“I don’t want to know. You can hold your tongue, and take your price,
and go.”
“Short and sweet,” said the man.
He laughed, and his friend laughed in echo, putting his long hand to
his mouth as if in apology for such an unpardonable ebullition of
nature.
“As to the price,” said the former, “taking into _con_sideration the
urgency, and the special providence, so to speak, in purwiding, at a
moment’s notice too, this ’ere comely young——”
A certain full chink of money stopped him.
“Thankee,” he said, after a short negotiation. “I’ll own you’ve done
the handsome, sir, and we’ve no cause to complain. Not but what I had
to give——”
“Good night!” said the Professor.
Not till they were gone, locked out, and the very trail of their
filthy footsteps hidden under the black droppings of the night, did he
turn, for all his impatience, and regard the body again.
“Nancy,” he murmured to himself; “yes, it’s Nancy.”
Into the vast study of biology it is perfectly certain that a personal
knowledge of biogenesis must enter. Here, too, the individual must be
sacrificed to the cause. Well, by virtue of that phase in his career
before-mentioned, he had already once made of Nancy a holocaust to
science. If the fruits of that sacrifice had been to be found in a
ruined life, a social degradation, a gradual decline upon infamy, what
was it all to him? As german to the general subject as the dead
specimens on his walls was the living specimen of his passion. _Ex
abusu non arguitur ad usum._ Still, it was a strange coincidence that
she should come thus to consummate his work.
Looking upon her frozen face, he was aware of certain tell-tale,
rudely-erased tokens about the mouth. He never had a doubt as to what
they signified. It was a rude kiss that of the pitch-plaster, more
close and savage than any he himself had once pressed upon those
blistered lips. So, the murderous beasts had gone the short way to
supply his urgency! Would they have taken it none the less, he
wondered, if they could have known in what relation their victim once
stood towards their employer? Very likely. Very justly, too, could
they believe him consistent with himself.
Nevertheless, though he had no conscience, though he had too often
scored that fact on human flesh with a knife to be in any doubt about
it, it was notable that, as he moved now, perfectly cold and
collected, to make some selection of tools from the table hard by, he
was registering to himself a vow, mortal to some folks, that no effort
of his should be lacking to help bring certain vile instruments to
their judgment—so soon as his disuse of them should find warrant in a
fuller supply of the legitimate material.
As he groped for what he wanted, a sparrow twittered somewhere in the
dark outside. He started, and dwelt a moment listening. Birds! the
little false priests of haunted woods, who sang their lying
benedictions over every folly perpetrated in their green shades! Why,
he had loathed them, even while he had been making their loves the
text for this early experiment of his in rustic nature. They had been
singing when——grasping his knife firmly, he returned to the table.
Something had happened there. For one moment the blade shook in his
hand. To his practised eye there were signs—the ghostliest, the most
remote—but signs still. A movement—a tremor—the faintest, faintest
vibration of a soul, unreleased, struggling to return to the
surface—that was what he felt rather than saw. He recalled the hasty
character of the deed; he thought of the shock, of the suspended
trance into which such a deed might cast a sensitive subject.
Mastering himself, with the dry firm will of an operator, he walked
once more unhurriedly to the instrument table, and made a further
selection.
The sparrow twittered again. Birds in the wood—small procuresses to
Sentiment! What a trollop she was, that Sentiment! He had known
ethereal creatures go from picking the bones of stuffed larks, to
moralize sweetly on the song of nightingales under the moon. For
himself, barring his natural asceticism, he would have no remorse
whatever in devouring nightingales. Such emotions were born of
surfeit, and the moral of them all was that a bird in the stomach was
worth two, or two hundred, in the bush. The one was the decoy which
brought the many into notice. Why, he himself, when flushed with
passion——
Harder than steel, hard as flesh can be, he stepped back to the table.
Yes, there was no longer doubt about it. He must decide quickly.
Decide! What was there in all his life to warrant in him a moment’s
indecision? His pledge to to-morrow was paramount over his pledge to
yesterday. It was by very virtue of the past that he owed everything
to the future. The _Cause_ was himself, bone of his bone, flesh of his
flesh. As she had made _her_self one with him, so must she consummate
the gift. He chose to believe, even, that she would not hesitate could
she know. He grasped his knife.
Her hair! He had said some foolish things about it once. In a sudden
fury he seized it, and sliced it off close by her head, and flung it
aside. She looked strangely innocent and boyish thus shorn. He had a
momentary grotesque thought that he would excuse himself to himself by
pretending that she was a boy. It passed on the instant. What excuse
was necessary? He remembered how once, to his idle amusement, when she
had fancied herself secure of him, she had coveted greatness for his
future. Well, it was within his grasp at length, and by her final
means.
Damn the sparrow! What was there in all the murky town to tempt his
twittering? He had blunted his knife’s edge on the hair. He must fetch
another.
As he came back with it, the bird seemed to flutter and cry out
against his very door. In a swift access of passion he strode to it,
and opened. Whether old, or wounded, or poisoned in the drooping fog,
there lay the little thing, gasping, with outspread wings, upon the
pavement. One moment the Professor hesitated; then, crushing out the
tiny shrieking life under his foot, he relocked the door and returned
with a firm step to the table.
* * * * *
His treatise, read the next day before an august body, was said
masterly to resolve an intricate and long obscure physiologic problem.
It brought him additional and great honour, and, what he prized above
all, that gift of the Society’s gold medal, which is only granted to
discoveries of the first importance. But then, it must be remembered,
he had given his soul to the Cause. The stain of its sacrifice was yet
red on the stones outside his door.