His mother was silent, and he, as though weary of the conversation, presently rose and left the room. Stepping out on the lawn in the full blaze of noonday, he looked towards the dome of the laboratory, but could scarcely fix his eyes upon its extreme brilliancy, which was blinding at every point. He felt very keenly that it was indeed the longest day of the year; never had hours moved so slowly,—and despite the summer glory of the day,—so drearily. His thoughts dwelt persistently on the bound and imprisoned form swung in solitude under the great Wheel, which he knew must now be revolving at almost lightning speed, churning the water beneath it into prismatic spray,—and every now and then a strong temptation beset him to go and unlock the door of the prison house, and see whether his victim had wakened to the consciousness of her condition. But he restrained this impulse.
With evening the slender curve of the new moon glided into the sky, looking like the pale vision of a silver sickle, and a delicious calm pervaded the air. His thoughts gradually took on a more human tendency,—he allowed himself to pity his “subject.” After all, what an arid sort of fate had been hers! The only child of one of those painfully respectable British couples who never move out of the conventional rut, and for whom the smallest expression or honest opinion is “bad form,”—and herself endowed (by some freak of Nature) with exceptional qualities of brain, what a neutral and sad-coloured existence hers had been when love and the hope of marriage had deserted her! No wonder she had resolved to break away and seek some outlet for her cramped and imprisoned mentality.
“Though marriage is drab-coloured enough!” he mused—“Unless husband and wife are prudent, and agree to live apart from each other for so many months in the year. And now—if my experiment succeeds she will make a fool or a lunatic of every man her eyes rest upon—except myself!”
The days wore away slowly. As each one passed, Madame Dimitrius grew more and more uneasy, and more and more her eyes questioned the unresponsive face of her son. Vasho, too, could not forbear gazing with a kind of appealing terror at his master’s composed features and easy demeanour; it was more than devilish, he thought, that a man could comport himself thus indifferently when he had a poor human victim shut up within a laboratory where the two devouring elements of fire and water held the chief sway. However, there was nothing to be done. A figure of stone or iron was not more immovable than Dimitrius when once bent to the resolved execution of a task, no matter how difficult such task might be. Looking at the cold, indomitable expression of the man, one felt that he would care nothing for the loss of a thousand lives, if by such sacrifice he could attain the end in view. But though his outward equanimity remained undisturbed, he was inwardly disquieted and restless. He saw two alternatives to his possible success. His victim might die,—in which case her body would crumble to ashes in the process to which it was being subjected,—or she might lose her senses. Death would be kinder than the latter fate, but he was powerless to determine either. And even at the back of his mind there lurked a dim suggestion of some other result which he could not formulate or reckon with.
The longest waiting must have an end, but never to his thought did a longer period of time stretch itself out between the evening of the twentieth of June and that of the twenty-fourth, Midsummer Day. The weather remained perfect; intensely warm, bright and still. Not a cloud crossed the burning blue of the daylight, and at evening, the young moon, slightly broadening from a slender sickle to the curve of a coracle boat floating whitely in the deep ether, shed fairy silver over the lake and the Alpine snows above it. During these days, many people of note and scientific distinction called at the Château Fragonard,—Féodor Dimitrius was a personage to be reckoned with in many departments of knowledge, and his exquisite gardens afforded coolness and shade to those wanderers from various lands who were touring Switzerland in search of health and change of scene. Near neighbours and acquaintances also came and went, but such is the generally vague attitude of mind assumed by ordinary folk to other than themselves, that scarcely any among the few who had met Diana and accepted her as a chance visitor to Madame Dimitrius, now remembered her, except the Baron and Baroness de Rousillon, who still kept up a slight show of interest as to her whereabouts, though their questions were lightly evaded and never fully answered. Professor Chauvet, irritated and unhappy at receiving no news whatever of the woman for whom he had conceived a singular but sincere affection, had taken it into his head to go suddenly to Paris, to see after his house and garden there, which had long been unoccupied; a fancy possessed him that if, or when, Diana did write to him, he would answer her from Paris, so that they might meet there or in London, without the surveillance or comment of Dimitrius. Meanwhile, Dimitrius himself, a figure of impenetrable reserve and cold courtesy, let his visitors come and go as they listed, apparently living the life of a scientist absorbed in studies too profound to allow himself to be troubled or distracted by the opinions of the outer world.
Midsummer Day, the Feast of St. John, and a day of poetic and superstitious observance, came at last and drifted along in a stream of gold and azure radiance, the sun sinking round as a rose in a sky without a cloud. To the last moment of its setting Dimitrius waited, watch in hand. All day long he had wandered aimlessly in the garden among his flowers, talking now and then to his gardeners, and stopping at every point where he could see the crystal dome of his laboratory shine clear like the uplifted minaret of some palace of the East, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he compelled himself to walk with a slow and indifferent mien when the moment arrived for him to return to the Château. His heart galloped like a run-away race-horse, while he forced his feet into a sauntering and languid pace as though he were more than oppressed by the heat of the day,—and he stopped for a moment to speak to his mother, whose reclining chair was in the loggia where she could enjoy the view of the gardens and the fountains in full play.
“I am—” he said, and paused,—then went on—“I am going to the laboratory for an hour or two. If I am late for dinner, do not wait for me.”
Madame Dimitrius, busy with some delicate lacework, looked up at him inquiringly.
“Are you seeing Diana this evening?” she asked.
He nodded assent.