Chapter XIII

Adrianis lay in the large salon where, two months earlier, they had dined together in the evening after finding the opal necklace. Damer had caused a bed to be taken into it and placed in the centre of the room, as affording more air from the four large windows than was to be obtained from the inner bedchamber adjoining. He did not give the true name to the disease in speaking to the people of the hotel; he spoke merely of cold and fever from a plunge in the hot noonday into foul canal water; on the local doctor, whom he paid the compliment of calling in, he enjoined the same reserve.

“The Prince is very rich,” he said, “he will pay for any loss which may be incurred, any renewal of furniture and of draperies.”

From Adrianis he did not conceal the truth.

Indeed, Adrianis himself said, in a hoarse, faint voice, “I have the disease which the child had. Cure me if you can, for——”

He did not add why life was more than ever beautiful to him, but the tears rose into his eyes; the other understood what remained unspoken.

When three in the afternoon sounded from the clock-tower on the south side of the hotel he raised his head, and, with a despairing gesture, said to Damer, “She expects me. Go, and explain to her; say I am ill. Tell her I would get up and keep my tryst if I died at her feet, but I fear—I fear—the contagion—for her.”

“Lie where you are and you will probably be well in a few days,” said Damer. “I will leave Stefanio with you and take your message. I shall soon return. Meanwhile your man knows what to do.”

Stefanio was the valet.

The eyes of Adrianis followed him from the room with longing and anguish. He was not yet so ill that the apathy of extreme illness dulled his desires and stilled his regrets. Both were intense as life still was intense in him. He would have risen and dragged himself to the Ca’ Zaranegra; but, as he had said, he feared the infection for her which would be in his voice, in his touch, in his breath, in his mere presence.

He lay on his back gazing wistfully at the great sunny windows, only veiled by the gauze of mosquito curtains. He could hear the churning of the water below as the canal steamers passed up and down; the softer ripple as oars parted it; he could see a corner of the marbles of the Salute, with two pigeons sitting side by side on it pruning their plumage in the sun.

He was not yet afraid, but he was very sorry; he longed to be up and out in the bright air, and he longed to be in the presence of his beloved, to ask again and again and again for the confession so dear to him; to hear it from her lips, to read it in her eyes.

“She loves me, she loves me,” he thought, and he, like a coward, like a knave, must be untrue to the first meeting she had promised him!

“Why is it,” he thought, as the tears welled up under his closed eyelids, “that our better, kinder impulses always cost us so much more heavily than all our egotisms and all our vices?”

If he had left the little child underneath the barge to drown, would it not have been better even for the child? The little thing had only suffered some eighteen hours longer through his rescue.

“Let us do what we ought,” he murmured, in words his mother had often spoken to him. “The gods will pay us.”

But the gods had been harsh in their payment to him.

He counted the minutes until Damer’s return, holding his watch in his hot hand. He took docilely what his servant gave him, though to swallow was painful and difficult.

“What a while he stays!” he thought, restlessly. He envied the other every moment passed at the Ca’ Zaranegra.

“What did you tell her?” he asked, breathlessly, when Damer at last returned.

“I told her the truth,” replied Damer, as he placed the thermometer under the sick man’s armpit. “You have worried and fretted; your fever has increased.”

“What did she say? She is not angry, or offended?”

“Who can be so at the misfortune of disease? Of course she knows that you have incurred this misfortune through your own folly.”

“Did she say so?”

“No; I am not aware that she said so. But she no doubt thought it. She bade me tell you not to agitate yourself.”

“Was that all?”

“She added—for her sake,” said Damer, with a cold, slight smile. He was truthful in what he repeated; he scorned vulgar methods of misrepresentation and betrayal. The heavy eyes of Adrianis gleamed and lightened with joy.

“Thanks,” he said softly, and his hot hand pressed that of his friend.

“I will write to her,” he added. “You can disinfect a note?”

“Yes. But do not exert yourself. Try to sleep.”

He crossed the room and closed the green wooden blinds; he gave an order to Stefanio, and dipped his hands in a disinfecting fluid; then he sat down and took up a book. But he could not read. He saw before him that blanched and frightened face, which a little while before had been raised to his as the voice of Veronica had cried to him, “Save him! You will save him? You have so much knowledge, so much power. You will save him for my sake!”

He had promised her nothing; he had only said briefly, in the language of people who were fools, that the issue of life and of death was in the hands of Deity. He had promised her nothing; in his own way he was sincere. Up to that time he had done everything which science and experience could suggest to combat the disease.

Adrianis wrote at intervals various pencilled notes to her; indistinct, feebly scrawled, but still coherent. He pointed to each when it was written and looked at his friend with supplicating eyes. He could not speak, for the false membrane filled his throat. Damer took each little note with apparent indifference.

“To the Countess Zaranegra?” he asked.

Adrianis signed a mute assent. Damer carried each scrap of paper to the next room, disinfected it, then sent it to its destination. He was of too proud a temper to use the usual small arts of the traitor.

Once she wrote in reply.

This he did thrice.

“I cannot see, my eyes are too weak,” Adrianis scrawled on its envelope as the letter was given to him. “Read it to me.”

Damer opened it, and read it aloud. It was short, timid, simple, but a deep love and an intense anxiety spoke in it. Adrianis took it and laid his cheek on it with a smile of ineffable peace. It seemed to give him firmer hold on life.

Adrianis slept peacefully, his cheek on the little letter, as a child falls to sleep with a favourite toy on its pillow.

He called in a second medical man of the town and two sisters of charity to replace Stefanio, who grew alarmed for his own safety and would no longer approach the bed.

“Send for my mother,” said Adrianis, in his choked voice.

“Certainly,” answered his friend. The disease which had fastened on Adrianis was not one which waits. But Damer telegraphed only to the Adrianis’ palace in Palermo, and he knew that it was unlikely she would be in that city in the summer heats of the end of June.

The telegram might be forwarded or it might not; Italian households are careless in such matters.

But when he murmured once and again, “Send for my mother!” Damer could, with a clear conscience, reply, “I have telegraphed.”

He sat by the bedside and watched the sick man.

He believed that he would recover.

In the dusk he was told that a lady who was below in her gondola desired to see him. He descended the stairs, prepared to find Veronica Zaranegra. She was veiled; he could not see her features, but he knew her by the turn of her head, the shape of her hand, before she spoke.

“You come for news of the Prince?” he said, coldly and harshly. “I can give you none. The disease is always uncertain and deceptive.”

“Let me see him! oh, let me see him!” she murmured. “I came for that. No matter what they say. No matter what danger there be. Only let me see him!”

“That is wholly impossible,” replied Damer, in an unchanged tone. “Why do you come on such errands?”

“Who should see him if not I? Who are you that you should keep me from him?”

“I am a man of science whose duty it is to protect you from yourself. Go home, madame, and pray for your betrothed. That is all that you can do.”

She burst into tears. He heard her sobs, he saw the heaving of her shoulders and her breast.

“Take your mistress home. She is unwell,” he said to the gondolier, who waited a moment for his lady’s orders, then, receiving none, pushed his oar against the steps and slowly turned the gondola round to go back up the canal.

“Why does she love him?” thought Damer. “Like to like. Fool to fool. Flower to flower!”

From his soul he despised her, poor lovely, mindless, childlike creature! But her voice turned his blood to flame; the sound of her weeping deepened his scorn to hate; the touch of her ungloved hand was ecstasy and agony in one; he loved her with furious, brutal, unsparing passion, like lava under the ice of his self-restraint.

He stood in the twilight and looked after the black shape of the gondola.

“He shall never be yours,” he said in his heart. “Never—never—never! unless I die instead of him to-night.”

He remained there some minutes whilst the water traffic passed by him unnoticed and the crowds flocked out from a novena in the Salute.

The day became evening, the lovely roseate twilight of summer in Venice wore into night, and the night waned into dawn. All the animation of Venetian life began again to awake with the whirr of the wings of the pigeons taking their sunrise flight from dome and cupola and pinnacle and gutter. To the sisters of charity their patient seemed better; to the surgeons of the city also; Damer said nothing.

“Is he not better?” asked the nun, anxiously.

“I see little amelioration,” replied Damer, and said in a louder tone to Adrianis, “Your mother has telegraphed; she will soon be here.”

Adrianis smiled again a smile which lighted up his beautiful brown eyes and momentarily banished their languor. He felt disposed to sleep, but he drew his pencil and paper to him and wrote feebly, “Mme. Zaranegra?”

Damer read the name.

“She came to see you an hour or two ago,” he answered. “But I could not allow it. Your illness is infectious.”

He spoke in his usual brief, calm, indifferent manner. Adrianis sighed, but it was a sigh of content; he was half asleep, he turned on his pillows and drew her little note which he had hidden under them once more against his cheek.

“He will sleep himself well,” said the nun.

“Let us hope so,” replied Damer; but she heard from his tone that he did not share her belief.

It was now eleven o’clock.

“Go and rest,” he said to her. “You need it. I will watch to-night. If there be any necessity for aid I will summon you.”

“Will his mother soon be here?” asked the sister, whose heart was tender.

“I believe so,” replied Damer.

One of the medical men whom he had summoned came out on to the balcony to his side.

“The sisters say the prince is better; he seems so,” said his colleague.

“What do they know?” said Damer; and added less harshly, “It is too early to be able to make sure of recovery; it is a disease which is very treacherous.”

“He has youth on his side.”

“Yes; but he is weakened by the effects of a wound he received last year for which I treated him. His constitution is not prepared to make so soon again another struggle for existence.”

“You have more knowledge of him than I,” said the Venetian, who was a meek man, not very wise.

“Come to my laboratory in the Fondamente, and I will show you something and tell you something,” said Damer.

His Italian colleague, flattered, complied with the request.

What he showed him were three animals, two rabbits and a cat, inoculated with and dying of diphtheria; what he explained to him were the theories of Lœffler and Klebs and the discovery of the presumed antidote by Behring; he also displayed to him some serum which he had received from Roux, who was only then at the commencement of his applications of Behring’s theory.

The Venetian doctor inspected and listened with deep respect.

“Why do you not try this treatment on the prince?” he said, which was what Damer desired and intended him to say.

“I will do so on my own responsibility if he be no better in the morning,” he replied. “But you will admit that the responsibility will be great, the theory of the cure being at present unknown to the general public, and no one of his family being at present in Venice to authorise the experiment.”

“We are there as your colleagues, and we shall support you,” replied the more obscure man, touched and flattered by the deference of one who was in the confidence of French and German men of science.

“If there be no other way, I will take the risk; the risk is less than that of tracheotomy,” said Damer, as he put the small phial of serum back into a locked case.