"Sleep, dear, sleep," said this old, tired man of science, "first let me sleep."
CHAPTER XVIII.
Orson Vane, scintillating theatrically by the sea, was in a fine rage when Nevins ceased to answer his telegrams. Telegrams struck Vane as the most dramatic of epistles; there was always a certain pictorial effect in tearing open the envelope, in imagining the hushed expectation of an audience. A letter—pooh! A letter might be anything from a bill to a billet. But a telegram! Those little slips of paper struck immediate terror, or joy, or despair, or confusion; they hit hard, and swiftly. Certainly he had been hitting Nevins hard enough of late. He had peppered him with telegrams about the furniture, about the pictures; he had forbidden one day what he had ordered the day before. It never occurred to him that Nevins might seek escape from these torments. Yet that was what Nevins had done. He had tippled himself into a condition where he signed sweetly for each telegram and put it in the hall-rack. They made a beautiful, yellow festoon on the mahogany background.
"Those," Nevins told himself, "is for a gentleman as is far too busy to notice little things like telegrams."
Nevins watched that yellow border growing daily with fresh delight.
He could keep on accepting telegrams just as long as the sideboard held its strength. Each new arrival from the Western Union drove him to more glee and more spirits—of the kind one can buy bottled.
At last Orson Vane felt some alarm creeping through his armor of dramatic pose. Could Nevins have come to any harm? It was very annoying, but he would have to go to town for a day or so. That seemed unavoidable. Just as he had made up his mind to it, he happened to slip on a bit of lemon-peel. At once he fell into a towering rage. He cursed the entire service on the Beaurivage up hill and down dale. You could hear him all over the harbor. It was the voice of a profane Voltaire.
That night, at the Casino, his rage found vent in action. He sold the Beaurivage as hastily as he had bought her.
He left for town, by morning, full of bitterness at the world's conspiracy to cheat him. He felt that for a careless deck-hand to leave lemon-peel on the deck of the Beaurivage was nothing less than part of the world-wide cabal against his peace of mind.