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Rappaccini’s Other Daughter 441
Rappaccini’s Other Daughter
For of course that sinister Paduan precursor of Mad Scientists, whose story
has been so ably if incompletely related by Mr. Hawthorne, was, though mad,
enough of a scientist to keep a control. While he gave out that the beauteous
Beatrice, of the loving soul and envenomed breath, was his only daughter, he
was rearing in seclusion the equally beauteous Laura.
And that is why our time machines are not permitted to travel back farther
than the middle of the twentieth century.
It had taken Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini some 16 years to rear Beatrice to toxic
perfection, nurturing her on lethal vegetable extracts until the rich balsam
of her breath was itself a poison. By the time of her regrettable death, this
incunabular toxicologist had learned more rapid methods; was he not able to
produce the same condition in her lover Giovanni in a matter of months? It
took even less time to elevate Laura from her position as control to the focal
role in the great (if mad) experiment; soon she, who had ever been as beautiful
as Beatrice, was now also as deadly.
That shallow youth Giovanni Guasconti found himself as facilely and
superficially in love with one baleful beauty as with the other—indeed, with
yet greater ease on this second occasion, since he had been wondering, ever
since he knew himself to be a victim of the Rappaccini method, how he was
to discharge the normal impulses of youth upon a living object.
All the wedding guests agreed that never had there been a more handsome
couple nor a more splendid wedding, even though the bride’s father eccentrically
enjoined the use of masks by all—through which, however, all could still
faintly perceive the dulcet and balsamous breath of the pair.
Laura and Giovanni were, though the term was not yet in vogue, the guinea
pigs of Dr. Rappaccini. They were also young and eager and Mediterranean,
and like guinea pigs they bred—if not indeed like hurkles.
After a quarter of a millennium had passed, in the first half of the twentieth
century, the pure Rappaccini-Guasconti strain (under a score of advisable
pseudonyms) had spread throughout the earth in such numbers that the
problem of integration with ordinary, unscented, non-lethal humanity was an
acute one. During the eighteenth century the women had passed unnoticed
by attaching breath-filters to their face masks; in the nineteenth, the men had
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