Baptisto did not reply, but smiled again.
“How is your inamerata and her family? I saw the little woman curtsying as I passed through the lodge-gates.”
Baptisto shook his head solemnly.
“Ah, senor,” he said, “you are mistaken. The woman of the lodge is a stupid person; and for the rest, I put no faith in women. Cuerpo di Baccho, no! They smile upon us when we are near; but no sooner do we turn our backs, than they smile upon some other man.”
“Pretty philosophy,” returned Haldane, with a laugh. “Why, you are a downright misogynist, my Baptisto. But I don’t believe one word you say, for all that. Men who talk like you are generally very easy conquests, and I would bet twenty to one on the little widow still.”
“Ah, senor, if all women were like your signora, it would be different. She is so good, so pure, so faithful at her devotions. It is a great thing to have religion.”
As Baptisto spoke his back was turned to his master, so that the extraordinary expression of his face was unnoticed, and there was no indication in his tone that he spoke satirically. Haldane shrugged his shoulders and said nothing, not caring to discuss his wife’s virtues with a servant, however familiar. Presently he went downstairs to dinner. All that evening he was very affectionate and merry, talking volubly of his adventures in Paris, of his scientific acquaintances, and of such new discoveries as they had brought under his notice. In the course of his happy chat he spoke frequently of a new acquaintance, one Dr. Dupré, whom he had met in the French capital. “The French, however far behind the Germans in speculative affairs,” he observed, “are far their superiors, and ours, in physiology. Take this Dupré, for example. He is a wonderful fellow! His dissections and vivisections’ have brought him to such a point of mastery that he is almost certain that he has discovered the problem poor Lewes broke his heart over—how and by what mechanism we can’t think. I don’t quite believe he has succeeded in that great discovery, but some of his minor discoveries are extraordinary. Did you read the account in the papers of his elixir of death?”
Ellen shook her head. The very name seemed horrible.
“His elixir of death?” she repeated.
“Yes. A chemical preparation, the fundamental principle of which is morphine. By its agency he can so produce in a living organism the ordinary phenomena of death, that even rigor mortis is simulated. I saw the experiment tried on two rabbits, a Newfoundland dog, and, to crown all, on the human subject. They were all, to every appearance, dead; the rabbits for twenty-four hours, the dog for half a day, and the woman for an hour and a half.”