“Ah, no,” he cried sharply. “Ah, no, not that, never that!”
Ellinor came close and laid her hands on his shoulders.
“Bad enough, God knows,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Heedless and selfish—but that, never!”
She looked at him, long and tenderly. When she spoke her tones and words were as full of deliberate comfort as her touch.
“Father,” she said, “compare yourself no more to that man. Your mind and his—what his was—are as the poles asunder. My mother’s life and mine, as Heaven and Hell. I did my duty to the end: whilst he lived, I lived by his side. He is dead—let him be forgotten! Life, surely, is not all bitterness and ashes,” she added a little wistfully. Then, with a return of brightness: “I have come back to you. I don’t know what I should have done if I had not had you. But here I am. This is the opening hour of my new life!”
The clock, in its dumb way, struck the hour of ten.
“Surely, father,” said Ellinor suddenly, “one of your little pots is rocking!”
There was a spirt of aromatic steam, in the midst of which white head and golden head bent together over the furnace; and young eyes and old eyes, so strangely alike, were fixed upon the boiling mysteries of the pharmacopic experiment. An adroit question here, a steadying touch there of those admirable hands and Master Simon, forgetting all else, began to direct and once more to explain—explain with an eager flow of words very different indeed from his disjointed solitary talk.
Chemistry or alchemy—how were the whimsical old student’s laboratory pursuits to be described? Chemist he was undoubtedly, by exactness of knowledge; but alchemist, too, by the visionary character of his scientific enthusiasm, though he himself derided the suggestion.
“Powder of projection? Nonsense, nonsense!” he would have cried. “Not in the scheme of our world. Much use to mankind if gold became cheaper than lead!... Elixir of Life? Again preposterous! Given birth, death is Nature’s law.... But pain and premature decay—ah, there opens quite another road!—that is the physician’s province to conquer. And if one seeks but well enough for the panacea, the universal anodyne, the true nepenthes, eh, eh, who knows? Such a thing is undoubtedly to be found. Doubtless! Have we not already partially lifted up the veil? Opium (grandest of brain soothers!) and Jesuit’s Bark and the Ether of Frobœnius, and Sir Humphry’s laughing gas! Yet those are but partial victors; the All-Conqueror has yet to be discovered.”