The opportunity and the temptation were too much for Willems, and under
the pressure of sudden necessity he abused that trust which was his
pride, the perpetual sign of his cleverness and a load too heavy for him
to carry. A run of bad luck at cards, the failure of a small speculation
undertaken on his own account, an unexpected demand for money from one
or another member of the Da Souza family—and almost before he was well
aware of it he was off the path of his peculiar honesty. It was such a
faint and ill-defined track that it took him some time to find out how
far he had strayed amongst the brambles of the dangerous wilderness he
had been skirting for so many years, without any other guide than his
own convenience and that doctrine of success which he had found for
himself in the book of life—in those interesting chapters that the
Devil has been permitted to write in it, to test the sharpness of men's
eyesight and the steadfastness of their hearts. For one short, dark and
solitary moment he was dismayed, but he had that courage that will not
scale heights, yet will wade bravely through the mud—if there be no
other road. He applied himself to the task of restitution, and devoted
himself to the duty of not being found out. On his thirtieth birthday he
had almost accomplished the task—and the duty had been faithfully and
cleverly performed. He saw himself safe. Again he could look hopefully
towards the goal of his legitimate ambition. Nobody would dare to
suspect him, and in a few days there would be nothing to suspect. He
was elated. He did not know that his prosperity had touched then its
high-water mark, and that the tide was already on the turn.
Two days afterwards he knew. Mr. Vinck, hearing the rattle of the
door-handle, jumped up from his desk—where he had been tremulously
listening to the loud voices in the private office—and buried his face
in the big safe with nervous haste. For the last time Willems passed
through the little green door leading to Hudig's sanctum, which, during
the past half-hour, might have been taken—from the fiendish noise
within—for the cavern of some wild beast. Willems' troubled eyes took
in the quick impression of men and things as he came out from the place
of his humiliation. He saw the scared expression of the punkah boy; the
Chinamen tellers sitting on their heels with unmovable faces turned up
blankly towards him while their arrested hands hovered over the
little piles of bright guilders ranged on the floor; Mr. Vinck's
shoulder-blades with the fleshy rims of two red ears above. He saw the
long avenue of gin cases stretching from where he stood to the arched
doorway beyond which he would be able to breathe perhaps. A thin rope's
end lay across his path and he saw it distinctly, yet stumbled heavily
over it as if it had been a bar of iron. Then he found himself in the
street at last, but could not find air enough to fill his lungs. He
walked towards his home, gasping.
As the sound of Hudig's insults that lingered in his ears grew fainter
by the lapse of time, the feeling of shame was replaced slowly by a
passion of anger against himself and still more against the stupid
concourse of circumstances that had driven him into his idiotic
indiscretion. Idiotic indiscretion; that is how he defined his guilt
to himself. Could there be anything worse from the point of view of his
undeniable cleverness? What a fatal aberration of an acute mind! He did
not recognize himself there. He must have been mad. That's it. A sudden
gust of madness. And now the work of long years was destroyed utterly. What would become of him?