Part 20

“Ha!” exclaimed the Professor, “I thought so!”

“But I should have liked him to have begun earlier,” I said. “Twenty-nine is a nice age, now.... It is the age we all try to stop at, and can’t, however much we try. Look there!”

A landau limousine, dark blue, beautifully varnished, nickel-plated, and upholstered in cream-white leather, came gliding gracefully through the press of vehicles. From the crest upon the panel to the sober workmanlike livery of the chauffeur, the turn-out was perfection. The pearl it contained was worthy of the setting.

“Look there?” I repeated, as the rose-cheeked, sapphire-eyed, smiling vision passed, wrapped in a voluminous coat of chinchilla and silver fox, with a toque of Parma violets under the shimmer of the silken veil that could only temper the burning glory of her wonderful Renaissance hair.

“There’s the exception to the rule.... There’s a woman who doesn’t need the aid of science or of Art to keep her at nine and twenty. There’s a woman in whom ‘the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue and bone’ goes on—if it does go on—imperceptibly. Her blood doesn’t seem to be much deteriorated by the microbe of old age, Professor, does it? And she’s forty-three! The alchemistical forty-three, that turns the gold of life back into lead! The gold remains gold in her case, for that hair, that complexion, that figure, are,” I solemnly declared, “her own.”

At that moment Lady Clanbevan gave a smiling gracious nod to the Professor, and he responded with a cold, grave bow. The glow of her gorgeous hair, the liquid sapphire of her eyes, were wasted on this stony man of science. She passed, going home to Stanhope Gate, I suppose, in which neighborhood she has a house; I had barely a moment to notice the white-bonneted, blue-cloaked nurse on the front of the landau, holding a bundle of laces and cashmeres, and to reflect that I have never yet seen Lady Clanbevan taking the air out of the society of a baby, when the Professor spoke:

“So Lady Clanbevan is the one woman who has no need of the aid of Art or science to preserve her beauty and maintain her appearance of youth? Supposing I could prove to you otherwise, my friend, what then?”

“I should say,” I returned, “that you had proved what everybody else denies. Even the enemies of that modern Ninon de l’Enclos, who has just passed——”

“With the nurse and the baby?” interpolated the Professor.

“With the nurse and the baby,” said I. “Even her enemies—and they are legion—admit the genuineness of the charms they detest. Mentioning the baby, do you know that for twenty years I have never seen Lady Clanbevan out without a baby? She must have quite a regiment of children—children of all ages, sizes, and sexes.”

“Upon the contrary,” said the Professor, “she has only one!”

“The others have all died young, then?” I asked sympathetically, and was rendered breathless by the rejoinder:

“Lady Clanbevan is a widow.”

“One never asks questions about the husband of a professional beauty,” I said. “His individuality is merged in hers from the day upon which her latest photograph assumes a marketable value. Are you sure there isn’t a Lord Clanbevan alive somewhere?”

“There is a Lord Clanbevan alive,” said the Professor coldly. “You have just seen him, in his nurse’s arms. He is the only child of his mother, and she has been a widow for nearly twenty years! You do not credit what I assert, my friend?”

“How can I, Professor?” I asked, turning to meet his full face, and noticed that his dark, somewhat opaque brown irises had lights and gleams of carbuncle-crimson in them. “I have had Lady Clanbevan and her progeny under my occasional observation for years. The world grows older, if she doesn’t, and she has invariably a baby—_toujours_ a new baby—to add to the charming illusion of young motherhood which she sustains so well. And now you tell me that she is a twenty-years’ widow with one child, who must be nearly of age—or it isn’t proper. You puzzle me painfully!”

“Would you care,” asked the Professor after a moment’s pause, “to drive back to Harley Street with me? I am, as you know, a vegetarian, so I will not tax your politeness by inviting you to lunch. But I have something in my laboratory I should wish to show you.”

“Of all things, I should like to come,” I said. “How many times haven’t I fished fruitlessly for an invitation to visit the famous laboratory where nearly twenty years ago——”

“I traced,” said the Professor, “the source of phenomena which heralded the evolution of the Röntgen Ray and the ultimate discovery of the radio-active salt they have christened radium. I called it protium twenty years ago, because of its various and protean qualities. Why did I not push on—perfect the discovery and anticipate Sir William C—— and the X——’s? There was a reason. You will understand it before you leave my laboratory.”

The Baby-Bunting stopped at the unfashionable end of Harley Street, in front of the dingy yellow house with the black front door, flanked by dusty boxes of mildewed dwarf evergreens, and the Professor, relieved of his fur-lined coat and cap, led the way upstairs as lightly as a boy. Two garret-rooms had been knocked together for a laboratory. There was a tiled furnace at the darker end of the long skylighted room thus made, and solid wooden tables much stained with spilt chemicals, were covered with scales, glasses, jars, and retorts—all the tools of chemistry. From one of the many shelves running round the walls, the Professor took down a circular glass flask and placed it in my hands. The flask contained a handful of decayed and moldy-looking wheat, and a number of peculiarly offensive-looking little beetles with tapir-like proboscides.

“The perfectly developed beetle of the _Calandria granaria_,” said the Professor, as I cheerfully resigned the flask, “a common British weevil, whose larvæ feed upon stored grain. Now look at this.” He reached down and handed me a precisely similar flask, containing another handful of grain, cleaner and sounder in appearance, and a number of grubs, sharp-ended chrysalis-like things buried in the grain, inert and inactive.

“The larvæ of _Calandria granaria_,” said the Professor, in his drawling monotone. “How long does it take to hatch the beetle from the grub? you ask. Less than a month. The perfect weevils that I have just shown you I placed in their flask a little more than three weeks back. The grubs you see in the flask you are holding, and which, as you will observe by their anxiety to bury themselves in the grain so as to avoid contact with the light, are still immature, I placed in the glass receptacle twenty years ago. Don’t drop the flask—I value it.”

“Professor!” I gasped.

“Twenty years ago,” repeated the Professor, delicately handling the venerable grubs, “I enclosed these grubs in this flask, with sufficient grain to fully nourish them and bring them to the perfect state. In another flask I placed a similar number of grubs in exactly the same quantity of wheat. Then for twenty-four hours I exposed flask number one to the rays emanating from what is now called radium. And as the electrons discharged from radium are obstructed by collision with air-atoms, I exhausted the air contained in the flask.” He paused.

“Then, when the grubs in flask number two hatched out,” I anticipated, “and the larvæ in flask number one remained stationary, you realized——”

“I realized that the rays from the salt arrested growth, and at the same time prolonged to an almost incalculable extent,” said the Professor—“for you will understand that the grubs in flask number one had lived as grubs half a dozen times as long as grubs usually do.... And I said to myself that the discovery presented an immense, a tremendous field for future development. Suppose a young woman of, say, twenty-nine were enclosed in a glass receptacle of sufficient bulk to contain her, and exposed for a few hours to my protium rays, she would retain for many years to come—until she was a great-grandmother of ninety!—the same charming, youthful appearance——”

“As Lady Clanbevan!” I cried, as the truth rushed upon me and I grasped the meaning this astonishing man had intended to convey.

“As Lady Clanbevan presents to-day,” said the Professor, “thanks to the discovery of a——”

“Of a great man,” said I, looking admiringly at the lean worn figure in the closely-buttoned black frock-coat.

“I loved her.... It was a delight to her to drag a disciple of Science at her chariot-wheels. People talked of me as a coming man. Perhaps I was.... But I did not thirst for distinction, honors, fame.... I thirsted for that woman’s love.... I told her of my discovery—as I told her everything. Bah!” His lean nostrils worked. “You know the game that is played when one is in earnest and the other at play. She promised nothing, she walked delicately among the passions she sowed and fostered in the souls of men, as a beautiful tigress walks among the poison-plants of the jungle. She saw that rightly used, or wrongly used, my great discovery might save her beauty, her angelic, dazzling beauty that had as yet but felt the first touch of Time. She planned the whole thing, and when she said, ‘You do not love me if you will not do this,’ I did it. I was mad when I acceded to her wish, perhaps; but she is a woman to drive men frenzied. You have seen how coldly, how slightingly she looked at me when we encountered her in the Row? I tell you—you have guessed already—I went there to see her. I always go where she is to be encountered, when she is in town. And she bows, always; but her eyes are those of a stranger. Yet I have had her on her knees to me. She cried and begged and kissed my hands.”

He knotted his thin hands, their fingers brown-tipped with the stains of acids, and wrung and twisted them ferociously.

“And so I granted what she asked, carried out the experiment, and paid what you English call the piper. The giant glass bulb with the rubber-valve door was blown and finished in France. It involved an expense of three hundred pounds. The salt I used—of protium (christened radium now)—cost me all my savings—over two thousand pounds—for I had been a struggling man——”

“But the experiment?” I broke in. “Good Heavens, Professor! How could a living being remain for any time in an exhausted receiver? Agony unspeakable, convulsions, syncope, death! One knows what the result would be. The merest common sense——”

“The merest common sense is not what one employs to make discoveries or carry out great experiments,” said the Professor. “I will not disclose my method; I will only admit to you that the subject—the subjects were insensible; that I induced _anæsthesia_ by the ordinary ether-pump apparatus, and that the strength of the ray obtained was concentrated to such a degree that the exposure was complete in three hours.” He looked about him haggardly. “The experiment took place here nineteen years ago—nineteen years ago, and it seems to me as though it were yesterday.”

“And it must seem like yesterday to Lady Clanbevan—whenever she looks in the glass,” I said. “But you have pricked my curiosity, Professor, by the use of the plural. Who was the other subject?”

“Is it possible you don’t guess?” The sad, hollow eyes questioned my face in surprise. Then they turned haggardly away. “My friend, the other subject associated with Lady Clanbevan in my great experiment was—Her Baby!”

I could not speak. The dowdy little grubs in the flask became for me creatures imbued with dreadful potentialities.... The tragedy and the sublime absurdity of the thing I realized caught at my throat, and my brain grew dizzy with its horror.

“Oh! Professor!” I gurgled, “how—how grimly, awfully, tragically ridiculous! To carry about with one wherever one goes a baby that never grows older—a baby——”

“A baby nearly twenty years old? Yes, it is as you say, ridiculous and horrible,” the Professor agreed.

“What could have induced the woman!” burst from me.

The Professor smiled bitterly.

“She is greedy of money. It is the only thing she loves—except her beauty and her power over men; and during the boy’s infancy—that word is used in the Will—she has full enjoyment of the estate. After he ‘attains to manhood’—I quote the Will again—hers is but a life-interest. Now you understand?”

I did understand, and the daring of the woman dazzled me. She had made the Professor doubly her tool.

“And so,” I gurgled between tears and laughter, “Lord Clanbevan, who ought to be leaving Eton this year to commence his first Oxford term, is being carried about in the arms of a nurse, arrayed in the flowing garments of a six-months’ baby! What an astonishing conspiracy!”

“His mother,” continued the Professor calmly, “allows no one to approach him but the nurse. The family are only too glad to ignore what they consider a deplorable case of atavistic growth-arrest, and the boy himself——” He broke off. “I have detained you,” he said, after a pause. “I will not do so longer. Nor will I offer you my hand. I am as conscious as you are—that it has committed a crime.” And he bowed me out with his hands sternly held behind him. There were few more words between us, only I remember turning on the threshold of the laboratory, where I left him, to ask whether protium—radium, as it is now christened—checks the growth of every organic substance? The answer I received was curious:

“Certainly, with the exception of the nails and the hair!”

A week later the Professor was found dead in his laboratory.... There were reports of suicide—hushed up. People said he had been more eccentric than ever of late, and theorized about brain-mischief; only I located the trouble in the heart. A year went by, and I had almost forgotten Lady Clanbevan—for she went abroad after the Professor’s death—when at a little watering-place on the Dorset coast, I saw that lovely thing, as lovely as ever—she who was fifty if a day! With her were the blue-cloaked elderly nurse and Lord Clanbevan, borne, as usual, in the arms of his attendant, or wheeled in a luxurious perambulator. Day after day I encountered them—the lovely mother, the middle-aged nurse, and the mysterious child—until the sight began to get on my nerves. Had the Professor selected me as the recipient of a secret unrivaled in the records of biological discovery, or had he been the victim of some maniacal delusion that cold October day when we met in Rotten Row? One peep under the thick white lace veil with which the baby’s face was invariably covered would clear everything up! Oh! for a chance to allay the pangs of curiosity!

The chance came. It was a hot, waspy August forenoon. Everybody was indoors with all the doors and windows open, lunching upon the innutritive viands alone procurable at health resorts—everybody but myself, Lord Clanbevan, and his nurse. She had fallen asleep upon a green-painted esplanade seat, gratuitously shielded by a striped awning. Lord Clanbevan’s C-springed, white-hooded, cane-built perambulator stood close beside her. He was, as usual, a mass of embroidered cambric and cashmere, and, as always, thickly veiled, his regular breathing heaved his infant breast; the thick white lace drapery attached to his beribboned bonnet obscured the features upon which I so ardently longed to gaze! It was the chance, as I have said; and as the head of the blue-cloaked nurse dropped reassuringly upon her breast, as she emitted the snore that gave assurance of the soundness of her slumbers, I stepped silently on the gravel towards the baby’s perambulator. Three seconds, and I stood over its apparently sleeping inmate; another, and I had lifted the veil from the face of the mystery—and dropped it with a stifled cry of horror!

The child had a moustache!

THE DUCHESS’S DILEMMA

“A person called to see me!” repeated the Duchess of Rantorlie. “He pleaded urgent business, you say?”

She glanced at the card presented by her groom-of-the-chambers without taking the trouble to lift it from the salver. “‘Mr. Moss Rubelius.’ I do not know the name—I have no knowledge of any urgent business. You must tell him to go away at once, and not call again.”

“Begging your Grace’s pardon,” remarked the official, “the person seemed to anticipate a message of the kind——”

“Did he? Then,” thought her Grace, “he is not disappointed.”

“And, still begging your Grace’s pardon,” pursued the discreet domestic, “he asked me to hand this second card to your Grace.”

It was rather a shabby card, and dog’s-eared as though it had been carried long in somebody’s pocket; but it was large and feminine, and adorned with a ducal coronet and the Duchess’s own cipher, and scribbled upon it in pencil, in the Duchess’s own handwriting, were two or three words, simple enough, apparently, and yet sufficiently fraught with meaning to make their fair reader turn very pale. She did not replace this card upon the salver, but kept it as she said:

“Bring the person to me at once.”

And when the softly stepping servant had left the room—one of her Grace’s private suite, charmingly furnished as a study—she made haste to tear the card up, dropping the fragments into the hottest part of the wood-fire, and thrusting at them with the poker until the last tremulous fragment of gray ash had disappeared. Rising from this exercise with a radiant glow upon her usually colorless cheeks the Duchess became aware that she was not alone. A person of vulgar appearance, outrageously attired in a travesty of the ordinary afternoon costume of an English gentleman, stood three or four feet off, regarding her with an observant and rather wily smile. Not at all discomposed, he was the first to speak.

“Before burnin’ _that_,” he remarked, in the thick, snuffling accents of the low-bred, “your Grace ought to have asked yourself whether it was any use. Because—I put it to your Grace, as a poker-player, being told the game’s fashionable in your Grace’s set—a man who holds four aces can afford to throw away the fifth card, even if it’s a king. And people of my profession don’t go in for bluff. It ain’t their fancy.”

“What is your profession?” asked the Duchess, regarding with contempt the dark, full-fed, red-lipped, hook-beaked countenance before her.

“Money!” returned Mr. Moss Rubelius. He rattled coin in his trousers-pockets as he spoke, and the superfluity of gold manifested in large, coarse rings upon his thick fingers, the massy chain festooned across his broad chest, the enormous links fastening his cuffs, and the huge diamond pin in his cravat, seemed to echo “Money.”

The Duchess lost no time in coming to the point. She was not guided by previous experience, having hitherto, by grace as well as luck, steered clear of scandal. But, girl of twenty as she was, she asked, as coolly as an _intrigante_ of forty, though her young heart was fluttering wildly against the walls of its beautiful prison, “How did you get that card?”

“I will be quite plain with your Grace,” returned the money-lender. “When the second lot of cavalry drafts sailed for South Africa early in the year of 1900, our firm, ’aving a writ of _’abeas_ out against Captain Sir Hugh Delaving of the Royal Red Dragoon Guards—I have reason to believe your Grace knew something of the Captain?”

“Yes,” said the Duchess, turning her cold blue eyes upon the twinkling orbs of Mr. Moss Rubelius, “I knew something of the Captain. You do not need to ask the question. Please go on!”

“The Captain was,” resumed Mr. Rubelius, “for a born aristocrat, the downiest I ever see—saw, I mean. He gave our clerks and the men with the warrant the slip by being ’eaded up in a wooden packin’ case, labeled ‘Officers’ Stores,’ and got away to the Cape, where he was killed in his first engagement.”

“This,” said the Duchess, “is no news to me.”

“No,” said the money-lender; “but it may be news to your Grace that, though we couldn’t lay our ‘ands on the Captain himself, we got hold of all his luggage. Not much there that was of any marketable value, except a silver-gilt toilet-set. But there was a packet of letters in a Russia writin’-case with a patent lock, all of ’em written in the large-sized, square ’and peculiar to the leadin’ female aristocracy, and signed ‘Ethelwyne,’ or merely ‘E.’”

“And this discovery procures me the pleasure of this interview?” remarked the Duchess. “The letters are mine—you come on the errand of a blackmailer. I have only one thing to wonder at, and that is—why you have not come before?”

“Myself and partner thought, as honorable men of business, it would be better to approach the Captain first,” explained the usurer. “His mother died the week he sailed for Africa, and left him ten thousand pounds. We ’astened to communicate with him, but——”

“But he had been killed meanwhile,” said the Duchess. “You would have had the money he owed—or did not owe—you, and your price for the letters, had you reached him in time; but you did not, and your goods are left upon your hands. Why, as honorable men of business”—her lovely lip curled—“did you not take them at once to the Duke?”

Mr. Moss Rubelius seemed for the first time a little nonplussed. He looked down at his large, shiny boots, and the sight did not appear to relieve him.

“I will be quite plain with your Grace.”

“Pray endeavor!” said the Duchess.

“The letters are—to put it delicately—not compromising enough. They’re more,” said Mr. Rubelius, “the letters a school-girl at Brighton would write to her music-master, supposing him to be young and possessed of a pair of cavalry legs and a moustache. There’s fuel in ’em for a First-Class Connubial Row,” continued Mr. Rubelius, “but not material for a Domestic Upheaval—followed by an Action for Divorce. As a man, no longer, but once in business—for within this last month our firm has dissolved, and myself and my partner have retired upon our means—this is my opinion with regard to these letters in your Grace’s handwriting, addressed to the late Captain Sir H. Delaving: The Duke, I believe, would only laugh at ’em.”

The Duchess started violently, and seemed about to speak.

“But, still, the letters are worth paying for,” ended Mr. Moss Rubelius. “And your Grace can have em—at my price.”

“What is your price?” asked the Duchess, trying in vain to read in the stolid physiognomy before her the secret purpose of the soul within.

“Perhaps your Grace wouldn’t mind my taking a chair?” insinuated Mr. Rubelius.

“Do as you please, sir,” said the Duchess, “only be brief.”

“I’ll try,” said the money-lender, comfortably crossing his legs. “To begin—we’re in the London Season and the month of March, and your Grace has a party at Rantorlie for the April salmon-fishing. Angling’s my one vice—my only weakness, ever since I caught minnows in the Regent’s Canal with a pickle-bottle tied to a string. Coarse fishing in the Thames was my recreation in grub times, whenever I ’ad a day away from our office in the Minories. Trout I’ve caught now and then, with a worm on a Stuart tackle—since I became a butterfly. But I’ve never had a slap at a salmon, and the finest salmon-anglin’ in the kingdom is to be ’ad in the Haste, below Rantorlie. Ask me there for April, see that I ’ave the pick of the sport, even if you ’ave a Royal duke to cater for, as you ’ad last year, and, the day I land my first twenty-pounder, the letters are yours.”

The Duchess burst out laughing wildly.

“Ha, ha! Oh!” she cried; “it is impossible to help it.... I can’t!... It is so.... Ha, ha, ha!”