, 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!