Chapter IX

One day Veronica asked him to go and see an old servant of the Zaranegra household who was very ill and in hospital; they had begged him not to go to the hospital, but he had wished to do so, and had been allowed to fulfil his wish. Damer went to visit him. He found the man at death’s door with cancer of the food and air passages.

“If he be not operated on he will die in a week,” said the Englishman.

None of the hospital surgeons dared perform such an operation.

“I will operate if you consent,” said Damer.

The surgeons acquiesced.

“Will Biancon recover?” asked Veronica, when he returned and told her on what they had decided.

“In his present state he cannot live a week,” replied Damer, evasively.

“Does he wish for the operation?”

“He can be no judge. He cannot know his own condition. He cannot take his own prognosis.”

“But it will be frightful suffering.”

“He will be under anæsthetics.”

“But will he recover?”

“Madame, I am not the master of Fate.”

“But what is probable?”

“What is certain is that the man will die if left as he is.”

He performed the operation next day. The man ceased to breathe as it was ended; the shock to the nervous system had killed him.

When she heard that he was dead she burst into tears.

“Oh! why, oh! why,” she said passionately to Damer, later in the day: “why, if you knew he must die, did you torture him in his last moments?”

“I gave him a chance,” he replied, indifferently. “Anyhow he would never have survived the operation more than a few weeks.”

“Why did you torture him with it then?” said Veronica, indignantly.

“It was a rare, and almost unique, opportunity. I have solved by it a doubt which has never been solved before, and never could have been without a human subject.”

She shrank from him in horror.

“You are a wicked man!” she said, faintly. “Oh, how I wish, how I wish I had never asked you to see my poor Biancon! He might have lived!”

“He would most certainly have died,” said Damer, unmoved. “The life of a man at sixty is not an especially valuable thing, and I believe he did nothing all his life except polish your palace floors with beeswax or oil; I forget which it is they use in Venice.”

She looked at him with a mixture of horror and fear.

“But you have killed him!—and you can jest.”

“I did not kill him. His disease killed him,” replied Damer, with calm indifference. “And his end has been a source of knowledge. I should wish my own end to be as fruitful.”

She shuddered, and motioned to him to leave her.

“Go away, go away, you have no heart, and no conscience.”

Damer smiled slightly.

“I have a scientific conscience; it is as good as a moral one, and does better work.”

“Why did you bring that man to Venice?” she said to Adrianis some hours later. “He has killed my poor Biancon, and he cares nothing.”

“Why do you receive him?” said Adrianis, feeling the reproach unjust. “Cease to receive him. That is very simple. If you banish him he is proud; he will not persist.”

“He would not perhaps persist; but he would be revenged,” she thought, but she did not say so. Though her life was short, she had learned in it that men are like detonators which you cannot throw against each other without explosion.

Adrianis began to desire the exile of his companion, though his loyalty withheld him from trying to obtain it by any unfair means or unjust attack. He was mortified and disquieted. Why had he not had patience, and waited to carry the opals to the Ca’ Zaranegra until the Englishman had been safe on the sea on his way to Trieste? He began to perceive that Damer had an influence on the Countess Veronica which was contrary to his own, and adverse to his interests. He did not attach importance to it, because he saw that it was purely intellectual; but he would have preferred that it had not existed. So would she.

It was such an influence as the confessor obtains over the devotee; against which husband, lover, children, all natural ties, struggle altogether in vain.

It is not love; it is alien to love, but it is frequently stronger than love, and casts down the winged god maimed and helpless.

“Pierres de malheur! Pierres de malheur!” she said, as she looked at the opals that night. “Why did you bring that cruel man into my life?”

She might banish him as Adrianis had said, but she felt that she would never have courage to do it. Damer awed her. She felt something of what the poor women in the Salpêtrière had felt, when he had hypnotised them, and made them believe that they clasped their hands on red-hot iron, or were being dragged by ropes to the scaffold. She strove to resist and conquer the impression, but she was subjugated by it against her will.

She buried her poor old servant that night, and followed the coffin in its gondola in her own, with her men in mourning and the torches burning at the prow.

From the casement of his high tower on the north of the city, which looked over the lagoon towards that island which is now the cemetery of Venice, with its tall mosque-like Campanile and its high sea-walls, Damer saw and recognised her on that errand of respect to the humble dead. He saw also the long-boat of the yacht of Adrianis, laden with flowers, following her gondola at a little distance, as though its owner were timid and uncertain of welcome. He recognised them both in the evening light, and through his binocular could discern their features, their hands, their garlands, as the torches flamed and the water, roughened by wind, broke against the black sides of her gondola, and the white sides of the boat.

“Two children,” he thought, “made for each other, with their flowers and fables and follies! I should do best to leave them together.”

Then he shut his window and turned from the sight of the silver water, the evening skies, the gliding vessels.

His work awaited him. Bound on a plank lay a young sheepdog, which he had bought from a peasant of Mazzorbo for a franc; he had cut its vocal chords; in his own jargon, had rendered it aphone; he had then cut open its body, and torn out its kidneys and pancreas; it was living; he reckoned it would live in its mute and unpitied agony for twelve hours more—long enough for the experiment which he was about to make.

These were the studies for which he had come to the tower on the Fondamenti.

The clang of hammers and the roar of furnaces drowned the cries of animals which it was not convenient to make aphone; and the people of the quarter were too engrossed in their labours to notice when he flung down into the water dead or half-dead mutilated creatures.