He had not emptied it when filling his pouch that morning; and being much preoccupied had not even noticed how little was left. Evidently, during his absence, a hotel servant had helped himself to the remaining handful, and a clear ten days must elapse before the arrival of a fresh consignment from home.
He gathered up the remaining scraps, and gazed at them blankly. His consignments were carefully timed to overlap one another. By rights the jar should have contained quite a fortnight's supply of his elixir vitae: and it took him one or two seconds to grasp the full significance of that which had befallen him.
"Great Heaven! I must have been overdoing it like blazes this last month," he reflected grimly, "And how about the next ten days?"
He stood aghast before that simple question, and its obvious answer. It was as if the earth has opened under his feet; as if he had suddenly discovered that only a thin crust intervened between himself and the crater of a volcano. And he had travelled hitherward blindly; goaded by the threefold necessity to work, and sleep, and forget. Thus, stealthily, inexorably, a habit creeps upon a man; enclosing him mesh by mesh in a network imponderable as spun silk, tenacious as steel wire. A sudden movement, a break in the hypnotic influence of routine, and he wakes to find himself prisoned in a web of his own weaving.
Lenox pushed aside the jar impatiently, as though it were in some way to blame; and sank into his chair, head bent, legs outstretched; the picture of defeat. All his thoughts and hopes crashed about him in ruins: and Lenox, contemplating the fragments with a numb acquiescence far removed from resignation, saw only the old maddening irony at work; saw himself, standing yet again, on the threshold of an Eden locked and barred against him; felt in every nerve the grip of the pitiless fact, and asked himself fiercely; "What next?"
Gradually thought penetrated the dull ache of rebellion; and Memory, that capricious handmaid of the brain, unearthed from the rubbish-heap of things forgotten, an incident of early days.
He recalled how, on a certain night, after the confiscation of their candles, and a stern injunction from old Ailie to speak "nae word" till morning, his elder brother—greatly daring—had invaded his bed, and with lips set close to his ear had startled and thrilled him with the following announcement:—
"Listen, Eldred,—what do you think? I've found out at last why Uncle Jock won't tell about grandfather, and why there's an empty place in the big album where he ought to be. Ailie told me. I bothered her, and bothered her, till she said I should hear it for a warning; and I think you ought to hear it for a warning too. She says grandfather served the East India Company for forty years. He was a grand soldier, and a sportsman; a great tall man, like you will be. Ailie says you 'have his face.' But he went to hell"—this in an awestruck whisper—"through eating too much opium, like some of the natives do out there. I wonder if it's nice stuff to eat; don't you?"
To the boy of ten, listening with rapt interest, his grandfather's backsliding had sounded only a few degrees more heinous than gormandising at Christmas; and since Ailie had proved obdurate when pressed, and even bribed for further information, the spark of curiosity had died out for lack of fuel. But to the man of five-and-thirty, racked with reawakened passion, and with a restless irritability, whose significance could no longer be ignored, the memory of his brother's whispered revelation flashed like a lightning-streak across his present dilemma; leaving him in the grasp of those invisible forces that are the true masters of destiny; that must either break or be broken by man's individual spirit and will. For some of us the struggle is conscious; for some unconscious; for others it never arises at all: because only the touchstone of circumstance can evoke any one of those past lives whereof each single life is so mysteriously compact.
For Eldred Lenox, imbued with his uncle's iron creed, the fight would, of necessity, be conscious and unremitting. But he had no heart to begin it yet. He felt as a man may feel who is suddenly struck blind. Thought, movement, life itself, seemed paralysed by a fear unnameable, and new; the fear of that other self, who is the arch-enemy of us all.