Conspiracy (England)/Chapter 9

now and then faintly groaning, bloodless, emaciated, a wrecked and martyred shell of a man, Wingate lay on his bed. He seemed almost in the pangs of dissolution.

Near him stood Jaccard. The level light of a setting sun, which flooded through the western window of the bungalow, revealed his hard and pitiless face. With his hands on his hips he stood there, regarding the sufferer, who dazedly blinked at him. An ugly grimace contorted his lips.

“Well, when are you coming back to the stuff?” the captain brutally demanded. His suavity of manner had quite departed. “You've got to, sooner or later, you know; so what's the use tormenting yourself like this? Only a damned fool would do it. When?”

“Get out!” Wingate flung at him. “You're poisoning the very air here!” Through all his martyrdom, more fiercely still his hate flared. “Oh, God, if I was only strong enough to get up and kill you!”

“Yes, but you're not,” gibed the captain. “You couldn't kill a flea—a poor, spineless wreck of a dope fiend like you!” He broke into an ugly laugh, and then checked it. “The idea of your killing anybody or anything—that's a good one! You can't kill anything but your fortune, and your wife's!”

“Here, you!” snarled the millionaire—or hardly a millionaire now, after the ravages of the past fortnight. “Don't you speak her name! I'll have the heart out of you for that!”

Jaccard chuckled maliciously.

“Hear him talk! A devil of a lot you care about her!”

Wingate reared up, made a desperate effort, and, racked in every wasted nerve and muscle, got to his feet. He staggered toward the captain, with his quivering fists up. Jaccard gave him a contemptuous little push that sent him reeling back, to collapse on the bed again.

“Lie down, you weakling!” he mocked. “Why, you couldn't even kill your own worthless self, let alone anybody else!”

“I—I'll kill you yet! My time will come yet!”

“Hop talk!” laughed Jaccard. “That's the way they all rave; but let me tell you this,” he added, in a sharper tone, as he glowered down at his victim. “You won't get any more chances to run amuck and kill yourself or try to hurt anybody. You nearly gave us the slip, four days ago—you and that damned snake. Zanelli made good as a guard, though. He got to it first, and winged it just in time.”

The victim bared teeth of hate at Jaccard, like a trapped wolf. The captain only sneered, and went on:

“You won't be let out of this bungalow again!” He waved his hand at the windows. All of them were now crisscrossed with iron bars. “There's a padlock on the outside of the door, too. We aren't taking any more chances on you. You're too valuable to lose. There's nothing here you can hurt yourself with, except the bedclothes, and we'll soon fix that. No hanging bee here! No metal, either—not even a spoon. From now on you'll claw up your grub out of a paper picnic plate, like a Chink, or a baby. You're here for keeps now; and here—here's your dope for this time!”

He pointed to a paper on the table, with two tablets on it. Save for books and magazines, the table was bare. The lamp had gone from it. Glass lamp chimneys make too fine weapons, when broken—weapons at least capable of slashing a man's wrists or cutting his throat. All the glass had likewise been removed from the windows, which were now like those of a jail.

Wingate's razor was gone, too. Every metal thing had been taken away. So far as the most careful thought of Jaccard and Zanelli had been able to manage it, nothing dangerous remained. The wicker furniture was too light to be used for assault and battery. Even if Wingate had possessed a rope, there was no place where he could tie it, to hang himself. The bungalow had become a cell.

“Here's your dope!” repeated Captain Jaccard.

Wingate made no answer, but lay panting, with the smolder of an immense hatred in his feverish eyes. Like tiny sentinels of fate the tablets lay there on the table.

“As if you could cure yourself of the habit, you poor, broken wreck of a man!” Jaccard mocked. “Why, the best sanitariums have failed, and the most skillful doctors. You're all gone. Your will power's gone—there's nothing left. Will power—pooh! You're a joke, Wingate—nothing but a joke, to reat men! Come on, now, admit it! You are, aren't you?”

Wingate made no reply. Not thus should his enemy badger-draw and bait him. Seeing that no more was to be got out of the victim, by way of diversion, Jaccard turned to the door.

“Well, you know where to find your dope, anyhow,” was his parting shot. “You've been without it four days, now. I guess you're about ready to take a shot or two!”

Laughing, he walked out and padlocked the door. Wingate was left alone with his torment.

A long time he lay there, while the blood-red patch of sunlight crept up the wall, faded, and died away. Another night was drawing on—another long, dark misery of awful heat, of breathless stifle and incredible agony. Somewhere, outside a window, a bluebottle fly was buzzing. Far echoes of the surf troubled the air. Save for these, there was silence—a heavy, lonely silence, that weighed like copes of lead.

“Constance!” muttered the wretch on the bed. Then, after a long pause: “Hugh!”

He said no more, but lay oddly huddled, as darkness took the island world.

After about an hour Jaccard and Zanelli came back with a lantern, and with rolls of heavy tarpaulin. They routed Wingate off the bed, took the bed apart, and put it outside, with all the bedding.

“Sheets and blankets make altogether too good ropes, when they're torn up,” said the captain. “Even if you can't hang yourself, you might strangle yourself with a rope around your neck, pulled tight. After this you'll sleep on things that you can't tear up—understand?”

Wingate refused to answer. Let them do what they pleased, he had finished dignifying them by even recognizing them. So, presently, they left him alone once more.

Morning found him stretched on the pile of hard tarpaulins, staring at the dawn after an almost sleepless night. His appearance had become truly shocking. This was the beginning of the fifth day since morphine had passed his lips. He had somehow lived through four days and nights of torment unspeakable, and still he survived.

But the struggle had left deep traces. His pupils were unnaturally dilated. He shook and trembled as with continual palsy. He looked a wreck, if ever there was one. Unshaven now, his scrub of beard accentuated his emaciation. Who could have recognized the one-time athlete, the daredevil aviator?

In only one way he had begun to show improvement—a different and more healthy color had commenced to tinge his face. Pale—yes, Wingate was still ghastly pale; but something of his mummylike yellowness had faded, and his skin had begun to manifest faint traces that blood really circulated beneath it. To this extent, at least, the prisoner had started to “come back.”

As the sun flooded in upon him, he smiled wanly. A more rational expression dignified him. Something like a plan seemed forming in his brain. The driving power of the deepest hate he had ever known was behind that plan, steadying and sustaining him—hate for his tormentors, but especially for Jaccard.

“Dope fiend, coward, weakling!” muttered Wingate. “He called me all that, and he dared to bring in Constance's name! Well, Jaccard will have to pay for it! Jackal, his name ought to be. He'll pay, all right—he'll pay!”

After a while Wingate struggled to his feet and shuffled to where a canvas water bucket was hung from a nail—a nail too small to sustain the weight of a human body. This collapsible bucket was now all that his jailers would allow him. The metal pitcher had been taken away, like all metal. There was not even a tin cup to drink from.

Wingate had to tilt the canvas bucket and drink from its edge, slopping water down his chest. He laughed savagely, drank deep, and laughed again. More scores to settle!

Like a trapped animal, he fell to pacing the floor, back and forth across the fiber tug. Hobbling, racked with pain, he took his exercise—a tortured soul in a hell of his own making.

“They're waiting for me to give in!” he pondered. “They're gloating over my pain, and thinking I can't break off.. Leaving that there to tempt me!” He stopped and glowered at the drug tablet still untouched on the table. “The devils!”

Of a sudden a new idea glimmered into his brain.

“Let's see—let's see!” he muttered, and once more began his pacing of the floor.

A grotesque kind of hobble, that was. His racked, cramped muscles could hardly serve him. He dragged himself along like a wounded, crippled thing.

All at once he straightened up, with the gleam of inspiration in his eye. He went to the bucket, dipped up a palmful of water, returned to the table, and dissolved the two tablets in his hand.

The touch of the stuff revolted him, as if it had been something leprous and pestilential—which indeed it was. Shuddering, he limped to a window and tossed out the morphine solution. Then, laughing harshly, he once more resumed his limping crawl.

An hour later he rang the bell. Jaccard came.

“Well, what's wanted?”

“You win!” the prisoner said sullenly. “I had to take them.”

“Of course!” sneered the captain. “I knew you would. It's all off, your fool idea of trying to break away. You can't, and I knew it all along. No dope fiend ever can!”

“Oh, shut up your preaching, you damned scoundrel, and get me another tablet!”

“Cash on delivery!”

“Here!”

Wingate fumbled bills from his pocket. Jaccard told him the market rate for that day, and he paid it. Then the captain put another tablet on the table, and, laughing with mordant scorn, departed, securely padlocking the door.

Once he was well away and out of sight, Wingate dissolved the new tablet and threw it out into the sand.

“I think, by God,” he whispered tensely, “I've found the way! I know I've found the way!”