VII
Jaccard, returning on the morrow, brought more than money and securities.
“There were three letters for you at the bank, sir,” he explained, handing them over. “The teller asked me to deliver them.”
“Damn the letters!” mouthed Wingate, and tossed them spitefully upon the wicker table. “Last thing I told my New York office, before I started South, was that no mail should be forwarded—nothing at all!”
Captain Jaccard shrugged indifferent shoulders.
“Well, those came through, anyhow.” A pause. “Ready for some more medicine, sir?”
“What do you think, you fool?”
“I think the compliment applies to you, sir, rather than to me. However, that's none of my business. Here's the packet of cash and bonds, sir. You'll find everything O.K., as listed. How many grains? Ten, as usual?”
Like a snarling dog, Wingate took the ten precious tablets and paid for them.
“Get out, now!” he growled. “Make yourself scarce, you infernal crook!”
“Easy, easy!” the captain cautioned. “You be good, or I'll shut down on you altogether, money or no money!”
With which dire threat he departed, leaving the captive to his misery; but almost on the moment he returned.
“Well, what the devil do you want now?” grated Wingate.
“I want eight of those tablets.”
“Eh?”
“You're getting into a state where it's not safe to let you have more than two at a time. You might take an overdose, through spite, or excess of pain, or what not, and I'd lose the best business prospect I've ever had.”
“You—you—”
“Never mind! Hand them over!”
When Wingate would have resisted, Jaccard held him as if he had been a child, and took the tablets by force. Not much force was needed, at that. Wingate felt himself helpless in those iron hands.
“Here, now—here's the money that doesn't belong to me—not yet,” said Jaccard. “Everything is honest and above-board. Besides, it 'll all be coming back to me before long. That's all. So long!”
Again he took his leave. It was more than two hours before Wingate, under the influence of his tablets, regained any sort of composure. Debased by this new humiliation, ground into the very dirt of a strong man's scorn, he shuddered before the picture of his own degradation.
As he sat there by the table, tasting the gall and wormwood of hate, of misery and shame, his pin-point eyes fell on the letters. He clawed them toward him and ripped one open.
It was from his college class secretary—something about a donation to help establish a scholarship.
“Pah! Always begging!” he spat, tore the letter into shreds, and hurled it into the basket. “How about this one?” He opened the second. “H-m!” he grunted, as his blurred vision focused. “What the devil, now? From Burgess, eh? So that new Florida development scheme at Santa Maria looks as if it was going to fall through, after all!” He tried to ponder, but all his thoughts seemed woolly. “If it does fall through, I stand to lose anywhere from three hundred thousand to twice that. Ah, well, what's the difference, anyhow?”
That letter, too, whisked into the basket, in a shower of fragments.
“If I was only down there at Santa Maria,” he said bitterly, “I could pull that proposition out of the fire in no time. God, wish I was there!” He laughed. “Might as well wish I was on the moon, and be done with it!”
The third letter gave him an agonizing start. He knew that writing on the envelope. It was his wife's!
Why had he grown indifferent to that woman? Why had he so despitefully used her? Why, save that the drug had bred in him a cruel and perverse heart?
Once he had loved her as few men love their wives. Courtship and marriage had been a dream—now a wonderful, far-off dream, whereof the memories were torment. All enwoven with that dream were recollections of how their home had been established—their two homes, rather—the winter house on Central Park West, and the summer cottage at Lake Sebago—not to count the camp at Eau Gallie, down on Indian River. Enwoven, too, were reminiscences of how all his affairs had prospered, with Constance a good partner and true pal. Then had come the birth of Hugh, and then the war—and after that, the entering in of the serpent into their Paradise.
Love had seemed to die, then, crushed and poisoned by that deadly serpent. Wingate remembered his wife's long, losing fight to save him; her pleading and her patience and all her ineffable but unavailing bravery; her faith in him, so often betrayed by supine relapses after the “cures”—oh, a thousand things!
He felt he hated her. But why? In his soul, where all things lay clotted and congealed by the serpent's touch, how seek for reasons? “Each of us kills the thing he loves.” Well, had he not killed Constance—or worse? More than two years had dragged away since he had seen her; more than a year since he had even heard from her. He had forced her out of his life and his thoughts, thrust her out of his soul's house and banged the door.
Oh, yes, he had provided liberally for her and Hugh, of course; but he had locked the door, and told them that they could never come in again. There was no room there for them, with the drug, too!
Sometimes he had wondered whether Constance had changed much. And Hugh, little Hugh—nearly twelve years old now; quite a boy, eh? Two years change a boy. He supposed Hugh was all right. They took excellent care of boys at St. Philip's School; but—
“What the devil and all is Constance writing me about, now?” Wingate snarled. Wan, wrinkled, unlovely, he was a sad mockery of the man Constance had married. “I told her I didn't want to hear from her again! Why couldn't she go to my lawyers, instead of pestering me?”
Mentally he vowed that if ever he won out of Jaccard's trap alive, somebody in the New York office was going to get the sack for having forwarded that letter. He was half minded to tear it up unread, and fling it into the basket; but somehow he could not quite force himself to that. Hugh! There might be news of the boy. Sick, perhaps, or—
The prisoner began to tremble, to feel a sinking around the heart. He held the letter undecidedly. The sight of that familiar writing, angular, bold, on the fine gray envelope, oddly affected him. Something of his wife's compelling personality seemed to diffuse itself from it, to affect him with a singular nostalgia.
For an instant, almost as in a vision, he seemed to perceive the woman herself, lithe, slender, vivid; to see the tilt of her chin, the curve of her throat, the shadow of her hair across her cheek.
He swore, gulped, and tore open the envelope. The words of Constance's letter blurred and ran together oddly under his blinking eyes:
- Dear Martin:
- Forgive me for breaking my promise and for writing to you, but you won't refuse me a bit of advice, just for old times' sake, will you?
- Some rather unpleasant developments have taken place, and I need your judgment. It's in the matter of Uncle Melvin's will. Judge Furchgott has just ruled against me, and I'm afraid most of the estate will go to the Farringtons. This is a serious blow, Martin. We can't afford to lose all that money—not till Hugh is out of school, anyhow. If you could come to New York, only for a day or two, and confer with Hamilton & Gavin, couldn't something be done about appealing the case, or holding up the settlement till you could put in the evidence about undue influence, and all that? I mean the evidence that only you know about.
- Another thing, Martin—I hate to ask you, but frankly, I need a little money. If I could only explain, you'd know why. Please don't misunderstand me—
Wingate almost barked an oath. Dark with rage, he ripped the letter into shreds and shot them into the basket. He sat there gnawing his nails, cursing.
“Money, always money!” he wheezed. “Three letters—two of 'em begging, and one about losing money. Damn money! Damn everything!”
He sprang up and fell to pacing the floor like a madman; but his heart would not stand the strain. He grew faint and dizzy, and felt himself about to collapse. Morphine! He must have another tablet. In every strain or crisis, the addict invariably turns to his drug, his panacea.
He tottered to the push button and rang and rang and rang. Then he sank into his wicker chair and remained there, spent and panting.
Jaccard presently appeared, with a knowing smile.
“Bad news, eh?” he cheerfully asked, his eye observing the fragments lying in the basket and littered all about it. “Well, that comes to everybody now and then. Believe me, I'm very sympathetic.”
“To hell with you and your infernal sympathy!” almost shrieked the miserable wretch. “Give me a tablet, and be quick about it!”
“No, sir, I couldn't do that, you know,” the captain mocked with rare malice. “I couldn't give you one, sir, under any circumstances whatever. I'll sell you one, though.”
Had Wingate possessed any weapon, he would have tried to do downright murder. Having none, all that he could do was to wave his fists, blaspheme, and make himself an object of shocking derision. It was only after a grotesque and terrible scene that he got his tablet, and Jaccard, ever richer, departed.
Wingate remained staring at the tablet, lying there on a book upon the wicker table. He advanced his shaking hand to seize it, but before his fingers closed upon it he drew the hand back.
“The will!” he gulped brokenly. “The court has ruled against her. Hugh! I've got to go back. Nearly two million at stake. My God, what next?”
He tried to think, but everything mingled in extraordinary confusion in his whirling brain. Thoughts of his probable loss at Santa Maria mixed up and blent with Constance and the boy, with his huge payments to Jaccard—why, the stuff was costing him sixty thousand dollars a day! And to-morrow more, and ever more and more and more! Merciful Heavens, Crœsus himself couldn't endure it!
As in a horrid nightmare he perceived his whole life crashing down—money, business, power, everything streaming away and going to perdition; his wife, his son, his honor, being engulfed in the general ruin.
“All going, everything, in one hideous wreck!” he groaned. Hatefully his eyes fastened on the tablet. “And all because of you, you accursed demon! All because of you!”
Suddenly something seemed to clear in the nebulous whirl of his tormented consciousness. His head came up, almost with some semblance of assertion. From his dulled, lackluster eyes there gleamed a spark of the old-time fire.
He laughed, did Martin Wingate. A strange, ghastly mockery of laughter it was, wild and hollow, such as might reëcho on the Brocken at some demons' festival. It was a macabre, graveyard sort of laugh—but still a laugh.
Wingate leaped up, snatched the tablet, and strode to the window. He jerked up the screen, and, with a spasmodic effort, moving like some badly jointed marionette, threw the morphine tablet out—the tablet that had just cost him six thousand dollars. As far as he could hurl so slight a thing, he threw it.
The tablet, a mocking white wink, sped spinning through the sunshine, the hot and brooding sunshine of that semitropic island. It struck the leaf of a Spanish bayonet near the edge of the little clearing. It ricocheted. Wingate saw it flicker away and vanish in the sand at the base of a palmetto.
With another and shriller laugh, he slammed down the screen, turned, fell into his big wicker chair, and dashed both fists against his bursting forehead.
“Now!” he gulped. “Now for it! Now for hell!”