Mr. Petre had grown more sealed up than ever. There were days when he never showed his face out of doors. He would spend whole weeks in the country, buried, lost, unattainable. Charlie Terrard began to wonder whether that stupendous brain were sound, and whether so large and such sudden operations had not begun to undermine the Imperial Intelligence which had fascinated him during all those months.
He had looked up Mr. Petre once or twice as the summer dragged on, first before he had gone away to Switzerland—and then he had thought him somewhat changed; again on his return, when the change was notable, and for the worse. He had tried gently to suggest a little going out into the world, a little relief from such strange isolation; but he had met with so fierce and unaccustomed a refusal to discuss the thing at all, that he had shrunk back—and he let some weeks go by without troubling that inhuman loneliness.
Mr. Petre was suffering after a fashion which Terrard could not understand. The original gnawing tooth of self-ignorance, the now maddening, now despairing and numbing presence of an impotent self that was not a self, had been reënforced as an agent of decay by a new and surely morbid mood; active, intense, destructive. Mr. Petre had grown frenzied against that base, bewildering world of money. His own comet-like path through it had no effect upon him as a good fortune, or even as a mere adventure. It had the effect of an increasing evil at the very core of his being.
Of old friends, of the ties which alone make human life endurable after forty—let alone at his age—he had none. He was wrecked and spiritually ruined; imprisoned, starved, exiled, damned. In the place of such good, human, necessary things as support a man with the savor of his youth and manhood—his old books and friends, and loves and worship, and air and powers of home—he was associating with what every nerve in him, every nerve inherited from the lost youth and middle-age of a better world, was exasperated against, and rejected as vile.
He called in a routine way at the office—as briefly as he could. He signed. He excused himself. The air of the place, the face of Trefusis, the talk of lesser men ruined and of the innocent caught unaware, of guttersnipes suddenly enriched, poisoned him out of all measure. It was, perhaps, the heat. We all remember that summer of ’53.
The man fell ill. He had long ago cut off his telephone. His bouts of country air failed to cure him. He would return restlessly to town, and yet walked the few steps from the gate of the Temple to the Row (by night if he could) in terror of being accosted. The few notes sent to him remained unanswered. He refused to go near the office. He saw Trefusis only twice. A third suggested meeting he escaped by a pretended absence. The new shares lay in the Bank. He tried to forget them. Later, the face of Trefusis began to haunt him unpleasantly, and a thirst which was becoming a wild longing for freedom and a clean riddance of all that abominable circumstance.
Then came dreams to torture him. Every night some new terror of sly inhuman creeping acquaintance poisoned his soul in dreadful sleep and the savor of it during the day, a savor of what was vampire-like and snake-like in the vices of the modern market fastened on him within. His soul was in hell.
He refused all service save that of a woman who came in late of a morning and left at night. What we have read of misers became true of this man, for whom the curse of gold was active in a very different way from what any miser has ever felt.
There came a point where the servant grew alarmed. She had heard Terrard’s name and knew his direction. She told him, and he had written asking to call again, fearing to come without warning. He had received a shaky line in reply, saying that the millionaire would rather be alone.
The message troubled Charlie Terrard.