He left the surgery, his heart beating with exhilarated anticipation, when suddenly the doctor, who was looking at the prescription again, gave a little whistle, and then called him. Thurso had hardly left the room, and came back at once.
“Lord Thurso,” he said, “this is rather odd. Sir James Sanderson is not on board, for I saw him leave the ship at Liverpool. Yet the prescription is written on the ship’s paper.”
Thurso made a furious gesture of impatience.
“Oh, for God’s sake give it me!” he said. “I shall go mad without it. It was Sir James’s prescription. I—I copied it out. I have taken it many times.”
Then a sudden thought struck him, and he could have screamed at his own stupidity in not having thought of it a second sooner.
“I don’t know what I am saying,” he said. “I didn’t copy it out at all. Sir James wrote it for me before he left the ship.”
The doctor looked at him in silence. It was sufficiently plain to him what the case was.
“I am very sorry,” he said, “but it is quite impossible for me to give you this. I will with pleasure give you a bromide mixture or phenacetin if your head is bad. Of course, the matter shall go no farther.”
Thurso merely walked away. There was nothing more to be said. And then suddenly the little flicker of will and of outraged self-respect shot up again, and he saw how mean it all was. He, Thurso, had not only forged this, but his forgery had been detected: that was bitter. He must not do this kind of thing. This powerlessness against his desire was intolerable, degrading; his pride rebelled against the hideous strength of his weakness.
He leaned against the bulwarks of the ship, looking at the hissing wreaths of foam that bubbled forty feet below, in despair at himself; yet, since for the moment he was ashamed, since he wished he was not such a despicable fellow, the despair was not total. Yet would it not be better if he ceased to struggle, ceased to be at all? One moment of bravery, one leap into those huge grey monsters of waves that were making even this leviathan of the seas rock and roll, and it would be all over. But even at the moment of thinking this he knew he had not the courage to do it. No moral quality seemed to be left to him. They had all been eaten up and transformed into one hideous desire, even as a cancer turns the wholesome blood and living tissues of the body into its own putrefying growth. And what if that doctor told somebody? He had said that it should go no further, but there was small blame to him if he could not resist so savoury a bit of scandal. “The Earl of Thurso forges Sir James Sanderson’s name in order to get laudanum, to which he is a slave!” That would make an alluring headline, if tastefully arranged, for some New York paper.