“You are a believer in power?” The tone was sarcastic, but the sarcasm sounded thin.
“Yes. All power is the outcome of individuality, either past or present. I find no sentiment for the man who plays with it.”
The quiet contempt of the tone stung Chilcote.
“Do you imagine that Lexington made no fight?” he asked, impulsively. “Can't you picture the man's struggle while the vice that had been slave gradually became master?” He stopped to take breath, and in the cold pause that followed it seemed to him that the other made a murmur of incredulity.
“Perhaps you think of morphia as a pleasure?” he added. “Think of it, instead, as a tyrant—that tortures the mind if held to, and the body if cast off.” Urged by the darkness and the silence of his companion, the rein of his speech had loosened. In that moment he was not Chilcote the member for East Wark, whose moods and silences were proverbial, but Chilcote the man whose mind craved the relief of speech.
“You talk as the world talks—out of ignorance and self-righteousness,” he went on. “Before you condemn Lexington you should put yourself in his place—”
“As you do?” the other laughed.
Unsuspecting and inoffensive as the laugh was, it startled Chilcote. With a sudden alarm he pulled himself up.
“I—?” He tried to echo the laugh, but the attempt fell flat. “Oh, I merely speak from—from De Quincey. But I believe this fog is shifting—I really believe it is shifting. Can you oblige me with a light? I had almost forgotten that a man may still smoke though he has been deprived of sight.” He spoke fast and disjointedly. He was overwhelmed by the idea that he had let himself go, and possessed by the wish to obliterate the consequences. As he talked he fumbled; for his cigarette-case.
His bead was bent as he searched for it nervously. Without looking up, he was conscious that the cloud of fog that held him prisoner was lifting, rolling away, closing back again, preparatory to final disappearance. Having found the case, he put a cigarette between his lips and raised his hand at the moment that the stranger drew a match across his box.