Pouring the greater part of the remaining liquid of the phial into a glass, he coolly drank it off before Gaudin could arrest his hand. But no effect supervened. Instead of falling lifeless as Sainte-Croix had anticipated, Exili gazed at him, and, with a short, hollow laugh, threw the empty bottle amongst the embers.
‘Are you man or demon?’ asked Gaudin, scarcely trusting to his senses.
‘Neither,’ said Exili. ‘I have lost the sympathies of the former; the latter I may be hereafter. I have studied poisons, as you see; but I have also studied their antidotes. Have you kept the small phial by you, which you bought of me at Milan?’
‘It has never been out of my keeping until now,’ said Gaudin.
‘With that you could command twenty lives,’ said Exili; ‘and yet my remedies could so blunt and weaken its malignity that I would take it all at one draught. You shall learn more. Attend!’
From his box of carved wood he drew forth a series of test glasses, and half-filled them with water from the prison cruche. He next took a small flacon, and pinched a few atoms of the powder it contained into the first glass, varying the addition in each. Then dropping some colourless fluid into them, one after the other, a precipitate fell down in all, in clouds of the brightest tints, but each different.
‘See how completely these dull minerals do my bidding,’ he exclaimed. ‘To you the potion offers no trace by which its nature could be told; to me there is not an atom suspended in it, in its invisible but imperishable form, which cannot be reproduced before our eyes. Do you believe in me?’
‘I do—I do,’ returned Gaudin. ‘What price do you put upon the revelation of these mysteries?’
‘Nothing—beyond your attention and secrecy.’
‘And yet you love revenge,’ said Sainte-Croix, eyeing him with mistrust.