When the Venetian doctor left him he took the phial of serum, the
inoculating syringe, and another smaller bottle containing a clear
liquid, which was the toxin or virus of the malady, and which he had
not shown to the Venetian. He put these together in the breast pocket
of his coat. He had no belief in the efficacy of the serum, but he
had prepared the venom of the toxin himself; and in that small glass
tube there was poison enough to slay twelve men.
“If there be no other way,” he repeated to himself as he went back to
the hotel through the moonlit canals and under the ancient houses.
The dual meaning which lay in the words was like a devil’s laugh in
his ears.
He looked up at the Ca’ Zaranegra as he passed it; its windows were
all dark, and the white lilies on the balconies had no light upon
them save that from the rays of the moon.
As he entered the lighted hall of the hotel they handed to him a
telegram. It was from the Princess Adrianis. She had received his
despatch twelve hours late, as she had been in her summer palace in
the mountains; she had left Sicily immediately, and said that she
would travel without pause at the utmost speed possible. She added:
“I commend my darling to God and to you.”
Damer crushed the paper up in his hand with a nervous gesture and
flung it out, by the open doorway, into the water below.
Then he ascended the staircase, and entered his patient’s room.
The night was very warm; the windows stood wide open; there was a
shaded porcelain lamp alight on the table. One nun watched whilst the
other slept. Adrianis lay still on the great bed in the shadow; he
was awake, his eyes were looking upward, his mouth was open but his
breathing was easier and less hard.
The sister of charity whispered to Damer, “I think he is better. The
fungus growth seems loosening. We have given the wine and the meat
essence. He could swallow.”
He lit a candle and approached the bed. Adrianis smiled faintly. He
could not speak.
“Let me see your throat,” said Damer.
He saw that the nun had spoken truly; the fungus growth was wasting,
the false membrane was shrinking; there was a healthier look on the
tongue. He set the lamp down and said nothing.
“Is he not better?” said the sister, anxiously.
“Perhaps,” he replied. “If there be no re-formation of the false
membrane he may be saved. Go, my good woman, and rest while you can.”
She went, nothing loth, to her supper and her bed. Damer was alone
with the man who trusted him and whose mother trusted him.
He went away from the bedside and sat down by one of the windows. His
heart had long years before been rendered dumb and dead; his mind
alone remained alive and his passions.
He stayed in the open air, looking down on the green water.
“Man cannot control circumstances,” he thought, “but the wise man can
assist circumstance, the fool does not.”
He had in him that fell egotism of science which chokes the fountain
of mercy at its well-springs in blood. He sat by the window and
looked out absently at the night.
He knew that the nun was right; he knew that the disease was passing
away from the sick man; that, if left alone, sleep and youth would
restore him to health, to love, and joy.
Should he leave him alone?
Should he let him live to become the lover and lord of Veronica
Zaranegra? Should he let those two mindless, flowerlike lives lean
together, and embrace, and multiply?
It would be what men called a crime, but his school despises the
trivial laws of men, knowing that for the wise there is no such thing
as crime and no such thing as virtue—only lesions of the brain, and
absence of temptation and opportunity.
The mother of Adrianis could not be there before another day, travel
as rapidly as she would. He knew the effect of affection on the
nervous system, and that the sight and sense of a beloved person
near them often gave to enfeebled frames the power of resistance and
recovery. Those emotions were not in himself, but he recognised
their existence, and he knew that in Adrianis the emotions and the
affections were very strong in proportion as the mental powers were
slight.
He must not await the arrival of the princess. He had before been
witness of her devotion, of her skill in illness, of her fortitude,
and of the love existing between her and her son. They were powers
he despised and never pitied, as he never pitied the love of the
nursing bitch from whom he removed her litter that he might watch her
die of the agony of her bursting teats. But he was conscious of the
existence of such powers; and the physiologist ignores no facts which
he has demonstrated, though they may belong to an order with which he
has no sympathy.
He knew that he must not allow the mother of Adrianis to arrive in
time to see her son alive.
“What thou doest, do quickly,” he murmured in words which he had
heard in his childhood as he had sat in the old parish church of his
native village.
He rose and walked to the bed.
Adrianis still seemed to sleep, the breathing was heavy and forced
chiefly through the nasal passages; but there was a look of returning
serenity on his features: a look which the man of science is well
aware precedes recovery, not death.
As surely as any one can gauge the unseen future, he was sure that if
let alone the young man would recover, would in a week or two arise
unharmed from his bed. He was equally sure that he had himself, in
his breast, the means of changing that process of recovery into the
agony of dissolution. He no longer hesitated; he no longer doubted.
He went to the adjacent chamber, where the two nuns, still dressed,
were sleeping. He awakened them.
“Come,” he said, gently. “He is worse. I am about to try the cure
of Behring. It may succeed. There is no other chance. It will be
necessary to hold him. I require you both.”
He was well aware that it would be unwise to essay that operation
alone—it would rouse comment in the day to come.
“Hold him motionless,” he said to the two women. “Do not awake him if
you can avoid it.”
[Illustration: Damer bent over him and inserted the injecting-needle
into one of the veins; the incident disturbed him without wholly
loosening the bonds of the soporific; he struggled slightly, moaned a
little, but the nuns succeeded in resisting his endeavour to rise.]
He filled the inoculating syringe from one of the little phials
which he had brought from the Fondamente. He stood in the full light
of the lamp so that the two sisters could see all that he did.
“Loosen his shirt,” he said to them. Adrianis still slept; in his
predisposition to sleep the few drops of chloral which had been
administered twenty minutes earlier, had sufficed to render him
almost insensible.
Damer bent over him and inserted the injecting-needle into one of the
veins; the incision disturbed him without wholly loosening the bonds
of the soporific; he struggled slightly, moaned a little, but the
nuns succeeded in resisting his endeavour to rise; the inoculation
was successfully made.
The face of Damer in the lamplight was not paler than usual, but his
hand trembled as he withdrew the syringe.
“What is Behring’s cure?” asked the nun who felt most interest in her
patient.
“An antitoxin; the serum of an immune beast,” he answered, calmly, as
he turned slightly towards her. The nun did not understand, but she
was afraid of troubling him with other questions.
He walked to the window and stood looking out at the moonlit water.
He had left on a table the syringe and the phial of serum which was
half empty. But in the breast pocket of his coat he had the phial
of toxin, and that phial was wholly empty. The nuns, engrossed in
holding down Adrianis, had not seen that the glass tube on the
table was not the one from which the syringe had been filled; and,
when used, Damer had plunged the syringe immediately into a bowl
of disinfecting acid. There was no trace anywhere that the toxin
had been used instead of the serum; no trace whatever save in the
tumifying vein of the sick man’s throat.
“You had better stay near him, you may be wanted, and it is two
o’clock,” said Damer to the nurses. “I shall remain here. There will
be, I hope, a great change soon.”
He went out on to the balcony and turned his back on the watching
women and leaned against the iron-work, looking down on the canal,
where nothing moved except the slow, scarcely visible ripple of the
water. He was human though he had killed his humanity, replacing it
by intellect alone. He suffered in that moment; a vague sense of
what ignorance calls crime was on him painfully; he had emancipated
himself wholly from the superstitions and prejudices of men, but he
was conscious that he had now done that which, if known, would put
him outside the pale of their laws.
He did not repent or regret; he did not see any evil in his act.
The right of the strong, the right of the sage was his; he had but
exercised his reason to produce an issue he desired.
So he thought as he leaned against the iron scroll work and watched
the thick, dark water glide by past the marble steps of the Salute.
There was a faint light in the sky on the east, but he could not see
the east where he stood; it was still completely night between the
walls of the Grand Canal. The voice of a man called up to him from
the darkness below.
“Madam sends me to know how goes it with the prince?”
Damer looked down. “Tell the Countess Zaranegra that things are as
they were. A new remedy has been essayed.”
The man who had come by the calle retired by them, swinging a lantern
in his hand.
The two Vulcans of the clock-tower, hard by in St. Mark’s square,
struck four times upon their anvil. Damer looked up the darkness of
the canal where nothing was to be seen but the lamps which burned on
either side of it with their reflections, and the lanthorns tied to
poles before some of the palaces. He could not see the Ca’ Zaranegra,
which was not in sight even in the day, but he saw it in remembrance
with its flowering balconies, its tapestried chambers, its red and
white awnings, its great escutcheon over its portals. He saw her in
his vision as she must be now—awake, listening for her messenger’s
return, in some white, loose gown no doubt, with her hair loose, too,
upon her shoulders, her face white, her eyes strained in anxiety, as
he had seen them that afternoon and evening.
If Adrianis had lived she would have been his wife: that was
as certain as that the sea was beating on the bar of Malomocco
underneath the moon.
“I have done well; I have exercised my supremacy,” he thought. “We
have right of life and death over all birds, and beasts, and things
which swim and crawl, by virtue of our greater brain; in like manner
has the greater brain the right to deal as it will with the weaker
brain when their paths meet and one must yield and go under. The fool
hath said that there is sanctity in life, but the man of science has
never said it. To him one organism or another has the same measure in
his scales.”
Strangely enough, at that moment and incongruously there came to him
a remembrance of his own childish days: of sitting by his mother’s
side in the little, dark, damp church of their northern hamlet, and
reading written on their tablets the Twelve Commandments.
“Mother, what is it to do murder?” he had asked her; and she had
answered, “It is to take life; to destroy what we cannot recall.”
He remembered how, some weeks later, when he had killed from
wantonness a mole which ran across a road, he had been frightened and
had gone to his mother and said to her, “Mother, mother, I have done
murder. I have taken life and I cannot recall it.” And his mother had
smiled and answered, “That is not murder, my dear. A little mole is a
dumb creature.”
But his mother had been wrong, as the world was wrong. Whether the
organism were animal or human, what difference was there? Only a
difference of brain.
The world and its lawgivers might and would still say that what
destroyed the human organism was murder, that is, a crime; but to
the trained, logical, strong reason of Damer the sophism was a
premiss untenable. To slay a man was no more than to slay a mole. To
do either was to arrest a mechanism, to dissolve tissues, to send
elements back into the space they came from; it was nothing more. One
organism or another, what matter?
Since that day in the dim long ago, he had taken life, not once,
not twice, but thousands of times, causing the greatest and most
lingering agony in its inflictions. But in his opinion that had not
been murder; it had been only torture and slaughter of dumb creatures
according to human law. What difference could there be if, by
accident, the creature to be removed were human?
He was consistent enough, and sincere enough to follow out the
theories of the laboratory to their logical sequence without
flinching. He honestly held himself without blame.
He was only a man, and therefore he felt some sickly sense of pain
when he heard in the still and waning night the sound of his victim’s
convulsive struggles to gain breath; but he held himself without
blame, for every thesis and every deduction of the priesthood of
science justified and made permissible his action to bring about a
catastrophe which was necessary to him.
Science bade him take all the other sentient races of earth and make
them suffer as he chose and kill them as he chose. Those other races
were organisms as susceptible as the human organisms. Why should the
human organism enjoy immunity?
He had done no more than is done for sake of experiment or
observation in the hospital or the laboratory every day all over the
known world. The reluctance to face what he had done was merely that
residue of early influences and impressions which remains in the soul
of the strongest, haunting its remembrances and emasculating its
resolution.
He called up to his command that volition, that power of will which
had never failed him; he returned to the bedside as he would have
returned to visit a dog dying under the pressure of eight atmospheres.
Adrianis still lay in the same position. About the almost invisible
orifice where the needle had punctured there was a slight tumified
swelling.
“He seems worse,” whispered the nun.
“He cannot be either better or worse as yet,” replied Damer,
truthfully. “Give him a little wine, if he can take it.”
They might give him what they chose; they could not now save him from
death. He had received enough of the virus into his vein to slay a
man in health. Passing as it did into an organ already diseased, he
would die before the sun rose, or an hour after.
He had aided nature to destroy her own work. There was nothing new or
criminal in that—nature was for ever creating and destroying. Once it
had suited him to save that young man’s life; now it suited him to
end it.
One action was as wrong or as righteous as the other. It was an
exercise of power, as when the monarch grants an amnesty or signs a
death warrant. Who blames the monarch who does but use his power? The
prerogative of superior reason is higher than the prerogative of a
monarch. Moreover, who would ever know it? Who would ever be aware
that the intenser virus of the toxin had mingled with the natural
formation of the disease?
Even were there an autopsy, discovery would be impossible; the
concentrated venom had mingled with and been absorbed in the common
and usual growth of the false membrane. He had but aided death
instead of hindering it.
His professional conscience would have shrunk from giving the
disease, but it did not shrink from making death certain where it
was merely possible. He did but add a stronger poison to that which
nature had already poisoned.
Men slew their rivals in duels and no one blamed them; who should
blame him because he used the finer weapon of science instead of the
coarser weapon of steel? He did but carry out the doctrine of the
laboratory to its just and logical sequence.
What he felt for Veronica was not love, but passion, and not passion
alone, but the sense of dominion. He knew that the fair creature
shrank from him but submitted to him. All the intense instinctive
tyranny of his nature longed to exercise itself on her, the beautiful
and patrician thing, so far above him, so fragile and so fair. He
knew that he would never possess her or command her except through
fear; but this would suffice to him. The finer and more delicate
elements of love were indifferent to him, were indeed unknown. They
had existed in Adrianis, whom he had despised; but in his own
temperament they could find no dwelling-place. His desires were
brutal as had ever been those of Attila, whose throne lies low
amongst the grass on Torcello.
Late at night and early at dawn messengers came from some noble
families in the city, and the Ca’ Zaranegra. Damer replied to all
inquiries, “It is impossible to say what turn the disease may take.”
Damer said nothing. He looked out at the marble church which had no
message for him, and down the moonlit waters which had no beauty for
him. He was absorbed in meditation. His will desired to do that from
which his natural weakness shrank; for in his great strength he was
still weak being human. The infliction of death was nothing to him;
could be nothing; he was used to kill as he was used to torture with
profound indifference, with no more hesitation, than he ate or drank
or fulfilled any natural function of his body. To obtain knowledge,
even the approach of knowledge, he would have inflicted the most
agonising and the most endless suffering without a moment’s doubt
or a moment’s regret. From his boyhood upwards he had always lived
in the hells created by modern science, wherein if the bodies of
animals suffer the souls of men wither and perish. What was the man
lying sleeping there to him? Only an organism like those which daily
he broke up and destroyed and threw aside. Only an organism, filled
by millions of other invisible organisms by a myriad of parasite
animalculæ, numerous as the star-dust in the skies.
The woman whom he desired was nothing more; he could not deem her
more; he scorned himself for the empire over him of his own desire of
her perishable form, of her foolish butterfly life. He himself was no
more, but there was alight in him that light of the intellect which
in his own esteem raised him above them into an empyrean unknown by
them. His intellect made him as Cæsar, as Pharaoh; their foolishness
made them as slaves.
The time is nigh at hand when there will be no priests and no kings
but those of science, and beneath their feet the nations will grovel
in terror and writhe in death.
He went out again into the balcony, leaving the nuns to endeavour
to administer the wine, which, however, their patient could not
swallow, the fungus growth closed his larynx. His head was thrown
back on the pillows; his eyes were staring but sightless; his face
was pallid and looked blue round the mouth and about the temples. He
was now straining for breath; like a horse fallen on the road, blown
and broken.
They called loudly to Damer, being frightened and horrified. He
re-entered the chamber.
“He is worse,” he said, gravely.
The nun, who had a tender heart, wept. Damer sat down by the bed. He
had seen that struggle for air a thousand times in all the hospitals
of Europe. It could now have but one end.
A little while after they brought him a note and a telegram. The
first was from the Countess Zaranegra. It said: “You must let me see
him. It is my right, my place.”
The second was from the mother of Adrianis; it said: “I have reached
Bologna; I shall soon be with you. God bless you for your goodness to
my son.”
He read them, and tore the one in pieces and flung the pieces in the
canal; the other he put in his breast pocket beside the empty phial
of toxin.
The mother’s letter would be useful if any called in question the
too late usage of the Behring serum. It would show the complete
confidence placed in him by the writer. At that moment his two
Venetian colleagues arrived. The day had dawned. The women put out
the light of the lamps.
“You have given the antitoxin?” said the elder of the Venetians,
glancing at the syringe.
“I have,” replied Damer. “But, I believe, too late.”
“I fear too late,” replied the Venetian. “Not less admirable is your
courage in accepting such responsibility.”
Damer bowed. He looked grave and worn, which was natural in a man who
had been in anxious vigil through thirty-six hours by the bedside of
his friend.
“Have you any hope?” whispered the Venetian.
“I confess none, now,” he answered.
The pure light of earliest daybreak was in the whole of the vast
chamber.
It shone on that ghastly sight, a man dying in his youth, struggling
and straining for a breath of air, fighting against suffocation.
The fresh sea air was flowing through the room, sweet with the odours
of fruits and flowers, free to the poorest wretch that lived. But in
all that bounteous liberty and radiance of air he could not draw one
breath, he could not reach one wave of it, to slake his thirst of
life.
The poisoned growth filled every chink of the air passages as though
they were tubes mortared up and closed hermetically. His face grew
purple and tumid, his eyes started from their sockets, his arms waved
wildly, beckoning in space; he had no sense left except the mere
instinctive mechanical effort to gasp for the air which he was never
to breathe again. The five persons round him stood in silence, while
the stifled sobs of the nun were heard; the splash of oars echoed
from the water below; somewhere without a bird sang.
The Venetians spoke one with another, then turned to Damer.
“The end must be near. We ought to call in the assistance of the
Church. We must not let him perish thus, unshrived, unannealed, like
a pagan, like a dumb creature.”
“Do whatever you deem right,” replied Damer. “With those matters I do
not meddle.”
The minutes went on; the nuns sank on their knees; the one who wept
hid her face on the coverlet of the bed. All which had so lately been
the youth, the form, the vitality of Adrianis wrestled with death as
a young lion tears at the walls of the den which imprisons him. The
terrible choking sounds roared through the air to which his closed
throat could not open. Blood foamed in froth from his lips, which
were curled up over the white teeth, and were cracked and blue. His
eyes, starting from their orbits, had no sight. Damer ceased to look;
almost he regretted that which he had done.
Suddenly the convulsions ceased.
“He is out of pain,” said one of the Venetians, in a solemn and
hushed voice.
“He is dead,” said Damer.
The women crossed themselves.
The little bird outside sang loudly.
The door opened, and the mother of Adrianis stood on the threshold.
* * * * *
Six months later the man who had killed him wedded Veronica
Zaranegra. Her family opposed, and her friends warned her, in vain;
she shrank from him, she feared him, she abhorred him, but the
magnetism of his will governed hers till he shaped her conduct at his
choice, as the hand of the sculptor moulds the clay.
He became master of her person, of her fortune, of her destiny; but
her soul, frightened and dumb, forever escapes from him, and hides in
the caverns of memory and regret.
[Illustration: Decorative chapter separator]