Chapter 14At nine oclock the m his servant came in with a cup of chocote on a tray and opehe shutters. Dorian was sleeping quite peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underh his cheek. He looked like a boy who had been tired out with py, or study.The man had to touch him twi the shoulder before he woke, and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had not dreamed at all. His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain. But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.He turned round, and leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his chocote. The mellow November sun came streaming into the room. The sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air. It was almost like a m in May.Gradually the events of the preg night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and restructed themselves there with terrible distiness. He wi the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came ba, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.He felt that if he brooded on what he had gohrough he would si row mad. There were sins whose fasation was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strariumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quied sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. But this was not one of them. It was a thing to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle oself.When the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead, and then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his ie and scarf-pin and ging his rings more than once. He spent a long time also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made for the servants at Selby, and going through his corresponde some of the letters, he smiled. Three of them bored him. One he read several times over and then tore up with a slight look of annoyan his face. "That awful thing, a womans memory!" as Lord Henry had once said.After he had drunk his cup of bck coffee, he wiped his lips slowly with a napkin, motioo his servant to wait, and going over to the table, sat down and wrote two letters. O in his pocket, the other he hao the valet."Take this round to 152, Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr. Campbell is out of tow his address."As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette and begag upon a piece of paper, drawing first flowers and bits of architecture, and then human faces. Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeo Basil Hallward. He frowned, aing up, went over to the book-case and took out a volume at hazard. He was determihat he would not think about what had happened until it became absolutely necessary that he should do so.When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page of the book. It was Gautiers Emaux et Camees, Charpentiers Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etg. The binding was of citron-greeher, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates. It had been given to him by Adrian Sion. As he turned over the pages, his eye fell on the poem about the hand of Laaire, the cold yellow hand "du supplial vé:e," with its downy red hairs and its "doigts de faune." He g his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice:Sur une gamme atique,Le sein de peries ruissent,La Vénus de lAdriatiqueSort de leau son corps rose et bnc.Les d?mes, sur zur des ondesSuivant phrase au pur tour,Se e des ges rondesQue soulève un soupir damour.Lesquif aborde et me dépose,Jetant son amarre au pilier,Devant une fa?ade rose,Sur le marbre dun escalier.How exquisite they were! As ohem, one seemed to be floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a bck gondo with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the Lido. The sudden fshes of colour reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall honeybed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the dim, dust-stained arcades. Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself:Devant une fa?ade rose,Sur le marbre dun escalier.The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to mad delightful follies. There was roman every pce. But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. Basil had been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Ti. Poor Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die!He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried tet. He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit ting their amber beads and the turbaned merts smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the Obelisk in the Pce de corde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded cws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those verses which, drawing musi kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious statue that Gautier pares to a tralto voice, the "monstre charmant" that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre. But after a time the book fell from his hand. He grew nervous, and a horrible fit of terror came over him. What if An Campbell should be out of Engnd? Days would epse before he could e back. Perhaps he might refuse to e. What could he do then? Every moment was of vital impo藏書網rtahey had bee friends once, five years before-- almost inseparable, iheimacy had e suddenly to an end. When they met in society now, it was only Dorian Gray who smiled: An Campbell never did.He was aremely clever young man, though he had no real appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gaiirely from Dorian. His dominant intellectual passion was for sce. At Cambridge he had spent a great deal of his time w in the boratory, and had taken a good css iural Sce Tripos of his year. Indeed, he was still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a boratory of his own in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist erson who made up prescriptions. He was an excellent musi, however, as well, and pyed both the violin and the piaer than most amateurs. In fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together--musid that indefira that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished-- and, indeed, exercised often without being scious of it. They had met at Lady Berkshires the night that Rubinsteihere, and after that used to be always seen together at the opera and wherever good music was going on. Fhteen months their intimacy sted. Campbell was always either at Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square. To him, as to many others, Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fasating in life. Whether or not a quarrel had takeween them no one ever knew. But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when they met and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at which Dorian Gray resent. He had ged, too--was strangely mencholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing musid would never himself py, giving as his excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in sce that he had no time left in which to practise. And this was certainly true. Every day he seemed to beore ied in biology, and his name appeared once or twi some of the stific reviews in e with certain curious experiments.This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for. Every sed he kept gng at the clock. As the minutes went by he became horribly agitated. At st he got up and began to pace up and down the room, looking like a beautiful caged thing. He took long stealthy strides. His hands were curiously cold.The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the jagged edge of some bck cleft of precipice. He knew what was waiting for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight and driven the eyeballs bato their cave. It was useless. The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grihrough moving masks. Then, suddenly, time stopped for him. Yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him sto st the door opened and his servaered. He turned gzed eyes upon him."Mr. Campbell, sir," said the man.A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back to his cheeks."Ask him to e in at once, Francis." He felt that he was himself again. His mood of cowardice had passed away.The man bowed aired. In a few moments, An Campbell walked in, looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his coal-bck hair and dark eyebrows."An! This is kind of you. I thank you for ing.""I had intended o enter your house again, Gray. But you said it was a matter of life ah." His voice was hard and cold. He spoke with slow deliberation. There was a look of pt ieady searg gaze that he turned on Dorian. He kept his hands in the pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have noticed the gesture with which he had beeed."Yes: it is a matter of life ah, An, and to more than one person. Sit down."Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him. The two mens eyes met. In Dorians there was infiy. He khat what he was going to do was dreadful.After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very quietly, but watg the effect of each word upon the face of him he had sent for, "An, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room to whiobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table. He has beeen hours now. Dont stir, and dont look at me like that. Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do not you. What you have to do is this--""Stop, Gray. I dont want to know anything further. Whether what you have told me is true or not true doesnt me. I entirely dee to be mixed up in your life. Keep your horrible secrets to yourself. They dont i me any more.""An, they will have to i you. This one will have to i you. I am awfully sorry for you, An. But I t help myself. You are the one man who is able to save me. I am forced t you into the matter. I have no option. An, you are stific. You know about chemistry and things of that kind. You have made experiments. What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs-- to destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left. Nobody saw this person e into the house. Indeed, at the present moment he is supposed to be in Paris. He will not be missed for months. When he is missed, there must be no trace of him found here. You, An, you must ge him, and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes that I may scatter in the air.""You are mad, Dorian.""Ah! I was waiting for you to call me Dorian.""You are mad, I tell you--mad to imagihat I would raise a fio help you, mad to make this monstrous fession. I will have nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is. Do you think I am going to peril my reputation for you? What is it to me what devils work you are up to?""It was suicide, An.""I am gd of that. But who drove him to it? You, I should fancy.""Do you still refuse to do this for me?""Of course I refuse. I will have absolutely nothing to do with it. I dont care what shame es on you. You deserve it all. I should not be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced. How dare you ask me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror? I should have thought you knew more about peoples characters. Your friend Lord Henry Wotton t have taught you much about psychology, whatever else he has taught you. Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you. You have e to the wrong man. Go to some of your friends. Dont e to me.""An, it was murder. I killed him. You dont know what he had made me suffer. Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or the marring of it than poor Harry has had. He may not have inte, the result was the same.""Murder! Good God, Dorian, is that what you have e to? I shall not inform upon you. It is not my business. Besides, without my stirring iter, you are certain to be arrested. Nobody ever its a crime without doing something stupid. But I will have nothing to do with it.""You must have something to do with it. Wait, wait a moment; listen to me. Only listen, An. All I ask of you is to perform a certain stific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there dont affect you. If in some hideous disseg-room or fetid boratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. On the trary, you would probably feel that you were being the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, ratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind. What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before. Io destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you are aced to work at. And, remember, it is the only piece of evidence against me. If it is discovered, I am lost; and it is sure to be discovered unless you help me.""I have no desire to help you. You fet that. I am simply indifferent to the whole thing. It has nothing to do with me.""An, I e you. Think of the position I am in. Just before you came I almost fainted with terror. You may know terror yourself some day. No! dont think of that. Look at the matter purely from the stific point of view. You dont inquire where the dead things on which you experiment e from. Dont inquire now. I have told you too much as it is. But I beg of you to do this. We were friends once, An.""Dont speak about those days, Dorian--they are dead.""The dead linger sometimes. The man upstairs will not go away. He is sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms. An! An! If you dont e to my assistance, I am ruined. Why, they will hang me, An! Dont you uand? They will hang me for what I have done.""There is no good in prolonging this se. I absolutely refuse to do anything iter. It is insane of you to ask me.""You refuse?""Yes.""I e you, An.""It is useless."The same look of pity came into Dorian Grays eyes. Theretched out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it. He read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table. Having dohis, he got up a over to the windobell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and ope. As he read it, his face became ghastly pale and he fell ba his chair. A horrible sense of siess came over him. He felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round and came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder."I am so sorry for you, An," he murmured, "but you leave me no alternative. I have a letter written already. Here it is. You see the address. If you dont help me, I must send it. If you dont help me, I will send it. You know what the result will be. But yoing to help me. It is impossible for you to refuse now. I tried to spare you. You will do me the justiit that. You were stern, harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me--no living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to dictate terms."Campbell buried his fa his hands, and a shudder passed through him."Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, An. You know what they are. The thing is quite simple. e, dont work yourself into this fever. The thing has to be done. Face it, and do it."A groan broke from Campbells lips and he shivered all over. The tig of the clo the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne. He felt as if an ir was being slowly tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already e upon him. The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead. It was intolerable. It seemed to crush him."e, An, you must decide at once.""I ot do it," he said, meically, as though words could alter things."You must. You have no choice. Dont dey."He hesitated a moment. "Is there a fire in the room upstairs?""Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos.""I shall have to go home a some things from the boratory.""No, An, you must not leave the house. Write out on a sheet of notepaper what you want and my servant will take a cab and bring the things back to you."Campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope to his assistant. Dorian took the note up and read it carefully. Then he rang the bell and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as soon as possible and t the things with him.As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and having got up from the chair, went over to the ey-piece. He was shivering with a kind of ague. For nearly twenty minutes, her of the men spoke. A fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the tig of the clock was like the beat of a hammer.As the chime strue, Campbell turned round, and looking at Dorian Gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. There was something in the purity and refi of that sad face that seemed te him. "You are infamous, absolutely infamous!" he muttered."Hush, An. You have saved my life," said Dorian."Your life? Good heavens! what a life that is! You have gone from corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. In doing what I am going to do--what you force me to do-- it is not of your life that I am thinking.""Ah, An," murmured Dorian with a sigh, "I wish you had a thousandth part of the pity for me that I have for you." He turned away as he spoke and stood looking out at the garden. Campbell made no answer.After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servaered, carrying a rge mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil of steel and ptinum wire and two rather curiously shaped iron cmps."Shall I leave the things here, sir?" he asked Campbell."Yes," said Dorian. "And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another errand for you. What is the name of the man at Rid who supplies Selby with orchids?""Harden, sir.""Yes--Harden. You must go down to Rid at once, see Harden personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered, and to have as few white ones as possible. In fact, I dont want any white ones. It is a lovely day, Francis, and Rid is a very pretty pce-- otherwise I wouldnt bother you about it.""No trouble, sir. At what time shall I be back?"Dorian looked at Campbell. "How long will your experiment take, An?" he said in a calm indifferent voice. The presence of a third person in the room seemed to give him extraordinary ce.Campbell frowned and bit his lip. "It will take about five hours," he answered."It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven, Francis. Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. You have the evening to yourself. I am not dining at home, so I shall not want you.""Thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room."Now, An, there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy this chest is! Ill take it for you. Y the other things." He spoke rapidly and in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by him. They left the room together.When they reached the top nding, Dorian took out the key and tur in the lock. Theopped, and a troubled look came into his eyes. He shuddered. "I dont think I go in, An," he murmured."It is nothing to me. I dont require you," said Campbell coldly.Dorian half opehe door. As he did so, he saw the face of his portrait leering in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn curtain was lying. He remembered that the night before he had fotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal vas, and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder.What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the vas had sweated blood? How horrible it was!--more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.He heaved a deep breath, opehe door a little wider, and with half-closed eyes and averted head, walked quickly iermihat he would not look even once upon the dead man. Then, stooping down and taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it right over the picture.There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed themselves oricacies of the pattern before him. He heard Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other things that he had required for his dreadful work. He began to wonder if he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had thought of each other."Leave me now," said a stern voice behind him.He turned and hurried out, just scious that the dead man had been thrust bato the chair and that Campbell was gazing into a glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs, he heard the key being turned in the lock.It was long after seven when Campbell came bato the library. He ale, but absolutely calm. "I have done what you asked me to do," he muttered "And now, good-bye. Let us never see each ain.""You have saved me from ruin, An. I ot fet that," said Dorian simply.As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been sitting at the table was gone.