The Great Amulet
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Maud Diver >> The Great Amulet
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Going over to the table, he turned up the lamp, acknowledged the
ponderous jubilations of Brutus, and took the damaged pipe out of his
pocket. Then he stood looking at it thoughtfully, as it lay in the
palm of his hand; an eloquent testimony to that which had been starved,
denied, trampled upon for years,--with this result! Smiling
half-scornfully at his new-found sentimentalism, he put the pieces into
an empty cigarette tin, and thrust it into the top drawer of his table.
As he did so, a strange thought invaded his mind. Some day, perhaps,
he would show it to her; and how delightfully she would laugh at him
for his pardonable foolishness!
But in the meantime the wooing and winning of her still remained to be
achieved; a unique position for a husband!
Absorbed in thoughts evoked by the bare possibility of success, Lenox
mechanically drew out his empty tobacco-pouch, opened the jar, and
thrust a hand into its capacious depths.
Then he started; and two lines of vexation furrowed his forehead. For
his fingers, descending in search of the good brown leaf, that was more
to him than meat and drink, encountered only a chill hardness,--the
bottom of the jar.
He had not emptied it when filling his pouch that morning; and being
much preoccupied had not even noticed how little was left. Evidently,
during his absence, a hotel servant had helped himself to the remaining
handful, and a clear ten days must elapse before the arrival of a fresh
consignment from home.
He gathered up the remaining scraps, and gazed at them blankly. His
consignments were carefully timed to overlap one another. By rights
the jar should have contained quite a fortnight's supply of his elixir
vitae: and it took him one or two seconds to grasp the full
significance of that which had befallen him.
"Great Heaven! I must have been overdoing it like blazes this last
month," he reflected grimly, "And how about the next ten days?"
He stood aghast before that simple question, and its obvious answer.
It was as if the earth has opened under his feet; as if he had suddenly
discovered that only a thin crust intervened between himself and the
crater of a volcano. And he had travelled hitherward blindly; goaded
by the threefold necessity to work, and sleep, and forget. Thus,
stealthily, inexorably, a habit creeps upon a man; enclosing him mesh
by mesh in a network imponderable as spun silk, tenacious as steel
wire. A sudden movement, a break in the hypnotic influence of routine,
and he wakes to find himself prisoned in a web of his own weaving.
Lenox pushed aside the jar impatiently, as though it were in some way
to blame; and sank into his chair, head bent, legs outstretched; the
picture of defeat. All his thoughts and hopes crashed about him in
ruins: and Lenox, contemplating the fragments with a numb acquiescence
far removed from resignation, saw only the old maddening irony at work;
saw himself, standing yet again, on the threshold of an Eden locked and
barred against him; felt in every nerve the grip of the pitiless fact,
and asked himself fiercely; "What next?"
Gradually thought penetrated the dull ache of rebellion; and Memory,
that capricious handmaid of the brain, unearthed from the rubbish-heap
of things forgotten, an incident of early days.
He recalled how, on a certain night, after the confiscation of their
candles, and a stern injunction from old Ailie to speak "nae word" till
morning, his elder brother--greatly daring--had invaded his bed, and
with lips set close to his ear had startled and thrilled him with the
following announcement:--
"Listen, Eldred,--what do you think? I've found out at last why Uncle
Jock won't tell about grandfather, and why there's an empty place in
the big album where he ought to be. Ailie told me. I bothered her,
and bothered her, till she said I should hear it for a warning; and I
think you ought to hear it for a warning too. She says grandfather
served the East India Company for forty years. He was a grand soldier,
and a sportsman; a great tall man, like you will be. Ailie says you
'have his face.' But he went to hell"--this in an awestruck
whisper--"through eating too much opium, like some of the natives do
out there. I wonder if it's nice stuff to eat; don't you?"
To the boy of ten, listening with rapt interest, his grandfather's
backsliding had sounded only a few degrees more heinous than
gormandising at Christmas; and since Ailie had proved obdurate when
pressed, and even bribed for further information, the spark of
curiosity had died out for lack of fuel. But to the man of
five-and-thirty, racked with reawakened passion, and with a restless
irritability, whose significance could no longer be ignored, the memory
of his brother's whispered revelation flashed like a lightning-streak
across his present dilemma; leaving him in the grasp of those invisible
forces that are the true masters of destiny; that must either break or
be broken by man's individual spirit and will. For some of us the
struggle is conscious; for some unconscious; for others it never arises
at all: because only the touchstone of circumstance can evoke any one
of those past lives whereof each single life is so mysteriously compact.
For Eldred Lenox, imbued with his uncle's iron creed, the fight would,
of necessity, be conscious and unremitting. But he had no heart to
begin it yet. He felt as a man may feel who is suddenly struck blind.
Thought, movement, life itself, seemed paralysed by a fear unnameable,
and new; the fear of that other self, who is the arch-enemy of us all.
One certainty alone stood out, like a black headland from a sea of
mist; all immediate hope of ratifying his marriage was at an end.
There spoke his tyrannical conscience with disconcerting directness:
and Lenox had never acquired the art of disguising plain fact in a
garment of high-sounding words. He told himself straightly that no
right-minded man could deliberately risk handing down to others such a
heritage of struggle and possible failure as was his. Yet, in the same
breath, the Devil whispered a plausible reminder that men as good as he
had taken the risk time after time; that De Quincey himself had
followed passion's dictates seemingly without a twinge of
self-reproach. But Lenox was too single-minded to take shelter behind
the failures of others. For him the principle was all. For him all
thought of marriage must be set aside, at least, until he knew for
certain how completely the subtle poison had entered into his blood.
"Thank God she didn't give me the chance I wanted!" he breathed in all
sincerity: and flinging himself back in his chair, he lay open-eyed and
still, while night slipped silently on toward morning.
Brutus made one or two attempts to attract his master's attention by
means of a moist nose and an urgent paw; and failing, returned
philosophically to the hearth-rug.
The lamp burned low, and lower, till the room reeked with fumes of
kerosene. This minor discomfort roused Lenox. He lit two candles,
blew out the lamp, and throwing aside his mess jacket, yawned and
stretched himself extensively. By this time one craving outweighed all
others. Every nerve in him ached for the respite of sleep; and his one
chance lay in succumbing to mental or physical exhaustion.
He sat down to the table, and took up his pen, determined to write till
it dropped from his fingers. But here also defeat confronted him. For
although his subconscious brain was discomfortably alert and voluble,
ordered consecutive thought refused to come at his bidding.
He gave it up at length for the simpler expedient of pacing to and fro
in the measured mechanical fashion most conducive to weariness of mind
and body. But though weariness came in due course, and the weight of
all time hung heavy on his eyelids, sleep held pitilessly aloof from
his brain.
For the greater part of two hours the man held out. Then his face
hardened; and he turned deliberately to a combined book-shell and
cupboard that hung on the wall. From the cupboard he took a dark
slender bottle labelled chlorodyne; and seating it on the table,
fetched a glass and water-bottle from the bedroom.
That done, he poured himself out a dose far exceeding the normal
allowance, and diluted it with the least admissible amount of water.
He drank the mixture slowly, savouring its sweetness and warmth; its
uncanny power to soothe and bless. But as he set down the glass
revulsion took hold of him; and on the heels of revulsion came
self-scorn. This last roused him like the prick of a spur: for to men
of Eldred Lenox's calibre, self-respect is the oxygen of the soul. The
spirit of his grandfather had "scored a point" to-night. But such an
achievement must not be risked again.
With the same deliberation that had marked all his former movements,
Lenox picked up the bottle, emptied its sluggish contents down one of
those primitive sluices that are to be found in every Indian bungalow,
and returned, still absently holding it between his finger and thumb.
A confession of weakness: there is no denying it. But let him who has
not yet found the devil's chink in his own defences cast the stone.
Head, heart, or heel--there is a weak spot in the strongest. Not even
Achilles' self was plunged wholesale into the waters of immunity.
Quite suddenly Lenox realised that he was still holding the bottle: and
for some unfathomable reason the trivial detail acted as a fuse that
fires the magazine. For the first time that night, unreasoning anger
mastered him: anger against himself; against the whole tragi-comical
scheme of things: against the man whose dead sins he was called upon to
expiate in his own living flesh.
A curse forced its way between his teeth; and he flung the unoffending
scrap of glass into the open hearth, where it clinked and shivered into
a hundred splinters, filling the room with the strong sickly odour of
the drug.
Then he went back again to the long chair; limbs and brain weighted
with a luxury of weariness. Shattered hope; a life-and-death struggle
ahead:--the words held no meaning for him now. His lids fell. The
balm of Nirvana shrouded his senses, blotting out thought, as sea
mists, rolling landward, obliterate all things.
The June morning broke in one sheet of gold. Creeping in through the
interstices of lowered "chicks," it emphasised the untidy, up-all-night
aspect of the room; the sharp lines, pencilled by pain and struggle, on
the sleeper's face, where he lay full length, in shirt-sleeves and
scarlet waistcoat, unhooked and flung open before weariness overpowered
him.
A deep sound, persistently repeated, at last invaded and dispelled the
drugged torpor of his brain: the voice of Zyarulla murmuring:
"Sahib--Sahib," with the regularity of a minute-gun.
Lenox stirred, yawned, and looked blankly about him, as though he had
waked in another world. Then remembrance sprang at him, like a wild
thing upon its prey: and his lids fell again heavily. In that first
moment of consciousness he understood why men of proven honour and
courage have been known to take liberties with the laws of life and
death.
Zyarulla, entering soundlessly, set down the _chota hassri_ on a small
table at his master's elbow without betraying his surprise and concern
by so much as the flicker of an eyelash. For not even your immaculate
family butler can excel, in dignity and true reserve, a bearer of the
old school, whose Sahib stands only second to his God, and who would
almost as soon think of defiling his caste as of entering another man's
service. We have educated the grand old ideal of service out of our
own land; and we are fast educating it out of India also: though it
remains an open question whether the good wrought by over-civilisation
can honestly be said to counterbalance the evil. A question few
Anglo-Indians will be found to answer in the affirmative.
Lenox poured out his tea, and drank it thirstily. But the first
mouthful of toast was enough for him. He pushed the plate away; and
his hand went out instinctively to the pipe Zyarulla, had laid beside
it.
"Damn!" he muttered between his teeth, almost flinging it from him; and
at that instant the door opened.
"_Desmin, Sahib argya_," [1] the Pathan announced; and with a startled
sound, Lenox got upon his feet, and began fastening his waistcoat.
"Good morning," he said quietly. "Made a night of it, as you see; and
overslept myself."
But beneath his quiet he was acutely aware of the contrast between his
own dishevelled aspect, and Desmond's unobtrusive neatness and
freshness.
"Hope I don't intrude," the latter apologised, smiling: but his keen
eyes searched the other's face, and read tragedy there. "As you hadn't
turned up by ten-thirty, my wife was afraid something might have gone
wrong. So I came over to set her mind at rest!"
"Your wife? Why, of course! And I promised to be round by
ten--ill-mannered cur that I am!" He sank wearily into his chair.
"Truth is," he added in a changed tone, "I couldn't get a wink of sleep
till near dawn; and then it came down on me like a sledge-hammer. You
know the sort of thing."
Desmond nodded, and took a seat on the edge of the table.
"Are you often given that way?" he asked with seeming unconcern.
"Now and again."
"Ever been really bad with it?"
"Pretty bad. Why d'you ask?"
"Because from the looks of you, I should say it was wearing your nerves
to fiddle-strings. Ever take anything for it?"
Lenox frowned; and Desmond made haste to add: "No call, of course, to
answer a question of that sort. But you look downright ill; and it's
unwise to let that kind of thing become a habit."
"Damned unwise!" Lenox answered, with a smile that did not lift the
shadow from his eyes. "As I know to my cost. The thing has been a
habit with me for longer than I care to reckon."
Desmond raised his eyebrows. He had noticed the fragments in the
fender: the faint suggestion of chlorodyne that still clung in the air.
"My dear Lenox, I am sorry for that. And--the remedy? You must have
tried something before now?"
"Yes. Drugged tobacco:--opium, a good strong mixture," the other
answered bluntly. "You may as well have it straight. You're an
understanding fellow; and no Pharisee."
Then, in a few clipped sentences, he stated the bald facts of the case,
culminating in his discovery of the previous night. He leaned forward
in speaking; elbows on knees; eyes averted from the other's face.
"You see, it's in the blood,--that's the hell of it all," he concluded
fiercely. "This morning, when I'd had my fill of thinking things out,
I took a stiff dose of chlorodyne. Smashed the bottle afterwards, in
disgust. But where's the use? The dice are loaded: and no doubt one
will be driven back to it again, sooner or later."
Words and tone betrayed the dread note of fatalism--the moral microbe
of the East. But men of Theo Desmond's calibre rarely succumb to its
paralysing influence.
"Look here, Lenox,"--he spoke almost brusquely,--"you must get quit of
that notion. No man worth his salt goes to meet failure half-way. I
grant you're on the edge of an ugly pit, and if you insist on peering
into it, your chance is gone. All you have to do is to shut your eyes,
and hang to the reins like the very deuce; if it's only for the sake
of--your wife. Honor told me about her," he added, with more
gentleness.
But Lenox threw up his head impatiently. "My wife?" he repeated on a
note of concentrated bitterness. "The greatest kindness I could do her
would be to plunge wholesale into the pit, and give her back the
freedom she wants. A man with a taint in his blood has no business to
beget children foredoomed to fight--and lose."
"My good chap," Desmond broke in hotly. "I'll never believe that any
living soul is foredoomed to lose. The chance of a fight, no matter
how heavy the odds, includes the chance of victory. And even if things
do look a bit hopeless for a time, our orders are plain and straight;
'No surrender.'"
Lenox searched his face.
"Ever been through the fire yourself?"
Desmond nodded.
"I suppose moat of us have to go through hell once or twice," he said
quietly. "And I know how it feels to wish that some one would lock up
my revolver."
For answer Lenox got up and paced the room, head down; hands plunged
deep into trouser-pockets; lost, by now, to all sense of his
incongruous appearance.
The other watched him thoughtfully. Then his hand went to his
breast-pocket, and drew out a leather case. A man proffers tobacco to
a friend in trouble as instinctively as a woman proffers a caress.
"Have a cheroot?" he said, holding them out: and Lenox checked his
pacing.
"Thanks,--no. I've no taste for 'em. Never had."
"Better cultivate it, then. These are A1 Havannahs. A passing
extravagance. Good to begin upon. I'd drop pipes for a time, if I
were you. When it comes to breaking a habit, association is the devil.
And whatever happens, don't let this heredity bogey get the upper hand
of you. The taint you speak of is no more, as yet, than inherited
tendency: and this accident--if you believe in accident, I don't--gives
you the chance of killing the snake in the egg. Now light up, there's
a good chap; just to keep me company."
Lenox helped himself with a wry face; lit the cigar, and continued his
walk. The iron had bitten into his soul: and, at the moment, he was
incapable of gratitude. Bit by bit brain and body were adjusting
themselves to the new outlook, the new demands enforced upon them; and
the process was not a pleasant one.
Suddenly he drew up, and faced his companion.
"You can leave me out of the reckoning now for Chumba and Kajiar," he
said abruptly. "I'm in no mood for that sort of foolery. I'll stay
here and grind at this book of mine instead. You must excuse me to Mrs
Desmond; and tell her just as much of the truth as you think fit."
But before he had finished speaking, Desmond was on his feet, decision
in every line of him.
"Not if I know it, my dear fellow! You won't get a stroke of work done
just at present; and 'that sort of foolery,' as you call it, will do
you all the good in the world. Your best chance is to get right
outside yourself; and we'll make it our business to keep you
there--Honor and I."
At that Lenox turned huskily away; and his broken attempt at a laugh
was not good to hear.
"Damn it all, man, why don't you leave me alone, to go to the devil in
my own way? What can it matter to you, or to any one, whether I break
myself in pieces, or am merely broken on the wheel?"
Desmond's quick ear detected emotion beneath the ungraciousness of
speech and tone; and following him, he laid a hand on his shoulder, a
friendly liberty to which Lenox was little accustomed.
"Come along home with me," he said quietly. "Stay for tiffin, and talk
it all out with my wife. She'll be able to answer you far better than
I can. Nothing like a woman's sympathy to put a dash of conceit back
into a man. Will you follow on? Or shall I wait while you change?"
For an instant Lenox stood silent; then, greatly to his own surprise,
he held out his hand.
"I'll be ready in ten minutes," was all he said.
An hour later, Desmond rode away from Terah Cottage, leaving Lenox and
his wife alone together. He had promised to give her what help he
could in the delicate task she had set her heart upon: and he belonged
to the satisfactory type of man who may be counted upon for good
measure, pressed down, and running over.
[1] Has come.
BOOK II.-JUST IMPEDIMENT.
CHAPTER IX.
"So many men; so many loves."
--M. O. Willcocks.
A dinner of native dishes served on leaves--to each guest his own
portion on his own leaf--eaten picnic-fashion on a Kashmir carpet in
the presence of twelve regally reproachful chairs, is a form of
entertainment only to be met with in India; and when, to these
incongruities, is added the crowning one that the host may not defile
himself by sharing the meal with his guests, you have a situation
typical of the land where all things are possible.
Prompted by Colonel Mayhew, the Chumba Rajah, a shy taciturn boy of
sixteen, had despatched a formal invitation, hoping that the Residency
party would honour him with their company at the Palace on the evening
of their arrival from Dalhousie; though in truth he wished them
anywhere else in the world; and Colonel Mayhew, who was by no means too
old to enjoy a spasmodic daylight flirtation with a woman of Quita's
intelligence, had devised the native menu mainly for her delectation.
A large sheet, promoted to the rank of tablecloth, covered the carpet,
while ten cushions apologised for the absence of chairs. A bowl of
roses, rigidly arranged in alternate lines of flower and fern, filled
the room with fragrance. In front of each guest a snowy dome of rice,
ringed about with a strange assortment of curries, gleamed on a silver
salver. A quaint array of flat baskets held fragments of roast chicken
and kid; unleavened cakes of a peculiarly greasy nature did duty for
bread; and the only concessions to civilisation were knives and forks,
table-napkins, and champagne.
"Why shouldn't we have the courage of our barbarism, and do without
knives and forks as well?" Quita had suggested airily, at the outset;
and a faint look of horror convulsed Mrs Mayhew's bird-like face.
Her husband saw it, and came promptly to her aid.
"No forks, no champagne!" he retorted, laughing; and Quita picked up
her fork straightway.
"Hobson's choice!" she said, in a tone of mock resignation. "It would
be sheer brutality to deprive six men of champagne!"
She was sitting now on a cushion, at the Resident's right hand, feet
tucked away under her skirts, and a napkin laid across her knee. On
this she had set a leaf piled with saffron-tinted rice, which she was
exploring eagerly for incidental sultanas and yellow lumps of sugar,
exchanging bulletins, from time to time, with Desmond, who had taken
her in to dinner, and in whom she speedily recognised a morning quality
of mind that matched her own.
Lenox, sitting opposite between Honor and Elsie, acutely aware that his
legs were too long for the occasion, almost forgot the torment of the
past week in looking and listening, and wondering how he had ever
attained even a passing hold upon a spirit so lightly poised, so
compact of volatile essences, that he shrank, almost with awe, from the
bare thought of subjecting her uncaptured loveliness to the pains and
penalties of marriage. He sat for the most part in silence; content to
let the ripple of her voice and laughter play over him like water over
parched earth. Her voice had drawn him irresistibly from the first.
It was a thing of exquisite modulations. It thrilled like a caress.
Its clear, cool tones, pure from passion, intoxicated him like the
rarefied atmosphere of the heights. Once or twice she flung him a
question or a remark, as if compelling him to be aware of her
existence. He answered her with grave politeness, and an occasional
direct look, before which her eyes fell, as if dazzled by a helio-flash
from the man's inner fire.
All these things Honor Desmond noted; and, by the searchlight of her
womanhood, discerned more than Quita herself had yet realised.
Garth, from his uncoveted post of honour at Mrs Mayhew's left hand,
noted them also; but with less of understanding. Stung to irritation
by a sense of vague happenings in which he counted for nothing, and by
the fact that Quita was evidently enjoying herself far more than the
occasion seemed to warrant, he was in no mood to do justice to the
supreme event of the day--his dinner. Strange foods, too, were an
abomination to his clockwork order of mind; and when, in addition, he
found himself condemned to eat them sitting cross-legged on the ground,
a leaf balanced precariously on one knee, he began to entertain grave
doubts as to the comparative values of the game and the candle.
He quite resented the manifest contentment of Elsie Mayhew and her
partner, who sat facing him, absorbed in the low-toned talk of
incipient lovers, blind and deaf to the insignificant doings around
them. Nor was he greatly blest in his left-hand partner, Bathurst, the
Rajah's tutor--a clean-limbed athlete of the two-adjective genus, who
discoursed complacently of "bags," "mounts," and handicaps; the staple
topics of his kind. And while the stream of words flowed on, unchecked
by his flagrant inattention, Garth's ears were tantalised by snatches
of talk from the lively end of the table, where Desmond and Quita were
behaving like two children; by the silver quality of her laughter that
whipped his senses, while it lulled his conscience like a narcotic, and
set him devising a moonlight stroll with her later on, in the Palace
courtyard, by way of compensation for present martyrdom endured on her
account. For since the night of the dance she had been so uniformly
gracious, that he was beginning to regard his rebuff on Dynkund as
little more than a delicate prelude to surrender after all.
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