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 Welcome to today's triple Z..... The triple Z podcast is a daily recording that you can use to help you fall asleep each night. Just turn down the volume, lay back and enjoy as you fall asleep

Today we are reading the first three chapters of the book the professor's experiment. Written by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford in 1895 this book is considered a science fiction novel for it's time.

Margaret was born in County Cork, Ireland on 27 April 1855. Her father was Canon Fitzjohn Stannus Hamilton, rector and vicar-choral at Saint Faughnan's cathedral in Rosscarbery. As a child she enjoyed making up stories, and won prizes for her writing at school. She was educated at Portarlington College.

After reading these chapters I was interested enough to finish the book, but the professors experiment is never mentioned again after these chapters and instead follows the life of the mysterious Girl. If you like our program please share it with your friends, and leave us feedback on your podcast platform.

 THE PROFESSOR’S EXPERIMENT

CHAPTER One

‘Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.’

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!’

His voice broke off, and he sank back in his chair. The young man went quickly to a cupboard and poured out a glass of some white cordial.

‘Thank you—thank you,’ said the Professor, swallowing the nauseous mixture hurriedly, as though regretting the waste of time it took to drink it.

‘Why talk any more to-night?’ said the young man anxiously; ‘I am going abroad in a few days, but I can come again to see you to-morrow. It is late.’ He glanced at the clock, which pointed to ten minutes past eleven. The movement he made in pointing pushed aside his overcoat and showed that he was in evening dress. He had evidently been dining out, and had dropped in to see the Professor—an old trick of his—on his way home.

‘I must talk while I can,’ said the Professor, smiling. The cordial, whatever it was, had revived him, and he sat up and looked again at his companion with eyes that were brilliant. ‘As for this pain here,’ touching his side, ‘it is nothing—nothing. What I want to say, Paul, is this’—he bent towards Wyndham, and his lips quivered again with excitement: ‘If I could send a human creature to sleep for seven months, then why not for seven years—for ever?’

Wyndham looked at him incredulously.

‘But the last time——’

‘The last time you were here, I had not quite perfected my discovery. But since then some of my experiments have led me to think—to be absolutely certain—that life can be sustained, with all the appearance of death upon the subject, for a full week at all events.’

‘And when consciousness returns?’

‘The subject treated wakes to life again in exactly the same condition as when he or she fell asleep—without loss of brain or body power.’

‘Seven days! A long time!’ The young man smiled. ‘You bring back old thoughts and dreams. Are you a second Friar Laurence? Even he, though he could make the fair Juliet sleep till all believed her dead, could not prolong that unfortunate deception beyond a certain limit.

‘“And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death

Thou shalt continue two-and-forty hours.”

‘Less than two days—and yet, thou conjurer’—he slapped the Professor’s arm gaily—‘you would talk of keeping one in death’s bonds for years!’

‘Ay, years!’ The Professor looked back at him, and his eyes shone. Old age seemed to slip from him, and for the moment a transient youth was his again. ‘This is but a beginning—a mere start; but if it succeeds—if life can be sustained by means of this drug alone for seven days, why not for months and years?’

‘You forget one thing,’ said the young man. ‘Who would care for it? Why should one care to lie asleep for years?’

‘Many!’ said the Professor slowly.

He ceased, and a strange gloom shadowed his face. His thoughts had evidently gone backward into a long-dead past—a past that still lived. ‘Have you no imagination?’ he said at last reproachfully. ‘Think, boy—think! When affliction falls on one, when a grievous sorrow tears the heart, who would not wish for an oblivion that would be longer than a sleeping-draught could give, and less pernicious than suicide?’

‘The same refusal in both cases to meet and face one’s doom,’ said the young man. ‘You would create a new generation of cowards.’

‘Pshaw! there will be cowards without me,’ said the Professor. ‘But here, again, take another case. A man, we will say, has had his leg cut off—well, let him sleep until the leg is well, and he will escape all the twinges, the agonizing pains of the recovery. This is but one instance; all surgical cases could be treated so, and so much pain saved in this most painful world.’

‘Ah, I confess a charm lies there!’ said Wyndham.

‘It does. And yet it is to the other thought I lean—to the dread of memory where grief and shame lie.’ The Professor’s gaunt face lost again its short return of youth, and grew grim, and aged, and white. ‘See,’ he leant towards Wyndham, and pressed him into a chair beside the dying fire, ‘to you—to you alone I have revealed this matter: not so much because you have been my pupil, as that you have a hold on me. You think me dry, and hard, and old. All that is true. But’—his voice grew if possible harsher than ever—‘I have an affection for you.’

It seemed almost ludicrous to think of the Professor as having an affection for anything beyond his science and his discovery, with his bald head, and his bleared eyes, and his cold, forbidding face. The young man gazed at him with pardonable astonishment. That the Professor liked him, trusted him, was quite easy to understand—but the word ‘affection’!

‘It surprises you,’ said the old man slowly, perhaps a little sadly. ‘Yet there was a time——’ He moved and poked the fire into a sullen blaze. ‘I married,’ he said presently. ‘And she—well, I loved her, I think. It seems hard to remember now, it is so long ago, but I believe I had a heart then, and it was hers. She died.’ He poked the fire again, and most of it fell into the grate—it was all cinders by this time, and the younger man shivered. ‘It was well. Looking back upon it now,’ said the Professor coldly, ‘I am glad she died. She would have interfered with my studies. Her death left me free; but for that freedom, I should never have found out this.’ He tapped some papers lying loosely on the table—three or four pages, no more, with only a line or two upon them—vague suggestions of the great discovery that was to shake the world, so vague as to be useless to anyone but himself.

‘You had no children, then?’ asked Wyndham, who had never even heard that he was married until now.

‘One.’ The Professor paused, and the silence grew almost insupportable. ‘He, too, is dead. And that, too, is well. He was of no use. He only burdened the world.’

‘But——’

‘Not a question——’ The old man silenced him. ‘I cast him off.’ There was something terrible in the indifference with which he said this. ‘He was a fool—a criminal one. I heard later that he had married—no doubt as great a fool as himself. I hope so. Set a thief to catch a thief, you know.’

He laughed bitterly—the cruel, mirthless laugh of the embittered old. ‘For the rest, I know nothing,’ he said.

‘You made no inquiries?’

‘None. Why should I?’

‘He was your son.’

‘Well, does that make a black thing white? No—no! My son—my child is here!’ He touched the loose papers with a loving hand.

Wyndham did not pursue the subject further, and as if to show that it was ended, he stooped and threw some coals upon the fire that now seemed to be at its last gasp. A tiny smoke flew up between the fresh lumps, and after that came a little uncertain blaze. The fire had caught the coals.

The Professor had gone back to his heart’s desire.

‘To see the blossom of my labour bear fruit—that is my sole, my last demand from life. I have so short a time to live that I would hasten the fulfilment of my hopes.’

‘You mean——’

‘That I want to see the drug used on a human being. I have approached the matter with some of the authorities at Kilmainham, with a view to getting a condemned criminal to experiment upon; but up to this I have been refused, and in such a presumptuous manner as leads me to fear I shall never receive a better answer. Surely a man respited for seven days, as has been the case occasionally, might as well risk those seven days in the cause of science.’

Wyndham shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have never met that man,’ said he. But the Professor did not hear him.

‘The most humane people in the world,’ said he, ‘refuse help to the man who has devoted twenty years of his life to the cause of humanity. Such an anæsthetic as mine would work a revolution in the world of medicine. As I have told you, a man might not only be unconscious whilst a limb was being lopped off, but might remain so until the wound was healed, and then, made free of pain and perfectly well, be able to take his part in the world again.’

‘It sounds like a fairy-tale,’ said Wyndham, smiling. ‘You have, I suppose, made many experiments?’

‘On animals, yes—and of late without a single failure; but on a human body, no. As yet no opportunity has been afforded me. Either jealousy or fear has stopped my march, which I feel would be a triumphal one were the road made clear. I tell you I have addressed many leading men of science on the subject. I have asked them to be present. I would have everything above board, as you who know me can testify. I would have all men look on and bear witness to the splendour of my discovery.’ Here again the Professor’s strange deep eyes grew brilliant, once again that queer flash of a youth long ago departed was his. ‘I would have it shown to all the world in a blaze of light. But no man will take heed or listen. They laugh. They scoff. They will not countenance the chance of my killing someone; as if’—violently—‘the loss of one poor human life was to be counted, when the relief of millions is in the balance.’

He sank back as if exhausted, and then went on, his tone hard, yet excited:

‘Now it has come to this. If the chance were given me of trying my discovery on man, woman, or child, I should take it, without the sanction of the authorities, and with it that other chance of being hanged afterwards if the experiment failed.’

‘You feel so sure as that?’ questioned Wyndham. The old man’s enthusiasm had caught him. He too was looking eager and excited.

‘Sure!’ The Professor rose, gaunt, haggard, and with eyes that flashed fire beneath the pent brows that overhung them. ‘I would stake my soul—nay, more, my reputation—on the success of my discovery. Oh for a chance to prove it!’

At this moment there was a low knock at the door.

CHAPTER two:

‘Of all things tired thy lips look weariest.’

‘What shall I do to be for ever known?’

The handle was turned, and the door opened with a considerable amount of caution (the Professor did not permit interruptions). It was evidently, however, the caution of one who was suppressing badly a wild desire to make a rush into the room, and presently a man’s head appeared round the corner of the door, and after it his body. He came a yard or two beyond the threshold, and then stood still. His reddish hair was standing out a little, and his small twinkling Irish eyes were blinking nervously. He looked eagerly first at the younger man, who was his master, and then at the Professor, and then back again at Wyndham.

‘Well, Denis?’ said the latter, a little impatiently.

‘If ye plaze, sir, there’s an unfortunate young faymale on the steps below.’

The Professor frowned. As if such an ordinary occurrence as that should be allowed to interfere with a discussion on the great discovery! Wyndham spoke.

‘If she is noisy or troublesome, you had better call a policeman,’ he said indifferently.

‘Noisy! Divil a sound out of her,’ said Denis. ‘She looks for all the world, yer honour, as if there wasn’t a spark o’ life left in her. Sthretched in the hall she is, an’ the colour o’ death.’

‘In the hall?’ said Wyndham quickly. ‘I thought you said she was on the steps.’

‘She was. She’—cautiously—‘was. But——’ He paused and scanned anxiously the two faces before him. ‘It’s bitther cowld outside to-night, so I tuk her in.’

And, indeed, though the month was May, a searching wind was shaking the city, and biting into the hearts of young and old. As often happens in that ‘merrie month,’ a light fall of snow was whitening the tops of the houses.

‘I had better see to this,’ said the young man, rising. He left the room, followed by Denis (who had stopped to throw a few more coals on the now cheerful fire), and went down to the cold, bare, hideous hall below. The light from the solitary gas-lamp scarcely lit it, and it took him a few seconds to discern something that lay on the worn tarpaulin at the lower end of it. At last he made it out, and, stepping nearer, saw that it was the figure of a young and very slight girl. She was lying on the ground, her back supported against a chair, and Wyndham could see that Denis had folded an old coat of the Professor’s that usually hung on the hat-stand, and placed it behind her head.

The light was so dim that he could not see what she was like; but stooping over her, he felt her hands, and found that they were cold as ice. Instinct, however, told him that life still ran within her veins, and lifting her quickly in his arms, he carried her upstairs to the room he had just left, and where the Professor still sat, so lost in fresh dreams of the experiment yet to be made that he started as Wyndham re-entered the room with his strange burden; it was, indeed, with difficulty that he brought his mind back to the present moment. He had forgotten why the young man had left the room.

‘She seems very ill,’ said Wyndham. His man had followed him, and now, through a sign from his master, he pulled forward a huge armchair, in which Wyndham placed the unconscious girl.

The Professor came nearer and stared down at her. She was very young—hardly eighteen—but already Misery or Want, or both, had seized and laid their cruel hands upon her, dabbing in dark bistre shades beneath her eyes, and making sad hollows in her pallid cheeks. The lips, white now, were firmly closed as if in death, but something about the formation of them suggested the idea that even in life they could be firm too.

It was a face that might be beautiful if health had warmed it, and if joy had found a seat within the heart that now seemed at its last ebb. The lashes lying on the white, cold cheek were singularly long and dark, and Wyndham roused himself suddenly to find himself wondering what could be the colour of the eyes that lay hidden behind that wonderful fringe.

Her gown was of blue serge, neatly, even elegantly made, and the collar and cuffs she wore were quite primitive in their whiteness and simplicity. She had no hat or cloak with her, but a little gray woollen shawl had been evidently twisted round her head. Now it had fallen back, leaving all the glory of her rich chestnut hair revealed.

Involuntarily the young man glanced at her left hand.

There was no ring there. An intense wave of pity swept over him. Another! Dear God! what cruel sorrows lie within this world of Yours!

The face was so young, so free of hardness, vice, or taint of any kind, that his very heart bled for her. Misery alone seemed to mark it. That was deeply stamped. Looking at her, he almost hoped that she would never wake again—that she was really dead; but even as this thought crossed his mind, she stirred, sighed softly, and opened her eyes.

For awhile she gazed at them—on the Professor, impassive, silent; on the younger man, anxious, pained—and then with a sharp, quick movement she released herself from the arm Wyndham had placed round her, and raised herself to a sitting posture. There was such terror in her eyes as she did this that the younger man hastened to reassure her.

‘You are quite safe here,’ he said kindly. The girl looked at him, then cast a frightened glance past him, and over his shoulder, as though looking fearfully for some dreaded object. ‘My man found you on the steps outside. You were ill—fainting, he said—so he brought you in here to’—with a gesture towards the Professor—‘this gentleman’s house.’

The girl looked anxiously at the Professor, who nodded as in duty bound, but who seemed unmistakably bored, for all that, and angry enough to frighten her afresh.

‘If you will tell us where you live,’ said Wyndham gently, ‘we shall see that you are taken back there.’

The girl shrank visibly. She caught the little shawl that had slipped from her, and drew it round her head once more, almost hiding her face.

‘I can find my own way,’ she said. The voice was low, musical; it trembled, and as she moved forward to pass Wyndham, so did she. She even tottered, so much, indeed, that she was obliged to catch hold of a table near to keep herself from falling.

‘It is impossible for you to walk to-night,’ said the young man earnestly. ‘And there is no necessity for it. My servant is at your disposal; he can call a cab for you, and he is quite to be trusted; he will see you to your home.’

The girl hesitated for a moment, then lifted her heavy eyes to his.

‘I have no home,’ she said.

It was a very forlorn answer, and it went to Wyndham’s heart. God help her, poor girl! whoever she was. He glanced again at her clothes, which were decidedly above the average of the extremely wretched, and he was conscious of a certain curiosity with regard to her—a distinctly kindly one.

The girl caught the glance and turned away her head.

‘You can at least say where you want to be driven,’ said he gravely, but with sympathy; he hesitated for a moment, and then went on. ‘No questions will be asked,’ he said.

She made no answer to this, and while he waited for one the Professor broke in impatiently:

‘Come, girl, speak! Where do you want to go? Where do you live?’

On this followed another shorter silence, and then at last she spoke.

‘I shall not go back,’ she said. Her tone was low, but defiant, and very firm.

‘That means you will not tell,’ said the Professor. ‘Then go—do you hear—go! You are interrupting us here.’ He motioned towards the door, where Denis stood mute as a sentinel; he was, indeed, an old soldier, for the matter of that.

The girl stepped quickly, eagerly forward, but Wyndham stopped her imperatively, and standing between her and the door, he spoke to the Professor.

‘It is impossible to turn her out at this hour—in this weather.’ He stopped, and now looked at the girl and spoke to her.

‘Why can’t you trust us?’ he said, with angry reproach. ‘Why can’t you let us do something for you? You must have a home somewhere, however bad.’

The girl thus addressed turned upon him suddenly with miserable passion shining in her large, dark eyes.

‘I have not,’ she said. ‘Under the sky of God, there is no creature so homeless as I am.’

Her passion was so great that it struck the listeners into silence. She made a little gesture with her arms suggestive of awful weariness, then spoke again:

‘There was a place where I lived yesterday. It was not a home. I shall not live there again. I have left it. I shall not go back.’

‘But where, then, are you going?’ asked Wyndham impulsively.

‘I don’t know.’ She drew her breath slowly, heavily. It was hardly a sigh. There was enough misery in it for ten sighs. But her passion was all gone, and a terrible indifference had taken its place; and there was such consummate despair in her tone as might have touched even the Professor. But it did not. He had begun to study her. He was always studying people, and now a curious expression had crept into his face. He leaned forward and peered at her. There was no compassion in the glance, no interest whatever in her as a suffering human thing; but there was a sudden sharp interest in her as a means to a desired end. Thought was in his glance, and a wild longing that was fast growing to a hope.

‘Have you no plans, then?’ asked the young man. His tone was sad. He had looked into the depths of her dark eyes, and found there no guile at all.

‘None!’ She was silent awhile, and then very slowly she raised her head; her brows contracted, and she looked past them both into vacancy. If she was communing with her own heart, the results were very sad. Despair itself gathered in her eyes. She turned presently and looked at Wyndham. ‘I wish,’ said she, with a forlorn look, ‘that I had the courage to die.’

It was unutterably sad, this young creature, with all her life before her, praying for courage to end it; craving for death in the midst of life, wishing she had the courage to escape from a world that had evidently given her but a sorry welcome.

Wyndham looked round at the Professor as if expecting him to join in his commiseration for this poor, unhappy child, but what he saw in the Professor’s face checked him. It startled him, and stopped the tide of sympathy for a time—as great floods will for the moment always catch and carry with them the milder rushes of the rivers near.

The Professor’s face was indeed a study. It was radiant—alight with a strange and sudden hope. His piercing eyes were fixed immovably upon the girl. They seemed to burn into her as though demanding and compelling an answering glance from hers.

She obeyed the call; slowly, languidly she lifted her head.

‘So you would die?’ said he.

‘Yes.’ The word fell listlessly from her lips; but she stared straight at him as she said it, and her young unhappy face looked nearly as gray as the old merciless one bending over it.

‘Then why liv?’ pursued he. ‘Death is easy.’

‘No, it is hard,’ she said. ‘And I am afraid of pain.’

‘If there were no pain, you would risk it, then?’

She hesitated. His glance was now, indeed, so wild, so full of frantic eagerness, that it might readily have frightened one older in the world’s ways. To Wyndham, waiting, watching, it occurred that the Professor was like a spider creeping towards its prey. He shuddered.

‘Speak, girl, speak!’ said the Professor. His agitation was intense, and almost beyond control. Here—here to his hand was his chance. Was he to have it at last, or lose it for ever? Wyndham could stand it no longer; he went quickly forward, and, standing between the Professor and the girl, took the former by the shoulders and pushed him gently backwards and out of hearing.

‘If this drug of yours possesses the lifegiving properties you speak of,’ said he sternly, ‘why speak to her of death? Do you honestly believe in this experiment? Or do you fear it—when you suggest this sort of suicide to her?’

‘I fear nothing,’ said the old man. ‘But we are all mortal. We can all err, even in our surest judgments. The very cleverest of us can be deceived. The experiment—though I do not believe it—might fail.’

At the word ‘fail’ he roused.

‘It will not! It cannot!’ he cried, with vehemence. ‘But in the meantime I would give her her chance, too. She shall know the worst that may befall her.’

‘Why not tell her all?’ said the young man anxiously. ‘It’—he hesitated and coloured faintly—‘it would give her her chance perhaps in another world if your experiment failed. It would take from her—in part—the sin of deliberately destroying herself.’

The Professor shrugged his shoulders. He thought it waste of time, this preparing for another world—another Judge.

‘You think, then, that I should tell her?’

‘I do. I think, too,’ said Wyndham strongly, ‘that if your experiment succeeds you should consider yourself indebted to her for ever.’

‘I shall see to her future, of course.’

‘If,’ said the young man gloomily, ‘anyone could see to the future of such a one as she is!’

The Professor looked at him.

‘You are out of sorts to-night,’ he said. ‘Your natural instinct is deadened in you. That girl does not belong to the class of which you are thinking. Whatever has driven her to her present desperate state of mind, it is not impurity.’

‘You think that?’ Wyndham looked doubtful, but was still conscious of a faint wave of relief; and the Professor, watching him, smiled, the tolerant smile of one who understands the cranks and follies of poor human nature.

‘If so,’ said Wyndham quickly, ‘she should surely not be subjected to this experiment at all. She——’

‘For all that, I shall not lose this chance,’ said the Professor shortly. He turned and went back to the girl.

She was sitting in the same attitude as when he left her—her hands clenched upon her knees, her eyes staring into the fire. God alone knew what she saw there. She did not change her position, but sat like that, immovable as a statue, as the Professor expounded his experiment to her, and then asked her the cold, unsympathetic question as to whether, now she knew what the risk was, she would accept it. It might mean death, but if not, it would mean safety and protection in the future.

When he had finished, she turned her sombre eyes on his.

‘I will take the risk,’ she said.

Wyndham made a movement as if to speak, but the Professor checked him.

‘Of course, if the experiment is successful,’ he said, ‘I shall provide for you for life.’

‘I hope you will not have to provide for me,’ she said.

At this, a little silence fell upon the room, that seemed to chill it. The Professor broke it.

‘You agree, then?’

‘I agree.’ She rose, and held out her hand. ‘Give me the draught.’

Wyndham started, his voice vibrating with horror.

‘No, no!’ he cried. ‘She does not understand; and’—to the Professor—‘neither do you. If this thing fails, it will mean murder. Think, I entreat you, before it is too late to think. That girl’—pointing to the young stranger, who was standing regarding him with a dull curiosity—‘she is but a child. She cannot know her own mind. She ought not to be allowed to settle so stupendous a question. Look at her!’ His voice shook. ‘Many a happier girl at her age would still be in her schoolroom. She is so young that, whatever her wrongs, her sorrows may be, she has still time before her to conquer or live them down. Professor, I implore you, do not go on with this.’

The Professor rested a contemptuous glance on him for a moment, then swept it from him, and addressed the girl.

‘You are willing?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She spoke quite firmly, but she was looking at Wyndham. It was a strange look, made up of surprise and some other feeling hardly defined.

‘She is not all,’ broke in Wyndham again, vehemently. ‘There is you to be considered, too. If this sleep of your making terminates fatally, have you considered the consequences to yourself?’

The Professor smiled. He pointed to the girl, who stood marble-white beneath the dull gaslight.

‘Like her, I take the risk,’ he said. ‘I think I told you a little while ago that I would chance the hanging.’ His smile—a very unpleasant one—faded suddenly, and his manner grew brusque and arrogant. ‘There—enough,’ he said. ‘Stand aside, man. Do you think that now—now when at last my hour has come—I am likely to let it slip, though death itself lay before me?’

‘For God’s sake, Professor, think yet a moment!’ said the younger man, holding him in his grasp. ‘She is young—so young!... To take a life like that!’

‘I am going to take no life’—coldly. ‘I see now that you never had any faith in me at all.’

‘I believe in you as no other man does,’ rejoined Wyndham hotly. ‘But surely at this supreme moment a doubt may be allowed me. If this thing were done openly in the eye of day, in sight of all men, it were well; but to try so deadly an experiment here, at midnight—with no witnesses, as it were—great heavens! you must see the pitfall you are laying for yourself. If this experiment fails——’

‘It will not fail,’ said the Professor coldly. ‘In the meantime’—he cast a scornful glance at him—‘if you are afraid of being called as a witness, it is’—pointing to the door—‘still open to you to avoid such a disagreeability.’

Their eyes met.

‘I don’t think I have deserved that,’ said the other proudly, and all at once in this queer hour both men felt that the tie that had bound them for years was stronger than they knew.

‘Stay, then,’ said the Professor.

He went into an inner room and returned with a phial and glass, and advanced towards the girl with an almost buoyant step. There was, indeed, an exhilaration in his whole air, that amounted almost to madness. He looked wild—spectral, indeed—in the dim light of the solitary lamp, with his white hair thrown back and his eyes shining fiercely beneath the rugged brows.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

She made a slight gesture of assent, and went a step or two to meet him. She was deadly pale, but she stood without support of any kind. The Professor poured some of the pale fluid from the phial into the glass with a hand that never faltered, and the girl took it with a hand that faltered quite as little; but before she could raise it to her lips, Wyndham caught her arm.

‘Stop!’ cried he, as if choking. ‘Have you thought—have you considered that there is no certainty in this drug?’ Her eyes rested for a moment on his.

‘I thought there was a certainty,’ she said slowly.

‘A certainty of death, perhaps,’ said he, poignant fear in his tone. ‘At this last moment I appeal to you, for your own sake. Don’t take it. If you do, it is doubtful whether you will ever come back to life again.’

She looked at him steadily.

‘I hope there is no doubt,’ she said. She raised the glass and drank its contents to the dregs.

As she did so, some clock in the silent city outside struck the midnight hour.

CHAPTER Three.

‘A land of darkness, as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death; without any order, and where the light is as darkness.’

Morning had broken through the sullen gloom of night, and still the two men watched beside the couch on which the girl lay, seemingly, in all the tranquillity of death. The Professor’s drug had been calculated to keep her asleep for exactly six hours. So long a time would be a test. If she lived, and woke at the right time, then he would try again. He would make it worth her while. For the younger man, during this anxious vigil, there had been passing lapses of memory, that he, however, would have disdained to acknowledge as sleep; but with the old man there had been no question of oblivion, and now, as the vital moment drew near that should test the truth of the great discovery, even Wyndham grew abnormally wide-awake, and with nervous heart-sinkings watched the pale, death-like face of the girl.

Could it be unreal? Wyndham rose once and bent over her. No faintest breath came from her lips or nostrils; the whole face had taken the pinched, ashen appearance of one who had lain for a full day dead. The hands were waxen, and the forehead too. He shuddered and drew back. At that moment he told himself that she was dead, and that he had undoubtedly assisted at a form of murder.

He turned to the Professor, who was sitting watch in hand, counting the moments. He would have spoken, but the old man’s grim face forbade him. He was waiting. At twelve o’clock the girl had sunk into a slumber so profound, so representative of death, that Wyndham had uttered an exclamation of despair, and had told himself she was indeed struck down by the Destroyer, and now when six o’clock strikes she ought to rise from her strange slumbers if the Professor’s drug possessed the powerful properties attributed to it by its discoverer.

As Wyndham stood watching the Professor, a sound smote upon his ear. One! Again the city clock was tolling the hour. The Professor rose; his face was ghastly. One, two, three, four, five, six!

Six! The Professor bent down over the girl, and Wyndham went near to him, to be ready to help him when the moment came—when the truth was made clear to him that his discovery had failed. Wyndham himself had long ago given up hope, but he feared for the old man, to whom his discovery had been more than life or love for over twenty years.

The Professor still stood peering into the calm face. Six, and no sign, no change!

Already the sun’s rays were beginning to peep sharply through the window; there was a slight stir in the street below. Six-thirty, and still the Professor stood gazing on the quiet figure, as motionless as it. Seven o’clock, and still no movement. The face, now lovely in its calm, was as marble, and the limbs lay rigid, the fingers lightly locked. Death, death alone could look like that!

Half-past seven! As the remorseless clock recorded the time, the Professor suddenly threw up his arms.

‘She is dead!’ he said. ‘Oh, my God!’

He reeled forward, and the young man caught him in his arms. He was almost insensible, and was gasping for breath. Wyndham carried him into an adjoining room and laid him on a bed, and, finding him cold, covered him with blankets. This, so far as it went, was well enough for the moment, but what was the next step to be? The old man lay gasping, and evidently there was but a short step between his state and that of his victim outside. Yet how to send for a doctor with that victim outside? To the Professor, whose hours were numbered, it would mean little or nothing; but to him, Wyndham, it would mean, if not death, eternal disgrace. He drew a long breath and bent over the Professor, who was now again sensible.

‘Shall I send for Marks or Drewd?’ he asked, naming two of the leading physicians in Dublin.

The Professor grasped his arm; his face grew frightful.

‘No one—no one!’ he gasped. ‘Are you mad? Do you think I would betray my failure to the world? To have them laugh—deride——’ He fell back, gasping still, but menacing the young man with his eye. By degrees the fury of his glance relaxed, and he fell into a sort of slumber, always holding Wyndham’s arm, however, as if fearing he should go. He seemed stronger, and Wyndham knelt by the bed, wondering vaguely what was going to be the end of it all, and whether it would be possible to remove the corpse outside without detection. There was Denis—Denis was faithful, and could be trusted.

Presently the Professor roused from his fit of unconsciousness. He looked up at the young man, and his expression was terrible. Despair in its worse form disfigured his features. The dream of a life had been extinguished. He tried to speak, but at first words failed him, then, ‘All the years—all the years!’ he mumbled. Wyndham understood, and his heart bled. The old man had given the best years of his life to his discovery, and now——

‘I have killed her!’ went on the Professor, after a minute or two.

‘Science has killed her,’ said Wyndham.

‘No; I, with my cursed pride of belief in myself—I have killed her,’ persisted the old man. ‘I would to God it were not so!’ He did not believe in anything but science, yet he appealed to the Creator occasionally, as some moderns still do to Jove. His lean fingers beat feebly on the blankets. ‘A failure—a failure,’ he kept muttering, his eyes fixed on vacancy. ‘I go to my grave a failure! I set my soul on it. I believed in it, and it was naught.’ He was rambling, but presently he sprang into a sitting posture, his eyes afire once more. ‘I believe in it still!’ he shouted. ‘Oh, for time, for life, to prove.... O God, if there is a God, grant me a few more days!’ He fell into a violent fit of shivering, and Wyndham gently laid him back in his bed, and covered him again with the blankets, where he lay sullen, powerless.

‘Try not to think,’ implored the young man.

‘Think—think—what else is left to me? Oh, Paul!’ He stretched out his arm and caught Wyndham. ‘That it should be a failure after all. I wish——’ He paused, and then went on: ‘I wish I had not tried it upon her; she was young. She was a pretty creature, too. She was like ... someone——’ He broke off.

‘She was a mere waif and stray,’ said Wyndham, trying to harden his voice.

‘She was no waif or stray of the sort you mean,’ said the Professor. ‘Her face—was not like that. There’—pointing to the room outside—‘go; look on her for yourself, and read the truth of what I say.’

‘It is not necessary,’ said the young man, with a slight shudder. And again a silence fell between them. It was again broken by the Professor.

‘She was full of life,’ he said; ‘and I took it.’

‘She wished you to take it,’ said Wyndham, who felt choking. Her blood seemed to lie heavily on him. Had he not seen, countenanced her murder? The Professor did not seem to hear him; his head had fallen forward, and he was muttering again.

‘She is dead!’ he whispered to himself. He made a vague but tragic gesture; and then, after a little while, ‘Dead!’ he said again. His head had sunk upon his breast. It was a strange scene. Here the Professor dying—out there the girl dead—and between them he, Paul Wyndham. What lay before him?

He roused himself with an effort from his horrible thoughts, and made a faint effort to withdraw his hand from the Professor’s; but though the latter had fallen into a doze, he still felt the attempt at withdrawal, and tightened his clutch on Wyndham; and all at once it seemed to the young man as though the years had rolled backward, and he was still the pupil, and this old man his tutor, and the days were once more present when he had been ordered here and there, and had taken his directions from him, and loved and reverenced him, stern and repellent as he was, as perhaps no tutor had ever been reverenced before.

After a little while the Professor’s grasp relaxed, and Wyndham rose to his feet. A shrinking from entering the room beyond was combated by a wild desire to go there and look once again upon the slender form of the girl lying in death’s sweet repose upon her couch. He went to the door, hesitated involuntarily for a second or two, and then entered.

How still is death! And how apart! Nothing can approach it or move it. He looked at her long and earnestly, and all at once it came to him that she was beautiful. He had not thought her beautiful last night, but now the dignity of death had touched her, and her fear and her indifference and her despair had dropped from her, and the face shone lovely—the features chiselled, and a vague smile upon the small, closed lips. He noticed one thing, and it struck him as strange—that pinched look about the features that he had noticed an hour ago was gone now. The mouth was soft, the rounded chin curved as if in life. Almost there seemed a little bloom upon the pale, cold cheeks.

With a heavy sigh he turned away, and, leaning his arm upon the mantelshelf, gave himself up a prey to miserable thought. The fire had died out long ago, and the morning was cold and raw, and from under the ill-fitting door a little harsh wind was rushing. The Professor, though actually a rich man, had never cared to change the undesirable house that had sheltered him when first he tried a fall with fortune, and, conquering it, came out at once to the front as a man not to be despised in the world of science.

What was to be done? The Professor would have to see a doctor, even if the medical man were brought in without his knowledge. Would it be possible to remove the—that girl—and trust to to-night for her removal to——To where? Again he lost himself in a sea of agonized doubt and uncertainty.

Denis would still be here, of course; but what could Denis do? He fell back upon all the old methods of concealing dead bodies he had ever heard of, but everything seemed impossible. What fools all those others must have been! Well, he could give himself up and explain matters; but then the Professor—to have his great discovery derided and held up to ridicule! The old man’s look, as he saw it a little while ago, seemed to forbid his betrayal of his defeat. Great heavens! what was to be done?

He drew himself up with a heavy sigh, and passed his hand across his eyes, then turned to go back to the inner room to see if the Professor was still sleeping. As he went he tried to avoid glancing at the couch where the dead form lay, but when he got close, some force stronger than his will compelled him to look at it. And as he looked he felt turned into stone. He seemed frozen to the spot on which he stood; his eyes refused to remove themselves from what they saw. Staring like one benumbed, he told himself at last that he was going mad. How otherwise could he see this thing? Sweat broke out on his forehead, and a cry escaped him. The corpse was looking at him!