But he had jerked his hand roughly away. He hated her at that moment. "She'll drive me to it, with her smug self-righteousness ... ignorant, sentimental fool!" He feigned to drop asleep after a few minutes, watching her all the time from under his lowered lids—detesting her—wondering why he had ever married her. How damned prim her mouth had looked when she refused him! Fancy kissing a mouth like that with passion! What an ass he had been! And he had thought her such a marvel of intelligence and sympathy! The little Bush-Ranger had more real brains in her skinny finger-tip—her rough slang held more human sympathy than all that other's gush of frilled, silky words! Very well. He'd take things in his own hands. He'd "'fess up" to the little Harding when she returned; but in the meantime he was going to do for himself what she had so often done for him—take a slightly larger dose to ease this damned pain that was prizing his skull asunder. Yes, by God! He was a bally simpleton not to have done it before!
It amused him to reach stealthily for the little tablet (he had it to his hand) and take it "under Sophy's nose," as it were—watching her all the time from between his lashes. She was sitting near a window, chin on hand, gazing out at the sky which seemed to her so like a vast ground-glass cover set above the green bowl of the earth. He grew impatient, waiting for the slow effect of the morphia, thus taken into his stomach. He missed that pringle of the stuff when hypodermically administered, quick through his veins. Then it occurred to him that these were hypodermic tablets—they would naturally be weaker than those to be taken by mouth. He took another quarter-grain tablet. Its vile bitterness seemed delicious to him. All at once he felt that grip at his midriff, as of a tiny claw clutching and teasing. Triumph seized him. He looked at her mockingly, his eyes wide open now. He did not hate her any longer. She amused him now. It was even very pleasant to watch her sitting there in her dejected attitude of unwilling Tyrant. She was not the stuff of which real tyrants are made. It took gritty little devils like the Bush-Bully to tyrannise with éclat....
So it had begun.
But unfortunately the self-administration of morphia is not a thing that can be moderately done. Soon Chesney began to confuse the number of doses; could not remember exactly when he had last taken the stuff; would swallow a tablet at the least symptom of physical malaise. He seemed stronger; wished to get up. Then came the morning when the larger dose revealed its presence clearly to Bellamy.
Sophy went to Cecil, all her soul in arms for him, not against him; but he met her with easy mockery. Would not admit it. Played with her. She had tried to tyrannise—well, let her tyrannise, then.
"If you're so damned sure I've got the stuff, why don't you find it?" he jeered. "Why didn't the little Bush-Sleuth unearth it? She's got the nose of a Pytchley bitch—the baggage!"
The poison was at its ugly work again. In its deadening clasp, kindliness and fellow-feeling lay numb; the sheer brute ramped free—the strong, coarse, primal animal which morphia rouses, at first merely to a savage irritation but later informs with more than ape-like cunning, with a callous cruelty lower than the brute's because moved by more than the brute's intelligence.
And within a week from his first lapse the change in Chesney had become alarming. Something was here that Bellamy could not understand. Dilated pupils and violent rages, as in London. A sort of false vigour that sent him roaming about the house at times—haranguing in his brilliant, bitter way—insolent, vituperative, insupportable. Sick with humiliation, Sophy told the physician of what Dr. Carfew had said: that Chesney alternated the morphia with cocaine.
So strange and wild were his brother's moods that Gerald had to be taken into confidence. Even Lady Wychcote agreed that Bellamy should wire to London for a man-nurse; but she held out implacably against all idea of committing Cecil against his will to a sanatorium.