"Morphia ... and cocaine, probably, Mrs. Chesney! Oh, the clever devil! The clever, clever devil!"
This secreting of tablets of morphia and cocaine in the big cigarettes had been the employment of Chesney during those hours behind locked doors before leaving London. With a pair of very long, slender forceps, he had pulled out part of the tobacco, dropped the tablets into the hollow thus made, and repacked the tobacco cunningly upon them. Hours and hours he had spent thus, making tiny marks on the cigarettes which contained the different drugs, that he might know them apart. Certain cigarettes he left intact. He mixed these and the doctored ones in the boxes, large tin cases made for importation, which he sealed up again cleverly, with a tiny strip of paper on the same tone as the wrapper.
The morphinomaniac's imagination works in spurts. First come jets of cerebral luminosity; then gaps of a grey vagueness. Cecil's constructive fancy had not worked beyond the point of laying in a large supply of the drug. He had not considered how he would procure more when it should have given out. He had provided for several months ahead. After that he trusted to chance and cunning.
When Sophy understood—and understanding had come in a flash, even as she questioned, even before Anne Harding's triumphant cry—she felt that this was the last straw. Something seemed to go click! within her, as though the fine mechanism of her reasoning mind had set itself to another gauge—would not, forever any more, work to the old standard. She must forgive—but she could never forget. And what is forgiveness without forgetfulness? The cold body of duty, mummied by conscientiousness, void of soul or life. She was done. He had seen her misery, her anguish of anxiety, her heart-racking efforts to help him, and day after day he had said to her, with that faint, mocking smile that her blood burned in remembering:
"Just hand me a cigarette, will you, Sophy?"
And she had handed them to him, had fetched and carried the poison for him like a well-trained retriever. And he had found pleasure—amusement—in thus making her the unconscious instrument of her own frustration—the innocent minister of his vile vice!
That was the most tragic moment of all to her—the moment when she gazed down at those little dots of white on the lacquer tray, and realised what they were.