Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/160

Rh ing to the beauty of the wonderful intellect that gradually unfolded in his behalf.

In private, Filippo complained to the doctor that his wife was too demonstrative. She thought nothing of distracting his attention from important experiments, with pouting lips clamoring for a kiss, and not until he had hastily brushed her lips with his would she return to her work.

"I am obliged to bribe the woman with kisses," cried the professor, despairingly.

Elena had gone so far as to affirm to her husband that she was even jealous of his research, his experiments. That was unwise. No woman can interfere between a man and his chosen life-work. Such things are, as D'Annunzio puts it, "piu che l'amore" (greater than love), and prove relentless Juggernauts to those who tactlessly disregard the greater claims.

"He is worn out," said Elena to the doctor. "He has flung himself into his work to such an extent that nothing exists for him but that. He studies all night. He works all day. I have to force him to stop long enough to eat sufficient to maintain life."

"Go on, Elena, go on! When my head swims, I tie cold wet towels about it. When my brain refuses to obey me, I concentrate with inconceivable force of will upon my goal. Oh, Giuseppe mio, my very existence is bound up in this last experiment, which, alas! I am unable to complete because the authorities will not permit me to make use of the death of some criminal—a death that must be entirely useless to the scientific world, through their blind stupidity."

The doctor shrugged, with a gesture of his slender brown hands. His eyes sought Elena's face. Since he had been away the Signora. Panebianco had altered terribly. She looked too delicate; she had faded visibly. Hectic roses flamed in her cheeks. Her thin hands, too, had been too cold when she touched his in greeting. Her constant cough racked her slender body. It seemed to Giuseppe del Giovine that she had become almost transparent, so slender had she become from loss of flesh. As she went from the room slowly with a gesture of helplessness, he turned to the professor.

"Your wife is a very sick woman," he declared, abruptly.

"I suppose she must be,’’ Filippo responded absently. "She's very nervous, I know. She disturbs me inexcusably with silly demands for kisses and caresses, actually weeping when she thinks I don't see her, because I refuse to humor her foolish whims. I've been obliged, more than once, to drive her away with cold looks and hard words, because she has tried to coax me to stop work, insisting upon my talking with her."

He began adjusting his apparatus with an abstracted air. It was as well that he did not see the expression of indignation and despair that flashed across the mobile face of the physician, who had long loved Elena in secret, but hopelessly, as he very well knew, because she was absolutely indifferent to anybody but her husband.

"Yes, Giuseppe, she interrupts my most particular experiments to caress me ardently, trying to bring my lips down on hers. Often I have reproved her severely for attempting to turn me aside from my life-work. The man whose intellect has driven him to enter the precincts of the great mystery cannot stop to dally with the folly of fools, and love is the greatest folly of all."

"Blind fool, you!" muttered the doctor under his breath. "Love is the very breath of life itself!"

"If Elena is to assist me in my last experiment, the greatest of all, I must