The Professor had been his tutor years ago, and the affection that existed between them in those far-off years had survived the changes of time and circumstance. The Professor loved him—and him only on all this wide earth. Wyndham had never known a father; the Professor came as near as any parent could, and in this new wild theory of the old man’s he placed implicit faith. It sounded wild, no doubt—it was wild—but there was not in all Ireland a cleverer man than the Professor, and who was to say but it might have some grand new meaning in it?
‘You are sure of it?’ he said, looking at the Professor with anxious but admiring eyes.
‘Sure! I have gone into it, I have studied it for twenty years, I tell you. What, man, d’ye think I’d speak of it even to you, if I weren’t sure? I tell ye—I tell ye’—he grew agitated and intensely Irish here—‘it will shake the world!’
The phrase seemed to please him; he drew his arms off the table and lay back in his chair as if revelling in it—as if chewing the sweet cud of it in fancy. He saw in his mind a day when in that old college of his over there, only a few streets away—in Trinity College—he should rise, and be greeted by his old chums and his new pupils, and the whole world of Dublin, with cheers and acclamations. Nay! it would be more than that—there would be London, and Vienna, and Berlin. He put Berlin last because, perhaps, he longed most of all for its applause; but in these dreamings he came back always to old Trinity, and found the greatest sweetness in the laurels to be gained there.
‘There can’t be a mistake,’ he went on, more now as if reasoning with himself than with his visitor, who was watching him, and was growing a little uneasy at the pallor that was showing itself round his nose and mouth—a pallor he had noticed very often of late when the old man was unduly excited or interested. ‘I have gone through it again and again. There is nothing new, of course, under the sun, and there can be little doubt but that it is an anæsthetic known to the Indians of Southern America years ago, and the Peruvians. There are records, but nothing sufficient to betray the secret. It was by the merest accident, as I have told you, that I stumbled on it. I have made many experiments. I have gone cautiously step by step, until now all is sure. So much for one hour. So much for six, so much for twenty-four, so much’—his voice rose almost to a scream, and he thumped his hand violently on the table—‘for seven days—for seven months!’
His voice broke off, and he sank back in his chair. The young man went quickly to a cupboard and poured out a glass of some white cordial.
‘Thank you—thank you,’ said the Professor, swallowing the nauseous mixture hurriedly, as though regretting the waste of time it took to drink it.
‘Why talk any more to-night?’ said the young man anxiously; ‘I am going abroad in a few days, but I can come again to see you to-morrow. It is late.’ He glanced at the clock, which pointed to ten minutes past eleven. The movement he made in pointing pushed aside his overcoat and showed that he was in evening dress. He had evidently been dining out, and had dropped in to see the Professor—an old trick of his—on his way home.
‘I must talk while I can,’ said the Professor, smiling. The cordial, whatever it was, had revived him, and he sat up and looked again at his companion with eyes that were brilliant. ‘As for this pain here,’ touching his side, ‘it is nothing—nothing. What I want to say, Paul, is this’—he bent towards Wyndham, and his lips quivered again with excitement: ‘If I could send a human creature to sleep for seven months, then why not for seven years—for ever?’
Wyndham looked at him incredulously.