The House of Defence v. 2

by E. F. Benson

She laid her hand on his. It was no time to preach: she could only console.

“Yes, dear Thurso,” she said. “We’ve all made mistakes. But, thank God! it is never too late.”

Then that moment of regret, that nearly amounted to contrition, passed from him. It had been brief as a sudden ray of sun piercing through some unconjectured rent in blinding storm-clouds.

“But it’s Catherine’s fault,” he said.

But the ray had been there. His soul, though sick to death, still lived. And that was the only piece of consolation that Maud could carry away with her.

CHAPTER III.

THURSO’S recovery, though he had had no relapse of any kind, and no hint of a second attack, had been slow, and it was more than three weeks from the time of his collapse when he and Maud were sitting together on the deck of the Celtic, Westward-bound, watching the shores of Ireland fade into blurred outlines of grey, as they were fused with the horizon. They had embarked the day before at Liverpool, and though they had been at sea only twenty-four hours, there was already some semblance of colour beginning to come back to his face. But if Maud had met him now after a year’s absence, she felt that she would scarcely have known who he was. Those months of indulgence in the drug had altered the whole character of his face: it was not of the same man. It had made him look strangely wan and old, too. The heavy dint of crows’ feet was planted on the outer corners of his eyes, and the lids were slack, baggy, and pendulous. His eyes had changed; they looked stale and dead, but it was his mouth, perhaps, that had deteriorated most: all power and force were gone from it; it drooped feebly and weakly at its corners, and the lower lip hung flabby and loose. It was the mouth of a man ruined by self-indulgence. His hair, too, had become very thin, and streaks of grey had appeared in it. And all this was but the shadow of the real wreck within.

Sometimes, when during these last three weeks she had seen him thus, she had felt her courage and hope for the future dwindle almost to the vanishing-point. It was not only his body which had so aged and fallen away: it was his soul that had grown decrepit. He had fits of black despair and depression, when he could bear to see nobody, not even her, and would lock himself up in his room, giving orders that his meals were to be left outside, and that under no circumstances was he to be disturbed. Then, when he emerged from one of these, remorse—but no more than a maudlin, querulous remorse—for the wreck he had made overtook him, and he would ask her to sit with him while he unloaded himself of tons of a washy despair. Half a dozen times he had said that he would not go to America at all. What could a week or two of sea air do for a man in his case? Yet there was no decision or determination in these refusals; next moment he would be talking of the books he would take with him. Then the pendulum would swing further, and that about which alone he seemed to have retained any force would come into his mind: namely, his bitterness against Catherine, his belief—almost strong enough to be called conviction—that it was she who was morally responsible for his wreck. It was that, indeed, that was the real cause of his having consented to leave England. The day before they sailed he had a fit of the darkest despair, and had altogether refused to think of going. But as that drew off, his own desire was to get away from his wife, to leave her neighbourhood, to be geographically widely separated from her. She was in England, therefore any place was more tolerable to him. And just before they left the house he had asked to see her, for the first time in all these weeks, to say:

“You are responsible for all this.”

It was all black enough, and there had been at present but one smoky ray of comfort. He had not taken laudanum again, nor, as far as could be ascertained, had he tried to procure any. But Sir James cautioned Maud against thinking that this ray was the promise of a coming dawn.