The House of Defence v. 1

by E. F. Benson

“Oh, Thurso, you don’t know what a dangerous thing you are doing,” she said—“indeed, you don’t. The very fact that you do it makes you unable to see what you do. Be a man, and don’t think about two days, or three days, or four days, but stop it now at once. The longer it goes on, the more difficult it will be to break it. Give me the bottle, or whatever it is, like a good fellow, and let me throw it away. You will be glad you have done so every day of your life afterwards. Please, I entreat you.”

His anger died out as she spoke, for the effect of the drug was still on him, enhancing his enjoyment of the light and the country fragrance, and enhancing the glory of her superb beauty as she pleaded with him. She had not resented the angry things he had said to her: that was fine of her, and fine she always was, and she was not contemptuous of the lie he had babbled and stuttered over. She seemed not to remember it, and that was generous. Above all, his craving for the drug was satisfied for the moment, and, so he added somewhere very secretly, he could always get some more. Nor was his will yet entirely enslaved, and all his best self told him that she was right beyond any question or possibility of argument.

He hesitated only a moment, then unlocked his despatch-box and took out a half-empty bottle. The sight of it made his desire flicker into flame again; but, after all, he had fully intended to take no more for three days. Then he swept that away also. His will for the time was set on breaking the habit now and at once. He held it out to her.

“Yes; you are right,” he said. “Here it is. Don’t despise me if you can help it, Cathy.”

The use of the shortened name touched her, too.

“Oh, my dear, don’t talk of that,” she said; “and thank you most awfully, Thurso. You will never regret this.”

She went to the window and poured the brown fluid out among the leaves of the creepers, with a little shudder at the stale, sickly smell of it. Then she flung the bottle into the shrubbery.

“I ought to thank you,” he said; “and I do.”

The evening was extraordinarily warm and windless, and though they had dinner in the open pavilion in the garden, Mr. Silas P. Morton only sent for the second thickest of his black-and-white plaids to put round his venerable shoulders as a precaution against chills, and after dinner a bridge-table was started for the occupation of the Americans and Jim and Ruby, while the others preferred for the present to wander about in the deepening dusk. The light still lingered in the west and beneath it the steely grey of the river smouldered with the reflected sunshine that the sky still retained. Moths hovered over the huddled fragrance of the dim garden-beds, emerging every now and then from the darkness into the bright light cast by the lamps in the pavilion where the little party had dined, and the veiled odours of night began to steal onto the air—the odours of tobacco-plant and night-stocks, of dewy foliage, ripe hayfields, and damp earth, which are so far more delicate and suggestive than the trumpet-blown fragrance of the day. Though crimson still lingered in the west, overhead the steel-blue of night was darkening fast, and minute stars were beginning to be lit. From the rest of the world the colour had already faded: it was an etching, a marvellous mezzotint of black-and-white.

Catherine, when they rose from the table, found Villars by her side, in a manner that irresistibly implied that he meant to have a stroll with her, and leaving the others—Maud had already towed Alice Yardly out of Thurso’s immediate neighbourhood, and was listening to a fearfully interminable account of Mrs. Eddy’s relation to Phineas P. Quimby—they went down through the door cut in the yew-hedge, which had so roused Theodosia’s enthusiasm, to stroll along the river-front and catch the last of the evening light. Opposite, on the other bank of the river, a tent was pitched, and outside it three or four young men were seated, having supper at a tablecloth spread on the grass, and lit by a couple of Chinese lanterns. Their fire for cooking burned bravely on the river edge, and the smell of aromatic wood-smoke was wafted across to them. It all looked exquisitely simple and uncomplicated. Catherine rather envied that, for her own life just now seemed involved and ravelled; she did not feel confidence in the future. Indeed, she was not sure whether even the next ten minutes would be quite easy, for woman of the world though she was, and conversational engineer, skilled at directing the flow of talk into the channels in which she wished it to run, she felt vaguely nervous with her companion. At dinner he had been the polished, suggestive talker, but it had seemed to her all the time as if he was talking from the surface only, saying the quick, glib things that came so easily to him. And now, when they had separated themselves from the others, she found her impression had been correct.