The Cost

XXV.

THE FALLEN KING.

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."

A long silence, then he said: "Why did you come?"

"The doctor wrote me that—wrote me the truth."

"But haven't you heard? Haven't you seen the papers? Don't they say I'm ruined?"

"Yes, John."

He lay silent for several minutes. Then he asked hesitatingly: "And—when—do you—go back—West?"

"I have come to stay," she replied. Neither in her voice nor in her face was there a hint of what those five words meant to her.

He closed his eyes again. Presently a tear slid from under each lid and stood in the deep, wasted hollows of his eye-sockets.