Sophy looked at Gaynor. His eyes were on his master's face.

"Gaynor--do you think? Might we?"

"I hardly know what to say, madam."

"Here! I'll give it him-- I'll risk it," said Gerald. He thrust his arm under his brother's neck, and held the little gla.s.s of spirit to his lips. Chesney drank feebly. Some of the brandy ran from the corner of his mouth.

"Here! fill it again!" said Gerald imperiously to Gaynor. Like all superficially timid people, he was overbold once his timidity was conquered.

The valet looked at Sophy before obeying. She did not see this look. She was staring at Cecil's face. The thought had come to her: "Is it all _real_? Is he _really_ as ill as he seems?"

Gaynor had no course but to obey Lord Wychcote. He merely said very low as he poured out the brandy:

"The doctor says it's very bad for him, your lordship."

But Gerald was past heeding such warnings. His usually rough, almost brutal, brother had spoken to him with peculiar kindness only a few moments ago. Now he lay there looking as though death had seized him.

Gerald had felt that presentiment of his death. He could not stand inertly by, while others trifled with the red-tape of doctors' orders.

He gave Cecil the second gla.s.s of brandy. Every drop was swallowed this time. The delicious fire burned its pleasant path to the very pit of the craving stomach. Cecil felt that he really loved his brother. He lifted his languid lids and gave him a look of grateful affection.

Lady Wychcote still stood by the tea-table, her handkerchief against her lips. She had not moved a muscle during this scene.

Of all those present, she was the only one who, from first to last, had felt sure that the attack was simulated. She was torn between humiliation that a son of hers should condescend to such mummery, and an odd, unwilling admiration for the skill with which it was done.

"He always had the will of demons," she told herself now. "I must put Bellamy on his guard." It was perhaps natural that, with her ignorance in regard to the habit of morphia, she should find this deadly determination to procure spirits far more alarming. Her youngest brother, a brilliant man, had drunk himself to death at forty-one.

Yes, she must speak to Bellamy. They must have a professional nurse for Cecil.

She went to bed, feeling full her age that night.

XXI

The next day the rain was coming down in swirls. A strong wind drove it.

It beat against the window-pane like little fingers drumming with sharp nails. Down the chimneys it beat, spattering into the fires which were kindled everywhere. The Park was a grey-green cl.u.s.tered shadow. The lawns looked soggy like moss. The huge house was gloomy as a decorated cave. The furniture and stair-rail sweated with moisture.

Chesney kept his bed, as always in the morning. He had waked with a dull headache from the unaccustomed dose of brandy on an empty stomach.

Waking too early, in the iron-grey, streaming dawn, he had lain there between the sheets that felt so clammy to his nervous skin which again craved morphia--unable to get it until Gaynor should have left the room--racked mentally, also, by a nauseating shame for the part that he had played last evening. In this interval between dose and dose, worse than the physical _malaise_ which amounted to torment, was the sense of his own vileness. Now he hated Gerald for running to fetch the brandy.

For the same thing which he had loved him for last night, he hated him this morning. Fool! If he hadn't been so d.a.m.nably officious, perhaps they might not have given him the brandy. Yes, he wished heartily now that his will had been denied him by force. Besides, he would have to see Bellamy sometime this morning, and he was all to bits--he could _feel_ that his face looked unnatural, deathly. And at the same time the craving for stimulant came over him again. He asked for a cup of black coffee. "Make it yourself," he said to Gaynor. "In that French machine of mine. I don't want the filth an English cook calls coffee."

While Gaynor was thus engaged he managed to crawl from bed and take a quarter grain of morphia in addition to the other quarter that Gaynor had just given him. He found a place for the needle on his thigh far up near the hip-bone. It was too near the head of the sciatic nerve, and hurt him unusually. He almost broke the needle in his flesh, from irritation and the awkwardness of using the syringe so high up on his leg. He had no time to put the wire through the needle or to clean it properly before the man came back with the coffee.

"d.a.m.ned nuisance," he thought. "Some day I shall be giving myself an abscess." But the extra dose and the coffee together braced and calmed him. He looked tolerably normal after he had had a tub and Gaynor had shaved him.

"I'll put on a dressing-gown and sit in that armchair with a rug over me," he said. One felt such a helpless carca.s.s in bed when those brutes of quacks came peering and asking their impudent questions.

Sophy felt encouraged when she saw him thus established in the big chair. She had pa.s.sed a wretched night. Her doubt of him--of the genuineness of his attack--had seemed so shameful to her--yet she could not help doubting. And if her doubt were justified--what abysms opened before her--before them both! What salvation could there be for one so deliberately, cunningly false?

"You look so much better," she said. "Perhaps this is the best thing for you, really--the country--the perfect quiet of it."

"The brandy is what did this bit of improvement," he replied calmly. He must brave it out. Besides, there was that only half-stilled craving deep underneath the caution of his present mood. He added reasonably: "You can't cut a chap off from a thing that he's as used to as I am to spirit of some sort without making him suffer rather severely."

"It's only that the doctor said it was so bad for you, Cecil."

"Pf! That a.s.s Hopkins! Now Bellamy has to bray his little bray. We'll see what _he_ says."

Giles Bellamy came at ten o'clock He was a good-looking man of about forty, with short-sighted, intelligent brown eyes that were rather too large for a man, and a pale, clever face set in a Vand.y.k.e beard. This beard and his large eyes, that looked almost womanishly soft at times, had gained him the nickname of O. P. from Cecil (the initials of the term "Old Portrait"). Sometimes he called him thus; sometimes, when in an especially ironical mood, by the full t.i.tle. He had known the physician from boyhood.

"_Wie gehts_, Old Portrait?" he greeted him this morning from the vantage of the easy chair. "The tender pa.s.sion still unroused? When are we to have some little new portraits for your family picture gallery?"

Bellamy took these pleasantries urbanely, though he was aware of a certain savagery underneath them. He understood Chesney's character fairly well, and felt rather sorry for him in his present predicament.

It was rather like seeing a trapped lion. Even though the lion had been indulging in man-eating, he still felt compa.s.sion for the great, baffled brute-force. His confirmed bachelorhood had always been the subject of more or less caustic jesting on Chesney's part. In an evil mood, he seemed to enjoy nothing better than baiting his brother and Bellamy, turn and turn about.

Bellamy was a Baliol man and so was Gerald. Cecil used to say that Baliol bred what Byron called "excellent persons of the third-s.e.x." He used to harangue the two celibates rather brilliantly on the subject of s.e.x in mind--quoting Mommson and other authorities to prove that "genius is in proportion to pa.s.sion."

But Bellamy was an able man in his way. He had studied medicine in Edinburgh and Vienna. He was far better posted than his London confrere, Hopkins, on the vagaries of the morphia habit. Besides, Lady Wychcote had had a talk with him in her private sitting-room before sending him upstairs. Now as he sat, parrying Cecil's rather ill-tempered thrusts with imperturbable good-humour, he was watching him narrowly out of his large, vague looking eyes, though he seemed casual enough. He saw clearly that Cecil was getting more morphia than Gaynor's record showed.

He had decided, before talking to him for twenty minutes, that a trained nurse was indispensable--one, moreover, who had been on such cases before, and had nerve and character. Hopkins had not engaged a nurse because the only one of whom he knew, perfectly suited for the purpose, had still ten days on a similar case before she would be free. In his pocket Bellamy had the address of this nurse--Anne Harding--Hopkins had sent it to him the day before. She would be free to accept another engagement on the twelfth--that was to-morrow.

He determined, with Mrs. Chesney's and Lady Wychcote's approval, to wire her that afternoon.

However, Bellamy made a serious mistake in not speaking openly to Chesney about his intention of sending for the nurse. Sophy had to break this news to him, and he received it with a burst of appalling fury against the doctor.

"d.a.m.ned little sneak!" he cried, his face convulsed. "Why the devil didn't he say so to _me_?" His language became so outrageous that Sophy rose, saying:

"I must leave you, if you talk like this."

Something in her white face--a sort of smothered loathing--checked him.

"See here," he said, mastering himself by a violent effort--a vein in the middle of his forehead stood out dark and purplish; "now just try to take this in, all of you--my well-wishers. To do anything with me whatever, you've got to be straight with me, by G.o.d! I'll not have sneaking, and confabulations in dark corners. And make that little eunuch Bellamy understand it, or I'll pitch him out of window, neck and crop, the next time he sets foot in this house!"

Sophy felt that he was to a certain extent justified in his anger. She promised for Bellamy that he would say things directly to Cecil himself in future.

Then she went away to the nursery for solace, sick at heart, sick at brain, sick in spirit.

To her amazement she found Lady Wychcote there, seated in a chair before the fire with Bobby on her knee. He was babbling excitedly, and his grandmother was smiling at him with that appraising look in her eyes which Sophy so resented. The boy tried to snap his soft, curled fingers at his mother as soon as he caught sight of her, in his eagerness to have her come near.

"Muvvah!" he cried. "Oh, _Muvvah_! Ganny div Bobby gee-gee!"

"Yes. I'm going to give him a Shelty," said Lady Wychcote. "It's high time the boy learned how to ride."

"It's very good of you," said Sophy, pleased for the child's delight.

"But he's only two, you know."

"Quite old enough," Lady Wychcote said firmly. "I wonder you never thought of it yourself."

"We couldn't have afforded it in town," Sophy said with some stiffness.