The Great Amulet Part 16

Lenox pushed aside the jar impatiently, as though it were in some way to blame; and sank into his chair, head bent, legs outstretched; the picture of defeat. All his thoughts and hopes crashed about him in ruins: and Lenox, contemplating the fragments with a numb acquiescence far removed from resignation, saw only the old maddening irony at work; saw himself, standing yet again, on the threshold of an Eden locked and barred 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-heap of things forgotten, an incident of early days.

He recalled how, on a certain night, after the confiscation of their candles, and a stern injunction from old Ailie to speak "nae word" till morning, his elder brother--greatly daring--had invaded his bed, and with lips set close to his ear had startled and thrilled him with the following announcement:--

"Listen, Eldred,--what do you think? I've found out at last why Uncle Jock won't tell about grandfather, and why there's an empty place in the big alb.u.m 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 I think you ought to hear it for a warning too. She says grandfather served 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 h.e.l.l"--this in an awestruck whisper--"through eating too much opium, like some of the natives do out there. I wonder if it's nice stuff to eat; don't you?"

To the boy of ten, listening with rapt interest, his grandfather's backsliding had sounded only a few degrees more heinous than gormandising at Christmas; and since Ailie had proved obdurate when pressed, and even bribed for further information, the spark of curiosity had died out for lack of fuel. But to the man of five-and-thirty, racked with reawakened pa.s.sion, and with a restless irritability, whose significance could no longer be ignored, the memory of his brother's whispered revelation flashed like a lightning-streak across his present dilemma; leaving him in the grasp of those invisible forces that are the true masters of destiny; that must either break or be broken by man's individual spirit and will. For some of us the struggle is conscious; for some unconscious; for others it never arises at all: because only the touchstone of circ.u.mstance can evoke any one of 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 to begin 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 of mist; 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 a garment of high-sounding words. He told himself straightly that no right-minded man could deliberately risk handing down to others such a heritage of struggle and possible failure as was his. Yet, in the same breath, the Devil whispered a plausible reminder that men as good as he had taken the risk time after time; that De Quincey himself had followed pa.s.sion's dictates seemingly without a twinge of self-reproach. But Lenox was too single-minded to take shelter behind the failures of others. For him the principle was all. For him all thought of marriage must be set aside, at least, until he knew for certain how completely the subtle poison had entered into his blood.

"Thank G.o.d she didn't give me the chance I wanted!" he breathed in all sincerity: and flinging himself back in his chair, he lay open-eyed and still, while night slipped silently on toward morning.

Brutus made one or two attempts to attract his master's attention by means of a moist nose and an urgent paw; and failing, returned philosophically to the hearth-rug.

The lamp burned low, and lower, till the room reeked with fumes of kerosene. This minor discomfort roused Lenox. He lit two candles, blew out the lamp, and throwing aside his mess jacket, yawned and stretched himself extensively. By this time one craving outweighed all others. Every nerve in him ached for the respite of sleep; and his one chance lay in succ.u.mbing to mental or physical exhaustion.

He sat down to the table, and took up his pen, determined to write till it dropped from his fingers. But here also defeat confronted him. For although 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 fro in the measured mechanical fashion most conducive to weariness of mind and body. But though weariness came in due course, and the weight of all time hung heavy on his eyelids, sleep held pitilessly aloof from his brain.

For the greater part of two hours the man held out. Then his face hardened; and he turned deliberately to a combined book-sh.e.l.l and cupboard that hung on the wall. From the cupboard he took a dark slender bottle labelled chlorodyne; and seating it on the table, fetched a gla.s.s and water-bottle from the bedroom.

That done, he poured himself out a dose far exceeding the normal allowance, and diluted it with the least admissible amount of water.

He drank the mixture slowly, savouring its sweetness and warmth; its uncanny power to soothe and bless. But as he set down the gla.s.s revulsion took hold of him; and on the heels of revulsion came self-scorn. This last roused him like the p.r.i.c.k of a spur: for to men of Eldred Lenox's calibre, self-respect is the oxygen of the soul. The spirit of his grandfather had "scored a point" to-night. But such an achievement 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 of those 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 has not yet found the devil's c.h.i.n.k in his own defences cast the stone.

Head, heart, or heel--there is a weak spot in the strongest. Not even Achilles' self was plunged wholesale into the waters of immunity.

Quite suddenly Lenox realised that he was still holding the bottle: and for some unfathomable reason the trivial detail acted as a fuse that fires the magazine. For the first time that night, unreasoning anger mastered him: anger against himself; against the whole tragi-comical scheme of things: against the man whose dead sins he was called upon to expiate in his own living flesh.

A curse forced its way between his teeth; and he flung the unoffending sc.r.a.p of gla.s.s into the open hearth, where it clinked and shivered into a hundred splinters, filling the room with the strong sickly odour of the drug.

Then he went back again to the long chair; limbs and brain weighted with a luxury of weariness. Shattered hope; a life-and-death struggle ahead:--the words held no meaning for him now. His lids fell. The balm of Nirvana shrouded his senses, blotting out thought, as sea mists, rolling landward, obliterate all things.

The June morning broke in one sheet of gold. Creeping in through the interstices of lowered "chicks," it emphasised the untidy, up-all-night aspect of the room; the sharp lines, pencilled by pain and struggle, on the sleeper's face, where he lay full length, in shirt-sleeves and scarlet waistcoat, unhooked and flung open before weariness overpowered him.

A deep sound, persistently repeated, at last invaded and dispelled the drugged 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 had waked in another world. Then remembrance sprang at him, like a wild thing upon its prey: and his lids fell again heavily. In that first moment of consciousness he understood why men of proven honour and courage have been known to take liberties with the laws of life and death.

Zyarulla, entering soundlessly, set down the _chota ha.s.sri_ on a small table at his master's elbow without betraying his surprise and concern by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. For not even your immaculate family butler can excel, in dignity and true reserve, a bearer of the old school, whose Sahib stands only second to his G.o.d, and who would almost as soon think of defiling his caste as of entering another man's service. We have educated the grand old ideal of service out of our own land; and we are fast educating it out of India also: though it remains an open question whether the good wrought by over-civilisation can honestly be said to counterbalance the evil. A question few Anglo-Indians will be found to answer in the affirmative.

Lenox poured out his tea, and drank it thirstily. But the first mouthful of toast was enough for him. He pushed the plate away; and his hand went out instinctively to the pipe Zyarulla, had laid beside it.

"d.a.m.n!" he muttered between his teeth, almost flinging it from him; and at that instant the door opened.

"_Desmin, Sahib argya_," [1] the Pathan announced; and with a startled sound, Lenox got upon his feet, and began fastening his waistcoat.

"Good morning," he said quietly. "Made a night of it, as you see; and overslept myself."

But beneath his quiet he was acutely aware of the contrast between his own dishevelled aspect, and Desmond's un.o.btrusive neatness and freshness.

"Hope I don't intrude," the latter apologised, smiling: but his keen eyes searched the other's face, and read tragedy there. "As you hadn't turned up by ten-thirty, my wife was afraid something might have gone wrong. So I came over to set her mind at rest!"

"Your wife? Why, of course! And I promised to be round by ten--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 sleep till near dawn; and then it came down on me like a sledge-hammer. You know 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 nerves to fiddle-strings. Ever take anything for it?"

Lenox frowned; and Desmond made haste to add: "No call, of course, to answer a question of that sort. But you look downright ill; and it's unwise to let that kind of thing become a habit."

"d.a.m.ned unwise!" Lenox answered, with a smile that did not lift the shadow from his eyes. "As I know to my cost. The thing has been a habit with me for longer than I care to reckon."

Desmond raised his eyebrows. He had noticed the fragments in the fender: the faint suggestion of chlorodyne that still clung in the air.

"My dear Lenox, I am sorry for that. And--the remedy? You must have tried something before now?"

"Yes. Drugged tobacco:--opium, a good strong mixture," the other answered bluntly. "You may as well have it straight. You're an understanding 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 forward in speaking; elbows on knees; eyes averted from the other's face.

"You see, it's in the blood,--that's the h.e.l.l of it all," he concluded fiercely. "This morning, when I'd had my fill of thinking things out, I took a stiff dose of chlorodyne. Smashed the bottle afterwards, in disgust. But where's the use? The dice are loaded: and no doubt one will be driven back to it again, sooner or later."

Words and tone betrayed the dread note of fatalism--the moral microbe of the East. But men of Theo Desmond's calibre rarely succ.u.mb to its paralysing influence.

"Look here, Lenox,"--he spoke almost brusquely,--"you must get quit of that notion. No man worth his salt goes to meet failure half-way. I grant you're on the edge of an ugly pit, and if you insist on peering into 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 sake of--your wife. Honor told me about her," he added, with more gentleness.

But Lenox threw up his head impatiently. "My wife?" he repeated on a note of concentrated bitterness. "The greatest kindness I could do her would be to plunge wholesale into the pit, and give her back the freedom she wants. A man with a taint in his blood has no business to beget children foredoomed to fight--and lose."

"My good chap," Desmond broke in hotly. "I'll never believe that any living soul is foredoomed to lose. The chance of a fight, no matter how heavy the odds, includes the chance of victory. And even if things do look a bit hopeless for a time, our orders are plain and straight; 'No surrender.'"