The Mesmerist's Victim

CHAPTER XXX

THE BLOOD

LADY DUBARRY had not seen the street door close after her before Balsamo hurried up into the room where he had left Lorenza. But she was gone.

Her fine flowered cashmere shawl remained on the cushions as a token of her stay in the room.

A painful thought struck him that she had feigned to sleep. Thus she would have dispelled all uneasiness, doubts and mistrust in her husband’s mind only to flee at the first chance for liberty. This time she would be surer of what to do, instructed by her former experience.

This idea made him bound. He searched without avail after ringing for Fritz to come to him. But nobody was about, as nobody had gone out behind the countess.

To run about, moving the furniture, calling Lorenza, looking without seeing, listening without hearing, thrilling without living, and pondering without thinking – such was the state of the infuriate for three minutes, which were as many ages.

He came out of his hallucination and dipping his hand in a vase of iced water, he held it on his forehead. By his will he chased away that throbbing of the blood in the brains which goes on silently in life but when heard means madness or death.

“Come, come, let us reason,” he said, “Lorenza is no more here, and consequently must have gone forth. How? Through Andrea de Taverney I can ascertain all – whether my incorruptible Fritz was bribed and – then, if love is a sham, if science is an error, and fidelity a snare – Balsamo will punish without pity or reservation – like the powerful man smites when he has put aside mercy and preserves but pride. I must let Fritz perceive nothing while I haste to Trianon.”

In taking up his hat to go, he stopped.

“Goodness, I am forgetting the old man,” he said. “I must attend to Althotas before all. In my monstrous love, I left my unfortunate friend to himself – I have been inhuman and ungrateful.”

With the fever animating his movements he sprang to the trap which he lowered and on which he stepped.

Scarcely had he reached the level of the laboratory, than he was struck by the old man’s voice crooning a song. To Balsamo’s high astonishment his first words were not a reproach as he expected; he was received by a natural and simple outburst of gaiety.

The old man was lolling back in his easy chair, snuffing the air as though he were drinking in new life at each sniff. His eyes were filled with dull fire, but the smile on his lips made them lighter as they were fastened on the visitor.

In this close, warm atmosphere, Balsamo felt giddy as if respiration and his strength failed him simultaneously.

“Master,” said he, looking for something to lean against, “you must not stay here: one cannot breathe. Let me open a window overhead for there seems to reek from the floor the odor of blood.”

“Blood? ha, ha, ha!” roared Althotas. “I noticed it but did not mind: it is you who have tender heart and brain who is easily affected.”

“But you have blood on your hands and it is on the table – this smell is of blood – and human blood,” added the younger man, passing his hand over his brow streaming with perspiration.

“Ha, he has a subtile scent,” said the old sage. “Not only does he recognize blood but can tell it is human, too.”

Looking round, Balsamo perceived a brass basin half full with a purple liquid reflected on the sides.

“Whence comes this blood?” he gasped.

He uttered a terrible roar! Part of the table, usually cumbered by alembics, crucibles, flasks, galvanic batteries and the like, was now clothed with a white damask sheet, worked with flowers. Among the flowers here and there, spots of a red hue oozed up. Balsamo took one corner of the sheet and plucked the whole towards him.

His hair bristled up, and his opened mouth could not let the horrible yell come forth – it died in the gullet.

It was the corpse of Lorenza which stiffened on the board. The livid head seemed still to smile and hung back as though drawn down by the weight of her hair.

A large cut yawned above the clavicle, but not a drop of blood was issuing now. The hands were rigid and the eyes closed under the violet lids.

“Yes, thanks for your having placed her under my hand where I could so readily take her,” said the horrible old man; “in her have I found the blood I wanted.”

“Villain of the vilest,” screamed Balsamo, with the cry of despair bursting from all pores, “you have nothing to do but die – for this was my wife since four days ago! You have murdered her to no gain.”

“She was not a virgin?”

Althotas quivered to the eyes at this revelation, as if an electric shock made them oscillate in their orbits. His pupils frightfully dilated; his gums gnashed for want of teeth; his hand let fall the phial of the elixir of long life, and it fell and shivered into a thousand splinters. Stupefied, annihilated, struck at the same time in heart and brain, he dropped back heavily in his armchair.

Balsamo, bending with a sob over the body of his wife, swooned as he was kissing the tresses.

Time passed silently and mournfully in the death-chamber where the blood congealed.

Suddenly in the midst of the night a bell rang in the room itself.

Fritz must have guessed that his master was in the laboratory of Althotas to have sent the warning thither. He repeated it three times and still Balsamo did not lift his head.

In a few minutes the ringing came, still louder, without rousing the mourner from his stupor.

But at another call, the impatient jangle made him look up though not with a start. He questioned the space with the cold solemnity of a corpse coming forth from a grave.

The bell kept on ringing.

Energy, reviving, at last aroused intelligence in the husband of Lorenza Feliciani. He took away his head from hers; it had lost its warmth without warming hers.

“Great news or a great danger,” he said to himself. “I should as lief meet a great danger.”

He rose upright.

“But why should I answer this appeal?” he asked without perceiving the sombre effect of his voice under the gloomy skylight and in the funeral chamber. “Is there anything in this world to alarm or interest me?”

As if to answer him the bell was so roughly shaken that the iron tongue broke loose and fell on a glass alembic which it shivered on the floor.

He held back no longer; besides, it was important that neither Fritz nor another should come here to find him.

With a tranquil tread he opened the trap and descended. When he opened the staircase door, Fritz stood on the top step, pale and breathless, holding a torch in one hand and the broken bell-pull in the other.

At sight of his master, he uttered a cry of satisfaction and then one of surprise and fright. Respectful as he usually was, he took the liberty of seizing him by the arm and dragging him up to a Venetian mirror.

“Look, excellency,” he said.

Balsamo shuddered. In an hour he had grown twenty years older. In his eyes were lustre; in his skin no blood; and over all his lineaments was spread an expression of stupor and lack of intelligence. Bloody foam bathed his lips, and on the white front of his shirt a large blood spot spread. He looked at himself for an instant without recognition. Then he plunged his glance steadily into that of his reflected self.

“You are quite right, Fritz,” he said. “But why did you call me?”

“They are here, master,” said the faithful servant, with disquiet: “the five masters.”

“All here?” queried Balsamo, starting.

“With each an armed servant in the yard. They are impatient which is why I rang so often and roughly.”