Conspiracy (England)/Chapter 5

found Martin Wingate ashore, diverting himself as best a prisoner under guard could possibly do; for under guard he most decidedly was. As he wandered along the beach, the eye of the saturnine Zanelli observed him from no great distance.

“This comes to an absolute game of blackjacking and hold-up,” Wingate analyzed the situation. He had seen the yacht's tender—long, slender, and speedy—emerge from behind a wooded point and fade away toward the mainland, which he knew lay somewhere off to westward. “The wireless Jaccard forced me to send, and the note I had to give him, will open my safe deposit box for him at the Southern Trust Company, right enough! I'll be lucky if the damned crook doesn't cut and run, after that, and leave me here high and dry!”

The prospect of being deprived of his drug terrified him even more than that of losing a few hundred thousand dollars. He cursed Jaccard, morphine, sea, and sky—everything but his own enslaving habit. In poisonous bad humor, he pushed on along the sand.

Yes, Jaccard had him sewed up, tight and fast—no doubt of that! The captain had him outplayed at every point. Even the chance of escape by suicide was cut off, with the watchful Zanelli ever on guard. Was there anything Jaccard had overlooked? Absolutely nothing, even to the explanation as to why Wingate needed money.

“Ready cash to close an important real estate deal here at Beaufort,” the wireless message had said.

Yes, that would get by. It was reasonable enough to suppose that the yacht had really put in at Beaufort. The wireless in code, and the note signed with Wingate's own signature, would suffice for all demands. Never was any rat in a trap so rat-proof as he was now!

Then hope whispered, as hope always does, in darkest moments:

“Cheer up! Something may happen yet!”

Something, the financier told himself, was bound to turn up before these crooks stripped him bare. But what? His well-known erratic habits favored the plotters. He might vanish from the world, almost indefinitely, without exciting suspicion. More than once he had disappeared for a month or two, without anybody seeming to notice, to care.

“Another sanitarium, perhaps!”—that would cover much.

“Damn them, they may pick me to the bare bones!” Wingate's thought swung back to low ebb. “Never was a plot more carefully organized than this!”

He groaned at thought of adventurers like these making ducks and drakes of his fortune.

It was now financial worry, more than physical pain, that oppressed him. In body, he felt as well as usual—which, though far from good health, was at least bearable. Before Jaccard had taken his departure, Wingate had bought and paid for six more tablets. Though this purchase had used up all his eight thousand dollars, the supply would keep him going for nearly twenty-four hours. He knew that he would be free from pain for practically a whole day—a blessed assurance!

For the immediate present, his real terror lurked in the possibility that Jaccard might never come back at all. Wingate weighed the captain's statement:

“Of course I'll come back, because if I stick with the game I can get more out of it, in the end, than as if I bolted now with what I can get my hands on.”

Yes—that sounded reasonable. Wingate could only hope and pray that the captain meant it. Otherwise, unspeakable agony loomed inevitable.

Strange it seemed that human fear and hate and anguish could exist in so halcyon an island! A charming place, that—one of the innumerable sea islands strewn along the Southern coast. Back from the beach rolled dunes, grass-grown and topped with palmettos that whispered in the softest of ocean breezes. Among the semitropical undergrowth wild goats bleated, trampled, browsed—descendants, no doubt, of some that long ago had been cast ashore from shipwrecked vessels, or had been left by fishermen, beach combers, or the like.

The beach itself stretched in a long curve, gleaming in the bright sunshine. Here and there some ship's timber or twisted bit of iron told of hurricanes. Now and again double rows of marks showed where great lumbering sea tortoises had dragged themselves up to lay their eggs, or had again plowed back to the Atlantic.

Underfoot, billions of sea shells glistened and as Wingate trod upon them—small conchs, angel wings, earrings, bull's-eyes, and many another species common to those latitudes. What a paradise for a conchologist! Even in spite of his mental perturbation, Wingate could not refrain from picking up a few, admiring their rare perfection of form, their delicate and lustrous gradations of color. How lavish nature was in wasted beauty!

“Well, I suppose if I've got to be marooned and have my financial throat cut,” he grumbled, “it might better be here than in some dingy, ugly place!” He smiled a bit grimly. “At least I'll give Jaccard credit for good taste in picking out his jail for me!”

Lazily the long, creamy surfs rolled in and in, curled over, and broke to swift-running lines of silver spray. Something almost hypnotic soothed the millionaire as he watched the unending succession of blue ridges trundle slowly ashore and crumble to dazzling white. He breathed more deeply than in a good while, straightened his bent shoulders, and felt vague, intangible longings, revocations tenuous as the stuff of dreams.

Scudding flights of sandpipers flitted away before him. Over the surf flapped slow, heavy-billed pelicans, with an immense splashing as they plunged for fish. Afar, like puffs of soot, black ducks cradled in immense flotillas on the sun-sparkled waters.

Under circumstances at all normal, what a paradise! As Wingate, clad in the most immaculate white, strolled along the shining sands, with the smoke from his cigar drifting on the summer breeze—he looked far other than a trapped victim of greed, with suffering, hate, bafflement, and perhaps bankruptcy all on the cards for him. True, his face was haggard, wan, and wrinkled; but the general effect was that of a rich man who, having come ashore in his cedar dinghy from his anchored yacht, was taking a quiet stroll for his own pleasure along the most delightful of all imaginable beaches.

He walked nearly to the island's northern end, and stood at gaze there. Very far, looms of low-lying shadows told of other islands. To westward, a drift of something miragelike and indeterminate hinted at the mainland. To eastward stretched an immensity of sea, broken only by a single scarf of smudge that bespoke a steamer.

Isolation! A vast, primal loneliness overbrooded sea and sky and all the world. Save for the figure of the alert Zanelli, always on guard, Wingate might have been some modern Crusoe on a veritable Juan Fernandez.

“Jaccard certainly made a fine job of it when he picked out this place!” he thought bitterly. “A fellow might stay here a year, and nobody would ever come near him. If I was on Kerguelen, I wouldn't be more out of the world!”

A little tired by the unusual exercise—for, like all addicts, he was physically inert—he turned and retraced his steps toward the cove. Zanelli waited in silence till Wingate had passed, then continued to shadow him. Not so much as by a word or glance did the millionaire recognize the steward's existence. He loathed, he hated Zanelli; and yet somehow it was hard to hate and loathe, on this delectable island.

A certain well-being possessed him, engendered by the cheery sun, the fresh sea air, the feel of the crisp, clean sand. Wingate felt even a touch of the adventurous, the exotic. Yes, the place had—for a few minutes, at any rate—changed his self-centered habit of thought. The millionaire almost forgot his anger, his fear. He could almost find it in his heart to enjoy this island of mystery.

“Really, this place mightn't be so infernally bad, eh?” he murmured with something like a smile. “Under other circumstances, not bad at all!”

Vague ideas of romance, of moonlight on embayed waters, of femininity, drifted through his mind, long a stranger to such thoughts. What a place for a honeymoon! For the first time since he had ragingly jammed his wife's photograph into his locker, he thought of her—of her, whom he had not even seen in so long! A gentler and more human expression softened his tensed features and lighted his eyes.

But this expression faded swiftly as he saw the Voyageur lying there in the little cove. Reawakening his consciousness of degrading servitude and compulsion, the yacht banished every thought but hatefulness and impotent rebellion.

Forgetting nature's beauties and his own temporarily softened mood, he clenched his thin fists, peered at the yacht with venomous eyes, and cursed the captain with an intense malice shocking to hear.

“I'll have the heart out of you yet, you son of a sea wolf!” he spat, poisoned with a malignant hate beyond all telling.

It was not until next day, toward noon, that Jaccard returned, with the tender and two seamen. He came aboard up the accommodation ladder, and gestured for the sailors to be off. They backed their long, slender craft—powerfully engined, and with a cabin forward—and swung it in a long circle out of the cove, disappearing round a wooded point to southward. No doubt they were withdrawing to some nook or corner of the island which they could use as a base for patrolling the coast, and where they would be out of Wingate's reach, should he think of attempting to bribe them. Evidently Jaccard was not the man to overlook even the most minute detail.

The captain found his victim in bad shape, as the result of having miscalculated the time requisite for the trip. That morning Wingate had used the last of his drug, and once more he was on the edge of the painful gulf.

“Well, so you're here, eh?” he growled, as Jaccard entered his little cabin. “It's about time, I should think!”

“Yes, I'm here,” the captain smilingly replied, handing over a bulky package. “Here's what you sent me for—cash, bonds. quite a bundle of stuff. It's all there. I haven't touched a penny of it. Honesty, strict honesty—that's my motto!”

Wingate snarled at him:

“Like hell! If you're an honest man, I'm a wise one! If I was, I'd break away from this Gehenna of morphine, and tell you all to go to fire and brimstone, where you belong!”

“Ah, but you can't break away, you see!” laughed Jaccard. “You can't, and you know it. You've tried before now, and you've always failed. It's nearly killed you, with suffering.”

“That's enough, from you!”

“It's a safe bet no old-timer as a dope fiend—nobody who's been taking the stuff for years—can ever get clear,” the captain blandly continued, eying Wingate with enjoyment of his obvious misery. “You'll never get clear. You haven't the stamina, the will power—to be plain, the guts!”

“You know a devil of a lot about me, don't you?”

“I know enough. You're a weakling, and you'll pay through the nose for it. Zanelli and I can clean up a million or more, on you. It's too easy!”

“Too easy, eh? Don't you be so sure!” Wingate threw at him with venom. “I might die, yet, and fool you!”

“Oh, no, you won't die. What is there to kill you, except stopping the dope?” Jaccard laughed with real enjoyment. “And as I said before, you'll never stop. After all, what's your money, compared to the living hell of trying to cut out the stuff? All that a man hath, you know, he'll give for his life.”

“You're the devil of a fine man to be quoting the Bible!”

“Well, you know Shakespeare says even the devil can quote it for his purpose; but never mind about that. How many tablets do you want now?”

Wingate would have given the world to shout: “None!” at him, and to consign both Jaccard and Zanelli to the bottomless pit; but a compulsion stronger than any will power gripped and bound him. He bowed to it, humbled his pride, and between set teeth growled:

“Give me six—and then clear out!”

“Six it is! All orders promptly and cheerfully filled! Let's see—at fifteen hundred per, that comes to nine thousand dollars. Come on—pay up!”

Cursing, Wingate opened the packet, and with unsteady fingers counted out the money. Jaccard duly delivered the drug.

“When you want any more, just let me know,” he said in parting.

Wingate kicked the door shut, even before Jaccard could close it, and shot the bolt. Alone, he swallowed two tablets, took a big drink of water, and sat there shivering, trembling, his every atom poisoned with hate.

Jaccard's mockery and laughter, his contemptuous utterance of such words as “dope fiend” and “weakling,” still echoed in the wretched captive's ears. Almost in a paroxysm of loathing for himself and his torturers—yes, even for all mankind—Wingate flung himself into his berth. He lay there, gasping, with a thin on his lips. His nether lip was bleeding sullenly, where he had bitten it.

Gradually, however, under the miraculous effect of the drug, pain and tension relaxed. Anger died down to smoldering resentment, like ashes of old fires. A certain degree of peace came to his troubled spirit. He slept.

Next day he awoke to the determination that, come what might, he would break this degrading bondage—that he would never again humiliate himself before these underlings, his own employees. Yes, he might die, but he would never yield. He had forever taken his last tablet!

Brave was the decision, made while some of the drug was still circulating in his veins. Not too difficult was computation of the cost:

“If Jaccard increases the price five hundred dollars a tablet, per day, it will run into impossible money. Why, these hell hounds will have me cleaned out in two or three weeks! Ill beat them to it—I'll quit!”

But gradually the old agony came on again. In spite of every effort to read, to walk the deck of the beautiful yacht, to write letters—to be sent, when?—even to go ashore, the misery increased.

The familiar and appalling sensations of restlessness and aching, the sweating weakness, the ratlike gnawing in the stomach, came once more. Then the heart began to jump and thrash, the raw nerves to quiver; the very bottom seemed to be falling out of the universe. Withal came exhausting fits of sneezing, panic fears, an indescribably horrible sensation of lassitude and pain.

Sleepless, in the most intense and growing torture, Wingate fought the demon till three o'clock in the morning of the third day. Then, suddenly, half a madman, he capitulated. He could stand no more. His last ounce of strength wrung to exhaustion, on the verge of collapse, and fearing death itself, he rang for Zanelli and told him to summon the captain.

“You don't have to see him, sir,” the steward replied, leering with scantily veiled insolence. “I'll do just as well.”

“What—what do you mean?” demanded Wingate, haggard and emaciated in those mockingly festive pongee pyjamas.

“I can get you your medicine, sir—and collect for it.”

“Get to hell out of here! Send me the captain!”

Zanelli shook a decisive head.

“No, sir. Sorry, but I can't do it. He gave positive orders that he wasn't to be disturbed.”

“You insolent pup! Go get him!”

The steward smiled and withdrew. Wingate went trembling, groveling after him, whipped to heel by forces stronger than his utmost will.

From Zanelli's scornful hand he took three tablets, now at two thousand dollars each. Then, loathing, hating himself as no man ever hated and loathed, cursing himself, but thrilled with ghoulish rapture in possession of his demoniac drug, he staggered feebly back to his cabin and locked himself in.

Laughing, blaspheming, praying, racked and shaken, he dissolved two of the tablets in water and drank the water at a gulp.

Thus presently he found relief again.

But until the red, hot morning burned across the island of torment, he sat there at his desk. He sagged there, beaten, self-hating, in blind despair.

Ahead of him there yawned bottomless abysses, there beckoned miasmatic paths that led—whither?