Adrianis lay in the large salon where, two months earlier, they had
dined together in the evening after finding the opal necklace. Damer
had caused a bed to be taken into it and placed in the centre of the
room, as affording more air from the four large windows than was to
be obtained from the inner bedchamber adjoining. He did not give the
true name to the disease in speaking to the people of the hotel; he
spoke merely of cold and fever from a plunge in the hot noonday into
foul canal water; on the local doctor, whom he paid the compliment
of calling in, he enjoined the same reserve.
“The Prince is very rich,” he said, “he will pay for any loss which
may be incurred, any renewal of furniture and of draperies.”
From Adrianis he did not conceal the truth.
Indeed, Adrianis himself said, in a hoarse, faint voice, “I have the
disease which the child had. Cure me if you can, for——”
He did not add why life was more than ever beautiful to him, but the
tears rose into his eyes; the other understood what remained unspoken.
When three in the afternoon sounded from the clock-tower on the south
side of the hotel he raised his head, and, with a despairing gesture,
said to Damer, “She expects me. Go, and explain to her; say I am
ill. Tell her I would get up and keep my tryst if I died at her feet,
but I fear—I fear—the contagion—for her.”
“Lie where you are and you will probably be well in a few days,” said
Damer. “I will leave Stefanio with you and take your message. I shall
soon return. Meanwhile your man knows what to do.”
Stefanio was the valet.
The eyes of Adrianis followed him from the room with longing and
anguish. He was not yet so ill that the apathy of extreme illness
dulled his desires and stilled his regrets. Both were intense as life
still was intense in him. He would have risen and dragged himself to
the Ca’ Zaranegra; but, as he had said, he feared the infection for
her which would be in his voice, in his touch, in his breath, in his
mere presence.
He lay on his back gazing wistfully at the great sunny windows, only
veiled by the gauze of mosquito curtains. He could hear the churning
of the water below as the canal steamers passed up and down; the
softer ripple as oars parted it; he could see a corner of the marbles
of the Salute, with two pigeons sitting side by side on it pruning
their plumage in the sun.
He was not yet afraid, but he was very sorry; he longed to be up and
out in the bright air, and he longed to be in the presence of his
beloved, to ask again and again and again for the confession so dear
to him; to hear it from her lips, to read it in her eyes.
“She loves me, she loves me,” he thought, and he, like a coward,
like a knave, must be untrue to the first meeting she had promised
him!
“Why is it,” he thought, as the tears welled up under his closed
eyelids, “that our better, kinder impulses always cost us so much
more heavily than all our egotisms and all our vices?”
If he had left the little child underneath the barge to drown, would
it not have been better even for the child? The little thing had only
suffered some eighteen hours longer through his rescue.
“Let us do what we ought,” he murmured, in words his mother had often
spoken to him. “The gods will pay us.”
But the gods had been harsh in their payment to him.
He counted the minutes until Damer’s return, holding his watch in
his hot hand. He took docilely what his servant gave him, though to
swallow was painful and difficult.
“What a while he stays!” he thought, restlessly. He envied the other
every moment passed at the Ca’ Zaranegra.
“What did you tell her?” he asked, breathlessly, when Damer at last
returned.
“I told her the truth,” replied Damer, as he placed the thermometer
under the sick man’s armpit. “You have worried and fretted; your
fever has increased.”
“What did she say? She is not angry, or offended?”
“Who can be so at the misfortune of disease? Of course she knows that
you have incurred this misfortune through your own folly.”
“Did she say so?”
“No; I am not aware that she said so. But she no doubt thought it.
She bade me tell you not to agitate yourself.”
“Was that all?”
“She added—for her sake,” said Damer, with a cold, slight smile.
He was truthful in what he repeated; he scorned vulgar methods of
misrepresentation and betrayal. The heavy eyes of Adrianis gleamed
and lightened with joy.
“Thanks,” he said softly, and his hot hand pressed that of his friend.
“I will write to her,” he added. “You can disinfect a note?”
“Yes. But do not exert yourself. Try to sleep.”
He crossed the room and closed the green wooden blinds; he gave an
order to Stefanio, and dipped his hands in a disinfecting fluid; then
he sat down and took up a book. But he could not read. He saw before
him that blanched and frightened face, which a little while before
had been raised to his as the voice of Veronica had cried to him,
“Save him! You will save him? You have so much knowledge, so much
power. You will save him for my sake!”
He had promised her nothing; he had only said briefly, in the
language of people who were fools, that the issue of life and of
death was in the hands of Deity. He had promised her nothing; in his
own way he was sincere. Up to that time he had done everything which
science and experience could suggest to combat the disease.
Adrianis wrote at intervals various pencilled notes to her;
indistinct, feebly scrawled, but still coherent. He pointed to each
when it was written and looked at his friend with supplicating eyes.
He could not speak, for the false membrane filled his throat. Damer
took each little note with apparent indifference.
“To the Countess Zaranegra?” he asked.
Adrianis signed a mute assent. Damer carried each scrap of paper to
the next room, disinfected it, then sent it to its destination. He
was of too proud a temper to use the usual small arts of the traitor.
Once she wrote in reply.
This he did thrice.
“I cannot see, my eyes are too weak,” Adrianis scrawled on its
envelope as the letter was given to him. “Read it to me.”
Damer opened it, and read it aloud. It was short, timid, simple, but
a deep love and an intense anxiety spoke in it. Adrianis took it and
laid his cheek on it with a smile of ineffable peace. It seemed to
give him firmer hold on life.
Adrianis slept peacefully, his cheek on the little letter, as a child
falls to sleep with a favourite toy on its pillow.
He called in a second medical man of the town and two sisters of
charity to replace Stefanio, who grew alarmed for his own safety and
would no longer approach the bed.
“Send for my mother,” said Adrianis, in his choked voice.
“Certainly,” answered his friend. The disease which had fastened on
Adrianis was not one which waits. But Damer telegraphed only to the
Adrianis’ palace in Palermo, and he knew that it was unlikely she
would be in that city in the summer heats of the end of June.
The telegram might be forwarded or it might not; Italian households
are careless in such matters.
But when he murmured once and again, “Send for my mother!” Damer
could, with a clear conscience, reply, “I have telegraphed.”
He sat by the bedside and watched the sick man.
He believed that he would recover.
In the dusk he was told that a lady who was below in her gondola
desired to see him. He descended the stairs, prepared to find
Veronica Zaranegra. She was veiled; he could not see her features,
but he knew her by the turn of her head, the shape of her hand,
before she spoke.
“You come for news of the Prince?” he said, coldly and harshly. “I
can give you none. The disease is always uncertain and deceptive.”
“Let me see him! oh, let me see him!” she murmured. “I came for that.
No matter what they say. No matter what danger there be. Only let me
see him!”
“That is wholly impossible,” replied Damer, in an unchanged tone.
“Why do you come on such errands?”
“Who should see him if not I? Who are you that you should keep me
from him?”
“I am a man of science whose duty it is to protect you from yourself.
Go home, madame, and pray for your betrothed. That is all that you
can do.”
She burst into tears. He heard her sobs, he saw the heaving of her
shoulders and her breast.
“Take your mistress home. She is unwell,” he said to the gondolier,
who waited a moment for his lady’s orders, then, receiving none,
pushed his oar against the steps and slowly turned the gondola round
to go back up the canal.
“Why does she love him?” thought Damer. “Like to like. Fool to fool.
Flower to flower!”
From his soul he despised her, poor lovely, mindless, childlike
creature! But her voice turned his blood to flame; the sound of her
weeping deepened his scorn to hate; the touch of her ungloved hand
was ecstasy and agony in one; he loved her with furious, brutal,
unsparing passion, like lava under the ice of his self-restraint.
He stood in the twilight and looked after the black shape of the
gondola.
“He shall never be yours,” he said in his heart. “Never—never—never!
unless I die instead of him to-night.”
He remained there some minutes whilst the water traffic passed by him
unnoticed and the crowds flocked out from a novena in the Salute.
The day became evening, the lovely roseate twilight of summer in
Venice wore into night, and the night waned into dawn. All the
animation of Venetian life began again to awake with the whirr of the
wings of the pigeons taking their sunrise flight from dome and cupola
and pinnacle and gutter. To the sisters of charity their patient
seemed better; to the surgeons of the city also; Damer said nothing.
“Is he not better?” asked the nun, anxiously.
“I see little amelioration,” replied Damer, and said in a louder
tone to Adrianis, “Your mother has telegraphed; she will soon be
here.”
Adrianis smiled again a smile which lighted up his beautiful brown
eyes and momentarily banished their languor. He felt disposed to
sleep, but he drew his pencil and paper to him and wrote feebly,
“Mme. Zaranegra?”
Damer read the name.
“She came to see you an hour or two ago,” he answered. “But I could
not allow it. Your illness is infectious.”
He spoke in his usual brief, calm, indifferent manner. Adrianis
sighed, but it was a sigh of content; he was half asleep, he turned
on his pillows and drew her little note which he had hidden under
them once more against his cheek.
“He will sleep himself well,” said the nun.
“Let us hope so,” replied Damer; but she heard from his tone that he
did not share her belief.
It was now eleven o’clock.
“Go and rest,” he said to her. “You need it. I will watch to-night.
If there be any necessity for aid I will summon you.”
“Will his mother soon be here?” asked the sister, whose heart was
tender.
“I believe so,” replied Damer.
One of the medical men whom he had summoned came out on to the
balcony to his side.
“The sisters say the prince is better; he seems so,” said his
colleague.
“What do they know?” said Damer; and added less harshly, “It is too
early to be able to make sure of recovery; it is a disease which is
very treacherous.”
“He has youth on his side.”
“Yes; but he is weakened by the effects of a wound he received last
year for which I treated him. His constitution is not prepared to
make so soon again another struggle for existence.”
“You have more knowledge of him than I,” said the Venetian, who was a
meek man, not very wise.
“Come to my laboratory in the Fondamente, and I will show you
something and tell you something,” said Damer.
His Italian colleague, flattered, complied with the request.
What he showed him were three animals, two rabbits and a cat,
inoculated with and dying of diphtheria; what he explained to
him were the theories of Lœffler and Klebs and the discovery of
the presumed antidote by Behring; he also displayed to him some
serum which he had received from Roux, who was only then at the
commencement of his applications of Behring’s theory.
The Venetian doctor inspected and listened with deep respect.
“Why do you not try this treatment on the prince?” he said, which was
what Damer desired and intended him to say.
“I will do so on my own responsibility if he be no better in the
morning,” he replied. “But you will admit that the responsibility
will be great, the theory of the cure being at present unknown to the
general public, and no one of his family being at present in Venice
to authorise the experiment.”
“We are there as your colleagues, and we shall support you,” replied
the more obscure man, touched and flattered by the deference of one
who was in the confidence of French and German men of science.
“If there be no other way, I will take the risk; the risk is less
than that of tracheotomy,” said Damer, as he put the small phial of
serum back into a locked case.
[Illustration: Decorative chapter separator]
[Illustration: Decorative separator]