Without a Home

by Edward Payson Roe

"Where is it?" he demanded angrily, for he felt that unless he had the support of the drug speedily, he would wholly lose his self-control.

"Oh, Martin," pleaded his wife, "wait till Dr. Benton comes; he will be here this evening."

"Why this ado about nothing? I merely wish to take a little tonic, and you look as if I proposed suicide."

"Martin, Martin, it is suicide of body and soul. It is worse than murder of me and your innocent children. Oh, Martin, my heart's true love, make me a Christmas gift that I will prize next to Him from whom the day is named. Give me the promise that you will never touch the vile poison again," and she knelt before him and sought to take his hand.

For a moment he was overwhelmed. She evidently knew all! He sank into a chair, and trembled almost convulsively. Then came the impulse—an almost inevitable effect of the drug upon the moral nature—to lie about the habit, and to strive to conceal it, even after an unclouded mind would see that deception was impossible.

"Nan," he began, as he grew a little quieter, "you take cruel advantage of my weak nerves. You must see that I am greatly reduced by illness, and I merely wish to take a little tonic as any sane man would do, and you treat me to a scene of high tragedy. Give me my medicine, and I know that I shall soon be much better."

"Oh, my husband, has it really come to this?" and the wretched wife buried her face in her arms, and leaned heavily on the table.

He was growing desperate. Through excess he had already reached a point where ordinary life became an unendurable burden without the stimulant; but facing a harrowing scene like this was impossible. He felt that his appetite was like a savage beast on which he held a weakening and relaxing grasp. With the strange, double consciousness of the opium maniac, he saw his wife in all her deep distress, and he had the remorse of a lost soul in view of her agony; he was almost certain that she knew how he had wronged her and his children, and he had all the shame and self-loathing of a proud, sensitive man; he knew that he was false to the sacred trusts of husband and father, and that awful thing we call a sense of guilt added its deep depression. It is not inability to comprehend his degradation, his danger, his utter loss of manhood, which opium imposes on its wretched slave, but an impossibility to do aught except gratify the resistless craving at any and every cost. All will-power has gone, all moral resistance has departed, and in its place is a gnawing, clamorous, ravening desire. The vitiated body, full of indescribable and mysterious pain, the still more tortured mind, sinking under a burden of remorse, guilt, fear, and awful imagery, both unite in one desperate, incessant demand for opium.

While his wife sat leaning upon the table, her face hidden, she was the picture of despair; and, in truth, she felt almost as if she were turning into stone. If her husband had been brought home a mangled, mutilated man, as she often feared he might be during the long years of the war, she would have bent over him with a tenderness equalled only by the pride and faith that had ever found in him their centre; but this strange apparition of a man with odd, sinister-looking eyes, who alternately threatened and cowered before her—this man, mutilated more horribly in the loss of truth and love, who was thus openly and shamelessly lying—oh, was he the chivalric, noble friend, who had been lover and husband for so many years! The contrast was intolerable, and the sense of his falseness stung her almost to madness. She did not yet know that opium, like the corruption of the grave, blackens that which is the fairest and whitest.

For a few minutes Mr. Jocelyn debated with himself. Was he strong enough to go out to the nearest drug store? After one or two turns up and down the room he found that he was not. He might fall in utter collapse while on the way, and yet his system, depleted by his recent excess, demanded the drug with an intensity which he could not restrain much longer without becoming wild and reckless. He therefore said to his wife, in a dogged manner, "Nan, I must have that medicine."