“Come!” he said with some impatience; and the boy took up his hat.
In another minute Lucretia was alone.
“Alone,” in an English home, is a word implying no dreary solitude to an accomplished woman; but alone in that foreign land, alone in those half-furnished, desolate apartments,—few books, no musical instruments, no companions during the day to drop in,—that loneliness was wearying. And that mind so morbidly active! In the old Scottish legend, the spirit that serves the wizard must be kept constantly employed; suspend its work for a moment, and it rends the enchanter. It is so with minds that crave for excitement, and live, without relief of heart and affection, on the hard tasks of the intellect.
Lucretia mused over Gabriel’s words and warning: “To be safe, you must know all his secrets, or none.” What was the secret which Dalibard had not communicated to her?
She rose, stole up the cold, cheerless stairs, and ascended to the attic which Dalibard had lately hired. It was locked; and she observed that the lock was small,—so small that the key might be worn in a ring. She descended, and entered her husband’s usual cabinet, which adjoined the sitting-room. All the books which the house contained were there,—a few works on metaphysics, Spinoza in especial, the great Italian histories, some volumes of statistics, many on physical and mechanical philosophy, and one or two works of biography and memoirs. No light literature,—that grace and flower of human culture, that best philosophy of all, humanizing us with gentle art, making us wise through the humours, elevated through the passions, tender in the affections of our kind. She took out one of the volumes that seemed less arid than the rest, for she was weary of her own thoughts, and began to read. To her surprise, the first passage she opened was singularly interesting, though the title was nothing more seductive than the “Life of a Physician of Padua in the Sixteenth Century.” It related to that singular epoch of terror in Italy when some mysterious disease, varying in a thousand symptoms, baffled all remedy, and long defied all conjecture,—a disease attacking chiefly the heads of families, father and husband; rarely women. In one city, seven hundred husbands perished, but not one wife! The disease was poison. The hero of the memoir was one of the earlier discoverers of the true cause of this household epidemic. He had been a chief authority in a commission of inquiry. Startling were the details given in the work,—the anecdotes, the histories, the astonishing craft brought daily to bear on the victim, the wondrous perfidy of the subtle means, the variation of the certain murder,—here swift as epilepsy, there slow and wasting as long decline. The lecture was absorbing; and absorbed in the book Lucretia still was, when she heard Dalibard’s voice behind: he was looking over her shoulder.
“A strange selection for so fair a student! En fant, play not with such weapons.”
“But is this all true?”
“True, though scarce a fragment of the truth. The physician was a sorry chemist and a worse philosopher. He blundered in his analysis of the means; and if I remember rightly, he whines like a priest at the motives,—for see you not what was really the cause of this spreading pestilence? It was the Saturnalia of the Weak,—a burst of mocking license against the Strong; it was more,—it was the innate force of the individual waging war against the many.”
“I do not understand you.”
“No? In that age, husbands were indeed lords of the household; they married mere children for their lands; they neglected and betrayed them; they were inexorable if the wife committed the faults set before her for example. Suddenly the wife found herself armed against her tyrant. His life was in her hands. So the weak had no mercy on the strong. But man, too, was then, even more than now, a lonely wrestler in a crowded arena. Brute force alone gave him distinction in courts; wealth alone brought him justice in the halls, or gave him safety in his home. Suddenly the frail puny lean saw that he could reach the mortal part of his giant foe. The noiseless sling was in his hand,—it smote Goliath from afar. Suddenly the poor man, ground to the dust, spat upon by contempt, saw through the crowd of richer kinsmen, who shunned and bade him rot; saw those whose death made him heir to lordship and gold and palaces and power and esteem. As a worm through a wardrobe, that man ate through velvet and ermine, and gnawed out the hearts that beat in his way. No. A great intellect can comprehend these criminals, and account for the crime. It is a mighty thing to feel in one’s self that one is an army,—more than an army! What thousands and millions of men, with trumpet and banner, and under the sanction of glory, strive to do,—destroy a foe,—that, with little more than an effort of the will,—with a drop, a grain, for all his arsenal,—one man can do!”