Master of His Fate Part 7

The detective-inspector entered, and opened an interview which proved less embarra.s.sing than Lefevre had antic.i.p.ated. The detective had already made up his mind about the case and his course regarding it. He put no curious questions; he merely inquired concerning the ident.i.ty and the condition of the lady. When he heard who she was, and when he caught the import of an aside from Lord Rivercourt that it would be worth any one's while to discover the mysterious offender, professional zeal sparkled in his eye.

"I think I know my man," said he; and the doctor looked the lively interest he felt. "I am right, I believe, Dr Lefevre, in setting this down to the author of that other case you had,--that from the Brighton train?" Lefevre thought he was right in that. "'M. Dolaro:' that was the name. I had charge of the case, and was baffled. I shan't miss him this time. I shall get on his tracks at once; he can't have left the Park in broad daylight, a singular man like him, without being noticed."

"It rather puzzles me," said the doctor, "what crime you will charge him with."

"It is an outrage," said Lord Rivercourt; "and if it is not criminal, it seems about time it were made so."

"Oh, we'll cla.s.s it, my lord," said the detective; "never fear."

The detective departed; but Lord Rivercourt seemed not inclined to stir.

"You will excuse me," said Lefevre; "but I must perform a very delicate operation."

"To be sure," said the old lord; "and you want me to go. How stupid of me! I kept waiting for my daughter to wake up; but I see that, of course, you have to rouse her. It did not occur to me what that machine meant. Something magneto-electric--eh? Forgive one question, Lefevre. I can see you look anxious: is Mary's condition very serious?--most serious? I can bear to be told the complete truth."

The doctor was touched by the old gentleman's emotion. He took his hand.

"It is serious," said he--"most serious, for this reason, that I cannot account for her obstinate lethargy; but I think there is no immediate danger. If necessity arises, I shall send for you again."

"To the House," said Lord Rivercourt. "I shall be sitting out a debate on our eternal Irish question."

Lefevre was left seriously discomposed, but at once he sent for the house-physician, summoned the Sister and the nurse, and set about his third attempt to revive his patient. He got the bed turned north and south. He carefully explained to the two women what was demanded of them, and applied them to their task; but, whatever the cause, the failure was completer than before: there was not even a tremor of muscle in the unconscious lady, and the doctor was suffused with alarm and humiliation. Failure!--failure!--failure! Such a concatenation had never happened to him before!

But failure only nerves the brave and capable man to a supreme effort for success. Still self-contained, and apparently unmoved, the doctor gave directions for some liquid nourishment to be artificially administered to his patient, said he would return after dinner, and went his way. The society of friends or acquaintances was distasteful to him then; the thought even of seeing his own familiar dining-room and his familiar man in black, whose silent obsequiousness he felt would be a reproach, was disagreeable. All his thought, all his attention, all his faculties were drawn tight to this acute point--he must succeed; he must accomplish the task he had set himself: life at that hour was worth living only for that purpose. But how was success to be compelled?

He walked for a while about the streets, and then he went into a restaurant and ordered a modest dinner. He broke and crumbled his bread with both hands, his mind still intent on that one engrossing, acute point. While thus he sat he heard a voice, as in a dream, say, "The very doctor you read about. That's the second curious case he's got in a month or so.... Oh yes--very clever; he treats them, I understand, in the same sort of way as the famous Dr Charbon of Paris would.... I should say so; quite as good, if not better than Charbon. I'd rather have an English doctor any day than a French.... His name's in the paper--_Lefevre_." Then the doctor woke to the fact that he was being talked about. He perceived his admirers were sitting at a table a little behind him, and he judged from what had been said that his fresh case was already being made "copy" of in the evening papers. The flattering comparison of himself with Dr Charbon had an oddly stimulating effect upon him, notwithstanding that it had been uttered by he knew not whom,--a mere _vox et praeterea nihil_. He disclaimed to himself the truth of the comparison, but all the same he was encouraged to bend his attention with his utmost force to the solution of his difficult problem--what to do to rouse his patient?

He sat thus, amid the bustle and buzz of the restaurant, the coming and going of waiters, completely abstracted, a.s.sailing his difficulty with questions on this side and on that,--when suddenly out of the mists that obscured it there rose upon his mental vision an idea, which appealed to him as a solution of the whole, and, more than that, as a secret that would revolutionise all the treatment of nervous weakness and derangement. How came the idea? How do ideas ever come? As inspirations, we say, or as revelations; and truly they come upon us with such amazing and inspiriting freshness, that they may well be called either the one or the other. But no great idea had ever yet an epiphany but from the ferment of more familiar small ideas,--just as the glorious Aphrodite was born of the ferment and pother of the waves of the sea. Lefevre's new idea clothed itself in the form of a comparative question--_Why should there not be Transfusion of Nervous Force, Ether, or Electricity, just as there is Transfusion of Blood?_

He pushed his dinner away (he could scarcely have told what he had been eating and drinking), called for his bill, and returned with all speed to the hospital. He entered his female ward just as evening prayers were finished, before the lights were turned out and night began for the patients. He summoned his trusted a.s.sistant, the house-physician, again.

"I am about to attempt," said he, "an altogether new operation: the patient has remained just as I left her, I suppose?"

"Just the same."

"Nervous Force, whether it be Electricity or not, is manifestly a fluid of some sort: why should it not be transfused as the other vital fluid is?"

"Indeed, sir, when you put it so," said the house-physician, suddenly steeled and brightened into interest, "I should say, 'why not?' The only reason against it is what can be a.s.signed against all new things--it has not, so far as I know, been done."

"Exactly. I am going to try. I think, in case we need a current, so to say, to draw it along, that we shall use the apparatus too; we shall therefore need the women."

"You mean, of course," said the young man, "you will cut a main nerve."

"I shall use this nerve," said Lefevre, indicating the main nerve in the wrist,--upon which the young man, in his ready enthusiasm, began to bare his arm.

"My dear fellow," said Lefevre, "do you consider what you are so promptly offering? Do you know that my experiment, if successful, might leave you a paralytic, or an imbecile, or even--a corpse?"

"I'll take the risk, sir," said the young man.

"I can't permit it, my boy," said Lefevre, laying his hand on his arm, and giving him a look of kindness. "n.o.body must run this risk but me. I don't mean, however, to cut the nerve."

"What then, sir?"

"Well," said Lefevre, "this Nervous Force, or Nervous Ether, is clearly a very volatile, and at the same time a very searching fluid. It can easily pa.s.s through the skin from a nerve in one person to a nerve in another. There is no difficulty about that; the difficulty is to set up a rapid enough vibration to whirl the current through!" He said that in meditative fashion: he was clearly at the moment repeating the working out of the problem.

"I see," said the young man, looking thoughtful.

"Now, you are a musician, are you not?"

"I play a little," said the young man, with a bewildered look.

"You play the violin?"

"Yes."

"And, of course, you have it in your rooms. Would you be so good as to bring me the bow of your violin, and borrow for me anywhere a tuning-fork of as high a note as possible?"

The young man looked at Dr Lefevre in puzzled inquiry; but the doctor was considering the electrical apparatus before him, and the young man set off on his errands. When he returned with the fiddle-bow and the tuning-fork, he saw Lefevre had placed the machine ready, with fresh chemicals in the vessels.

"Do you perceive my purpose?" asked Lefevre. He placed one handle of the apparatus in the unconscious patient's right hand, while he himself took hold of her left arm with his right hand, so that the inner side of his wrist was in contact with the inner side of hers; and then, to complete the circle of connection, he took in his left hand the other handle of the apparatus. "You don't understand?"

"I do not," answered the young man.

"We want a very rapid vibration--much more rapid than usual," said the doctor. "I can apply no more rapid vibration at present than that which the note of that tuning-fork will produce. I want you to sound the tuning-fork with the fiddle-bow, and then apply the fork to this wire."

"Oh," said the young man, "I understand!"

"Now," said Lefevre, "you'd better call the Sister to set the electricity going."

The Sister came and took her place as before described--with her hands, that is, on the cylinder of the electrode, her fingers dipping over into the vessels of chemicals. She opened her eyes and smiled at sight of the fiddle-bow and tuning-fork.

"I am trying a new thing, Sister," said Lefevre, with a touch of severity. "I do not need you, I do not wish you, to exert yourself this time; I only wish you to keep that position, and to be calm. Maintain your composure, and attend.... Now!" said he, addressing the young man.

The fiddle-bow was drawn across the tuning-fork, and the fork applied with its thrilling note to the conducting wire which Lefevre held. The wire hummed its vibration, and electricity tingled wildly through Lefevre's nerves... There was an anxious, breathless pause for some seconds, and fear of failure began to contract the doctor's heart.

"Take your hands away, Sister," said he. Then, turning to his a.s.sistant, "Apply that to the other wire," said he; and dropping his own wire, he put his hand over the cylinder, with his fingers dipping into the vessel from which the other wire sprang. When the wire hummed under the tuning-fork and the vibration thrilled again, instantly he felt as if an inert obstruction had been removed. The vibratory influence whirled wildly through him, there was a pause of a second or two (which seemed to him many minutes in duration), and then suddenly a kind of rigor pa.s.sed upon the form and features of his patient, as if each individual nerve and muscle were being threaded with quick wire, a sharp rush of breath filled her chest, and she opened her eyes and closed them again.

"That will do," said Lefevre in a whisper, and, releasing his hands, he sank back in a chair. "It's a success," said he, turning his eyes with a thin smile on the house-physician, and then closing them in a deadly exhaustion.

Chapter VI.

At the Bedside of the Doctor.

For the first time since he had come into the world Dr Lefevre was that night attended by another doctor. The resident a.s.sistant-physician took him home to Savile Row in a cab, a.s.sisted him to bed, and sat with him a while after he had administered a tonic and soporific. Then he left him in charge of the silent man in black, whom he rea.s.sured by saying that there was no danger; that his master had a magnificent const.i.tution; that he was only exhausted--though exhausted very much; and that all he needed was rest, sleep, nourishment,--sleep above all.