She flushed hotly.
"Mon Dieu, what a detestable similie!"
"Quite so. But it expresses the position. If you will make it a case of mastery, what else can a man do?"
And as Richardson entered from the dining-room, Lenox went out; by way of the verandah into his study.
CHAPTER XXXI.
"When the fight begins within himself,
The man's worth something."
—Browning.
Lenox, back at his writing-table, automatically took up his pen. But five minutes later he still sat thus, looking straight ahead of him into a future darkened by the encroaching shadow of opium, and complicated by this new factor of open discord, which—apart from the pain of finding division, where he had looked for unity—set all his nerves on edge.
Hitherto, his distaste for friction, coupled with an almost unlimited power of endurance, had inclined him to let matters slide. But now his conscience—the accusing, spiritual thing that was himself—warned him that if marriage meant compromise, it also meant responsibility; that having been goaded into decisive speech, he stood pledged to decisive action, for her sake, even more than for his own. Yet, at the moment, he felt physically and mentally unfit to grapple with the complex situation, hampered as he was by the experience of all that may spring from one false move, one instant of unguarded speech; and the knowledge that his insight, his judgment, were clouded by the insomnia, grinding headache, and renewed wrestling with a power stronger than his will. For there was no evading the truth, that, in the past weeks, the drug had gained fresh hold upon him; had resuscitated the old paralysing pessimism and dread of defeat, so that he asked himself bitterly what right had he to sit in judgment upon any one, least of all upon the dear woman who was the core and mainspring of his life?
Yet, fit or unfit, the need for action, for the rightful assertion of authority, remained. He laid down his pen, planted an elbow on the table, and covered his eyes; struggling for clear unprejudiced thought; tormented by the consciousness of a certain small box hidden away in a locked drawer within easy reach of his hand.
Suddenly he sat upright. The lines of his face hardened; a cold moisture broke out upon his forehead; and the desperate look in his eyes was an ill thing to see. Yet his movements had a strange mechanical deliberation, as he opened the drawer, found the box, helped himself from its contents, and, locking it up again, leaned back with the long exhausted sigh of a man released from tension.