him:--
Dr. Van Helsing, are you mad? He raised his head and looked at me, and
somehow the tenderness of his face calmed me at once. Would I were! he
said. Madness were easy to bear compared with truth like this. Oh, my
friend, why, think you, did I go so far round, why take so long to tell
you so simple a thing? Was it because I hate you and have hated you all
my life? Was it because I wished to give you pain? Was it that I wanted,
now so late, revenge for that time when you saved my life, and from a
fearful death? Ah no!
Forgive me, said I. He went on:--
My friend, it was because I wished to be gentle in the breaking to you,
for I know you have loved that so sweet lady. But even yet I do not
expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at once any abstract
truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always
believed the no of it; it is more hard still to accept so sad a
concrete truth, and of such a one as Miss Lucy. To-night I go to prove
it. Dare you come with me?
This staggered me. A man does not like to prove such a truth; Byron
excepted from the category, jealousy.
And prove the very truth he most abhorred.
He saw my hesitation, and spoke:--
The logic is simple, no madman s logic this time, jumping from tussock
to tussock in a misty bog. If it be not true, then proof will be relief;
at worst it will not harm. If it be true! Ah, there is the dread; yet
very dread should help my cause, for in it is some need of belief. Come,
I tell you what I propose: first, that we go off now and see that child
in the hospital. Dr. Vincent, of the North Hospital, where the papers
say the child is, is friend of mine, and I think of yours since you were
in class at Amsterdam. He will let two scientists see his case, if he
will not let two friends. We shall tell him nothing, but only that we
wish to learn. And then----
And then? He took a key from his pocket and held it up. And then we
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