“That may have been a forgery, too,” thought Don. “How do I know? I wish I’d never agreed to do that other business of dropping the letter to Winston where Sterndale could find it. Oh, I’ve got myself into a pretty mess, and all because I had anything to do with Bentley. But Renwood is back of it all! He started it! He is to blame!”
Always he came round to this mental assertion, but now, for the first time, he found it was not at all satisfying to himself. He was struck by the thought that in this manner he was trying to shift the blame for his own weakness on to the shoulders of another, which made him feel mean and small and more wretched than ever.
Then he thought of his father’s story and of Charlie, who had been ruined by associating with evil companions, suddenly feeling that the similarity of his position to that of Charlie when first accused of stealing was something startling. Charlie had associated with bad boys, but he had not actually stolen when first charged with theft. Don’s father had been taught a lesson by that terrible experience, and his lips had not harshly charged his son with participating in the crime of forgery, but his eyes had spoken quite as distinctly as words.
“But I’ll not be like Charlie!” the tortured boy mentally cried. “I see my mistake now, and I’ll have no more to do with Leon Bentley.”
He felt in a pocket of his coat and found a half-consumed package of cigarettes, which he took out and flung away. Leon’s father and mother were respectable, hard-working, honest people, and it now began to seem to Don that somehow all the degraded qualities of the son had developed under the brain-weakening, conscience-deadening, manhood-destroying thrall of that opium-tainted creation of evil, the paper-covered cigarette. Don wondered now that he had ever been tempted to smoke one of the vile-smelling things, and wondered still more that, having found neither satisfaction nor pleasure in the first one, he had persisted in their use; but he was thankful in his heart that the dreadful habit had not fixed itself firmly upon him, though he tried to assure himself that he would have broken it at any cost of self-denial and distress. His heart, however, declared to him that one of his passionate, impulsive disposition, one who could not control his fiery temper, would surely have found it hard to break clear from a habit with such power to fasten itself on its victims and bind them with chains soft as silk and strong as iron.
With the casting away of those cigarettes a feeling of partial relief came to him, for it seemed that he had broken the unsuspected bond that somehow connected him with the unscrupulous fellow he now despised.
As he was wandering about the streets, thinking of this thing and hoping to run across Bentley, he met Danny Chatterton, who seemed flushed, excited and in a great hurry.
“Hello, Scott!” called Chatterton, seeing him. “Have you heard the nun-nun-nun-news?”
“What news?” asked Don.
“Abub-bub-about Bentley.”