Chapter Nine.
The Strange Accident.
A change seemed to have come over Doctor Chartley. A short time before he was calm and placid, his movements were slow, and a pleasant stereotyped professional smile made his handsome face beam. But now all was changed; the smile had gone, and, as he had passed to and fro, the light from the gas bracket displayed a countenance puckered with curious lines and frowns, while the variations of shadow caused by his constantly-changing position seemed to have altered him into another man.
He went back into the consulting-room, and looked at his patient, to find him breathing more easily and plunged into a deep sleep; and as he bent over him his hand stole toward the prostrate man’s breast.
He snatched it away angrily, and returned to the surgery, to resume his hurried walk, muttering to himself, his thoughts finding utterance in sound, till he started and looked about him, as if in dread of being overheard.
Stealing back to the consulting-room, he went to the closet, and took out the bottle which contained the result of his studies, and looked at it with a sigh. Then he raised the retort and its stand from the shelf, shook his head, and replaced it.
“And if I only had money,” he thought, “I could carry out my experiments at my ease, and succeed. This miserable poverty would be no more; my children would be happy; and I should win a name which would become immortal.”
He shook his head, his brow grew darker, and a terrible temptation attacked him.
“No one saw him come here. It is his fancy that he has been followed. One life. What is one life in this vast world? One life. Why, my discovery perfected would be the saving of the lives of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of generations of human beings in this teeming earth. Suppose he slept and waked no more? Ah!”