In truth, when evening came she was too weary to go with him or with any one else, and the first Sunday after her duties at the shop began she could not be present at the chapel and meet her cla.s.s.
Mr. Wentworth called, fearing she was ill. She explained in part, and he was quick to understand. His brow darkened in such a frown that the poor girl grew frightened, and began: "Indeed, Mr. Wentworth, do not judge me harshly, or think that I let a trifle keep me--"
Then he awakened to her misapprehension, and coming directly to her side he took her hand, with a face so kind, so full of deep, strong sympathy, that her eyes filled at once.
"My poor child," he said, "could you imagine I was frowning at you?--brave little soldier that you are, braver and stronger in your way and place than I in mine. G.o.d bless you, no. I felt savage to think that in this nineteenth century, and right under the shadow of our church spires, this diabolical cruelty is permitted to go on year after year. Oh, I know all about it, Miss Mildred; you are not the first one by hundreds and hundreds. I wish I could give you more than sympathy, and that some other way would open--we must find some other way for you--but you have no idea how many are worse off in these bad times than you are--worthy people who are willing to work, but cannot get work. If it seems to you that I cannot do very much for you, remember that there are scores who, for the time, seem to have no resources at all. I trust you may soon hear such tidings from your father as will bring relief to both body and mind. And now, my child, don"t let a morbid conscience add to your burdens. When you are as greatly in need of rest as you were last Sunday, don"t come to the chapel. I"ll take your cla.s.s, or find a subst.i.tute."
In a few minutes he was gone; but they were not alone, for he had made them conscious of One who is touched with the feeling of our infirmities.
How was the absent husband and father fulfilling the hopes that daily turned to him, but found no reward? He was literally writhing under chains that, to his horror, he could not break. He had found on shipboard that sudden and complete abstinence irom the drug brought a torture of mind and body that he could not endure, and now he was learning, in sickening fear, that he could not gradually reduce his daily allowance below a certain point without immediate sufferings beyond his fort.i.tude to sustain.
The room in the Inquisition, whose circular walls, studded with long, sharp spikes, gradually closed upon and pierced the victim, had its spiritual counterpart in his present condition. He was shut in on every side. If he made a push for liberty by abstaining from the drug, he was met and driven back by many nameless agonies. He seemed to recoil, inevitably, as if from steel barbs. Meanwhile the walls were closing in upon him. In order to prevent life from being a continuous burden, in order to maintain even the semblance of strength and manhood, so that he might have some chance of finding employment, he had to increase the quant.i.ty of morphia daily; but each succeeding indulgence brought nearer the hour when the drug would produce pain--pain only, and death. After a week or two of futile and spasmodic effort he drifted on in the old way, occasionally suffering untold agony in remorse and self-loathing, but stifling conscience, memory, and reason, as far as possible, by continuous stimulation.
His quest of employment was naturally unsuccessful. The South was impoverished. Weak from the wounds of war, and the deeper enervation of a system that had poisoned her life for generations, she had not yet begun to rally. There was not enough business in the city for the slow and nerveless hands of its citizens, therefore there was little prospect for a new-comer, unless he had the capital and energy to create activity in the midst of stagnation. A few were slightly imposed upon at first by Mr. Jocelyn"s exalted moods, and believed that he might do great things if he were given the chance; but they soon recognized that he was unsound and visionary, broaching plans and projects that varied widely with each succeeding interview. The greater number of his former friends and acquaintances were scattered or dead, and those who remembered him had their hands too full to do more than say a good word for him--saying it, too, more and more faintly as they saw how broken and untrustworthy he was. The story of his behavior on the ship, and correct surmises of the true cause of his manner and appearance, soon became current in business circles, and the half-pitying, half-contemptuous manner of those with whom he came in contact at last made it clear, even to his clouded mind, that further effort would be utterly useless.
Meanwhile his habit now began to inflict a punishment that often seemed beyond endurance. The increased quant.i.ties of morphia with which he sought to sustain himself, combined with his anxiety, remorse, and solicitude for his family and his own future, filled the hours of darkness with one long nightmare of horror. His half-sleeping visions were more vivid and real than the scenes of day. From some harrowing illusion he would start up with a groan or cry, only to relapse a few moments later into an apparent situation more appalling and desperate.
The earth would open and swallow him in fathomless darkness; then he was on a ship caught in a maelstrom and whirled down with a speed imaginable only by a mind as disordered and morbid as his own.
Panting, struggling, drenched with a cold perspiration, he would struggle back into a brief and miserable consciousness. With scarcely any respite his diseased imagination would seize him again, and now the ship, with tattered sails and broken masts, would be becalmed in the centre of a cyclone. All around him was the whirling tornado from which the vessel had pa.s.sed into awful silence and deceptive peace. Although viewless, a resistless volume was circling round him, a revolving torrent of air that might at any second make its existence known by wrenching the ship in some direction with such violence as to destroy it at once. When would the awful suspense be over, and the cyclone, with a peal of thunder through the rigging, again lay its frenzied grasp on the ill-fated ship? In unspeakable dread he seemed to spring from the deck in the hope of ending all, and would find himself gasping on his couch, which vice had made a place of torture, nor rest.
But the visions which most shook his soul were those connected with his wife and children. He saw them starving; he saw them turned into the street, mocked and gibed at by every pa.s.ser-by. He saw them locked up in prison-cells, under the charge of jailers that were half brute, half fiend; he saw Fred and Minnie carried off by an Italian padrone to a den reeking with filth, and loud with oaths and obscenity. With a hoa.r.s.e shout of rage he would spring up to avert blows that were bruising their little forms; he saw his wife turn her despairing eyes from heaven and curse the hour of their union; he saw Mildred, writhing and resisting, dragged from her home by great dark hands that were claws rather than hands; worse than all, he saw Belle, dressed in colors that seemed woven from stains of blood, stealing out under the cover of night with eyes like livid coals.
Such are the beatific visions that opium bestows, having once enchained its victims. Little wonder that, after spending nights upon a poisoned rack, Mr. Jocelyn was in no condition to meet his fellow-men and win their confidence.
The dark thought crossed his mind more than once that he had better never return home--that, since he had lost his manhood, life had better go too; but in these darkest and most desperate moments the face of his wife would rise before him, and from her white lips came the cry, "No! no! no!" with such agonized intensity that he was restrained.
Moreover, he had not given up hope altogether, and he determined to return, and, unknown to his family, consult his old physician, who had inadvertently led him into this terrible dilemma, and adjure him to undo his work. He might aid in concealing the truth from those from whom, of all others, the unhappy man would hide his shame. This seemed his one last chance.
CHAPTER x.x.x
THE SECRET VICE REVEALED
On the day preceding Christmas, late in the afternoon, Roger Atwood boarded a steamer which had just arrived from a Southern city.
His uncle, the commission merchant, was expecting a consignment of tropical fruits, and as the young man stood among others waiting to see the freight clerk, he overheard one of the vessel"s officers remark, "His name is Jocelyn--so papers on his person indicate--and he must be sent to a hospital as soon as possible."
Advancing promptly to the speaker, Roger said, "I overheard your remark, sir, and think I know the gentleman to whom you refer. If I am right, I will take him to his family immediately."
The officer acted with such alacrity as to prove that he was very glad to get the sick man off his hands, and Roger noted the fact.
A moment later he saw Martin Jocelyn, sadly changed for the worse, and lying unconscious in a berth.
"I am right, I am very sorry to say," Roger said, after a moment, with a long, deep breath. "This will be a terrible shock to his family."
"Do you think he is dying?" the officer asked.
"I don"t know. I will bring a physician and take Mr. Jocelyn home on one condition--that our consignment of produce is delivered at once. I must be absent, and my employer"s interests must not suffer in consequence. I am doing you a favor, and you must return it just as promptly."
The freight clerk was summoned, and Roger was a.s.sured that his uncle"s consignment should take the precedence as fast as it could be reached. The young man then hastened to find the nearest physician, stopping a moment at his place of business to give a hurried explanation of his course. Mr. Atwood listened in silence, and nodded merely; but, as Roger hastened away, he muttered, "This mixing himself up with other people"s troubles isn"t very shrewd, but his making capital out of it so that my consignment will all be delivered to-night is--well, we"ll call it even. He"s no fool."
The physician was rather young and inexperienced, and he p.r.o.nounced Mr. Jocelyn"s trouble to be congestion of the brain. He agreed to go with Roger to the old mansion and do what he could for the patient, although holding out slight hope of recovery.
"She is learning to a.s.sociate me with misfortune, and will dread my presence as if I were a bird of ill-omen," Roger groaned mentally, as he recalled the several miserable occasions which, in the mind of Mildred, were inseparably connected with himself; "but some day--SOME DAY, if I have to strive for a lifetime--she shall also learn that it is not I who bring the trouble."
Christmas comes at the darkest and dreariest season of the year, making short, cold days, and longer, colder nights the holiday season, just as He, whose birth the day commemorates, comes to human hearts in the darkest and coldest hours of desolation. Even in the great city there were few homes so shadowed by poverty and sorrow that they were not brightened by some indications of the hallowed time. The old mansion, that once may have been embowered in evergreens, was again filled with the aromatic breath of the forest, for Roger had commissioned a friend in the country to send so large a supply to Belle that she was embarra.s.sed with riches of hemlock, laurel, and pine, which, although given away prodigally, left enough to transform their rooms into the aspect of bowers. Since they had not money for toys, they could make the Christmas-tide a time of wonder and delight to Fred and Minnie in this inexpensive way, and Mildred, who would naturally shrink from the wild mountain home of the evergreen boughs, found in weaving and arranging them into tasteful decorations a pleasure alloyed by only one thought--she was indebted for it to Roger Atwood, the silent yet determined rival of the man she loved. Though he buried his feeling in such profound silence, and hid all manifestation so carefully that even her intuition could not lay hold of any one thing, and say, "This proves it," she nevertheless felt the presence of his love, and sometimes thought she felt it all the more because of its strong repression. It almost vexed her that he made no advances, and gave her nothing to resent, while all the time he was seeking her with the whole force of his will, or at least waiting for some possibility of the future. When Belle proposed that he should help decorate their living-room, since they, at this season, had only the remnants of evenings to give, and were wearied, too, almost beyond the power for extra effort, she felt that for Belle"s sake she ought not to object, and that for her own sake she could not, so scrupulous had been the quiet, distant respect with which he had treated her.
When he came he seemed to antic.i.p.ate her thoughts and to obey her wishes in the arrangement of the greenery, even before she spoke, so keen was his observation and quick his sympathy with her mind.
These very facts increased her prejudice and dislike. He was too clever, too keen-sighted and appreciative. Had he been indifferent toward her, and not so observant, she would have soon learned to like him and enjoy his society, for he had a bright, piquant way of talking, and was seldom at a loss for words. In fact, he had plenty of ideas, and was fast gaining more. One reason why Mildred shrank from him in strengthening repulsion was because, in his absorbing interest and his quick comprehension of her thought and feeling, he came too near. Without intending it, and in spite of himself, he intruded on her woman"s privacy; for no matter how careful he might be, or how guarded she was in words or manner, she felt that he understood what was in her mind. Her natural impulse, therefore, was to shun his presence and suppress her own individuality when she could not escape him, for only an answering affection on her part could make such understanding appreciation acceptable.
Roger was not long in guessing quite accurately how he stood in her thoughts, and he was often much depressed. As he had said to Clara Bute, he had a downright dislike to contend against, and this might not change with his success. And now it was his misfortune to become a.s.sociated in her mind with another painful event--perhaps a fatal one. She might thank him sincerely for his kindness and the trouble he had taken in their behalf, but, all the same, deep in her heart, the old aversion would be strengthened.
"That invertebrate, Arnold," he muttered, "represents to her the old, happy life; I, her present life, and it"s my luck always to appear when things are at their worst. After to-night she will shudder with apprehension whenever she sees me. What WILL become of them if Mr. Jocelyn dies!"
Full of forebodings and distress at the shock and sorrow impending over those in whom he was so deeply interested, he and the physician placed Mr. Jocelyn in a covered express wagon that was improvised into an ambulance, and drove up town as rapidly as they dared.
In response to a low knock Mrs. Jocelyn opened the door, and the white, troubled face of Roger announced evil tidings before a word was spoken.
"My husband!" she gasped, sinking into a chair.
The young man knelt beside her and said, "Mrs. Jocelyn, his life may depend on your courage and fort.i.tude."
He had touched the right chord, and, after a momentary and half-convulsive sob, she rose quietly, and said, "Tell me what to do--tell me the worst."
"I have brought him with me, and I have a physician also. I found him on a steamer, by accident. They were about to send him to a hospital, but I was sure you would want him brought home."
"Oh, yes--G.o.d bless you--bring him, bring him quick."
"Courage. Good nursing will prevent the worst."
Roger hastened back to the patient, stopping on the way only long enough to ask Mrs. Wheaton to go to Mrs. Jocelyn"s room instantly, and then, with the physician"s aid, he carried the unconscious man to his room, and laid him on his bed.
"Oh, Martin! Martin!" moaned the wife, "how changed, how changed!
Oh, G.o.d! he"s dying."
"I hope not, madam," said the physician; "at any rate we must all keep our self-possession and do our best. While there is life there is hope."
With dilated eyes, and almost fierce repression of all aid from other hands, she took the clothing from the limp and wasted form.
"He IS dying," she moaned; "see how unnatural his eyes are; the pupils are almost gone. Oh, G.o.d! why did I let him go from me when he was so ill!"
"Would you not like Belle and Miss Mildred summoned at once?" Roger asked.
"Yes, yes, they ought to be here now; every moment may be precious, and he may become conscious."
"At the same time I would like you to call on Dr. Benton in Twenty-third Street," added the physician. "He is a friend of mine, and has had much experience. In so serious a case I would like to consult him."