Part 4

“Thank you,” she said. “I knew there was a right reason; and all the time I have been hunting for a fancied one.”

I suffered an instant reaction to dismay. I had had no right whatever to make this point. Whatever my private opinion of Valentine’s folly, I had allowed myself to be accredited his ambassador.

“Come; it is no reason at all,” I said. “There is no such thing as a misalliance in love” (I threw this atrocious sop to my own panic). “If only the practical bar between you could be as easily disposed of.”

“The practical bar?”

She turned upon me with a piteous pain in her voice. I had opened a door of release to her, I suppose, and before she could escape shut it again in her face. I was stumbling weakly on an explanation, when suddenly from somewhere above the baby began to wail. Instantly her face assumed the strangest expression—a sort of exalted hardness. She put up her hand, listened a moment, then, without another word, glided from the room. I am ashamed to say that I seized the opportunity to put an instant period to my visit.

I expected to meet Valentine loitering without; but to my relief he did not appear. So I went on my way fuming. What right had the man to try to inveigle me into seeming to sanction his idiotcy by claiming me its advocate? He wanted to buy justification, I suppose. There are certain natures which cannot properly relish their own grief or happiness unless a witness be by to report upon them. Such was Valentine’s, I thought; and the thought did not increase my respect for my friend. I fancied I had already plumbed the shallows of that pretentious reserve, and was angry and half contemptuous that he had so soon revealed himself to me. There was certainly something attractive about the girl; but—well, _he_ had not been the first to discover the fact, and, when all was said, his infatuation showed him a fool in my eyes.

That evening, when I was sitting alone writing, she suddenly stood before me. My first shock of amazement was followed by a glow of fury. I felt that I was being persecuted.

“Well, what is it?” I said harshly.

“I only wanted to tell you,” she said low, panting as if she had run; “I wanted you to tell _him_ that—that I know now what it is. I found out the moment I left you; and I came to say—but you were gone.”

“Well?”

“It is the child, sir.”

“Yes, you are quite right—it is the child.”

No sooner had I said it, than I felt the weight of my self-commitment. Had she discovered—remembered all? Did she conceive the impediment as associated with some scandal attaching to the ineffable Aunt Mim? or was the baby, in her clouded soul, but an unattachable changeling, which had come to disrupt the kind order of things and brand their household with a curse?

“Yes, it is the child,” I said, and leaned my forehead into my hand while I frowned over the problem.

She made no answer. When I looked up at the end of a minute, she was gone.

I started to my feet, and went up and down. I made no attempt to follow. “It is better,” I thought angrily, “to let this stuff ferment in its own way. I could have given no other answer.”

At the twentieth turn I saw Valentine before me, and stopped abruptly.

“Well,” he said; “were you able to get it out of her?”

“What?” I asked defiantly.

“The reason—the impediment, you know?” he answered.

“Sit down, Valentine,” I said. “I will tell you the truth. I hinted that the _mésalliance_ might be her unconscious consideration.”

“She is not so proud,” he said quietly; “though I’m unworthy to buckle her little shoe for her.”

I positively gasped.

“O! if that’s your view! But, anyhow, she was seeming to accept mine, when the infant hailed her, and she left me, and I bolted. You put too much upon me—really you do, Val; and here’s the sequel. Ten minutes ago she appeared in this room and told me that she had discovered the reason—the real one this time.”

“And it was?”

“The baby—no less.”

“What! Does she——?”

“I don’t know from Adam. I was thinking over my answer; and when I looked up, she was gone.”

“And you gave her no reply?”

“O yes! I told her I entirely agreed with her. I had to be honest.”

“Verender! You must come with me!”

“Go with you!”

“You’ve called the tune; you must pay the piper.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’ll see you—cremated first!”

He stared at me a moment, his teeth showing, his eyes rounding in the dusk, his fists clinching and unclinching; then he, too, was gone. And I went and stood at the window, slinking into the curtains, and feeling myself the most abused cur in all London.

V

For a fortnight this state continued in me, through alternations of depression, self-accusation, and savage bursts of rebellion. On the sixteenth day a brief note, begging me to call at his rooms, reached me from Valentine.

“I won’t go,” I swore through my teeth, feeling an inclination to tear the paper in them; and five minutes later was on my way.

“He shall justify me to myself,” I had thought. “I’ll let my conscience be his footstool no longer.”

The fellow lived _en prince_ in Piccadilly. I found him in the midst of a litter—boxes and packages and strewed floors—evidently on the eve of a journey. He greeted me, twinkling, in high excitement—not a trace of grievance or embarrassment in his manner.

“Leave those things, Phillips,” he said to his staid valet. “We’ll finish by and by.”

The man left the room; and his master took me by the sleeve, while I held myself in reserve—unconsciously, at the same time, softening to his geniality.

“We’re off to Capri—Egypt,” he said, “following our late summer with the swallows.”

“You and—Phillips?” I asked.

“I and my wife,” said he, with a laugh. “Hush! She’s seeing the baby to sleep.”

He could say it without a blush; and they had been married, as I came to learn, just a week! He led me on tiptoe to a distant room, and bade me look through the opened door. Nanny, crowned, proud as any young queen, with conscious maternity, was bent, singing softly, above a little cot. The sight of her—Val’s wife—restored me at once to my self-respect. I had done nothing after all, it seemed, but help to precipitate an event I deplored. My shout had brought down the avalanche. Henceforth my position was to be that of the amused onlooker.

He let me stare; then led me away with all his old affectation of pregnant mystery. We went out together—I don’t know why—into the Green Park. It seemed remote and silent, and the better shadows of night were beginning to troop under its trees. Then he spoke to me, as follows:

“Verender, you have a right to know. You remember what you told me that evening? I wasn’t just to you, perhaps. I foresaw issues to which you must necessarily be blind. The baby stood between us, you said. It did, but not in the way you meant to imply. I am its father.”

I listened perfectly silent, and very grave, as we stepped on together.

“I will say of, not for, myself,” he continued, “that I had known nothing of the fruits of a little moonlight idyll out in that Kent village. I was hop-picking, as she was, but for a worser reason. Our encounter in B—— Hospital was my first intimation of the truth. Till that moment I had never considered, at least had been careless of, a sequel; had never, of course, had a shadow of thought to identify the patient with my victim. Then in a moment—Verender, her helplessness found all that wasn’t bad in me. She didn’t know me—the curtain was too thick. I determined to woo and win, as a stranger, what was already my own. Was I right?”

I nodded. “Yes, you were right.”

“Then came the strange part,” he said—“a sort of subconsciousness of an impediment she could not define. It was her dishonour, Verender—my God! Verender, _her_ dishonour!—that found some subtle expression in the little life introduced into her home. She always feared and distrusted the child; and I tell you I lived in horror that some day her witlessness would arm her gentle hand to do it a hurt. For she wanted to come to me, Verender, she wanted to come, and it was as if she couldn’t, and nobody would tell her why.

“_You_ told her, you old rascal! And with what result, do you think? When I followed her, I found her gone—she had taken the baby from its cot, and hurried out. The old harpy was there, raving and gobbling beyond reason. I had her down on her knees to confess. She admitted that the girl had come in, in a fever to proclaim her knowledge of the bar which separated us. Nanny had rounded upon her, it appeared, and accused her, Aunt Mim, of wantonly causing the scandal which had brought this shadow into her life. And then—perhaps it wasn’t to be wondered at—Auntie exploded, and gave up all.”

“The truth?”

“All of it but what the old hag herself didn’t know—the name of the villain. That, circumstances had kept from her, you see. She let loose, did Auntie—we’ll allow her a grain of justification; to have her forbearance turned upon herself like that, you know!—and screamed to the girl to pack, and dispose of her rubbish somewhere else. And Nanny understood at last, and went.”

“Where?”

“Ah, where? That was the question. I’d only one clue—Skene and the river; but I seized upon it, and my inspiration proved right. She’d gone instinctively to the only place where, it seemed, her trouble could be resolved. You see, she hadn’t yet come to identify _me_ with it. But I followed, and I caught her in time.”

He hung his head, and spoke very low.

“I took the next train possible to Skene. Verender, I’m not going to talk. It was one of those fainting, indescribable experiences, like the voice in the burning bush. Cold dawn it was, with a white bubbling river and the ghost of an old moon. She had intended to commit _it_ to the water—the fog wasn’t yet out of her brain—and then, all in an instant, the mother came upon her, and the memory of me; and she ran to cast herself in instead, and saw me coming.”

There followed a long interval of silence.

“And Aunt Mim?” I asked drily, chiefly to keep up my character.

He laughed.

“O! we’ve added an honourable moiety to a dishonourable pension, and settled her,” he said.

Another silence followed.

“Well, I apologize,” I said grumpily.

THE SOUL OF THE PROFESSOR

John Stannary hungrily paced his laboratory, awaiting an expected advent. A brilliant coronal of candles, concentrated within a shade and pendent from a black beam over the dissecting table, regularly identified him as he came within its radiance, and as regularly, when he had passed without it, returned to its scrutiny of the empty slab beneath, as if it were trying to trace on that blank surface the unwritten hieroglyphics of his development. Yet, if each of its half-score fiery tongues had been as polyglot as the Apostles’ tongues of flame, it could have found among them all no voice to dispute his lifelong consistency with himself. From the hard, ungracious child, who had rejoiced to discomfit the love which sought to hedge him; from the cynic schoolboy, to whom to awaken and analyze pain in the living had been the only absorbing sport; from the unimpassioned student, who had walked the hospitals like a very spectre of moral insensibility; from the calculating libertine, whose experimental phase of animalism had been as brief as it was savage; from the lust of life, soon spent, to the bloodless analysis of its organic motives; from the soulless child to the virile monster of science; from nothingness to a great early reputation, to honours, to a fine house, to his present self and condition, in short, Professor Stannary’s progress had been entirely and unerringly consistent. He was one of those born to account for results, not by any means with a view to clearing the stream of tendency by cleansing its source. On the contrary, he never would have hesitated further to contaminate it, could he by so doing have evolved some novel epidemic. His fight was not to win Nature to God, but to the laboratory; and, if he had a conqueror’s ambition, it was to die gloriously upon a protoplast, at that beginning of things which his fathers had struggled through æons to forget. To have called him a dog nosing back for a scent, would have been to libel the sorriest of mongrels with an inch of tail to wag at a kind word. Yet he had routled so much, nevertheless, that his eyes were inflamed, and his features pimpled, and his nose itself sharpened as with much whetting on carrion. And, still unappeased, he paced his shambles that evening like a caged ravening jackal.

In those early decades of the nineteenth century, anthropophagous science, especially when non-official, was often hard put to it for a meal. The “ringing grooves of change” were sounding; discovery was a new-risen star; ghoulish explorers shouldered one another in their struggle for the scientific pabulum which the grave afforded. But the supply, die as men would, was unequal to the demand. The hospitals kept their own; the others, _à contre-cœur_, must keep the resurrection-men. They pulled the blinds down on their consciences; they were willing to accept the least plausible of explanations, for the _Cause_ was paramount. But, indeed, we are all casuists when we want to justify our lusts to ourselves. Still the material lacked, only, according to the universal law of necessity, to evolve its more desperate instruments of supply. And then at last, hard-driven, first one, and after him another and another, had the panic courage to pull up those blinds, and let in the light on some very shocking suspicions—with the result that Burke was hanged in Edinburgh, and Bishop and Williams in London.

Professor Stannary was not of these white-livers. He pulled up no blind, for the simple reason that he had let none down. He would have diagnosed conscience as a morbid disease characterized by a diathetic condition, and peculiar to fools of both sexes and all ages. He would have said that to ask any question in this world was to invite a lie, and that in all his thirty years’ experience he had found none but the dead to answer back the unswerving truth. Well, if they did? Did it matter to them, being dead? But it mattered greatly to the cause of science to get at the truth; and he, for one, was certainly not going to question the means so long as the results came to justify them.

While yet, however, the blinds were down and the pitch-plaster but an ugly suspicion, the competition for material had not so ceased of its keenness but that Professor Stannary had found himself checked, one day, under the very near-conquered crest of a physiological peak, for want of the final clue to that crowning achievement—a clue which, like Bluebeard’s key, turned upon nothing so intimately as dead bodies. Step by step he had reasoned his way to this position, only, when within touch of the end, to find himself held up, tantalized, irritated by an inability to proceed farther until a nice necessity should be provided. His material, in fact and in short, had given out at the psychologic moment. His laboratory was already a museum of shredded particles—the pickings from much inevitable waste of dead humanity. There needed only the retraversing of certain nerves, or ducts, or canals to put the finishing touches to a great discovery. And then—the summit, the tribune, as it were, from which he was engaged to announce on the morrow to the Royal Society the triumphant term to his investigations.

Already, pacing to and fro, eager and impatient, in the silent room, he foresaw himself the recipient of the highest honour it was in the power of that body to bestow. He was not above desiring it. He was not himself so superlatively rational but he could covet applause for knocking yet another long nail into the coffin of irrationality; could expect the recognition of the world for his services in helping to reduce it, its passions and its hopes and its pathetic fallacies, to some mathematical formulæ. There is nothing so incomprehensible to the men of science as the reluctance of the unscientific to part with their doting illusions. To be content to rejoice or sorrow in things as they seem, and not to wish to know them as they are—that, they think, is so foolish as to justify their hardest castigation of the folly. At least so thought John Stannary, as, with his lips set sourly, he paused, and consulted his watch, and listened for a sound of expected footsteps shuffling down the hang-dog passage which skirted that wall of the house, and into which his laboratory door conveniently opened.

Not a whisper, however, rewarded him. He put his ear to the panels. Even then, the surf-like murmur of distant traffic—or the thud of his own excited heart, he could not tell which—was the only articulate sound. He glanced up angrily at the shortening candles before resuming his tramp. As he passed to and fro, from dusk to light, and into dusk again, he seemed to be demonstrating to a theatre of spectral monstrosities the hieroglyphics of that same empty slab. For the central core of radiance, concentrating itself with deadly expectancy upon its surface, had, nevertheless, its own ghostly halo—a dim auditorium, tier over tier, peopled with shadows of misbegotten horrors. Sets of surgical steel in the pit, arrayed symmetrically on a table as if for a dinner party of vampires; nameless writhed specimens on cards or in bottles, standing higher behind the dry sleek of glass; over all, murderous busts in the gallery, the dust on their heads and upper features giving them the appearance of standing above some infernal sort of footlights—with such shapes, watchful and gloating in suggestion, was the man hemmed in. They touched his nerves with just such an emotion as the ordinary citizen feels towards his domestic _lares_; they affected him in just such proportion as he was moved by the thought of the possible manner in which an order he had given to some friends of his that morning might be executed. That is to say, his feeling towards these dead members, as towards the means taken by others to procure him the use of them, was utterly impersonal. He had had at this pass a great truth to demonstrate. “A body, this night, at any cost,” he had simply ordered, and had straightway shut the door on his caterers. He had had no thought of scruple. His responsibility in these matters was to the ages; never to the individual.

A low tap sounded at the door. He was there in three strides, and opening swiftly, let in two men, the one shouldering a sack, the other hovering about his comrade in a sort of anxious moral support.

Professor Stannary, without a word, pointed to the table. The laden one, as mutely, shuffled across, backed, heaved his burden down, and stood to take off his hat and mop his brow. He was a burly, humorous-looking fellow, with a sort of cheerful popularity written across his face—an expression in strong contrast with that of the other, who, tall and stealthy, stood lank behind him, like his shadow at a distance, watching the persuasive effect of his principal on the customer. It was he who had closed the door gently upon them all as soon as they were in, and now stood, his teeth and eyeballs the prominent things in him, softly twirling his hat in his hand.

“Take away the sack,” said the Professor quietly.

The burly man obeyed, sliding it off like a petticoat; and revealed the body of a young woman. Lowering and rubbing his jaw, the Professor stood some moments pondering the vision. Then he turned sharply.

“You are late. I expected you sooner.”

“The notice was short, sir,” answered the man coolly. “These ’ere matters can’t be accommodated in a moment. As it is she’s warm. I bought the body off of——”

The other interrupted him—

“I don’t want to know. You can hold your tongue, and take your price, and go.”

“Short and sweet,” said the man.

He laughed, and his friend laughed in echo, putting his long hand to his mouth as if in apology for such an unpardonable ebullition of nature.

“As to the price,” said the former, “taking into _con_sideration the urgency, and the special providence, so to speak, in purwiding, at a moment’s notice too, this ’ere comely young——”

A certain full chink of money stopped him.

“Thankee,” he said, after a short negotiation. “I’ll own you’ve done the handsome, sir, and we’ve no cause to complain. Not but what I had to give——”

“Good night!” said the Professor.

Not till they were gone, locked out, and the very trail of their filthy footsteps hidden under the black droppings of the night, did he turn, for all his impatience, and regard the body again.

“Nancy,” he murmured to himself; “yes, it’s Nancy.”

Into the vast study of biology it is perfectly certain that a personal knowledge of biogenesis must enter. Here, too, the individual must be sacrificed to the cause. Well, by virtue of that phase in his career before-mentioned, he had already once made of Nancy a holocaust to science. If the fruits of that sacrifice had been to be found in a ruined life, a social degradation, a gradual decline upon infamy, what was it all to him? As german to the general subject as the dead specimens on his walls was the living specimen of his passion. _Ex abusu non arguitur ad usum._ Still, it was a strange coincidence that she should come thus to consummate his work.

Looking upon her frozen face, he was aware of certain tell-tale, rudely-erased tokens about the mouth. He never had a doubt as to what they signified. It was a rude kiss that of the pitch-plaster, more close and savage than any he himself had once pressed upon those blistered lips. So, the murderous beasts had gone the short way to supply his urgency! Would they have taken it none the less, he wondered, if they could have known in what relation their victim once stood towards their employer? Very likely. Very justly, too, could they believe him consistent with himself.

Nevertheless, though he had no conscience, though he had too often scored that fact on human flesh with a knife to be in any doubt about it, it was notable that, as he moved now, perfectly cold and collected, to make some selection of tools from the table hard by, he was registering to himself a vow, mortal to some folks, that no effort of his should be lacking to help bring certain vile instruments to their judgment—so soon as his disuse of them should find warrant in a fuller supply of the legitimate material.

As he groped for what he wanted, a sparrow twittered somewhere in the dark outside. He started, and dwelt a moment listening. Birds! the little false priests of haunted woods, who sang their lying benedictions over every folly perpetrated in their green shades! Why, he had loathed them, even while he had been making their loves the text for this early experiment of his in rustic nature. They had been singing when——grasping his knife firmly, he returned to the table.

Something had happened there. For one moment the blade shook in his hand. To his practised eye there were signs—the ghostliest, the most remote—but signs still. A movement—a tremor—the faintest, faintest vibration of a soul, unreleased, struggling to return to the surface—that was what he felt rather than saw. He recalled the hasty character of the deed; he thought of the shock, of the suspended trance into which such a deed might cast a sensitive subject. Mastering himself, with the dry firm will of an operator, he walked once more unhurriedly to the instrument table, and made a further selection.