Next morning, immediately after breakfast, Captain Ducie shut himself up in his own room on the plea of having several important letters to write. The letters resolved themselves into one note, of no great length, addressed to a friend in London--to the same friend, in fact, to whom he had applied for a translation of the stolen cryptogram. Although the note did not contain more than a dozen lines, Captain Ducie was unusually particular as to its composition. He corrected and re-wrote it several times before he was satisfied. Then he sealed and directed it, and went down into the village and posted it himself. Then he set himself to wait patiently for a reply.
A reply came on the fifth day by post, in the shape of a tiny square packet. Captain Ducie received the packet from Jasmin with apparent indifference, but he did not open it till he was alone. The contents consisted of a brief note from his friend, inside which was a small square box made of very thin wood, which proved to be filled with some dark, fatty-looking substance, from which exhaled a faint, sickly odour that was far from pleasant. The following is a copy of the note:--
"My dear Ducie,--I send you a small quantity of the drug you ask for. I daresay there will be enough to serve your purpose. It is an exceedingly powerful narcotic, and very little of it must be used at one time. I greatly question the advisability of using it at all in the case of neuralgic pains such as you describe, but I presume you are acting under advice.
"Glad to hear that you are enjoying yourself so thoroughly. Town is anything but pleasant at this time of the year, and to be strolling on the banks of Windermere would suit much better the idiosyncrasy of
"Your perspiring but devoted friend,
"Geo. Bexell."
Captain Ducie, after taking one whiff at the contents of the box, put it carefully away under lock and key. Nothing further could be done till the next evening that his host might devote to drashkil-smoking. For that occasion he had not long to wait.
Ducie was now so far familiar with the process of drashkil-smoking and its results, that from the first evening of Cleon's absence he had taken upon himself the office of preparing M. Platzoff's pipe. This he did in that easy good-natured way which sat so gracefully on him, and made his simplest acts seem better than greater things done by another. On the first "big smoke night" after his receipt of the tiny packet from London, Ducie did not fail to proffer his services as usual, and Platzoff was glad to accept them. This evening as he charged the pipe out of the little silver box in which the preparation was always kept, he turned his back on the Russian, who was lazily reclining on the low cushioned seat that ran round the room, and seemed longer than usual in filling it to his mind. Platzoff was not heeding him at all, but was gazing with half-shut eyes on the lamp, of Oriental workmanship, by which the room was lighted.
"What strange patterns or weavings of life we often get," he said, speaking more to himself than to Ducie, "when we are asleep, or in a fever, or in any other state in which the vagaries of the brain are no longer controlled by the force of reason, or no longer restrained by what you would call the trammels of common sense. It is like looking at life through a kaleidoscope--a strange jumble of many-coloured differently shaped fragments, which yet shake themselves into curious and unlooked for patterns that have oftentimes a beauty and coherence of their own such as we seldom see in real life. Singular, too, that behind many of these brain-weavings which at first sight seem so purposeless and absurd there lurks an idea, sometimes a very subtle one, and wholly dissociated from any waking thought that we can remember. It is as if such an idea had found its way by chance into one's brain, and was determined to make its presence known by scratching a few quaint characters on the walls of its new domicile."
"You fly too high for me to follow you," said Ducie, with a laugh. "It is time you were ballasted with a pipe of your favourite drug. You have a lot of cobweb fancies in your brain that want clearing away. To-morrow you will be as practical and business-like as any Englishman of us all."