fire struggling out through the fuel but newly heaped on it, threw their
reflection on the ceiling just over my head in a reek of quivering
blackness, like an angry cloud.

Suddenly I felt my arm grasped; with his left hand (the right side was
already lifeless) the dying man drew me towards him nearer and nearer,
till his lips almost touched my ear, and, in a voice now firm, now
splitting into gasp and hiss, thus he said, "I have summoned you to gaze
on your own work! You have stricken down my life at the moment when it
was most needed by my children, and most serviceable to mankind. Had I
lived a few years longer, my children would have entered on manhood, safe
from the temptations of want and undejected by the charity of strangers.
Thanks to you, they will be penniless orphans. Fellow-creatures
afflicted by maladies your pharmacopoeia had failed to reach came to me
for relief, and they found it. 'The effect of imagination,' you say.
What matters, if I directed the imagination to cure? Now you have mocked
the unhappy ones out of their last chance of life. They will suffer and
perish. Did you believe me in error? Still you knew that my object was
research into truth. You employed against your brother in art venomous
drugs and a poisoned probe. Look at me! Are you satisfied with your
work?"

I sought to draw back and pluck my arm from the dying man's grasp. I
could not do so without using a force that would have been inhuman. His
lips drew nearer still to my ear.

"Vain pretender, do not boast that you brought a genius for epigram to
the service of science. Science is lenient to all who offer experiment
as the test of conjecture. You are of the stuff of which inquisitors are
made. You cry that truth is profaned when your dogmas are questioned.