She began to think of what she must do. She supposed it would be easily possible for them both to leave Trevellin, and for an idle minute considered how such a flight could best be accomplished. Then she remembered that she had too little money to make it feasible; and that Clay was under age. She did not know whether Penhallow could lay legal claim to him, but she thought it very likely. They would never be able to hide from him; he would hunt them down for the sheer sport of it.
Her gaze was fixed and unseeing; she remained motionless, except for the working of her fingers. She thought and thought, trying to find the certain way of escape which must surely exist if she had the wit to perceive it. But every path she explored seemed to lead, in her overwrought brain, only to a huge painted bedstead, in which Penhallow lay roaring with laughter at her attempts to evade him.
So real was this image that she gradually became convinced that there was no scheme she could evolve that he would not be able easily to frustrate. She had always been afraid of him: he was beginning now to assume grotesque proportions in her mind, so that she felt herself to be as powerless, while he lived, as some fairy-tale creature under an evil spell.
She wished that her head would stop aching. She was tired, too; she had not slept naturally for several nights, and had been obliged lately to increase the veronal she took from twenty to thirty drops. She had sent Loveday to Liskeard the day before, to have the prescription made up again at the chemist’s, and Loveday had protested diffidently, telling her that it was not right that she should drug herself, that she ought to see Dr Rame about her insomnia, because he was younger than Dr Lifton, his partner, and was said to be a clever man, and very up-to-date. She had not listened to Loveday, partly because she had drawn away from the girl since her discovery that she meant to marry Bart, and partly because she did not like Dr Rame, and had come to think that she could not do without her sleeping-draught. The new bottle, as yet unopened, stood beside the old on the shelf above her wash-stand. She turned her eyes towards it, thinking that it was as well she had sent Loveday for it, since she would be obliged to broach it tonight, if her headache continued. If it were not for Clay, she thought she might be tempted to empty the bottle into her glass, and drink it all at a gulp, thus putting a painless end to herself.
It seemed to her that her brain, which had not seriously contemplated such an action as this, became suddenly suspended above the thought that had so casually occurred to her. She sat with her eyes riveted to the little bottle, and her heart beating so hard that it thudded against her ribs.
No one would ever know. That was the thought which leaped to her mind, and stayed there, behind all the others which swiftly followed it. Dr Lifton had told her that not even Penhallow’s constitution could stand the strain he was imposing on it. He would feel no surprise it Penhallow were to die suddenly; he would say that he had warned them of what must happen if they could not persuade him to change his way of life. Everyone knew that so far from modifying his eating and his drinking and his crazy spurts of energy he had been going from bad to worse during the past weeks; and although Clara, and perhaps others of his family as well, might be confident that he would survive his excesses, they would only think, when he died, that they had been mistaken after all, and had paid too little heed to the doctor’s warning.
With fatal clarity, the very means by which she could hasten Penhallow’s end (for it was no more than that, she told herself showed themselves to her, so that it almost seemed as though she were meant to take this course. It was so easy that it seemed strange that she had never thought of it before. He would not suffer; he would not even know that he had swallowed the drug, for when he was already a little fuddled, as he had been for so many nights, he had a way of tossing off his whisky at a gulp. It appeared to her that if he felt no pain she could not be thought to have committed so great a crime. She was sure that she had many times heard him inveigh against the life he was forced to lead, saying that the sooner he died the better pleased he would be, and if her brain could not quite accept this declaration at its face-value, at least it was ready to receive it as a half-excuse for what she meant to do.
The more she thought of it, the more clearly she perceived that every trivial circumstance militated so strangely in her favour that her task began to assume the colour of a predestined act.
When they left Penhallow every evening, and the trays of refreshment had been removed from his room, Reuben was compelled to get out the decanter of whisky from the corner-cupboard, and to place it on the table beside the bed. Reuben had a trick of reducing the quantity of liquor in the decanter to a bare minimum, so that there should be a check on the amount his master could consume when he was left alone for the night. There was never anything left in the decanter in the morning, so that there could be no fear that others besides Penhallow might drink the drugged whisky; nor was it ever produced during the course of the evening for the refreshment of those who foregathered in his room. Penhallow would not touch his private store of whisky, she thought, until he had been made ready for sleep, and left alone in his huge, over-heated room.
The fancy had seized him to get up today; he meant to take the head of his table at dinner, when he would no doubt eat and drink too much, grow boisterous, and exhaust himself, as he always did on such occasions. Surely it would seem the most natural thing in the world if he should be found to have died in his sleep after a day of most unwise exertion!
Martha, she knew, had seized the opportunity to turn out his room that afternoon. It was done now, all the sweeping and the dusting, and the great bed stood ready for its occupant. There could be nothing to take anyone to the room again until Penhallow re-entered it; all she had to do was to go down to it at a moment when it was unlikely that she would encounter any of the household in that part of the house. That was as easy as the rest. Before dinner, when the family was gathered in the Yellow drawing-room, drinking sherry; and Reuben, with Jimmy to help him, was busy laying the table in the dining-room, she could pass with little fear of meeting anyone on the way down the narrow stairway at the far end of the house into the small hall on to which Penhallow’s room opened. All she had to do then to win freedom for herself, and for Clay, for Raymond, for Vivian, for Bart, even for Aubrey, was to cross the wide floor to the corner-cupboard, to open it, to lift the stopper from the decanter, and to empty in the contents of one small bottle. It seemed such a little thing to do to achieve so much that was good that it scarcely bore the appearance to her of a crime. All the troubles which now beset the Penhallows would be settled by this one act; there would be peace at Trevellin, and happiness: a release for more persons than herself and Clay from an intolerable bondage.
A long sigh heaved her breast. The thudding of her heart had abated; she felt calm, and clear-sighted; even the ache in her head was less, although it had left her, as it so often did, with a feeling of narcosis, as though the pain had been merely blanketed by a strong anodyne. She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, and, getting up from her chair, began to change her dress for dinner.
She thought that if she met anyone on her way to Penhallow’s room, or heard someone in the room when she came to it, it would be a sign to her that she was not, after all, meant to carry out her intention; but she felt so sure that she was meant to that it would have been a shock to her to have encountered even so small a hindrance as a housemaid upon the landing.