Shadows of Flames Part 26

"And now, Gaynor," said he, "be so kind as to take away this stuff and bring me a fresh gla.s.s of wine."

Gaynor moved to the bedside as in a daze. Then his face worked suddenly.

"Oh ... sir!" he said in a husky whisper.

"There, that will do! I'd like to be alone for a bit. I'm sure you'll excuse me, Sophy."

She went and kissed him in silence. Gaynor had left the room at once, his head hung low on his breast. Sophy followed quickly.

When the door was shut, a convulsed look broke the a.s.sumed calm on Chesney's face.

"d.a.m.n it!" he choked, clenching his fist at the wall before him.

"d.a.m.nation! I've lied to a man--and he believes me!"

Somehow, what had been almost an amusing game when played for Sophy's benefit, turned to stark humiliation when practised on another man.

He slipped from the bed and, striding to the door in his bare feet, snapped the lock. Then reaching his bed again, thrust his arm far in between the mattresses. He drew out a brand-new syringe--opened it deftly, fitted on the needle--took a spoon from a little drawer in the table. Heated water in it over the lamp, dissolved in it a half-grain tablet of morphia (he was afraid to take a larger dose lest it should prove noticeable)--stripped up the sleeve from his powerful forearm all covered with purplish knots, and drove the little needle home in his flesh, holding the syringe firmly in place by its curved, steel horns, so like the antennae of some poisonous insect. Then he hid all away again--unlocked the door, and slipped quickly into bed.

When Gaynor arrived a moment later, his master seemed to be dozing.

The valet stood looking down on him with a shy expression of affection and relief.

"Thank G.o.d," the servant's heart was saying; "thank G.o.d--he's acted like a man!"

XIX

Lady Wychcote came again next morning about ten o'clock. She seemed much mollified by Sophy's account of the arrangement that had been entered into--showed a marked inclination to a.s.sume more amicable relations with her daughter-in-law.

"I _knew_ that he would act reasonably when things were put clearly before him. He is erratic--but a most able creature. As soon as he realised the gravity of the situation I was convinced that he would act with me--with us--for his own benefit."

"Yes--you were right--you knew him better than I did," said Sophy with generous humility. She, too, felt softened towards her mother-in-law because her maternal intuition had been right, when she, Sophy, as a wife, had doubted.

"Very nice of you to admit it, I'm sure," said Lady Wychcote affably.

She was so highly pleased that all her ideas were by way of being carried out, that she actually asked to see Bobby. This was a wonderful condescension, for from the day of his birth she seemed scarcely to have been aware of his existence.

"I will go to the nursery if you like," she said, as it were a Queen saying with royal affectation of equality: "See, I am even prepared to descend from my dais and walk on a level with you."

"Thanks--but there's no need," said Sophy. "I will have him brought here."

Lady Wychcote had not seen the child, except at a distance, since he could walk and talk. As his nurse set him upon his feet, and his st.u.r.dy little figure came towards her, strutting mannishly, serious but unafraid, something stirred in her chilly breast--something not exactly warm but pungent. The child had the look of her own family. It had been a family noted for its statesmen. What possibilities might not lie hid in that small, firm breast under its ruffled collar! It came over her in a sudden tingling wave of resuscitated hope and fact abruptly realised, that in case of Gerald's dying childless--_this_ child would be heir to the t.i.tle. He was a Chesney after all. He had the name, and her own blood in his veins. The mother was only the "incalculable quant.i.ty" in the sum of this higher spiritual mathematics.

Inconsistently, as with all tyrants, her mind whirled about, accepting as a pleasing possibility what had until then only occurred to her as an insufferable one--a weapon with which to goad Gerald, when his disinclination to marry put her beyond all patience. Now as she looked at Bobby, who had gone straight to his mother's knee, and stood biting his small fist, and regarding her solemnly out of grey, noncommittal eyes, she thought, "Why not! He is my grandchild after all." She even spoke her thought aloud.

"Has it ever occurred to you that that child may be Lord Wychcote some day, in case Gerald dies unmarried!" she asked.

It had occurred to Sophy, for Cecil had spoken once or twice of such a possibility--but he had spoken of it grumblingly.

"If that duffer Gerald dies without begetting a proper little Conservative," he had said, "our little chap's chances may be knocked out, by a seat in the Lords. Nice country this--where a political career can be smashed to smithereens by having to wear a bally t.i.tle whether you will or no."

It never seemed to cross his mind that Bobby might desire a career other than political--or granting that he should not, that by a sort of figurative reversion of species, he might become a Unionist instead of a Liberal.

But Sophy did not have political ambitions for her son. She would rather have seen him a great artist of some sort--the great poet of his day. In her marriage seemed to have quenched the spark of mental creation. It was a deep grief to her that she had felt no real desire to write since becoming Chesney's wife. Only that saddest of all emotions--the desire to desire. It was as if mocking, satyr-hoofs had trampled her mind's garden. The fine poetry of her imaginative mood had not been able to withstand the shocks of such a marriage as hers. Sometimes she had felt bitterly, as though there were the print of a goat's hoof on her heart and that it had filled slowly with blood. It was this scar that burnt when she was unhappy.

"Oh, Gerald is sure to marry," she now said hastily. "He was so much better when I saw him in April."

"Pf! He goes up and down. There's no counting on him," said his mother bitterly. "Is your boy strong? He looks very healthy."

"He's splendidly strong," said Sophy proudly. "He's never had an ill day in his life."

She gathered the boy close to her jealously. There was such a greedy, appraising look in Lady Wychcote's eyes. She might have been a civilised ogress, estimating from long habit the tender flesh of a child.

"Is he clever? Quick?"

"Very," said Sophy briefly.

"I hope you won't let Cecil instil his wretched Radical principles into the boy's mind before he's able to think for himself."

"He thinks for himself already," said Sophy, with a slight smile.

"Well--who knows? We may yet give another famous man to the Conservative cause," said Lady Wychcote, still gazing at Bobby. Then she said to him:

"Come to your grandmother, child."

Sophy impelled him forward, and he went slowly but steadily, and stood before the young-old lady, his hands behind him, his little stomach thrust forward. It was the true statesman's att.i.tude. But Bobby was only wondering why the lady had black specks all over her face, and whether the bird on her brown velvet hat could cry "cuckoo" like the one in the nursery clock.

And to Sophy there came the words of Constance:

"Do, child, go to it' grandam, child: Give grandam kingdom, and it' grandam will Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig."

For it galled her that Lady Wychcote should never have shown the least interest in the boy, until it had occurred to her that some day he might serve her ambition.

Chesney saw his mother for a few minutes before she went. He was languid but apparently quite normal. He exaggerated this languor, as later on he exaggerated a certain nervousness consequent on the fact that he dared not take as much morphia as he really wanted, fearing that Gaynor, at least, might suspect something, and well aware that a man under reduced doses of the drug shows symptoms of extreme weakness and restlessness.

When she asked if he would see Craig Hopkins that afternoon, he replied good-humouredly:

"Bring in the performing poodles as soon as you like. Since I'm in for it, the show might as well begin promptly."

"Cecil is _most_ reasonable--I did not hope as much as this," she told Sophy. Then she took her departure, adding:

"And now I must set the Town talking the way we wish."

It had been agreed between her and Sophy that she should spread reports to the effect that Cecil was suffering from an attack of inflammation of the brain. She had submitted this idea to Dr. Hopkins yesterday, and he had agreed that it was wise and permissible under the circ.u.mstances.

Lady Wychcote was a clever woman. She set this report going with such skill and so apt a measure of detail that even the sceptical Olive Arundel was quite taken in by it. The people who chiefly mattered, and those who had been present at the painful dinner, were only too glad to accept such a solution of the disgraceful scene. Only Oswald Tyne smiled behind Lady Wychcote's well-preserved and still girlish back, his mocking, unctuous smile, and said: "I would rather dream of the degrading spectacle of a British plum-pudding served in flames at an Athenian banquet than see again at a London feast the brain of an Englishman thus ignited. Both are too ma.s.sive to burn gracefully. But the plum-pudding has a lightness--a delicacy--a wholesomeness--which the British cerebrum even in flames can never accomplish."

Olive, to whom Tyne made these remarks, exclaimed, much vexed: