Conspiracy (England)/Chapter 6

for Martin Wingate fell into a singular routine.

Well supplied now with the means of purchase, and with plenty of the drug in sight, the most horrifying fear of his situation—for the immediate present, at least—had been banished. He became as contented as any soul can be that feels itself suspended over hell by one thin thread.

What the future might bring he dared not think. He dared not look ahead and question. Black, terrifying prospects loomed. Like all of us, confronted with ultimate disaster, he closed his eyes and tried to whisper:

“Somehow, some way, this can be fled away from!”

A morphine victim, if only his daily supply seems assured, adopts the maxim that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; and Wingate reasoned thus. At certain hours, however, especially at night, appalling terrors gripped the unfortunate man—presciences of disaster, of agony and death. Now and then his thoughts turned toward the wife and the little son whom he had not only forsaken, but was swiftly ruining, robbing, depriving of the money that—since he would not sacrifice himself—he should have protected for their sake.

At such times, a very Gehenna of torment made him writhe. He fought to put such ponderings away, to bar the gates of memory against them.

Two or three days of lying idle in the stifling yacht—anchored in the cove, and as motionless as “a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—ran the former magnate's nerves ragged. A deadly grind was such inaction under the sun-drenched awnings, on that white-painted, mahogany-paneled, brass-polished thing of beauty. No wicker chairs, no novels or magazines from the yacht's library, no cool drinks chilled by the little ice machine and served by the mockingly obsequious Zanelli, could allay the fever in Wingate's blood. A prisoner, he stifled.

“See here, Jaccard, I can't stand this!” he said at last. “I'd rather have a bit of tarpaulin on the beach, or sleep on the bare sand. Anything to get away from the damned monotony of this double-damned yacht!”

“How about some fishing, sir? There's uncommonly good mullet, sheepshead, and sea bass here, and you might possibly hook a tarpon. We could take the dinghy, and—”

“Who's 'we'? You think I'd go fishing with any of this gang of pirates?”

“You might go with one of the engineers, sir. Neither of them is in on this game. They think you're just an invalid, here for your health. Maclvor's a fine young chap, and Hazeltine's still better.”

“No—I'm not going to broil in this sun, for anybody! All I want is to get ashore, where I can stretch my legs, and look at the birds and bugs and ants—if there are any here. Just to get out of sight of you and Zanelli, anywhere!”

“We really can't let you out of our sight altogether; but we might camouflage ourselves a little, sir. Not a bad idea at all!” Jaccard spoke with the suavity that had always marked his manner before the trap was sprung. Now that all was going as if on rollers, and Wingate no longer be-slanged and cursed him, he had resumed his air of deference—though one sensed that it was the thinnest of masks. “The three of us might as well live ashore.”

“You two, as well?”

“Oh, naturally—though not intruding on you unnecessarily. If we were ashore, it would look more like a fishing camp, if anybody happened to cruise in here; and it would certainly be a lot more comfortable. When do you want to go?”

“When? Now!”

“Come along, then, sir. I dare say you'll be surprised.”

“At what? After what you've done to me, I guess there's nothing on this island to surprise me!”

To this Jaccard vouchsafed no reply. He ordered the one remaining seaman down the ladder into the dinghy tied alongside. This fellow, stolid and silent, rowed Wingate, Jaccard, and Zanelli ashore.

Not five minutes after landing on the beach, Wingate found that the captain had prophesied truly. To say that the millionaire was surprised by what he saw expressed it mildly indeed.

Some three hundred yards back from the shore, in a small clearing edged with palmetto thickets, he found a couple of little portable houses—bungalows, rather—with broad porches and well screened windows. He stared at them with contracted, varnished-looking eyes.

“How the devil did these get here?” he demanded. “Somebody been here before, and left them?”

“No, sir. As you see, they're quite new,” replied Jaccard. “So far as I know, Tortugas Key hasn't been occupied in a good many years. I had these little huts brought out here and stuck together, when the idea first occurred to me about this pleasant game we're playing.”

Struck dumb, the millionaire could only make an odd, gulping noise; but in a moment words came.

“Well, by God! You are a thorough-going crook, I must say!”

“Thanks, sir,” returned the captain, not perturbed. “Anything that's worth doing at all, you know—”

He knocked out the dottle of his pipe, in his broad hand, and filled the bowl once more.

“Yes,” he went on, “I made every sort of provision for the affair. It was a bit of a job, I'll admit, getting these portable houses freighted out here and set up. Cost me a tidy lot of money, too; but it's turning out a good investment. Hope you'll like your quarters, sir. I'm sure you will, after you've looked 'em over.”

Wingate uttered a short, explosive laugh.

“You're a wonder!” he exclaimed, with real admiration. “Better cut this kidnaping, blackmailing, conspiring game, and come into my office as a partner. In the legitimate business game, with your brains, energy, daring, and foresight, you would—”

“No, thanks, sir! I never cared for business. The sea for mine! Once I make my pile out of this present matter, I'm off. My next address will be somewhere east of Suez; but never mind about me. You're the only important factor here. Take a look at your little camp, sir, and see how you like it.”

Amazed, Wingate followed his captor to the larger of the bungalows. Jaccard threw open the door, and stood aside for him to enter through a broad, screened porch.

A pleasanter and more homelike little place it would have been difficult to fancy. Wingate saw two rooms, coolly carpeted with grass rugs; a well cushioned wicker couch; a trim white iron bed. He saw hooks and shelves in abundance; lamps all filled and ready; window shades and muslin curtains swaying in the sea breeze that came through half a dozen well screened windows.

“Well, I'll be damned!”

“I hope not,” smiled the captain. “That is, not till after you and I have got through our little matter of business. If you're satisfied here, all you've got to do is move in. It's pretty nearly complete, but I'll fix it up a bit more for you. All the comforts of home, you see! Here's your thermos bottle, for cold drinks. Here's your washstand, all slick as pins. You'll be snugger than the majority of bugs.”

“You've got me all dated up for a long stay, I guess, eh?”

“That depends on how long your money holds out—or such money as I can get at, without running my neck into any nooses. I'll have some of the wicker chairs from the yacht put in here—the library, too, and the phonograph. Your meals will be served here, hot or cold—vacuum containers, you know; though a man in your situation may not care much for eating. Here's an electric push button. It's wired to a bell in the other camp. Either Zanelli or I will be on duty there all the time. You've only got to punch that button, to get service—medical or otherwise. Fact is, I've done everything for your comfort here that I could think of.”

“I should think you might,” sneered the prisoner, “with me paying for it all, at anywhere from ten or twelve thousand dollars a day up!”

“It comes high, but we have to have it,” Jaccard mocked. “You'll admit there's everything here—or is going to be—that any reasonable man might want.”

“Yes,” said Wingate caustically, “everything, except the one thing all Americans insist on—liberty!”

“Ah, we won't discuss that,” replied the captain, with a wave of his massive hand; “but otherwise it's satisfactory?”

Wingate nodded silently.

“And you've decided to take it?”

“Go to the devil!” the millionaire flared out. “What else can I do?”

Jaccard laughed with an enjoyment that turned the iron in the captive's soul. What would he not have given for revenge on this tormentor?

Brooding, Wingate went to a window and stood looking through the palmettos at the sunlit glimpse of blue that marked the sea—the sea, beyond which lay liberty.

Within two hours, everything he wanted had been brought from the Voyageur and cozily installed. The bungalow assumed a homelike air. Wingate took charge of the moving in, and even carried some of the things. Anything for employment!

Looking over his desk and lockers, he came upon the photograph of Constance and little Hugh. A stab of shame pierced him as he looked at the bent frame and the broken glass. He removed the photograph, laid it carefully in a book, and carried the book ashore with him.

In the bungalow he set the photograph on one of the shelves, and for a moment stood silently regarding it. Then, impassively, he turned away. After all, a man like himself—what had such to do with wife or son? “Dope fiend!” The captain's words echoed in his memory. Wingate flushed dully through his parchment skin, and busied himself arranging the books brought in boxes by the seaman.

But once or twice his glance flitted to photograph, and for a moment rested there.

Existence dropped into a languid routine that would have been idyllic, if under its apparent calm the grim reality of a most slavish incarceration had not lurked.

Tortugas Key was a terrestrial paradise, for the most part; though toward its southern end lay low, swampy land, about which Jaccard cautioned the prisoner.

“No telling, you know, sir, what kind of snakes and things might be down that way!”

Wingate was apparently free to come and go, to read, smoke, or loaf about, to amuse himself as he liked. He explored most of the island, casually, as his strength permitted. He knew that the tender was hidden away in some cove or other, as a patrol, in case he should make any attempt to escape—though how that could possibly be done he failed to understand—but he never found any trace of the little vessel. Perhaps, thought he, it might lie in some creek or inlet in the swampy part of the island, which he dared not penetrate. Jaccard's remark about snakes stuck in his memory. Rattlers, cotton-mouthed moccasins, venomous Southern reptiles—no, the millionaire wanted no encounters with such!

He found that the island was about two miles long and from half to three-quarters of a mile wide, much indented with bays and lagoons, and well wooded with palms, palmettos, live oaks, water oaks, and gum trees. In the woods, the branches drooped under immense streamers of gray Spanish moss, through which the breeze sometimes made eerie little whistlings, as of elvish orchestras. In places, wild grapevines and lianas knit the trees with fantastic loopings. Holly and mistletoe grew there, too; and at sight of these -the captive's eyes would soften with memories.

“Damned strange that the symbols of the Northern Christmas grow only down here in the South!” he mused.

Holly, mistletoe! Wingate did not like to see them. Too poignantly they evoked other and better days. Still, on one of his rambles, he broke off a spray of holly with gay red berries, which he took to his bungalow and laid on the shelf under the photograph of Constance and little Hugh. The mistletoe he could not reach, for that grew high in topmost branches.

“What an infernal fool I am!” he sneered the next day, and threw the spray into the wastebasket beside the wicker table that had been brought from the Voyageur; but on the day after that, he picked it out of the basket again, and replaced it on the shelf.

Days passed, each like the rest, save when some sudden, drumming rainstorm burst over sea and island, only to be swiftly followed by a glorious clearing off, golden and crimson as the sun set over bright waters. A horrible ennui possessed the captive. Much as his drug habit had made him hate and shun his fellow men, he found that after all he missed even slight contacts with them.

The lack of any business news chafed and irked him unspeakably. Books bored him. His attention wandered, and he could read no more than a page or two, even in his most capacious chair on the screened porch, without tossing his book away and cursing its author.

“What do they know about stories?” he would growl. “Damned pack of lies, made up out of whole cloth! If they'd only come to me, now, I could give them a story!”

But at the thought that his story might ever become known, he shrank and quivered. No, no, come what might, never should the world know this shameful thing that had befallen him!

Driven desperate by idleness, he finally overcame his aversion for fishing, and decided to go out with Jaccard. With the engineers he would not associate, fearful lest they might in some way, through some slip of his tongue, fathom the real situation. He ordered the dinghy, and had tackle and bait prepared.

That little expedition was the first of several. For some hours he and his jailer would sit silently in the boat, out on some calm lagoon where now or then porpoises breached, or where a shark finned up. There they would try their Waltonian luck, which was usually good. How could it be otherwise, in such teeming waters?

Once Wingate hooked a tarpon, but he lacked strength to land it. He had to pass the rod to Jaccard, and could do no less than admire the captain's strength and skill in a two-hour battle that began in a cove and ended more than a mile at sea.

That day the two men talked together almost like friends. Even the captive's hate was for the moment forgotten in the enthusiasm of battle; but after the huge fish lay on the Voyageur's deck, the old sullen spirit returned. Wingate remembered that this very day Jaccard had robbed him of forty thousand dollars.

“If only I could fix it some way to blow up the yacht, with Jaccard and Zanelli aboard!” he darkly pondered, his heart leaping at the thought.

Yes, gladly he would have sacrificed that half-million-dollar marvel, for vengeance's sweet sake!

The island offered splendid shooting. Ducks of many kinds—mallard, teal, red-head, diver—swarmed all about it. There was a colony of egrets, too, and one of flamingos. So many miles at sea, who was there to enforce game laws? But though Jaccard and Zanelli now and then brought in a few wild fowl, which made a welcome change in the menu, they never invited their prisoner to hunt with them. Fishing tackle was all very well to put into Wingate's hands, but firearms—never!

The captive chafed under his restrictions—chafed bitterly, with much red-hot profanity. The whole thing was a ghastly mockery. Here he was on this paradisiac island, with every want supplied save one, and that one was the greatest of all—freedom! Though his jailers' watchfulness never became obtrusive, still he always felt it lurking, spying. Always one or the other of them remained in sight. They haunted him like an obsession.

“Prison—that's what it is!” he fumed. “And a damned sight stronger prison than any ever built of stone and steel. I'm in prison here, and at fabulous expense per day!”

In the rare moments when his mind grew completely lucid, he would pace the floor of his bungalow, agonized with hate and humiliation, mentally inflicting the most hideous punishments on the captain and Zanelli, imagining vain things.

On the morning of the tenth day he awoke to a terrible realization. His money was running dangerously low again, and he would have to send for more. Every day, Just at noon, Jaccard presented himself for payment, and for the delivery to Wingate of the morphine ration for the following twenty-four hours. Now hardly enough money remained for one day more.

Wingate had standardized his dosage at ten grains per diem. The daily price having advanced five hundred dollars a grain, eleven days' supply had cost him more than three hundred thousand dollars. Merciful Heaven!

This discovery gave Wingate a terrific shock.

“To-morrow will cost me sixty-five thousand,” he realized; “and the day after, seventy. I won't have that much money left. I'll only have enough for four grains!”

That spelled agony. Out of his fool's paradise of temporary relief there surged a specter of torment, perhaps of death.

“Good Lord, I've got to get busy again, and raise a lot more money!”

So indeed it fell out. Jaccard remained adamant against any suggestion of a final cash settlement—the prisoner to pay a lump sum and to receive his liberty.

“Nothing doing, sir,” said the captain, sitting with Wingate on the bungalow porch, and very contentedly smoking an excellent cigar. “That is, unless you make over all your business and real estate holdings to me, and stay here under guard till I can cash in on them. After that, I'll come back and release you. No—better still, I'll wireless Zanelli to take you ashore.”

“What?” exclaimed Wingate, aghast.

“Oh, yes, I've thought it all out,” the captain went on. “It can be worked easily enough. By the time you get ashore, I'll be—elsewhere. Zanelli can take care of himself. He'll make his get-away, all right enough, and later I'll whack up with him.”

“You insufferable scoundrel!” snarled Wingate. “Give you all I've got, and ruin myself?”

“Well, why not? You're ruined, anyhow. What are you worth to yourself, to your wife and family, or to anybody else? You're a drag on them and on your business. You've got no will power left, no manhood. There's nothing ahead of you but to go nutty and die in a padded cell. Besides, what is it to me whether you're ruined or not? I'm looking out for myself. Well, what do you say? Buy yourself free with your whole wad, at once, or shall I get the code book again and frame out another touch on the bank?”

Unable to speak, Wingate choked and gasped. His wan face grew livid, distorted, horrible. His clawlike hands gripped the arms of the chair. A soul in hell, he writhed.

Jaccard laughed easily, and got up.

“Well, which is it to be?”

“Go get—get the code book!” gulped the millionaire.

An hour later, from the beach at one point of the cove, he heard the rapid-fire prrrrrrr of the powerful tender, and presently saw it slitting the sea, westward bound. Aboard it was Jaccard, with the two seamen.

Wingate's face, as he watched the speedy craft melt into the semitropical haze and fade away over the long swell, was a mask of such agony as Doré never drew in his pictures of the inferno.

“Oh, God, if it would only catch fire, burn, sink!” he groaned. Then, after a pause: “Prison—and I've turned the key on myself!”

He cursed himself. Then, with bent head, dejected and abased to the depths, he dragged back to the bungalow. He flung himself down on the wicker couch and abandoned himself to loathing and self-hate.

Another day of torment dragged to its infernal close.