“What could have induced the woman!” burst from me.
“She is greedy of money. It is the only thing she loves—except her beauty and her power over men; and during the boy’s infancy—that word is used in the Will—she has full enjoyment of the estate. After he ‘attains to manhood’—I quote the Will again—hers is but a life-interest. Now you understand?”
I did understand, and the daring of the woman dazzled me. She had made the Professor doubly her tool.
“And so,” I gurgled between tears and laughter, “Lord Clanbevan, who ought to be leaving Eton this year to commence his first Oxford term, is being carried about in the arms of a nurse, arrayed in the flowing garments of a six-months’ baby! What an astonishing conspiracy!”
“His mother,” continued the Professor calmly, “allows no one to approach him but the nurse. The family are only too glad to ignore what they consider a deplorable case of atavistic growth-arrest, and the boy himself——” He broke off. “I have detained you,” he said, after a pause. “I will not do so longer. Nor will I offer you my hand. I am as conscious as you are—that it has committed a crime.” And he bowed me out with his hands sternly held behind him. There were few more words between us, only I remember turning on the threshold of the laboratory, where I left him, to ask whether protium—radium, as it is now christened—checks the growth of every organic substance? The answer I received was curious:
“Certainly, with the exception of the nails and the hair!”
A week later the Professor was found dead in his laboratory.... There were reports of suicide—hushed up. People said he had been more eccentric than ever of late, and theorized about brain-mischief; only I located the trouble in the heart. A year went by, and I had almost forgotten Lady Clanbevan—for she went abroad after the Professor’s death—when at a little watering-place on the Dorset coast, I saw that lovely thing, as lovely as ever—she who was fifty if a day! With her were the blue-cloaked elderly nurse and Lord Clanbevan, borne, as usual, in the arms of his attendant, or wheeled in a luxurious perambulator. Day after day I encountered them—the lovely mother, the middle-aged nurse, and the mysterious child—until the sight began to get on my nerves. Had the Professor selected me as the recipient of a secret unrivaled in the records of biological discovery, or had he been the victim of some maniacal delusion that cold October day when we met in Rotten Row? One peep under the thick white lace veil with which the baby’s face was invariably covered would clear everything up! Oh! for a chance to allay the pangs of curiosity!