Part 31 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+pboard 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p? 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.”