CHAPTER I.
‘Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.’
The lamp was beginning to burn low; so was the fire. But neither of the two people in the room seemed to notice anything. The Professor had got upon his discovery again, and once there, no man living could check him. He had flung his arms across the table towards his companion, and the hands, with the palms turned upwards, marked every word as he uttered it, thumping the knuckles on the table here, shaking some imaginary disbeliever there—and never for a moment quiet—such old, lean, shrivelled, capable hands!
He was talking eagerly, as though the words flowed to him faster than he could utter them. This invention of his—this supreme discovery—would make a revolution in the world of science.
The young man looking back at him from the other side of the table listened intently. He was a tall man of about eight-and-twenty, and if not exactly handsome, very close to it. His eyes were dark, and somewhat sombre, and his mouth was thin-lipped, but kind, and suggestive of a nature that was just, beyond everything, if hardly sympathetic. It was a beautiful mouth, at all events, and as he was clean-shaven, one could see it as it was, without veiling of any kind. Perhaps the one profession of all others that most fully declares itself in the face of its sons is that of the law. A man who has been five years a barrister is seldom mistaken for anything else. Paul Wyndham was a barrister, and a rising one—a man who loved his profession for its own sake, and strove and fought to make a name in it, though no such struggle was needful for his existence, as from his cradle his lines had fallen to him in pleasant places. He was master of a good fortune, and heir to a title and ten thousand a year whenever it should please Providence to take his uncle, old Lord Shangarry, to an even more comfortable home than that which he enjoyed at present.
The Professor had been his tutor years ago, and the affection that existed between them in those far-off years had survived the changes of time and circumstance. The Professor loved him—and him only on all this wide earth. Wyndham had never known a father; the Professor came as near as any parent could, and in this new wild theory of the old man’s he placed implicit faith. It sounded wild, no doubt—it was wild—but there was not in all Ireland a cleverer man than the Professor, and who was to say but it might have some grand new meaning in it?
‘You are sure of it?’ he said, looking at the Professor with anxious but admiring eyes.
‘Sure! I have gone into it, I have studied it for twenty years, I tell you. What, man, d’ye think I’d speak of it even to you, if I weren’t sure? I tell ye—I tell ye’—he grew agitated and intensely Irish here—‘it will shake the world!’
The phrase seemed to please him; he drew his arms off the table and lay back in his chair as if revelling in it—as if chewing the sweet cud of it in fancy. He saw in his mind a day when in that old college of his over there, only a few streets away—in Trinity College—he should rise, and be greeted by his old chums and his new pupils, and the whole world of Dublin, with cheers and acclamations. Nay! it would be more than that—there would be London, and Vienna, and Berlin. He put Berlin last because, perhaps, he longed most of all for its applause; but in these dreamings he came back always to old Trinity, and found the greatest sweetness in the laurels to be gained there.
‘There can’t be a mistake,’ he went on, more now as if reasoning with himself than with his visitor, who was watching him, and was growing a little uneasy at the pallor that was showing itself round his nose and mouth—a pallor he had noticed very often of late when the old man was unduly excited or interested. ‘I have gone through it again and again. There is nothing new, of course, under the sun, and there can be little doubt but that it is an anæsthetic known to the Indians of Southern America years ago, and the Peruvians. There are records, but nothing sufficient to betray the secret. It was by the merest accident, as I have told you, that I stumbled on it. I have made many experiments. I have gone cautiously step by step, until now all is sure. So much for one hour. So much for six, so much for twenty-four, so much’—his voice rose almost to a scream, and he thumped his hand violently on the table—‘for seven days—for seven months!’
His voice broke off, and he sank back in his chair. The young man went quickly to a cupboard and poured out a glass of some white cordial.
‘Thank you—thank you,’ said the Professor, swallowing the nauseous mixture hurriedly, as though regretting the waste of time it took to drink it.
‘Why talk any more to-night?’ said the young man anxiously; ‘I am going abroad in a few days, but I can come again to see you to-morrow. It is late.’ He glanced at the clock, which pointed to ten minutes past eleven. The movement he made in pointing pushed aside his overcoat and showed that he was in evening dress. He had evidently been dining out, and had dropped in to see the Professor—an old trick of his—on his way home.
‘I must talk while I can,’ said the Professor, smiling. The cordial, whatever it was, had revived him, and he sat up and looked again at his companion with eyes that were brilliant. ‘As for this pain here,’ touching his side, ‘it is nothing—nothing. What I want to say, Paul, is this’—he bent towards Wyndham, and his lips quivered again with excitement: ‘If I could send a human creature to sleep for seven months, then why not for seven years—for ever?’
Wyndham looked at him incredulously.
‘But the last time——’
‘The last time you were here, I had not quite perfected my discovery. But since then some of my experiments have led me to think—to be absolutely certain—that life can be sustained, with all the appearance of death upon the subject, for a full week at all events.’
‘And when consciousness returns?’
‘The subject treated wakes to life again in exactly the same condition as when he or she fell asleep—without loss of brain or body power.’
‘Seven days! A long time!’ The young man smiled. ‘You bring back old thoughts and dreams. Are you a second Friar Laurence? Even he, though he could make the fair Juliet sleep till all believed her dead, could not prolong that unfortunate deception beyond a certain limit.
‘“And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two-and-forty hours.”
‘Less than two days—and yet, thou conjurer’—he slapped the Professor’s arm gaily—‘you would talk of keeping one in death’s bonds for years!’
‘Ay, years!’ The Professor looked back at him, and his eyes shone. Old age seemed to slip from him, and for the moment a transient youth was his again. ‘This is but a beginning—a mere start; but if it succeeds—if life can be sustained by means of this drug alone for seven days, why not for months and years?’
‘You forget one thing,’ said the young man. ‘Who would care for it? Why should one care to lie asleep for years?’
‘Many!’ said the Professor slowly.
He ceased, and a strange gloom shadowed his face. His thoughts had evidently gone backward into a long-dead past—a past that still lived. ‘Have you no imagination?’ he said at last reproachfully. ‘Think, boy—think! When affliction falls on one, when a grievous sorrow tears the heart, who would not wish for an oblivion that would be longer than a sleeping-draught could give, and less pernicious than suicide?’
‘The same refusal in both cases to meet and face one’s doom,’ said the young man. ‘You would create a new generation of cowards.’
‘Pshaw! there will be cowards without me,’ said the Professor. ‘But here, again, take another case. A man, we will say, has had his leg cut off—well, let him sleep until the leg is well, and he will escape all the twinges, the agonizing pains of the recovery. This is but one instance; all surgical cases could be treated so, and so much pain saved in this most painful world.’
‘Ah, I confess a charm lies there!’ said Wyndham.
‘It does. And yet it is to the other thought I lean—to the dread of memory where grief and shame lie.’ The Professor’s gaunt face lost again its short return of youth, and grew grim, and aged, and white. ‘See,’ he leant towards Wyndham, and pressed him into a chair beside the dying fire, ‘to you—to you alone I have revealed this matter: not so much because you have been my pupil, as that you have a hold on me. You think me dry, and hard, and old. All that is true. But’—his voice grew if possible harsher than ever—‘I have an affection for you.’
It seemed almost ludicrous to think of the Professor as having an affection for anything beyond his science and his discovery, with his bald head, and his bleared eyes, and his cold, forbidding face. The young man gazed at him with pardonable astonishment. That the Professor liked him, trusted him, was quite easy to understand—but the word ‘affection’!
‘It surprises you,’ said the old man slowly, perhaps a little sadly. ‘Yet there was a time——’ He moved and poked the fire into a sullen blaze. ‘I married,’ he said presently. ‘And she—well, I loved her, I think. It seems hard to remember now, it is so long ago, but I believe I had a heart then, and it was hers. She died.’ He poked the fire again, and most of it fell into the grate—it was all cinders by this time, and the younger man shivered. ‘It was well. Looking back upon it now,’ said the Professor coldly, ‘I am glad she died. She would have interfered with my studies. Her death left me free; but for that freedom, I should never have found out this.’ He tapped some papers lying loosely on the table—three or four pages, no more, with only a line or two upon them—vague suggestions of the great discovery that was to shake the world, so vague as to be useless to anyone but himself.
‘You had no children, then?’ asked Wyndham, who had never even heard that he was married until now.
‘One.’ The Professor paused, and the silence grew almost insupportable. ‘He, too, is dead. And that, too, is well. He was of no use. He only burdened the world.’
‘But——’
‘Not a question——’ The old man silenced him. ‘I cast him off.’ There was something terrible in the indifference with which he said this. ‘He was a fool—a criminal one. I heard later that he had married—no doubt as great a fool as himself. I hope so. Set a thief to catch a thief, you know.’
He laughed bitterly—the cruel, mirthless laugh of the embittered old. ‘For the rest, I know nothing,’ he said.
‘You made no inquiries?’
‘None. Why should I?’
‘He was your son.’
‘Well, does that make a black thing white? No—no! My son—my child is here!’ He touched the loose papers with a loving hand.
Wyndham did not pursue the subject further, and as if to show that it was ended, he stooped and threw some coals upon the fire that now seemed to be at its last gasp. A tiny smoke flew up between the fresh lumps, and after that came a little uncertain blaze. The fire had caught the coals.
The Professor had gone back to his heart’s desire.
‘To see the blossom of my labour bear fruit—that is my sole, my last demand from life. I have so short a time to live that I would hasten the fulfilment of my hopes.’
‘You mean——’
‘That I want to see the drug used on a human being. I have approached the matter with some of the authorities at Kilmainham, with a view to getting a condemned criminal to experiment upon; but up to this I have been refused, and in such a presumptuous manner as leads me to fear I shall never receive a better answer. Surely a man respited for seven days, as has been the case occasionally, might as well risk those seven days in the cause of science.’
Wyndham shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have never met that man,’ said he. But the Professor did not hear him.
‘The most humane people in the world,’ said he, ‘refuse help to the man who has devoted twenty years of his life to the cause of humanity. Such an anæsthetic as mine would work a revolution in the world of medicine. As I have told you, a man might not only be unconscious whilst a limb was being lopped off, but might remain so until the wound was healed, and then, made free of pain and perfectly well, be able to take his part in the world again.’
‘It sounds like a fairy-tale,’ said Wyndham, smiling. ‘You have, I suppose, made many experiments?’
‘On animals, yes—and of late without a single failure; but on a human body, no. As yet no opportunity has been afforded me. Either jealousy or fear has stopped my march, which I feel would be a triumphal one were the road made clear. I tell you I have addressed many leading men of science on the subject. I have asked them to be present. I would have everything above board, as you who know me can testify. I would have all men look on and bear witness to the splendour of my discovery.’ Here again the Professor’s strange deep eyes grew brilliant, once again that queer flash of a youth long ago departed was his. ‘I would have it shown to all the world in a blaze of light. But no man will take heed or listen. They laugh. They scoff. They will not countenance the chance of my killing someone; as if’—violently—‘the loss of one poor human life was to be counted, when the relief of millions is in the balance.’
He sank back as if exhausted, and then went on, his tone hard, yet excited:
‘Now it has come to this. If the chance were given me of trying my discovery on man, woman, or child, I should take it, without the sanction of the authorities, and with it that other chance of being hanged afterwards if the experiment failed.’
‘You feel so sure as that?’ questioned Wyndham. The old man’s enthusiasm had caught him. He too was looking eager and excited.
‘Sure!’ The Professor rose, gaunt, haggard, and with eyes that flashed fire beneath the pent brows that overhung them. ‘I would stake my soul—nay, more, my reputation—on the success of my discovery. Oh for a chance to prove it!’
At this moment there was a low knock at the door.