Meantime, Diana, up in her own room, was engaged in what to her had, of
late years, been anything but an agreeable pastime,--namely, looking
at herself in the mirror. She was keenly curious to find out what was
the change in her appearance which had apparently surprised Madame
Dimitrius so much that she could hardly be restrained, even by her
masterful son, from expressing open wonderment. She stood before the
long cheval glass, gazing deeply into it as if it were the magic mirror
of the “Lady of Shalott,” and as if she saw
“The helmet and the plume
Of bold Sir Lancelot.”
Her face was serious,--calmly contemplative,--but to herself she
could not admit any positive change. Perhaps the slightest suggestion
of more softness and roundness in the outline of the cheeks and an
added brightness in the eyes might be perceived,--but this kind of
improvement, as she knew, happened often as a temporary effect of
something in the atmosphere, or of a happier condition of mind, and
was apt to vanish as rapidly as it occurred. Still looking at herself
with critical inquisitiveness, she slipped out of her pale blue
gown and stood revealed in an unbecoming gauntness of petticoat and
camisole,--so gaunt and crude in her own opinion that she hastened to
pull the pins out of her hair, so that its waving brightness might fall
over her scraggy shoulders and flat chest and hide the unfeminine
hardness of these proportions. Then, with a deep sigh, she picked up
her gown from the floor where she had let it fall, shook out its folds
and hung it up in the wardrobe.
“It’s all nonsense!” she said. “I’m just the same thin old thing as
ever! What difference Madame Dimitrius can see in me is a mystery! And
_he_----”
Here, chancing to turn her head rather quickly from the wardrobe
towards the mirror again, she saw the charming profile of--a pretty
woman!--a woman with fair skin and a sparkling eye that smiled in
opposition to the gravity of rather set lip-lines,--and the suddenness
of this apparition gave her quite a nervous start.
“Who is it?” she half whispered to the silence,--then, as she moved her
head again and the reflection vanished, “Why, it’s me! I do believe
it’s me!”
Amazed, she sat down to think about it. Then, with a hand-glass she
tried to recapture the vision, but in vain!--no position in which she
now turned gave just the same effect.
“It’s enough to drive one silly!” she said--“I won’t bother myself any
more about it. The plain truth is that I’m better in health and happier
in mind than I’ve ever been, and of course I look as I feel. Only the
dear Madame Dimitrius hasn’t noticed it before--and he?--well, he never
notices anything about me except that I do his work well, or well
enough to suit him. If his mysterious ‘globule’ had killed me, I wonder
whether he would have been really sorry?”
She considered a moment,--then shook her head in a playful negative
and smiled incredulously. She finished undressing, and throwing a warm
boudoir wrap about her, a pretty garment of pale rose silk lined with
white fur which had been a parting gift from her friend Sophy Lansing,
and which, as she had declared, was “fit for a princess,” she went into
her sitting-room, where there was a cheerful wood fire burning, and sat
down to read. Among the several books arranged for her entertainment on
a row of shelves within reach of the hand, was one old one bearing the
title: “Of the Delusions whereby the Wisest are Deluded”--and the date
1584. Taking this down she opened it haphazard at a chapter headed:
“Of the Delusion of Love.” It was written in old style English with
many quaint forms of expression, more pointed and pithy than our modern
“newspaper slang.”
* * * * *
“How many otherwise sober and sane persons are there,” soliloquised
the ancient author--“who nevertheless do pitifully allow themselves
to be led astray by this passion, which considered truly, is no more
than the animal attraction of male for female, and female for male, no
whit higher than that which prevails in the insect and brute world. For
call it Love as they will, it is naught but Lust, as low an instinct or
habit as that of craving for strong liquor or any wherewithall to still
the insatiate demands of uncontrolled appetite. Love hath naught to do
with Lust,--for Love is a Principle, not a Passion. For this cause it
is comforting to read in Holy Scripture that in Heaven there is neither
marrying nor giving in marriage, for there we are as the angels. And to
be as the angels implyeth that we shall live in the Principle and not
in the Passion. Could we conceive it possible on this earth for such an
understanding to be arrived at between two persons of intelligence that
they should love each other in this highest sense, then there would
be no satiety in their tenderness for one another, and the delicacies
of the soul would not be outraged by the coarseness of the body. It
is indeed a deplorable and mournful contemplation, that we should be
forced to descend from the inexpressible delights of an imagined ideal
to the repulsive condition of the material stye, and that the fairest
virgin, bred up softly, with no rougher composition of spirit than that
of a rose or a lily, should be persuaded by this delusion of ‘love’ to
yield her beauties to the deflowering touch which destroys all maidenly
reserve, grace and modesty. For the familiarity of married relations
doth, as is well known, put an end to all illusions of romance, and
doth abase the finest nature to the gross animal level. And though it
is assumed to be necessary that generations should be born without
stint to fill an already over-filled world, meseemeth the necessity is
not so great as it appeareth. Wars, plagues and famines are bred from
the unwisdom of over-population, for whereas the over-production of
mites in a cheese do rot the cheese, so doth the over-production of
human units rot the world. Therefore it is apparent to the sage and
profound that while the material and animal portion of the race may
very suitably propagate their kind, they having no higher conception of
their bodies or their souls, the more intelligent and cleanly minority
of purer and finer temperament may possibly find the way to a nobler
and more lasting ‘love’ than that which is wrongfully called by such a
name,--a love which shall satisfy without satiating, and which shall
bind two spirits so harmoniously in one, that from their union shall be
born an immortal offspring of such great thoughts and deeds as shall
benefit generations unborn and lead the way back to the lost Paradise!”
Here Diana let the book fall in her lap, and sat meditating, gazing
into the hollows of the wood fire. Love! It was the thing she had
longed for,--the one joy she had missed! To be loved,--to be “dear to
someone else” seemed to her the very acme of all desirable attainment.
For with Tennyson’s hero in “Maud” she felt:
“If I be dear to some one else
I should be to myself more dear.”
Her thoughts went “homing” like doves down the air spaces of memory
to the days when she had, or was fooled into believing she had, a
lover whose love would last,--a bold, splendid creature, with broad
shoulders and comely countenance, and “eyes which looked love to eyes
that spake again,”--and when, as the betrothed bride of the Splendid
Creature, she had thanked God night and morning for giving her so
much happiness!--when the light in the skies and the flowers in the
fields apparently took part in the joyous gratitude of her spirit,
and when the very songs of the birds had seemed for her a special
wedding chorus! She went over the incidents of that far-away period
of her existence,--and presently she began to ask herself what, after
all, did they amount to? Why, when they were all cruelly ended, had
she shed such wild tears and prayed to God in such desperate agony?
Was it worth while to have so shaken her physical and spiritual
health for any Splendid Creature? For what had he done to merit such
passionate regret?--such weeping and wailing? He had kissed her a
great deal (when he was in the mood for kissing), and sometimes more
than she quite cared for. He had embraced her in gusts of brief and
eager passion, tinged with a certain sensuality which roused in her
reluctant repulsion--he had called her by various terms of endearment
such as “sweetest,” “dearest,” and “wood-nymph,” a name he had bestowed
upon her on one occasion when he had met her by chance in a shady
corner of Kew Gardens, and which he thought poetical, but which she
privately considered silly,--but what real meaning could be attached
to these expressions? When, all suddenly, his regiment was ordered to
India, and she had to part from him, he had sworn fidelity, and with
many protestations of utmost tenderness had told her that “as soon as
cash would allow,” he would send for her to join him, and marry her
out there,--and for this happy consummation she had waited, lovingly
and loyally, seven years. Meanwhile his letters grew shorter and
fewer,--till at last, when his father died and he came into a large
fortune, he struck the final blow on the patient life that had been
sacrificed to his humour. He wrote a last letter, telling her he was
married,--and so everything of hope and promise fell away from her like
the falling leaves of a withering flower, though her friend, Sophy
Lansing, in hot indignation at the callous way in which she had been
treated, advised her to “take on another man at once.” But poor Diana
could not do this. Hers was a loyal and tender spirit,--she was unable
to transfer her affections from one to another _au grand galop_. She
thought of it all now in a half amused way, as she sat in her easy
chair by the sparkling fire, in the charming room which she could for
the present call her own, surrounded by every comfort and luxury, and
she looked at her ringless hand,--that small, daintily-shaped hand, on
which for so many wasted years her lover’s engagement ring had sparkled
as a sign of constancy. Poor little hand!--it was shown off with effect
at the moment, lying with a passive prettiness on the roseate silk of
her “boudoir wrap”--as white as the white fur which just peeped beneath
the palm. Suddenly she clenched it.
“I should like to punish him!” she said. “It may be small--it may be
spiteful--but it is human! I should like to see him suffer for his
treachery! I should have no pity on him or his fat wife!” Here she
laughed at herself. “How absurd I am!” she went on--“making ‘much
ado about nothing!’ The fat wife herself is a punishment for him, I’m
sure! He’s rich, and has a big house in Mayfair and five very ugly
children,--_that_ ought to be enough for him! I saw his wife by chance
at a bazaar quite lately--like a moving jelly!--rather like poor mother
in the fit of her clothes,--and smiling the ghastly smile of that
placid, ineffable content which marks the fool! If I could do nothing
else I’d like to disturb that smug, self-satisfied constitution of
oozing oil!--yes, I would!--and who knows if I mayn’t do it yet!”
She rose, and the antique book “Of Delusions” fell to the floor. Her
slim figure, loosely draped in the folds of crimson silk and white
fur, looked wonderfully graceful and well-poised, and had there been
a mirror in the sitting-room, as there was in the bedroom, she might
possibly have seen something in her appearance worthy of even men’s
admiration. But her thoughts were far away from herself,--she had
before her eyes the picture of her old lover grown slightly broader and
heavier in build, with ugly furrows of commonplace care engraven on
his once smooth and handsome face,--“hen-pecked” probably by his stout
better-half and submitting to this frequently inevitable fate with
a more or less ill grace, and again she laughed,--a laugh of purest
unforced merriment.
“Here I am, like Hamlet, ‘exceeding proud and revengeful,’ and after
all I ought to be devoutly thankful!” she said. “For, if I analyse
myself honestly, I do not really consider I have lost anything in
losing a man who would certainly have been an unfaithful husband. What
I _do_ feel is the slight on myself! That he should have callously
allowed me to wait all those years for him, and _then_--have cast
me aside like an old shoe, is an injury which I think I may justly
resent--and which,--if I ever get the chance--I may punish!” Here her
brows clouded, and she sighed. “What an impossible idea! I talk as if I
were young, with all the world before me!--and with power to realise my
dreams!--when really everything of that sort is over for me, and I have
only to see how I can best live out the remainder of life!”
Then like a faint whisper stealing through the silence, came the words
which Dimitrius had spoken on the first night of her arrival--that
night when the moonlight had drenched the garden in a shower of pearl
and silver,--“_What would you give to be young?_”
A thrill ran through her nerves as though they had been played upon
by an electric vibration. Had Dimitrius any such secret as that which
he hinted at?--or was he only deluding himself, and was his brain,
by over much study, slipping off the balance? She had heard of the
wisest scientists who, after astonishing the world by the brilliancy of
their researches and discoveries, had suddenly sunk from their lofty
pinnacles of attained knowledge to the depth of consulting “mediums,”
who pretended to bring back the spirits of the dead that they might
converse with their relatives and friends in bad grammar and worse
logic,--might not Dimitrius be just as unfortunate in his own special
“scientific” line?
Tired at last of thinking, she resolved to go to bed, and in her
sleeping chamber, she found herself facing the long mirror again.
Something she saw there this time appeared really to startle her, for
she turned abruptly away from it, threw off her wrap, slipped into her
night-gown, and brushed her hair hastily without looking at herself for
another second. And kneeling at her bedside as she said her prayers she
included an extra petition, uttered in a strangely earnest whisper:
“From all delusions of vanity, self-love and proud thinking, good Lord,
deliver me!”
The next morning she awoke, filled and fired with a new resolve. She
had slept well and was strong in energy and spirit, and she determined,
as she expressed it to herself, to “have it out” with Dr. Dimitrius. So
after breakfast, when he was about to go to his laboratory as usual,
she stopped him on the way.
“I want to speak to you,” she said. “Please give me a few moments of
your time.”
“Now?” he queried, with a slight uplifting of his eyebrows.
She bent her head.
“Now!”
“In the library, then,” he said, and thither they went together.
On entering the room he closed the door behind them and stood looking
at her somewhat quizzically.
“Well?”
“Well!” she echoed, slightly smiling. “Are you wondering what I want to
say? You ought not to wonder at all,--you ought to know!”
“I know nothing!” he answered--“I may guess--but guessing is risky. I
prefer to hear.”
“So you _shall_ hear,”--and she drew a little closer to him--“If I
express myself foolishly you must tell me,--if you think me officious
or over-bold, you must reprove me--there is only one thing I will not
bear from you, and that is, want of confidence!”
He looked at her in something of surprise.
“Want of confidence? My dear Miss Diana, you surely cannot complain on
that score! I have trusted you more than I have ever trusted any man or
any woman----”
“Yes,” she interrupted him, quickly--“I know that wherever it is
absolutely necessary to trust me you have done so. But where you think
it is _un_-necessary, you have not. For example--why don’t you tell me
just straight what you mean to do with me?”
His dark, lustrous eyes flashed up under their drooping lids.
“What I mean to do with you?” he repeated--“Why what do you imagine----”
“I imagine nothing,” she answered, quietly. “The things you teach are
beyond all imagination! But see!--I have signed myself and my services
away to you for a certain time, and as you have yourself said, you did
not engage me merely to copy old Latin script. What you really want of
me is, as I begin to understand, just what the vivisector wants with
the animal he experiments upon. If this is so, I offer no opposition. I
am not afraid of death--for I am out of love with life. But I want to
know your aims--I want to understand the actual thing you are striving
for. I shall be better able to help you if I know. You put me through
one test yesterday--you saw for yourself that I had no fear of the
death or life properties of the thing I took from your hand without
any hesitation--I have not even spoken of the amazing and terrifying
sensations it gave me--I am ready to take it again at any moment. You
have a willing servant in me--but, as I say, I feel I could help you
more if I knew the ultimate end for which you work,--and you must trust
me!”
He listened attentively to every word,--charmed with the silvery
softness of her voice and its earnest yet delicate inflections.
“I _do_ trust you!” he said, when she had ceased speaking. “If I did
not, you would not be here a day. I trusted you from the moment I saw
you. If I had not, I should never have engaged you. So be satisfied on
that score. For the rest--well!--I confess I have hesitated to tell you
more than (as you put it) seemed necessary for you to know,--the old
fear and the narrow miscomprehension of woman is still inherent in me,
as in all of my sex, though I do my best to eliminate it,--and I have
thought that perhaps if I told you all my intentions with regard to
yourself, you might, at the crucial moment, shrink back and fail me----”
“When I shrink from anything you wish me to do, or fail in my
undertaking to serve you loyally, I give you leave to finish me off in
any way you please!” she said, calmly--“and without warning!”
He smiled--but his eyes were sombre with thought.
“Sit down,” he said, and signed to her to take a chair near the window.
“I will tell you as much as I can--as much as I myself know. It is
briefly said.”
He watched her closely, as, in obedience to his wish, she seated
herself, and he noted the new and ardent brilliance in her eyes which
gave them a look of youthful and eager vitality. Then he drew up
another chair and sat opposite to her. Outside the window the garden
had a wintry aspect--the flowerbeds were empty,--the trees were
leafless, and the summits of the distant Alps peered white and sharp
above a thick, fleece-like fog which stretched below.
“You say you are out of love with life,” he began. “And this, only
because you have been spared the common lot of women--the so-called
‘love’ which would have tied you to one man to be the drudge of
his coarse passions till death. Well!--I admit it is the usual
sort of thing life offers to the female sex,--but to be ‘out of
love’ with the stupendous and beautiful work of God because this
commonest of commonplace destinies has been denied you, is--pardon my
_brusquerie_,--mere folly and unreasoning sentiment. However, I am
taking you at your word,--you are ‘out of love’ with life, and you are
not afraid of death. Therefore, to me you are not a woman--you are
a ‘subject’:--you put it very clearly just now when you said that I
need you as the vivisector needs the animal he experiments upon--that
is perfectly correct. I repeat, that for my purpose, you are not a
woman,--you are simply an electric battery.”
She looked up, amazed--then laughed as gaily as a child.
“An electric battery!” she echoed. “Oh, dear, oh, dear! I have imagined
myself as many things, but never _that_!”
“And yet that is what you really _are_,” he said, unmoved by her
laughter. “It is what we all are, men and women alike. Our being is
composed of millions of cells, charged with an electric current which
emanates from purely material sources. We make electricity to light
our houses with--and when the battery is dry we say the cells need
recharging--a simple matter. Youth was the light of _your_ house of
clay--but the cells of the battery are dry--they must be recharged!”
She sat silent for a moment, gazing at him as though seeking to read
his inmost thought. His dark, fine eyes met hers without flinching.
“And you,--you propose to recharge them?” she said, slowly and
wonderingly.
“I not only propose to do it--I have already begun the work!” he
answered. “You want me to be straightforward--come, then!--give me
the same confidence! Can you honestly say you _see_ no difference and
_feel_ no difference in yourself since yesterday?”
She gave a quick sigh.
“No, I cannot!” she replied. “I _do_ see and feel a change in myself!
This morning I was almost terrified at the sense of happiness which
possessed me!--happiness for nothing but just the joy of living!--it
overwhelmed me like a wave!” She stretched out her arms with a gesture
of indefinable yearning--“Oh, it seemed as if I had all the world in my
hands!--the light, the air, the mere facts of breathing and moving were
sufficient to make me content!--and I was overcome by the fear of my
own joy! That is why I determined to ask you plainly what it means, and
what I am to expect from you!”
“If all goes well you may expect such gifts as only the gods of old
time were able to give!” he said, in thrilling accents,--“Those poor
gods! They represented the powers that have since been put into man’s
hands,--their day is done! Now, listen!--I have told you that I have
commenced my work upon you,--and you are now the centre of my supreme
interest. You are precisely the ‘subject’ I need,--for, understand
me well!--if you had led a ‘rackety’ life, such as our modern women
do--if you had been obsessed by rabid passions, hysterical sentiments,
greedy sensualities or disordered health, you would have been no use
to me. Your ‘cells,’ speaking of you as a battery, would, under such
conditions, have been worn out, and in a worn-out state could not have
been recharged. The actual renewal, or perpetual germination of cells
is a possibility of future science,--but up to the present we have
not arrived at the right solution of the problem. Now, perhaps, you
understand why I was to some extent startled when you took that first
‘charge’ from my hand yesterday,--it was a strong and a dangerous
test,--for if one or any of your ‘cells’ had been in a broken or
diseased state it might have killed you instantly--as instantly as by a
flash of lightning----”
“And if it had,” interrupted Diana, with a smile--“what would you have
done?”
“I should have disposed of your remains,” he answered, coolly. “And I
should have arranged things so that no one would have been any the
wiser--not even my mother.”
She laughed.
“You really are a first-class scientist!” she said. “No pity--no
remorse--no regret----!”
His eyes flashed up in a sort of defiance.
“Who could feel pity, remorse, or regret for the fate of one miserable
unit,” he exclaimed--“one atom among millions, sacrificed in the
pursuit of a glorious discovery that may fill with hope and renewed
power the whole of the human race! Tens of thousands of men are slain
in war and the useless holocaust is called a ‘Roll of Honour,’ but if
one superfluous woman were killed in the aid of science it would be
called murder! Senseless hypocrisy!--The only thing to regret would
be failure! Failure to achieve result,--horrible! But success!--what
matter if a hundred thousand women perished, so long as we possess the
Flaming Sword!”
He spoke with an almost wild excitation, and Diana began to think he
must be mad. Mad with a dream of science,--mad with the overpowering
force and flow of ideas too vast for the human brain!
“Why,” she asked, in purposely cold and even tones--“have you chosen a
woman as your ‘subject’? Why not a man?”
“A man would attempt to become my rival,” he answered at once. “And he
would not submit to coercion without a struggle. It is woman’s nature
instinctively to bend under the male influence,--one cannot controvert
natural law. Woman does not _naturally_ resist; she yields. I told you
I wanted obedience and loyalty from you,--I knew you would give them.
You have done so, and now that you partially know my aims I know you
will do so still.”
“I shall not fail you,” said Diana, quietly. “But,--if I may know as
much,--suppose you succeed in your idea of recharging the ‘cells’
which make up Me, what will be the result to Myself?”
“The result to yourself?” he repeated. “Little can you imagine
it!--little will you believe it even if I attempt to describe it! What
will it mean to you, I wonder, to feel the warmth and vigour of early
youth once more tingling in your veins?--the elasticity and suppleness
of youth in your limbs?--to watch the delicate and heavenly magic of a
perfect beauty transfiguring your face to such fairness that it shall
enchant all beholders!----”
“Stop,--stop!” cried Diana, almost angrily, springing up from her chair
and putting her hands to her ears. “This is mere folly, Dr. Dimitrius!
You talk wildly,--and unreasonably! You must be mad!”
“Of course I am mad!” he answered, rising at the same moment and
confronting her--“As mad as all original discoverers are! As mad as
Galileo, Newton, George Stephenson or Madame Curie! And I am one with
them in the madness that makes for a world’s higher sanity! Come, look
at me!” and he took both her hands firmly in his own--“Honestly, can
you say I am mad?”
His eyes, dark and luminous, were steadfast and frank as the eyes of
a faithful animal,--his expression serious,--even noble. As she met
his calm gaze the colour flushed her cheeks suddenly, then as quickly
faded, leaving her very pale.
“No--I cannot!” she said, swiftly and humbly. “Forgive me! But you deal
with the impossible!”
He loosened her hands.
“Nothing is impossible!” he said. “Whatsoever the brain of a man
conceives in thought can be born in deed. Otherwise there would be
a flaw in the mathematics of the Universe, which is a thing utterly
inconceivable.” He paused,--then went on. “I have told you all that you
wished to know. Are you satisfied?”
She looked at him, and a faint smile lifted the corners of her mouth.
“If you are satisfied, I am,” she replied. “What I seem to understand
is this,--if you succeed in your experiment I shall feel and look
younger than I do now,--we will leave the ‘beauty’ part out of it,--and
if you fail, the ‘cells’ you have begun to charge with your mysterious
compound, will disintegrate, and there’ll be an end of me?”
“You have put the case with perfect accuracy,” he said. “That is so.”
“Very well! I am prepared!”--and she went to the table desk where she
usually worked--“and now I’ll go on deciphering Latin script.”
She seated herself, and, turning over the papers she had left, began to
write.
An odd sense of compunction came over him as he looked at her and
realised her courage, patience, and entire submission to his will, and
yet--his careful and vigilant eye noted the improved outlines of cheek
and chin, the delicate, almost imperceptible softening of the lately
thin and angular profile,--and the foretaste of a coming scientific
triumph was stronger in him than any other human feeling. Nevertheless
she was a woman, and----
Moved by a sudden impulse, he approached and bent over her as she
worked.
“Diana,” he said, very softly and kindly--“you will forgive me if I
have seemed to you callous, or cruel?”
Her heart beat quickly--she was annoyed with herself at the nervous
tremor which ran through her from head to foot.
“I have nothing to forgive,” she answered, simply--“I am your paid
‘subject,’--not a woman at all in your eyes. And being so, I am content
to live--or die--in your service.”
He hesitated another moment,--then possessing himself of the small
hand that moved steadily across the paper on which she was writing, he
dexterously drew the pen from it and raised it to his lips with a grave
and courteous gentleness. Then, releasing it, without look or word he
went from the room, treading softly, and closing the door behind him.