Supremely selfish, treacherous by nature and with a stealthy leaning toward the fleshpots, he began early to betray her trust in cold blood. She did not know of this; she knew only of his indulgence in liquor, increasing alarmingly, and his growing taste for cards. He had drammed moderately from a very early age; now he had a fiend's appetite, while his passion for the gaming table grew accordingly. She used to plead pitifully with him to eschew the practices. At first he laughed; later he sneered. Meanwhile his dissipation had not affected his business prospects as yet. Often rioting through a sleepless night, he was invariably at his desk in the morning, and his house was glad to command his services, for he was a veritable business genius.
His wife, poor soul, hoped that the baby's coming would influence him to better things. It grew worse. His appetite for liquor, which was evidently inherited from some bibulous ancestor, grew tyrannous, and he was a willing slave. Lucky at cards, ordinary gambling became too tame for him. He fell to speculating, cannily at first, but with success and increasing indulgence in liquor came recklessness. The man's naturally cool business judgment was clouded, for he was never wholly sober now. Yet his business prospects were still of the best, for he succeeded marvellously in retaining his strong hold on affairs. The dawn was more than likely to find him reeling, but the opening of the day's business invariably found him at his desk, alert, coldly inscrutable, his wits more than a match for the sharpest ones that might oppose him. Dissipated as he was in those days, he engineered some brilliant _coups_ which benefited his concern and increased his own prestige, to his material advantage. He was already pointed out as a man of power. He could have figured as a Napoleon of honorable business, as he later figured as a Napoleon of graft. Of splendid intellectual endowment, he chose to mar himself.
Their home-life, because of his course, had grown unspeakably wretched. They lived simply; the bulk of the man's income was expended away from home. The wife did not reproach him and she had ceased to plead, but she was pale and silent and sad-eyed. She knew all now, and she lived only for her baby.
Like many an infinitely better man, the husband's worst side was reserved for his family. The inevitable reaction of tippling, in a nature like his, rendered him fairly diabolic at times in his home; and the cruel spirit was the fiercer by reason of the need for its repression elsewhere. He remembered one morning when he stood shaving before his mirror, shaking from the effect of a debauch. It was several months after his son was born. His wife, in pitiful appeal to his better side, of whose existence she still dreamed, had softly entered the room, carrying the baby. She thoughtlessly approached from the side, and he neither heard nor saw her. A soft little hand, the baby's, crept into his neck. Shaken as he was, it startled him; his razor slipped and the blood spurted from a gash in his cheek. Blind with swift, unreasoning rage, he whirled with a curse and a murderous, involuntary swoop of his razor. She had sprung back with a sharp cry, but just too late. He heard again the sudden, shrill cry of the baby; saw the swift blood rimming an ugly gash above its little wrist; saw himself shriveling, before the horror in his wife's eyes, into a loathsome thing.
"My God!" he had stammered, "I—I didn't mean—"
She had recoiled, the flame in her eyes repelling him. Ever afterward her burning eyes, accusing him in memory, had caused his own to close spasmodically in swift desire to escape her gaze; had caused him to dig his nails into his palms in temporary agonized abasement. The grim mills of the gods, indeed!
The poor woman annoyed him no more after that, but she grew like a voiceless, accusing ghost. She was thin and pale now and her beauty was fading pathetically. As for him, his course grew madder, he plunged into dissipation as it had been an enveloping sea. By and by things began to go wrong with him; wild speculations turned out poorly, his resources began seriously to dwindle. With his old, clear head he could have repaired his fortunes, but now he saw things through a red haze, and in endeavoring to right himself with one reckless stroke, he lost everything.
Well, it was time to leave. But he would not go alone, he sullenly decided. There was a siren to whom he had long been devoted, a creature of sensuous mould designed to hold enmeshed such evil souls as his. Nor, he fiercely told himself, would they go empty-handed. And he fortified his nerve with more whisky.
The newspapers accordingly had a sensation. One of the city's most brilliant and most trusted young business men was a defaulter to the extent of thousands of dollars, and he was gone. This startling fact, coupled with the simultaneous departure of the siren and the revelations of the defaulter's double life, made an attractive tit-bit. The wife and child, being of minor importance in this sensational tale, were quickly forgotten. The memory of the defaulter remained, and men confidently believed at first that one day they would welcome his return, shackled to an officer of the law. But it was not to be, though once the man, driven by the lash of belated remorse, had ventured to cross a continent and steal furtively into the scene of his early crime, on a bootless quest.
It seemed to him later that, following his flight with his siren, he had been drunk for years. The furtive sting was at work; he drank to deaden it. At times he would shiver and the cold perspiration would bead his forehead, for he saw again the horror in her eyes as she sought to stanch the blood that flowed from her baby's arm. More, he saw himself again, with hideous humor, repeatedly when he was in his cups, tearing her baby from her arms and plying it with toddy. The boy would take it like milk, he remembered; and the father was wont to laugh, with all the sardonic mirth of a hyena, at the anguish in the mother's eyes, and finally to hand back the infant with ironical courtesy and the observation "that he was a chip off the old block."