'So what made your surgeon change his mind?'
Drinkwater wrenched his thoughts back to the present. 'A theory — a theory he was developing into a thesis. If I understood him aright, it was his contention (and Metcalfe had, apparently, furnished him with evidence over a long period) that Metcalfe was, as it were, two people. No, that ain't right: he considered Metcalfe possessed two individual personalities ...
'Pym argued we all have a tendency to be two people, a fusion of opposites, of contrary humours. The relationship between weaknesses and strengths, likes and dislikes, the imbalance of these humours and so forth, nevertheless produces an equilibrium which inclines in favour of one or the other, making us predominantly one type of person, or another and hence forming our characters.
'He seemed to think Metcalfe's disparate parts were out of kilter in the sense that they exactly balanced, do you see? Thus, he postulated, if you conceive circumstances acting like the moon upon water, the water being these leanings, or inclinations inherent in us, our response is the vacillation of moods and humours. Because one humour predominates, we remain in character, whereas in Metcalfe's case the swings from one to another were equal, his personality was not weighted in favour of choler or sanguinity or phlegm, for instance, but swung more violently and uncontrollably from one exclusive humour to another.
'Therefore he became wholly one half of his complete character, before changing and becoming the other. Pym dignified his hypothesis the Pendular Personality and proposed to publish a treatise about it.'
'But surely such a condition is, nevertheless, a form of madness.'
'Yes, I suppose it is. Though Pym suggested that so rational an explanation made of it a disease, madness being a condition beyond explanation. At all events it does not sit happily upon a sea-officer's shoulders.'
Poor Metcalfe. He had wept with remorse when his accusers confronted him with the enormity of murder, yet a day later, when Drinkwater had visited him again, he had screamed ingratitude, claiming to have done everything and more that his commander wished for and chastising Drinkwater for abandoning a loyal subordinate capable of great distinction. Pym had prescribed laudanum and they had brought him back dopey with the opiate.
There had been nothing more that Drinkwater could have done for Metcalfe. He waited upon the man's wife in her lodgings at Southsea and expressed his condolences. He gave her a testimonial for the Sick and Hurt Board and twenty guineas to tide her over. She had a snot-nosed brat at her side and another barely off the breast. Drinkwater had been led to believe Metcalfe came from a good family, but the appearance of his wife suggested a life of penurious scrimping and saving, of pretensions beyond means and ambitions beyond ability. The impression left by this sad meeting weighed heavily upon his own troubles as he made his way home.
Was Pym right? His theory had, as far as Drinkwater could judge, a logical attraction. He had himself proved to be two men and had behaved as such in the verdant woodlands of Virginia, so much so that he seemed now to be a different person to the man who had lain with Arabella Shaw. That careless spirit had been younger and wilder than the heat-stupefied, half-soaked, married and middle-aged sea-officer now sprawled before the fire in Gantley Hall. Had he, at least temporarily, suffered from an onset of the same dichotomous insanity which had seized so permanent a hold on Metcalfe? Was he in the grip of Pym's pendular personality?
The ridiculous humour of the alliteration escaped him.
One could argue he had done no more than thousands of men had done before him. He had, after all, spent most of his adult life cooped up on ship-board, estranged even from the body of his lawful wedded wife, so that the willing proximity of so enchanting, comely and passionate a woman as Arabella was irresistible. He could cite other encounters, with Dona Ana Maria Conchita Arguello de Salas and Hortense Santhonax, women whose beauty was fabled and yet with whom he had behaved with utter propriety, notwithstanding fate had thrown them together in unusual circumstances. He could invent no end of excuses for his momentary weakness and invent no end of specious proofs as to his probity. But he could think of no justification for his behaviour with Arabella.
He dared not look at his wife, lest she catch his eye and ask, in her acutely intuitive way, what troubled him. The events of that afternoon, the riot in the blood which had ended in their physical commingling, stood as a great sin in Drinkwater's mind.
Yet, God knew, he had committed greater sins. He was a murderer himself, perhaps more so than poor Metcalfe, for he had killed in cold blood, mechanically, under orders, at the behest of his Sovereign. And not once but many times.
He had shot out the brains of a Spanish seaman and hacked down a French officer long before his majority, yet had suffered no remorse, rather, he recollected, the contrary. Had the sanction of war relieved him of the trouble of a conscience over such matters? It was not logical to suppose that he suffered now merely because he loved his wife and he had threatened her with his mindless infidelity. Conscience should, if he understood it aright, prick him for every sin, not just the one that threatened his domestic security.
No, he had loved Arabella Shaw that afternoon, loved her as completely and consumingly as he had loved his wife and it was the diminution of the latter that wounded him most.
Arabella too had been driven by more than the demand of physical release, he was certain. She could have had the pick of those eager young officers, yet had chosen him, and as surely as he had recoiled after their wild fling, she had made no move to renew their passion, as if she too half-regretted it. She too harboured another love: that for her dead husband.
The moment he seized upon the thought, he doubted it.
'Could you still love me after my death?' he found himself blurting out, so introverted had his train of thought become.
Elizabeth looked up, hand poised above the circular frame, the candlelight playing upon the needle with its trail of scarlet thread.
'Why do you ask?'
He shrugged, colouring, wishing he had guarded his tongue and seized by a sudden conviction that Elizabeth knew all about his affair, that he had spoken in his sleep and had called Arabella's name in his dreams. 'A fancy I have,' he said lamely, 'a self-conceit...'
'I love you when you are not here,' she replied, 'it is as bad sometimes as being a widow.'
The phrases struck him as confirmation of his fears, yet it might be mere foolishness on his part. He felt her eyes upon him almost quizzically.
'You are exhausted with this war,' she said, watching her husband with concern, thinking him much older since he returned from America in a way she had not previously noticed.
'I am perverted by this war,' he wanted to say, but he nodded his weariness and thrust himself to his feet. He could not apportion blame elsewhere but within himself. 'I’ll take a turn outside before we go up, Bess,' he said instead, 'to see all's well.' He bent over her head and kissed her hair. The strands of grey caught the yellow light and looked almost golden.
'Don't be long,' she said, and the catch in her voice articulated her desire. He squeezed her shoulder. Yes, he would drown his senses in the all-encompassing warmth of her body, but first he must excoriate his soul.