‘Many!’ said the Professor slowly.
He ceased, and a strange gloom shadowed his face. His thoughts had evidently gone backward into a long-dead past—a past that still lived. ‘Have you no imagination?’ he said at last reproachfully. ‘Think, boy—think! When affliction falls on one, when a grievous sorrow tears the heart, who would not wish for an oblivion that would be longer than a sleeping-draught could give, and less pernicious than suicide?’
‘The same refusal in both cases to meet and face one’s doom,’ said the young man. ‘You would create a new generation of cowards.’
‘Pshaw! there will be cowards without me,’ said the Professor. ‘But here, again, take another case. A man, we will say, has had his leg cut off—well, let him sleep until the leg is well, and he will escape all the twinges, the agonizing pains of the recovery. This is but one instance; all surgical cases could be treated so, and so much pain saved in this most painful world.’
‘Ah, I confess a charm lies there!’ said Wyndham.
‘It does. And yet it is to the other thought I lean—to the dread of memory where grief and shame lie.’ The Professor’s gaunt face lost again its short return of youth, and grew grim, and aged, and white. ‘See,’ he leant towards Wyndham, and pressed him into a chair beside the dying fire, ‘to you—to you alone I have revealed this matter: not so much because you have been my pupil, as that you have a hold on me. You think me dry, and hard, and old. All that is true. But’—his voice grew if possible harsher than ever—‘I have an affection for you.’
It seemed almost ludicrous to think of the Professor as having an affection for anything beyond his science and his discovery, with his bald head, and his bleared eyes, and his cold, forbidding face. The young man gazed at him with pardonable astonishment. That the Professor liked him, trusted him, was quite easy to understand—but the word ‘affection’!
‘It surprises you,’ said the old man slowly, perhaps a little sadly. ‘Yet there was a time——’ He moved and poked the fire into a sullen blaze. ‘I married,’ he said presently. ‘And she—well, I loved her, I think. It seems hard to remember now, it is so long ago, but I believe I had a heart then, and it was hers. She died.’ He poked the fire again, and most of it fell into the grate—it was all cinders by this time, and the younger man shivered. ‘It was well. Looking back upon it now,’ said the Professor coldly, ‘I am glad she died. She would have interfered with my studies. Her death left me free; but for that freedom, I should never have found out this.’ He tapped some papers lying loosely on the table—three or four pages, no more, with only a line or two upon them—vague suggestions of the great discovery that was to shake the world, so vague as to be useless to anyone but himself.
‘You had no children, then?’ asked Wyndham, who had never even heard that he was married until now.
‘One.’ The Professor paused, and the silence grew almost insupportable. ‘He, too, is dead. And that, too, is well. He was of no use. He only burdened the world.’