Читать книгу Shadows of Flames - Amélie Rives - Страница 22

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Lady Wychcote came again next morning about ten o'clock. She seemed much mollified by Sophy's account of the arrangement that had been entered into—showed a marked inclination to assume more amicable relations with her daughter-in-law.

"I knew that he would act reasonably when things were put clearly before him. He is erratic—but a most able creature. As soon as he realised the gravity of the situation I was convinced that he would act with me—with us—for his own benefit."

"Yes—you were right—you knew him better than I did," said Sophy with generous humility. She, too, felt softened towards her mother-in-law because her maternal intuition had been right, when she, Sophy, as a wife, had doubted.

"Very nice of you to admit it, I'm sure," said Lady Wychcote affably. She was so highly pleased that all her ideas were by way of being carried out, that she actually asked to see Bobby. This was a wonderful condescension, for from the day of his birth she seemed scarcely to have been aware of his existence.

"I will go to the nursery if you like," she said, as it were a Queen saying with royal affectation of equality: "See, I am even prepared to descend from my dais and walk on a level with you."

"Thanks—but there's no need," said Sophy. "I will have him brought here."

Lady Wychcote had not seen the child, except at a distance, since he could walk and talk. As his nurse set him upon his feet, and his sturdy little figure came towards her, strutting mannishly, serious but unafraid, something stirred in her chilly breast—something not exactly warm but pungent. The child had the look of her own family. It had been a family noted for its statesmen. What possibilities might not lie hid in that small, firm breast under its ruffled collar! It came over her in a sudden tingling wave of resuscitated hope and fact abruptly realised, that in case of Gerald's dying childless—this child would be heir to the title. He was a Chesney after all. He had the name, and her own blood in his veins. The mother was only the "incalculable quantity" in the sum of this higher spiritual mathematics. Inconsistently, as with all tyrants, her mind whirled about, accepting as a pleasing possibility what had until then only occurred to her as an insufferable one—a weapon with which to goad Gerald, when his disinclination to marry put her beyond all patience. Now as she looked at Bobby, who had gone straight to his mother's knee, and stood biting his small fist, and regarding her solemnly out of grey, noncommittal eyes, she thought, "Why not! He is my grandchild after all." She even spoke her thought aloud.

"Has it ever occurred to you that that child may be Lord Wychcote some day, in case Gerald dies unmarried!" she asked.

It had occurred to Sophy, for Cecil had spoken once or twice of such a possibility—but he had spoken of it grumblingly.

"If that duffer Gerald dies without begetting a proper little Conservative," he had said, "our little chap's chances may be knocked out, by a seat in the Lords. Nice country this—where a political career can be smashed to smithereens by having to wear a bally title whether you will or no."

It never seemed to cross his mind that Bobby might desire a career other than political—or granting that he should not, that by a sort of figurative reversion of species, he might become a Unionist instead of a Liberal.

But Sophy did not have political ambitions for her son. She would rather have seen him a great artist of some sort—the great poet of his day. In her marriage seemed to have quenched the spark of mental creation. It was a deep grief to her that she had felt no real desire to write since becoming Chesney's wife. Only that saddest of all emotions—the desire to desire. It was as if mocking, satyr-hoofs had trampled her mind's garden. The fine poetry of her imaginative mood had not been able to withstand the shocks of such a marriage as hers. Sometimes she had felt bitterly, as though there were the print of a goat's hoof on her heart and that it had filled slowly with blood. It was this scar that burnt when she was unhappy.

"Oh, Gerald is sure to marry," she now said hastily. "He was so much better when I saw him in April."

"Pf! He goes up and down. There's no counting on him," said his mother bitterly. "Is your boy strong? He looks very healthy."

"He's splendidly strong," said Sophy proudly. "He's never had an ill day in his life."

She gathered the boy close to her jealously. There was such a greedy, appraising look in Lady Wychcote's eyes. She might have been a civilised ogress, estimating from long habit the tender flesh of a child.

"Is he clever? Quick?"

"Very," said Sophy briefly.

"I hope you won't let Cecil instil his wretched Radical principles into the boy's mind before he's able to think for himself."

"He thinks for himself already," said Sophy, with a slight smile.

"Well—who knows? We may yet give another famous man to the Conservative cause," said Lady Wychcote, still gazing at Bobby. Then she said to him:

"Come to your grandmother, child."

Sophy impelled him forward, and he went slowly but steadily, and stood before the young-old lady, his hands behind him, his little stomach thrust forward. It was the true statesman's attitude. But Bobby was only wondering why the lady had black specks all over her face, and whether the bird on her brown velvet hat could cry "cuckoo" like the one in the nursery clock.

And to Sophy there came the words of Constance:

"Do, child, go to it, grandam, child:

Give grandam kingdom, and it' grandam will

Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig."

For it galled her that Lady Wychcote should never have shown the least interest in the boy, until it had occurred to her that some day he might serve her ambition.

Chesney saw his mother for a few minutes before she went. He was languid but apparently quite normal. He exaggerated this languor, as later on he exaggerated a certain nervousness consequent on the fact that he dared not take as much morphia as he really wanted, fearing that Gaynor, at least, might suspect something, and well aware that a man under reduced doses of the drug shows symptoms of extreme weakness and restlessness. When she asked if he would see Craig Hopkins that afternoon, he replied good-humouredly:

"Bring in the performing poodles as soon as you like. Since I'm in for it, the show might as well begin promptly."

"Cecil is most reasonable—I did not hope as much as this," she told Sophy. Then she took her departure, adding:

"And now I must set the Town talking the way we wish."

It had been agreed between her and Sophy that she should spread reports to the effect that Cecil was suffering from an attack of inflammation of the brain. She had submitted this idea to Dr. Hopkins yesterday, and he had agreed that it was wise and permissible under the circumstances.

Lady Wychcote was a clever woman. She set this report going with such skill and so apt a measure of detail that even the sceptical Olive Arundel was quite taken in by it. The people who chiefly mattered, and those who had been present at the painful dinner, were only too glad to accept such a solution of the disgraceful scene. Only Oswald Tyne smiled behind Lady Wychcote's well-preserved and still girlish back, his mocking, unctuous smile, and said: "I would rather dream of the degrading spectacle of a British plum-pudding served in flames at an Athenian banquet than see again at a London feast the brain of an Englishman thus ignited. Both are too massive to burn gracefully. But the plum-pudding has a lightness—a delicacy—a wholesomeness—which the British cerebrum even in flames can never accomplish."

Olive, to whom Tyne made these remarks, exclaimed, much vexed:

"Oswald! You are bwutal. You are never funny when you are bwutal."

"On the contrary," he assured her gravely, "I am a Celt. I am always funny when I am brutal. Your Englishman, now, is always brutal when he is funny."

"Oh, don't try to be witty with every breath!" she cried crossly. "I think it heartless of you, and that poor man was in danger of his life at the very moment he said that awful thing!"

"Indeed he was," said Tyne earnestly. "I know that I had clutched my knife with red slaughter hissing at my ear. Several men who were present have confessed the same thing to me. The vice of self-control was all that restrained us."

"At any rate," she said earnestly, seeing that it was hopeless to get at his serious side through sympathy for Cecil, "at any rate, you like poor dear Sophy, don't you?"

"Yes, I burn discreetly 'with a hard, gem-like flame' for her."

"You wouldn't want to hurt her?"

"Not even for my own pleasure."

"Then don't go about saying things about 'plum-puddings' and Grecian feasts and all that when her husband is mentioned, will you? Even if you don't believe he's ill—be a good sort for Sophy's sake, and pretend to."

"Pretence is always lovely," said Tyne dreamily. "Zeus pretended to be a swan, and lo!—Artemis and Apollo!"

"I'm sure you don't have to pretend to be a goose," said Olive, out of patience, and she walked away from him, proudly carrying off the last word.

But Tyne's native kindliness outweighed his love of drollery this time. The memory of Sophy's beautiful, frozen profile as he had last seen it, and which had reminded him of the drooping, white profile of the Neapolitan Antinous, held him from further expressing his doubts of the genuineness of Chesney's attack. As for the others, they behaved with discreet and kindly sympathy, and carriages drew up often before the house in Regent's Park to leave cards and inquiries.

Thus the bitterness of humiliation was lifted from Sophy's heart, and thus, too, it came to pass that Amaldi could think of her again without that overwhelming surge of helpless pity, and fierce, thwarted indignation. He left cards on her and Chesney a few days later, and meeting Bobby as he turned from the door, had the rather bitter pleasure of holding him in his arms for a moment.

The child had not forgotten him. He gazed soberly into his eyes for a moment, then broke into the delicious chuckle that meant delighted affection with him, and pressing the firm little fruit of his fresh cheek to Amaldi's, said:

"Bobby man!... Bobby nith man—tome back!"

Amaldi's heart glowed and ached. He kissed the boy with passion, then set him gently down and went away. He had found that which was lost to him even as he found it, and the world seemed to him like a vast house full of vacant, echoing rooms.

It was decided that Chesney should be taken to Dynehurst during the next week. He affected a listless apathy, and seemed not to care whether he went or stayed. Dr. Hopkins expressed himself satisfied with his condition. He thought, however, that the sooner he could be moved to the country the better it would be for him in every way. He had written fully to Dr. Bellamy, the Wychcotes' physician at Dynehurst. For Sophy these intervening days were peaceful but heavy. She could not recapture, somehow, her high mood of the evening of her talk with Cecil. Things went along evenly, monotonously. He was never either cheerful or depressed—talked little, sometimes locked his bedroom door for hours together. This made her curiously apprehensive. What was he doing behind that locked door? She felt that Gaynor also was vaguely uneasy over this new phase, but they did not mention it to each other. Apart from this one thing, Cecil was very reasonable—submitted to having all wine withdrawn from his diet; even put up with having his cigarettes cut down to eight a day. Neither Sophy nor Gaynor suspected for a moment that he had a third hypodermic syringe in his possession. With the startling and crafty acumen of the morphinomaniac, he had secreted it in the last place that they would have thought of—namely, in the same letter-case, of which now he left the key carelessly on his dressing-table or the little stand by his bed. Nor did they, in their inexperience of such things, realise that one who had for three years been addicted to the habit, and who, during two years of that time, had been accustomed to large and constant doses of the drug, could not possibly have supported its withdrawal, even gradually, with the composure shown by Chesney.

Dr. Hopkins always made his visits about ten in the morning; and, deeply cunning, determined that no mistake on his part should prevent his escape from the town where Algernon Carfew lived, an ever present menace, Chesney refrained from taking his usual dose until after the physician had seen him. These occasions of waiting for Hopkins to come and go were very painful. Sometimes the little doctor would be half an hour late, and each minute of this half hour seemed endless to the man, fretting with crawling skin and muscles spasmodically twitching, for the calming poison. So when Hopkins felt his forehead and his pulse on these occasions, he would find the one moist and the other feeble. These symptoms were in accord with the therapeutics of the case, hence the inexperienced doctor's satisfaction.

But though Sophy felt saddened by the way that Cecil seemed to keep her civilly aloof, as though what he was enduring were impossible of comprehension to her, on the other hand she was very happy in her surprise that this dreadful and mysterious habit should prove so easy to cure. She recalled De Quincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater, and the agonies that he described as accompanying his efforts to abstain. Morphia, then, must differ in its effects from opium. She thanked God, in her ignorance, that Cecil's enemy was morphia and not opium.