A Republic Without a President, and Other Stories, Herbert D. Ward [top 100 novels txt] 📗

the hand that held the slender glass, and snatching up a silver knife from the table he poised it for an instant: then buried it to the hilt.

It struck just below her left ear. It obliterated the little black patch. With a sound more like a hiss than a cry the woman drooped to her divan. The music stopped with a frightened crash. The dancing-girl fled with a shriek; but Harland stood immovable, exultant, holding his hands ready to strangle if the wound did not kill. His face, but now so weak, had acquired an inexorable strength. Strange! At this moment he felt himself not a murderer, but a man.

He watched his victim dying, without a word; and when her curse was spent, he turned and walked triumphantly back through the wasted magnificence to the room from whence he had come.

He did not hurry. At first, he did not apprehend arrest. He felt as if he had accomplished a great deed. Without looking back he closed the door and sought for his hat. He put it on and made for the outer entrance. He tried it and found it locked.

Now at last he began to comprehend his situation. Terror fell upon him. Cold drops bathed him. The enormity of his act flashed upon his conscience. Kill! Kill a woman? He struggled at the window and the door. Both were impervious. He dared not go back. How could he look at her? Escape was cut off. His head became clotted with the old sensations. Fear, such as makes a man's heart stand still, assailed him. He looked in vain for the flask. It was gone. With a loud cry, he flung himself upon the sofa and fainted dead away.

How long he lay there of course he did not know. Soon, vague cerebrations began to torture his mind. It burned as if it were being recalled to life from a frozen state. Then, soaring upward from deeps beyond the deeps, supported through irremediable turmoil by an overwhelming power, he felt himself gently laid upon a couch. There was a moment when the brain, recovering its equilibrium, swam and spun. Then suddenly he found consciousness and emerged through the mist of pain. He tried to use his limbs, but could not rise. With an effort he strove to loosen his tongue, but could not speak. With desperate will he endeavored to open his eyes. Their lids were riveted together. This was no hallucination. He was never more alert nor more helpless.

He knew that some one was bending over him.

He felt two eyes examining his soul. He had the consciousness that there was nothing hid from this intense gaze. Then a commanding voice spoke to him, and a hand of unutterable persuasion touched his forehead.

"Harland Slack!" said the ringing voice. Beginning a little above a whisper it seemed to increase to oratorical tones: then it reverberated throughout his nature, and burst upon him like the rattle of thunder. "Harland Slack, you have had a terrible lesson. Harland Slack, you will not drink again!" Then after a pause in a different voice, "Now, Slack get up! You're all right now. Come!"

With a mighty wrench Harland, at his bidding, cast off the numbness from his body, the incubus from his will, and staggering to his feet opened his eyes.

Before him stood Dr. Alaric Randolph holding his hand and looking searchingly into his face.

This fact recalled to him his awful deed. He understood perfectly that he had committed a murder. He knew not how, or why, or where. With a tremulous look about him he burst into tears and clung for protection to his enigmatical host.

As tenderly as a hospital nurse Dr. Randolph led the criminal to a deep chair and placed him in it.

"There, there, old fellow. It's all right. You will come out of it all straight. I'll see you through. Trust me. There, take my hand. That will help you, see?"

The broken man, shuddering from weakness, clasped the sympathetic hand and wrung it. Harland sat still a long while with closed eyes. The doctor watched him professionally, even tenderly, at times anxiously.

"Now," he said, "I'll go and bring you a demitasse. It will set you on your feet."

"No, no!" cried Harland in terror, "don't leave me. I can't be left alone."

"But only to the next room."

The patient's hands relaxed, and he assented wearily. When the coffee came, he drank a little obediently.

"Now, my boy," said the Doctor, with what under the circumstances seemed to Harland a ghastly cheerfulness, "this will get you up entirely. When you finish it, I am going to send you to the Club!" At the mention of the Club Harland began to tremble.

"My God, Randolph! I can't go there. I'll be arrested." He glanced apprehensively at the outer door as if expecting a policeman. "Don't you know," he added in a whisper, "what I've done in your infernal place?"

"Nonsense!" replied Randolph lightly, "not a soul shall know you've been here. She deserved it. I'll take all the blame. Now brace up and be a man. Don't be nervous. You're feverish. You need a tonic before you start. What'll you drink?"

Harland looked at his host in a state divided between dementia and moral nausea. What manner of man was this American Doctor with his accursed Parisian education?

"I am horribly thirsty," he admitted: "I will take a glass of water, thank you."

He said this without surprise at himself, naturally and quite sincerely. He longed for it. It was the first request of the kind he had made for years. Randolph handed the water to him and watched him narrowly. Harland held up the glass to the light with a connoisseur's eye, smiled with satisfaction, and took the clear draught down at one swallow.

"Ah!" he said: "that is good. I feel better now. Now swear that you will save me. Don't give me up. Hide me somehow. It happened in your house, you know."

"Give yourself no concern," said the Doctor easily.

"Why, man," blazed Harland Slack, "don't you know that I've murdered somebody? It was a woman. I've murdered that woman you keep here. I am a murderer."

"Your Club is only two blocks off," answered the physician with astonishing indifference; "It will do you good to walk there. Trust me. Don't worry over it. Let me feel your hand. It's moist and soft. No fever; that's good. When you step foot into the Club you will never think of the affair again."

The Doctor quietly gave the criminal his hat and coat, put a cane into his hand, and conducted him to the door.

"Go!" he said, "go directly to your Club as usual. As a physician I order it. It is the best thing you can do."

Mutely the trembling man obeyed, and thus the two actors in this awful evening parted; so, perhaps, criminal and accomplice are wont to part in the extremity of great emergencies, as if nothing had happened out of the moral order of things.

Harland Slack walked into his fashionable Club slowly. As he did so, whether by reason of the familiar atmosphere, or the contrast to the scene from which he had escaped, he did not stop to consider, his crime dropped from his memory like the burden from Christian's back. He handed his outer garments to the liveried boy, and, as was his wont, turned towards the poker and billiard rooms. There were the usual number of useless gambling and playing men uselessly drinking. Harland Slack was greeted in the usual boisterous manner.

"Hilloa! What'll you take? Here, boy, bring the same old stuff to Mr. Slack."

The gossip proceeded, the chips rattled, the balls clicked, the smoke mounted, the liquors gurgled, and the regular Club life proceeded.

The friend of his appointment now joined him.

"By ——! You look as white as that foam there. You need a nerve restorer. You haven't been idiot enough to buck the tiger again, have you? What will you take?"

"No," said Harland slowly. "I have not gambled." He shook his head with a strange expression. He did not understand. The Club seemed different to him. It was not as entrancing or as necessary as usual. The odor of stale liquor and of staler tobacco nauseated him. Still, it did not occur to him that this was an unusual state of mind for him to be in.

The attendant placed the chased tray upon the table. His friend took the decanter from the boy and poured out the brown liquid into the delicate glasses. He then offered one to Harland and held up his own in token of courtesy.

"Well, here's to luck," he said, and nodded to Harland. Harland nodded in return. His nerves twitched him. What was this new sensation of repugnance? He lifted his glass higher to his mouth. He tried to put it to his lips. It would not go. He tried again. His arm refused him service. But the fumes of this familiar liquor mounted to his nostrils, which dilated with horror. What was this terrible thing which he was asked to drink? Never had he felt such physical repulsion. A shudder of disgust shook him. With a curse he dashed the glass to the floor, and glared suspiciously upon his companion.

"How dare you ask me to drink this stuff?" His voice rang with passion. "I loathe it! I cannot stand it. Let me go. This is an infernal den, and I will get out!"

The men around jumped up and held him. They thought that D. T. had come at last.

"Somebody send for the nearest expert," said his nearest friend.

This inebriate's first resistance to his dipsomania was interpreted darkly, with sundry shrugs and winks and gestures.

"It is too devilish bad," said his companion, "but I knew it would happen some day."

They called a cab and put him in and sent him home. But he gave no further evidence of insanity. His case became a seven days' gossip and warning behind the bulging windows of the great Club.

Harland Slack went straightway to Colorado, and came back a man. He went into law, and succeeded. It is well known that he does not drink. The committee elected a new heir to damnation in Harland's place at the Club.

At the end of an address delivered a year afterward before a close medical meeting Dr. Alaric Randolph said:

"A bit of bright, cut glass, and a healthy will, and the proportional training did this thing. I have not given the man's name, not only on account of his high social standing and marked mental ability, but also because he himself is still ignorant of the facts. I have no fear of a relapse. He has forgotten that he ever believed himself to have murdered a woman who never existed. But he has not forgotten that he no longer drinks. This case is now a tested cure. My first successful experiment in this great, unknown field, rests upon its facts. Alcoholism is probably as serious an illustration as we could present. The hypnotic therapeutics have come to stay."

SCUD.

It was the morning after my arrival. I had just come, jaded from examination papers, agued with the incessant ring of orations, abhorrent of the rustle of white tarlatans, distrustful of the future attitude of trustees, and utterly wilted from the effect of a country academy exhibition held in the heat of June in the torridest of Western towns. I had never seen the ocean, and before my window the glorious old Atlantic heaved solemnly. Its intermittent swash upon the rocks sent peace into my soul. I found myself near enough even to throw something into the water. The longing to communicate with this new friend, dreamed of for so many inland years, overpowered me. A box of buttons was all I had, and I leaned far out into the air, pungent with a mixture of fish and kelp, and cast into the deep these feminine necessities, one by one. Now a tiny disk of mother-of-pearl would glance on the float and bounce off into a gray ripple; and then a bit of jet would clatter on the red granite rocks, and be swallowed by a lapping wavelet that seemed to rise on purpose for this strange offering. Too soon the box was emptied of its contents; then there came a mad desire to throw cologne, shoes, satchel, anything, everything, myself, from the second-story window into this mysterious, beckoning, repelling Atlantic tide beneath me. Leaning on the sill, with my whole soul absorbed in this new Nirvana, I was suddenly and yet not unpleasantly aroused by a strident yell:

"Hellow, Scud! Wha'che got this mornin'?"

"Oh, no-thin', only twenty-six little 'uns, an' a couple bucket o' bait."

The answer came back in a deep, orotund, sing-song voice. It was the natural intoning of the man of the sea. Two boats shot from under a rocky headland a