"'Who loveth life shall lose it all;Who seeketh life shall surely fall!'
"'Who loveth life shall lose it all;
Who seeketh life shall surely fall!'
"There is no remedy for me but death, which (who knows?) may be the mother of new life!"
"It would have been better for you," said Lefevre, sitting down again with hishead in his hands, "better—if you had never seen Nora."
"Nay, nay," cried Julius, sitting up, animate with a fresh impulse of life. "Better for her, dear, beautiful soul, but not for me! I have truly lived only since I saw her, and I have the joy of feeling that I have beheld and known Nature's sole and perfect chrysolite. But I must be quick, my friend; the dawn will soon be upon us. There is but one other thing for me to speak of—my method of taking to myself the force of life. It is my secret; it is perfectly adapted for professional use, and I wish to give it to you, because you are wise enough in mind, and great enough of soul, to use it for the benefit of mankind."
"I will not hear you, Julius!" exclaimed Lefevre. "I am neither wise nor great.Your perfect secret would be too much for me. I might be tempted to keep it for my own use. Come home with me, and apply it well yourself."
Julius was silent for a space, murmuring only, "I have no time for argument." Then his face assumed the white sickness of death, and his dark eyes seemed to grow larger and to burn with a concentrated fire.
"Lefevre!" he panted in amazement, "do you know that you are refusing such a medical and spiritual secret as the world has not known for thousands of years? A secret that would enable you—you—to work cures more wonderful than any that are told of the greatest Eastern Thaumaturge?"
"I have discovered a method," answered the doctor,—"an imperfect, clumsy method—formyself, of transmitting nervous force or ether for curative purposes. That, for the present, must be enough for me. I cannot hear your secret, Julius."
"Lefevre, I beg of you," pleaded Julius, "take it from me. I have promised myself, as a last satisfaction, that the secret I have guarded—it is not altogether mine: it is an old oriental secret—that now I would hand it over to you for the good of mankind, that at the last I might say to myself, 'I have, after all, opened my hand liberally to my fellow-men!' For pity's sake, Lefevre, don't deny me that small final satisfaction!"
"Julius," said Lefevre, firmly, "if your method is so perfect—as I believe it must be from what I have seen—I dare not lay on myself the responsibility of possessing its secret."
"Would not my example keep you from using it selfishly?"
"Does the experience of another," demanded the doctor, "however untoward it may be, ever keep a man from making his own? I dare not—I dare not trust myself to hold your perfect secret."
"Then share it with others," responded Julius, promptly; "and I daresay it is not so perfect, but that it could be made more perfect still."
"I'll have nothing to do with it, Julius; you must keep and use it yourself."
"Then," cried Julius, throwing himself on his bed of cordage, "then there will be, indeed, an end of me!"
There was no sound for a time, but the soft rush of the sea at the bows of the yacht. They had left the Thames water some distance behind, and were then inthat part of the estuary where it is just possible in mid-channel to descry either coast. The glorious rose of dawn was just beginning to flame in the eastern sky. Lefevre looked about him, and strove to shake off the sensation, which would cling to him, that he was involved in a strange dream. There lay Julius or Hernando Courtney before him; or at least the figure of a man with his face hid in his hands. What more could be said or done?
In the meantime light was swiftly rushing up the sky and waking all things to life. A flock of seagulls came from the depth of the night and wheeled about the yacht, their shrill screams strangely softened in the morning air. At the sound of them Julius roused himself, and raised himself on his elbow to watch theirbeautiful evolutions. As he watched, one and another swooped gracefully to the water, and hanging there an instant, rose with a fish and flew away. Julius flung himself again on his face.
"O God!" he cried. "Is it not horrible? Even on such a beautiful day as this death wakes as early as life! Devouring death is ushered in by the dawn, hand in hand with generous life! Awful, devilish Nature! that makes all creatures full of beauty and delight, and then condemns them to live upon each other! Nature is the sphinx: she appears soft and gentle and more lovely than heart can bear, but if you look closer, you see she is a creature with claws and teeth that rend and devour! I thought, fool that I was! that I had found the secret to solve her riddle! But it was an empty hope, a vainimagination.... Yet, I have lived! Yes, I have lived!"
He rose and stood erect, facing the dawn, with his back to Lefevre. He stood thus for some time, with one foot on the low bulwark of the vessel, till the sun leaped above the horizon and flamed with blinding brilliance across the sea.
"Ah!" he murmured. "The superb, the glorious sun! Unwearied lord of Creation! Generous giver of all light and life! And yet, who knows what worlds he may not have drawn into his flaming self, and consumed during the æons of his existence? It is ever and everywhere the same: death in company with life! And swift, strong death is better than slow, weak life!... Almost the splendour and inspiration of his rising tempt me to stay! Great nourisher and renewer of life's heat!"
He put off his fur coat, and let it fall on the deck, and stood for a while as if wrapt in ecstasy. Then, before Lefevre could conceive his intention, his feet were together on the bulwark, and with a flash and a plunge he was gone!
Amazement held the doctor's energies congealed, though but for an instant or two. Then he threw off hat and coat, and stood alert and resolute to dive to Julius's rescue when he rose, while those who manned the yacht prepared to cast a buoy and line. Not a ripple or flash of water passed unheeded; the flood of sunshine rose fuller and fuller over the world; moments grew to minutes, and minutes swelled to hopeless hours under the doctor's weary eyes, till it seemed to them as if the universe were only a swirling, greedy ocean;—but no sign appearedof his night's companion: his life was quenched in the depths of the restless waters, as a flaming meteor is quenched in night. At length Lefevre ordered the yacht to stand away to the shore, his heart torn with grief and self-upbraiding. He had called Courtney his friend, and yet until that last he had never won his inner confidence; and now he knew that his friend—he of the gentle heart, the peerless intelligence, and the wildly erring life—was dead in the hour of self-redemption.
When he had landed, however, given to the proper authorities such information as was necessary, and set off by train on his return to town, the agitation of his grief began to assuage; and when next day, upon the publication in the papers of the news of Courtney's death by drowning, a solicitor called in Savile Row with a willwhich he had drawn up two days before, and by which all Julius Courtney's property was left to Dr Lefevre, to dispose of as he thought best, "for scientific and humane ends," the doctor admitted to his reason that a death that could thus calmly be prepared was not lightly to be questioned.
"He must have known best," he said to himself, as he bowed over his hands—"he must have known best when to put off the poisoned garment of life he had woven for himself."