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 Apart from this one thing, Cecil was very reasonable—submitted to having all wine withdrawn from his diet; even put up with having his cigarettes cut down to eight a day.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.
XX
It was on a lovely afternoon that they left London for Durham. A Wednesday had been chosen, so that the usual week-end parties going to the country or returning from it might be avoided. A compartment had been reserved. Lady Wychcote went with them, and Gaynor travelled in the same carriage to be at hand in case his master needed him. Chesney, pale as always now, but quite composed, settled down with a copy of Le Mannequin d'Osier. France's brilliant cynicism suited his present mood admirably. Now and then he glanced out toward London as the train drew swiftly away. There was that subtle, just sketched smile about his lips that rested there so often during these days. He seemed to be savouring a pleasant, ironical secret which he alone knew. Lady Wychcote was absorbed in a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. She liked the political atmosphere in these books, though she sniffed at the politicians described in them. "Clockworks" she called them. She was very intolerant of the achievements of other women.
Bobby was very good, playing in grave silence with his red and white bricks on the shawl that Miller had spread for ham. But presently he began to shove one up and down along the seat near his father, saying, "Choo! Choo!" Sophy lifted him upon her lap and began to tell him stories in a low voice. She was very glad to be thus mechanically occupied. Dynehurst always depressed her. She felt a vague, grey gloom rising about her at the thought of spending several months there, with Cecil in this strange, cold, forbidding mood. She looked out of the window as she told the oft-repeated story of "The Three Bears," her subconscious mind attending to the tale, her fancy selecting bits in flying hedge and fence that she would jump were she riding to hounds across that country. Purposely she put serious matters from her. The rough music of the train lulled her mind. She seemed caught up by the swift motion, whirled from the ordinary course of life. The fixed events in it seemed like the stations that they passed—existent only in a world already wheeling backward.
By the time that Darlington was reached, Bobby had begun to grow fretful from the journey. He demanded to be given the small engine on its stone pedestal in the station there. "Baby Puff-Puff!" he announced. "Bobby want—Bobby want!" Sophy sent Miller into the next carriage with him. She had seen Chesney's eyes contract and fix upon the boy. The change of train annoyed him. Besides, he was beginning to crave another dose of morphia. The time for the dose to be given by Gaynor had not yet come. When it did it would be so small that it would barely temper the fierce lust of his accustomed nerves. He closed his eyes, frowning, his lip between his teeth. There was a bluish shade about his mouth. His eyes looked sunken thus closed, in the sidelight from the carriage-window.