“Poor wretch!” muttered North; “if that miserable interruption had not taken place, you might have been the means of doing more good to posterity than all your predecessors could have achieved had they lived on right until now.
“Yes,” he continued, as he made a final examination previous to awakening Moredock, “I had succeeded up to then. Decay was arrested, and Nature seemed to be working on my side to prove that I was right. Now I must begin again, for it is as if I had done nothing. No, no; the toil has not been thrown away. I have learned more than I think for; I have—”
He shrank back, and looked sharply round, as if puzzled. He turned his gaze upon the sleeping figure before him, and saw only too plainly that the decay he had held at defiance for a time had now definitely set in, and yet how he could not tell, for mentally all seemed misty and obscure. Something seemed to suggest that after all he had arrested the progress of death.
“Pish! What strange fancy is upon me now?” he exclaimed angrily.
But even as he said this in a low whisper, he felt a consciousness that in some manner his work had not been in vain. There before him, surely enough, lay the remains of Luke Candlish, passing back into the elements of which they were composed—ashes to ashes, dust to dust; but the man did not seem to him to be dead. There was a feeling almost like oppression troubling him and making him feel that he had succeeded—that he had stayed the flight of the hale, strong man, but not wholly; that his work had partially been successful, and that had he continued, a complete triumph would have been the result.
“Absurd!” he muttered, jerking the cloth over the subject of his experiment, and going towards Moredock, but only to spin round, as if he had been arrested by a hand clapped suddenly upon his shoulder.
He stared sharply round the vault again and then laughed aloud.
“How childish!” he exclaimed. “Well, no,” he added thoughtfully; “it is a lesson worth learning how, under certain circumstances connected with violence and terrible mental distress, the brain acts as in a case of delirium tremens. I was not fit to come here to-night. Better finish, go home, and sleep—and forget,” he added softly, “if I can.
“I must be going mad,” he exclaimed the next moment; and, making an effort over himself, he sat down upon the edge of the stone slab to try and think out consistently the mental trouble which kept attacking him.
“It cannot be that,” he said, at last. “I am perfectly cool and consistent; I know everything about me. I can go right back through my experiments to the beginning, analyse every thought and feeling, and yet I cannot master this idea.”