“As a patient. It’s a sad story. You won’t like it. You had better keep your fancies without the addition of any of the facts.”
“Go on,” said Hayden, briefly.
“They live here, you know. He was the only son. He unconsciously acquired the morphine habit from taking quantities of the stuff for neuralgic symptoms during a severe protracted illness. After he got better, and found what had happened to him, he came to me. I had to tell him he would die if he didn’t break it off, and would probably die if he did. ‘Oh, no matter,’ he said. ‘What disgusts me is the idea that it has taken such hold of me.’ He did break it off directly and absolutely. I never knew but one other man who did that thing. But between the pain and the shock from the sudden cessation of the drug, his mind was unbalanced for awhile. Of course the girl’s parents broke off the engagement. I knew they were travelling with him last summer. It was a trying case, and the way he accepted his own weakness touched me. At his own request he carried no money with him. It was a temptation when he wanted the drug, you see. It must have been at some such moment, when he contemplated giving up the struggle, that you met him in the pawn-shop.”
“I am glad I knew enough to respect him even there,” murmured Hayden, in his beard.
“Oh, you may respect him, and love him if you like. He died a moral hero, if a mental and physical wreck. That is as good a way as any, or ought to be, to enter another life—if there is another life.”
“And the woman?” asked the connoisseur.
“Keep the opals, Hayden; they and he are more to you than to her. She—in fact it is very soon—is to marry another man.”
“Who is—”
“A gilded cad. That’s all.”
Langworthy took out his watch and looked at it. I turned to the table. What had happened to the dreaming stones? Did a light flash across from one to the other, or did my eyes deceive me? I looked down, not trusting what I saw. One opal lay as pale, as pure, as lifeless, as a moon-stone is. The other glowed with a yet fierier spark; instead of coming from within, the color seemed to play over its surface in unrestricted flame.