The House of Defence. Volume 2

“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.