Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “He used to have dreadful headaches,” she observed. “Perhaps he had one this afternoon.”

  “He didn’t seem that way,” said Theodosia, “and I know about headaches, because Silas used to have them, arising from faulty digestion, to which he is a martyr. He took opium for them.”

  “Yes?” said Lady Swindon.

  “That always cured him. Why, here’s Count Villars. Count Villars, I haven’t set eyes on you since lunch, and I feel bad because you are neglecting me. Let me present you to Lady Swindon.”

  Villars bowed.

  “I think we were introduced about twelve years ago,” he observed. “How are you, Lady Swindon? You have come down the river from your charming Cookham?”

  Lady Swindon got up, turning her back on Theodosia, for whom she had no further use.

  “Yes, and I am just going back there. How clever of you to remember where we live! Will you take me to my boat? Let us walk round the garden first. It is charming to see you again.”

  They strolled a few yards down the path between the two tall herbaceous borders, while she rapidly ran over in her mind what information she wanted from him. It was very quickly done.

  “And you are staying here?” she asked. “How do you find Catherine? I am sure you walked together last night after dinner, and joined old memories onto the present.”

  Lady Swindon was colossal in her impertinence. It struck Villars afresh after his long absence from England how very ill-bred a well-bred Englishwoman can be. But he was more than a match for her.

  “Ah, my dear lady,” he said, “we found that the two needed no link. We neither of us have that faculty, which, no doubt, is often convenient, of forgetting old friends. As always, I adore her; as always, she receives my adoration from her infinite height. The Madonna still smiles on her worshipper. He asks no more.”

  It was admirably done, for it told her nothing. She tried again.

  “Indeed? I thought you had once asked more,” she said. “We all supposed so.”

  “There is no limit to what people of brilliant and vivid imagination may not suppose,” said he.

  She could not help smiling at her own defeat. His refusals to give direct answers were so very silken.

  “And the truth always exceeds one’s imagination, does it not?” she said.

  “It is usually different from it,” observed he.

  This would not do. She tried something else.

  “And Thurso?” she said. “How do you think he is?”

  Villars looked at her in bland surprise.

  “Very well, surely, is he not?” he said. “Why should you think otherwise?”

  “Only something I heard about his calling at a chemist’s and racing home afterwards.”

  “Indeed!” said Villars.

  Lady Swindon was afraid there was no more to be got there, and he handed her into her launch.

  “But I am so glad, so very glad you think he is well,” she said. “Do come and spend a Sunday with us some week. I will try to get Catherine to come and meet you.”

  He murmured gratitude of the non-committal sort, and stood a little while looking after her launch, which sped like an arrow up-stream, raising a two-foot wave in its wake, and nearly upset half a dozen boats in its passage. Then he strolled back to the lawn again. He had not the faintest intention of staying with Lady Swindon, but, on the other hand, he did not at all desire to be on bad terms with her, for, little as he respected her, he had a profound respect for her supreme mischief-making capabilities. She had got hold of something about Thurso, too, and perhaps it was as well she had not seen him. In that case, his own bland assertion that he considered him very well would not have been of much use.

  Lady Swindon’s departure had acted as a signal for a general move, and when Villars got back, Lady Thurso was just saying good-bye to the last of her guests. On the moment, the butler came out of the house and spoke to her.

  “His lordship begs that you and Lady Maud will go to his room for a moment as soon as you are disengaged, my lady,” he said.

  “Tell his lordship we will come immediately. Ah, Count Villars, we were going on the river, were we not? Could you wait a few minutes? Thurso wants to see me about something.”

  Maud joined her, and they went together to Thurso’s sitting-room at the end of the house. He was sitting at his table in the window, and, with his usual courtesy, got up as they entered. On the table in front of him stood a bottle of dark blue glass. He had just finished unpacking this as they entered, and threw the corrugated paper in which it had been wrapped into the waste-paper basket.

  “A cigarette, Catherine?” he said, offering her one. “I want a few minutes’ talk with you both.”

  She took one, and he waited till she had lit it, and sat down.

  “Maud tells me,” he said, “that you and she undid a package that arrived here this afternoon addressed to me, and threw it away. That is so, I believe?”

  She did not answer — it seemed unnecessary — and he raised his voice a little.

  “Will you kindly say whether that is so?” he said.

  “Yes; quite right,” she said.

  Again he raised his voice, that shook with suppressed rage.

  “And do you make a habit of doing such things, both of you? Do you open my letters, other people’s letters?”

  “Oh, Thurso, don’t be a fool!” said Maud quietly.

  His face went very white.

  “Maud, I am trying to be courteous,” he said, “under a good deal of provocation. You might make an effort to follow my example.”

  “Is it courteous to ask Catherine and me whether we are in the habit of opening other people’s letters?” she asked.

  “Your behaviour this afternoon seems to me to warrant my question,” he said.

  “No, Thurso, it does not,” said his wife. “I think you know it, too.”

  He looked first at the one, then at the other, and his hand moved as if instinctively towards the bottle on the table.

  “I don’t want to make a scene with either of you,” he said, “and I don’t want to detain you. I wish to say, however, that I think you behaved quite outrageously. And I require you both to promise never again to act in such a way. You are absolutely unjustified in touching or interfering with my things in this way from whatever motive.”

  He took up the bottle.

  “You see how little good your interference has done in this instance,” he said, “and it will do as little in any other. You will merely oblige me to adopt methods as underhand as your own.”

  “There was nothing underhand,” said Catherine. “We were going to tell you what we had done. Indeed, Maud did tell you.”

  “I should have said that stealing was underhand,” said he very evilly, “though perhaps you think differently. As to your telling me, you knew it was inevitable that I should find out.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” said Maud quickly. “Even if you could never have found out otherwise, we should have told you.”

  “Ah!” said he.

  Maud looked at him in amazement. She had been told by Catherine this afternoon that there were two Mauds, and here indeed was a Thurso whom she would scarcely have known for her brother. His manner was quite quiet and courteous again now, but it seemed as if he was possessed. There was a world of sneering incredulity in that one word.

  “You don’t believe what I say?” she asked.

  He was silent; he smiled a little, and raised his eyebrows. There was no need for him to speak; he could not have shouted his meaning nearly so clearly.

  “Then where is the use of our giving you any promise for the future, if you don’t believe what we say?” she asked.

  “I ask for your promise, however,” he said.

  “And if we don’t give it you?” said Catherine.

  He looked at her closely, and she felt that he hated her at that moment.

  “I shall merely have to find some other way of getting things delivered,
” he said, “so that you shall not st — intercept them.”

  There was silence.

  “I ask for your promise,” he repeated.

  Maud threw back her head.

  “I promise,” she said. “It is no use refusing.”

  “And I,” said Catherine, getting up. “Is that all, Thurso?”

  Thurso put his hand to his head suddenly, with a wince of pain he could not control.

  “Yes, on that point that is all,” he said. “Let us agree to say nothing more about a most unpleasant subject. But I want to tell you this: I am suffering so hideously at the present moment that I hardly know what I am saying. Agitation and anger, for which you two are responsible, have brought on about the worst attack I ever had. Very likely I should not have taken laudanum from that bottle you threw away; in any case, I should have struggled hard not to. I struggled yesterday, with the result that I allowed Catherine to pour away all I had in the house. But I am not going to struggle now, thank you. The pain is intolerable, and I believe it to have been brought on by what you did. Your interference has not done the slightest good; it has only given me an hour of hell.”

  Then, quite suddenly, his mood changed. “I have said abominable things to you both,” he said. “My only excuse is that I am in torments. I beg the forgiveness of both of you.”

  Here was the real Thurso again, looking out like a soul in prison, trying to burst through the bars, and there was a dreadful, hopeless pathos about him. Catherine laid her hand on his shoulder.

  “Ah, Thurso, of course we forgive you,” she said. “But for God’s sake don’t give up. I suppose you must take this now because of your pain, but say you will go on fighting it again. It’s — it’s damnation, you know.”

  He looked at her with agonised eyes.

  “I will do my best,” he said. “Now go, please. Make my excuses to the others if I don’t appear at dinner. But I expect I shall; I have two hours yet.”

  The women went out together, but before the door was closed they heard the clink of glass.

  CHAPTER II.

  IT was a chill November afternoon in the autumn of the same year, and Catherine was seated at the table in her sitting-room at Thurso House, surrounded by a plentiful litter of letters and telegrams, writing busily, fiercely almost, as if to absorb herself in what she was doing to the exclusion of other thoughts. Her secretary, to whom she had just finished dictating a pile of business correspondence and letters less private than those she was occupying herself with, had just left her, and Catherine had begun to tackle this great heap of letters which she felt she had better answer herself — inquiries, mainly, from personal friends. She knew she had given herself more to do than it was really needful that she should, but what to her mind was needful was that she should be occupied in writing, and leave herself no leisure to think. At present there was nothing to be gained by thinking; she could take no step.

  Outside the day was utterly dispiriting; there had been a dense yellow fog all morning, and though it had cleared a little about midday, so that from her window she could see the lilac-bushes of the garden that bordered the Green Park, it hovered still overhead, and though the hour was still not yet three in the afternoon, and her table was in the window, she had to light the shaded electric candle that stood on it to enable her to write. A big fire burned in the open hearth, compounded of logs and coal, that hissed and whistled cheerfully as they blazed, and the room was warm and fragrant. But so dense had been the fog this morning that it had penetrated a little through the joinings of the windows, and a haze, visible now that the electric lights were burning, hung in the atmosphere.

  The room where she sat was one of her own private suite, which she had fitted up not long ago for occupation in those numerous flying visits she had to pay to town, when she intended to stop only a day or two and do some necessary business. On these occasions it was not worth while to open the whole house, and so she had established herself here on the third-floor, with just the one sitting-room, and a bedroom and bathroom adjoining. Until half-way through November she had been paying a series of visits at different country houses ever since she came down from Scotland, while Thurso, so she then believed, had been doing the same at other houses. This week they were to have had the first big shoot at their place in Norfolk, but all that had been put off. Ten days ago now she had arrived here for a couple of days’ stay before going down to Norfolk, and had found her husband was in the house. He had been there ever since they came down from Scotland, alone with his valet and a couple of maidservants, one to cook and one to clean, having excused himself from the various houses where he had told her he should be staying, in order to live here in the hell-paradise of opium. Catherine had at once telegraphed for Maud, who was of more use than anybody with her brother, and the two had been here now for ten days. It was just better that they should be with him than that he should be alone; he still occasionally felt ashamed of himself if they were there.

  Since last June the habit had gained on him with appalling rapidity, though for a few months he had, as she knew, made frantic, agonising efforts to throw it off. He had seen doctors, he had done apparently all that lay in his power to do. But now it seemed that a sort of atrophy of his will had set in; he no longer actively desired to be a free man again, though sometimes a sort of shame and remorse seemed to visit him; and though his will had been so completely dominated and destroyed by the drug, it had left the calculating, scheming part of his brain untouched, and he had a thousand devices for obtaining it after the chemists with whom he habitually dealt had been warned not to give it him. Indeed, it was ten days now since he made what appeared to be the very last effort of will, when, on Catherine’s appearance here, he had burned the prescription which enabled him to obtain it. But within twenty-four hours he had himself forged it again, and Lord Thurso, calling suddenly at some big pharmacy with a prescription bearing an eminent doctor’s name, was naturally not refused the blue bottle with its red poison label.

  Yet busily as Catherine occupied herself with her correspondence, striving, since at the moment she could do nothing for her husband, to engage her mind rather than let it dwell on the hideous realities that were going on, and so vitally concerning her, she was alert for the interruption she expected. For yesterday afternoon Thurso, undermined and weakened as he was by this habit, had had an attack of syncope, and for an hour or two they thought he could not live. But the doctor had pulled him round out of immediate danger, and he had regained a little strength during the last twenty-four hours. Sir James Sanderson had, in fact, just come back for his afternoon visit, and was with him now. He had promised to make his report to Lady Thurso before he left the house. The news of Thurso’s sudden illness had been in the evening papers last night, and had appeared again this morning. She was answering the inquiries of her huge circle of friends.

  Her pen went rapidly from the top to the bottom of her sheets, and envelope after envelope was directed and thrown on her pile. Awful as the present moment was, yet, in a sense, now that a crisis like this had come, it was almost more bearable than the hideous growth of the anxieties and torments she had suffered before. For as the habit gained on him, his moral perception, like his will, seemed to wither and vanish. He had conceived wholly baseless suspicions against his wife; he had uttered them to her; he had told her in what relation he believed her to stand towards Villars. Worse even than that, he did not seem to mind it. He had spied on her; he had opened her letters, both those which she received and those which she wrote — in a word, he seemed to hate her, and to delight in his hate. He made long absences, when he was not at his club or in the house, and gave elaborate, palpably false accounts of his movements when he returned. Finally, all sense of decency seemed to have left him, and he had brought to Thurso House, while his wife was in it, a common woman off the street. How it would all end she dared not think. If he lived, it seemed impossible to her that she should go on living with him. What would happen to the children? what woul
d happen to Maud? And the shame, the atrocious shame and publicity that must follow!

  But the crisis which had occurred yesterday afternoon, the crisis that concerned life and death, had somewhat mitigated the horror of these things. It had also blunted the acuteness of another question that did not concern her less. Since June last she had known that Villars loved her now just as he had always loved her, and though, since he was a gentleman, to put the matter broadly, he had not traded on her growing disgust at the man who was her husband, it was impossible for her not to know that her lover had moved closer. She had no moral House of Defence to take refuge in — nothing of that nature prevented her letting the man who loved her, the lover whom she was sure now she loved, become in deed what both he and she knew that he was in all else but that. Nothing, except a blind determination, which she often told herself was irrational, that this should not be so, stood in her way. Again and again Thurso had taunted her with a lie; he could not taunt her more if it had been a truth. Indeed, to taunt her, as he had done, with what was not true was more unbearable to her than if it had been. Had Villars been her lover, she almost felt as if she would have hurled that fact in his face. For her actions never ran away with her; she was not in the habit of doing what she was ashamed of afterwards; and certainly if she had taken a step so momentous, so vitally affecting her life, as that of having a lover, she was sure she would not have done so blindly or in any sudden flash of passion. Had she meant to live the double life she would have done so deliberately, and for reasons which seemed to her excellent — namely, that her husband was opium-drenched, and had vilely insulted her; secondly, that she loved Villars; and, thirdly, that she did not think it wicked for her in this position to do so. And yet, though in judging others she had no moral code, she judged herself and made her decision in obedience to some stricter law, though all-unformulated, than she applied to others. She knew she was irrational and inconsistent, but she knew she could not be otherwise.