VIII
Night—a night of splendid moonlight—found the millionaire gripped and throttled by an anguish so intolerable as to pass all powers of description.
Racked by pain in every joint, bone, and nerve, twisted and torn, sweating, groaning, transfixed with barblike darts of torture, he staggered back and forth through the two dark rooms of his bungalow.
He had all shades pulled down, to hide his torment from the hateful eyes of Jaccard and Zanelli. A single lamp burned on the table, turned very low. The stifling heat made the place an oven. A normal man could hardly have caught his breath there. As for Wingate, he was breathing only in panting gulps.
His heart was acting very badly. Bump, thump, bump, it would go—and then an awful vacancy, a skip. He thought everything was over; but no—again the thumping started.
Gripping his breast, doubled half over, he limped back and forth. His shadow, black and huge, grotesquely mocking him, wavered along the walls. In a sort of hallucination, the shadow seemed a devil, his own evil genius, trailing him, waiting to seize and slay him.
He stopped, shook impotent fists at the shadow, cursed it, and then again took up that limping hobble. Groans of mortal agony companioned his convulsive shuffling. A grim battle, that—a battle to the very death!
At last, able to walk no more, he dropped on his bed and lay there, twitching. His bony fingers clenched, his body twisted with dolorous cramps, he fought for very life. Now he moaned, now he swore, now he mouthed his wife's name and his boy's. Even his curses, on that rack of torment for their sake, were prayers.
Two hours he lay thus, while the ocean murmured on the island beaches, and while the moon moved majestically toward mid heaven. What was the beauty of that Southern night to him? What was any beauty, anywhere? Demons of ugliness, nightmare fiends of torture, had their grip upon him.
“Oh, God, if I could only die!” he gritted. As a corollary to that wish, realization came: “If I were dead, they'd be far better off!”
Disjointed thoughts of his heavy insurance policies passed through his mind. Thank goodness, they were paid up. There could be no cavil or question. The fact of his death must sooner or later be established, and then—
Then perhaps Jaccard and Zanelli might find the gallows beckoning, or the electric chair. Then, surely, Constance and Hugh would never want for anything.
“God! Why can't I die?”
But no, life still struggled in him. The man's naturally splendid constitution still battled for him. Not yet had his desperation reached the stage of suicide. All he could do was to live and suffer; to writhe in deadly pangs, but still to live on and on and on.
Of a sudden, after still another hour of this steadily increasing torture there in the stifling gloom, Wingate struggled up. He sat huddled on the edge of the bed, drooping and haggard, a creature fearful to look upon.
For a while he held his aching head—devils seemed to be driving wedges into it—between both quivering hands. Then, as if his last rag of will power had torn away, he staggered to his feet with a blistering oath. All limits of endurance past, he stumbled toward the door. He reached it, hauled it open, and shuffled out on the porch.
Never had a more lovely night rested like a benediction upon a tired world. Slow surfs boomed along the beaches. In the palmettos, the night breeze seemed whispering secrets that no man should ever understand. The moon, a white round glory in the deepest of purple skies, irradiated the gleaming sands. The silver light slashed shadows like sticks of India ink across the porch floor, over the dunes, the clearing.
A few of the bolder stars dared to show their tiny candles, despite the moon. Somewhere, in thickets unseen, fluted the notes of a Southern whippoorwill—double notes, not triple like those of the North, but still reminding Wingate of nights long gone. Once there had been a night, at Sebago, almost like this!
The prisoner groaned, supporting himself against the side of the bungalow, swaying there.
He stood for a minute, still undecided. Then, unable to bear the inhuman anguish, he crept toward the screen door, opened it, and lagged down the steps. Hardly able to crawl, none the less he managed to force his way along.
Yes, he remembered—the Spanish bayonet, and then the palmetto! He dragged himself toward the palmetto, trembling with eagerness, his face writhen and evil in the moonlight.
Driven on by demons more cruel than any ever imagined by Dante, he reached the palmetto, fell on his bony knees there, and began his search for the precious tablet.
Six thousand dollars' worth of relief! Not even a man of his means—now swiftly dwindling, moreover—could afford to throw away six thousand dollars! He cursed himself for having been such a fool. He might have known he could not live without that tablet—and more, more, ever more!
“I'll find this one, right enough,” he tried to reassure himself. “It's bright as day here, and the tablet's pure white. I'll find it, never fear!”
With burning, feverish eyes he peered about him. He crawled cautiously on all fours. He, a power in the financial world—he, feared in both hemispheres, now abased by vile necessity, crept like an animal, searching, groping. A modern Nebuchadnezzar he was, groveling like a brute beast, and, like that king of olden times, conquered and brought down to shame by powers of evil.
He explored the sand all about, sifting it in fingers that shook, throwing it away and beginning again. As he worked, the sweat of suffering and of abstention from the drug beaded his forehead, coagulated, ran down into his eyes, and half blinded him. He smeared it away and continued his degrading search.
A grotesque and repellent figure he made, abased and crawling there, twitching with spasmodic pangs, spent, all but perishing.
All at once he uttered an animal-like cry, almost a shout. It burst from his throat, mingled of triumph and despair, joy and torment, as if a lost soul had shouted in exultation at hearing its judgment of eternal doom.
“Here it is, by God!”
Wingate's questing fingers had closed on the precious, the damnable, the adored and hated tablet!
With a palsied hand he raised it toward his lips; but suddenly his muscles stiffened, and the hand stopped. It seemed to him that he saw a dark figure lurking among the palmettos. He blinked, and now saw nothing. So, then, it was merely an hallucination? To his fevered brain the figure had appeared like Constance.
A flood of disjointed memories surged back. His wife's letter! What was that white gleam he saw? Her letter? Her appeal for herself and for the boy—for both of them, whom he was ruining?
With an odd little cry, Wingate crushed the tablet between his fingers. He ground it to powder and flung the powder away. He staggered up, laughing horribly, and like a madman stumbled off among the palmettos, striking against them, scrambling up again.
The sea, the sea! There at last he could find cooling and peace, rest, oblivion, surcease from pain. The sea would give him all these. To his wife and boy it would give freedom from his squandering, it would give wealth,
Passionately, as he never had desired anything, he longed for the embraces of our primal mother, the compassionate and all-consoling sea.
But now, as he staggered along the sand between the palmettos—a crouching and grotesque figure in his white flannels—he became conscious of something in his path. It lay half in moonlight, half in shadow. An evil, sinuous, horrible thing it was, watchful and awake. The moon revealed it as a snakelike thing of chestnut brown, with obscure blackish bars. Tiny high lights glittered in its cold, malicious eyes. Its form was graceful, with the repellent grace of a thing supremely efficient only in inflicting death.
It drew back, slightly, as Wingate shuffled toward it; raised its flattened, triangular head, and gaped horribly. Its jaws widened till they extended rigid and almost in a straight line. Two needle-like fangs protruded, gleaming portents of swift destruction. The mouth showed white as cotton.
Thus the thing waited—the most deadly reptile of those Southern coasts and islands—a cottonmouth moccasin!
For a second or two Wingate paused and hesitated. He stood there swaying slightly, staring, and pressed a hand to his forehead. He laughed feebly.
“Crazy, eh? Fever—seeing snakes, already?” It sounded uncanny, shuddering. Silence followed. Then, as the wretched man peered closer: “No, I'm not crazy—yet. This is real! Thank God for it!”
And he lurched forward, laughing again.
Here was certain relief, indeed—here was a solution for all his torture, all his problems, failures, despairs. Why seek the ocean? Failure might await him there. Once in the water, he dimly realized that the life forces still struggling in him might whip him up to efforts, might make him swim and struggle back to land. Always a powerful swimmer, even now the instinct of it could not die. Reflex action would defeat him. He simply could not drown.
But the cottonmouth—yes, that was sure. There could be no doubt about that. Once those fangs had buried themselves in his wasted flesh, no power on earth could save him. Death, absolutely certain, awaited almost within reach of his hand.
Wingate suddenly became sane, sober, and coherent. The mist of half delirium rolled away, leaving his intelligence absolute master of him. His nerves tensed for the final act of his life tragedy. He laughed again, but differently now, as once more he approached the gaping white mouth and gleaming fangs.
“Come on, old friend!” he cried. “Just once—that's all I need! You're stronger than the human snakes that are keeping me here. You and I together—we'll beat them!”
Lightning swift, the moccasin struck. A flash of brown steel, tipped with white, it flicked at him; but, against his will, Wingate had leaped back.
Reflex action! Something stronger even than the lust of death possessed him. He found it impossible to stand, to meet that drive of annihilation. Few men can let a snake strike at them, even behind plate glass, and not jerk back their hands—few, if any. Now forces stronger than Wingate's own desire dominated him. He retreated; but on the instant he checked that retreat.
“You damned cowardly whelp!” he snarled at himself.
He rallied his forces. Shouting, he plunged toward the reptile.
As the moccasin reared for the fatal blow, the staccato bark of a pistol cracked among the palmettos. The snake flailed into a horrible, writhing tangle, its body drilled clean with a bullet.
But its hate of man, its rage and fighting spirit, were not yet dead. Even smitten with destruction, it recovered for an instant, lashed forward, and flung its jaws wide. There in the moonlight Wingate could see those jaws; and in them blood gushed upward out of the reptile's throat like a little fountain, dyeing the white an angry crimson.
The moccasin bubbled blood, made a final stroke, missed Wingate's hand by inches. Then it collapsed in a hideous, thrashing writhe.
Again the pistol barked. The snake's head flew apart, shattered. There came a shouting, the rush of a figure trampling the sand and crashing through the palmettos.
“Here, you crazy fool!” shouted Zanelli. “Here, you!” The guard reached Wingate, now a crumpled heap in the whiteness of the moonlight and the gleaming sand. “Get up, there! What the hell?”
No answer.
Overborne by the shock of it, the unspeakable horror, Wingate had collapsed in a dead faint. He lay there, prone and distorted, his outsprawled hand hardly clear of those shattered, deadly jaws.