Lenox

“ Talk of this kind draws men very close together; and in the course of it Lenox discovered—as others had done before him—that this man who had become so intimately linked with the vital issues of his life was no mere good comrade, but a dynamic force, challenging and evoking the manhood of his friends.
When they parted Lenox felt more hopeful than he had done since the arrival of Quita's note; and honest sleep hung heavy on his eyelids.
"Don't believe you need the dose we spoke of after all," Desmond remarked on a note of satisfaction. ”

“ Lenox knew little of half measures: and, having succumbed,—in spite of himself, in spite of inherent prejudices and convictions,—he succumbed heart and soul. That which he had unduly scorned, he now unduly exalted. Only Time and the woman could lead him into the Middle Way, which is the way of truth. For beneath the surface hardness of the Scot lurked the fire, the imaginative force, the proud sensitiveness of the Celt: a heritage from his Cornish mother, whose untimely death had left her two younger sons in the hands of a bachelor uncle, of red-hot Calvinistic views. ”

“ After sitting for twenty minutes before a blank sheet of foolscap, Lenox gave up all further effort at mental concentration. A nostalgia of vast untenanted spaces was upon him,—of those great glacier regions where a man could stand alone with God and the universe, could shake himself free from the fret of personal desire. And he had agreed to forgo this—the one real rest and refreshment life afforded him,—to "suffer gladly" the insistent trivialities of hill-station life, merely, forsooth, because a woman had asked it of him. ”

“ As Lenox stood feasting his soul upon the splendour of it all, he knew that this was one of the great days of his life: that only Quita's inspiring presence was needed to crown the triumph of it. Even in the first glow of achievement, his heart turned instinctively to hers for sympathy and approval: and, could she have known it, her haunting fear that the mountains would prove too strong for her had crumbled into nothingness there and then. For if 'many waters cannot quench love,' neither can many mountains dwarf it. ”

“ To Lenox it seemed a matter of years. Because, in that short breathing space, fear—overmastering fear—gripped him as it never yet had done. A year or two ago, for all his human love of life, he would have accepted a mountaineer's death with something of the same pride and stoicism as a soldier accepts death in battle. But now . . now . . life meant so infinitely more to him, that every throbbing artery and nerve rebelled against the loss of it. For it is happiness, more than conscience, that 'makes cowards of us all.'
Nearer and louder grew the appalling sound. ”

“ She expressed no surprise at seeing Lenox again so soon. Come when he might, his presence was accepted as a matter of course; the surest way to put a man at his ease.
"So sorry I kept you waiting," she said simply, and the hand she gave him was at once soft and strong,—an epitome of the woman. "Theo was lunching out with Colonel Mayhew—they are both very full of that book of his on the Hill Tribes—and I have been devoting most of my time to this very exacting person!" ”

“ The freshness, the sweetness, the bright rich colouring of sky and water and land, the stillness, the strangeness, the novelty, all moved Mr. Lenox to say,
"I would not have missed this for a hundred dollars!"
"Missed what?" asked his wife.
"This whole afternoon."
"It's one way that people live, I suppose."
"Yes, for they really do live; there is no stagnation; that is one thing that strikes me."
"Don't you want to buy a farm here, and settle down?" asked Mrs. Lenox scornfully. "Live on hymns and long clams?"
Meanwhile the interior of the bathing-house was changing its aspect. ”

“ For the 'mighty and subtle' drug kills with kindness. Coming to a tormented man in the guise of an angel of peace, it lures him, lulls him, and wraps him about with false contentment before plunging him into the pit.
While the holiday folk trooped into the long mess-tent, laughing or lamenting over the afternoon's vicissitudes, Lenox sat at his table in shirt and trousers, his pen devouring the loose sheets before him. He bade Zyarulla bring him meat, bread, and a cup of coffee, and deny admittance even to 'Desmond Sahib' himself. ”

“ The bitterness of conviction in his tone made Desmond lean forward to get a better sight of him.
"Lenox, old man," he said, almost tenderly, "such exaggerated notions are all a part of your unsettled nerves.—Smash up your devil's box of pills; or . . hand it over to me . . if you will . . . ?"
Lenox hesitated; but his face gave no sign of the short sharp struggle within. "You shall have the thing, if you wish it," he said at length. "It gives me no pleasure to make a beast of myself. But that doesn't touch the heart of the difficulty. So long as she's here, I haven't a chance. ”

“ For Quita Lenox, though far from beautiful, in the accepted sense, was undeniably good to look at. Coils of soft hair, golden in the sun, brown in the shade; eyes neither grey nor green, intensified by unusually large pupils, and by brows and lashes almost black; a straight nose, low at the root; a mouth too long, too mobile for beauty, its emotional quality safeguarded by an uncompromising chin, completed a face whose charm lay in no particular excellence of details ”

“ 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 ”

“ In his esteem, then, nothing stood between him and his desire but a poor crop of scruples, readily trampled under foot; and by a fine stroke of irony Lenox himself completed the trampling process. He, who rarely took an active part in the random, unedifying talk congenial to after-dinner "pegs" and cigars, had one night been moved to administer advice to a rapturous subaltern, in the shape of a few trenchant cynicisms in respect of women and marriage, bidding him not be fool enough to run his misguided head into the noose; and the subaltern had collapsed like a pricked air-ball. ”

“ Lenox following.
Two such figures! Sun-bonnets shading merry faces, flushed with business; blue flannel bathing-suits draping very unpicturesquely the persons, bare feet stained with mud,—baskets full of the delicate fish they had been catching.
"What a quantity!" exclaimed Mrs. Barclay.
"Yes, because I had aunt Anne to help. We cannot boil them all at once, but that is all the better. They will come hot and hot."
"You don't mean that you are going to cook all those?" said Mrs. Lenox incredulously.
"There will not be one too many," said Lois. "You do not know long clams yet." ”

“ 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 ”

“ Lenox. There ain’t many that takes the trouble. And yet time was when I was considered as good-lookin’ as that ungrateful daughter of mine, that I slaved for for years. Put them flowers in water, Sarah. I guess326 a butter jar’s the only thing I got that’s big enough to hold them.”
Mrs. Lenox sat down, wondering if time and life could ever transform the smooth beauty of Lena’s features to this semblance of failure which they so closely resembled. Mrs. Quincy’s face was like a grain field over which the storms had swept, changing what was its glory to a horror. ”

“ The men chorussed voluble excuses; but since time meant life or death, Lenox waved them aside impatiently, and ordered the guide to go on, making his own tracks as best he might. The which he did, with the help of two others, pressed into service by promises of liberal backsheesh, stepping out valiantly at the head of the mixed procession; his sister's remains—tied up in a wisp of turban—bobbing over his shoulder; driving on before him a donkey followed by a goat. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Lenox, as he stood listening, experienced fresh proof of man's innate spirit of perversity. For many days past he had been angered by the suspicion that in this affair of portrait painting, the subject counted for too much;—and now, when he ought to have been relieved, he found his anger rekindled to white heat by Quita's frank confession that his friend—whose heart had been wrenched from him by her so-called 'method'—counted for nothing at all. ”

“ The Dream Compeller is no poison, Hazúr, but Allah's bountiful gift to man, bringing strength out of weakness, peace out of turmoil, even as the rain draweth grass from parched earth. Nevertheless, it is as your Honour wills."
And Lenox, still watching the man's movements with a strange mingling of indifference and triumph, saw the miracle-worker—of whose powers he knew far more than the Pathan—disappear unhindered into the folds of the man's kummerbund; saw himself once more a free man,—captain of the soul and body given into his charge. ”

“ Lenox remarked drily, his eyes on the bowl of his pipe. "Hope you enjoyed yourself there?"
"Yes, rather so. Had a rattling good time." Then he leaned forward again, elbows on knees. "Look here, Lenox, old chap; I'm no hand at skirting round a subject, and I feel bound to tell you that I know now . . . what happened there five years ago."
Lenox started so violently that the pipe dropped from his hand. A minimum of sleep and a maximum of tobacco do not tend to steady a man's nerve.
"How the devil d'you come to do that?" ”

“ Lenox muttered between his teeth, adding something hastily, "You can spare me the details. Nothing stands a chance against a woman's passion for other people's affairs. Very straight of you to speak out at once. Don't allude to it again, though;—that's all."
"But, Lenox," Richardson persisted, not without misgiving, for it is ill work tampering with the reserve of a Scot, "there's just one question I want to ask you, and I think I have a right to know the truth. I remember writing a certain letter to you that autumn; a rather disparaging letter about—Miss Maurice." ”

“ Eldred Lenox walked close to his wife, one hand resting on the crupper behind her. The man's intensity of feeling did not rise readily to the surface; and a certain proud sensitiveness, the cardinal weakness of big natures, withheld him from the full expression of an emotion to which she could not adequately respond. He was content to wait, and hope; and in the meanwhile, he walked at her side wrapt in the mere joy of possession; one of the strongest, yet least recognised passions of a man's heart. ”

“ Startled and stunned as he was, Lenox righted himself speedily; and kneeling on one knee, supported his subaltern's shoulders against the other, while a Havildar roughly bandaged the wounded leg, and bullets whinged and whirred on all sides of them.
"Dick, you'd no business to be there. What the devil did you do?" Lenox asked, a queer vibration in his voice: for it seemed that not till this moment had he understood the strength of the link that bound him to the simple-hearted man who was his friend.
"For God's sake don't plague a chap with questions when he's hard hit. The thing's done ”

“ The whole Dialogue between Lenox and the Lord is miraculous. It abounds with knowledge of events that had not happened—and could not have happened—on the showing of Shakspeare himself; but I do not believe that there is another man now alive who knows that Lenox and the "other Lord" are caught up and strangled in that noose of Time. Did the Poet? You would think, from the way they go on, that one ground of war, one motive of Macduff's going, is the murder of Banquo—perpetrated since he is gone off! ”

“ Lenox said at length,
"No earthly use. He swore like a trooper when I suggested it; and I can't blame him. Professional platitudes are not the style of physic to ease a man when he's suffering hell's own torments in his mind and body." He set down the picture abruptly, and swung round on his heel. "I'll be going on now, for a tub, and a change of clothing. Idiotic of me, no doubt; but I feel a bit off colour after all that. How about the funeral? To-night?"
"No. First thing to-morrow. I'll arrange it with Peters before he leaves; and get Courtenay to let me off the sick-list, if I can." ”

“ For all his vaunted supremacy man is not always master of his fate. Circumstance, heredity, the despicable trifle, the inexpert finger, which a certain type of human is so zealous to thrust into an alien life, compass him about with a cloud of witnesses to his own impotence.
With which conclusion, softened by the kindly influence of drugged tobacco, Lenox knocked the ashes out of his pipe; and decided that since he was here to observe his wife and Garth, and to cure himself of an undignified infatuation, it would be well to return to the ballroom till number twelve. ”