Such emptiness of life and aim had to be filled, and it was filled; he
helped his father sometimes with the plantations, but he helped
spasmodically and played at work.
The unregulated fire of energy and delicacy of nervous poise within him
continually hounded him to the verge of excess and sometimes beyond.
Cool, quiet, and gentlemanly as he was by rule of his clan, the ice was
thin and underneath raged unappeased fires. He craved the madness of
alcohol in his veins till his delicate hands trembled of mornings. The
women whom he bent above in languid, veiled-eyed homage, feared lest
they love him, and what work was to others gambling was to him.
The Cotton Combine, then, appealed to him overpoweringly--to his passion
for wealth, to his passion for gambling. But once entered upon the game
it drove him to fear and frenzy: first, it was a long game and Harry
Cresswell was not trained to waiting, and, secondly, it was a game whose
intricacies he did not know. In vain did he try to study the matter
through. He ordered books from the North, he subscribed for financial
journals, he received special telegraphic reports only to toss them
away, curse his valet, and call for another brandy. After all, he kept
saying to himself, what guarantee, what knowledge had he that this was
not a "damned Yankee trick"?
Now that the web was weaving its last mesh in early January he haunted
Montgomery, and on this day when it seemed that things must culminate or
he would go mad, he hastened again down to the Planters' Hotel and was
quickly ushered to John Taylor's room.
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