The Mystery of Madeline Le Blanc/Chapter 2
II.
While the crowd was dispersing, Doctor Satiani stole to his office, which was a short distance from the ‘’Hôtel de Ville’’. He had not been frightened at the possibility of being beaten by the men who had taken offense at his words. Fear was hardly an ingredient in his character. He had had too many disappointments to care much what became of him; and he had been further schooled by the sight of bravery and death on more than one battle-field. Though bearing an Italian name, his ancestors had been French for many generations,
Born in 1780, of noble blood, the son of a viscount, he had lived through a variety of scenes not to be found in the same number of years in any other period of history. At the outbreak of the Revolution he was living in the manner of a prince with his parents near Versailles. The ambition of the father's life was that the son should become important in the affairs of France; but assuredly not as a republican, whose hideous voices had been for some time filling the air with a miasma that choked the breath of royalty. After the storming of the Bastile in July, 1789, while the coils were twining around Louis XVI., Viscount Satiani and his family fled over the frontiers with the Count of Artois, the young brother of the King, and the Charles X. of a later age. Before young Satiani saw France again there had been a States General,a Republic, a King and Queen guillotined, a Reign of Terror, pillage and massacre, a Directory, and from the ashes and smoke of desolation had risen the figure of Napoleon.
The father having meanwhile died in poverty, and the mother having been conveyed to an alms hospital in Coblenz, where she still lay, young Satiani returned to France in 1800, under an assumed name. Under Napoleon's extension of amnesty to certain classes of nobles, he had detached himself from the Bourbon cause and assumed his real name, hoping to regain his father's possessions under the new dynasty that was forming. He made claims for these; but after so many years, and under so many different forms of government, they had changed hands not less than twenty times; and south of Versailles, on the very spot where in his boyhood stood the Château de Satiani, an old peasant had this year planted a field of grain. One could never have told that a château had once stood there.
Stricken with poverty, desolation and misanthropy, he had wandered afoot to Paris; where, by all sorts of labor, from the most menial to the occupation of copyist, he was able to keep from starvation. In 1806 he was forced into the army and fought at Jena and at Auerstadt. In the latter battle he was wounded in the right breast, and by a saber cut on the hip. He was taken from the field, and finally, when nearer dead than alive, removed to a hospital at Tours; whence they took him to Paris. After about eight months he was able to move about again, and assisted in taking care of the other patients; but the right lung was gone. Unfit to go back into the army, it was in this way that he began the study of medicine. By the year 1811 he had fairly recovered; and by hisapplication to study was entitled to practise anywhere in France. In 1814, at the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, his last hope of regaining any of his father's former possessions was shattered. For the next sixteen years he wandered from place to place, practising his profession.
He never stayed long anywhere; and wherever he had been, there always remained after his departure a sort of mysterious haze. No one knew him well; yet in the small communities where he had remained for any length of time, everybody knew him by sight, and respected his mysterious austerity. He was now, in the year 1830, fifty years of age. In appearance, he was of rough and wrinkled countenance, wore a copious gray mustache and a sharp chin-beard. His small eyes—one of which was blue and the other black—were set deep in his head, environed by coarse eyebrows and fleshy creases at the base of the lids. Though years had wrenched his form and features, so long as he kept his ugly eyes out of one's face, there was something stately in his appearance. Whether it was hidden power that still abode with him, or whether it was only the majestic ruins of what once had been, one could not tell by looking at him. Every feature showed his consciousness of noble lineage; and the disgust he manifested at anything democratic was equally innate with him; for to his mind it had been just such popular fanaticism that had made France bleed and Europe restless for a quarter of a century, and had dispossessed him of his rightful inheritance.
He now sat in his office (three o'clock in the afternoon) writing chemical formul æ on a sheet of paper that lay before him. Now and then he would go to the bookshelves, finger a volume for a few moments, and then return to the formulæ. Still somewhat agitated with indignation at what had happened a few hours before, at the departure of the town company of soldiers, he was trying to dissipate the feeling by applying himself to his science, which in the years gone by had pleasantly absorbed many of his hours that might otherwise have been wretched. Not infrequently, when thus at work, he would talk to himself. "C H C l 3 — —," he was just saying, "that will do it," when there came a knocking at the door.
"Come in."
Irène entered, her hair down her back, flushed and out of breath from running. "Is this—is this the doctor?"
"Yes, Mademoiselle."
"Would you be kind enough to come at once to Monsieur Le Blanc's house?"
The pleasure he had had at seeing the pretty Irène disappeared at the name "Le Blanc." "Rebels," he muttered to himself. "Who is sick?"
"Mademoiselle."
"Very sick?"
"Yes, yes, indeed, she fainted at the Hôtel de Ville, as the soldiers were marching away."
"These and their like," he said beneath his breath, “have bereft me of everything, and yet I am to go among them like a ministering angel.” Then aloud, "Was it she who said, 'Kill the King'?" There was bitterness in his voice.
"I do not know, monsieur—doctor. She was calling aloud; but I do not know what she said."He seated himself again at the chemical formulæ, indifferent to the anxiety of the girl that stood before him.
"Will you be kind enough to come at once?" pleaded Irène. “Mademoiselle is unconscious."
At the word "unconscious" Doctor Satiani seemed to awaken from his indifference.
"Mademoiselle may die if you do not come."
After a pause, he said, without enthusiasm, "Go and say that I am coming."
Irène flitted out; and the doctor, after gathering together the sheets of paper he had been studying, also left.
The cottage where Madeline lived was a modest wooden structure, a story and a half high, three rooms long, with a side room to the left. It was set back in a spacious garden that was generously shaded by massive oak trees, and screened here and there by nooks of shrubbery and sweet-scented flowers, about which curled a well-kept walk. Here she had played and read every summer of her life.
The anxiety on the interior of the house was in great contrast to the calm of the garden. The stricken girl lay on a couch in the center of the middle room. The mother had retired up-stairs, where she was being attended by some neighbors. The father and the others had tried everything they knew to restore Madeline, but all in vain. She lay like dead; and but for a feeble pulsation of the heart, gave no sign of life.
"Here comes the doctor," some one said, looking out the window.
"Thank God," whispered the father, sitting beside the couch, holding her hand, and saying tender things that he had forgotten to say when she could understand.
Poor Madeline!
"Well!" said Satiani under his breath, as he entered the house and saw the consternation.
The father arose and gave him his hand. "What can you do for her, doctor? It must be done at once—or can this sort of thing continue long?"
The doctor made no reply but proceeded to examine the girl. There was that silence that there is in a court of justice when the judge is about to render a verdict of life or death. Some of the women who had seen Madeline every day of her life, and who had something of the feeling of a mother for her, began to weep at the sight of this living death; and when the doctor turned away from the couch, they looked beseechingly at him, as if he were to decide according to his pleasure whether or not Madeline should be restored.
"I shall do what I can," said Satiani, answering their looks.
"What is it?" asked the father.
"If there is anything beyond suspension of consciousness, it cannot yet be told. Allow her to lie undisturbed where she is." And with these words, he began to rub her forehead and wrists with a fluid that he took from his medicine case. But few minutes elapsed when Doctor Satiani took his hat and bade the father good evening, ’saying, as he went, "Send for me to-morrow if she does not awaken."