The women had risen from their seats, and retreated into a corner of the apartment near the stove. The physician seized the table, and, implicitly followed by Benoit, was moving towards the door, when there was a violent knocking without, and a command to open it immediately.
‘It is by the king’s order,’ said Benoit: ‘we cannot resist.’
He reached the door, and unfastened it before the physician could pull him back, although he attempted to do so. It flew open, and a party of the Guet Royal entered the room, headed by the chief of the marching watch of Paris.
‘Antonio Exili,’ said the captain, pointing his sword towards the physician, ‘commonly known as the Doctor St. Antonio, I arrest you in the king’s name!’
‘Exili!’ ejaculated Benoit, gazing half aghast at his master.
CHAPTER III.
THE ARREST OF THE PHYSICIAN
The name pronounced was that of an Italian, terrible throughout all Europe; at the mention of whom even crowned heads quailed, and whose black deeds, although far more than matters of surmise, had yet been transacted with such consummate skill and caution as to baffle the keenest inquiries, both of the police and of the profession. Exili, who had been obliged to fly from Rome, as one of the fearful secret poisoners of the epoch, was instructed in his hellish art, it has been presumed, by a Sicilian woman named Spara. She had been the confidante and associate of the infamous Tofana, from whom she acquired the secret at Palermo, where the dreaded preparation which bore her name was sold, with little disguise, in small glass phials, ornamented with some holy image.
Six years previous to the commencement of our romance, a number of suspicious deaths in Rome caused unusual vigilance to be exercised by the police of that city, little wanting at all times in detective instinct; and the result was the detection of a secret society (of which Spara was at the head, ostensibly as a fortune-teller), to whose members the various deaths were attributed; inasmuch, amongst other suspicious circumstances, as Spara had frequently, in her capacity of sybil, predicted their occurrence. Betrayed through the jealousy of one of the party, all in the society were arrested, and put to the torture; a few were executed, and others escaped. Amongst these last Exili eluded the punishment no less due to him than to the rest, and, flying from Italy, came into France, and finally established himself at Paris under an assumed name; but his real condition was tolerably well understood by the police, although his depth and care never gave them tangible ground for an arrest. He practised as a simple physician. In this portion of his career little occurred to throw suspicion on his calling; but, driven at length by poverty to sink his dignity in a less precarious method of gaining a livelihood, he had appeared as the mere charlatan, and it was now hinted, that whilst he sold the simplest drugs to the people, poisons of the most subtle and violent nature could be obtained through his agency. Where they came from no one was aware, but their source was attributed, like many other uncertain ones, to the devil. These suspicions were, however, principally confined to the police; the mass looked upon him as an itinerant physician of more than ordinary talents.
Those, indeed, to whom he had administered potions had been known to die; but his skill in pharmacy enabled him to produce his effects as mere aggravated symptoms of the disease he was ostensibly endeavouring to cure. And chemical science, in those days, was so far behind its modern state, that no delicate tests of the presence of poisons—even of those offering the strongest precipitates—were known. At the present time, our poisons have increased to tenfold violence and numbers: yet in no instance, scarcely, could an atom be now administered, without its presence, decomposed or entire, being laid bare on the test-glass of the inquirer.
‘Exili!’ again gasped Benoit, as he drew nearer his wife and Louise; in an agony of fear, also, that the part he bore in the public displays of the medicines would involve him in the punishment.