Blondel gasped. "Why did he not make more?" he cried. His voice was querulous, almost savage.
"The experiment," Basterga answered, "of which it was the product was costly."
Blondel's face turned purple. "Costly?" he cried. "Costly? When the lives of men hung in the balance."
"True," Basterga replied with a smile; "but I was about to say that, costly as it was, it was not its price which hindered the production of a further supply. The reason was more simple. He could not extract it."
"Then why could he not make it again?" the Syndic asked. He was genuinely, honestly angry. It was strange how much he took the matter to heart.
"He could not," Basterga answered. "He repeated the process again and again, but the peculiar product, which at the first trial had resulted from the precipitation, was not obtained."
"There was something lacking," Basterga answered. "But what that was which was lacking, or how it had entered into the alembic in the first instance, could not be discovered. The sage tried the experiment under all known conditions, and particularly when the moon was in the same quarter and when the sun was in the same house. He tried it, indeed, thrice on the corresponding day of the year, but--the product did not issue."
"Probably, in the first instance, an impurity in one of the drugs introduced a foreign substance into the alembic. That chance never occurred again, as far as I can learn, until, amusing myself with the same precipitation, I--I, Cæsar Basterga of Padua," the scholar continued, not boastfully but in a tone thoughtful and almost absent, "in the last year of the last century, hit at length upon the same result."
The Syndic leaned forward; his hands gripped his knees more tightly. "And you," he said, "can repeat it?"
Basterga shook his head sorrowfully. "No," he said, "I cannot. Not that I have myself essayed the experiment more than thrice. I could not afford it. But a correspondent, M. de Laurens, of Paris, physician to the King, has, at the expense of a wealthy patient, spent more than fifteen thousand florins in essays. Alas, without result."
The big man spoke with his eyes on the floor. Had he turned them on the Syndic he must have seen that he was greatly agitated. Beads of moisture stood on his brow, his face was red, he swallowed often and with difficulty. At length, with an effort at composure, "Possibly your product--is not, after all, the same as Ibn Jasher's?" he said.