THE BLOOD
Lady Dubarry had not seen the street door close after her before Balsamo
hurried up into the room where he had left Lorenza. But she was gone.
Her fine flowered cashmere shawl remained on the cushions as a token of
her stay in the room.
A painful thought struck him that she had feigned to sleep. Thus she
would have dispelled all uneasiness, doubts and mistrust in her
husband’s mind only to flee at the first chance for liberty. This time
she would be surer of what to do, instructed by her former experience.
This idea made him bound. He searched without avail after ringing for
Fritz to come to him. But nobody was about, as nobody had gone out
behind the countess.
To run about, moving the furniture, calling Lorenza, looking without
seeing, listening without hearing, thrilling without living, and
pondering without thinking--such was the state of the infuriate for
three minutes, which were as many ages.
He came out of his hallucination and dipping his hand in a vase of iced
water, he held it on his forehead. By his will he chased away that
throbbing of the blood in the brains which goes on silently in life but
when heard means madness or death.
“Come, come, let us reason,” he said, “Lorenza is no more here, and
consequently must have gone forth. How? Through Andrea de Taverney I can
ascertain all--whether my incorruptible Fritz was bribed and--then, if
love is a sham, if science is an error, and fidelity a snare--Balsamo
will punish without pity or reservation--like the powerful man smites
when he has put aside mercy and preserves but pride. I must let Fritz
perceive nothing while I haste to Trianon.”
In taking up his hat to go, he stopped.
“Goodness, I am forgetting the old man,” he said. “I must attend to
Althotas before all. In my monstrous love, I left my unfortunate friend
to himself--I have been inhuman and ungrateful.”
With the fever animating his movements he sprang to the trap which he
lowered and on which he stepped.
Scarcely had he reached the level of the laboratory, than he was struck
by the old man’s voice crooning a song. To Balsamo’s high astonishment
his first words were not a reproach as he expected; he was received by a
natural and simple outburst of gaiety.
The old man was lolling back in his easy chair, snuffing the air as
though he were drinking in new life at each sniff. His eyes were filled
with dull fire, but the smile on his lips made them lighter as they were
fastened on the visitor.
In this close, warm atmosphere, Balsamo felt giddy as if respiration and
his strength failed him simultaneously.
“Master,” said he, looking for something to lean against, “you must not
stay here: one cannot breathe. Let me open a window overhead for there
seems to reek from the floor the odor of blood.”
“Blood? ha, ha, ha!” roared Althotas. “I noticed it but did not mind: it
is you who have tender heart and brain who is easily affected.”
“But you have blood on your hands and it is on the table--this smell is
of blood--and human blood,” added the younger man, passing his hand over
his brow streaming with perspiration.
“Ha, he has a subtile scent,” said the old sage. “Not only does he
recognize blood but can tell it is human, too.”
Looking round, Balsamo perceived a brass basin half full with a purple
liquid reflected on the sides.
“Whence comes this blood?” he gasped.
He uttered a terrible roar! Part of the table, usually cumbered by
alembics, crucibles, flasks, galvanic batteries and the like, was now
clothed with a white damask sheet, worked with flowers. Among the
flowers here and there, spots of a red hue oozed up. Balsamo took one
corner of the sheet and plucked the whole towards him.
His hair bristled up, and his opened mouth could not let the horrible
yell come forth--it died in the gullet.
It was the corpse of Lorenza which stiffened on the board. The livid
head seemed still to smile and hung back as though drawn down by the
weight of her hair.
A large cut yawned above the clavicle, but not a drop of blood was
issuing now. The hands were rigid and the eyes closed under the violet
lids.
“Yes, thanks for your having placed her under my hand where I could so
readily take her,” said the horrible old man; “in her have I found the
blood I wanted.”
“Villain of the vilest,” screamed Balsamo, with the cry of despair
bursting from all pores, “you have nothing to do but die--for this was
my wife since four days ago! You have murdered her to no gain.”
“She was not a virgin?”
Althotas quivered to the eyes at this revelation, as if an electric
shock made them oscillate in their orbits. His pupils frightfully
dilated; his gums gnashed for want of teeth; his hand let fall the phial
of the elixir of long life, and it fell and shivered into a thousand
splinters. Stupefied, annihilated, struck at the same time in heart and
brain, he dropped back heavily in his armchair.
Balsamo, bending with a sob over the body of his wife, swooned as he was
kissing the tresses.
Time passed silently and mournfully in the death-chamber where the blood
congealed.
Suddenly in the midst of the night a bell rang in the room itself.
Fritz must have guessed that his master was in the laboratory of
Althotas to have sent the warning thither. He repeated it three times
and still Balsamo did not lift his head.
In a few minutes the ringing came, still louder, without rousing the
mourner from his stupor.
But at another call, the impatient jangle made him look up though not
with a start. He questioned the space with the cold solemnity of a
corpse coming forth from a grave.
The bell kept on ringing.
Energy, reviving, at last aroused intelligence in the husband of Lorenza
Feliciani. He took away his head from hers; it had lost its warmth
without warming hers.
“Great news or a great danger,” he said to himself. “I should as lief
meet a great danger.”
He rose upright.
“But why should I answer this appeal?” he asked without perceiving the
sombre effect of his voice under the gloomy skylight and in the funeral
chamber. “Is there anything in this world to alarm or interest me?”
As if to answer him the bell was so roughly shaken that the iron tongue
broke loose and fell on a glass alembic which it shivered on the floor.
He held back no longer; besides, it was important that neither Fritz nor
another should come here to find him.
With a tranquil tread he opened the trap and descended. When he opened
the staircase door, Fritz stood on the top step, pale and breathless,
holding a torch in one hand and the broken bell-pull in the other.
At sight of his master, he uttered a cry of satisfaction and then one of
surprise and fright. Respectful as he usually was, he took the liberty
of seizing him by the arm and dragging him up to a Venetian mirror.
“Look, excellency,” he said.
Balsamo shuddered. In an hour he had grown twenty years older. In his
eyes were lustre; in his skin no blood; and over all his lineaments was
spread an expression of stupor and lack of intelligence. Bloody foam
bathed his lips, and on the white front of his shirt a large blood spot
spread. He looked at himself for an instant without recognition. Then
he plunged his glance steadily into that of his reflected self.
“You are quite right, Fritz,” he said. “But why did you call me?”
“They are here, master,” said the faithful servant, with disquiet: “the
five masters.”
“All here?” queried Balsamo, starting.
“With each an armed servant in the yard. They are impatient which is why
I rang so often and roughly.”
Without adjusting his dress or hiding the blood spot, Balsamo went down
the stairs to the parlor.
“Has your excellency no orders to give me about weapons?” asked the
valet.
“Why should I take a sword even?”
“I do not know, I only feared--I thought---- ”
“Thanks, you can go.”
“Yes: but your double-barrelled pistols are in the ebony box on the
gilded buffet.”
“Go, I bid you,” said the master, and he entered the parlor.