as well for her to know. He has the air, in all he does or says, of a scientific man who has no existence out of the region of science.
Valerie—for it is indeed she—raises her veil.
“Monsieur,” she says, “you are candid with me, and it will be the best for me to be frank with you. I am very unhappy—I have been so for some months past; and I shall be so until my dying day. One reason alone has prevented my coming to you long ere this, to offer you half my fortune for such another drug as that which you sold to me some time past. You may judge, then, that reason is a very powerful one, since, though death alone can give me peace, I yet do not wish to die. But I wish to have at my command a means of certain death. I may never use it at all: I swear never to use it on anyone but myself!”
All this time the blue spectacles have been fixed on her face, and now Monsieur Blurosset interrupts her—
“And now for such a drug, mademoiselle, you would offer me a large sum of money?” he asks.
“I would, monsieur.”
“I cannot sell it you,” he says, as quietly as though he were speaking of some unimportant trifle.
“You cannot?” she exclaims.
“No, mademoiselle. I am a man absorbed entirely in the pursuit of science. My life has been so long devoted to science only, that perhaps I may have come to hold everything beyond the circle of my little laboratory too lightly. You asked me some time since for a poison, or at least you were introduced to me by a pupil of mine, at whose request I sold you a drug. I had been twenty years studying the properties of that drug. I may not know them fully yet, but I expect to do so before this year is out. I gave it to you, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may in your hands have done some mischief.” He pauses here and looks at her for a moment; but she has borne the knowledge of her crime so long, and it has become so much a part of her, that she does not flinch under his scrutiny.
“I placed a weapon in your hands,” he continues, “and I had no right to do so. I never thought of this at that time; but I have thought of it since. For the rest, I have no inducement to sell you the drug you ask for. Money is of little use to me except in the necessary expenses of the chemicals I use. These”—he points to the cards—“give me enough for those expenses; beyond those, my wants amount to some few francs a week.”
“Then you will not sell me this drug? You are determined?” she asks.
“Quite determined.”
She shrugs her shoulders. “As you please. There is always some river within reach of the wretched; and you may depend, monsieur, that they who cannot support life will find a means of death. I will wish you good evening.”
She is about to leave the room, when she stops, with her hand upon the lock of the door, and turns round.
She stands for a few minutes motionless and silent, holding the handle of the door, and with her other hand upon her heart. Monsieur Blurosset has the faintest shadow of a look of surprise in his expressionless countenance.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me to-night,” she says, “but something seems to root me to this spot. I cannot leave this room.”
“You are ill, mademoiselle, perhaps. Let me give you some restorative.”
“No, no, I am not ill.”
Again she is silent; her eyes are fixed, not on the chemist, but with a strange vacant gaze upon the wall before her. Suddenly she asks him,—
“Do you believe in animal magnetism?”
“Madame, I have spent half my lifetime in trying to answer that question, and I can only answer it now by halves. Sometimes no; sometimes yes.”
“Do you believe it possible for one soul to be gifted with a mysterious prescience of the emotions of another soul?—to be sad when that is sad, though utterly unconscious of any cause for sadness; and to rejoice when that is happy, having no reason for rejoicing?”
“I cannot answer your question, madame, because it involves another. I never yet have discovered what the soul really is. Animal magnetism, if it ever become a science, will be a material science, and the soul escapes from all material dissection.”
“Do you believe, then, that by some subtle influence, whose nature is unknown to us, we may have a strange consciousness of the presence or the approach of some people, conveyed to us by neither the hearing nor the sight, but rather as if we felt that they were near?”
“You believe this possible, madame, or you would not ask the question.”
“Perhaps. I have sometimes thought that I had this consciousness; but it related to a person who is dead——”
“Yes, madame.”
“And—you will think me mad; Heaven knows, I think myself so—I feel as if that person were near me to-night.”
The chemist rises, and, going over to her, feels her pulse. It is rapid and intermittent. She is evidently violently agitated, though she is trying with her utmost power to control herself.
“But you say that this person is dead?” he asks.
“Yes; he died some months since.”
“You know that there are no such things as ghosts?”
“I am perfectly convinced of that!”
“And yet—?” he asks.
“And yet I feel as though the dead were near me to-night. Tell me—there is no one in this room but ourselves?”
“No one.”
“And that door—it leads——”
“Into the room in which I sleep.”
“And there is no one there?” she asks.
“No one. Let me give you a sedative, madame: you are certainly ill.”
“No, no, monsieur; you are very good. I am still weak from the effects of a long illness. That weakness may be the cause of my silly fancies of to-night. To-morrow I leave France, perhaps for ever.”
She leaves him; but on the steep dark staircase she pauses for a moment, and seems irresolute, as if half determined to return: then she hurries on, and in a minute is in the street.
She takes a circuitous route towards the house in which she lives. So plainly dressed, and thickly veiled, no one stops to notice her as she walks along.
Her husband, Monsieur Marolles, is engaged at a dinner given by a distinguished member of the chamber of peers. Decidedly he has held winning cards in the game of life. And she, for ever haunted by the past, with weary step goes onward to a dark and unknown future.
Book the Fourth
Napoleon the Great
