Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/152

148 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"