The Professor's Experiment: A Novel (Complete‪)‬

The lamp was beginning to burn low; so was the fire. But neither of the two people in the room seemed to notice anything. The Professor had got upon his discovery again, and once there, no man living could check him. He had flung his arms across the table towards his companion, and the hands, with the palms turned upwards, marked every word as he uttered it, thumping the knuckles on the table here, shaking some imaginary disbeliever there—and never for a moment quiet—such old, lean, shrivelled, capable hands!

He was talking eagerly, as though the words flowed to him faster than he could utter them. This invention of his—this supreme discovery—would make a revolution in the world of science.

The young man looking back at him from the other side of the table listened intently. He was a tall man of about eight-and-twenty, and if not exactly handsome, very close to it. His eyes were dark, and somewhat sombre, and his mouth was thin-lipped, but kind, and suggestive of a nature that was just, beyond everything, if hardly sympathetic. It was a beautiful mouth, at all events, and as he was clean-shaven, one could see it as it was, without veiling of any kind. Perhaps the one profession of all others that most fully declares itself in the face of its sons is that of the law. A man who has been five years a barrister is seldom mistaken for anything else. Paul Wyndham was a barrister, and a rising one—a man who loved his profession for its own sake, and strove and fought to make a name in it, though no such struggle was needful for his existence, as from his cradle his lines had fallen to him in pleasant places. He was master of a good fortune, and heir to a title and ten thousand a year whenever it should please Providence to take his uncle, old Lord Shangarry, to an even more comfortable home than that which he enjoyed at present.

The Professor had been his tutor years ago, and the affection that existed between them in those far-off years had survived the changes of time and circumstance. The Professor loved him—and him only on all this wide earth. Wyndham had never known a father; the Professor came as near as any parent could, and in this new wild theory of the old man’s he placed implicit faith. It sounded wild, no doubt—it was wild—but there was not in all Ireland a cleverer man than the Professor, and who was to say but it might have some grand new meaning in it?

‘You are sure of it?’ he said, looking at the Professor with anxious but admiring eyes.

‘Sure! I have gone into it, I have studied it for twenty years, I tell you. What, man, d’ye think I’d speak of it even to you, if I weren’t sure? I tell ye—I tell ye’—he grew agitated and intensely Irish here—‘it will shake the world!’

The phrase seemed to please him; he drew his arms off the table and lay back in his chair as if revelling in it—as if chewing the sweet cud of it in fancy. He saw in his mind a day when in that old college of his over there, only a few streets away—in Trinity College—he should rise, and be greeted by his old chums and his new pupils, and the whole world of Dublin, with cheers and acclamations. Nay! it would be more than that—there would be London, and Vienna, and Berlin. He put Berlin last because, perhaps, he longed most of all for its applause; but in these dreamings he came back always to old Trinity, and found the greatest sweetness in the laurels to be gained there.

‘There can’t be a mistake,’ he went on, more now as if reasoning with himself than with his visitor, who was watching him, and was growing a little uneasy at the pallor that was showing itself round his nose and mouth—a pallor he had noticed very often of late when the old man was unduly excited or interested. ‘I have gone through it again and again. There is nothing new, of course, under the sun, and there can be little doubt but that it is an anæsthetic known to the Indians of Southern America years ago, and the Peruvians. There are records, but nothing sufficient to betray the secret. It was by the merest accident, as I have told you, that I stumbled on it. I have made many experiments. I have gone cautiously step by step, until now all is sure. So much for one hour. So much for six, so much for twenty-four, so much’—his voice rose almost to a scream, and he thumped his hand violently on the table—‘for seven days—for seven months!’