CHAPTER XXIII. DR. DUPRÉ’S ELIXIR.
George Haldane returned home in the best of spirits. His paper had been received with enthusiasm by the savants of France, and his life in Paris had been one pleasant succession of visits, learned conversaziones, and private entertainments. Thanks to his happy pre-occupation, he scarcely noticed that his wife’s manner was constrained, nervous, yet deeply solicitous; that she looked pale and worn, as if with constant watching; and that, in answer to his careless questioning as to affairs at home, she made only fragmentary replies.
On entering his dressing-room to change his apparel, he found Baptisto, who was quietly undoing his portmanteau and selecting the necessary things with a calm air, as if his services had never been interrupted.
“So, my Baptisto,” he said, clapping that worthy on the shoulder, “you are not dead or buried, I see? Ah, you may smile, but I am quite aware of the trick you played me. Well, you have been the loser. You would have had a pleasant time of it in Paris, the best of entertainment, and nothing whatever to do.”
“I am glad you have returned, senor,” replied Baptisto, with his customary solemnity.
“I hope you have given satisfaction to your mistress during my absence?”
“I hope so, senor.”
“Humph! we shall see what report she has to make concerning you, and if that is favourable, I may forgive your freak of laziness.”
“I have not been lazy, senor,” said Baptisto, quietly preparing the toilette.
“Indeed! Pray, how have you been employing yourself?”
Baptisto did not reply, but smiled again.
“How is your inamerata and her family? I saw the little woman curtsying as I passed through the lodge-gates.”
Baptisto shook his head solemnly.
“Ah, senor,” he said, “you are mistaken. The woman of the lodge is a stupid person; and for the rest, I put no faith in women. Cuerpo di Baccho, no! They smile upon us when we are near; but no sooner do we turn our backs, than they smile upon some other man.”
“Pretty philosophy,” returned Haldane, with a laugh. “Why, you are a downright misogynist, my Baptisto. But I don’t believe one word you say, for all that. Men who talk like you are generally very easy conquests, and I would bet twenty to one on the little widow still.”
“Ah, senor, if all women were like your signora, it would be different. She is so good, so pure, so faithful at her devotions. It is a great thing to have religion.”
As Baptisto spoke his back was turned to his master, so that the extraordinary expression of his face was unnoticed, and there was no indication in his tone that he spoke satirically. Haldane shrugged his shoulders and said nothing, not caring to discuss his wife’s virtues with a servant, however familiar. Presently he went downstairs to dinner. All that evening he was very affectionate and merry, talking volubly of his adventures in Paris, of his scientific acquaintances, and of such new discoveries as they had brought under his notice. In the course of his happy chat he spoke frequently of a new acquaintance, one Dr. Dupré, whom he had met in the French capital. “The French, however far behind the Germans in speculative affairs,” he observed, “are far their superiors, and ours, in physiology. Take this Dupré, for example. He is a wonderful fellow! His dissections and vivisections’ have brought him to such a point of mastery that he is almost certain that he has discovered the problem poor Lewes broke his heart over—how and by what mechanism we can’t think. I don’t quite believe he has succeeded in that great discovery, but some of his minor discoveries are extraordinary. Did you read the account in the papers of his elixir of death?”
Ellen shook her head. The very name seemed horrible.
“His elixir of death?” she repeated.
“Yes. A chemical preparation, the fundamental principle of which is morphine. By its agency he can so produce in a living organism the ordinary phenomena of death, that even rigor mortis is simulated. I saw the experiment tried on two rabbits, a Newfoundland dog, and, to crown all, on the human subject. They were all, to every appearance, dead; the rabbits for twenty-four hours, the dog for half a day, and the woman for an hour and a half.”
“Horrible!” exclaimed Ellen, with a shudder. “Do you actually mean he experimented on a living woman?”
“Yes; on a strapping wench, the daughter of his housekeeper; and a very fine thing she made of it. We subscribed together, and presented her with a purse of a thousand francs.”
“I think such things are wicked,” cried Ellen, with some warmth. “Mere mortals have no right to play, in that way, with the mystery of life and death.”
“My dear Nell,” cried Haldane, laughing, “it is in the interests of science!”
“But I am sure it is not right. Life is given and taken by God alone.”
“Your argument, if accepted, would make all mankind accept the religion of the Peculiar People, who will cure no diseases by human intervention. As to this business of suspended animation, it is merely a part of our discoveries in anodynes. Dupré’s experiment, I know, is perfectly safe.”
“But that is not the question.”
“How so, my dear?”
“What I mean is, that death is too solemn and awful a thing to imitate as you describe. Such experiments are simply blasphemous, in my opinion.”
“Come, come,” cried the philosopher. “There is no blasphemy where there is no irreverence. According to your religious people, your priests of the churches, there was blasphemy in circumnavigating the globe; in discovering the circulation of the blood; in ascertaining the age of the earth; and, still later, in using chloroform to lessen the pangs of parturition.”
“But what purpose can be served by such experiments as that?”
“A good many,” was the reply. “For example, it may help us to the discovery of the nature of life itself, which has puzzled everybody, from Parmenides down to Haeckel. If we can by a simple anodyne suspend the vital mechanism for a period, and then by a vegetable antidote restore it again to action, the resurrection of Lazarus will cease to be a miracle, and the pretensions of Christianity——”
Ellen rose impatiently, with an expression of sincere pain.
“My dear Nell, what is the matter?” cried her husband.
“I cannot bear to hear you discuss such a thing. Oh, George, if you would leave such wicked speculations alone, and try to believe in the mystery and sovereignty of God!”
“You mean, burn my books, and go to hear your seraphic friend every Sunday?”
Had he not touched, unconsciously, on another painful chord? Why, otherwise, did his wife flush scarlet and partially avert her face? Conquering herself with an effort, she went over to him, and bending over him, looked fondly into his face.
“You are so much cleverer than I, so much wiser, and do you think I am not proud of your wisdom? But, all the same, dear, I wish you did not think as you do. When life becomes a mere experiment, a mere thing of mechanism, what will be left? If we knew everything, even what we are, and why we exist, the world would be a tomb—with no place in it for the Living God.”
Touched by her manner, Haldane drew her down by his side and kissed her; then, with more earnestness than he had yet exhibited, he answered her, holding her hand in his own and pressing it softly.
“My dear Nell, do me the justice to believe that I am not quite a materialist; simple agnosticism is the very converse of materialism. There is not living a scientific philosopher of any eminence who does not, in his calculations, postulate a mystery which can never be solved by the finest intellect. Even if we had fully completed, with the poet—=
The new creed of science, which showeth to man
How he darkly began,
How he grew from a cell to a soul, without plan;
How he breaks like a wave of the ocean, and goes
To eternal repose—
A tone that must fade, tho’ the great Music grows! ‘=
even then, we should know nothing of the First Cause. That must for ever remain inscrutable.”
“But how horrible it would be to believe in annihilation? Can you believe in it?”
“Certainly not,” replied the philosopher.
Ellens face brightened.
“Oh, I am so glad to hear you say that!”
“My dear Nell, annihilation is absurd.”
“Now, isn’t it?” she cried triumphantly.
“It is refuted, on the face of it, by the doctrine of the conservation of force. Life is eternal, in one shape or another; no force can be destroyed, be sure of that!”
“I wish Mr. Santley could hear you! He wouldn’t call you an atheist then!”
Haldane’s face darkened angrily.
“What? Does the man actually——”
“Don’t misunderstand,” cried Ellen, flushing scarlet. “I do not mean that he really calls you an atheist, but he is so sorry, so deeply sorry, that you do not believe. He does not know you, dear, and takes all my bear’s satirical growling for solemn earnest. Now, when I tell him——”
“You will tell him nothing,” exclaimed Haldane, with sudden sternness. “I will have no priest coming between my wife and me!”
“Mr. Santley would never do that,” she returned, now trembling violently.
“Mr. Santley is like all his tribe, I suppose—a meddler and a mischief-maker. That is the worst of other-worldliness; it gives these traders in the Godhead, these peddlers who would give us in exchange for belief in their superstitions a bonus in paradise, an excuse for making this world unbearable. Well, my atheism, if you choose to call it so, against his theism. Mine at least keeps me a man among men, while his keeps him a twaddler among women.”
Haldane spoke with heat, for the word “atheist” had somehow stung him to the quick. This man, who rejected all outward forms of belief, and whose conversation was habitually ironical, was in his inmost nature deeply and sincerely religious; humbly reverent before the forces of nature; spiritually conscious of that Power beyond ourselves which makes for righteousness. True, he rejected the ordinary forms of theism; but he had, on the other hand, a deep though dumb reverence for the character of Christ, and he had no sympathy with such out-and-out materialists as Haeckel and hoc genus omne. For the rest, he was liberal-minded, and had no desire to interfere with his wife’s convictions; could smile a little at her simplicity, and would see no harm in her clerical predispositions, so long as the clergyman didn’t encroach too far on the domain of married life and domestic privacy.
His indignation did not last. Seeing his wife greatly agitated, and fearing that he had caused her pain, he drew her forehead down and kissed it; then, patting her cheek, he said—
“Forgive me, Nell. I did not mean to scold; but one does not like hard names. When any one calls me ‘atheist,’ I am like the old woman whom Cobbett called a ‘parallelogram;’ it is not the significance of the epithet, but its opprobrium, that rouses me. Besides, I do not like any man to abuse me—to my own wife.”
“No one does that,” she cried. “You know I would not listen.”
“I hope not, my dear.” He added after a little, looking at her thoughtfully and sadly, “Man and wife have fallen asunder before now, on this very question of religion. Well, rather than that should happen, I will let you convert me. Will that satisfy you?”
“I shall never be quite satisfied till I know that you believe as I do.”
“What is that, pray?”
“That there is a just God, who made and cherishes us; and that, through the blood of His Son we shall live again although we die!”
“Well, it is a beautiful creed, my dear.”
“And true?”
“Why not? I will go with you thus far. I believe that, if there is a God, He is just, and that we shall certainly live again, if it is for our good.”
The emphasis with which he spoke the last words attracted her attention.
“For our good?” she queried.
“I am quoting the saddest words ever written, by the saddest and best man I ever knew. * He, too, believed that a God might spare us, and give us eternal life, if—mark the proviso—eternal life were indeed for our good. But suppose the contrary—suppose God knew better, and that it would be an evil and unhappy gift? Alas! who knows?”
* J. S. Mill.
He rose from his chair, still encircling his wife’s waist, and moved towards the door.
“Come to the drawing-room,” he cried gaily. “After so much offhand theology, a little music will be delightful. Ah, Nell, one breath of Beethoven is worth all the prosings of your parsons. Play to me, and, while the music lasts, I will believe what you will.”