Part 16 (1/2)
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 fas.h.i.+on 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 s.h.i.+rt-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.