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.