# The Trail of the Serpent/Book 3/Chapter 10

Chapter X. Animal Magnetism.
Nearly a month has passed since this strange marriage, and Monsieur Blurosset is seated at his little green-covered table, the lamp-light falling full upon the outspread pack of cards, over which the blue spectacles bend with the same intent and ​concentrated gaze as on the night when the fate of Valerie hung on the lips of the professor of chemistry and pasteboard. Every now and then, with light and careful fingers, Monsieur Blurosset changes the position of some card or cards. Sometimes he throws himself back in his chair and thinks deeply. The expressionless mouth, which betrays no secrets, tells nothing of the nature of his thoughts. Sometimes he makes notes on a long slip of paper; rows of figures, and problems in algebra, over which he ponders long. By-and-by, for the first time, he looks up and listens.
His little apartment has two doors. One, which leads out on to the staircase; a second, which communicates with his bed-chamber. This door is open a very little, but enough to show that there is a feeble light burning within the chamber. It is in the direction of this door that the blue spectacles are fixed when Monsieur Blurosset suspends his calculations in order to listen; and it is to a sound within this room that he listens intently.
That sound is the laboured and heavy breathing of a man. The room is tenanted.
"Good," says Monsieur Blurosset, presently, "the respiration is certainly more regular. It is really a most wonderful case."
As he says this, he looks at his watch. "Five minutes past eleven—time for the dose," he mutters.
He goes to the little cabinet from which he took the drug he gave to Valerie, and busies himself with some bottles, from which he mixes a draught in a small medicine-glass; he holds it to the light, puts it to his lips, and then passes with it into the next room.
There is a sound as if the person to whom he gave the medicine made some faint resistance, but in a few minutes Monsieur Blurosset emerges from the room carrying the empty glass.
He reseats himself before the green table, and resumes his contemplation of the cards. Presently a bell rings. "So late," mutters Monsieur Blurosset; "it is most likely some one for me." He rises, sweeps the cards into one pack, and going over to the door of his bedroom, shuts its softly. When he has done so, he listens for a moment with his ear close to the woodwork. There is not a sound of the breathing within.
He has scarcely done so when the bell rings for the second time. He opens the door communicating with the staircase, and admits a visitor. The visitor is a woman, very plainly dressed, and thickly veiled.
"Monsieur Blurosset?" she says, inquiringly.
"The same, madame. Please enter, and be good enough to be seated." He hands her a chair at a little distance from the green table, and as far away as he can place it from the door of ​the bedchamber: she sits down, and as he appears to wait for her to speak, she says,—
"I have heard of your fame, monsieur, and come———"
"Nay, madame," he says, interrupting her, "you can raise your veil if you will. I perfectly remember you; I never forget voices, Mademoiselle de Cevennes."
There is no shade of impertinence in his manner as he says this; he speaks as though he were merely stating a simple fact which it is as well for her to know. He has the air, in all he does or says, of a scientific man who has no existence out of the region of science.
Valerie—for it is indeed she—raises her veil.
"Monsieur," she says, "you are candid with me, and it will be the best for me to be frank with you. I am very unhappy—I have been so for some months past; and I shall be so until my dying day. One reason alone has prevented my coming to you long ere this, to offer you half my fortune for such another drug as that which you sold to me some time past. You may judge, then, that reason is a very powerful one, since, though death alone can give me peace, I yet do not wish to die. But I wish to have at my command a means of certain death. I may never use it at all: I swear never to use it on anyone but myself!"
All this time the blue spectacles have been fixed on her face, and now Monsieur Blurosset interrupts her—
"And now for such a drug, mademoiselle, you would offer me a large sum of money?" he asks.
"I would, monsieur."
"I cannot sell it you," he says, as quietly as though he were speaking of some unimportant trifle.
"You cannot?" she exclaims.
"No, mademoiselle. I am a man absorbed entirely in the pursuit of science. My life has been so long devoted to science only, that perhaps I may have come to hold everything beyond the circle of my little laboratory too lightly. You asked me some time since for a poison, or at least you were introduced to me by a pupil of mine, at whose request I sold you a drug. I had been twenty years studying the properties of that drug. I may not know them fully yet, but I expect to do so before this year is out. I gave it to you, and, for all I know to the contrary, it may in your hands have done some mischief." He pauses here and looks at her for a moment; but she has borne the knowledge of her crime so long, and it has become so much a part of her, that she does not flinch under his scrutiny.
"I placed a weapon in your hands," he continues, "and I had no right to do so. I never thought of this at that time; but I have thought of it since. For the rest, I have no inducement to sell you the drug you ask for. Money is of little use to me. ​except in the necessary expenses of the chemicals I use. These"—he points to the cards—"give me enough for those expenses; beyond those, my wants amount to some few francs a week."
"Then you will not sell me this drug? You are determined?" she asks.
"Quite determined."
She shrugs her shoulders. "As you please. There is always some river within reach of the wretched; and you may depend, monsieur, that they who cannot support life will find a means of death. I will wish you good evening."
She is about to leave the room, when she stops, with her hand upon the lock of the door, and turns round.
She stands for a few minutes motionless and silent, holding the handle of the door, and with her other hand upon her heart. Monsieur Blurosset has the faintest shadow of a look of surprise in his expressionless countenance.
"I don't know what is the matter with me to-night," she says, "but something seems to root me to this spot. I cannot leave this room."
"You are ill, mademoiselle, perhaps. Let me give you some restorative."
"No, no, I am not ill."
Again she is silent; her eyes are fixed, not on the chemist, but with a strange vacant gaze upon the wall before her. Suddenly she asks him,—
"Do you believe in animal magnetism?"
"Madame, I have spent half my lifetime in trying to answer that question, and I can only answer it now by halves. Sometimes no; sometimes yes."
"Do you believe it possible for one soul to be gifted with a mysterious prescience of the emotions of another soul?—to be sad when that is sad, though utterly unconscious of any cause for sadness; and to rejoice when that is happy, having no reason for rejoicing?"
"I cannot answer your question, madame, because it involves another. I never yet have discovered what the soul really is. Animal magnetism, if it ever become a science, will be a material science, and the soul escapes from all material dissection."
"Do you believe, then, that by some subtle influence, whose nature is unknown to us, we may have a strange consciousness of the presence or the approach of some people, conveyed to us by neither the hearing nor the sight, but rather as if we felt that they were near?"
"You believe this possible, madame, or you would not ask the question."
"Perhaps. I have sometimes thought that I had this conciousness; but it related to a person who is dead———"
​"Yes. madame."
"And—you will think me mad; Heaven knows, I think myself so—I feel as if that person were near me to-night."
The chemist rises, and, going over to her, feels her pulse. It is rapid and intermittent. She is evidently violently agitated, though she is trying with her utmost power to control herself.
"But you say that this person is dead?" he asks.
"Yes; he died some months since."
"You know that there are no such things as ghosts?"
"I am perfectly convinced of that!"
"And yet—?" he asks.
"And yet I feel as though the dead were near me to-night. Tell me—there is no one in this room but ourselves?"
"No one."
"And that door—it leads———"
"Into the room in which I sleep."
"And there is no one there?" she asks.
"No one. Let me give you a sedative, madame: you are certainly ill."
"No, no, monsieur; you are very good. I am still weak from the effects of a long illness. That weakness may be the cause of my silly fancies of to-night. To-morrow I leave France, perhaps for ever."
She leaves him; but on the steep dark staircase she pauses for a moment, and seems irresolute, as if half determined to return: then she hurries on, and in a minute is in the street.
She takes a circuitous route towards the house in which she lives. So plainly dressed, and thickly veiled, no one stops to notice her as she walks along.
Her husband, Monsieur Marolles, is engaged at a dinner given by a distinguished member of the chamber of peers. Decidedly he has held winning cards in the game of life. And she, for ever haunted by the past, with weary step goes onward to a dark and unknown future.