Part 3

“What do you do there?” Veronica Zaranegra wished to ask him; but she never did so; she felt vaguely afraid as a woman of the Middle Age would have feared to ask a magician what he did with his alembics and his spheres.

Although the eyes of lovers are proverbially washed by the collyrium of jealousy, those of Adrianis were blind to the passion which Damer, like himself, had conceived. The reserve and power of self-restraint in Damer were extreme, and served to screen his secret from the not very discerning mind of his companion. Moreover, the pride of race which was born and bred in Adrianis rendered it impossible for him to suspect that he possessed a rival in one who was, however mentally superior, so far socially inferior, to himself and to the woman he loved.

That a man who was going to receive a stipend as a teacher in a German university could lift his eyes to Veronica Zaranegra would have seemed wholly impossible to one who had been reared in patrician and conservative tenets. He never noticed the fires which slumbered in the cold wide-opened eyes of his friend and monitor. He never observed how frequently Damer watched him and her when they were together, listened from afar to their conversation, and invariably interrupted them at any moment when their words verged on more tender or familiar themes. He was himself tenderly, passionately, romantically enamoured; his temper was full of a romance to which he could not often give adequate expression; his love for her had the timidity of all sincere and nascent passion; he was pained and chafed by the manner in which she avoided his definite declaration of it, but he did not for a moment trace it to its right cause, the magnetic influence which the Englishman had upon her, the hesitation which was given her by vague hypnotic suggestion. If any looker-on had warned him, he would have laughed and said that the days of magic were past.

He himself only counted time by the hours which brought him into her presence on the water, on the island, or in the evening receptions in the palace. He made water-festivals and pleasure-cruises to please her; he had sent for his own sailing yacht from Palermo. The long, light days of late spring and earliest summer passed in a series of ingenious amusements of which the sole scope was to obtain a smile from her. Often she did smile, the radiance of youth and of a woman’s willingness to be worshipped shining on her fair countenance as the sun shone on the sea. Sometimes also the smile ceased suddenly when, from a distance, her eyes encountered those of Damer.

All that was most delightful in life offered itself to her in the homage of Adrianis: his mother’s welcome, his southern clime, his great love, his infinite tenderness and sweetness of temper, his great physical beauty. She longed to accept these great gifts; she longed to feel his arms folded about her and his cheek against hers; and yet she hesitated, she delayed, she avoided, because in the eyes of another man, whom she disliked and feared, she read mockery, disdain, and superiority. She could not have said what it was that she felt any more than the young spaniel could tell what moves it as it looks up into human eyes, and reads authority in them, and crouches, trembling.

Why did he stay here? she asked herself, this cold, still, irresponsive man, who had nothing in him which was not alien to the youthful and pleasure-loving society in which he found himself, and who was by his own admission already overdue at the university to which he had been appointed.

“Are you not losing time?” she said once to him; “we are so frivolous, so ignorant, so unlike you.”

“I never lose time,” replied Damer. “An amœba in a pool on the sand is companion enough for me.”

Seeing that she had no idea of what he meant, he added:

“A man of science is like an artist; his art is everywhere, wherever natural forms exist.”

“Or like a sportsman,” said Adrianis, who was listening; “his sport is everywhere, wherever there are living things to kill.”

“Put it so if you please,” said Damer. But he was annoyed; he disliked being answered intelligently and sarcastically by one whom he considered a fool. Whatever Adrianis said irritated him, though it was almost perpetually courteous and simple, as was the nature of the speaker.

Damer read the young man’s heart like an open book and he knew that it was wholly filled with the image of Veronica. He had never liked Adrianis; he had no liking for youth or for physical beauty, or for kindliness and sweetness and simplicity of character. Such qualities were not in tune with him; they were no more to him than the soft, thick fur of the cat in his laboratory, which he stripped off her body that he might lay bare her spinal cord; the pretty, warm skin was nothing to science—no more than was the pain of the bared nerves.

He had saved the life of Adrianis because it had interested and recompensed him to do so; he had travelled with him for a year because it suited him financially to do so; but he had never liked him, he had never been touched by any one of the many generous and delicate acts of the young man, nor by the trust which the mother of Adrianis continually expressed in her letters to himself. Where jealousy sits on the threshold of the soul, goodness and kindness and faith knock in vain for admittance. Envy is hatred in embryo; and only waits in the womb of time for birth.

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.

X.

After the death of the serving-man, Biancon, the name of the English scientist and surgeon became known and revered amongst the persons of his own profession in Venice. The poor man had died certainly from the shock to the nerves, but that was of small moment. The operation had been eminently successful, as science counts success. It had been admirably performed, and had, as he had said to Veronica, cleared up a doubt which could not, without a human subject, have been satisfactorily dissipated. His skill, his manual dexterity, his courage, were themes of universal praise, and more than one rich person of the Veneto entreated his examination, and submitted to his treatment.

Adrianis saw but little of him in the daytime, but most evenings in _prima sera_ they met in the Palazzo Zaranegra. There Damer spoke little, but he spoke with effect; and, when he was silent, it seemed to the young mistress of the house that his silence was odiously eloquent, for it appeared always to say to her: “What a mindless creature you are! What a mindless creature you love!”

Sometimes it seemed to her to say more; to say across the length of the lighted, perfumed, flower-filled salon, “And if I forbid your mutual passion? If I prevent its fruition?”

Out of his presence she ridiculed these ideas, but in his presence they were realities to her, and realities which alarmed and haunted her.

“How I wish you had never brought him here—oh, how I wish it!” she said once to Adrianis.

They were in the Piazza of St. Mark; it was late in the evening; the gay summer crowd was all around them; the band was playing; the full moon was above in all her glory; laughter and gay chatter mingled with the lapping of the water and the splash of oars. In the blaze of light under the colonnades people were supping and flirting and jesting, as though they were still in the days of Goldoni.

“Are you not a little unjust to me?” said Adrianis, gently. “I could not do otherwise, in common honesty, than tell you that it was not I who had found your opals, and you wished to see and to thank the person who had done so.”

“Oh, I know! I know!” she said, with an impatient sigh. “Such things are always one’s own fault. But he killed Biancon, and his very presence now is painful to me.”

“Tell him so.”

“I dare not.”

“Shall I tell him for you?”

She looked at him with the wistful, alarmed gaze of a frightened child.

“Oh, no, no! He would be offended. He might quarrel with you. No! Pray do not do that.”

“His anger has no terrors for me,” he said, with a smile. “But you know what you wish is my law for silence as for speech.”

“Limonate? Fragolone? Gelate? Confetti?” sang a boy, pushing against them with his tray of summer drinks, ices, fruits, and sweetmeats.

“Let us go; it is late; and the crowd grows noisy,” said her duenna.

Adrianis accompanied them to their gondola, which was in waiting beyond the pillars. He did not venture to offer to accompany them, for the hour was late, and the elder lady, herself a Zaranegra, was rigid in her construction and observance of etiquette. He watched the gondola drift away amongst the many others waiting there, and then turned back to the piazza as the two Vulcans on the clock-tower beat out on their anvil with their hammers the twelve strokes of midnight. He saw amongst the crowd the pale and thoughtful countenance of Damer. Had he heard what the young Countess had said of him? It was impossible to tell from his expression; he was looking up at the four bronze horses, as he sat, with an evening paper on his knee, at one of the little tables, an untouched lemonade standing at his elbow.

“I did not know you were here,” said Adrianis. “It is too frivolous a scene for you. Are you longing to dissect the horses of St. Mark’s?”

Damer smiled slightly.

“I fear I should find their anatomy faulty. I am no artist, or art critic either, or I should venture to say that I object to their attitude. Arrested motion is a thing too momentary to perpetuate in metal or in stone.”

Adrianis looked up at the rearing coursers.

“Surely we might as well object to the statue of Colleone because he sits erect and motionless through centuries?”

“No, that is quite another matter. Colleone is at rest. The horses yonder are leaping violently.”

“You are too subtle for me! I can only admire. I am an ignorant, you know. Have you been here long?”

“Half an hour.”

Had he heard? Adrianis wondered. It was impossible to tell.

“I seldom see you now,” he added. “You have become very unsociable.”

“I was not aware that I was ever sociable. People much occupied cannot be so. You see I have a newspaper and I do not read it; I have a _bevanda_ and I do not drink it. I have seen the Contessa Zaranegra and I have not spoken to her.”

It seemed that the reply, which was longer and more jesting than was the wont of the speaker, was made with intention.

Adrianis was silent. He wished to tell Damer that his presence was unwelcome to the lady of whom he spoke, but he hesitated; he was afraid to compromise her, to seem to boast of some confidence from her.

“Did you know,” he asked in a low tone, “that her poor serving man would die under the knife?”

Damer gave him a cold, contemptuous glance.

“I do not speak on professional subjects to laymen,” he said, curtly.

“I do not ask you,” replied Adrianis, “from the professional point of view. I ask you from that of humanity.”

“Humanity does not enter into the question,” said Damer, slightingly. “I hope you will not regard it as offensive if I ask you to limit yourself to speaking of what you understand.”

The blood rose into the cheek of Adrianis, and anger leapt to his lips. He restrained it with effort from utterance. The boundless scorn which Damer never scrupled to show for him was at times very chafing and provocative.

“You know, yourself, nothing of sculpture, you admit,” he said, controlling his personal feeling, “and yet you venture to criticise the horses of Lysippus.”

“My criticism is sound, and they are not the horses of Lysippus.”

“They may not be. But my criticism is sound too, I think, on your want of humanity towards poor Biancon.”

Damer cast an evil and disdainful glance at him.

“With regard,” he replied, “to the man Biancon, there could be no question of either cruelty or kindness. These terms do not enter into surgical vocabularies. You are well aware that on the stage no actor could act who felt in any manner the real emotions of his part. In like degree no surgeon could operate who was unnerved by what you call ‘humanity’ with regard to his patient. There is no more of feeling, or want of feeling, in the operator than in the actor. Is it impossible for you to comprehend that? As for yourself, you do not care the least for the dead facchino, you only care because a fair woman who is dear to you has wept.”

He spoke with insolence, but with apparently entire indifference. Adrianis coloured with displeasure and self-consciousness. It was the first time that the name of the Countess Zaranegra had been mentioned between them when out of her presence. It seemed to him an intolerable presumption in Damer to speak of her. But he scarcely knew how to reply. With a man of his own rank he would have quarrelled in such a manner that a sabre duel on the pastures by the Brenta river would have followed in the morning. But Damer was not socially his equal, and was a man to whom a year before he had owed, or had thought that he owed, his restoration to health and life.

“I should prefer that you left the name of that lady out of our discourse,” he said, in a low tone but with hauteur. “In my world we do not venture to speak of women whom we respect.”

Damer understood the reproof and the lesson so conveyed.

“I am not of your world,” he said, slightingly. “I have no such pretensions. And women are to me but subjects of investigation, like cats—in their bodies, I mean; of their minds and hearts I have no knowledge. I leave such studies to Paul Bourget and you.”

Then he rose and walked away towards the end of the piazza, where the opening of the goldsmiths’ street of the Merceria leads to the back of the clock-tower and the network of narrow passages beyond it.

Adrianis did not detain him, but went himself to his gondola and was taken the few yards which parted St. Mark’s from his hotel. Sometimes he slept on board his yacht, but sometimes at the hotel, because it was nearer to the Ca’ Zaranegra, which he could not see from his windows, but which he knew were there on the bend of the canal towards Rialto.

However, he reflected with consolation, in a week or two more Veronica would go to her father’s villa in the mountains of the Trentino, and she had given him to understand that she would tell the duke to invite him. Thither it would be impossible for Damer to go, even if he should desire to do so, which was improbable. For Adrianis never suspected the existence of any passion in Damer except the desire of command, the pleasure which the exercise of a strong will over weaker ones gave him from its sense of intellectual dominion.

The words of Damer seemed to him insolent; but he was used to his insolence, and he did not attribute them to any other feeling than that coldness of heart which was not new to him in the speaker.

To all interference in, or interrogation concerning, his scientific or surgical actions and purposes the Englishman had always replied with the same refusal to permit those whom he called laymen to judge either the deeds or the motives of his priesthood. It was precisely the same kind of arrogance and of inflexible secrecy to which Adrianis had been used in the ecclesiastics who had been set over him in his boyhood; the same refusal to be interrogated, the same mystic and unexplained claim of superiority and infallibility.

“If he would only go away!” thought Adrianis, as his gondola glided over the few hundred yards.

For the next few days he and Damer did not meet; he had arranged an excursion to Chioggia, and another to Grado, in which small cruises the Countess Zaranegra and other ladies were on board his schooner. It was beautiful weather; the sea was smooth and smiling; all that wealth could do to make the little voyages delightful was done, and he hoped in the course of them to have some opportunity to force from the lady of his thoughts some definite assurance of her acceptance of his love. In this hope he was disappointed.

Damer was not on board the yacht; but as she saw, over the distant water as they sailed away from Venice, the foundry flames and factory smoke of the Fondamenti, where his tower stood, she shuddered in the hot midsummer noon. It seemed as if even from that distance the eyes of the strange Englishman could see her and lay silence on her lips and terror on her heart. It was but a morbid fancy; she knew that; but she could not shake off the impression. Even when far out on the sunlit green waves of the Adriatic, when Venice had long dropped away out of sight, the chilliness and oppression of the hallucination remained with her.

Although she and every one else knew that the water-fêtes were solely in her honour and for her pleasure, she continued to accept the homage but to stop short of any actual and decisive words on her own part. Adrianis believed that her heart was his, and he could see nothing in the circumstances of either of them which need cause so much hesitation and doubt. Each was free, each young; each might run to meet happiness half-way, as children run to catch a ripe fruit before it has time to fall to earth, and pluck it, warm with sunlight, or pause, and let it drop ungathered. The position troubled and galled him, but his nature was sanguine and his temper optimistic.