He was fain to confess that his energies had long demanded a wider field for their exercise. He had done a certain amount of work which would last. Tho seed sown must bear fruit some day, and in the voluntary retirement he had embraced, he had found a strong internal felicity which could have come to him in no other way. A growing conviction took hold of him that he was being prepared, by an unseen Hand, for some great work which would require all that self-command, that conviction of right, that neglect of selfish ease, which had come to him during these Spanish days. He had found that in the lowest of our race, there is lying dormant that spark of the Divine essence which needs but the call of sympathy to awaken. With these poor folk he had spent some of the happiest years of his life, among them had found many real friends, and had learned in their company a thousand things to enable him to benefit mankind.
CHAPTER XLIII.
DR. SONES SUCCEEDS.
I have no title to aspire,
Yet when you sink I seem the higher.—Swift.
The greatest professor and proficient in any science loves it not so sincerely as to be fully pleased with any finer effort than he can himself produce—Lacon.
Dr. Sones had pursued his investigations till he had made the great discovery of a test for the active principle of the poisonous fungi. He clearly demonstrated that the poison of the deadly Russian fungus was identical with that absorbed by the handkerchiefs which Mrs. Crowe’s maid had given to Mr. Mole. Here then was the detection of a horrible crime! He of course lost no time in communicating these important results to Mr. Mole, whose triumph was complete. They held long deliberation as to what was to be done. In the minds of both these experts there was no doubt of the guilt of Mr. Crowe; but was it advisable to bring his guilt home to him? They decided it was not possible, nor was it expedient even were it in their power. But Mr. Mole determined to do one thing that would test the matter pretty closely. He wrote a learned and exhaustive paper for the Medical Society of the Hospital on “The Physiological and Chemical Tests of the Poisonous Principles of Fungi,” and read it. Mr. Crowe, who was the chairman of the Society, wrote, an hour or two before the meeting, that “important engagements would prevent him having the extreme pleasure of being present that evening to hear Mr. Mole’s deeply interesting paper.”
Dr. Wilson occupied his place, and so highly did he and the rest of the staff and students present think of the monograph that it was ordered to be printed and circulated at the Society’s expense. Mr. Mole received the warm congratulations of the audience, and it was felt that he had conferred honour on his alma mater by his original research.
The next morning, when Mr. Crowe heard the report of the evening’s work—the nature of the long course of investigations, the Russian treatise which had fallen so strangely into his assistant’s hands, the discovery of the tests and the other points that indicated, as by the finger of an avenging angel, his guilt and downfall—he knew Mole was on his track, knew that he was in his power, and that his doom had come. He was alone with his crime; his murdered wife was avenged. He turned from his pupils, who eagerly questioned him as to his opinion on this and the other points of Mole’s paper, went into his laboratory, seized a bottle of prussic acid, drank its contents, and was a corpse before his class had left the lecture theatre. Everybody attributed the awful tragedy to jealousy of Mole’s success. Two men knew the secret, and kept it. Two women guessed it, and told their suspicions. Gradually, like a bad vapour spread by the law of diffusion of gases, all the world had an inkling of the crime. But Mole and Sones held their peace; and when the former was elected to the vacant chair of physiology at St. Bernard’s, there was only one man besides the occupier of the post who knew the steps by which it had been reached.
Mr. Mole proved a failure; his great monograph was all the original work he ever did, and he lived a poor and obscure man. He never married Janet, after all, so that her Egyptian gentleman misled her no less than the little physiologist. Dr. Sones still occupies his old quarters, and now and then gets a thrill of ecstatic delight as he makes some new discovery in his favourite study; and though he does not acquire a fortune, he gets what he values more—a little fame from time to time in the chemical journals of Europe. His good sister still befriends his poor clients; and even his Board of Guardians acknowledges that, in the medical officer of the south ward of their parish and his estimable sister, they have full value for the salary they pay their doctor. This has actually been admitted at the Board, and nobody opposed it—a fact going far to prove that the officer must either be a very good or an exceedingly bad one.