by Ouida
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.
An Altruist
THE scene is Wilfrid Bertram’s rooms in Piccadilly, facing the Green Park. The time is six o’clock in the afternoon. The audience is a goodly number of men and women of that class which calls itself Society. The rooms are small and the guests are many. A few look contemptuously amused. A great many appear excruciatingly bored.
“It’s all rot!” says one g
entleman in confidence to his walking-stick.
It is the general opinion, though it has but one spokesman.
“What a shame, when he is so much in earnest!” says a pretty girl.
“Bores always are awfully in earnest,” replies the critic. “If he’d only give us something to drink—”
“You can get plenty to drink in the street,” says the young lady, with a withering glance.
Meantime, Wilfrid Bertram, who has been speaking for more than an hour without contradiction, except such as he read on his friends’ faces, perceives at last that he has been wearying them; a knowledge which is always slow to steal upon the teacher of mankind.
He stops in the middle of a very fine peroration.
“My dear people,” he remarks, a little irritably— “I mean, ladies and gentlemen — if you are so soon weary of so illimitable a subject, I fear I must have failed to do it justice.”
“So soon? — oh, hang it!” says the man who has wished for something to drink. “We came upstairs at half-past four, and you’ve had all the jaw to yourself ever since, and it’s past six now, and we’re all as thirsty as dogs.”
An expression of extreme disdain passes over the lecturer’s face.
“I did not invite you, Lord Marlow,” he says, very coldly. “If I had done I would have provided beer and skittles for your entertainment.”
“Oh, I say Wilfrid, come, finish your address to us; it’s extremely interesting,” observes, in amiable haste, a much older man, with a bald head and pleasant, ruddy countenance, who is his uncle, Lord Southwold.
“Immensely interesting!” echo everybody: they can say so with animation, almost with veracity, now that they are aware it is drawing to an end.
“I ask your pardon if my infirmities have done injustice to a noble theme. I fear I have failed to make myself intelligible,” says Bertram, in a tone intended to be apologetic, but which is actually only aggressive, since it plainly implies that his pearls have been thrown before swine. He closes the manuscript and notebooks which are lying before him with the air of a person who is prepared for anything from the obtuseness and ingratitude of humanity.
“Nothing could be clearer than what you’ve said,” says the gentleman who wanted a drink. “Nobody is to have anything they can call their own, and everybody who likes is to eat in one’s plate and bathe in one’s bath.”
“At theatres the buffoon in the gallery is usually turned out, with the approval of the entire audience,” Bertram remarks, with sententious chilliness.
“Were I not in my own chambers —— —”
Lord Marlow laughs rudely. “I don’t think you could throw me downstairs. Your diet of brown bread and asparagus don’t make muscle.”
“My dear fellow — before women — pray be quiet,” murmurs a guardsman who is on the seat next to him.
“Do finish your reading, Wilfrid,” says Lady Southwold, coaxingly. “Your views are so disinterested if they are a — a — a little difficult to carry out as the world is constituted.”
“Excuse me,” replies Bertram, “I have trespassed too long on every one’s indulgence. It is, I believe, altogether impossible to attempt to introduce altruism and duty into a society which considers Lord Marlow’s type of humanity as either wholesome or ornamental.”
“I never knew a lecture that didn’t end in a free fight,” says his uncle Southwold, hurriedly. “But we can’t have one here, Wilfrid, there are too many ladies present.”
A shabby little old gentleman, doubled up in his chair, who is his grace of Bridlington, murmurs doubtfully: “I don’t see how your theories would work, Bertram.”
“Don’t you, Duke? Is there not such a proverb as Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra?”
The duke nods, and coughs. “There is. But I am afraid it will land you in Queer Street sometimes. There’s another old saw, you know, ‘Look before you leap!’ Safer of the two, eh?”
“For the selfish, no doubt,” replies Bertram.
His hand is on his note-book; he is thinking with regret of the concluding passages which he has not been able to read, and a little also that Cicely Seymour, the young lady who snubs Marlow, has a very beautiful profile, as a white gauze hat laden with white lilac rests on the fair coils of her hair.
That brute Marlow is at her elbow, saying something idiotic; Bertram cannot hear what, but he hears her laugh, and knows that she is probably being made to laugh at himself.
The intruding Marlow’s jeer at his vegetarian views is unjust to him, for he is tall and well made, though slender; but then, as his people often tell him, his muscle was built up in the score of unregenerate years before his Oxford terms, when he was as philistine as any other Eton boy, though he liked his books better than the playing-fields.
He is the younger son of a peer, has a little money of his own, and makes a little more by writing for scholarly reviews; but beyond all he is an altruist, a collectivist, a Fourrierist, an Engelist, a Tolstoi-ist; and, in common with other theorists, he has imagined that to be told the truth is enough to make people believe in it and observe its gospel. He has been continually deceived in this impression; but he has always held it, and it is proportionately irritating to him when, after having shed the light of information upon his contemporaries, they still show no symptoms of being converted.
Even the old duke, who is his godfather, and is generally tender to his theories, does nothing but nod his head and repeat like a magpie: “Look before you leap!”
“I think you said that property was like a cancer in the body politic?” observes a lover of practical politics, a Unionist member of parliament, putting his glass in his eye.
“I said the consolidation and transmission of property was so,” replies Bertram, with some hauteur: — people cannot even quote him correctly!
“Ah! seems to me the same thing.”
“No more the same thing than Seltzer and the Sellinger!” cries Marlow.
“Oh, indeed,” says the politician, humbly; “forgive my stupidity.”
Bertram implies by a gesture that his indulgence to human imbecility is inexhaustible, but sorely tried.
“I had hoped,” he says, sententiously, “that you would have gathered from my previous discourse how intense is my conviction that those who possess property should give it up, generously, spontaneously, for the good of all, before awaiting that inevitable retribution which will fall on them if they continue to insult the People by their display of wealth, unearned and unjustified; for the riches of the noble and the millionaire are as absolutely theft as any stolen goods obtained by violence and fraud, and do continually provoke the crimes which they so savagely denounce and punish—”
“Humph! That’s strong,” mutters the duke.
“La Propriété c’est le vol,” murmurs Cicely Seymour “La propriété d’autrui, oui; mais pas la mienne!”
“If there’s no flimsy anywhere,” asks Lord Marlow, “who’ll breed racers?”
“Who’ll buy Comet clarets?”
“Who’ll employ cooks?”
“Who’ll keep upshootin’?”
“Who’ll build Valkyries?”
“Who’ll go by the Flying Dutchman?”
“Who’ll dance cotillons?”
Bertram replies with dignity: “My friends, these are mere frivolous jests on your part. When the entire structure of our rotten and debased society shall have been shattered there will of course be no place in a regenerate world for these mere foolish egotisms.
“Foolish egotisms!” echoes Lord Southwold. “Oh, Lord! A good glass of wine a foolish egotism?”
“Do you mean you want Local Option?” asks the duke, with some alarm. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d known that.”
Bertram answers with irritation: “There is no question of local option or of total abstinence, Duke. If property were generally and duly distributed, wine would be so too; and if individualism were duly recognised, you would no more dare to interfere with the drunkard than wi
th the genius.
“African sherry all round — what a millennium!” cries his uncle. “Tipplers all over the place, and no lock-up to put ’em in! What an Arcadia!”
“Genius has frequently been rudely compared to inebriety,” remarks the practical politician; “but I have never known quite such a slap in the face given to it as this. Max Nardau is deferential in comparison.”
“Look, sir,” says Bertram, addressing the duke, but glancing at Cicely Seymour—” look at the utter debasement of our financial system! What are banks except incentives to crime? What are the Bourses; the Exchanges, or Wall Street, except large seething cauldrons of sin? What are the great speculating companies if not banded thieves for the stripping of a gullible public? What is the watch you wear, with its visible chain glaring across your waistcoat, except a base, mean, grinning mockery of the hungry man who meets you in the street?”
Marlow takes out his watch.
“My conscience is clear in that respect. My watch is a Waterbury, and wouldn’t fetch the hungry man a shilling if he pawned it.”
“And my chain,” says Lord Southwold, touching a steel one, “was my poor old Hector’s collar, and I wear it in memory of him. How he’d thresh out five acres of turnips before luncheon! We shall never see his like.”
Bertram grows impatient: “Individually you may wear Waterburys or dog-collars, but each is nevertheless a symbol of inequality between you and the man in the street, who is obliged to look at the church clock to see the hour at which he may seek the parish dole.
“What profound philosophy!” cries Southwold. “What crimes one may commit without knowing it!”
“If a watch be an unwholesome sign of a bloated aristocracy, pray, Mr. Bertram, what are our jewels?” asks a very pretty woman, Lady Jane Rivaux.
“There are no words strong enough,” replies Bertram, “to condemn the use of gems, whether from a moral or an aesthetic point of view. In a purified condition of society they would of course become impossible abominations.”