“More than this, he believes you could do the same with a human being—destroy its human attributes and give it, for example, the ferocity, and something of the speed, of a wolf or a tiger.”
“How on earth did you learn this, Renstoke?” asked Dick.
“From perhaps the only person who ever knew Erckmann really well,” was the reply. “Some years ago Erckmann was the resident doctor at a lunatic asylum in Prague. He made a particular crony of his chief assistant, a young doctor named Chatry, who afterwards went to Canada, where I met him. Chatry told me something of Erckmann’s views and experiments. I was, of course, tremendously interested, but I little thought I should ever run against the man in the flesh. Erckmann was undoubtedly a very able man, but there was a scandal. On some pretext or other he performed a remarkable operation on an insane person. The patient, who had previously been quite tractable, developed extraordinary characteristics. He growled and snapped at all who approached him, insisted on eating his food on the floor instead of at table, barked like a dog, and finally would only sleep curled up on a rug. In fact, he developed strikingly dog-like habits. How much of anything Erckmann let out generally Chatry never knew. But he was asked to resign, and he left Prague.”
“A very curious story!” Dick remarked.
“Now Chatry had no doubt whatever on the subject,” said his host. “Amazing as it may seem, he was firmly convinced that Erckmann had deliberately made this extraordinary experiment and that it had succeeded. Chatry died just before I left Canada, but before he died, he gave me a little manuscript book in which he has related the whole story. I’ll show it to you to-morrow.”
They said good-night and went to bed, leaving Renstoke, who sometimes suffered from insomnia, to read himself sleepy.
It was about two o’clock when Dick, who was a light sleeper, was roused by a shout for help, apparently from the drawing-room which was directly below his bedroom. Instantly he sprang out of bed, and snatching up a revolver, rushed downstairs.
But he was just too late.
As he entered the brilliantly lighted drawing-room he caught sight through the open window of a heavy misshapen body disappearing into the gloom beyond the bright patch of light cast by the electric lamps on the lawn outside.
Renstoke lay on his back on the floor, dying beside his favourite chair. Close by was the book he had been reading and on the carpet near it was his pipe, the tobacco still smouldering.