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.
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