Toward noon the next day Dumont emerged from the stupor into which
Doctor Sackett's opiate had plunged him. At once his mind began to
grope about for the broken clues of his business. His valet appeared.
"The morning papers," said Dumont.
"Yes, sir," replied the valet, and disappeared.
After a few seconds Culver came and halted just within the doorway.
"I'm sorry, sir, but Doctor Sackett left strict orders that you were to
be quiet. Your life depends on it."
Dumont scowled and his lower lip projected--the crowning touch in his
most imperious expression. "The papers, all of 'em,--quick!" he
commanded.
Culver took a last look at the blue-white face and bloodshot eyes to
give him courage to stand firm. "The doctor'll be here in a few
minutes," he said, bowed and went out.
Choking with impotent rage, Dumont rang for his valet and forced him to
help him dress. He was so weak when he finished that only his will
kept him from fainting. He took a stiff drink of the brandy--the odor
was sickening to him and he could hardly force it down. But once down,
it strengthened him.
"No, nothing to eat," he said thickly, and with slow but fairly steady
step left his room and descended to the library. Culver was there--sat
agape at sight of his master. "But you--you must not--" he began.
Dumont gave him an ugly grin. "But I will!" he said, and again drank
brandy. He turned and went out and toward the front door, Culver
following with stammering protests which he heeded not at all. On the
sidewalk he hailed a passing hansom. "To the Edison Building," he said
and drove off, Culver, bareheaded at the curb, looking dazedly after
him. Before he reached Fifty-ninth Street he was half-sitting,
half-reclining in the corner of the seat, his eyes closed and his
senses sinking into a stupor from the fumes of the powerful doses of
brandy. As the hansom drove down the avenue many recognized him,
wondered and pitied as they noted his color, his collapsed body, head
fallen on one side, mouth open and lips greenish gray. As the hansom
slowly crossed the tracks at Twenty-third Street the heavy jolt roused
him.
"The newspapers," he muttered, and hurled up through the trap in the
roof an order to the driver to stop. He leaned over the doors and
bought half a dozen newspapers of the woman at the Flat-iron stand. As
the hansom moved on he glanced at the head-lines--they were big and
staring, but his blurred eyes could not read them. He fell asleep
again, his hands clasped loosely about the huge proclamations of
yesterday's battle and his rout.
The hansom was caught in a jam at Chambers Street. The clamor of
shouting, swearing drivers roused him. The breeze from the open sea,
blowing straight up Broadway into his face, braced him like the tonic
that it is. He straightened himself, recovered his train of thought,
stared at one of the newspapers and tried to grasp the meaning of its
head-lines. But they made only a vague impression on him.
"It's all lies," he muttered. "Lies! How could those fellows smash
ME!" And he flung the newspapers out of the hansom into the faces of
two boys seated upon the tail of a truck.
"You're drunk early," yelled one of the boys.
"That's no one-day jag," shouted the other. "It's a hang-over."
He made a wild, threatening gesture and, as his hansom drove on,
muttered and mumbled to himself, vague profanity aimed at nothing and
at everything. At the Edison Building he got out.
"Wait!" he said to the driver. He did not see the impudent smirk on
the face of the elevator boy nor the hesitating, sheepish salutation of
the door-man, uncertain how to greet the fallen king. He went straight
to his office, unlocked his desk and, just in time to save himself from
fainting, seized and half-emptied a flask of brandy he kept in a
drawer. It had been there--but untouched ever since he came to New
York and took those offices; he never drank in business hours.
His head was aching horribly and at every throb of his pulse a pain
tore through him. He rang for his messenger.
"Tell Mr. Giddings I want to see him--you!" he said, his teeth clenched
and his eyes blazing--he looked insane.
Giddings came. His conscience was clear--he had never liked Dumont,
owed him nothing, yet had stood by him until further fidelity would
have ruined himself, would not have saved Dumont, or prevented the
Herron-Cassell raiders from getting control. Now that he could afford
to look at his revenge-books he was deeply resenting the insults and
indignities heaped upon him in the past five years. But he was unable
to gloat, was moved to pity, at sight of the physical and mental wreck
in that chair which he had always seen occupied by the most robust of
despots.
"Well," said Dumont in a dull, far-away voice, without looking at him.
"What's happened?"
Giddings cast about for a smooth beginning but could find none. "They
did us up--that's all," he said funereally.
Dumont lifted himself into a momentary semblance of his old look and
manner. "You lie, damn you!" he shouted, his mouth raw and ragged as a
hungry tiger's.
Giddings began to cringe, remembered the changed conditions, bounded to
his feet.
"I'll tolerate such language from no man!" he exclaimed. "I wish you
good morning, sir!" And he was on his way to the door.
"Come back!" commanded Dumont. And Giddings, the habit of implicit
obedience to that voice still strong upon him, hesitated and half
turned.
Dumont was more impressed with the truth of the cataclysm by Giddings'
revolt than by the newspaper head-lines or by Giddings' words. And
from somewhere in the depths of his reserve-self he summoned the last
of his coolness and self-control. "Beg pardon, Giddings," said he.
"You see I'm not well."
Giddings returned--he had taken orders all his life, he had submitted
to this master slavishly; the concession of an apology mollified him
and flattered him in spite of himself.
"Oh, don't mention it," he said, seating himself again. "As I was
saying, the raid was a success. I did the best I could. Some called
our loans and some demanded more collateral. And while I was fighting
front and rear and both sides, bang came that lie about your condition.
The market broke. All I could do was sell, sell, sell, to try to meet
or protect our loans."
Giddings heard a sound that made him glance at Dumont. His head had
fallen forward and he was snoring. Giddings looked long and pityingly.
"A sure enough dead one," he muttered, unconsciously using the slang of
the Street which he habitually avoided. And he went away, closing the
door behind him.
After half an hour Dumont roused himself--out of a stupor into a
half-delirious dream.
"Must get cash," he mumbled, "and look after the time loans." He lifted
his head and pushed back his hair from his hot forehead. "I'll stamp
on those curs yet!"
He took another drink--his hands were so unsteady that he had to use
both of them in lifting it to his lips. He put the flask in his pocket
instead of returning it to the drawer. No one spoke to him, all
pretended not to see him as he passed through the offices on his way to
the elevator. With glassy unseeing eyes he fumbled at the dash-board
and side of the hansom; with a groan like a rheumatic old man's he
lifted his heavy body up into the seat, dropped back and fell asleep.
A crowd of clerks and messengers, newsboys and peddlers gathered and
gaped, awed as they looked at the man who had been for five years one
of the heroes of the Street, and thought of his dazzling catastrophe.
"What's the matter?" inquired a new-comer, apparently a tourist, edging
his way into the outskirts of the crowd.
"That's Dumont, the head of the Woolens Trust," the curb-broker he
addressed replied in a low tone. "He was raided yesterday--woke up in
the morning worth a hundred millions, went to bed worth--perhaps five,
maybe nothing at all."
At this exaggeration of the height and depth of the disaster, awe and
sympathy became intense in that cluster of faces. A hundred millions
to nothing at all, or at most a beggarly five millions--what a dizzy
precipice! Great indeed must be he who could fall so far. The driver
peered through the trap, wondering why his distinguished fare endured
this vulgar scrutiny. He saw that Dumont was asleep, thrust down a
hand and shook him. "Where to, sir?" he asked, as Dumont straightened
himself.
"To the National Industrial Bank, you fool," snapped Dumont. "How many
times must I tell you?"
"Thank you, sir," said the driver--without sarcasm, thinking
steadfastly of his pay--and drove swiftly away.
Theretofore, whenever he had gone to the National Industrial Bank he
had been received as one king is received by another. Either eager and
obsequious high officers of King Melville had escorted him directly to
the presence, or King Melville, because he had a caller who could not
be summarily dismissed, had come out apologetically to conduct King
Dumont to another audience chamber. That day the third assistant
cashier greeted him with politeness carefully graded to the due of a
man merely moderately rich and not a factor in the game of high finance.
"Be seated, Mr. Dumont," he said, pointing to a chair just inside the
railing--a seat not unworthy of a man of rank in the plutocratic
hierarchy, but a man of far from high rank. "I'll see whether Mr.
Melville's disengaged."
Dumont dropped into the chair and his heavy head was almost immediately
resting upon his shirt-bosom. The third assistant cashier returned,
roused him somewhat impatiently. "Mr. Melville's engaged," said he.
"But Mr. Cowles will see you." Mr. Cowles was the third vice-president.
Dumont rose. The blood flushed into his face and his body shook from
head to foot. "Tell Melville to go to hell," he jerked out, the haze
clearing for a moment from his piercing, wicked eyes. And he stalked
through the gateway in the railing. He turned. "Tell him I'll tear
him down and grind him into the gutter within six months."
In the hansom again, he reflected or tried to reflect. But the lofty
buildings seemed to cast a black shadow on his mind, and the roar and
rush of the tremendous tide of traffic through that deep canon set his
thoughts to whirling like drink-maddened bacchanals dancing round a
punch-bowl. "That woman!" he exclaimed suddenly. "What asses they
make of us men! And all these vultures--I'm not carrion yet. But THEY
soon will be!" And he laughed and his thoughts began their crazy spin
again.
A newsboy came, waving an extra in at the open doors of the hansom.
"Dumont's downfall!" he yelled in his shrill, childish voice. "All
about the big smash!"
Dumont snatched a paper and flung a copper at the boy.
"Gimme a tip on Woolens, Mr. Dumont," said the boy, with an impudent
grin, balancing himself for flight. "How's Mrs. Fanshaw?"
The newspapers had made his face as familiar as the details of his
private life. He shrank and quivered. He pushed up the trap. "Home!"
he said, forgetting that the hansom and driver were not his own.
"All right, Mr. Dumont!" replied the driver. Dumont shrank again and
sat cowering in the corner--the very calling him by his name, now a
synonym for failure, disgrace, ridicule and contempt, seemed a subtile
insult.
With roaring brain and twitching, dizzy eyes he read at the newspaper's
account of his overthrow. And gradually there formed in his mind a
coherent notion of how it had come to pass, of its extent; of why he
found himself lying in the depths, the victim of humiliations so
frightful that they penetrated even to him, stupefied and crazed with
drink and fever though he was. His courage, his self-command were
burnt up by the brandy. His body had at last revolted, was having its
terrible revenge upon the mind that had so long misused it in every
kind of indulgence.
"I'm done for--done for," he repeated audibly again and again, at each
repetition looking round mentally for a fact or a hope that would deny
this assertion--but he cast about in vain. "Yes, I'm done for." And
flinging away the newspaper he settled back and ceased to try to think
of his affairs. After a while tears rolled from under his blue
eyelids, dropped haltingly down his cheeks, spread out upon his lips,
tasted salt in his half-open mouth.
The hansom stopped before his brick and marble palace. The butler
hurried out and helped him alight--not yet thirty-seven, he felt as if
he were a dying old man. "Pay the cabby," he said and groped his way
into the house and to the elevator and mechanically ran himself up to
his floor. His valet was in his dressing-room. He waved him away.
"Get out! And don't disturb me till I ring."
"The doctor--" began Mallow.
"Do as I tell you!"
When he was alone he poured out brandy and gulped it down a drink that
might have eaten the lining straight out of a stomach less powerful
than his. He went from door to door, locking them all. Then he seated
himself in a lounging-chair before the long mirror. He stared toward
the image of himself but was so dim-eyed that he could see nothing but
spinning black disks. "Life's not such a good game even when a man's
winning," he said aloud. "A rotten bad game when he's losing."
His head wabbled to fall forward but he roused himself. "Wife gone--"
The tears flooded his eyes--tears of pity for himself, an injured and
abandoned husband. "Wife gone," he repeated. "Friends gone--" He
laughed sardonically. "No, never had friends, thank God, or I
shouldn't have lasted this long. No such thing as friends--a man gets
what he can pay for. Grip gone--luck gone! What's the use?"
He dozed off, presently to start into acute, shuddering consciousness.
At the far end of the room, stirring, slowly oozing from under the
divan was a--a Thing! He could not define its shape, but he knew that
it was vast, that it was scaly, with many short fat legs tipped with
claws; that its color was green, that its purpose was hideous, gleaming
in craft from large, square, green-yellow eyes. He wiped the sticky
sweat from his brow. "It's only the brandy," he said loudly, and the
Thing faded, vanished. He drew a deep breath of relief.
He went to a case of drawers and stood before it, supporting himself by
the handles of the second drawer. "Yes," he reflected, "the revolver's
in that drawer." He released the handles and staggered back to his
chair. "I'm crazy," he muttered, "crazy as a loon. I ought to ring
for the doctor."
In a moment he was up again, but instead of going toward the bell he
went to the drawers and opened the second one. In a compartment lay a
pearl-handled, self-cocking revolver. He put his hand on it, shivered,
drew his hand away--the steel and the pearl were cold. He closed the
drawer with a quick push, opened it again slowly, took up the revolver,
staggered over to his desk and laid it there. His face was chalk-white
in spots and his eyes were stiff in their sockets. He rested his
aching, burning, reeling head on his hands and stared at the revolver.
"But," he said aloud, as if contemptuously dismissing a suggestion,
"why should I shoot myself? I can smash 'em all--to powder--grind 'em
into the dirt."
He took up the revolver. "What'd be the use of smashing 'em?" he said
wearily. He felt tired and sick, horribly sick.
He laid it down. "I'd better be careful," he thought. "I'm not in my
right mind. I might--"
He took it in his hand and went to the mirror and put the muzzle
against his temple. He laughed crazily. "A little pressure on that
trigger and--bang! I'd be in kingdom come and shouldn't give a damn
for anybody." He caught sight of his eyes in the mirror and hastily
dropped his arm to his side. "No, I'd never shoot myself in the
temple. The heart'd be better. Just here"--and he pressed the muzzle
into the soft material of his coat--"if I touched the trigger--"
And his finger did touch the trigger. Pains shot through his chest
like cracks radiating in glass when a stone strikes it. He looked at
his face--white, with wild eyes, with lips blue and ajar, the sweat
streaming from his forehead.
"What have I done?" he shrieked, mad with the dread of death. "I must
call for help." He turned toward the door, plunged forward, fell
unconscious, the revolver flung half-way across the room.
When he came to his senses he was in his bed--comfortable, weak, lazy.
With a slight effort he caught the thread of events. He turned his
eyes and saw a nurse, seated at the head of his bed, reading. "Am I
going to die?" he asked--his voice was thin and came in faint gusts.
"Certainly not," replied the nurse, putting down her book and standing
over him, her face showing genuine reassurance and cheerfulness.
"You'll be well very soon. But you must lie quiet and not talk."
"Was it a bad wound?"
"The fever was the worst. The bullet glanced round just under the
surface."
"It was an accident," he said, after a moment's thought. "I suppose
everybody is saying I tried to kill myself."
"'Everybody' doesn't know anything about it. Almost nobody knows.
Even the servants don't know. Your secretary sent them away, broke in
and found you."
He closed his eyes and slept.
When he awoke again he felt that a long time had passed, that he was
much better, that he was hungry. "Nurse!" he called.
The woman at the head of the bed rose and laid a cool hand upon his
forehead. "How good that feels," he mumbled gratefully. "What nice
hands you have, nurse," and he lifted his glance to her face. He
stared wonderingly, confusedly. "I thought I was awake and almost
well," he murmured. "And instead, I'm out of my head."
"Can I do anything for you?" It certainly was HER voice.
"Is it you, Pauline?" he asked, as if he feared a negative answer.
"Yes--John."