But when Mrs. Langford’s carriage turned and rolled away, the good little man stood in the doorway of his study and shook his head sadly to the tune of a musing commentary on his latest visitor.
“Strange, passing strange, that she can be so uncharitable, when her own son stands so sorely in need of the broadest charity! I do hope there is no dreadful day of retribution in store for her, but it is certainly tempting Providence to be so pitiless.”
CHAPTER XX
THE DEMONIAC
The rounds in the descending ladder of dissipation are many or few according to the temperament of the man who makes use of them: the man, I say, for women rarely descend—they fall. As in a galloping consumption it is not infrequently the strongest who succumb first, so in a moral lapse it is often the self-contained who set the pace.
Antrim’s sudden plunge into the stream of excess was fairly illustrative of this. Beginning with the mild debauch in the company of Grotter, the division engineer, he went from bad to worse with such breathtaking celerity that the end of a single week found him shattered and nerveless, and already dependent upon stimulants for the inspiration needful to keep him up to his work.
It was in such a plight that he began the day following his adventure with the “rook.” To be sure, there were, early in the morning, some feeble and shame-prompted motions toward amendment, but these were soon swept away by the onrush of appetite, newborn but mighty; and since he went fasting to his work, he began the earlier to borrow efficiency from the bottle.
As it is prone to do in time of need, the stimulant played him false at first, though he gauged the doses with careful accuracy and repeated them frequently. All through the forenoon he found himself struggling with a vague sense of uncertainty, a mental obscuration which made perplexing puzzles out of the well-known details of the office work. The mail was heavy that day, and in the absence of the superintendent the chief clerk’s tasks were multiplied. There was an unusual influx of callers, each with a grievance real or fancied, and a dribbling stream of telegrams trickled insistently through the clicking relay on his desk. To make a bad matter worse, his telegraph operator was sick, and such wire business as came to the office he had to handle himself.
It was some time during this hazy interval that a message, repeated from some station on the Eastern Division, came from the despatcher’s office at Lone Pine Junction. It was from the general manager, who, with the president and his party in the private car Aberystwyth, was on the line moving westward. Some member of the party was sick, and in consequence the car was running as a special train, with orders giving it right of way over all other trains. Similar orders were required for the Western Division, and Antrim turned to the stenographer:
“Take a message to the general manager, care car Aberystwyth, running as special train on Eastern Division,” he directed; and when Bertram’s pencil stopped, he dictated:
“Your message to-day. Car Aberystwyth will be run as special train on Western Division, Lone Pine Junction to Denver, with right of way over all trains.”