by Ouida
“Do you want nothing more than these?” the gaze of Damer seemed in her imagination to say to her.
She was angered with herself for thinking of him or of his opinion; he was not of her world or of her station; he was a professional man, a worker, a teacher; natural pride of lineage and habit made her regard him as in no way privileged to be considered by her. And yet she could not help being influenced by that disdain of the mental powers of others which he had never uttered, but which he continually showed. Indecision is the greatest bane of women; obstinacy costs them much, but indecision costs them more. The will of Veronica flickered like a candle in the wind, veered hither and thither like a fallen leaf in a gust of wind and rain.
Adrianis was delightful to her; his beauty, his gaiety, and his homage were all sympathetic to her. She knew that he loved her, but she prevented him telling him so; she liked her lately acquired liberty; she did not want a declaration which would force her to decide in one way or another what to do with her future. And she was affected without being aware of it by the scarcely disguised contempt which his companion had for him. It was seldom outspoken, but it was visible in every word of Damer, in every glance.
“He is beautiful, yes,” he said once to her. “So is an animal.”
“Do you not like animals?”
“I do not like or dislike them. The geologist does not like or dislike the stones he breaks up, the metallurgist does not like or dislike the ore he fuses.”
She did not venture to ask him what he meant; she had a vague conception of his meaning, and it gave her a chill as such replies gave to Adrianis: a chill such as the north wind, when it comes down from the first snows on the Dolomite peaks, gives to the honeysuckle flowers hanging over the sea-walls. She was not clever or much educated, but she had seen a good deal of the world, and she had heard men talk of science, of its pretensions and its methods, its self-worship and its tyrannies. She had put her rosy fingers in her ears and run away when they had so spoken, but some things she had heard and now remembered.
“You are what they call a physiologist?” she said once, suddenly.
“I am,” replied Damer.
She looked at him under her long silky lashes as a child looks at what it fears in the dusk of a fading day. He attracted her and repelled her, as when she had herself been a little child she had been at once charmed and frightened by the great ghostly figures on the tapestries, and the white and grey busts of gods and sages on the grand staircase of her father’s house in the Trentino. She would have liked to ask him many things, things of mystery and of horror, but she was afraid. After all, how much better were the sea, the sunshine, the dog-rose, the barcarolle, the laughter, the lute!
She turned to Adrianis, who at that moment came along the sands of the beach, his hands filled with spoils from the blossoming hedges; turned to him as when, a little child on the staircase in the dusk, she had run to reach the shelter of a warmed and lighted room. He was of her own country, her own age, her own temperament; he carried about him a sense of gladness, an atmosphere of youth; he was of her own rank; he was as rich as she, and richer. There was no leaven of self-seeking in the love he bore her; the passion she had roused in him was pure of any alloy; it was the love of the poets and the singers. If she accepted it, her path, from youth to age, would be like one of those flowering meadows of his own Sicily which fill the cloudless day with perfume.
She knew that; her foot was ready to tread the narcissus-filled grass, but by an unaccountable indecision and caprice she would not let him invite her thither. She continually evaded or eluded the final words which would have united them or parted them.
Again and again, when that moment of decision could not have: been postponed, the sombre shadow of Damer had appeared, as in the moment when the clasp of the necklace had been entangled in the little curls at the back of her throat.
It might be chance, it might be premeditation; but he was always there in those moments when the heart of Adrianis leaped to his eyes and lips and called to hers.
VIII.
IN the evening she was usually at home. She did not as yet go to balls or theatres; the aristocratic society of Venice flocked to her rooms, and what was best in the foreign element. In the evenings neither Adrianis nor Damer saw her alone; but in the daytime, on the island or in the water excursions, sometimes one or the other was beside her for a few minutes with no listener near.
Adrianis eagerly sought such occasions; Damer never seemed to seek them. He was often in her palace and on her island, but appeared to be so chiefly because he went where Adrianis went. No one could have told that he took pleasure in doing so.
But Adrianis, somewhat surprised at his lingering so long, thought to himself: “He was to be in Gottenberg by the 10th of May, and it is now the 23rd.”
“Have you given up your appointment?” he asked once, directly.
Damer merely answered, “No.” He did not offer any explanation; but he continued to stay on in Venice, though he had removed from the fine apartments occupied by his friend to a house on the Fondamenti Nuovi, where he had hired two chambers.
Adrianis, who was very generous and had always a grateful and uneasy sense of unrepaid obligation, vainly urged him to remain at his hotel. But Damer, somewhat rudely, refused.
“I cannot pursue any studies there,” he replied.
The house he had chosen was obscure and uninviting, standing amidst the clang of coppersmiths’ hammers and the stench of iron-foundries in what was once the most patrician and beautiful garden-quarter of Venice, but which is now befouled, blackened, filled with smoke, and clamour, and vileness, where once the rose-terraces and the clematis-covered pergole ran down to the lagoon, and the marble stairs were white as snow under silken awnings.
“What do you do there?” Veronica Zaranegra wished to ask him; but she never did so; she felt vaguely afraid as a woman of the Middle Age would have feared to ask a magician what he did with his alembics and his spheres.
Although the eyes of lovers are proverbially washed by the collyrium of jealousy, those of Adrianis were blind to the passion which Damer, like himself, had conceived. The reserve and power of self-restraint in Damer were extreme, and served to screen his secret from the not very discerning mind of his companion. Moreover, the pride of race which was born and bred in Adrianis rendered it impossible for him to suspect that he possessed a rival in one who was, however mentally superior, so far socially inferior, to himself and to the woman he loved.
That a man who was going to receive a stipend as a teacher in a German university could lift his eyes to Veronica Zaranegra would have seemed wholly impossible to one who had been reared in patrician and conservative tenets. He never noticed the fires which slumbered in the cold wide-opened eyes of his friend and monitor. He never observed how frequently Damer watched him and her when they were together, listened from afar to their conversation, and invariably interrupted them at any moment when their words verged on more tender or familiar themes. He was himself tenderly, passionately, romantically enamoured; his temper was full of a romance to which he could not often give adequate expression; his love for her had the timidity of all sincere and nascent passion; he was pained and chafed by the manner in which she avoided his definite declaration of it, but he did not for a moment trace it to its right cause, the magnetic influence which the Englishman had upon her, the hesitation which was given her by vague hypnotic suggestion. If any looker-on had warned him, he would have laughed and said that the days of magic were past.
He himself only counted time by the hours which brought him into her presence on the water, on the island, or in the evening receptions in the palace. He made water-festivals and pleasure-cruises to please her; he had sent for his own sailing yacht from Palermo. The long, light days of late spring and earliest summer passed in a series of ingenious amusements of which the sole scope was to obtain a smile from her. Often she did smile, the radiance of youth and of a woman’s willingness to be worshipped shi
ning on her fair countenance as the sun shone on the sea. Sometimes also the smile ceased suddenly when, from a distance, her eyes encountered those of Damer.
All that was most delightful in life offered itself to her in the homage of Adrianis: — his mother’s welcome, his southern clime, his great love, his infinite tenderness and sweetness of temper, his great physical beauty. She longed to accept these great gifts; she longed to feel his arms folded about her and his cheek against hers; and yet she hesitated, she delayed, she avoided, because in the eyes of another man, whom she disliked and feared, she read mockery, disdain, and superiority.
She could not have said what it was that she felt any more than the young spaniel could tell what moves it as it looks up into human eyes, and reads authority in them, and crouches, trembling.
Why did he stay here? she asked herself, this cold, still, irresponsive man, who had nothing in him which was not alien to the youthful and pleasure-loving society in which he found himself, and who was by his own admission already overdue at the university to which he had been appointed.
“Are you not losing time?” she said once to him; “we are so frivolous, so ignorant, so unlike you.”
“I never lose time,” replied Damer. “An amoeba in a pool on the sand is companion enough for me.”
Seeing that she had no idea of what he meant, he added:
“A man of science is like an artist; his art is everywhere, wherever natural forms exist.”
“Or like a sportsman,” said Adrianis, who was listening; “his sport is everywhere, where-ever there are living things to kill.”
“Put it so if you please,” said Damer. But he was annoyed; he disliked being answered intelligently and sarcastically by one whom he considered a fool. Whatever Adrianis said irritated him, though it was almost perpetually courteous and simple, as was the nature of the speaker.
Damer read the young man’s heart like an open book and he knew that it was wholly filled with the image of Veronica. He had never liked Adrianis; he had no liking for youth or for physical beauty, or for kindliness and sweetness and simplicity of character. Such qualities were not in tune with him; they were no more to him than the soft, thick fur of the cat in his laboratory, which he stripped off her body that he might lay bare her spinal cord; the pretty, warm skin was nothing to science — no more than was the pain of the bared nerves.
He had saved the life of Adrianis because it had interested and recompensed him to do so; he had travelled with him for a year because it suited him financially to do so; but he had never liked him, he had never been touched by any one of the many generous and delicate acts of the young man, nor by the trust which the mother of Adrianis continually expressed in her letters to himself. Where jealousy sits on the threshold of the soul, goodness and kindness and faith knock in vain for admittance. Envy is hatred in embryo; and only waits in the womb of time for birth.
IX.
ONE day Veronica asked him to go and see an old servant of the Zaranegra household who was very ill and in hospital; they had begged him not to go to the hospital, but he had wished to do so, and had been allowed to fulfil his wish. Damer went to visit him. He found the man at death’s door with cancer of the food and air passages.
“If he be not operated on he will die in a week,” said the Englishman.
None of the hospital surgeons dared perform such an operation.
“I will operate if you consent,” said Damer.
The surgeons acquiesced.
“Will Biancon recover?” asked Veronica, when he returned and told her on what they had decided.
“In his present state he cannot live a week,” replied Damer, evasively.
“Does he wish for the operation?”
“He can be no judge. He cannot know his own condition. He cannot take his own prognosis.”
“But it will be frightful suffering.”
“He will be under anaesthetics.”
“But will he recover?”
“Madame, I am not the master of Fate.”
“But what is probable?”
“What is certain is that the man will die if left as he is.”
He performed the operation next day. The man ceased to breathe as it was ended; the shock to the nervous system had killed him.
When she heard that he was dead she burst into tears.
“Oh! why, oh! why,” she said passionately to Damer, later in the day: “why, if you knew he must die, did you torture him in his last moments?”
“I gave him a chance,” he replied, indifferently. “Anyhow he would never have survived the operation more than a few weeks.”
“Why did you torture him with it then?” said Veronica, indignantly.
“It was a rare, and almost unique, opportunity. I have solved by it a doubt which has never been solved before, and never could have been without a human subject.”
She shrank from him in horror.
“You are a wicked man!” she said, faintly. “Oh, how I wish, how I wish I had never asked you to see my poor Biancon! He might have lived!”
“He would most certainly have died,” said Darner, unmoved. “The life of a man at sixty is not an especially valuable thing, and I believe he did nothing all his life except polish your palace floors with beeswax or oil; I forget which it is they use in Venice.”
She looked at him with a mixture of horror and fear.
“But you have killed him! — and you can jest.”
“I did not kill him. His disease killed him,” replied Damer, with calm indifference. “And his end has been a source of knowledge. I should wish my own end to be as fruitful.”
She shuddered, and motioned to him to leave her.
“Go away, go away, you have no heart, and no conscience,” Damer smiled slightly.
“I have a scientific conscience; it is as good as a moral one, and does better work.”
“Why did you bring that man to Venice?” she said to Adrianis some hours later. “He has killed my poor Biancon, and he cares nothing.”
“Why do you receive him?” said Adrianis, feeling the reproach unjust. “Cease to receive him. That is very simple. If you banish him he is proud; he will not persist.”
“He would not perhaps persist; but he would be revenged,” she thought, but she did not say so. Though her life was short, she had learned in it that men are like detonators which you cannot throw against each other without explosion.
Adrianis began to desire the exile of his companion, though his loyalty withheld him from trying to obtain it by any unfair means or unjust attack. He was mortified and disquieted. Why had he not had patience, and waited to carry the opals to the Ca’ Zaranegra until the Englishman had been safe on the sea on his way to Trieste? He began to perceive that Damer had an influence on the Countess Veronica which was contrary to his own, and adverse to his interests. He did not attach importance to it, because he saw that it was purely intellectual; but he would have preferred that it had not existed. So would she.
It was such an influence as the confessor obtains over the devotee; against which husband, lover, children, all natural ties, struggle altogether in vain.
It is not love; it is alien to love, but it is frequently stronger than love, and casts down the winged god maimed and helpless.
“Pierres de malheur! Pierres de malheur!” she said, as she looked at the opals that night. “Why did you bring that cruel man into my life?”
She might banish him as Adrianis had said, but she felt that she would never have courage to do it. Damer awed her. She felt something of what the poor women in the Salpétrière had felt, when he had hypnotised them, and made them believe that they clasped their hands on red-hot iron, or were being dragged by ropes to the scaffold. She strove to resist and conquer the impression, but she was subjugated by it against her will.
She buried her poor old servant that night, and followed the coffin in its gondola in her own, with her men in mourning and the torches burning at the prow.
From t
he casement of his high tower on the north of the city, which looked over the lagoon towards that island which is now the cemetery of Venice, with its tall mosque-like Campanile and its high sea-walls, Damer saw and recognised her on that errand of respect to the humble dead. He saw also the long-boat of the yacht of Adrianis, laden with flowers, following her gondola at a little distance, as though its owner were timid and uncertain of welcome. He recognised them both in the evening light, and through his binocular could discern their features, their hands, their garlands, as the torches flamed and the water, roughened by wind, broke against the black sides of her gondola, and the white sides of the boat.
“Two children,” he thought, “made for each other, with their flowers and fables and follies! I should do best to leave them together.”
Then he shut his window and turned from the sight of the silver water, the evening skies, the gliding vessels.
His work awaited him. Bound on a plank lay a young sheepdog, which he had bought from a peasant of Mazzorbo for a franc; he had cut its vocal chords; in his own jargon, had rendered it aphone; he had then cut open its body, and torn out its kidneys and pancreas; it was living; he reckoned it would live in its mute and unpitied agony for twelve hours more — long enough for the experiment which he was about to make.
These were the studies for which he had come to the tower on the Fondamenti.
The clang of hammers and the roar of furnaces drowned the cries of animals which it was not convenient to make aphone; and the people of the quarter were too engrossed in their labours to notice when he flung down into the water dead or halfdead mutilated creatures.
X.
AFTER the death of the serving-man, Biancon, the name of the English scientist and surgeon became known and revered amongst the persons of his own profession in Venice. The poor man had died certainly from the shock to the nerves, but that was of small moment. The operation had been eminently successful, as science counts success. It had been admirably performed, and had, as he had said to Veronica, cleared up a doubt which could not, without a human subject, have been satisfactorily dissipated. His skill, his manual dexterity, his courage, were themes of universal praise, and more than one rich person of the Veneto entreated his examination, and submitted to his treatment.