‘Where did he go?’
‘Restless and dissatisfied as usual—capital operations not sufficiently numerous to compensate for loss of time—thought he’d try the South Sea Islands.’
‘Any gold there?’
‘None so far; but human life little regarded—obscure diseases, and a possible discovery, his absorbing life-long quest for a cure of the most terrible, insidious, so-called incurable disease, Leprosy!’
‘Horrible to think of! Why did he pick the most hopeless evil in the whole world—the most loathsome?’
‘Just because it was so. He had lost a friend [177] ]by it, or rather, he had seen him deported to Molokai, the leper island, where Father Damien lived and died—himself a martyr-victim. The South Sea law is, that when the incipient symptom shows itself—the white circular mark never known to indicate falsely—the patient is carried off, and landed on the Island of the Lost, whence he or she can never return to civilisation.’
‘And do you mean to tell me that a man’s wife, or his child, can be legally torn from him and cast into hell—as such an accursed spot must be—compelled to live out the remainder of life there? What a fate—what a mockery of civilisation!’
‘This law, like others, was made for the preservation of society in the mass; better that the few should suffer than that the many be infected. So Carteret was compelled to see his friend torn from his wife, to witness his despair. They had only been married a few months. None knew, of course, how the infection was taken, nor did it matter. He was landed on that awful strand—is there now—where at a certain time in the evening the cries and groans of the patients in the more advanced stages can be plainly heard. Carteret is hardly sane on the subject, and from that hour resolved to devote his life to the discovery of a cure. To this end he made an exhaustive study of the disease in all its manifestations and stages of development. Worn with study, lowered in health and spirits, he turned to the as yet practically untrodden fields of research in the east of Asia, resolved to test the boundless, half-mythical [178] ]solitudes on the northern frontier of India. These he traversed, cheerfully risking health, freedom, life itself, if but the end could be obtained—the salvation of his friend, the happiness of Lilburne’s peerless wife. She was his cousin, and they had been boy and girl lovers.’
‘And has no cure ever been found for the disease?’ asked Leslie Bournefield. ‘So many physical evils have been attacked successfully of late years—X-rays, and what’s that other boon to mankind—Radium?’
‘Reports of cures, of course, but rarely authenticated,’ replied Chesterfield. ‘One feels doubtful, but nothing will discourage Carteret. He will go on searching till he dies, or Mrs. Lilburne does. Then, unless he elects to serve humanity in general for her sake—“in memoriam”—I fear his interest in the question will cease. His last remaining hope was in a nostrum said to be the property of the monks of Vatopede.’