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Title: Toxin
A sketch
Author: Ouida
Illustrator: A. Forestier
Sedgwick
Release date: April 20, 2026 [eBook #78502]
Language: English
Original publication: London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78502
Credits: Tim Lindell, Andrew Scott, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOXIN ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_
[Illustration: colophon]
TOXIN
_CENTURY LIBRARY_
[Illustration: _“The Child, The Child! My Carlino!” screamed his
mother. Adrianis gave him to her outstretched arms._]
OUIDA
TOXIN
_A SKETCH_
[Illustration: Decorative separator]
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
M DCCC XCV
COPYRIGHT BY T. FISHER UNWIN
_for Great Britain_.
COPYRIGHT BY THE FREDERICK. A.
STOKES CO.
_for the United States of America_.
[Illustration:
TOXIN
by Ouida]
[Illustration: Chapter head woodcut]
I.
“Oh! my necklace!” cried a fair woman as she leaned over the side of
her gondola.
A string of opals, linked and set in gold, had been loosened from
her throat, and had slid down into the water of the lagoon, midway
between the Lido and the city of Venice. But the gondola was moving
swiftly under the impulsion of a rower fore and aft, and, though they
stopped a few moments after at her cry, the spot where it had fallen
was already passed and left behind. She was vexed and provoked. She
had many jewels, but the opal necklace was an heirloom, and of fine
and curious workmanship. The gondoliers did their best to find it,
but in vain. They were in the deeper water of the sailing roads,
which were marked out by the lines of poles, and the necklace, a
slight thing, had been borne away by the current setting in from the
open sea.
It was a pale afternoon in late summer; the heat was still great; the
skies and the waters were of the same soft, dreamy, silvery hue, and
the same transparency and ethereality were on the distant horizons
of the hills, west and east. The only colour there was came from
the ruddy painted sails of some fruit-laden market boats which were
passing to leeward.
[Illustration: “Oh! my necklace!” cried a fair woman, as she leaned
over the side of the gondola.]
Neither of the men could swim; many Venetians cannot; but they got
over the side, and waded up to their waists in the water, and with
their oars struck and sounded the sandy bottom, whilst she encouraged
them with praise and extravagant promise of reward. Their efforts
were of no avail. The lagoon, which has been the grave of so many,
kept the drowned opals.
“We will go back and send divers,” she said to her men who, wet to
their waists, were well content to turn the head of the gondola back
to the city.
They wore white clothes with red sashes and red ribbons round their
straw hats; they were in her private service; they steered quickly
home again over the calm water-way, and in and out the crowded craft
by the Schiavone past the Customs House, and S. Giorgio, and the
Salvatore, until they reached a palace on the Grand Canal, which
was their mistress’s residence, with poles painted red and white,
with coronets on their tops, marking the landing stairs in the old
Venetian fashion.
“I have lost my opals in the water!” she cried to a friend who was on
one of the balconies of the first floor.
“I am glad you have lost them,” replied her friend. “They are stones
of misfortune.”
“Nonsense! They were beautiful, and they were Ninetta Zaranegra’s,
poor Carlo’s great-great-grandmother; they were one of her nuptial
presents a hundred and twenty years ago. I must have the men dive and
dredge till they are found. The water is so shallow. I cannot think
how the collar can have vanished so completely in such a moment of
time.”
She ascended her palace steps, and dismissed her gondoliers with a
gesture, as she paused in the entrance-hall to tell her major-domo
of her loss, and consult him as to the best means to recover the
necklace. The hall was painted in fresco, with beautiful Moorish
windows, and a groined and gilded ceiling, and a wide staircase of
white marble, uncarpeted. Opposite the entrance was a latticed door
through which was seen the bright green of acacias, cratægus, and
laurel growing in a garden.
On the morrow, when it was known through Venice that the rich and
generous Countess Zaranegra had lost her jewels, all the best
divers hurried to the place where the opals had dropped, and worked
sedulously from daybreak to find it, sailors and fishermen and
boatmen all joining in the search, in hope to merit the reward she
promised. But no one of them succeeded. Their efforts were useless.
The tenacious water would not yield up its prey. The opals were gone,
like spindrift.
[Illustration: Chapter end woodcut]
[Illustration: The winter came and went, wrapping Venice in its
mists.]
[Illustration: Chapter head woodcut]
II.
The winter came and went, wrapping Venice in its mists, driving the
sea-birds into the inland canals, making the pigeons sit ruffled and
sad on the parapets of the palaces, and leaving many a gondolier
unemployed, to warm his hands over little fires of driftwood under
the snow-sprinkled rafters and naked vine-branches of his traghetto.
The gondoliers of the Ca’ Zaranegra were more fortunate; they could
sit round the great bronze brazier in the hall of their lady’s
house, and the gondola was laid up high and dry to await the spring,
and their wages were paid with regularity and liberality by the
silent and austere major-domo who reigned in the forsaken palace,
for their lady was away on warmer shores than the wind-beaten,
surge-drowned, sea-walls of their city.
[Illustration: The gondoliers of the Ca’ Zaranegra were more
fortunate; they could sit round the great bronze brazier in the hall
of their lady’s house.... Their wages were paid with regularity and
liberality by the silent and austere major-domo.]
The winter was hard; snow lay long on the Istrian hills and on the
Paduan pastures; there was ice on the rigging of the Greek brigs
in the Giudecca, and the huge ocean steamers from the east looked
like uncouth prehistoric beasts, black and gigantic, as they loomed
through the fogs, moving slowly towards the docks under cautious
pilotage. There were laughter and warmth in the theatres, and the
sounds of music came from some of the palaces; but in the Calle,
in the fishermen’s quarters, on the islands, on board the poor rough
sailing craft, and amongst the maritime population generally, there
were great suffering and much want; and by the bar of Malomocco and
off the coast of Chioggia there were wrecks which strewed the waters
with broken timbers and dashed drowning sailors like seaweed on to
the wooden piles. Stout boats were broken like shells, and strong
seafaring men were washed to and fro like driftwood. But the frail
opal necklace of the Countess Zaranegra was safe in the midst of the
strife; it had fallen into a hollow in a sunken pile and lay there,
unharmed, whilst above it the stormy tides rose and fell, and the
winds churned the cream of the surf. There it lay, all through the
rough winter weather, whilst the silvery gulls died of hunger, and
the sea swallows were hurled by the hurricane on to the lanterns of
lighthouses and against the timbers of vessels.
It weathered many storms, this frail toy, made to lie on the warm
breasts of women, whilst the storm kings drew down to their death the
bread-winners for whom wife and children vainly prayed on shore, and
the daring mariners for whom the deep had had no terrors.
In the hollow of the old oak pile the opals remained all winter long,
lying like bird’s eggs in a nest, whilst the restless waters washed
and swirled above its sanctuary. The worn stump of the wood had
kept its place for centuries, and many a corpse had drifted past it
outward to the sea in days when the white marbles of St. Mark’s city
had run red with blood. It had once been the base of a sea-shrine, of
a Madonna of the waters to whom the boatmen passing had invoked the
Stella Maris Virgine so dear to fishermen and sailors.
But the painted shrine had long disappeared, and only the piece of
timber, down underneath the waters, rooted in the sand amongst the
ribbon weed and mussels, had had power to resist the forces of tide
and tempest.
All the winter long the old wood kept the opals safe and sound. When
the cold passed, and the blasts from the Dolomite glaciers softened,
and the orchards of the fruit islands were in bud, the opals were
still in their hollow, covered from the sea by the bend of the wood
above them, so that, though often wet, they were never washed away.
But one day, when the peach and pear and plum trees had in turn burst
into blossom on the isles, and the flocks of gulls who had survived
the stress of famine and frost had returned to their feeding-places
on the outer lagoons, a large iron ship coming from the Black Sea
gave a rude shock in passing to the old oak pile; the top of it under
the blow parted and fell asunder; the necklace was washed out of
its hiding-place, and, carried in the heavy trough of the steamer’s
path, was floated nearer to the isles, farther from the city. It
became entangled with some algæ, and, rocked on the weed as on a
little raft, was borne to and fro by a strong wind rushing from the
north-east, and so was driven round past San Cristoforo and Burano,
and was finally carried ashore up the creeks into the long grasses
and reeds beneath the Devil’s Bridge at Torcello. The yellow water
iris was then flowering, and two little reed warblers were nesting
amongst the flags, as the opals were drifted up under some hemlock
leaves and there rested.
“I think they are eggs, but they are all strung together,” said the
warbler to his mate.
“They look more like the spawn of a fish,” said the little winged
lady, with scorn.
A water-rat came up and smelt at them, then went away disdainfully;
they were not good to eat. For birds and beasts do not care for
jewels: it is only humanity, which thinks itself superior to them,
which sees any value in stones, and calls such toys precious.
[Illustration: Decorative separator]
III.
The devil is credited with building many bridges on the earth; it is
hard to know why he should have done so, since waters however wide
cannot possibly have been an obstacle in his own path.
But Devil’s Bridges there are, from the Hebrides to the Isles of
Greece; the Devil’s Bridge at Torcello has been so called from the
height and breadth of its one arch, but there is nothing diabolic or
infernal in its appearance; it is of old brick made beautiful in its
hues by age, and has many seeding grasses and weeds growing in its
crevices. Its banks are rich in grass; in flags, in sea lavender, and
about it grow hazel trees and pear trees.
There is nowhere in the world any grass richer than that of Torcello,
and forget-me-nots, honeysuckle, and wild roses grow down to the
water’s edge and around the hoary stones of the deserted isle.
“What a God-forgotten place!” said a young man as he sprang from a
boat on to the bank by the bridge.
“Torcello was the mother of Venice; the daughter has slain her,”
replied an older man as he laid down his oars in the boat, and
prepared to follow his companion.
His foot trod amongst the hemlock leaves and was entangled by them;
he stooped, and his eyes, which were very keen, caught sight of the
string of opals.
“A woman’s necklace!” he said, as he drew it out from under the salt
seaweed, and the dewy dock leaves. It was discoloured, and had sand
and mud on it, and bore little traces of its former beauty; but he
recognised that it was a jewel of worth; he perceived, even dulled as
they were, that the stones were opals.
“What have you there?” cried the younger man from above on the bank.
“The skull of an Archimandrite?”
The other threw the necklace up on to the grass.
“You would have been a fitter finder of a woman’s collar than I am.”
“Opals! The stones of sorrow!” said the younger man, gravely, as
he raised it and brushed off the sand. “It has been beautiful,” he
added. “It will be so again. It is not really hurt, only a little
bruised and tarnished.”
The necklace interested him; he examined it minutely as the sun shone
on the links of dimmed gold. It awakened in him an image of the woman
who might have possessed and worn it.
“What will you do with it?” he said to his companion, who had mounted
on to the bank after securing the boat.
“What does one always do with things found? Send them to the police,
I believe.”
“Oh you Goth!” said the younger. “Let us spend our lives in
discovering the owner.”
“You can spend yours so if you like, Prince. Mine is already in bond
to a severer mistress.”
“Lend me your glass,” said the younger man; the glass was of strong
magnifying power; when it was handed to him he looked through it
at some little marks on the back of the clasp of the opal collar.
“Zaranegra 1770,” he read aloud. “Zaranegra is a Venetian name.”
There was an inscription so minute that to the unaided eye it was
invisible; through the glass it was possible to read it. It was this:
NINA DELLA LUCEDIA
CONTESSA ZARANEGRA
_Capo d Anno_
1770.
[Illustration: “Lend me your glass,” said the younger man. The glass
was of strong magnifying power; when it was handed to him he looked
through it at some little marks on the back of the clasp of the opal
collar.]
“Zaranegra!” repeated the younger man. “That is a Venetian name.
Lucedia is a name of the Marches of Ancona. There is a Ca’
Zaranegra on the Grand Canal. It is next to the Loredàn. You admired
its Moorish windows on the second storey this morning. Carlo
Zaranegra died young; he left a widow who is only twenty now. She
is a daughter of the Duke of Monfalcone; a family of the Trentino,
but pure Italians in blood. Their place is in the mountains above
Gorizia. It must be she who owns this necklace, an heirloom probably.”
“Take it to her,” said the finder of it, with indifference. “I cede
you my rights.”
The younger laughed.
“Ah! who knows what they may become?”
“Whatever they may become they are yours. I do not appreciate that
kind of reward.”
“Really?” said the younger man. “If so I pity you!”
“Nay, I pity you,” said the elder.
The young man still stood with the opals in his hands; with a wisp
of grass he had cleared the sand in a measure off them; the pearly
softness and the roseate flame of the stones began to show here and
there; two alone of their number were missing.
“Come,” said his companion, with impatience. “Put that broken rubbish
in your pocket and let us go and see the Cathedral and S. Fosca, for
it will soon grow dark.”
They walked along the dyke of turf which traverses the isle, past the
low fruit trees and the humble cabins of the few peasants who dwell
there; the grass was long and full of ox-eyed daisies, and purple
loosestrife, and pink campion. They soon reached the green and quiet
place where the sacred buildings of S. Maria and S. Fosca, stand in
the solitude of field and sea.
They entered first of all the old church of S. Fosca. The younger man
went straight to the altar with uncovered head and knelt before it, a
soft and serious look upon his face as his lips moved.
The elder cast a glance, contemptuous and derisive, on him, and
turned to look at the five arcades, with their columns, so precious
to those who understand the laws of architecture.
He was learned in many things, and architecture and archæology
were the studies which were to him pastimes, in the rare hours of
recreation which he allowed himself.
“Have you prayed to find the mistress of the opals?” he said to the
younger man who, risen from his knees, approached him, a red light of
the late afternoon slanting in from an upper window in the apse and
falling on his bright hair and beautiful classic face.
The young man coloured.
“I prayed that the stones may bring us no evil,” he said, with
ingenuous simplicity. “Laugh as you will, a prayer can never do harm,
and you know opals are stones of sorrow.”
“I know you are a credulous child—a superstitious peasant—though you
are twenty-four years old and have royal and noble blood in your
veins.”
“If you had not saved my life I would throw you into the sea,”
replied the other, half in jest half in anger. “Leave my faiths
alone. Lead your own barren life as you choose, but do not cut down
flowers in the garden of others.”
“Life is truly a garden for you,” said the elder man, with a touch of
envy in the tone of his voice.
It was dusk in S. Fosca for the day was far advanced, and the sun was
setting without beyond the world of waters.
Two peasant women were saying their aves before low burning lamps.
The scent of the grass and the smell of the sea came in through the
open door. A cat walked noiselessly across the altar. As the church
was now so it had been a thousand years earlier.
“Does this place say nothing to you?” asked the younger man.
“Nothing,” replied the other. “What should it say?”
[Illustration: Decorative separator]
IV.
When the young Sicilian prince, Lionello Adrianis, head of an ancient
Hispano-Italian family, had met with a hunting accident, and the
tusks of an old boar had brought him near to death, an English
surgeon, by name Frederic Damer, who was then in Palermo, did for
him what none of the Italian surgeons dared to do, and, so far as
the phrase can ever be correct of human action, saved his life. A
year had passed since then; the splendid vitality of the Sicilian
had returned to all its natural vigour; he was only twenty-four
years of age and naturally strong as a young oak in the woods of
Etna. But he had a mother who loved him, and was anxious; she begged
the Englishman to remain awhile near him; the Sicilian laughed but
submitted; he and Damer had travelled together in Egypt and India
during several months, and were now about in another month to part
company; the Sicilian to return to his own people, the Englishman to
occupy a chair of physiology in a town of northern Europe.
Their lives had been briefly united by accident and would have parted
in peace: a collar of opals was by chance washed up amongst the flags
and burdocks of Torcello and the shape of their fate was altered.
With such trifles do the gods play when they stake the lives of men
on the game.
Damer was the son of a country physician, but his father had been
poor, the family numerous, and he, a third son, had been sent out
into the world with only his education as his capital. He practised
surgery to live; he practised physiology to reach through it that
power and celebrity for which his nature craved and his mental
capacity fitted him. But at every step his narrow means galled
and fretted him, and he had been a demonstrator, an assistant, a
professor in schools, when his vast ability and relentless will
fitted him for the position of a Helmholtz or a Virchow in that
new priesthood which has arisen to claim the rule of mankind, and
sacrifices to itself all sentient races.
In Adrianis he saw all the powers of youth and of wealth concentrated
in one who merely used them for a careless enjoyment and a
thoughtless good nature, which seemed, to himself, as senseless as
the dance in the sun of an amorous negro.
Adrianis and the whole of his family had shown him the utmost
gratitude, liberality, and consideration, and the young prince
bore from him good-humouredly sarcasms and satires which he would
not have supported from an emperor; but Damer in his turn felt for
the Sicilian and his people nothing but the contempt of the great
intellect for the uncultured mind, the irritation of the wise man
who sees a child gaily making a kite to divert itself out of the
parchments of a treatise in an unknown tongue which, studied, might
have yielded up to the student the secret of perished creeds and
of lost nations. There is no pride so arrogant, no supremacy so
unbending, as those of the intellect. It may stand, like Belisarius,
a beggar at the gate; but like Belisarius it deems itself the
superior of all the crowds who drop their alms to it, and while it
stretches out its hand to them its lips curse them.
[Illustration: Decorative chapter separator]
[Illustration: Decorative separator]
V.
They went, without visiting the basilica, back to Venice in the
twilight which deepened into night as they drew near the city; the
moon was high and the air still. They dined in the spacious rooms set
aside in the hotel for the young prince. When the dinner was over
Adrianis rose.
“Will you come?” he asked.
“Where?” asked Damer.
“To the Ca’ Zaranegra,” he replied, with a boyish laugh.
“Not I,” replied Damer.
“A rivederci, then,” said Adrianis.
But he lingered a moment.
“It will not be fair to you,” he said, “for me to take the credit of
having found this necklace.”
“Whatever honour there may be in the salvage I cede it, I tell you,
willingly.”
“Of course I shall tell her that it was you.”
“There is no need to do so; I am not a squire of dames. She will
prefer a Sicilian Prince to a plain man of science. However, you must
find the lady first. The true owner lies under some mossgrown slab in
some chapel crypt, no doubt.”
“Why will you speak of death? I hate it.”
“Hate it as you may it will overtake you. Alexander hated it, but
still! When we shall have found the secret of life we may perhaps
find the antidote to death. But that time is not yet.”
He looked at his companion as he spoke, and thought what he did not
speak:
“Yes; strong as you are, and young as you are, and fortunate as you
are, you too will die like the pauper and the cripple and the beggar!”
The reflection gratified him; for of the youth, of the beauty, of the
fortune, he was envious, and with all his scorn of higher intellect
he despised the childlike, happy, amorous temperament, and the
uncultured mind which went with them.
“If I had only his wealth,” he thought often. “Or if he only had my
knowledge!”
“When we shall have penetrated the secret of life we shall perhaps
be able to defy death,” repeated Adrianis. “What use would that be?
You would soon have the world so full that there would be no standing
room; and what would you do with the choking multitudes?”
“I never knew you so logical,” said the elder man, contemptuously.
“But have no fear. We are far enough off the discovery; when it is
made it will remain in the hands of the wise. The immortality of
fools will never be contemplated by science.”
“The wise will not refuse to sell the secret to the wealthy fools,”
thought his companion, but he forbore to say so. He was generous of
temper, and knew that his companion had both wisdom and poverty.
A few seconds later the splash of the canal water beneath the
balcony told the other that the gondola was moving.
“What a child!” thought Damer, with impatient contempt; he turned
up the light of his reading lamp, opened a number of the French
_Journal de Physiologie_, and began to read, not heeding the beauty
of the moonlit marbles of the Salvatore in front of him, or listening
to the song from Mignon which a sweet-voiced lad was singing in a
boat below. He read on thus in solitude for three hours; the great
tapestried and gilded room behind him, the gliding water below; the
beautiful church in front of his balcony, the laughter, the music,
the swish of oars, the thrill of lutes and guitars, all the evening
movement on the canal as the crowds went to and fro the Piazza, not
disturbing him from his studies of which every now and then he made
a note in pencil in a pocket-book.
It was twelve o’clock when, into the empty brilliantly lighted room,
Adrianis entered and came across it to where Damer sat on the balcony.
“I have found her!” he said, with joyous triumph. The moonlight
shone on his dark, starry eyes, his laughing mouth, his tall figure,
full of grace and strength like the form of the Greek Hermes in the
Vatican.
Damer laid aside his papers with impatience.
“And she has welcomed you, apparently? It is midnight, and you look
victorious.”
Adrianis made a gesture of vexed protestation.
“Pray do not suspect such things. I sent in my card and begged her
major-domo to say that I had found her necklace. She sent word
for me to go upstairs that she might thank me. Of course my name
was known to her. She had a duenna with her. It was all solemn and
correct. She was enchanted to find her necklace. It was an heirloom
which Zaranegra gave her. He was killed in a duel, as I told you,
two years ago. She is very beautiful and looks twenty years old,
even less. I was very honest; I told her that an Englishman who was
travelling with me had enjoyed the honour of finding the opals; and
she wishes to see you to-morrow. I promised to take you _in prima
sera_; you surely ought to be grateful.”
Damer shrugged his shoulders and looked regretfully at his papers and
pencils.
“Women only disturb one,” he said, ungraciously.
Adrianis laughed.
“It is that disturbance which perfumes our life and shakes the rose
leaves over it. But I remember, to attract you a woman must be lying,
dead or alive, on an operating-table.”
“Alive by preference,” said Damer. “The dead are little use to us;
their nervous system is still, like a stopped clock.”
“A creature must suffer to interest you?”
“Certainly.”
Adrianis shuddered slightly.
“Why did you save me?”
Damer smiled.
“My dear prince, it is my duty to save when I can. I should have
preferred to let you alone, and study your natural powers of
resistance in conflict with the destruction which was menacing them.
But I could not follow my preferences. I was called in to assist
your natural powers by affording them artificial resistance; and I
was bound to do so.”
Adrianis made a grimace which signified disappointment and distaste.
“If my mother knew you looked at it in that way she would not adore
you, my friend, as she does.”
“The princess exaggerates,” said Damer, putting out his lamp.
“Mothers always do; I do not think I ever said anything to lead her
to deceive herself with regard to me. She knows what my interests and
my pursuits are.”
“But,” said Adrianis, wistfully, “surely there are many men of
science, many surgeons, whose desire is to console, to amend, who
care for the poor human material on which they work?”
“There are some,” replied Damer; “but they are not in the front ranks
of their profession, nor will science ever owe much to them.”
The young man was silent; he felt in his moral nature as he had
sometimes felt in his physical, when a chill icy wind had risen
and passed through the sunshine of a balmy day. He shook off the
impression with the mutability of a happy temper.
“Eh via!” he cried. “You make me feel cold in the marrow of my bones.
Good-night. I am tired, and I go to dream of the lady of the opals.
Like you, I prefer living women to dead ones, but I do not wish them
to suffer. I wish them to enjoy—for my sake and their own!”
Damer, left alone, relit his lamp, took up his papers and books,
went into the room, for the night was fresh, and remained reading and
writing until daybreak.
[Illustration: Decorative chapter separator]
[Illustration: Decorative separator]
VI.
Veronica Zaranegra was charmed to find her necklace; she was still
more charmed to find an adventure through it.
This beautiful youth with his starry eyes, soft with admiration,
who had brought her back the opals, looked like a knight out of
fairyland. She was young; she was weary of the seclusion of her
widowhood; she was kept in close constraint by those who had
authority over her; she was ready to re-enter life in its enjoyments,
its amusements, its affections, its desires. The tragic end of
her husband had impressed and saddened her, but she had recovered
from its shock. The marriage had been arranged by their respective
families, and the hearts of neither had been consulted. Zaranegra,
however, had become much in love with her, and had left her all which
it was in his power to leave, and that had been much.
[Illustration: She was like a picture of Caterina Cornaro as she
stood on the balcony of her house; her golden hair was enclosed in a
pearl-sown net, she had some crimson carnations at her throat, and
her cloak of red satin, lined with sables, lay on her shoulders and
fell to her feet like the robes of a Dogaressa.]
She was like a picture of Caterina Cornaro as she stood on the
balcony of her house; her golden hair was enclosed in a pearl-sown
net, she had some crimson carnations at her throat, and her cloak of
red satin lined with sables lay on her shoulders and fell to her feet
like the robes of a Dogaressa.
The balcony was filled with spiræa, whose white blossoms were like
snow about her in the starlight and lamplight as the gondola which
brought the Sicilian prince and his companion to her palace paused
below at the water-stairs.
“How clever it was of you to see my opals under the grass and the
sand!” she said, a few moments later, as Adrianis presented Damer in
the long, dim room hung with tapestries and rich in bronzes, marbles,
pictures, and mosaics.
She threw her cloak on a couch as she spoke; she was dressed in
black, but the gauze sleeves of the gown showed her fair arms, and
the bodice was slightly open on her bosom; her face was bright like
a rose above the deep shadow of the gown; her hair had been a little
ruffled by the wind of the evening as she had stood on the balcony.
“Madame,” said Damer, as he bowed to her with a strange and unwelcome
sense of embarrassment, “Prince Adrianis should not have told you
that I had such good fortune. I am no fit squire of dames: he is.”
“But how came you to see them, all dull and muddy as they were?”
“Sight is a matter of training; I use my eyes. Most people do not use
theirs.”
She looked at him curiously and laughed. The answer seemed to her
very droll.
“Everybody sees except the blind,” she said, somewhat puzzled.
“And the purblind,” added Damer.
She did not catch his meaning. She turned from him a little
impatiently and addressed Adrianis.
She spoke of music. Adrianis was accomplished in that art; there was
a mandoline lying on the grand piano; he took it up and sang to it a
Sicilian love-song; she took it from him and sang Venetian barcarolle
and stornelli; then they sang together, and their clear, youthful
voices blent melodiously. People passing on the canal stopped their
gondolas under the balcony to listen; some Venetian professional
musicians in a boat below applauded. Damer sat in the shadow, and
listened, and looked at them. Music said little or nothing to him;
he had scarcely any comprehension of it; but something in the sound
of those blended voices touched a chord in his nature; made him feel
vaguely sad, restlessly desirous, foolishly irritated. The light fell
on the handsome head of the youth, on the carnations at the lady’s
throat, on the rings on their hands, which touched as they took the
mandoline one from the other; behind them were the open casement, the
balcony with its white flowers, the lighted frontage of a palace on
the opposite side of the canal.
[Illustration: There was a mandoline lying on the grand piano; he
took it up and sang to it a Sicilian love-song; she took it from
him and sang Venetian barcarolle and stornelli.... Damer sat in the
shadow, and listened, and looked at them.]
As they ceased to sing the people below on the water applauded again,
and cried, “Brava! brava! Bis, bis!”
Adrianis laughed and rose, and, going out on to the balcony, threw
some money to the boat-load of ambulant musicians who had left off
their playing and singing to listen.
“Those artists below are very kind to us amateurs,” said Adrianis,
with a little branch of spiræa in his hand, which he proceeded to
fasten in his button-hole as he came back into the light of the room.
“You are more than an amateur.”
“Oh, all Sicilians sing. The syrens teach us.”
“Prince Adrianis is a poet,” said Damer, with a harsh tone in his
voice.
“Who never wrote a verse,” said Adrianis, as he handed a cup of
coffee to his hostess.
“Shut the windows,” said the Countess Zaranegra to her servants, who
brought in coffee and wine, lemonade and syrups.
Through the closed windows the sound of a chorus sung by the
strolling singers below came faintly and muffled into the room; the
lamplight shone on the white spray of the spiræa in his coat, which
looked like a crystal of snow.
“If I had found the opals I should have been inspired by them,” he
added. “As it is, I am dumb and unhappy.”
Veronica Zaranegra smiled.
“If you are dumb, so was Orpheus.”
“And if you are unhappy so was Prince Fortunatus,” added Damer. “You
are only sad out of wantonness because the gods have given you too
many gifts.”
“Or because he has stolen a piece of spiræa.”
“I may keep my theft?” asked Adrianis.
“Yes. For you brought back the opals, though you did not find them.”
Soon after they both took their leave of her and went down to the
waiting gondola. The boat-load of musicians had drifted upwards
towards Rialto, the colours of their paper lanthorns glowing through
the dark. There was no moon. They did not speak to each other in the
few minutes which carried them to their hotel. When they reached it
they parted with a brief good-night. Neither asked the other what his
impressions of the lady, and of the evening, had been.
The night was dark. Mists obscured the stars. The lights at the
Dogana and of the lamps along the Schiavone were shining brightly,
and many other lights gleamed here and there, where they shone in
gondolas, or boats, or at the mast-heads of vessels anchored in the
dock of St. Mark. The hour was still early; eleven o’clock and the
canal was not yet deserted. There was the liquid sound of parting
water as people went to and fro on its surface. At such an hour
Venice is still what it was in the days of Paul Veronese, or of
Virginia di Leyva.
Adrianis sat by the sea-wall of the hotel garden and looked absently
down the dark expanse studded with lights like diamonds, and thought
exclusively of the woman he had quitted. He saw her golden hair
shining in the lamplight, the red of the knot of carnations at her
throat, the slender, jewelled hand on the mandoline, the smiling,
rose-like mouth; he heard the clear, fresh, unstrained voice rising
and falling with his own, whilst her eyes smiled and her eyes met his.
“Stones of sorrow! stones of sorrow!” he thought. “No, no. They shall
be jewels of joy to me, to her. Love is born of a glance, of a note,
of a murmur. It is the wonder flower of life. It blossoms full-grown
in an instant. It needs neither time nor reflection.”
His heart beat gladly in him: his nerves were thrilled and throbbing;
his welcome of a new and profound emotion was without fear.
In such a mood the merest trifle has eloquence. He was sorry when he
looked down on the spray of spiræa in his coat, and saw that all the
little starry flowers of it had fallen off, and vanished, as though
it had indeed been snow which had melted at a breath of scirocco.
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VII.
Two weeks passed, and brought the month of May. On the many island
banks long sprays of dog-rose and honeysuckle hung down over the
water, and the narrow canals which ran through them were tunnels of
blossom and verdure; on the sunny shallows thousands of white-winged
gulls were fishing and bathing all the day long; and in the churches
azaleas and lilies and arums were grouped round the altars under the
dark-winged angels of Tintoretto and the golden-haired cherubim of
Tiepolo.
The nights were still cold but the days were warm, were at noontide
even hot; and Veronica Zaranegra passed almost all her time on
the water. There was a little orchard island which belonged to
the family, out beyond Mazzorbo; in the previous century a small
summer-house or pavilion, with a red-tiled dome like a beehive, had
been erected on it and was still there; a pretty toy still, though
its frescoed walls were faded and its marble landing steps eaten
away by the incessant washing of the sea; it was embowered in peach
and plum and pear trees, and looked westward. Here she came often
for breakfast, or for afternoon tea, or the evening merenda of fruit
sweetmeats and wine, and here she was often accompanied by a gay
party of Venetians of her own years and by the two strangers who
had given her back her opals. The weather was rainless and radiant;
the gondolas glided like swallows over the lagoons; she was rich,
childlike, fond of pleasure; she tried to bring back the life of the
eighteenth century, and amused herself with reviving its customs,
its costumes, its comedies, as they had been before the storms of
revolution and the smoke of war had rolled over the Alps, and Arcole
and Marengo had silenced the laughter of Italy.
“I wish I had lived when this collar was new,” she said, when her
jewellers returned to her the opals restored to their pristine
brilliancy. “Life in Venice was one long festa then; I have read
of it. It was all masque, and serenade, and courtship, and
magnificence. People were not philosophical about life then; they
lived. Nina Zaranegra was a beautiful woman. They have her portrait
in the Belle Arte. She holds a rose to her lips and laughs. She was
killed by her husband for an amour. She had these opals on her throat
when he drove the stiletto through it. At least so Carlo used to tell
me. But perhaps it was not true.”
“Do not wear them,” said Adrianis, to whom she was speaking. “Do not
wear them if they are blood-stained. You know they are stones of
sorrow.”
She laughed.
“You Sicilians are superstitious. We northerners are not. I like to
wear them for that very reason of their tragedy.”
She took up the necklace and clasped it round her throat; some
tendrils of her hair caught in the clasp; she gave an involuntary
little cry of pain. Adrianis hastened to release her hair from the
clasp. His hand trembled; their eyes met, and said much to each
other. Damer, who was near, drew nearer.
“I have seen the portrait in the Belle Arte,” he said. “The Countess
Nina symbolises silence with her rose, but she has the face of a
woman who would not keep even her own secrets. Indeed a charming
woman is always ‘_bavarde comme les pies_,’ as the French say.”
“You despise women,” said Veronica Zaranegra, with vexation.
“Oh, no. But I should not give them my confidence any more than I
should give a delicate scientific instrument to a child.”
“Not even to a woman whom you loved?”
“Still less to a woman whom I loved.”
“You are a mysterious sage,” she said, a little impatiently.
“You regard us as if we were children indeed, incapable of any
comprehension.”
Damer did not dispute the accusation.
“Did I hear you say,” he asked, “that the lovely original of that
portrait was murdered by her husband?”
“Yes, and he would not even allow her Christian burial, but had her
body carried out on to the Orfano canal, and thrown into the water,
with a great stone tied to her feet.”
“He was primitive,” said Damer. “Those are rough, rude ways of
vengeance.”
“What would you have done?”
“I hardly know; but I should not have so stupidly wasted such a
beautiful organism. Besides the end was too swift to be any great
punishment.”
She was silent, looking at him with that mixture of curiosity,
interest, and vague apprehension which he always aroused in her. She
was not very intelligent, but she had quick susceptibilities; there
was that in him which alarmed them and yet fascinated them.
“He awes me,” she said later in the day to Adrianis. “So often one
cannot follow his meaning, but one always feels his reserve of power.”
It was a grave speech for a light-hearted lover of pleasure. Adrianis
heard it with vexation, but he was loyal to the man who, as he
considered, had saved his life.
“He is a person of great intellect,” he answered; “we are pigmies
beside him. But——”
“But what?”
“He used his brains to cure my body. So I must not dispute the virtue
of his use of them. Yet sometimes I fancy that he has no heart. I
think all the forces in him have only nourished his mind, which
is immense. But his heart, perhaps, has withered away, getting no
nourishment. He would say I talk nonsense; but I think you will
understand what I mean.”
“I think I understand,” said Veronica, thoughtfully.
She had thought very little in her careless young life; she had begun
to think more since these two men had come into it.
“Adrianis merits better treatment than you give him,” said her duenna
to her that day. “How long will you keep him in suspense? You ought
to remember ‘what hell it is in waiting to abide.’”
“A hell?” said Veronica, with the colour in her face. “You mean a
paradise!”
“A fool’s paradise, I fear,” replied the elder woman. “And what does
that other man do here? He told me he was due at some university in
Germany.”
“How can I tell why either of them stays?” said Veronica,
disingenuously as her conscience told her. “Venice allures many
people, especially in her spring season.”
“So does a woman in her spring,” said the elder lady, drily, with an
impatient gesture.
“You are angry with me,” said Veronica, mournfully.
“No, my dear. It is as useless to be angry with you as to be angry
with a young cat because in its gambols it breaks a vase of which it
knows nothing of the preciousness.”
Veronica Zaranegra did not resent or reply. She knew the vase was
precious; she did not mean to break it; but she wanted to be free
awhile longer. Mutual love was sweet, but it was not freedom. And
what she felt ashamed of was a certain reluctance which moved her
to allow Damer to see or know that she loved a man of so little
intellectual force as Adrianis, a man who had nothing but his
physical beauty and his gay, glad temper and kind heart.
“Do you want nothing more than these?” the gaze of Damer seemed in
her imagination to say to her.
She was angered with herself for thinking of him or of his opinion;
he was not of her world or of her station; he was a professional man,
a worker, a teacher; natural pride of lineage and habit made her
regard him as in no way privileged to be considered by her. And yet
she could not help being influenced by that disdain of the mental
powers of others which he had never uttered, but which he continually
showed. Indecision is the greatest bane of women; obstinacy costs
them much, but indecision costs them more. The will of Veronica
flickered like a candle in the wind, veered hither and thither like a
fallen leaf in a gust of wind and rain.
Adrianis was delightful to her; his beauty, his gaiety, and his
homage were all sympathetic to her. She knew that he loved her, but
she prevented him telling her so; she liked her lately acquired
liberty; she did not want a declaration which would force her to
decide in one way or another what to do with her future. And she was
affected without being aware of it by the scarcely disguised contempt
which his companion had for him. It was seldom outspoken, but it was
visible in every word of Damer, in every glance.
“He is beautiful, yes,” he said once to her. “So is an animal.”
“Do you not like animals?”
“I do not like or dislike them. The geologist does not like or
dislike the stones he breaks up, the metallurgist does not like or
dislike the ore he fuses.”
She did not venture to ask him what he meant; she had a vague
conception of his meaning, and it gave her a chill as such replies
gave to Adrianis: a chill such as the north wind, when it comes down
from the first snows on the Dolomite peaks, gives to the honeysuckle
flowers hanging over the sea-walls. She was not clever or much
educated, but she had seen a good deal of the world, and she had
heard men talk of science, of its pretensions and its methods, its
self-worship and its tyrannies. She had put her rosy fingers in her
ears and run away when they had so spoken, but some things she had
heard and now remembered.
“You are what they call a physiologist?” she said once, suddenly.
“I am,” replied Damer.
She looked at him under her long silky lashes as a child looks at
what it fears in the dusk of a fading day. He attracted her and
repelled her, as when she had herself been a little child she had
been at once charmed and frightened by the great ghostly figures on
the tapestries, and the white and grey busts of gods and sages on
the grand staircase of her father’s house in the Trentino. She would
have liked to ask him many things, things of mystery and of horror,
but she was afraid. After all, how much better were the sea, the
sunshine, the dog-rose, the barcarolle, the laughter, the lute!
She turned to Adrianis, who at that moment came along the sands of
the beach, his hands filled with spoils from the blossoming hedges;
turned to him as when, a little child on the staircase in the dusk,
she had run to reach the shelter of a warmed and lighted room. He was
of her own country, her own age, her own temperament; he carried
about him a sense of gladness, an atmosphere of youth; he was of her
own rank; he was as rich as she, and richer. There was no leaven of
self-seeking in the love he bore her; the passion she had roused
in him was pure of any alloy; it was the love of the poets and the
singers. If she accepted it, her path, from youth to age, would be
like one of those flowering meadows of his own Sicily which fill the
cloudless day with perfume.
She knew that; her foot was ready to tread the narcissus-filled
grass, but by an unaccountable indecision and caprice she would not
let him invite her thither. She continually evaded or eluded the
final words which would have united them or parted them.
Again and again, when that moment of decision could not have been
postponed, the sombre shadow of Damer had appeared, as in the moment
when the clasp of the necklace had been entangled in the little curls
at the back of her throat.
It might be chance, it might be premeditation; but he was always
there in those moments when the heart of Adrianis leaped to his eyes
and lips and called to hers.
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VIII.
In the evening she was usually at home. She did not as yet go to
balls or theatres; the aristocratic society of Venice flocked to her
rooms, and what was best in the foreign element. In the evenings
neither Adrianis nor Damer saw her alone; but in the daytime, on the
island or in the water excursions, sometimes one or the other was
beside her for a few minutes with no listener near.
Adrianis eagerly sought such occasions; Damer never seemed to seek
them. He was often in her palace and on her island, but appeared to
be so chiefly because he went where Adrianis went. No one could have
told that he took pleasure in doing so.
But Adrianis, somewhat surprised at his lingering so long, thought to
himself: “He was to be in Gottenberg by the 10th of May, and it is
now the 23rd.”
“Have you given up your appointment?” he asked once, directly.
Damer merely answered, “No.” He did not offer any explanation; but he
continued to stay on in Venice, though he had removed from the fine
apartments occupied by his friend to a house on the Fondamenti Nuovi,
where he had hired two chambers.
Adrianis, who was very generous and had always a grateful and uneasy
sense of unrepaid obligation, vainly urged him to remain at his
hotel. But Damer, somewhat rudely, refused.
“I cannot pursue any studies there,” he replied.
The house he had chosen was obscure and uninviting, standing amidst
the clang of coppersmiths’ hammers and the stench of iron-foundries
in what was once the most patrician and beautiful garden-quarter of
Venice, but which is now befouled, blackened, filled with smoke,
and clamour, and vileness, where once the rose-terraces and the
clematis-covered pergole ran down to the lagoon, and the marble
stairs were white as snow under silken awnings.
“What do you do there?” Veronica Zaranegra wished to ask him; but
she never did so; she felt vaguely afraid as a woman of the Middle
Age would have feared to ask a magician what he did with his alembics
and his spheres.
Although the eyes of lovers are proverbially washed by the collyrium
of jealousy, those of Adrianis were blind to the passion which Damer,
like himself, had conceived. The reserve and power of self-restraint
in Damer were extreme, and served to screen his secret from the not
very discerning mind of his companion. Moreover, the pride of race
which was born and bred in Adrianis rendered it impossible for him to
suspect that he possessed a rival in one who was, however mentally
superior, so far socially inferior, to himself and to the woman he
loved.
That a man who was going to receive a stipend as a teacher in a
German university could lift his eyes to Veronica Zaranegra would
have seemed wholly impossible to one who had been reared in patrician
and conservative tenets. He never noticed the fires which slumbered
in the cold wide-opened eyes of his friend and monitor. He never
observed how frequently Damer watched him and her when they were
together, listened from afar to their conversation, and invariably
interrupted them at any moment when their words verged on more
tender or familiar themes. He was himself tenderly, passionately,
romantically enamoured; his temper was full of a romance to which
he could not often give adequate expression; his love for her had
the timidity of all sincere and nascent passion; he was pained and
chafed by the manner in which she avoided his definite declaration
of it, but he did not for a moment trace it to its right cause, the
magnetic influence which the Englishman had upon her, the hesitation
which was given her by vague hypnotic suggestion. If any looker-on
had warned him, he would have laughed and said that the days of magic
were past.
He himself only counted time by the hours which brought him into her
presence on the water, on the island, or in the evening receptions in
the palace. He made water-festivals and pleasure-cruises to please
her; he had sent for his own sailing yacht from Palermo. The long,
light days of late spring and earliest summer passed in a series of
ingenious amusements of which the sole scope was to obtain a smile
from her. Often she did smile, the radiance of youth and of a woman’s
willingness to be worshipped shining on her fair countenance as the
sun shone on the sea. Sometimes also the smile ceased suddenly when,
from a distance, her eyes encountered those of Damer.
All that was most delightful in life offered itself to her in the
homage of Adrianis: his mother’s welcome, his southern clime, his
great love, his infinite tenderness and sweetness of temper, his
great physical beauty. She longed to accept these great gifts; she
longed to feel his arms folded about her and his cheek against hers;
and yet she hesitated, she delayed, she avoided, because in the eyes
of another man, whom she disliked and feared, she read mockery,
disdain, and superiority. She could not have said what it was that
she felt any more than the young spaniel could tell what moves it
as it looks up into human eyes, and reads authority in them, and
crouches, trembling.
Why did he stay here? she asked herself, this cold, still,
irresponsive man, who had nothing in him which was not alien to the
youthful and pleasure-loving society in which he found himself, and
who was by his own admission already overdue at the university to
which he had been appointed.
“Are you not losing time?” she said once to him; “we are so
frivolous, so ignorant, so unlike you.”
“I never lose time,” replied Damer. “An amœba in a pool on the sand
is companion enough for me.”
Seeing that she had no idea of what he meant, he added:
“A man of science is like an artist; his art is everywhere, wherever
natural forms exist.”
“Or like a sportsman,” said Adrianis, who was listening; “his sport
is everywhere, wherever there are living things to kill.”
“Put it so if you please,” said Damer. But he was annoyed; he
disliked being answered intelligently and sarcastically by one whom
he considered a fool. Whatever Adrianis said irritated him, though it
was almost perpetually courteous and simple, as was the nature of the
speaker.
Damer read the young man’s heart like an open book and he knew that
it was wholly filled with the image of Veronica. He had never liked
Adrianis; he had no liking for youth or for physical beauty, or for
kindliness and sweetness and simplicity of character. Such qualities
were not in tune with him; they were no more to him than the soft,
thick fur of the cat in his laboratory, which he stripped off her
body that he might lay bare her spinal cord; the pretty, warm skin
was nothing to science—no more than was the pain of the bared nerves.
He had saved the life of Adrianis because it had interested and
recompensed him to do so; he had travelled with him for a year
because it suited him financially to do so; but he had never liked
him, he had never been touched by any one of the many generous and
delicate acts of the young man, nor by the trust which the mother
of Adrianis continually expressed in her letters to himself. Where
jealousy sits on the threshold of the soul, goodness and kindness and
faith knock in vain for admittance. Envy is hatred in embryo; and
only waits in the womb of time for birth.
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IX.
One day Veronica asked him to go and see an old servant of the
Zaranegra household who was very ill and in hospital; they had begged
him not to go to the hospital, but he had wished to do so, and had
been allowed to fulfil his wish. Damer went to visit him. He found
the man at death’s door with cancer of the food and air passages.
“If he be not operated on he will die in a week,” said the
Englishman.
None of the hospital surgeons dared perform such an operation.
“I will operate if you consent,” said Damer.
The surgeons acquiesced.
“Will Biancon recover?” asked Veronica, when he returned and told her
on what they had decided.
“In his present state he cannot live a week,” replied Damer,
evasively.
“Does he wish for the operation?”
“He can be no judge. He cannot know his own condition. He cannot take
his own prognosis.”
“But it will be frightful suffering.”
“He will be under anæsthetics.”
“But will he recover?”
“Madame, I am not the master of Fate.”
“But what is probable?”
“What is certain is that the man will die if left as he is.”
He performed the operation next day. The man ceased to breathe as it
was ended; the shock to the nervous system had killed him.
When she heard that he was dead she burst into tears.
“Oh! why, oh! why,” she said passionately to Damer, later in the
day: “why, if you knew he must die, did you torture him in his last
moments?”
“I gave him a chance,” he replied, indifferently. “Anyhow he would
never have survived the operation more than a few weeks.”
“Why did you torture him with it then?” said Veronica, indignantly.
“It was a rare, and almost unique, opportunity. I have solved by it
a doubt which has never been solved before, and never could have been
without a human subject.”
She shrank from him in horror.
“You are a wicked man!” she said, faintly. “Oh, how I wish, how I
wish I had never asked you to see my poor Biancon! He might have
lived!”
“He would most certainly have died,” said Damer, unmoved. “The life
of a man at sixty is not an especially valuable thing, and I believe
he did nothing all his life except polish your palace floors with
beeswax or oil; I forget which it is they use in Venice.”
She looked at him with a mixture of horror and fear.
“But you have killed him!—and you can jest.”
“I did not kill him. His disease killed him,” replied Damer, with
calm indifference. “And his end has been a source of knowledge. I
should wish my own end to be as fruitful.”
She shuddered, and motioned to him to leave her.
“Go away, go away, you have no heart, and no conscience.”
Damer smiled slightly.
“I have a scientific conscience; it is as good as a moral one, and
does better work.”
“Why did you bring that man to Venice?” she said to Adrianis some
hours later. “He has killed my poor Biancon, and he cares nothing.”
“Why do you receive him?” said Adrianis, feeling the reproach unjust.
“Cease to receive him. That is very simple. If you banish him he is
proud; he will not persist.”
“He would not perhaps persist; but he would be revenged,” she
thought, but she did not say so. Though her life was short, she had
learned in it that men are like detonators which you cannot throw
against each other without explosion.
Adrianis began to desire the exile of his companion, though his
loyalty withheld him from trying to obtain it by any unfair means
or unjust attack. He was mortified and disquieted. Why had he not
had patience, and waited to carry the opals to the Ca’ Zaranegra
until the Englishman had been safe on the sea on his way to Trieste?
He began to perceive that Damer had an influence on the Countess
Veronica which was contrary to his own, and adverse to his interests.
He did not attach importance to it, because he saw that it was
purely intellectual; but he would have preferred that it had not
existed. So would she.
It was such an influence as the confessor obtains over the devotee;
against which husband, lover, children, all natural ties, struggle
altogether in vain.
It is not love; it is alien to love, but it is frequently stronger
than love, and casts down the winged god maimed and helpless.
“Pierres de malheur! Pierres de malheur!” she said, as she looked at
the opals that night. “Why did you bring that cruel man into my life?”
She might banish him as Adrianis had said, but she felt that she
would never have courage to do it. Damer awed her. She felt something
of what the poor women in the Salpêtrière had felt, when he had
hypnotised them, and made them believe that they clasped their hands
on red-hot iron, or were being dragged by ropes to the scaffold. She
strove to resist and conquer the impression, but she was subjugated
by it against her will.
She buried her poor old servant that night, and followed the coffin
in its gondola in her own, with her men in mourning and the torches
burning at the prow.
From the casement of his high tower on the north of the city,
which looked over the lagoon towards that island which is now the
cemetery of Venice, with its tall mosque-like Campanile and its high
sea-walls, Damer saw and recognised her on that errand of respect to
the humble dead. He saw also the long-boat of the yacht of Adrianis,
laden with flowers, following her gondola at a little distance, as
though its owner were timid and uncertain of welcome. He recognised
them both in the evening light, and through his binocular could
discern their features, their hands, their garlands, as the torches
flamed and the water, roughened by wind, broke against the black
sides of her gondola, and the white sides of the boat.
“Two children,” he thought, “made for each other, with their flowers
and fables and follies! I should do best to leave them together.”
Then he shut his window and turned from the sight of the silver
water, the evening skies, the gliding vessels.
His work awaited him. Bound on a plank lay a young sheepdog, which
he had bought from a peasant of Mazzorbo for a franc; he had cut
its vocal chords; in his own jargon, had rendered it aphone; he had
then cut open its body, and torn out its kidneys and pancreas; it was
living; he reckoned it would live in its mute and unpitied agony for
twelve hours more—long enough for the experiment which he was about
to make.
These were the studies for which he had come to the tower on the
Fondamenti.
The clang of hammers and the roar of furnaces drowned the cries of
animals which it was not convenient to make aphone; and the people
of the quarter were too engrossed in their labours to notice when he
flung down into the water dead or half-dead mutilated creatures.
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X.
After the death of the serving-man, Biancon, the name of the English
scientist and surgeon became known and revered amongst the persons
of his own profession in Venice. The poor man had died certainly
from the shock to the nerves, but that was of small moment. The
operation had been eminently successful, as science counts success.
It had been admirably performed, and had, as he had said to Veronica,
cleared up a doubt which could not, without a human subject, have
been satisfactorily dissipated. His skill, his manual dexterity, his
courage, were themes of universal praise, and more than one rich
person of the Veneto entreated his examination, and submitted to his
treatment.
Adrianis saw but little of him in the daytime, but most evenings in
_prima sera_ they met in the Palazzo Zaranegra. There Damer spoke
little, but he spoke with effect; and, when he was silent, it seemed
to the young mistress of the house that his silence was odiously
eloquent, for it appeared always to say to her: “What a mindless
creature you are! What a mindless creature you love!”
Sometimes it seemed to her to say more; to say across the length of
the lighted, perfumed, flower-filled salon, “And if I forbid your
mutual passion? If I prevent its fruition?”
Out of his presence she ridiculed these ideas, but in his presence
they were realities to her, and realities which alarmed and haunted
her.
“How I wish you had never brought him here—oh, how I wish it!” she
said once to Adrianis.
They were in the Piazza of St. Mark; it was late in the evening; the
gay summer crowd was all around them; the band was playing; the full
moon was above in all her glory; laughter and gay chatter mingled
with the lapping of the water and the splash of oars. In the blaze
of light under the colonnades people were supping and flirting and
jesting, as though they were still in the days of Goldoni.
“Are you not a little unjust to me?” said Adrianis, gently. “I could
not do otherwise, in common honesty, than tell you that it was not
I who had found your opals, and you wished to see and to thank the
person who had done so.”
“Oh, I know! I know!” she said, with an impatient sigh. “Such things
are always one’s own fault. But he killed Biancon, and his very
presence now is painful to me.”
“Tell him so.”
“I dare not.”
“Shall I tell him for you?”
She looked at him with the wistful, alarmed gaze of a frightened
child.
“Oh, no, no! He would be offended. He might quarrel with you. No!
Pray do not do that.”
“His anger has no terrors for me,” he said, with a smile. “But you
know what you wish is my law for silence as for speech.”
“Limonate? Fragolone? Gelate? Confetti?” sang a boy, pushing against
them with his tray of summer drinks, ices, fruits, and sweetmeats.
“Let us go; it is late; and the crowd grows noisy,” said her duenna.
Adrianis accompanied them to their gondola, which was in waiting
beyond the pillars. He did not venture to offer to accompany them,
for the hour was late, and the elder lady, herself a Zaranegra, was
rigid in her construction and observance of etiquette. He watched
the gondola drift away amongst the many others waiting there, and
then turned back to the piazza as the two Vulcans on the clock-tower
beat out on their anvil with their hammers the twelve strokes
of midnight. He saw amongst the crowd the pale and thoughtful
countenance of Damer. Had he heard what the young Countess had said
of him? It was impossible to tell from his expression; he was looking
up at the four bronze horses, as he sat, with an evening paper on his
knee, at one of the little tables, an untouched lemonade standing at
his elbow.
“I did not know you were here,” said Adrianis. “It is too frivolous a
scene for you. Are you longing to dissect the horses of St. Mark’s?”
Damer smiled slightly.
“I fear I should find their anatomy faulty. I am no artist, or art
critic either, or I should venture to say that I object to their
attitude. Arrested motion is a thing too momentary to perpetuate in
metal or in stone.”
Adrianis looked up at the rearing coursers.
“Surely we might as well object to the statue of Colleone because he
sits erect and motionless through centuries?”
“No, that is quite another matter. Colleone is at rest. The horses
yonder are leaping violently.”
“You are too subtle for me! I can only admire. I am an ignorant, you
know. Have you been here long?”
“Half an hour.”
Had he heard? Adrianis wondered. It was impossible to tell.
“I seldom see you now,” he added. “You have become very unsociable.”
“I was not aware that I was ever sociable. People much occupied
cannot be so. You see I have a newspaper and I do not read it; I have
a _bevanda_ and I do not drink it. I have seen the Contessa Zaranegra
and I have not spoken to her.”
It seemed that the reply, which was longer and more jesting than was
the wont of the speaker, was made with intention.
Adrianis was silent. He wished to tell Damer that his presence was
unwelcome to the lady of whom he spoke, but he hesitated; he was
afraid to compromise her, to seem to boast of some confidence from
her.
“Did you know,” he asked in a low tone, “that her poor serving man
would die under the knife?”
Damer gave him a cold, contemptuous glance.
“I do not speak on professional subjects to laymen,” he said, curtly.
“I do not ask you,” replied Adrianis, “from the professional point of
view. I ask you from that of humanity.”
“Humanity does not enter into the question,” said Damer, slightingly.
“I hope you will not regard it as offensive if I ask you to limit
yourself to speaking of what you understand.”
The blood rose into the cheek of Adrianis, and anger leapt to his
lips. He restrained it with effort from utterance. The boundless
scorn which Damer never scrupled to show for him was at times very
chafing and provocative.
“You know, yourself, nothing of sculpture, you admit,” he said,
controlling his personal feeling, “and yet you venture to criticise
the horses of Lysippus.”
“My criticism is sound, and they are not the horses of Lysippus.”
“They may not be. But my criticism is sound too, I think, on your
want of humanity towards poor Biancon.”
Damer cast an evil and disdainful glance at him.
“With regard,” he replied, “to the man Biancon, there could be no
question of either cruelty or kindness. These terms do not enter
into surgical vocabularies. You are well aware that on the stage no
actor could act who felt in any manner the real emotions of his part.
In like degree no surgeon could operate who was unnerved by what
you call ‘humanity’ with regard to his patient. There is no more of
feeling, or want of feeling, in the operator than in the actor. Is it
impossible for you to comprehend that? As for yourself, you do not
care the least for the dead facchino, you only care because a fair
woman who is dear to you has wept.”
He spoke with insolence, but with apparently entire indifference.
Adrianis coloured with displeasure and self-consciousness. It was
the first time that the name of the Countess Zaranegra had been
mentioned between them when out of her presence. It seemed to
him an intolerable presumption in Damer to speak of her. But he
scarcely knew how to reply. With a man of his own rank he would have
quarrelled in such a manner that a sabre duel on the pastures by the
Brenta river would have followed in the morning. But Damer was not
socially his equal, and was a man to whom a year before he had owed,
or had thought that he owed, his restoration to health and life.
“I should prefer that you left the name of that lady out of our
discourse,” he said, in a low tone but with hauteur. “In my world we
do not venture to speak of women whom we respect.”
Damer understood the reproof and the lesson so conveyed.
“I am not of your world,” he said, slightingly. “I have no such
pretensions. And women are to me but subjects of investigation, like
cats—in their bodies, I mean; of their minds and hearts I have no
knowledge. I leave such studies to Paul Bourget and you.”
Then he rose and walked away towards the end of the piazza, where the
opening of the goldsmiths’ street of the Merceria leads to the back
of the clock-tower and the network of narrow passages beyond it.
Adrianis did not detain him, but went himself to his gondola and was
taken the few yards which parted St. Mark’s from his hotel. Sometimes
he slept on board his yacht, but sometimes at the hotel, because
it was nearer to the Ca’ Zaranegra, which he could not see from
his windows, but which he knew were there on the bend of the canal
towards Rialto.
However, he reflected with consolation, in a week or two more
Veronica would go to her father’s villa in the mountains of the
Trentino, and she had given him to understand that she would tell
the duke to invite him. Thither it would be impossible for Damer to
go, even if he should desire to do so, which was improbable. For
Adrianis never suspected the existence of any passion in Damer
except the desire of command, the pleasure which the exercise of a
strong will over weaker ones gave him from its sense of intellectual
dominion.
The words of Damer seemed to him insolent; but he was used to his
insolence, and he did not attribute them to any other feeling than
that coldness of heart which was not new to him in the speaker.
To all interference in, or interrogation concerning, his scientific
or surgical actions and purposes the Englishman had always replied
with the same refusal to permit those whom he called laymen to judge
either the deeds or the motives of his priesthood. It was precisely
the same kind of arrogance and of inflexible secrecy to which
Adrianis had been used in the ecclesiastics who had been set over
him in his boyhood; the same refusal to be interrogated, the same
mystic and unexplained claim of superiority and infallibility.
“If he would only go away!” thought Adrianis, as his gondola glided
over the few hundred yards.
For the next few days he and Damer did not meet; he had arranged an
excursion to Chioggia, and another to Grado, in which small cruises
the Countess Zaranegra and other ladies were on board his schooner.
It was beautiful weather; the sea was smooth and smiling; all that
wealth could do to make the little voyages delightful was done, and
he hoped in the course of them to have some opportunity to force from
the lady of his thoughts some definite assurance of her acceptance
of his love. In this hope he was disappointed.
Damer was not on board the yacht; but as she saw, over the distant
water as they sailed away from Venice, the foundry flames and factory
smoke of the Fondamenti, where his tower stood, she shuddered in the
hot midsummer noon. It seemed as if even from that distance the eyes
of the strange Englishman could see her and lay silence on her lips
and terror on her heart. It was but a morbid fancy; she knew that;
but she could not shake off the impression. Even when far out on the
sunlit green waves of the Adriatic, when Venice had long dropped away
out of sight, the chilliness and oppression of the hallucination
remained with her.
Although she and every one else knew that the water-fêtes were
solely in her honour and for her pleasure, she continued to accept
the homage but to stop short of any actual and decisive words on her
own part. Adrianis believed that her heart was his, and he could
see nothing in the circumstances of either of them which need cause
so much hesitation and doubt. Each was free, each young; each might
run to meet happiness half-way, as children run to catch a ripe
fruit before it has time to fall to earth, and pluck it, warm with
sunlight, or pause, and let it drop ungathered. The position troubled
and galled him, but his nature was sanguine and his temper optimistic.
Adrianis returned to the city, not wholly discouraged, but vexed and
impatient of continual probation and uncertainty.
If he could not persuade her to promise herself to him in Venice he
would follow her to the hills above Goritz, and there decide his
fate. He had little doubt that he would succeed before the summer
should have wholly fled.
“It is getting too warm here; let us go to the mountains,” said her
companion.
“In a few days,” she answered. But the days passed, the weeks passed,
the temperature grew higher, and she still did not move; and Adrianis
stayed also, living chiefly on board his yacht, and Damer still
delayed his departure, passing most of his time behind bolted doors
in his two chambers on the Fondamenti.
What harm could he do? What harm should he do? He was going to the
German university; he would pass out of her existence with the
steamship which should bear him from the Giudecca to Trieste; he
would vanish in the cold, grim, dark north, and she would remain in
the sunshine and laughter and mirth of the south. They had nothing
in common: could have nothing. He belonged to his ghastly pursuits,
his sickening experiments, his merciless ambitions, and she belonged
to herself—and another. So she told herself a hundred times, and out
of his presence her reasoning served to reassure her. But whenever
she saw him a vague, dull fear turned her heart cold. She felt as
helpless as the blythe bird feels when suddenly in the flowering
meadow, where it has made its nest, it sees a snake come gliding
through the grass. The bird trembles, but does not fly away; dares
not fly away. So she dared not dismiss this man from her house, and
had not courage to go herself out of the city, out of reach from
his magnetism. Her nerves felt the same cold terror as was felt by
those of the Venetian brides who were borne away from the feasting
on Castello by the brown arms of the Moorish sea-ravishers. She
endeavoured to conceal what she felt, for she was ashamed of her own
groundless and harmless fears, but they dulled for her the gaiety,
the mirth, the beauty of the summer cruise on the emerald seas.
“You play with your happiness,” said her duenna, angrily, to her.
“I do not play, indeed,” she answered, seriously. “We will go to the
hills the day after to-morrow.”
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XI.
Adrianis went out on the following day to make some purchases of
glass and metal work for which one of his sisters had written to him.
He thought that when they were completed it would be but courtesy to
go and tell Damer that he himself was about to leave the city, and
offer him his yacht to go in, if he desired it, to Trieste. Their
last words had been chafing and cold. The indulgent kindliness of
his nature made him wish to part friends with a man to whom he
considered that he owed his life.
He bade his gondolier steer northwards to the Fondamenti. He had
never been to the chambers occupied by Damer in the old watch-tower;
the other had always discouraged all visits; but now he thought that
he had better go there, or he might wholly miss seeing the Englishman
again before his departure, for of late Damer had come but rarely
to the Ca’ Zaranegra. But before he could give the order to his
gondolier, in passing the Ponte del Paradiso, a sandalo, in which
there was one person alone, fouled his own in the narrow channel, and
that solitary person was Damer.
“I was just going to your apartments,” cried Adrianis, whilst his
gondolier swore loudly as his prow grazed the wall of Palazzo Narni.
“I am going to the hospital, and shall not be at home till dark,”
replied Damer, ungraciously.
“I was coming to tell you,” said Adrianis, “that I am about to leave
Venice.”
“And are going to Goritz, no doubt,” said Damer, with a brief smile.
“I may be and I may not,” replied Adrianis, in a tone which implied
that wherever he chose to go was no business of any one’s. “Anyhow,
I wished to say that the schooner is entirely at your disposition if
you remain here or if you cross to Trieste.”
“Thanks. Yachts are rich men’s toys for which I have no use,”
answered Damer, without saying where he was going or what he
intended to do. “Send yours to her docks in Messina, if you do not
require her yourself.”
“You might be a little more polite,” said Adrianis, half angrily,
half jestingly. “I should be glad to do you any services.”
“Poor men cannot accept such services.”
“Why do you constantly speak of your poverty? You have intellect;
that is much rarer than riches.”
“And much less esteemed,” said Damer, with that brief, icy smile
which always depressed and troubled Adrianis. “I fear I cannot stay
to gossip,” he added, “I am already rather late for a conference at
the hospital with my esteemed Venetian colleague.”
They were about to part, Damer to pass underneath the bridge,
Adrianis to pursue his way to a coppersmith’s workshop, when a weak,
infantine cry smote on their ears, echoed by other shriller childish
voices.
There was a row of barges moored along the wall under the old grim
Narni palace which stands just beyond the bridge, with its massive
iron-studded doors, unaltered in appearance since the time when
Tiziano walked a living presence over the Paradiso, and the sunshine
shone on the golden hair of Palma Vecchio’s daughter.
Some children were playing on the black barges which were laden with
firewood and coal. They were small creatures, half naked in the warm
air and sportive as young rabbits; they ran, leaped, climbed the
piles of fuel, caught each other in mimic wrestling and screamed
with glad laughter; there was only one who did not join in the games,
a little boy who lay languidly and motionless on some sacks, and
watched the sports of others with heavy eyes.
There was no grown man or woman near, there were only the children,
and the old palace, like a grey beard with closed eyes; it looked as
if it had been shut when Dandolo was young, and had never been opened
since; its white statues gazed down over the iron fencing of its
garden wall; they, too, were very old.
As the gondola passed under that wall the sporting children growing
wilder and more reckless, rushed in their course past and over the
little sick boy, and jostled him so roughly that they pushed him over
the edge of the barge, and he fell, with a shrill cry, into the
water. The others, frightened at what had befallen them, gathered
together, whimpering and afraid, irresolute and incapable. The fallen
child disappeared. The water hereabouts is thick and dark, and sewage
flows unchecked into it. It was in that instant of his fall that his
cry, and the shrieks of his companions, rose shrilly on the morning
silence.
In a second Adrianis sprang from the gondola, dived for the child,
who had drifted underneath the barge, and brought him up in his arms.
He was a boy of some five years old, with a pretty pale face and
naked limbs, his small, curly head fell in exhaustion on the young
man’s shoulder, his ragged clothes were dripping.
Damer looked at him with professional insight. “That boy is ill,” he
said to Adrianis. “You had better put him out of your arms.”
“Poor little man!” said Adrianis, gently, holding the child closer.
“What shall we do with him? We cannot leave him here with only these
children.”
“You are wet through yourself. You must go to your hotel,” said Damer.
Adrianis was still standing in the water. At that moment a woman rose
up from the cabin of the farthest barge, and came leaping wildly from
one barge to another screaming, “The child, the child! my Carlino!”
She was his mother. Adrianis gave him to her outstretched arms, and
slipped some money into the little ragged shirt.
“I will come and see how he is in an hour,” he said to her, amidst
her prayers and blessings. “He is not well. You must take more care
of him; you should not leave him alone.”
The child opened his eyes and smiled.
Adrianis stooped and kissed him.
“Go home by yourself. I will stay and see what is the matter with
him,” said Damer. Adrianis went. Damer, bidding the woman go before
him, walked over the barges until he reached the one to which there
was attached a rude deck-house, or cabin, in which she and five
children lived. There he examined the little boy.
“A sore throat,” he said, simply. “I will bring you remedies.”
He returned to his sandolo, and went on his way to the hospital
conference.
“What is amiss with him?” said Adrianis, later in the day.
“You would have done better to leave him in the canal water,” replied
Damer. “He is a weak little thing, he has never had any decent food,
he will never recover.”
“But what is his illness?”
“A sore throat,” replied Damer, as he had replied to the mother; and
added, “It is what the Faculty call Boulogne sore throat.”
They went both to the Ca’ Zaranegra that evening. There were several
people there; the night was very warm; the tall lilies and palms on
the balcony glistened in the light of a full moon; there was music.
Veronica held out the lute to Adrianis.
“Will you not sing with me to-night?”
“Alas! You must forgive me. I am rather hoarse. I have no voice,” he
answered, with regret.
“I heard of what you did this morning,” she murmured, in a low tone.
“Your gondolier told mine. Perhaps you have taken a chill. I will go
and see the little child to-morrow.”
“We will go together,” he replied, in the same soft whisper, while
his hand touched hers in seeming only to take the lute. Damer saw
the gesture where he sat in the embrasure of a window speaking of a
frontier question of the hour with a German Minister who was passing
through Venice.
When they left the house two or three other men accompanied them on
to the water-steps. Warm though the night was, Adrianis shivered
a little as he wrapped his overcoat round him. “I could bear my
sables,” he said, as he descended the stairs. Damer looked at him in
the moonlight, which was clear as the light of early morning.
“You should not plunge into sewage water, and embrace little sick
beggars,” he said, coldly, as he accompanied one of the Venetian
gentlemen whose palace was near the Fondamenti, and who had offered
him a seat in his gondola.
Adrianis, refusing the entreaties of his companions to go and sup
with them at Florian’s, went to his rooms at the hotel. He had a
flood of happiness at the well-springs of his heart, but in his body
he felt feverish and cold.
“It is the sewage water. It got down my throat as I dived,” he
thought, recalling the words of his friend. “I shall sleep this chill
off and be well again in the morning.”
But he did not sleep; he drank some iced drinks thirstily, and only
fell into a troubled and heavy slumber as the morning dawned red over
the roofs of Venice, and the little cannon on the Giudecca saluted a
new day.
He felt ill when he rose, but he bathed and dressed, and, though he
had no appetite for breakfast, went down to his gondola, which he had
bidden to be before the hotel at nine o’clock.
At parting from her he had arranged with Veronica that they should go
at that hour to see the little child of the Bridge of Paradise.
As he stood on the steps and was about to descend Damer touched him
on the arm.
“You are going to take the Countess Zaranegra to the sick boy?”
“Yes,” said Adrianis, with a haughty accent; he did not like the tone
of authority in which he was addressed.
“I forbid you to do so, then,” said Damer. “She would only see a dead
body, and that body infectious with disease.”
Adrianis was pained.
“Is the little thing dead?” he said, in a hushed voice. “Dead
already?”
“He died twenty minutes ago. He had been ill for three days.”
“Poor little pretty thing!” murmured Adrianis. “I am sorry; I will go
to the mother.”
“You had better go to your bed. You are unwell. You did a foolish act
yesterday.”
“I am quite well. When I require your advice I will ask it,” said
Adrianis, impatiently; and he entered his gondola and went to the Ca’
Zaranegra. Damer, standing on the steps of the hotel, looked after
him with a gaze which would have killed him could a look have slain.
Her house was bright in the morning radiance, the green water lapping
its marbles, the lilies and palms fresh from the night’s dew, the
doors standing open showing the blossoming acacias in the garden
behind.
She came to him at once in one of the smaller salons.
“I am ready,” she said, gaily. “Look! I have got these fruits and
toys for your little waif.”
Then something in his expression checked her gladness.
“What is it?” she asked.
“The child is dead,” said Adrianis.
“Oh, how sad!”
She put down the little gifts she had prepared on a table near her;
she was tender-hearted and quickly moved; the tears came into her
eyes for the little boy whom she had never seen.
Adrianis drew nearer to her.
“Mia cara,” he murmured. “Do not play with me any longer. Death is so
near us always. I have told you a hundred times that I love you. I
will make you so happy if you will trust to me. Tell me—tell me——”
She was softened by emotion, conquered by the answering passion
which was in her; she did not speak, but her breast heaved, her lips
trembled; she let him take her hands.
“You will be mine—mine—mine!” he cried, in delirious joy.
“I love you,” she answered, in a voice so low that it was like the
summer breeze passing softly over the lilies. “Hush! Leave me! Go
now. Come back at three. I shall be alone.”
The doors were open and the windows; in a farther chamber two
liveried servants stood; approaching through the ante-room was the
figure of the major-domo of the palace.
Adrianis pressed her hands to his lips and left her. He was dizzy
from ecstasy, or so he thought, as the busts and statues of the
entrance-hall reeled and swam before his sight, and his limbs felt so
powerless and nerveless that, if one of his gondoliers had not caught
and held him, he would have fallen headlong down the water-steps.
[Illustration: Decorative chapter separator]
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XII.
When three of the clock chimed from the belfries of St. Mark she
awaited him, alone in her favourite room, clothed in white with a
knot of tea-roses at her breast; she was full of gladness; she looked
at herself in the many mirrors and saw that she was as fair as the
fair June day.
“How beautiful our lives will be!” she thought. “Poor little dead
child! It was his little hands joined ours. Perhaps he is an angel of
God now, and will be always with us!”
She heard the swish of oars at the water-stairs below; she heard
steps ascending those stairs; she heard the voice of her head servant
speaking. It was he! She put her hand to her heart; it beat so wildly
that the leaves of the roses fell; she crossed herself and murmured a
prayer; such happiness seemed to merit gratitude.
Through the vista of the antechambers came the figure of a man. But
it was not that of Adrianis.
Damer came up to her with his calm, expressionless face, his intent
eyes, his air of authority and of indifference.
“You expected the Prince Adrianis,” he said to her. “I regret to tell
you, madame, that he is unable to keep his appointment with you. He
has taken the disease of which that child on the barge died this
morning. He has what the vulgar call diphtheria.”
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XIII.
Adrianis lay in the large salon where, two months earlier, they had
dined together in the evening after finding the opal necklace. Damer
had caused a bed to be taken into it and placed in the centre of the
room, as affording more air from the four large windows than was to
be obtained from the inner bedchamber adjoining. He did not give the
true name to the disease in speaking to the people of the hotel; he
spoke merely of cold and fever from a plunge in the hot noonday into
foul canal water; on the local doctor, whom he paid the compliment
of calling in, he enjoined the same reserve.
“The Prince is very rich,” he said, “he will pay for any loss which
may be incurred, any renewal of furniture and of draperies.”
From Adrianis he did not conceal the truth.
Indeed, Adrianis himself said, in a hoarse, faint voice, “I have the
disease which the child had. Cure me if you can, for——”
He did not add why life was more than ever beautiful to him, but the
tears rose into his eyes; the other understood what remained unspoken.
When three in the afternoon sounded from the clock-tower on the south
side of the hotel he raised his head, and, with a despairing gesture,
said to Damer, “She expects me. Go, and explain to her; say I am
ill. Tell her I would get up and keep my tryst if I died at her feet,
but I fear—I fear—the contagion—for her.”
“Lie where you are and you will probably be well in a few days,” said
Damer. “I will leave Stefanio with you and take your message. I shall
soon return. Meanwhile your man knows what to do.”
Stefanio was the valet.
The eyes of Adrianis followed him from the room with longing and
anguish. He was not yet so ill that the apathy of extreme illness
dulled his desires and stilled his regrets. Both were intense as life
still was intense in him. He would have risen and dragged himself to
the Ca’ Zaranegra; but, as he had said, he feared the infection for
her which would be in his voice, in his touch, in his breath, in his
mere presence.
He lay on his back gazing wistfully at the great sunny windows, only
veiled by the gauze of mosquito curtains. He could hear the churning
of the water below as the canal steamers passed up and down; the
softer ripple as oars parted it; he could see a corner of the marbles
of the Salute, with two pigeons sitting side by side on it pruning
their plumage in the sun.
He was not yet afraid, but he was very sorry; he longed to be up and
out in the bright air, and he longed to be in the presence of his
beloved, to ask again and again and again for the confession so dear
to him; to hear it from her lips, to read it in her eyes.
“She loves me, she loves me,” he thought, and he, like a coward,
like a knave, must be untrue to the first meeting she had promised
him!
“Why is it,” he thought, as the tears welled up under his closed
eyelids, “that our better, kinder impulses always cost us so much
more heavily than all our egotisms and all our vices?”
If he had left the little child underneath the barge to drown, would
it not have been better even for the child? The little thing had only
suffered some eighteen hours longer through his rescue.
“Let us do what we ought,” he murmured, in words his mother had often
spoken to him. “The gods will pay us.”
But the gods had been harsh in their payment to him.
He counted the minutes until Damer’s return, holding his watch in
his hot hand. He took docilely what his servant gave him, though to
swallow was painful and difficult.
“What a while he stays!” he thought, restlessly. He envied the other
every moment passed at the Ca’ Zaranegra.
“What did you tell her?” he asked, breathlessly, when Damer at last
returned.
“I told her the truth,” replied Damer, as he placed the thermometer
under the sick man’s armpit. “You have worried and fretted; your
fever has increased.”
“What did she say? She is not angry, or offended?”
“Who can be so at the misfortune of disease? Of course she knows that
you have incurred this misfortune through your own folly.”
“Did she say so?”
“No; I am not aware that she said so. But she no doubt thought it.
She bade me tell you not to agitate yourself.”
“Was that all?”
“She added—for her sake,” said Damer, with a cold, slight smile.
He was truthful in what he repeated; he scorned vulgar methods of
misrepresentation and betrayal. The heavy eyes of Adrianis gleamed
and lightened with joy.
“Thanks,” he said softly, and his hot hand pressed that of his friend.
“I will write to her,” he added. “You can disinfect a note?”
“Yes. But do not exert yourself. Try to sleep.”
He crossed the room and closed the green wooden blinds; he gave an
order to Stefanio, and dipped his hands in a disinfecting fluid; then
he sat down and took up a book. But he could not read. He saw before
him that blanched and frightened face, which a little while before
had been raised to his as the voice of Veronica had cried to him,
“Save him! You will save him? You have so much knowledge, so much
power. You will save him for my sake!”
He had promised her nothing; he had only said briefly, in the
language of people who were fools, that the issue of life and of
death was in the hands of Deity. He had promised her nothing; in his
own way he was sincere. Up to that time he had done everything which
science and experience could suggest to combat the disease.
Adrianis wrote at intervals various pencilled notes to her;
indistinct, feebly scrawled, but still coherent. He pointed to each
when it was written and looked at his friend with supplicating eyes.
He could not speak, for the false membrane filled his throat. Damer
took each little note with apparent indifference.
“To the Countess Zaranegra?” he asked.
Adrianis signed a mute assent. Damer carried each scrap of paper to
the next room, disinfected it, then sent it to its destination. He
was of too proud a temper to use the usual small arts of the traitor.
Once she wrote in reply.
This he did thrice.
“I cannot see, my eyes are too weak,” Adrianis scrawled on its
envelope as the letter was given to him. “Read it to me.”
Damer opened it, and read it aloud. It was short, timid, simple, but
a deep love and an intense anxiety spoke in it. Adrianis took it and
laid his cheek on it with a smile of ineffable peace. It seemed to
give him firmer hold on life.
Adrianis slept peacefully, his cheek on the little letter, as a child
falls to sleep with a favourite toy on its pillow.
He called in a second medical man of the town and two sisters of
charity to replace Stefanio, who grew alarmed for his own safety and
would no longer approach the bed.
“Send for my mother,” said Adrianis, in his choked voice.
“Certainly,” answered his friend. The disease which had fastened on
Adrianis was not one which waits. But Damer telegraphed only to the
Adrianis’ palace in Palermo, and he knew that it was unlikely she
would be in that city in the summer heats of the end of June.
The telegram might be forwarded or it might not; Italian households
are careless in such matters.
But when he murmured once and again, “Send for my mother!” Damer
could, with a clear conscience, reply, “I have telegraphed.”
He sat by the bedside and watched the sick man.
He believed that he would recover.
In the dusk he was told that a lady who was below in her gondola
desired to see him. He descended the stairs, prepared to find
Veronica Zaranegra. She was veiled; he could not see her features,
but he knew her by the turn of her head, the shape of her hand,
before she spoke.
“You come for news of the Prince?” he said, coldly and harshly. “I
can give you none. The disease is always uncertain and deceptive.”
“Let me see him! oh, let me see him!” she murmured. “I came for that.
No matter what they say. No matter what danger there be. Only let me
see him!”
“That is wholly impossible,” replied Damer, in an unchanged tone.
“Why do you come on such errands?”
“Who should see him if not I? Who are you that you should keep me
from him?”
“I am a man of science whose duty it is to protect you from yourself.
Go home, madame, and pray for your betrothed. That is all that you
can do.”
She burst into tears. He heard her sobs, he saw the heaving of her
shoulders and her breast.
“Take your mistress home. She is unwell,” he said to the gondolier,
who waited a moment for his lady’s orders, then, receiving none,
pushed his oar against the steps and slowly turned the gondola round
to go back up the canal.
“Why does she love him?” thought Damer. “Like to like. Fool to fool.
Flower to flower!”
From his soul he despised her, poor lovely, mindless, childlike
creature! But her voice turned his blood to flame; the sound of her
weeping deepened his scorn to hate; the touch of her ungloved hand
was ecstasy and agony in one; he loved her with furious, brutal,
unsparing passion, like lava under the ice of his self-restraint.
He stood in the twilight and looked after the black shape of the
gondola.
“He shall never be yours,” he said in his heart. “Never—never—never!
unless I die instead of him to-night.”
He remained there some minutes whilst the water traffic passed by him
unnoticed and the crowds flocked out from a novena in the Salute.
The day became evening, the lovely roseate twilight of summer in
Venice wore into night, and the night waned into dawn. All the
animation of Venetian life began again to awake with the whirr of the
wings of the pigeons taking their sunrise flight from dome and cupola
and pinnacle and gutter. To the sisters of charity their patient
seemed better; to the surgeons of the city also; Damer said nothing.
“Is he not better?” asked the nun, anxiously.
“I see little amelioration,” replied Damer, and said in a louder
tone to Adrianis, “Your mother has telegraphed; she will soon be
here.”
Adrianis smiled again a smile which lighted up his beautiful brown
eyes and momentarily banished their languor. He felt disposed to
sleep, but he drew his pencil and paper to him and wrote feebly,
“Mme. Zaranegra?”
Damer read the name.
“She came to see you an hour or two ago,” he answered. “But I could
not allow it. Your illness is infectious.”
He spoke in his usual brief, calm, indifferent manner. Adrianis
sighed, but it was a sigh of content; he was half asleep, he turned
on his pillows and drew her little note which he had hidden under
them once more against his cheek.
“He will sleep himself well,” said the nun.
“Let us hope so,” replied Damer; but she heard from his tone that he
did not share her belief.
It was now eleven o’clock.
“Go and rest,” he said to her. “You need it. I will watch to-night.
If there be any necessity for aid I will summon you.”
“Will his mother soon be here?” asked the sister, whose heart was
tender.
“I believe so,” replied Damer.
One of the medical men whom he had summoned came out on to the
balcony to his side.
“The sisters say the prince is better; he seems so,” said his
colleague.
“What do they know?” said Damer; and added less harshly, “It is too
early to be able to make sure of recovery; it is a disease which is
very treacherous.”
“He has youth on his side.”
“Yes; but he is weakened by the effects of a wound he received last
year for which I treated him. His constitution is not prepared to
make so soon again another struggle for existence.”
“You have more knowledge of him than I,” said the Venetian, who was a
meek man, not very wise.
“Come to my laboratory in the Fondamente, and I will show you
something and tell you something,” said Damer.
His Italian colleague, flattered, complied with the request.
What he showed him were three animals, two rabbits and a cat,
inoculated with and dying of diphtheria; what he explained to
him were the theories of Lœffler and Klebs and the discovery of
the presumed antidote by Behring; he also displayed to him some
serum which he had received from Roux, who was only then at the
commencement of his applications of Behring’s theory.
The Venetian doctor inspected and listened with deep respect.
“Why do you not try this treatment on the prince?” he said, which was
what Damer desired and intended him to say.
“I will do so on my own responsibility if he be no better in the
morning,” he replied. “But you will admit that the responsibility
will be great, the theory of the cure being at present unknown to the
general public, and no one of his family being at present in Venice
to authorise the experiment.”
“We are there as your colleagues, and we shall support you,” replied
the more obscure man, touched and flattered by the deference of one
who was in the confidence of French and German men of science.
“If there be no other way, I will take the risk; the risk is less
than that of tracheotomy,” said Damer, as he put the small phial of
serum back into a locked case.
[Illustration: Decorative chapter separator]
[Illustration: Decorative separator]
XIV.
When the Venetian doctor left him he took the phial of serum, the
inoculating syringe, and another smaller bottle containing a clear
liquid, which was the toxin or virus of the malady, and which he had
not shown to the Venetian. He put these together in the breast pocket
of his coat. He had no belief in the efficacy of the serum, but he
had prepared the venom of the toxin himself; and in that small glass
tube there was poison enough to slay twelve men.
“If there be no other way,” he repeated to himself as he went back to
the hotel through the moonlit canals and under the ancient houses.
The dual meaning which lay in the words was like a devil’s laugh in
his ears.
He looked up at the Ca’ Zaranegra as he passed it; its windows were
all dark, and the white lilies on the balconies had no light upon
them save that from the rays of the moon.
As he entered the lighted hall of the hotel they handed to him a
telegram. It was from the Princess Adrianis. She had received his
despatch twelve hours late, as she had been in her summer palace in
the mountains; she had left Sicily immediately, and said that she
would travel without pause at the utmost speed possible. She added:
“I commend my darling to God and to you.”
Damer crushed the paper up in his hand with a nervous gesture and
flung it out, by the open doorway, into the water below.
Then he ascended the staircase, and entered his patient’s room.
The night was very warm; the windows stood wide open; there was a
shaded porcelain lamp alight on the table. One nun watched whilst the
other slept. Adrianis lay still on the great bed in the shadow; he
was awake, his eyes were looking upward, his mouth was open but his
breathing was easier and less hard.
The sister of charity whispered to Damer, “I think he is better. The
fungus growth seems loosening. We have given the wine and the meat
essence. He could swallow.”
He lit a candle and approached the bed. Adrianis smiled faintly. He
could not speak.
“Let me see your throat,” said Damer.
He saw that the nun had spoken truly; the fungus growth was wasting,
the false membrane was shrinking; there was a healthier look on the
tongue. He set the lamp down and said nothing.
“Is he not better?” said the sister, anxiously.
“Perhaps,” he replied. “If there be no re-formation of the false
membrane he may be saved. Go, my good woman, and rest while you can.”
She went, nothing loth, to her supper and her bed. Damer was alone
with the man who trusted him and whose mother trusted him.
He went away from the bedside and sat down by one of the windows. His
heart had long years before been rendered dumb and dead; his mind
alone remained alive and his passions.
He stayed in the open air, looking down on the green water.
“Man cannot control circumstances,” he thought, “but the wise man can
assist circumstance, the fool does not.”
He had in him that fell egotism of science which chokes the fountain
of mercy at its well-springs in blood. He sat by the window and
looked out absently at the night.
He knew that the nun was right; he knew that the disease was passing
away from the sick man; that, if left alone, sleep and youth would
restore him to health, to love, and joy.
Should he leave him alone?
Should he let him live to become the lover and lord of Veronica
Zaranegra? Should he let those two mindless, flowerlike lives lean
together, and embrace, and multiply?
It would be what men called a crime, but his school despises the
trivial laws of men, knowing that for the wise there is no such thing
as crime and no such thing as virtue—only lesions of the brain, and
absence of temptation and opportunity.
The mother of Adrianis could not be there before another day, travel
as rapidly as she would. He knew the effect of affection on the
nervous system, and that the sight and sense of a beloved person
near them often gave to enfeebled frames the power of resistance and
recovery. Those emotions were not in himself, but he recognised
their existence, and he knew that in Adrianis the emotions and the
affections were very strong in proportion as the mental powers were
slight.
He must not await the arrival of the princess. He had before been
witness of her devotion, of her skill in illness, of her fortitude,
and of the love existing between her and her son. They were powers
he despised and never pitied, as he never pitied the love of the
nursing bitch from whom he removed her litter that he might watch her
die of the agony of her bursting teats. But he was conscious of the
existence of such powers; and the physiologist ignores no facts which
he has demonstrated, though they may belong to an order with which he
has no sympathy.
He knew that he must not allow the mother of Adrianis to arrive in
time to see her son alive.
“What thou doest, do quickly,” he murmured in words which he had
heard in his childhood as he had sat in the old parish church of his
native village.
He rose and walked to the bed.
Adrianis still seemed to sleep, the breathing was heavy and forced
chiefly through the nasal passages; but there was a look of returning
serenity on his features: a look which the man of science is well
aware precedes recovery, not death.
As surely as any one can gauge the unseen future, he was sure that if
let alone the young man would recover, would in a week or two arise
unharmed from his bed. He was equally sure that he had himself, in
his breast, the means of changing that process of recovery into the
agony of dissolution. He no longer hesitated; he no longer doubted.
He went to the adjacent chamber, where the two nuns, still dressed,
were sleeping. He awakened them.
“Come,” he said, gently. “He is worse. I am about to try the cure
of Behring. It may succeed. There is no other chance. It will be
necessary to hold him. I require you both.”
He was well aware that it would be unwise to essay that operation
alone—it would rouse comment in the day to come.
“Hold him motionless,” he said to the two women. “Do not awake him if
you can avoid it.”
[Illustration: Damer bent over him and inserted the injecting-needle
into one of the veins; the incident disturbed him without wholly
loosening the bonds of the soporific; he struggled slightly, moaned a
little, but the nuns succeeded in resisting his endeavour to rise.]
He filled the inoculating syringe from one of the little phials
which he had brought from the Fondamente. He stood in the full light
of the lamp so that the two sisters could see all that he did.
“Loosen his shirt,” he said to them. Adrianis still slept; in his
predisposition to sleep the few drops of chloral which had been
administered twenty minutes earlier, had sufficed to render him
almost insensible.
Damer bent over him and inserted the injecting-needle into one of the
veins; the incision disturbed him without wholly loosening the bonds
of the soporific; he struggled slightly, moaned a little, but the
nuns succeeded in resisting his endeavour to rise; the inoculation
was successfully made.
The face of Damer in the lamplight was not paler than usual, but his
hand trembled as he withdrew the syringe.
“What is Behring’s cure?” asked the nun who felt most interest in her
patient.
“An antitoxin; the serum of an immune beast,” he answered, calmly, as
he turned slightly towards her. The nun did not understand, but she
was afraid of troubling him with other questions.
He walked to the window and stood looking out at the moonlit water.
He had left on a table the syringe and the phial of serum which was
half empty. But in the breast pocket of his coat he had the phial
of toxin, and that phial was wholly empty. The nuns, engrossed in
holding down Adrianis, had not seen that the glass tube on the
table was not the one from which the syringe had been filled; and,
when used, Damer had plunged the syringe immediately into a bowl
of disinfecting acid. There was no trace anywhere that the toxin
had been used instead of the serum; no trace whatever save in the
tumifying vein of the sick man’s throat.
“You had better stay near him, you may be wanted, and it is two
o’clock,” said Damer to the nurses. “I shall remain here. There will
be, I hope, a great change soon.”
He went out on to the balcony and turned his back on the watching
women and leaned against the iron-work, looking down on the canal,
where nothing moved except the slow, scarcely visible ripple of the
water. He was human though he had killed his humanity, replacing it
by intellect alone. He suffered in that moment; a vague sense of
what ignorance calls crime was on him painfully; he had emancipated
himself wholly from the superstitions and prejudices of men, but he
was conscious that he had now done that which, if known, would put
him outside the pale of their laws.
He did not repent or regret; he did not see any evil in his act.
The right of the strong, the right of the sage was his; he had but
exercised his reason to produce an issue he desired.
So he thought as he leaned against the iron scroll work and watched
the thick, dark water glide by past the marble steps of the Salute.
There was a faint light in the sky on the east, but he could not see
the east where he stood; it was still completely night between the
walls of the Grand Canal. The voice of a man called up to him from
the darkness below.
“Madam sends me to know how goes it with the prince?”
Damer looked down. “Tell the Countess Zaranegra that things are as
they were. A new remedy has been essayed.”
The man who had come by the calle retired by them, swinging a lantern
in his hand.
The two Vulcans of the clock-tower, hard by in St. Mark’s square,
struck four times upon their anvil. Damer looked up the darkness of
the canal where nothing was to be seen but the lamps which burned on
either side of it with their reflections, and the lanthorns tied to
poles before some of the palaces. He could not see the Ca’ Zaranegra,
which was not in sight even in the day, but he saw it in remembrance
with its flowering balconies, its tapestried chambers, its red and
white awnings, its great escutcheon over its portals. He saw her in
his vision as she must be now—awake, listening for her messenger’s
return, in some white, loose gown no doubt, with her hair loose, too,
upon her shoulders, her face white, her eyes strained in anxiety, as
he had seen them that afternoon and evening.
If Adrianis had lived she would have been his wife: that was
as certain as that the sea was beating on the bar of Malomocco
underneath the moon.
“I have done well; I have exercised my supremacy,” he thought. “We
have right of life and death over all birds, and beasts, and things
which swim and crawl, by virtue of our greater brain; in like manner
has the greater brain the right to deal as it will with the weaker
brain when their paths meet and one must yield and go under. The fool
hath said that there is sanctity in life, but the man of science has
never said it. To him one organism or another has the same measure in
his scales.”
Strangely enough, at that moment and incongruously there came to him
a remembrance of his own childish days: of sitting by his mother’s
side in the little, dark, damp church of their northern hamlet, and
reading written on their tablets the Twelve Commandments.
“Mother, what is it to do murder?” he had asked her; and she had
answered, “It is to take life; to destroy what we cannot recall.”
He remembered how, some weeks later, when he had killed from
wantonness a mole which ran across a road, he had been frightened and
had gone to his mother and said to her, “Mother, mother, I have done
murder. I have taken life and I cannot recall it.” And his mother had
smiled and answered, “That is not murder, my dear. A little mole is a
dumb creature.”
But his mother had been wrong, as the world was wrong. Whether the
organism were animal or human, what difference was there? Only a
difference of brain.
The world and its lawgivers might and would still say that what
destroyed the human organism was murder, that is, a crime; but to
the trained, logical, strong reason of Damer the sophism was a
premiss untenable. To slay a man was no more than to slay a mole. To
do either was to arrest a mechanism, to dissolve tissues, to send
elements back into the space they came from; it was nothing more. One
organism or another, what matter?
Since that day in the dim long ago, he had taken life, not once,
not twice, but thousands of times, causing the greatest and most
lingering agony in its inflictions. But in his opinion that had not
been murder; it had been only torture and slaughter of dumb creatures
according to human law. What difference could there be if, by
accident, the creature to be removed were human?
He was consistent enough, and sincere enough to follow out the
theories of the laboratory to their logical sequence without
flinching. He honestly held himself without blame.
He was only a man, and therefore he felt some sickly sense of pain
when he heard in the still and waning night the sound of his victim’s
convulsive struggles to gain breath; but he held himself without
blame, for every thesis and every deduction of the priesthood of
science justified and made permissible his action to bring about a
catastrophe which was necessary to him.
Science bade him take all the other sentient races of earth and make
them suffer as he chose and kill them as he chose. Those other races
were organisms as susceptible as the human organisms. Why should the
human organism enjoy immunity?
He had done no more than is done for sake of experiment or
observation in the hospital or the laboratory every day all over the
known world. The reluctance to face what he had done was merely that
residue of early influences and impressions which remains in the soul
of the strongest, haunting its remembrances and emasculating its
resolution.
He called up to his command that volition, that power of will which
had never failed him; he returned to the bedside as he would have
returned to visit a dog dying under the pressure of eight atmospheres.
Adrianis still lay in the same position. About the almost invisible
orifice where the needle had punctured there was a slight tumified
swelling.
“He seems worse,” whispered the nun.
“He cannot be either better or worse as yet,” replied Damer,
truthfully. “Give him a little wine, if he can take it.”
They might give him what they chose; they could not now save him from
death. He had received enough of the virus into his vein to slay a
man in health. Passing as it did into an organ already diseased, he
would die before the sun rose, or an hour after.
He had aided nature to destroy her own work. There was nothing new or
criminal in that—nature was for ever creating and destroying. Once it
had suited him to save that young man’s life; now it suited him to
end it.
One action was as wrong or as righteous as the other. It was an
exercise of power, as when the monarch grants an amnesty or signs a
death warrant. Who blames the monarch who does but use his power? The
prerogative of superior reason is higher than the prerogative of a
monarch. Moreover, who would ever know it? Who would ever be aware
that the intenser virus of the toxin had mingled with the natural
formation of the disease?
Even were there an autopsy, discovery would be impossible; the
concentrated venom had mingled with and been absorbed in the common
and usual growth of the false membrane. He had but aided death
instead of hindering it.
His professional conscience would have shrunk from giving the
disease, but it did not shrink from making death certain where it
was merely possible. He did but add a stronger poison to that which
nature had already poisoned.
Men slew their rivals in duels and no one blamed them; who should
blame him because he used the finer weapon of science instead of the
coarser weapon of steel? He did but carry out the doctrine of the
laboratory to its just and logical sequence.
What he felt for Veronica was not love, but passion, and not passion
alone, but the sense of dominion. He knew that the fair creature
shrank from him but submitted to him. All the intense instinctive
tyranny of his nature longed to exercise itself on her, the beautiful
and patrician thing, so far above him, so fragile and so fair. He
knew that he would never possess her or command her except through
fear; but this would suffice to him. The finer and more delicate
elements of love were indifferent to him, were indeed unknown. They
had existed in Adrianis, whom he had despised; but in his own
temperament they could find no dwelling-place. His desires were
brutal as had ever been those of Attila, whose throne lies low
amongst the grass on Torcello.
Late at night and early at dawn messengers came from some noble
families in the city, and the Ca’ Zaranegra. Damer replied to all
inquiries, “It is impossible to say what turn the disease may take.”
Damer said nothing. He looked out at the marble church which had no
message for him, and down the moonlit waters which had no beauty for
him. He was absorbed in meditation. His will desired to do that from
which his natural weakness shrank; for in his great strength he was
still weak being human. The infliction of death was nothing to him;
could be nothing; he was used to kill as he was used to torture with
profound indifference, with no more hesitation, than he ate or drank
or fulfilled any natural function of his body. To obtain knowledge,
even the approach of knowledge, he would have inflicted the most
agonising and the most endless suffering without a moment’s doubt
or a moment’s regret. From his boyhood upwards he had always lived
in the hells created by modern science, wherein if the bodies of
animals suffer the souls of men wither and perish. What was the man
lying sleeping there to him? Only an organism like those which daily
he broke up and destroyed and threw aside. Only an organism, filled
by millions of other invisible organisms by a myriad of parasite
animalculæ, numerous as the star-dust in the skies.
The woman whom he desired was nothing more; he could not deem her
more; he scorned himself for the empire over him of his own desire of
her perishable form, of her foolish butterfly life. He himself was no
more, but there was alight in him that light of the intellect which
in his own esteem raised him above them into an empyrean unknown by
them. His intellect made him as Cæsar, as Pharaoh; their foolishness
made them as slaves.
The time is nigh at hand when there will be no priests and no kings
but those of science, and beneath their feet the nations will grovel
in terror and writhe in death.
He went out again into the balcony, leaving the nuns to endeavour
to administer the wine, which, however, their patient could not
swallow, the fungus growth closed his larynx. His head was thrown
back on the pillows; his eyes were staring but sightless; his face
was pallid and looked blue round the mouth and about the temples. He
was now straining for breath; like a horse fallen on the road, blown
and broken.
They called loudly to Damer, being frightened and horrified. He
re-entered the chamber.
“He is worse,” he said, gravely.
The nun, who had a tender heart, wept. Damer sat down by the bed. He
had seen that struggle for air a thousand times in all the hospitals
of Europe. It could now have but one end.
A little while after they brought him a note and a telegram. The
first was from the Countess Zaranegra. It said: “You must let me see
him. It is my right, my place.”
The second was from the mother of Adrianis; it said: “I have reached
Bologna; I shall soon be with you. God bless you for your goodness to
my son.”
He read them, and tore the one in pieces and flung the pieces in the
canal; the other he put in his breast pocket beside the empty phial
of toxin.
The mother’s letter would be useful if any called in question the
too late usage of the Behring serum. It would show the complete
confidence placed in him by the writer. At that moment his two
Venetian colleagues arrived. The day had dawned. The women put out
the light of the lamps.
“You have given the antitoxin?” said the elder of the Venetians,
glancing at the syringe.
“I have,” replied Damer. “But, I believe, too late.”
“I fear too late,” replied the Venetian. “Not less admirable is your
courage in accepting such responsibility.”
Damer bowed. He looked grave and worn, which was natural in a man who
had been in anxious vigil through thirty-six hours by the bedside of
his friend.
“Have you any hope?” whispered the Venetian.
“I confess none, now,” he answered.
The pure light of earliest daybreak was in the whole of the vast
chamber.
It shone on that ghastly sight, a man dying in his youth, struggling
and straining for a breath of air, fighting against suffocation.
The fresh sea air was flowing through the room, sweet with the odours
of fruits and flowers, free to the poorest wretch that lived. But in
all that bounteous liberty and radiance of air he could not draw one
breath, he could not reach one wave of it, to slake his thirst of
life.
The poisoned growth filled every chink of the air passages as though
they were tubes mortared up and closed hermetically. His face grew
purple and tumid, his eyes started from their sockets, his arms waved
wildly, beckoning in space; he had no sense left except the mere
instinctive mechanical effort to gasp for the air which he was never
to breathe again. The five persons round him stood in silence, while
the stifled sobs of the nun were heard; the splash of oars echoed
from the water below; somewhere without a bird sang.
The Venetians spoke one with another, then turned to Damer.
“The end must be near. We ought to call in the assistance of the
Church. We must not let him perish thus, unshrived, unannealed, like
a pagan, like a dumb creature.”
“Do whatever you deem right,” replied Damer. “With those matters I do
not meddle.”
The minutes went on; the nuns sank on their knees; the one who wept
hid her face on the coverlet of the bed. All which had so lately been
the youth, the form, the vitality of Adrianis wrestled with death as
a young lion tears at the walls of the den which imprisons him. The
terrible choking sounds roared through the air to which his closed
throat could not open. Blood foamed in froth from his lips, which
were curled up over the white teeth, and were cracked and blue. His
eyes, starting from their orbits, had no sight. Damer ceased to look;
almost he regretted that which he had done.
Suddenly the convulsions ceased.
“He is out of pain,” said one of the Venetians, in a solemn and
hushed voice.
“He is dead,” said Damer.
The women crossed themselves.
The little bird outside sang loudly.
The door opened, and the mother of Adrianis stood on the threshold.
* * * * *
Six months later the man who had killed him wedded Veronica
Zaranegra. Her family opposed, and her friends warned her, in vain;
she shrank from him, she feared him, she abhorred him, but the
magnetism of his will governed hers till he shaped her conduct at his
choice, as the hand of the sculptor moulds the clay.
He became master of her person, of her fortune, of her destiny; but
her soul, frightened and dumb, forever escapes from him, and hides in
the caverns of memory and regret.
[Illustration: Decorative chapter separator]
UNWIN BROS., PRINTERS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected after careful
comparison with other occurrences within the text and
consultation of external sources.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and
inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.
First illustration “Adrianus” changed to “Adrianis” in illustration caption.
Pg 15 “to and fro like driftword” to “to and fro like driftwood”.
Pg 90 “the poor women in the Salpétrière” to “the poor women in
the Salpêtrière”.
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