Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/240

Rh my voice was intended to convey a kindly interest in his pursuits, not mere curiosity, still less anxiety.

"Oh, some salts," he said, with obviously forced unconcern. "We have been analysing the water here, and I rather imagined that it contained a new element."

If the "celebrated" spring had suddenly discharged itself upon my head, the feeling of cold dismay could scarcely have been more intense. "A new element—in the chalybeate waters here!" I gasped—I am afraid that I must use that expression. "A new element, and you found it, and sent it to Sir Walter Bent, and this is his reply to you! How—how did you do it?"

"Oh, we just analysed it," said the hardened young ruffian, affecting to appear bored. "Being there, of course we found it."

Drowning men, one reads, see their whole past lives in a flash. I was drowning, metaphorically, in the Campton water; certainly I was experiencing most of the actual sensations; and for the next few minutes I enjoyed the mortification of a kaleidoscopic view of my future life if only I had stood in my nephew's shoes. A new element! Not merely undetected before in the Campton spring, but new to science. What might have been! I saw long vistas of platforms, myself enthroned on each; unending crowds of black-coated men eagerly surrounding one central figure—myself; interminable streams of professors in academic robes; countless articles in journals of every imaginable kind, from the airy, snappy, inaccurate "par" of the halfpenny daily to the weighty essay of the quarterly—yes, in those brief seconds I even read some of the opening sentences; flocks of honorary degrees. And now that ever-to-be-execrated treatise in the local sheet—placid, vacuous, self-satisfied, with this on its heels—doomed to involve me in unending ridicule. Why, why, in heaven's name, had not I looked