bad with it?"
"Pretty bad. Why d'you ask?"
"Because from the looks of you, I should say it was wearing your nervesto fiddle-strings. Ever take anything for it?"
Lenox frowned; and Desmond made haste to add: "No call, of course, toanswer a question of that sort. But you look downright ill; and it'sunwise to let that kind of thing become a habit."
"Damned unwise!" Lenox answered, with a smile that did not lift theshadow from his eyes. "As I know to my cost. The thing has been ahabit with me for longer than I care to reckon."
Desmond raised his eyebrows. He had noticed the fragments in thefender: the faint suggestion of chlorodyne that still clung in the air.
"My dear Lenox, I am sorry for that. And--the remedy? You must havetried something before now?"
"Yes. Drugged tobacco:--opium, a good strong mixture," the otheranswered bluntly. "You may as well have it straight. You're anunderstanding fellow; and no Pharisee."
Then, in a few clipped sentences, he stated the bald facts of the case,culminating in his discovery of the previous night. He leaned forwardin speaking; elbows on knees; eyes averted from the other's face.
"You see, it's in the blood,--that's the hell of it all," he concludedfiercely. "This morning, when I'd had my fill of thinking things out,I took a stiff dose of chlorodyne. Smashed the bottle afterwards
, indisgust. But where's the use? The dice are loaded: and no doubt onewill be driven back to it again, sooner or later."
Words and tone betrayed the dread note of fatalism--the moral microbeof the East. But men of Theo Desmond's calibre rarely succumb to itsparalysing influence.
"Look here, Lenox,"--he spoke almost brusquely,--"you must get quit ofthat notion. No man worth his salt goes to meet failure half-way. Igrant you're on the edge of an ugly pit, and if you insist on peeringinto it, your chance is gone. All you have to do is to shut your eyes,and hang to the reins like the very deuce; if it's only for the sakeof--your wife. Honor told me about her," he added, with moregentleness.
But Lenox threw up his head impatiently. "My wife?" he repeated on anote of concentrated bitterness. "The greatest kindness I could do herwould be to plunge wholesale into the pit, and give her back thefreedom she wants. A man with a taint in his blood has no business tobeget children foredoomed to fight--and lose."
"My good chap," Desmond broke in hotly. "I'll never believe that anyliving soul is foredoomed to lose. The chance of a fight, no matterhow heavy the odds, includes the chance of victory. And even if thingsdo look a bit hopeless for a time, our orders are plain and straight;'No surrender.'"
Lenox searched his face.
"Ever been through the fire yourself?"
Desmond nodded.
"I suppose moat of us have to go through hell once or twice," he saidquietly. "And I know how it feels to wish that some one would lock upmy revolver."
For answer Lenox got up and paced the room, head down; hands plungeddeep into trouser-pockets; lost, by now, to all sense of hisincongruous appearance.
The other watched him thoughtfully. Then his hand went to hisbreast-pocket, and drew out a leather case. A man proffers tobacco toa friend in trouble as instinctively as a woman proffers a caress.
"Have a cheroot?" he said, holding them out: and Lenox checked hispacing.
"Thanks,--no. I've no taste for 'em. Never had."
"Better cultivate it, then. These are A1 Havannahs. A passingextravagance. Good to begin upon. I'd drop pipes for a time, if Iwere you. When it comes to breaking a habit, association is the devil.And whatever happens, don't let this heredity bogey get the upper handof you. The taint you speak of is no more, as yet, than inheritedtendency: and this accident--if you believe in accident, I don't--givesyou the chance of killing the snake in the egg. Now light up, there'sa good chap; just to keep me company."
Lenox helped himself with a wry face; lit the cigar, and continued hiswalk. The iron had bitten into his soul: and, at the moment, he wasincapable of gratitude. Bit by bit brain and body were adjustingthemselves to the new outlook, the new demands enforced upon them; andthe process was not a pleasant one.
Suddenly he drew up, and faced his companion.
"You can leave me out of the reckoning now for Chumba and Kajiar," hesaid abruptly. "I'm in no mood for that sort of foolery. I'll stayhere and grind at this book of mine instead. You must excuse me to MrsDesmond; and tell her just as much of the truth as you think fit."
But before he had finished speaking, Desmond was on his feet, decisionin every line of him.
"Not if I know it, my dear fellow! You won't get a stroke of work donejust at present; and 'that sort of foolery,' as you call it, will doyou all the good in the world. Your best chance is to get rightoutside yourself; and we'll make it our business to keep youthere--Honor and I."
At that Lenox turned huskily away; and his broken attempt at a laughwas not good to hear.
"Damn it all, man, why don't you leave me alone, to go to the devil inmy own way? What can it matter to you, or to any one, whether I breakmyself in pieces, or am merely broken on the wheel?"
Desmond's quick ear detected emotion beneath the ungraciousness ofspeech and tone; and following him, he laid a hand on his shoulder, afriendly liberty to which Lenox was little accustomed.
"Come along home with me," he said quietly. "Stay for tiffin, and talkit all out with my wife. She'll be able to answer you far better thanI can. Nothing like a woman's sympathy to put a dash of conceit backinto a man. Will you follow on? Or shall I wait while you change?"
For an instant Lenox stood silent; then, greatly to his own surprise,he held out his hand.
"I'll be ready in ten minutes," was all he said.
An hour later, Desmond rode away from Terah Cottage, leaving Lenox andhis wife alone together. He had promised to give her what help hecould in the delicate task she had set her heart upon: and he belongedto the satisfactory type of man who may be counted upon for goodmeasure, pressed down, and running over.
[1] Has come.
