Shadows of Flames Part 37

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 a.s.suagement, 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 grat.i.tude 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 att.i.tude) 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 d.a.m.ned prim her mouth had looked when she refused him! Fancy kissing a mouth like that with pa.s.sion! What an a.s.s 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 d.a.m.ned pain that was prizing his skull asunder. Yes, by G.o.d! 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-gla.s.s 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 att.i.tude 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 d.a.m.ned 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 b.i.t.c.h--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, coa.r.s.e, 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 h.e.l.l ... to the sewers of h.e.l.l...."

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. d.a.m.n 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.

XXVII

On Wednesday evening, about eleven o'clock, Gaynor knocked at the door of Sophy's bedroom. She was sitting before the fire, her dressing-gown over her night-gown, ready for any emergency. She sent Tilda to bed early these terrible days--living, as she did, in constant terror lest the servants should witness some odious scandal.

She opened the door herself, not knowing who it might be. The little man was very pale, he had the appearance attributed to those who have "just seen a ghost." In his hand he held a white gla.s.s quart bottle. He looked at Sophy without speaking.

"What is it? What _is_ it?" she urged. Her eyes were fixed on that big, empty bottle. Why should Gaynor bring an empty bottle to her room at eleven o'clock at night? Why was he so frightened?

"Mrs. Chesney ..." said the valet. "Pardon me, but you must know. I've thought different. Now it's plain. This bottle was more than half full at five this afternoon. Now, you see, madam; you see for yourself...."

Sophy stared bewildered.

"I don't understand," she said, full of vague terror herself now. "What was in the bottle? Why is it empty?"

"Spirit, madam; ninety-five-proof spirit--for the little spirit lamp I use for Mr. Chesney, madam. It was two-thirds full six hours ago. Oh, don't you see, madam? And now the master's door is locked. He won't answer--I've knocked and knocked. He laughed once--so he's not unconscious, madam."

Sophy stood staring.

"Do you mean...?" she whispered finally. "You don't mean that he ...