THE PROFESSOR’S EXPERIMENT
MRS. HUNGERFORD’S NOVELS
‘_Mrs. Hungerford has well deserved the title of being one of the most
fascinating novelists of the day. The stories written by her are the
airiest, lightest, and brightest imaginable, full of wit, spirit, and
gaiety; but they contain, nevertheless, touches of the most exquisite
pathos. There is something good in all of them._’—ACADEMY.
=A MAIDEN ALL FORLORN=, and other Stories. Post 8vo., illustrated
boards, 2s.; cloth limp, =2s. 6d.=
‘There is no guile in the novels of the authoress of “Molly Bawn,” nor
any consistency or analysis of character; but they exhibit a faculty
truly remarkable for reproducing the rapid small-talk, the shallow but
harmless “chaff” of certain strata of modern fashionable
society.’—_Spectator._
=IN DURANCE VILE=, and other Stories. Post 8vo., illustrated boards,
2s.; cloth limp, =2s. 6d.=
‘Mrs. Hungerford’s Irish girls have always been pleasant to meet upon
the dusty pathways of fiction. They are flippant, no doubt, and often
sentimental, and they certainly flirt, and their stories are told often
in rather ornamental phrase and with a profusion of the first person
singular. But they are charming all the same.’—_Academy._
=A MENTAL STRUGGLE.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp,
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‘She can invent an interesting story, she can tell it well, and she
trusts to honest, natural, human emotions and interests of life for her
materials.’—_Spectator._
=A MODERN CIRCE.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth limp,
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‘Mrs. Hungerford is a distinctly amusing author.... In all her books
there is a “healthy absenteeism” of ethical purpose, and we have derived
more genuine pleasure from them than probably the most earnest student
has ever obtained from a chapter of “Robert Elsmere.”’—_Saturday
Review._
=MARVEL.= Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s.; cloth, =2s. 6d.=
‘The author has long since created an imaginary world, peopled with more
or less natural figures; but her many admirers acknowledge the easy
grace and inexhaustible _verve_ that characterize her scenes of
Hibernian life, and never tire of the type of national heroine she has
made her own.’—_Morning Post._
=LADY VERNER’S FLIGHT.= Crown 8vo., cloth extra, =3s. 6d.=; post 8vo.,
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‘There are in “Lady Verner’s Flight” several of the bright young
people who are wont to make Mrs. Hungerford’s books such very
pleasant reading.... In all the novels by the author of “Molly Bawn”
there is a breezy freshness of treatment which makes them most
agreeable.’—_Spectator._
=THE RED-HOUSE MYSTERY.= Crown 8vo., cloth extra, =3s. 6d.=
‘Mrs. Hungerford is never seen to the best advantage when not dealing
with the brighter sides of life, or seeming to enjoy as much as her
readers the ready sallies and laughing jests of her youthful personages.
In her present novel, however, the heroine, if not all smiles and mirth,
is quite as taking as her many predecessors, while the spirit of
uncontrolled mischief is typified in the American heiress.’—_Morning
Post._
=THE THREE GRACES.= 2 vols., crown 8vo., =10s.= net.
‘It is impossible to deny that Mrs. Hungerford is capable of writing a
charming love-story, and that she proves her capacity to do so in “The
Three Graces.”’—_Academy._
LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY.
THE
PROFESSOR’S EXPERIMENT
=A Novel=
BY
MRS. HUNGERFORD
AUTHOR OF
‘MOLLY BAWN,’ ‘THE RED-HOUSE MYSTERY,’ ‘THE THREE GRACES,’ ‘LADY
VERNER’S FLIGHT,’ ETC.
[Illustration]
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
=London=
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1895
THE
PROFESSOR’S EXPERIMENT
CHAPTER I.
‘Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.’
The lamp was beginning to burn low; so was the fire. But neither of the
two people in the room seemed to notice anything. The Professor had got
upon his discovery again, and once there, no man living could check him.
He had flung his arms across the table towards his companion, and the
hands, with the palms turned upwards, marked every word as he uttered
it, thumping the knuckles on the table here, shaking some imaginary
disbeliever there—and never for a moment quiet—such old, lean,
shrivelled, capable hands!
He was talking eagerly, as though the words flowed to him faster than he
could utter them. This invention of his—this supreme discovery—would
make a revolution in the world of science.
The young man looking back at him from the other side of the table
listened intently. He was a tall man of about eight-and-twenty, and if
not exactly handsome, very close to it. His eyes were dark, and somewhat
sombre, and his mouth was thin-lipped, but kind, and suggestive of a
nature that was just, beyond everything, if hardly sympathetic. It was a
beautiful mouth, at all events, and as he was clean-shaven, one could
see it as it was, without veiling of any kind. Perhaps the one
profession of all others that most fully declares itself in the face of
its sons is that of the law. A man who has been five years a barrister
is seldom mistaken for anything else. Paul Wyndham was a barrister, and
a rising one—a man who loved his profession for its own sake, and strove
and fought to make a name in it, though no such struggle was needful for
his existence, as from his cradle his lines had fallen to him in
pleasant places. He was master of a good fortune, and heir to a title
and ten thousand a year whenever it should please Providence to take his
uncle, old Lord Shangarry, to an even more comfortable home than that
which he enjoyed at present.
The Professor had been his tutor years ago, and the affection that
existed between them in those far-off years had survived the changes of
time and circumstance. The Professor loved him—and him only on all this
wide earth. Wyndham had never known a father; the Professor came as near
as any parent could, and in this new wild theory of the old man’s he
placed implicit faith. It sounded wild, no doubt—it was wild—but there
was not in all Ireland a cleverer man than the Professor, and who was to
say but it might have some grand new meaning in it?
‘You are sure of it?’ he said, looking at the Professor with anxious but
admiring eyes.
‘Sure! I have gone into it, I have studied it for twenty years, I tell
you. What, man, d’ye think I’d speak of it even to you, if I weren’t
sure? I tell ye—I tell ye’—he grew agitated and intensely Irish here—‘it
will shake the world!’
The phrase seemed to please him; he drew his arms off the table and lay
back in his chair as if revelling in it—as if chewing the sweet cud of
it in fancy. He saw in his mind a day when in that old college of his
over there, only a few streets away—in Trinity College—he should rise,
and be greeted by his old chums and his new pupils, and the whole world
of Dublin, with cheers and acclamations. Nay! it would be more than
that—there would be London, and Vienna, and Berlin. He put Berlin last
because, perhaps, he longed most of all for its applause; but in these
dreamings he came back always to old Trinity, and found the greatest
sweetness in the laurels to be gained there.
‘There can’t be a mistake,’ he went on, more now as if reasoning with
himself than with his visitor, who was watching him, and was growing a
little uneasy at the pallor that was showing itself round his nose and
mouth—a pallor he had noticed very often of late when the old man was
unduly excited or interested. ‘I have gone through it again and again.
There is nothing new, of course, under the sun, and there can be little
doubt but that it is an anæsthetic known to the Indians of Southern
America years ago, and the Peruvians. There are records, but nothing
sufficient to betray the secret. It was by the merest accident, as I
have told you, that I stumbled on it. I have made many experiments. I
have gone cautiously step by step, until now all is sure. So much for
one hour. So much for six, so much for twenty-four, so much’—his voice
rose almost to a scream, and he thumped his hand violently on the
table—‘for seven days—for seven months!’
His voice broke off, and he sank back in his chair. The young man went
quickly to a cupboard and poured out a glass of some white cordial.
‘Thank you—thank you,’ said the Professor, swallowing the nauseous
mixture hurriedly, as though regretting the waste of time it took to
drink it.
‘Why talk any more to-night?’ said the young man anxiously; ‘I am going
abroad in a few days, but I can come again to see you to-morrow. It is
late.’ He glanced at the clock, which pointed to ten minutes past
eleven. The movement he made in pointing pushed aside his overcoat and
showed that he was in evening dress. He had evidently been dining out,
and had dropped in to see the Professor—an old trick of his—on his way
home.
‘I must talk while I can,’ said the Professor, smiling. The cordial,
whatever it was, had revived him, and he sat up and looked again at his
companion with eyes that were brilliant. ‘As for this pain here,’
touching his side, ‘it is nothing—nothing. What I want to say, Paul, is
this’—he bent towards Wyndham, and his lips quivered again with
excitement: ‘If I could send a human creature to sleep for seven months,
then why not for seven years—for ever?’
Wyndham looked at him incredulously.
‘But the last time——’
‘The last time you were here, I had not quite perfected my discovery.
But since then some of my experiments have led me to think—to be
absolutely certain—that life can be sustained, with all the appearance
of death upon the subject, for a full week at all events.’
‘And when consciousness returns?’
‘The subject treated wakes to life again in exactly the same condition
as when he or she fell asleep—without loss of brain or body power.’
‘Seven days! A long time!’ The young man smiled. ‘You bring back old
thoughts and dreams. Are you a second Friar Laurence? Even he, though he
could make the fair Juliet sleep till all believed her dead, could not
prolong that unfortunate deception beyond a certain limit.
‘“And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two-and-forty hours.”
‘Less than two days—and yet, thou conjurer’—he slapped the Professor’s
arm gaily—‘you would talk of keeping one in death’s bonds for years!’
‘Ay, years!’ The Professor looked back at him, and his eyes shone. Old
age seemed to slip from him, and for the moment a transient youth was
his again. ‘This is but a beginning—a mere start; but if it succeeds—if
life can be sustained by means of this drug alone for seven days, why
not for months and years?’
‘You forget one thing,’ said the young man. ‘Who would care for it? Why
should one care to lie asleep for years?’
‘Many!’ said the Professor slowly.
He ceased, and a strange gloom shadowed his face. His thoughts had
evidently gone backward into a long-dead past—a past that still lived.
‘Have you no imagination?’ he said at last reproachfully. ‘Think,
boy—think! When affliction falls on one, when a grievous sorrow tears
the heart, who would not wish for an oblivion that would be longer than
a sleeping-draught could give, and less pernicious than suicide?’
‘The same refusal in both cases to meet and face one’s doom,’ said the
young man. ‘You would create a new generation of cowards.’
‘Pshaw! there will be cowards without me,’ said the Professor. ‘But
here, again, take another case. A man, we will say, has had his leg cut
off—well, let him sleep until the leg is well, and he will escape all
the twinges, the agonizing pains of the recovery. This is but one
instance; all surgical cases could be treated so, and so much pain saved
in this most painful world.’
‘Ah, I confess a charm lies there!’ said Wyndham.
‘It does. And yet it is to the other thought I lean—to the dread of
memory where grief and shame lie.’ The Professor’s gaunt face lost again
its short return of youth, and grew grim, and aged, and white. ‘See,’ he
leant towards Wyndham, and pressed him into a chair beside the dying
fire, ‘to you—to you alone I have revealed this matter: not so much
because you have been my pupil, as that you have a hold on me. You think
me dry, and hard, and old. All that is true. But’—his voice grew if
possible harsher than ever—‘I have an affection for you.’
It seemed almost ludicrous to think of the Professor as having an
affection for anything beyond his science and his discovery, with his
bald head, and his bleared eyes, and his cold, forbidding face. The
young man gazed at him with pardonable astonishment. That the Professor
liked him, trusted him, was quite easy to understand—but the word
‘affection’!
‘It surprises you,’ said the old man slowly, perhaps a little sadly.
‘Yet there was a time——’ He moved and poked the fire into a sullen
blaze. ‘I married,’ he said presently. ‘And she—well, I loved her, I
think. It seems hard to remember now, it is so long ago, but I believe I
had a heart then, and it was hers. She died.’ He poked the fire again,
and most of it fell into the grate—it was all cinders by this time, and
the younger man shivered. ‘It was well. Looking back upon it now,’ said
the Professor coldly, ‘I am glad she died. She would have interfered
with my studies. Her death left me free; but for that freedom, I should
never have found out this.’ He tapped some papers lying loosely on the
table—three or four pages, no more, with only a line or two upon
them—vague suggestions of the great discovery that was to shake the
world, so vague as to be useless to anyone but himself.
‘You had no children, then?’ asked Wyndham, who had never even heard
that he was married until now.
‘One.’ The Professor paused, and the silence grew almost insupportable.
‘He, too, is dead. And that, too, is well. He was of no use. He only
burdened the world.’
‘But——’
‘Not a question——’ The old man silenced him. ‘I cast him off.’ There was
something terrible in the indifference with which he said this. ‘He was
a fool—a criminal one. I heard later that he had married—no doubt as
great a fool as himself. I hope so. Set a thief to catch a thief, you
know.’
He laughed bitterly—the cruel, mirthless laugh of the embittered old.
‘For the rest, I know nothing,’ he said.
‘You made no inquiries?’
‘None. Why should I?’
‘He was your son.’
‘Well, does that make a black thing white? No—no! My son—my child is
here!’ He touched the loose papers with a loving hand.
Wyndham did not pursue the subject further, and as if to show that it
was ended, he stooped and threw some coals upon the fire that now seemed
to be at its last gasp. A tiny smoke flew up between the fresh lumps,
and after that came a little uncertain blaze. The fire had caught the
coals.
The Professor had gone back to his heart’s desire.
‘To see the blossom of my labour bear fruit—that is my sole, my last
demand from life. I have so short a time to live that I would hasten the
fulfilment of my hopes.’
‘You mean——’
‘That I want to see the drug used on a human being. I have approached
the matter with some of the authorities at Kilmainham, with a view to
getting a condemned criminal to experiment upon; but up to this I have
been refused, and in such a presumptuous manner as leads me to fear I
shall never receive a better answer. Surely a man respited for seven
days, as has been the case occasionally, might as well risk those seven
days in the cause of science.’
Wyndham shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have never met that man,’ said he.
But the Professor did not hear him.
‘The most humane people in the world,’ said he, ‘refuse help to the man
who has devoted twenty years of his life to the cause of humanity. Such
an anæsthetic as mine would work a revolution in the world of medicine.
As I have told you, a man might not only be unconscious whilst a limb
was being lopped off, but might remain so until the wound was healed,
and then, made free of pain and perfectly well, be able to take his part
in the world again.’
‘It sounds like a fairy-tale,’ said Wyndham, smiling. ‘You have, I
suppose, made many experiments?’
‘On animals, yes—and of late without a single failure; but on a human
body, no. As yet no opportunity has been afforded me. Either jealousy or
fear has stopped my march, which I feel would be a triumphal one were
the road made clear. I tell you I have addressed many leading men of
science on the subject. I have asked them to be present. I would have
everything above board, as you who know me can testify. I would have all
men look on and bear witness to the splendour of my discovery.’ Here
again the Professor’s strange deep eyes grew brilliant, once again that
queer flash of a youth long ago departed was his. ‘I would have it shown
to all the world in a blaze of light. But no man will take heed or
listen. They laugh. They scoff. They will not countenance the chance of
my killing someone; as if’—violently—‘the loss of one poor human life
was to be counted, when the relief of millions is in the balance.’
He sank back as if exhausted, and then went on, his tone hard, yet
excited:
‘Now it has come to this. If the chance were given me of trying my
discovery on man, woman, or child, I should take it, without the
sanction of the authorities, and with it that other chance of being
hanged afterwards if the experiment failed.’
‘You feel so sure as that?’ questioned Wyndham. The old man’s enthusiasm
had caught him. He too was looking eager and excited.
‘Sure!’ The Professor rose, gaunt, haggard, and with eyes that flashed
fire beneath the pent brows that overhung them. ‘I would stake my
soul—nay, more, my reputation—on the success of my discovery. Oh for a
chance to prove it!’
At this moment there was a low knock at the door.