Chapter IV

When the young Sicilian prince, Lionello Adrianis, head of an ancient Hispano-Italian family, had met with a hunting accident, and the tusks of an old boar had brought him near to death, an English surgeon, by name Frederic Damer, who was then in Palermo, did for him what none of the Italian surgeons dared to do, and, so far as the phrase can ever be correct of human action, saved his life. A year had passed since then; the splendid vitality of the Sicilian had returned to all its natural vigour; he was only twenty-four years of age and naturally strong as a young oak in the woods of Etna. But he had a mother who loved him, and was anxious; she begged the Englishman to remain awhile near him; the Sicilian laughed but submitted; he and Damer had travelled together in Egypt and India during several months, and were now about in another month to part company; the Sicilian to return to his own people, the Englishman to occupy a chair of physiology in a town of northern Europe.

Their lives had been briefly united by accident and would have parted in peace: a collar of opals was by chance washed up amongst the flags and burdocks of Torcello and the shape of their fate was altered.

With such trifles do the gods play when they stake the lives of men on the game.

Damer was the son of a country physician, but his father had been poor, the family numerous, and he, a third son, had been sent out into the world with only his education as his capital. He practised surgery to live; he practised physiology to reach through it that power and celebrity for which his nature craved and his mental capacity fitted him. But at every step his narrow means galled and fretted him, and he had been a demonstrator, an assistant, a professor in schools, when his vast ability and relentless will fitted him for the position of a Helmholtz or a Virchow in that new priesthood which has arisen to claim the rule of mankind, and sacrifices to itself all sentient races.

In Adrianis he saw all the powers of youth and of wealth concentrated in one who merely used them for a careless enjoyment and a thoughtless good nature, which seemed, to himself, as senseless as the dance in the sun of an amorous negro.

Adrianis and the whole of his family had shown him the utmost gratitude, liberality, and consideration, and the young prince bore from him good-humouredly sarcasms and satires which he would not have supported from an emperor; but Damer in his turn felt for the Sicilian and his people nothing but the contempt of the great intellect for the uncultured mind, the irritation of the wise man who sees a child gaily making a kite to divert itself out of the parchments of a treatise in an unknown tongue which, studied, might have yielded up to the student the secret of perished creeds and of lost nations. There is no pride so arrogant, no supremacy so unbending, as those of the intellect. It may stand, like Belisarius, a beggar at the gate; but like Belisarius it deems itself the superior of all the crowds who drop their alms to it, and while it stretches out its hand to them its lips curse them.