Chapter V

They went, without visiting the basilica, back to Venice in the twilight which deepened into night as they drew near the city; the moon was high and the air still. They dined in the spacious rooms set aside in the hotel for the young prince. When the dinner was over Adrianis rose.

“Will you come?” he asked.

“Where?” asked Damer.

“To the Ca’ Zaranegra,” he replied, with a boyish laugh.

“Not I,” replied Damer.

“A rivederci, then,” said Adrianis.

But he lingered a moment.

“It will not be fair to you,” he said, “for me to take the credit of having found this necklace.”

“Whatever honour there may be in the salvage I cede it, I tell you, willingly.”

“Of course I shall tell her that it was you.”

“There is no need to do so; I am not a squire of dames. She will prefer a Sicilian Prince to a plain man of science. However, you must find the lady first. The true owner lies under some mossgrown slab in some chapel crypt, no doubt.”

“Why will you speak of death? I hate it.”

“Hate it as you may it will overtake you. Alexander hated it, but still! When we shall have found the secret of life we may perhaps find the antidote to death. But that time is not yet.”

He looked at his companion as he spoke, and thought what he did not speak:

“Yes; strong as you are, and young as you are, and fortunate as you are, you too will die like the pauper and the cripple and the beggar!”

The reflection gratified him; for of the youth, of the beauty, of the fortune, he was envious, and with all his scorn of higher intellect he despised the childlike, happy, amorous temperament, and the uncultured mind which went with them.

“If I had only his wealth,” he thought often. “Or if he only had my knowledge!”

“When we shall have penetrated the secret of life we shall perhaps be able to defy death,” repeated Adrianis. “What use would that be? You would soon have the world so full that there would be no standing room; and what would you do with the choking multitudes?”

“I never knew you so logical,” said the elder man, contemptuously. “But have no fear. We are far enough off the discovery; when it is made it will remain in the hands of the wise. The immortality of fools will never be contemplated by science.”

“The wise will not refuse to sell the secret to the wealthy fools,” thought his companion, but he forbore to say so. He was generous of temper, and knew that his companion had both wisdom and poverty.

A few seconds later the splash of the canal water beneath the balcony told the other that the gondola was moving.

“What a child!” thought Damer, with impatient contempt; he turned up the light of his reading lamp, opened a number of the French _Journal de Physiologie_, and began to read, not heeding the beauty of the moonlit marbles of the Salvatore in front of him, or listening to the song from Mignon which a sweet-voiced lad was singing in a boat below. He read on thus in solitude for three hours; the great tapestried and gilded room behind him, the gliding water below; the beautiful church in front of his balcony, the laughter, the music, the swish of oars, the thrill of lutes and guitars, all the evening movement on the canal as the crowds went to and fro the Piazza, not disturbing him from his studies of which every now and then he made a note in pencil in a pocket-book.

It was twelve o’clock when, into the empty brilliantly lighted room, Adrianis entered and came across it to where Damer sat on the balcony.

“I have found her!” he said, with joyous triumph. The moonlight shone on his dark, starry eyes, his laughing mouth, his tall figure, full of grace and strength like the form of the Greek Hermes in the Vatican.

Damer laid aside his papers with impatience.

“And she has welcomed you, apparently? It is midnight, and you look victorious.”

Adrianis made a gesture of vexed protestation.

“Pray do not suspect such things. I sent in my card and begged her major-domo to say that I had found her necklace. She sent word for me to go upstairs that she might thank me. Of course my name was known to her. She had a duenna with her. It was all solemn and correct. She was enchanted to find her necklace. It was an heirloom which Zaranegra gave her. He was killed in a duel, as I told you, two years ago. She is very beautiful and looks twenty years old, even less. I was very honest; I told her that an Englishman who was travelling with me had enjoyed the honour of finding the opals; and she wishes to see you to-morrow. I promised to take you _in prima sera_; you surely ought to be grateful.”

Damer shrugged his shoulders and looked regretfully at his papers and pencils.

“Women only disturb one,” he said, ungraciously.

Adrianis laughed.

“It is that disturbance which perfumes our life and shakes the rose leaves over it. But I remember, to attract you a woman must be lying, dead or alive, on an operating-table.”

“Alive by preference,” said Damer. “The dead are little use to us; their nervous system is still, like a stopped clock.”

“A creature must suffer to interest you?”

“Certainly.”

Adrianis shuddered slightly.

“Why did you save me?”

Damer smiled.

“My dear prince, it is my duty to save when I can. I should have preferred to let you alone, and study your natural powers of resistance in conflict with the destruction which was menacing them. But I could not follow my preferences. I was called in to assist your natural powers by affording them artificial resistance; and I was bound to do so.”

Adrianis made a grimace which signified disappointment and distaste.

“If my mother knew you looked at it in that way she would not adore you, my friend, as she does.”

“The princess exaggerates,” said Damer, putting out his lamp. “Mothers always do; I do not think I ever said anything to lead her to deceive herself with regard to me. She knows what my interests and my pursuits are.”

“But,” said Adrianis, wistfully, “surely there are many men of science, many surgeons, whose desire is to console, to amend, who care for the poor human material on which they work?”

“There are some,” replied Damer; “but they are not in the front ranks of their profession, nor will science ever owe much to them.”

The young man was silent; he felt in his moral nature as he had sometimes felt in his physical, when a chill icy wind had risen and passed through the sunshine of a balmy day. He shook off the impression with the mutability of a happy temper.

“Eh via!” he cried. “You make me feel cold in the marrow of my bones. Good-night. I am tired, and I go to dream of the lady of the opals. Like you, I prefer living women to dead ones, but I do not wish them to suffer. I wish them to enjoy—for my sake and their own!”

Damer, left alone, relit his lamp, took up his papers and books, went into the room, for the night was fresh, and remained reading and writing until daybreak.