Chapter III (1)

The shifting and removal of furniture and the banishment of carpets preparatory to the reception of patients next day, together with the installation of the necessaries for sick-rooms, were complete when Maud got home that evening, and she found Dr. Symes, who had come up to superintend this, just on the point of leaving. He had no very cheering account to give concerning several of the patients whom Maud asked after, but there was one cause, at least, for thankfulness, since no fresh case had appeared during the day.

"And that is rather strange," he said, "for we have not yet been able to discover what the cause of the epidemic was, and so have not intentionally cut off any source of infection. But, God knows, I am quite content not to know what it is, provided it is cut off."

"Yes, indeed," said she. "And to-morrow you will fill up all the beds here?"

"Yes, all, I am sorry to say. Of course, we are taking certain risks, but, for the sake of the fresher air and better attention they will be able to receive up here, we shall move some very serious cases. Ah, my dear lady, we doctors get sick at heart sometimes! Doctor though I am, and prescriber of drugs, I wonder how much good we really do with our powders and potions. I wonder if all the contents of all the chemists' shops, and our cabalistic prescriptions, are measurable by the side of fresh air and quiet, and the conviction on the part of the patient that he is going to get well."

"But if he believes that the drugs are going to make him well, surely they are a spring of faith," said she.

He laughed.

"Well, well, they may get better how they choose, and I won't quarrel with it," he said. "By the way, I should like to say just once how splendid it is of you and Lord Thurso to give up the house like this."

"It was absolutely Thurso's idea," said she, "though, of course, it seemed obvious when he suggested it. And he wanted to send me back to town! Has he come in yet, do you know?"

"Yes, he came in half an hour ago, in great pain, I fear, with one of those neuralgic headaches. He is rather overdone; he wants rest."

Maud made a little quick movement towards him.

"Not seriously so?" she asked. "You don't mean that there is anything to be anxious about?"

"I don't, anyhow, want you to be anxious," said he, "but as long as he is continually anxious himself, and gets constantly tired, those headaches will probably be rather frequent. He has had attacks during these last three days, and pain like that is good for nobody. I certainly hope he will get rest soon. We do not want it to become chronic."

"Chronic?"

"Yes; your nerves, you know, form habits, like everything else."

Maud was silent a moment; an anxiety she had felt while she was waiting for Thurso to come in last night reminded her again of its presence. She did not much want to speak of it, but, after all, she was speaking to the old doctor whom she had known since she was a child. Also, she very much wanted to be reassured.

"He takes laudanum when he is in great pain," she said. "Is that wise?"

"It would be unwise of him to do so frequently, or continue doing so for long. There, again, is a reason why we do not want his nerves to form the habit of pain. I did not know, by the way, that he took it. It was prescribed for him, of course."

"Oh yes; I know it was."

Dr. Symes seemed to dismiss that from his mind.

"Then it is no business of mine," he said. "Now I hope--and to-day there is cause for hoping--that we have seen the worst of this epidemic. There has been no fresh case to-day, so before many days are over I think Lord Thurso can get away. I tell you frankly that I shall be glad when he can."

"Ought he to go now, do you think?" asked Maud.

Dr. Symes considered this before he replied.

"No, I think he ought to stop here," he said at length. "It is true he is running a certain danger of producing a chronic irritation and--how shall I say it?--exasperation of nerves. Also, there is a certain risk in continuing to take laudanum. But, after all, he is sensible, and he is certainly brave, and I think for the present his sense of duty is right in keeping him here. Our orders and the nurses' orders are obeyed when they know he is here and is backing us up. You have no idea of the difficulties we had before you and he came. Well, I must get back to the village again. And, Lady Maud, I like plucky people like you and your brother. Good night. The patients will begin to arrive early to-morrow."

* * * * *

Dr. Symes, brisk and active for all his sixty years and grey head, hopped nimbly onto his bicycle, and rode off, feeling that Maud had done him good. Apart from the Raynhams, his notions of the British aristocracy were founded on those curious volumes known as society novels, books which his wife read aloud to him in the evening with horrified gusto. These works presented this class in a more lurid but less pleasant light. But Lord Thurso and his sister were both so simple and so good, to use that ordinary word in its most ordinary sense. They made no more fuss over the reception of forty patients suffering from typhoid into the house than they would have made over a few friends dropping in to tea. No thought of risk or inconvenience seemed to have occurred to either of them; it appeared to them the most natural thing in the world that the house should be turned into a hospital, and though professionally he believed that there was no risk, still he felt that the wicked countesses and marchionesses in "Lepers" or "Lady Babylon" would not have behaved quite like this. Indeed, for one half moment he let himself wonder what even Mrs. Symes would have said if he had suggested taking cases into their house. But it had seemed to that beautiful girl whom he had left on the doorstep with her fishing-rod in one hand and a landing-net weighed down with half a dozen sea-trout in the other a perfectly natural thing to do. It was this courageous acceptation of events that did him good.

* * * * *

Thurso, to his sister's great relief, came down to dinner in the most equable and cheerful spirits. All trace of his headache had vanished, and Maud thought that Dr. Symes must have been mistaken about it, for, as he had said, he had only guessed that Thurso must be in great pain. In any case, it was her part to try to take his thoughts away from fever and neuralgia, and all the darker side of things, and she instantly began on her own poaching comedy by the river.

"Thurso, I have broken the record to-day," she said. "I have done the most awful thing that has ever been done. After you went out this morning, I took a rod down to the river to look about for sea-trout, and was firm in a salmon--oh no, he saw me hook it--when Mr. Bertie Cochrane appeared. How could you forget to tell me you had let the fishing? There I was, tied to it--to his fish. He watched me play it. And, of course, I didn't know him from Adam."

For the moment Thurso was almost as horrified as Maud had been.

"Good Lord!" he said; "I hope you lost the fish."

"Not at all. It was entirely owing to Mr. Cochrane that I landed it, for in the nick of time down came Duncan--his gillie, not ours at all--with a gaff. Mr. Cochrane looked on with interest and sympathy."

Thurso had laid down his knife and fork, and a huge grin was beginning to take the place of his horror.

"Go on, quick," he said.

"I will. Mr. Cochrane had a rod, and I said I supposed he was going over to Scarsdale. No, he was not. So, with a slight addition of stiffness, I thanked him for his help, but said that this was your river. He explained. Oh, Thurso, did you ever? And I asked him to come and dine to-morrow, and eat some of his own fish. He is coming."

Thurso shouted with laughter.

"Oh, what would I not give to have been there when the light broke on you!" he said. "And to ask him to dinner--add insult to injury! You were caught poaching--poaching, you know--and then you ask the rightful owner to have some. Did you tell him, by the way, that we were a typhoid hospital?"

"Yes; he didn't mind."

"Oh, Maud--oh, Maud! An American, too! He will probably telegraph an account of it to the New York press, and it will come out all over the States with enormous headlines!"

"Oh, I think not," said she. "I'm sure he wouldn't do it."

Thurso recollected his own meeting with Cochrane.

"No, I don't think he would," he said. "Because I met him in the village yesterday evening, and I agree he doesn't look like that. Go on."

"Isn't that enough?" she asked. "Afterwards we sat and talked as if I hadn't been caught poaching at all. He begged me to go on fishing, too, and he did it, somehow, so simply and naturally that I thanked him and did go on. I caught six sea-trout, too, and we're just going to have some of them. He really made it easy for me to say 'Yes.' In fact, it would have been absurd to say 'No.'"

Thurso laughed again.

"That almost beats everything," he said. "You are absolutely brazen."

"Not in the least. When you see Mr. Cochrane you will understand how simple it was."

"I have seen him, as I told you. It occurred to me then that we might ask him to dinner. It was that I began to suggest last night, but you were so curious to know what I was going to say that I stopped."

Maud looked at him reproachfully.

"Oh, Thurso, if you had gone on you would have saved me from all this!" she said. "But don't you understand how it was possible for me to accept?"

Thurso considered.

"Yes, even though I did not speak to him, I think perhaps I do. He did look to be the sort of man whose sea-trout you might catch after he had caught you poaching his salmon. That is rather a high compliment. It is a great gift to be able to make people not ashamed of themselves. I should have absolutely sunk into the earth."

"And Mr. Cochrane would very kindly have pulled you out," said Maud. "At least, he pulled me out."

There was a short pause, during which Maud occupied her mouth with sea-trout and her mind with the question as to whether she should tell Thurso that Mr. Cochrane was a Christian Scientist. But his remark that it was not his plan to proselytise decided her against doing so. Then Thurso spoke again.

"Do you know, to-day is the first on which I haven't felt absolutely swamped and water-logged with depression and anxiety?" he said. "There has been no fresh case since morning, and Duncan's wife, who, like Sandie, was almost despaired of, has taken a sudden inexplicable turn for the better. She was dying of sheer exhaustion from fever, and now all day she has been gaining strength--gaining it quickly, too, though you would have said there was no strength left. I saw Duncan this evening. He--really, I wondered whether he had been drinking."

"Drinking?" asked Maud. "Why, he is a tee-totaller!"

"The worst sort of drunkard," remarked Thurso rather cynically.

"Oh, don't be cheap!"

Thurso looked up at her, and then nodded.

"Quite right," he said; "it's a pity. Sorry."

"You old darling! But Duncan's as sober as I am. Soberer. Go on. It interests me."

"Well, it all leads back to Mr. Cochrane again," he said. "Don't interrupt. I looked in to-night, as I told you, and there was Duncan sitting by his wife's bedside, nursing the baby, who was, with extraordinary gurgles, trying to swarm up his beard. And his wife lay there, different, changed, with life instead of death in her face. But fancy bringing a baby into a room where there is typhoid! So I got Duncan and the child out, and cursed him, and told him that his wife was really on the mend, as the nurse had just told me. I thought he would like to know that, but apparently he had known it all day. Our Mr. Cochrane had told him this morning that his wife was getting better all the time."

"Yes, I heard him tell him," said Maud.

"Well, but how did he know?" asked Thurso. "Twelve hours ago they thought she couldn't live through the day. And what the deuce has our Mr. Cochrane got to do with it? Who is he? What is he? How did he know?"

Maud had no reply to this at once; "our Mr. Cochrane" had repudiated preaching on his own account--clearly, then, it was not her business to state his views.

"Well, he hasn't done any harm, anyhow," she said.

"Of course not; but it's an odd coincidence. Mr. Cochrane tells Duncan that his wife is getting better, and Duncan has only got to walk home, and finds it is so. Oh, and another thing: Dr. Symes called there this afternoon, and Duncan kindly but quite firmly refused to let him in at all unless he promised not to give her any more medicine. So he promised, because when he saw her last she was absolutely past all hope; also, he doesn't much believe in medicines, though you needn't mention it. He saw, of course, the enormous improvement, and wanted to take her temperature, but Duncan again firmly, and with beaming smiles, would not allow it. I suppose he considered a thermometer a sort of modified medicine."

"Well?"

"Dr. Symes insisted, and eventually Duncan, with great respect, threw the thermometer out of the window. That is why I supposed he was drunk."

"No, I'm sure he wasn't drunk," said Maud. "Go on, dear."

They had finished dinner, and Thurso rose to get a cigarette.

"That's the end," he said. "Dr. Symes tells me he has seen that sort of recovery before, but what is odd is that our Mr. Cochrane should have foreseen it. Is he a crank, do you think, or a spiritualist, or some sort of innocent lunatic?"

Again Maud mentally reviewed her decision not to do Mr. Cochrane's preaching (which he would not do for himself) for him, and again endorsed her policy.

"How do you expect me to know?" she asked. "I talked to him for ten minutes. But he's coming to dine to-morrow, and you can judge for yourself. And how have you been? No headache?"

He glanced at her sharply and sideways a moment, with a movement of vague suspicion.

"Headache?" he said; "I haven't seemed much like headache this evening, have I? Why?"

"Only Dr. Symes told me he was afraid you were in pain. I am delighted he was mistaken."

Thurso shrugged his shoulders.

"Lord, what bad guesses a skilful doctor makes!" he said. "He half wants people to be ill, so that he may have the pleasure of curing them."

* * * * *

Maud naturally asked no further question, and told herself that Dr. Symes had simply made what Thurso called a "bad guess." But, knowing them both, it seemed to her odd that he should have thought that Thurso had been suffering if he had not. For it was only when he was in the extremes of pain that anyone could guess that he was on the rack, for it had to be strongly screwed before he visibly winced. For one moment it flashed through her mind that he had been in pain, had perhaps taken laudanum to stop it, and had--well, not chosen to tell her so. Yet his answer, though as a matter of fact it was slightly evasive in form, clearly bore the construction that he had been free from pain all day. So she dismissed that at once, telling herself that it was scandalous of her, though involuntarily only and momentarily, to suspect Thurso of insincerity. Thus, the pause only lasted a moment before she spoke of something else. But in that moment he had said to himself, "Shall I tell her?"

* * * * *

The two sat up rather late that night, for Maud disliked going to bed nearly as much as she disliked getting up, and it was usually Thurso who moved the adjournment. But to-night he was extraordinarily alert; as he had said, to-day had been the first on which there had been any break in the tempest of illness which was devastating the village, and his spirits seemed to have risen in sympathy, enabling him to think and speak of other things than the immediate preoccupations which surrounded them. And chief among these was London and the reopening of Thurso House. His father, the late Earl, had died just a year ago, and next week the house was to celebrate its re-entry into London life with an adequately magnificent ball. His wife, who had stopped in town, was seeing to all arrangements, and when Catherine undertook to see to a thing, it was unnecessary for anyone else, however closely concerned, to feel any anxiety as to the completeness with which it would be seen to.

"I heard from Catherine this morning," he said--"at least, I heard from her typewriter. She did not even sign it. She is up to the eyes in a million affairs, and hopes I am well. Really it seems to me that most of the festivities, as well as all the charities of London would collapse unless she saw to them. And there's the ball next week. I shall go up for the night, though whether I stop depends on how things go on here. Of course, you'll come."

Maud looked at him in mild surprise; it was as if he had said, "Of course, you'll have breakfast to-morrow."

"It is _not_ improbable," she said. "Or did you really suppose that your house was going to make its debut again, and me not there?"

"Oh, well, I didn't know," he said.

"You do now. What fun it will be! It will be crammed with kings and queens like 'Alice in Wonderland.' Thurso, what a good thing Catherine is so smart! I hate the word, but she is: she is magnificent. She said the other day that there are only two sorts of entertaining possible--the one where you have a great party, with kings and queens, and everybody in orders and tiaras; and the other where it is just tea-gowns and two or three real friends. I don't believe she has ever had a party at which there were more than eight people and less than forty."

"It's usually not less than forty," remarked Thurso.

"Oh no; it's often less than eight. Of course I shall come. Do have a special all the way to town; it will be so expensive! Catherine--I must quote her again--says, 'Either have a special or go third.'"

"With a preference for specials?"

"Not at all. She doesn't care which it is. She often goes third, and talks to the people. And on the tops of omnibuses. But she doesn't go in cabs: she says they are middling, like parties of twenty to meet a Serene Transparency. If she can't have the twenty-five million horse-power motor, up she gets on the omnibus. She never stops it, either, because of the horses. She runs after it, and jumps quite beautifully. I do admire her so."

Thurso laughed.

"So do I. And it's something to admire your wife when you have been married twelve years!"

Maud made a little sideways movement in her chair, as if her position had become suddenly uncomfortable. Her brother continued.

"I don't believe a woman ever existed who was so obviously admirable," he said. "We went to the opera together the night before I came up here, and as she was going on to some large ball afterwards, she was--well, suitably dressed."

Maud felt, as she always felt when Thurso talked like this, as if a file had been drawn across her teeth. She tried to turn, not the conversation, but its tone.

"Oh, how?" she asked, with deep and genuine interest; for, like all sensible girls, she loved beautiful clothes, especially when beautiful people wore them. "She always makes everybody else look dowdy or overdressed. That must be such fun."

"Well, she had the diamond palisade, as she calls it, in her hair, and what she calls the ruby plaster all, all down her."

"Yes, but her dress?" said Maud. "I know the plaster."

"Her dress? Goodness knows what it was made of, but it looked--you know what whipped cream looks like compared to cream--it looked like whipped gold. Sort of froth of gold: not yellow, but gold. Melba was in the middle of the jewel-song when we came in, but at the end of it nobody was paying the slightest attention to her. Every glass in the house was turned on Catherine."

He got up and threw his cigarette-end away.

"And she's my wife," he added; and the four words carried tons of irony.

Maud got up also. She hated this: it was the process of the file again. She knew that Thurso talked to no one but her like that, but she deplored that he felt like that.

"Oh, it is such a pity, dear," she said.

"That she's my wife?"

"Oh, Thurso, don't! All the worst of you spoke then. No, a pity that you feel like that. You are both such splendid people, really. And----"

"And I bore her, and she gets on my nerves," he remarked.

Maud gave a little frown and gesture of disapproval.

"You should never say such things," she said. "It is a mistake to say them just because they are--well, partly true. If they were untrue it would not matter. But to let yourself say a true thing, when that thing is a pity, only makes it more real. Speech confirms everything. Good gracious! if people would only hold their tongues on unpleasant topics, how the things themselves would improve! Oh, I am a philosopher."

He looked at her with great tenderness and affection.

"Are you?" he said. "I like you, anyhow. Go on."

Maud gave a long sigh.

"You don't do her justice," she said, "any more than she does you justice. You don't allow for each other. And--Thurso, I don't believe she is happy any more than you are."

"Why do you think that? She carves forty-eight hours out of every day, and fills them all, while the world looks on in envious admiration. That is her ideal, and she always attains it. And even her husband claps his hands."

Maud took him by the shoulders and shook him gently.

"Idiot!" she said--"dreadful idiot! Shut up! I am going to bed. Thank me for catching so many beautiful fish."

"I am not sure that I thank you for asking Mr. Cochrane to dinner to-morrow," he said. "I love these quiet evenings with you."

"Thanks, dear. I get on tolerably, too. Good night. What a nice day it has been, and what nice things we've got to think about to send us to sleep! No fresh case of typhoid to-day for the people, and no headache for you, and a salmon for me. I am so sleepy that I don't mind going to bed."

"Maud," he began, then stopped.

No, he could not tell her. In himself he was ashamed of having taken laudanum, and was ashamed, also, of having deceived her, for he saw he had done that. Since, then, he was ashamed of it, there was no need that she should know.

"Well?"

"No, it's nothing."

"Thurso, your manners are atrocious!" she said. "Both yesterday and to-day you have begun to say something, and then stopped. I shall keep doing that all to-morrow, and you will see how maddening it is."

He laughed again.

"Good night, dear old boy," said she.

* * * * *

The next day was wholly given up to the installation of the typhoid patients. Carpets, rugs, and curtains had been rolled up, unnecessary furniture removed, and beds brought up and down from the basement and the higher floors, so that the utmost accommodation might be provided in the big rooms on the first-floor. Dr. Symes, in consultation with the other doctors, had settled that it was better to run a little risk, and move even bad cases up here, since the day was dry and warm, for the sake of the more immediate attention and greater abundance of fresh air than was possible when patients were scattered about in tiny cottage-rooms, and the ambulance, going backwards and forwards all day, brought grave burdens. But by five in the afternoon the work of transportation was done, and the house was full. Afterwards the doctors went the round of the whole house, and found the results satisfactory. Not one, apparently, had suffered from the move, and now, instead of the patients being in small, ill-ventilated rooms, they were airily housed, with every facility for constant supervision from the nurses. Most, too, were going on well; but there was one case, that of Sandie the gillie, which was as serious as it could be. As often when the strong are ill, it seemed as if the fever, vampire-like, sucked out his strength and itself thrived and grew strong on it; and Dr. Symes, before he left, had given orders that he should be sent for at once if any further unfavourable symptoms occurred. Duncan's wife, it is true, had been through a passage no less perilous that very morning, but, with every wish to be hopeful, it was unlikely that two should be snatched from the very snap of the jaws of death.

Thurso had been in the house all day, and when the move was finished he went down into the room where he and Maud lived, feeling desperately tired, and intending to get an hour's sleep before dinner. But to have an intention, however strong, laudable, and innocent, does not imply that the very best efforts are able to put it into effect; and instead, in this instance, he had no sooner composed himself to sleep than he felt that, though the surface of his brain was drowsy and tired beyond all words, something below was broadly and staringly awake.

He had lain down on the sofa with his face averted from the light and his eyes shut, so as to give the utmost welcome to sleep, but it was not sleep that came, but a series of vivid though unreal images, born of memory. First an interminable series of stretchers, each with its swathed, fever-stricken burden, came up the stairs, and just when he was beginning to feel that this monotonous procession was the precursor of sleep, another image twitched him and claimed his attention. Maud had gone fishing, poaching, yesterday, and had enjoyed good sport; thus the procession of stretchers gave way to the vision of her landing fish after fish, all dead-beat, all silver-sided, till it seemed that this iteration, too, must end in unconsciousness. But something jarred it, and, instead, Catherine stood at the head of the stairs in Thurso House, dressed in rubies, with a sort of "love-in-the-mist" of gold round her, receiving kings and queens, and queens and kings, all in crowns. But that, again, ended, not in slumber, but in something very antagonistic to it. There was just a little stab--it was hardly pain--inside his head, as remote as the sound of an electric bell in the basement. Then it was repeated, but this time louder and more insistently, as if the ringer, on the one hand, was impatient, and as if the bell was beginning to come up the back-stairs. Then--it was right to call it pain now--the sound grew louder, and the finger pressed the bell more firmly, while the bell itself came closer. He was quite wide awake now, surface of brain and secret cells alike, and he opened his eyes. Then he said out loud:

"I am in for another."

That seemed to be the case, for the prediction began to be instantly fulfilled. The half-drowsy similitude of the electric bell vanished, and instead there was pain--clear, clean pain. It stabbed half a dozen times with a firm, practised touch, as a pianist strikes a chord or two before he begins his piece. Then it paused for a moment. Immediately afterwards it began again, but differently. Instead of stabbing at the nerve, it laid a cold, steady finger on it, and that finger grew quietly steadier and colder, till something inside his head seemed to ring with it, as a musical glass rings when it is adroitly stroked. Then came a brilliant passage of all sorts of pain, as if the orchestra had begun to accompany that masterly solo. Then, as the horn holds a long, lazy, piercing note, pain pierced and dwelt in him, while wonderful arpeggios of torture from neighbouring nerves crossed it. That was the prelude.

* * * * *

In his room upstairs, which he could reach in ten seconds, there stood on his dressing-table a bottle, not very large, which contained not only the antidote and instant cure of his suffering, but also blissful content and the gift of ecstatic well-being. But the very fact that yesterday he had so lightly (or so it seemed now) had recourse to that, deceiving Maud, and had uncorked Paradise, made him at this moment brace himself against the temptation of resorting to it again. If he had got to bear pain--and it really appeared just now that he had--then he would set his teeth and bear it, sooner than, at the cost of another step in the formation of a damnable habit, drug himself into remission from his pain, or, what even now, when he was suffering hell, tempted him more closely, into that sense of divine harmony of being that the drug gave him. He longed that the pain should cease; he longed even more for that seventh heaven of content. It was all in that small bottle, with its brown elixir.

Then his desire disguised itself, and made a more insidious approach. There was a guest coming to dinner to-night. He could not simply retire to bed, leaving Maud to entertain Mr. Cochrane alone, nor, on the other hand, did it seem to him to be physically possible that he should be able to sit through dinner if in this state, for already the beads of anguish were thick upon him. And he knew well that this was but the prelude; it was only an orchestral performance. Soon the curtain would go up; the singers would be there too. It was intolerable enough now; he had never known so full an orchestra. Yet he could stifle them, he could extinguish the singers, by a little draught, a swallowing in the throat.

But his will, his intention, remained firm. He was not going to silence them like that. For now he knew quite well that his desire for the drug was acute, not only because of the blessed relief from pain that it would give him, but because of the intense physical enjoyment that it brought. Then, with head splitting and buzzing with pain, he went upstairs to dress and make ready to entertain his guest. There were forty other guests, too, in the house, but those were well looked after. Also they were in bed, lucky devils!

* * * * *

Breeding, and what is implied by that much-abused word, includes courage of a quiet but rather heroic kind, since it has no stirring aids to help it, no moral trumpets and drums to stimulate it to its shining deeds. Yet it demands a greater command of self, a greater obedience to the courtesies of life, to be courageous in hum-drum and unexciting circumstances than in those to which romance and adventure are auxiliary; and certainly to-night Thurso's perfectly natural and even gravely convivial manner towards his guest and his sister, while he himself was suffering pain of the most excruciating kind, was courage that in its small and difficult sphere deserved some sort of domestic Victoria Cross. Though most people have more manliness than they themselves or anybody else would have credited them with when pain has got to be borne, or a heart-rending situation faced, yet to have the ready smile, the attentive ear, the genial manner, under such circumstances is a fine exhibition of the courage of good breeding. More than this, too, Thurso had faced before dinner, when the little bottle on his dressing-table reminded him that pain need not be borne a moment longer than he chose.

But all through dinner Thurso achieved the outward signs of inward well-being, and it was through no remissness or failure on his part, but by instinct born of intimate knowledge on Maud's, that she knew he was going through hells of physical torture. Sometimes he just bit his lip or suddenly stroked his long moustache; sometimes in the middle of a sentence he would make a pause that was scarcely noticeable, as if he but considered for a word; sometimes he gripped knife and fork so that the skin over his knuckles showed white; but that was all. He talked quite easily and naturally, made reference to Maud's poaching expedition, and its satisfactory results as far as dinner was concerned, for the salmon was excellent, and went on to speak of the epidemic which had brought them both up North.

"But at last it shows some sign of abating," he said, "though we are still ignorant of the source of it. In fact, there has been no fresh case either to-day or yesterday."

Maud looked up at Mr. Cochrane, wishing rather intently that he would preach his gospel. She felt that it might do Thurso good, or, at any rate, take his mind off the pain that flickered round him like a shower of daggers. But the gospel was veiled, at any rate.

"I think it is so good of you to bring the cases up here," he said. "Lady Maud told me yesterday that you were doing so. I am sure it must help towards recovery to remove people from surroundings which they associate with illness to fresh, bright places."

He paused a moment.

"One sees that every day," he said. "If you associate a place with pleasure, you are pleased to go there again. The mind, left to itself, clings so strongly to material things. If one has been happy in a certain room, one thinks that those surroundings will tend to produce happiness again. It is one of the illusions we get rid of last."

Thurso began to speak.

"You mean," he said, and then stopped, for an access of pain so sharp seized him that he could not get on.

Maud saw, and gave him a sudden quick look of sympathy, which annoyed him, and, for the first time, Cochrane saw too. But after a moment he recovered himself, and went on.

"You mean I shall always associate this house with typhoid and sick, suffering people?" he asked. "That is not very cheering."

Bertie Cochrane smiled, looking with those happy, childlike eyes first at Maud, then at his host.

"No, I mean just the opposite," he said. "You will always associate this house with recovery, with the sweeping away of illness and pain."

* * * * *

Dinner was at an end, and the pause of cigarette-lighting followed. Bertie Cochrane had taken one as he spoke, but he did not light it, and laid it down again on the cloth. Then he got up.

"Lord Thurso, you are wonderfully brave," he said. "I am sure you feel in horrible pain. Let me go right away now. I have enjoyed coming up to dine with Lady Maud and you ever so much."

For the last minute or two the pain had become so much more acute that Thurso's forehead dripped with perspiration. All dinner, too, the longing, the drunkard's desire, to get to his room and take a dose from that healing bottle had been growing like some nightmare figure. And now, when his pain, in spite of all his gallant efforts to conceal it, was discovered, the desire became overwhelming--he could no longer master it.

"Pray don't think of going away," he said, "but if you will excuse me for a few minutes, I think I will go upstairs. I have some medicine there that never fails to set me right, and I shall be down again quite shortly. Yes, I may as well confess it, the pain has been pretty bad."

For one moment it appeared that Cochrane had something on the tip of his tongue, for he turned eagerly to Thurso, who had risen, and was wiping his face. But it was clear to Maud, when he did speak, that he was not giving expression to the original impulse.

"I shall be delighted to stop," he said, "if Lady Maud does not mind my being on her hands. I wanted so much to ask about one or two of the pools on the river."

Thurso left the room, and Cochrane turned to her with the same eagerness as he had shown a minute ago.

"I am so willing, so eager to treat your brother," he said, "but I didn't like suggesting it to him. I did not know if he would not think me some very special kind of lunatic."

Maud shook her head. She knew quite well it would be perfectly idle to suggest such a thing to Thurso, and, indeed, to her sense, too, there was something unthinkable about calling into play the power that rules the world in order to cure neuralgia. Besides, the poppy-juice, though she did not wholly like his taking it, would do that. The other was like cracking your egg for breakfast with a steam-hammer.

"Oh, thank you very much," she said, "but his medicine always puts him right."

And she instantly turned the conversation to the subject he had suggested, and spoke of certain pools in the river which he had found difficulty in fishing satisfactorily.

Thurso, meantime, half blind with pain, had almost run to his room, for he longed for the relief which awaited him there as the desert-parched traveller longs for water. And keenly as he desired the cessation of pain, much more keenly did he thirst for the ecstatic sense of well-being that the drug produced. All day, even before this racking neuralgia came on, he had been almost unable to think of anything but that. He had thirsted all day for that stimulated consciousness, that huge, vivid sense of happiness, which already seemed to him the proper, normal level of life. Already, too, he was beginning to be dishonest with himself, just as yesterday he had been dishonest with Maud; and even as he poured it out he told himself, knowing it was untrue, that he would not be taking it if Mr. Cochrane had not been dining with them. It was inhospitable and impossible to send him away five minutes after dinner; it was equally impossible that he should spend the evening alone with Maud. And though that, so far as it went, was true, it was not the essential truth.

He took the glass in his hand, torturing himself, now that relief was near and assured, with voluntary delay, even as the caged beast which has been roaring for its meat sits fierce and snarling when it has been given it before it begins to assuage the hunger-pangs which it now knows it can satisfy, and deliberately prolonged for a moment more this stabbing pain. He sat down in an easy-chair, and put his feet up on another, in order to make himself quite comfortable before he drank it. His room looked north-west, and they had dined early, so that the sun still shone in at his window, flooding the room in cool crystal light. Then he drank.

Inside his head during this last hour he felt as if a sort of piston-rod from a cylinder had been making firm strokes onto some bleeding, mangled nerve. The end of the piston-rod was fitted sometimes with a blunt hammer, so that it crushed the nerve, sometimes with a sharp needle-point which went deeper, and seemed to penetrate the very home and heart of pain. Then perhaps the piston-rod would cease for a few seconds, while an iron-toothed, rusty rake collected the smashed fragments of nerve together again, so that the hammer should not fail to hit them squarely, and made a neat little pyramid of the pieces on the place where it would descend. This raking together (the image was so vivid to him that he almost believed that it actually took place) was about the worst part. He knew that in a minute the hammer would begin again. But now, a few moments only after he had taken his dose, the change began. Though the hammer did not cease to fall, its blows no longer produced pain. They produced instead a warm, tingling sensation, like that which the hand feels when it spreads out icy fingers to a friendly blaze. And that tingling warmth felt its way gradually through his head, passed down his neck, and slowly flooded body and limbs to toe and finger tip. He forgot what pain meant; he was unable to realise even before the piston-rod ceased to beat what it connoted, knowing only what the oncoming of this tide of physical bliss was like.

Every sense, too, was quickened and stimulated. The sun that still shone in at his windows burned with a ruddier and more mellow light. The glory of it was soft but incredibly brilliant, and to his quickened sense of smell the air that came in through the open sash was redolent with the honey-scent of warm heather. The blind had been a little drawn down over the top of the window, but whereas, when he was dressing for dinner an hour ago, the sound of it flapping against the frame was a fretting and irritating thing, it now seemed to him to give out flute-like and vibrating notes, while the taste of the cigarette which he had lit five minutes ago, and brought up with him, had a flavour new and exquisite. The present moment, and the sensations of it, were all quickened into the vividness of dream-life, while it was but vaguely that he remembered that downstairs Maud was sitting with a very pleasant American fellow who had come to dinner. At dinner he remembered, but again vaguely, that he was not sure if he liked him; now he appeared to be the most charming of companions. But with the gates of Paradise here upstairs flung wide for his reception, he could not fix his mind very clearly on him. No doubt, if he made an effort, he could recall more about him, and remember his name, which just now eluded him; but an effort was the one thing he certainly would not make, since it might disturb or destroy this perfect equilibrium on which he was balanced. And there was really no reason, so it now appeared, why he should go downstairs again. Maud and her poaching friend would talk about fishing for awhile, and then he--ah, yes! Bertie Cochrane--would go away. They would both easily understand his own non-appearance. He had suffered tortures; no inquisitor or master of the rack would refuse to grant him this little rest and compensation.

Then for a moment his breeding and the habit of his whole life jerked him to his feet, with the intention of rejoining them, as courtesy and decorum demanded. But the drug he had taken was already more powerful than they. It told him with authority that this ecstasy of consciousness would be trespassed on and interfered with by the presence of others. It would, if he went downstairs, be necessary for him to some extent to give attention to them instead of letting himself be absorbed in the exquisiteness of his own sensations. And those sensations had nothing in common with the dulled perceptions of sleep or intoxication. He was lifted onto a plane more vivified than the normal; he basked in super-solar sunlight.

Then, still without any suggestion of sleepiness or intoxicated consciousness, the most wonderful visions, or, rather, the intentional visualisation of scenes and moods magic in their beauty, passed in front of him. He, turned into Keats himself, was listening to the nightingale, and losing himself in "embalmed darkness" to the charmed music of the immortal song. "The weariness, the fever and the fret," were remembered only as the traveller arrived at his long-desired home remembers the weariness of the way. His spirit seemed to draw away from life, though still intensely living, and he was in love with death, that but loosed it from the impediment of the body. Then a curve was suddenly turned, and next moment he was mounting higher than the blithe spirit of the lark could carry it, and hung in some clear interstellar ether so remote that the sun above him and the earth below seemed about equal in size, and the shape of England and the coasts of Europe were visible as in a map, set in dim blue sea. Then, still mounting, he turned his eye upward, and looked undazzled into the high noon of the heavens, and yet, though it was noon, the infinite velvet vault was sown with the sparkle of stars. Sun and stars shone there together, and a slip of crescent moon made the company of heaven complete.

Again, still vividly awake, and without the least hint of drowsiness, the aspect of the firmament was changed, and the stars became globules of sparkling dew, and the empty spaces of ether took shape, until above him that which had been the heavens was transformed into a huge bed of blue acanthus-leaves, on which the dew of the stars lay sparkling. The sun was still there in the centre of all, and round it the sky took the shape of the petals of a flower. It was the "centre spike of gold" in an immense blue blossom, which was thick with petals as a rose, and pure of shape as a daffodil. All this, too--this vision to which the hosts of heaven contributed--was his own, born of his own brain, which so short a time ago was bound on the rack of torture and sordid suffering. But now that was nothing. He remembered he had been in pain, but no more, and how cheaply had he purchased, at the price of but copper coin, these jewels of consciousness. That little draught which relieved him of physical pain had brought him these astounding joys; it had made the whole machinery of the universe to serve his vision. The stars were drops of dew on the acanthus-leaves of infinite space, and the sun burned in the centre of this unique flower. A few minutes ago he had half started to go downstairs; now the ravings of any lunatic in Bedlam were not more distant from his mind than such a thought. He was absorbed in that contemplation of things which the brain, with the aid he had given it, can re-create out of the objects it is used to see without wonder. But this was the real world, easy of entry to those who had the sense to turn the key; while the material world was a dream, vague and pale, compared to this reality.

* * * * *

Meantime, below, Bertie Cochrane and Maud had for some ten minutes talked unmitigated fishing; but Maud, though in general to talk fishing was to her one of the most entrancing forms of conversation, provided she talked to a real fisherman, as she was now doing, was giving lip-service only to the subject, for inwardly she regretted the finality of those few little frozen words about Thurso with which she had so successfully dismissed the subject of Christian Science and all the matter of Duncan's wife, of which she wanted to know more. For very shame or pride--the two, so verbally opposed, are often really identical--she could not go back to the subject she had so unmistakably snuffed out, while he, in his confessed and genuine dislike of preaching, was equally unlikely to approach it again.

But he had said that, though he disliked preaching, he loved practice, and she had just leaned forward over the dinner-table where they still sat, her pride in her pocket, to ask a question about this, when an interruption came. One of the nurses entered.

"I beg your pardon, my lady," she said; "I thought Lord Thurso was here."

"He will be back soon," said Maud. "Can I do anything?"

"I think Dr. Symes ought to be sent for at once, my lady," she said. "Sandie Mackenzie had very high fever an hour ago, but I didn't like his looks, and I have just taken his temperature again. It is below normal, and that is the worst that can happen, suddenly like this. Dr. Symes told me to send for him if there was a change for the worse, and I thought I had better come and tell his lordship."

Maud got up.

"You did quite right to come and tell us, nurse," she said. "I will have him sent for at once. Is it very serious?"

"Yes, my lady; it means perforation," she said. "I don't know that it is any good to send for the doctor, but one must do what one can."

Maud nodded.

"Thank you," she said; "I will see to it."

* * * * *

The nurse left the room, going back to her patients; but Maud stood there for a moment without moving, for all she had mused about by the river yesterday came back to her mind in spate, vividly, instantaneously. Only yesterday she had heard Mr. Cochrane tell Duncan that his wife was better, and though that morning she had been ill almost beyond hope of recovery, yet all that day, and all to-day, she had been mending swiftly and steadily. Thurso was upstairs, too; the opportunity she had desired was completely given her.

She had started to go to ring the bell, and order someone to go down to Dr. Symes's house and summon him, but half-way she stopped. It seemed almost as if Mr. Cochrane had expected this, for he had wheeled round in his chair, and when she stopped he was facing her, quiet, cheerful, looking at her with those strong, childlike eyes.

"Mr. Cochrane," she began.

Their eyes met, and again she felt antagonistic to him. He had the element of certainty about him, which, it seemed to her, no one had the right to carry. But then, his simplicity made it easier to be simple with him. She moved a step nearer him, a step further from the bell.

"I don't know whether I am right to ask you this," she said; "but, to begin with, if what the nurse thinks has happened, it is quite useless, as she said, to send for the doctor. I don't ask it either in a spirit of derision or curiosity."

"Ask, then," said he quietly.

"Yes; a life is at stake. Can you go to poor Sandie, and make him live? And, if so, will you? I have known him all my life. He has landed a hundred fish for me. But if you say "No," I shall quite understand that you feel--honestly, I am quite sure--that it is not right for you to do so. I shall be sorry, but I shall in no way question your decision. So I ask you: Will you go to Sandie?"

Maud did not know that the human face could hold such happiness as she saw there. He answered at once.

"Why, certainly I will," he said. "But if I am to make him better, you mustn't, while I am treating him, whether you think he is improving or not, send for the doctor. There must be none of that. I will go to him if you wish, but if I go the case is in my hands--no, not that, but under the direct care of Divine Love. I cannot tell how long it may take to cure him. You know some patients are healed sooner than others, and respond more quickly than others to the healing power. But if you ask me to make him well, believing that I can, I will do so. But you must trust me completely, otherwise you hinder. And you must be sure you are not asking it only to see if I can."