"But," replied the other, losing color, "you will never tell them; never to a living soul? You will bury them in the remotest place in your memory so that they shall die there, smothered."
"Just the other way," retorted Lorenza, delighted as angry persons are at having found the antagonist's vulnerable point. "My memory shall piously preserve those words, which I will repeat over and over again when alone, and say aloud when the opening comes, as already I have done."
"To whom?"
"To the princess royal."
"Lorenza, mind this well," said he, clenching his nails in his flesh to subdue his fury and check his rushing blood at the thought that his brothers were in danger through the woman whom he had selected to aid them all, "if you said them, never again will you do so. For the doors will be kept fastened, those bars pointed at the head, and those walls reared as high as Babel's."
"I have already told you, Balsamo, that any soul wherein the love of liberty is reinforced by the hate of tyranny must escape from all prison houses."
"Well and good; try it, woman; but mark this well: you will only twice try it. For the first time I will punish you so severely that you will weep all the tears in your body; and for the second I will strike you pitilessly that you will pour forth all the blood in your veins."
"Help,help, he is murdering me," shrieked the woman, at the last paroxysm of wrath, tearing her hair and rolling on the carpet.
For an instant Balsamo considered her with mingled rage and pity, the latter overcoming the other.
"Come, come, Lorenza, return to your senses, and be calm. A day will come when you will be rewarded amply for what you have suffered, or fancy."
"Imprisoned," screamed the Italian, "and beaten."
"These are times to try the mind. You are mad, but you shall be cured."
"Better throw me into a madhouse at once; shut me up in a real jail."
"No, you have warned me what you would do against me."
"Then," said the infuriate, "let me have death straightway."
Springing up with the suppleness and rapidity of the wild beast, she leaped to break her head against the wall. But Balsamo had merely to stretch out his hands toward her and utter a single word rather with his will than with his lips, to stop her dead. She stopped, indeed, reeled and dropped sleep-stricken in the magnetiser's arms.
The strange enchanter, who seemed to rule all the material part of the woman though the mental portion baffled him, lifted up Lorenza in his arms and carried her to the couch; there he laid a long kiss on her lips, drew the curtains of bed and windows, and left her.
A sweet and blessed sleep enveloped her like the cloak of a kind mother wrapping the willful child who has much suffered and wept.
Lorenzawas not mistaken.
A carriage, going through St. Denis gateway, and following the street of the same name, turned into the road leading out to the Bastille.
As the clairvoyant had stated, this conveyance enclosed the Cardinal Prince of Rohan, Bishop of Strasburg, whose impatience had caused him to anticipate the hour fixed for his visit to the magician in his cave of mystery.
The coachman, who had been inured to obscurity, pitfalls and dangers of some darksome streets by the prelate's love adventures, was not daunted the least when, after leaving the part of the way still populated and lighted, he had to take the black and lonesome Bastille Boulevard.
The vehicle stopped at the corner of St. Claude Street, where it hid along the trees twenty paces off.
Prince Rohan, in plain dress, glided up the street, and rapped three times on the door, which he easily recognized from the indication the count had afforded.
Fritz's steps sounded in the passage, and he opened the door.
"Is it here resides Count Fenix?" inquired Rohan.
"Yes, my lord, and he is at home."
"Say a visitor is here."
"Shall I announce his Eminence Cardinal Prince de Rohan?" asked Fritz.
The prince stood aghast, looking round him and at himself to see if anything about him in costume or surroundings betrayed his rank. No; he was alone and in civilian dress.
"How do you know my name?" he inquired.
"My lord told me just now, that he expected your Eminence."
"Yes, but to-morrow, or the day after?"
"Not so, please your highness—this evening."
"Announce me, any way," said the prelate, putting a double-louis gold piece in his hand.
Fritz intimated that the visitor should follow him; and he walked briskly to the door of the ante-chamber, which a largechandelier with a dozen tapers illuminated. The visitor followed, surprised and meditative.
"There must be some mistake, my friend," he said, pausing at the door, "in which case I do not wish to disturb the count. It is impossible he can expect me, as he could not know I was coming."
"As your highness is Cardinal Prince Rohan, you are certainly expected by my lord."
Lighting the other candelabra, Fritz bowed and went out. Five minutes elapsed, during which the prelate, the prey to singular emotion, scanned the elegant furniture of the room, and the half-dozen paintings by masters on the tapestried walls. When the door opened, Count Fenix appeared on the threshold.
"Good-evening to your highness," he simply said.
"I am told that you expected me," observed the visitor, without replying to the welcome. "Expected this evening? impossible!"
"I ask your pardon, but I was expecting your highness," returned the host. "I may be doubted, seeing how paltry is my reception, but I have hardly got settled yet, from being but a few days in town. I hope for your eminence's excusing me."
"My visit expected? Who could have forewarned you?"
"Yourself, my lord. When you called your footman to the carriage door, did you not say to him: 'Drive to St. Claude Street, in the Swamp, by St. Denis Street and the Boulevard?'—words which he repeated to thedriver?"
"Yes; but how could you see this and hear the words, not being present?"
"I was not there, but I saw and heard at this distance, as I am, you must not forget, a wizard."
"I had forgotten. By the way, am I to entitle you Baron Balsamo or Count Fenix!"
"In my own house I have no title—I am plainly TheMaster."
"Ah, the title in alchemy. So, my master in hermetics, if you expected me, the fire would be lit in the laboratory!"
"The fire is always kept burning, my lord. And I will have the honor to show your highness into the place."
"I follow you on the condition that you do not personally confront me with the devil. I am dreadfully afraid of his Satanic Majesty Lucifer."
"My lord, my familiar friends," replied Balsamo, "never forget how to deal with princes, and they will behave properly."
"This encourages me; so, ho! for the laboratory."
Thetwo threaded a narrow staircase which led, as did the grand stairs, to the first floor rooms, but a door was under an archway there, which the guide opened and the cardinal bravely walked into a dark corridor thus disclosed.
Balsamo shut the door, and the sound of the closing made the visitor look back with some emotion.
"We have arrived," said the leader. "Only one door to open and shut behind us. Do not be astonished at the noise it makes, as it is of iron."
It was fortunate that the cardinal was warned in time, for the snap of the handle and the grinding of the hinges might make nerves more susceptible than his to vibrate.
They went down three steps and entered a large cell with rafters overhead, a huge lamp with shade, many books, and a number of chemical and physical instruments—such was the aspect.
In a few seconds the cardinal felt a difficulty in breathing.
"What does this mean, my lord?" he asked. "The water is streaming off me and I am stifling. What sound is that, master?"
"This is the cause," answered the host, pulling aside a large curtain of asbestos, and uncovering a large brick furnace in the centre of which glared two fiery cavities like lions' eyes in the gloom.
This furnace stood in an inner room, centrally, twice the size of the first, unseen from the stone-cloth screen.
"This is rather alarming, meseems," said the prince.
"Only a furnace, my lord."
"But there are different kinds of furnaces; this one strikes me as diabolical, and the smell is not pleasant. What devil's broth are you cooking?"
"What your eminence wants. I believe you will accept a sample of my produce. I was not going to work until to-morrow; but as your eminence changed his mind, I lit the fire as soon as I saw you on the road hither. I made the mixture so that the furnace is boiling, and you can have your gold in about ten minutes. Let me open the ventilator to let in some air."
"What, are these crucibles on the fire——"
"In ten minutes they will pour you out the gold as pure as from any assayer's in christendom."
"I should like to look at them."
"Of course, you can; but you must take the indispensableprecaution of putting on this asbestos mask with glass eyes; or the ardent fire will scorch your sight."
"Have a care, indeed! I prize my eyes, and would not give them for the hundred thousand crowns you promised me."
"So I thought, and your lordship's eyes are good and bright."
The compliment did not displease the prince, who was proud of his personal advantages.
"He, he!" he chuckled; "so we are going to see gold made?"
"I expect so, my lord."
"A hundred thousand crowns' worth?"
"There may be a little more, as I mixed up liberally the raw stuff."
"You are certainly a generous magician," said the prince, fastening the fireproof mask on, while his heart throbbed gladly.
"Less than your eminence, though it is kind to praise me for generosity, of which you are a good judge. Will your highness stand a little one side while I lift off the crucible covers?"
He had put on a stone-cloth shirt, and seizing iron pincers, he lifted off an iron cover. This allowed one to see four similar melting pots, each containing a fluid mass, one vermilion red, others lighter but all ruddy.
"Is that gold?" queried the prelate in an undertone, as if afraid by loud speaking to injure the mystery in progress.
"Yes, the four crucibles contain the metal in different stages of production, some having been on eleven hours, some twelve. The mixture is to be thrown into the first mass of ingredients—the living stuff into the gross—at the moment of boiling—that is the secret, which I do not mind communicating to a friend of the science. But, as your eminence may notice, the first crucible is turning white hot; it is time to draw the charge. Will you please stand well back, my lord?"
Rohan obeyed with the same punctuality as a soldier obeying his captain. Dropping the iron pincers, which had already heated to redness, the other ran up to the furnace a carriage on wheels of the same level, the top being an iron block, in which were set eight molds of round shape and the same capacity.
"This is the mold in which I cast the ingots," explained the alchemist.
On the floor he spread a lot of wet oakum wads to prevent the splashing of the metal setting the floor afire. He placed himself between the molds and the furnace, opened a large book, from which he read an incantation, and said, as he caught up long tongs in his hand to clutch the crucible:
"The gold will be splendid, my lord, of the first quality."
"Oh, you are never going to lift that mass single-handed?" exclaimed the spectator.
"Though it weighs fifty pounds, yes, my lord; but do not fear, for few metal-melters have my strength and skill."
"But if the crucible were to burst——"
"That did happen once to me: it was in 1399, while I was experimenting with Nicolas Flamel, in his house by St. Jacques' in the Shambles. Poor Nick almost lost his life, and I lost twenty-seven marks' worth of a substance more precious than gold."
"What the deuse are you telling me? that you were pursuing the great work in 1399 with Nicolas Flamel?"
"Yes, Flamel and I found the way while together fifty or sixty years before, working with Pietro the Good, in Pela town. He did not pour out the crucible quickly enough, and I had a bad eye, the left one, for ten or twelve years, from the steam. Of course you know Pietro's book, the famous 'Margarita Pretiosa,' dated 1330?"
"To be sure; and you knew Flamel and Peter the Good?"
"I was the pupil of one and the master of the other."
While the alarmed prelate, wondered whether this might not be the Prince of Darkness himself and not one of his imps by his side, Balsamo plunged his tongs into the incandescence.
It was a sure and rapid seizure. He nipped the crucible four inches beneath the rim, testing the grip by lifting it just a couple of inches. Then, by a vigorous effort, straining his muscles, he raised the frightful pot from the scorching bed. The tongs reddened almost up to the grasp. On the superheated surface white streaks ran like lightning in a sulphurous cloud. The pot edges deepened into brick red, then browner, while its conical shape appeared rosy and silvery in the twilight of the recess. Finally the molten metal could be spied, forming a violet cream on the top, with golden shivers, which hissed out of the lips of the container, and leaped flaming into the black mold. At its orifice reappeared the gold, spouting up furious and fuming, as if insulted by the vile metal which confined it.
"Number two," saidBalsamo, passing to the second mold, which he filled with the same skill and strength.
Perspiration streamed from the founder, while the beholder crossed himself, in the shadow.
It was truly a picture of wild and majestic horror. Illumined by the yellow gleams of the metallic flame, the operator resembled the condemned souls writhing in the Infernos of Dante and Michelangelo, in their caldrons. Add to this the sensation of what was in progress being unheard-of. Balsamo did not stop to take breath between the two drawings of the charges, for time pressed.
"There is little loss," observed he, after filling the secondmold. "I let the boiling go on the hundredth of a minute too long."
"The hundredth of a minute?" repeated the cardinal, not trying to conceal his stupefaction.
"Trifles are enormous in the hermetical art," replied the magician simply; "but anyway, here are two crucibles empty and two ingots cast, and they amount to a hundred weight of fine gold."
Seizing the first mold with the powerful tongs, he threw it into a tub of water, which seethed and steamed for a long time; at length he opened it, and drew out an ingot of purest gold in the shape of a sugarloaf, flattened at both ends.
"We shall have to wait nearly an hour for the other two," said Balsamo. "While waiting, would your eminence not like to sit down and breathe the fresh air?"
"And this is gold!" said the cardinal, without replying, which made the hearer smile, for he had firm hold of him now.
"Does your eminence doubt?"
"Science has so many times been deceived."
"You are not speaking your mind wholly," said Balsamo. "You suppose that I cheat you, but do so with full knowledge. My lord, I should look very small to myself if I acted thus, for my ambition would then be restricted by the walls of this foundry, whence you would go forth to give the rest of your admiration to the first juggler at the street corner. Come, come! honor me better, my prince, and take it that I would cheat you more skillfully and with a higher aim if cheating was intended by me. At all events your eminence knows how to test gold?"
"By the touchstone, of course."
"Has not my lord made the application of the lunar caustic to the Spanish gold coins much liked at card-play on account of the gold being the finest, but among which a lot of counterfeits have got afloat?"
"This indeed has happened me."
"Well, here is acid, and a bluestone, my lord."
"No, I am convinced."
"My lord, do me the pleasure of ascertaining that this is not only gold, but gold without alloy."
The doubter seemed averse to giving this proof of unbelief, and yet it was clear that he was not convinced. Balsamo himself tested the ingots and showed the result to his guest.
"Twenty-eight karats fine," he said: "I am going to turn out the other twain."
Ten minutes subsequently, the two hundred thousand crowns' worth of the precious metal was lying on the damp oakum bed, in four ingots altogether.
"I saw youreminence coming in a carriage, so I presumeit is in waiting. Let it be driven up to my door, and I will have my man put the bullion in it."
"A hundred thousand crowns," muttered the prince, taking off the mask in order to gloat on the metal at his feet.
"As you saw it made, you can freely say so," added the conjurer, "but do not make a town talk of it, for wizards are not liked in France. If I were making theories instead of solid metal, it would be a different matter."
"Then what can I do for you?" questioned the prince, with difficulty hoisting one of the fifty pound lumps in his delicate hands.
The other looked hard at him and burst into laughter without any respect.
"What is there laughable in the offer I make you?" asked the cardinal.
"Why, your lordship offers me his services, and it seems more to the purpose that I should offer mine."
"You oblige me," he said, with a clouding brow, "and that I am eager to acknowledge. But if my gratitude ought to be rated higher than I appraise it, I will not accept the service. Thank heaven, there are still enough usurers in Paris for me to find the hundred thousand crowns in a day, half on my note of hand, half on security; my episcopal ring alone is worth forty thousand livres."
Holding out his hand, white as a woman's, a diamond flashed on the ring-finger as large as a hickory nut.
"Prince, you cannot possibly have held the idea for an instant that I meant to insult you. It is strange that truth seems to have this effect on all princes," he added, as to himself. "Your eminence offers me his services; I ask you yourself of what nature can they be?"
"My credit at court, to begin with."
"My lord, you know that is shaky, and I would rather have the Duke of Choiseul's, albeit he may not be the prime minister for yet a fortnight. Against your credit, look at my cash—the pure, bright gold! Every time your eminence wants some, advise me overnight or the same morning, and I will conform to his desire. And with gold one obtains everything, eh, my lord?"
"Nay, not everything," muttered the prince, falling from the perch of patronage, and not even seeking to regain it.
"Quite right. I forgot that your eminence seeks something else than gold, a more precious boon than all earthly gifts; but that does not come within the scope of science as in the range of magic. Say the word, my lord, and the alchemist will become a magician, to serve you."
"Thank you, I need nothing and desire no longer," sighed the prelate.
"My lord," sighed the tempter, drawing nearer, "such areply ought not to be made to a wizard by a prince, young, fiery, handsome, rich and bearing the name of Rohan. Because the wizard reads hearts and knows to the contrary."
"I wish for nothing," repeated the high nobleman, almost frightened.
"On the contrary, I thought that your eminence entertained desires which he shrank from naming to himself, as they are truly royal."
"I believe you are alluding to some words you used in the Princess Royal's rooms?" said the prince, starting. "You were in error then, and are so still."
"Your highness is forgetting that I see as clearly in your heart what is going on now as I saw your carriage coming from the Carmelite convent, traversing the town and stopping under the trees fifty paces off from my house."
"Then explain what is there?"
"My lord, the princes of your house have always hungered for a great and hazardous love affair."
"I do not know what you mean, my lord," faltered the prince.
"Nay, you understand to a T. I might have touched several chords in you—but why the useless? I went straight to the heartstring which sounds loudest, and it is vibrating deeply, I am sure."
With a final effort of mistrust the cardinal raised his head and interrogated the other's clear and sure gaze. The latter smiled with such superiority that the cardinal lowered his eyes.
"Oh, you are right not to meet my glance, my lord, for then I see into your heart too clearly. It is a mirror which retains the image which it has reflected."
"Silence, Count Fenix; do be silent," said the prelate, subjugated.
"Silence?—you are right, for the time has not come to parade such a passion."
"Not yet? may it expect a future?"
"Why not?"
"And can you tell me whether this is not a mad passion, as I have thought, and must think until I have a proof to the opposite?"
"You ask too much, my lord. I cannot say anything until I am in contact with some portion of the love-inspirer's self—for instance, a tress of her golden hair, however scanty."
"Verily you are a deep man! You truly say you can read into hearts as I in my prayer-book."
"Almost the very words your ancestor used—I mean Chevalier Louis Rohan, when I bade farewell to him, on the execution-stage in the Bastille, which he had ascended so courageously."
"He said that you were deep?"
"And that I read hearts. For I had forewarned him that Chevalier Preault would betray him. He would not believe me, and he was betrayed."
"What a singular connection you make between my ancestor and me," said the cardinal, turning pale against his wish.
"Only to show that you ought to be wary, in procuring the lock to be cut from under a crown."
"No matter whence it comes, you shall have it."
"Very well. Here is your gold; I hope you no longer doubt that it is gold?"
"Give me pen and paper to write the receipt for this generous loan."
"What do I want a receipt from your lordship for?"
"My dear count, I often borrow, but I never fail to write a receipt," rejoined the prince.
"Have it your own way, my lord."
The cardinal took a quill and scrawled in large and illegible writing a signature under a line or two which a schoolboy would be ashamed of at present.
"Will that do?" he inquired, handing it to Balsamo, who put it in his pocket without looking at it.
"Perfectly," he said.
"You have not read it."
"I have the word of a Rohan, and that is better than a bond."
"Count Fenix, you are truly a noble man, and I cannot make you beholden to me. I am glad to be your debtor."
Balsamo bowed, and rang a bell, to which Fritz responded.
Saying a few words in German to him, the servant wrapped up the ingots of gold in their wads of ropeyarn, and took them all up as a boy might as many oranges in a handkerchief, a little strained but not hampered or bent under the weight.
"Have we Hercules here?" questioned the cardinal.
"He is rather lusty, my lord," answered the necromancer, "but I must own that, since he has been in my employment, I make him drink three drops every morning of an elixir which my learned friend Dr. Althotas compounded. It is beginning to do him good. In a year he will be able to carry a hundredweight on each finger."
"Marvelous! incomprehensible!" declared the prince-priest. "Oh, I cannot resist the temptation to tell everybody about this."
"Do so, my lord," replied the host, laughing. "But do not forget that it is tantamount to pledging yourself to put out the match when they start the fire going to burn me in public."
Having escorted his illustrious caller to the outer door, he took his leave with a respectful bow.
"But I do not see your man," said the visitor.
"He went to carry the gold to your carriage, at the fourth tree on the right round the corner on the main street. That is what I told him in German, my lord."
The cardinal lifted his hands in wonder and disappeared in the shadows.
Balsamo waited until Fritz returned, when he went back to the private inner house, fastening all the doors.
Hewent to listen at Lorenza's door, where she was sleeping evenly and sweetly.
He opened a panel and looked in upon her, for some while in affectionate reverie. Closing the wicket, he stole away to his laboratory, where he put out the fire, by opening a register plate which sent most of the heat up the chimney, and ran in water from a tank without.
In a pocket-book, he carefully fastened up the receipt of Cardinal Rohan, saying:
"The parole of a Rohan is all very well, but only for me, and the brothers will want to know yonder how I employ their money."
These words were dying on his lips when three sharp raps on the ceiling made him lift his head.
"Althotas wants me, and in a hurry. That is a good sign."
With a long iron rod he rapped in answer. He put away the tools, and by means of an iron ring in a trap overhead, which was the floor of a dumb-waiter, as then they called elevators, he pulled this down to his feet. Placing himself in the center of it, he was carried gently, by no spring but a simple hydraulic machine, worked by the reservoir which had extinguished the fire, up into the study reserved for the old alchemist.
This new dwelling was eight feet by nine in height, and sixteen in length; all the light came from a skylight, as the four walls were without inlet. It was, relatively to the house on wheels, a palace.
The old man was sitting in his easy-chair on casters, at the middle of a horseshoe-shaped table in iron, with a marble top, laden with a quantity of plants, books, tools, bottles, and papers traced with cabalistic signs—a chaos.
He was so wrapt in thought that he was not disturbed by the entrance.
A globe of crystal hung over his yellow and bald pate; in this a sort of serpent, fine and coiled like a spring, seemed to curl, and it sent forth a bright and unvarying light, withoutother apparent source of luminous supply than the chain supporting the globe might contain to transmit.
He was "candling" a phial of ground glass in his fingers as a good wife tries eggs.
"Well, anything new?" said Balsamo, after having silently watched him for a while.
"Yes, yes; I am delighted, Acharat, for I have found what I sought."
"Gold—diamonds?"
"Pooh! They are pretty discoveries for my soul to rejoice over."
"I suppose you mean your elixir, in that case."
"Yes, my boy, my elixir—life everlasting."
"Oh, so you are still harping on that string," said the younger sage sadly, for he thought his senior was following an idle dream.
But without listening Althotas was lovingly peering into his phial.
"The proportions are found at last," he mumbled. "Elixir of Aristæus, twenty grams; balm of mercury, fifteen; precipitate of gold, fifteen; essence of Lebanon cedar, twenty-five grams."
"But it seems to me, bar the Aristæan elixir, this is about what you last mixed up."
"That is so, but there was lacking the binding ingredient, without which the rest are no good."
"Can one procure it?"
"Certainly; it is three drops of a child's arterial blood."
"And have you the child?" gasped Balsamo, horrified.
"No, I expect you to find one for me."
"Master, you are mad."
"In what respect?" asked the emotionless old man, licking with his tongue the stopper of the phial, from which a little of the nectar had oozed.
"The child would be killed."
"What of it—the finer the child, the better the heart's blood."
"It cannot be; children are no longer butchered, but brought up with care."
"Indeed! how fickle is the world. Three years ago, we were offered more children than we knew what to do with, for four charges of gunpowder or a pint of traders' whiskey."
"That was on the Congo River, in Africa, master."
"I believe so: but it does not matter if the young is black. I remember that what they offered were sprightly, woolly-headed, jolly little urchins."
"Unfortunately we are no longer on the Congo. We are in Paris."
"Well, we can embark from Marseilles and be in Africa in six weeks."
"That can be done; but I must stay in France on serious business."
"Business?" sneered the old man, sending forth a peal of shrill laughter, most lugubrious. "True, I had forgotten that you have political clubs to organize, conspiracies to foster, and, in short, serious business!" And he laughed again forced and false.
Balsamo held his peace, reserving his powers for the storm impending.
"How far has your business advanced?" he inquired, painfully turning in his chair and fixing his large gray eyes on the pupil.
"I have thrown the first stone," he replied, feeling the glance go through him. "The pool is stirred up. The mud is in agitation—the philosophic sediment."
"Yes, you are going to bring into play your utopias, fogs and hollow dreams. These idiots dispute about the existence or non-existence of the Almighty, when they might become little gods themselves. Let us hear who are the famous philosophers whom you have enlisted!"
"I have already the leading poet and the greatest atheist of the age, who will be coming into France presently, to be made a Freemason, in the lodge I am getting up in the old Jesuits' College, Potaufer street. His name is Voltaire."
"I do not know him. The next?"
"I am to be introduced to the greatest sower of ideas of the century, the author of the Social Contract, Rousseau."
"He is not known to me either."
"I expect not, as you only know such old alchemists as Alfonso the Wise, Raymond Lully, Peter of Toledo and Albert the Great."
"Because they are the only men who have really loved a life, sowed ideas that live, and labored at the grand question of to be or not tobe."
"There are two ways of living, master."
"I only know of one—existing. But to return to your brace of philosophers. With their help you intend to——"
"Grasp the present and sap the future."
"How stupid they must be in this country to be lured away by ideas."
"No, it is because they have too much brains that they are led by ideas. And then, I have a more powerful help than all the philosophers—the fact that monarchy has lasted sixteen hundred years in France, and the French are tired of it."
"Hence, they are going to overturn the throne, and you are backing them with all your forces! You fool! Whatgood is the upsetting of this monarchy going to do you?"
"It will bring me nothing, at the best, but it will be happiness for others."
"Come, come, I am in a good humorto-day, and can listen to your nonsense. Explain to me how you will obtain the general weal and what it consists of."
"A ministry is in power which is the last rampart defending the monarchy; it is a cabinet, brave, industrious and intelligent, which might sustain this wornout and staggering monarchy for yet twenty years. My aids will overturn it."
"Your philosophers?"
"Oh, no, for they are in favor of the ministry, for its head is a philosopher too."
"Then they are a selfish pack. What great imbeciles!"
"I do not care to discuss what they are, for I do not know," said Balsamo, who was losing his patience. "I only know that they will all cry down the next ministry when this one isdestroyed."
"This new cabinet will have against it the philosophers and then theParliament. They will make such an uproar that the cabinet will persecute the philosophers and block the Parliament. Then in mind and matter will be organized a sullen league, a tenacious, stubborn, restless opposition, which will attack everything, undermining and shaking. Instead of Parliament they will try to rule with judges appointed by the king; they will do everything for their appointer. With reason they will be accused of venality, corruption and injustice. The people will rise, and at last royalty will have arrayed against it philosophy, which is intelligence, Parliament, which is the middle class, and the mob, which is the people; in other words, the lever with which Archimedes can raise the world."
"Well, when you have lifted it, you will have to let it fall again."
"Yes, but when it falls it will smash the royalty."
"To use your figurative language, when this wormeaten monarchy is broken, what will come out of the ruins?"
"Freedom."
"The French be free? Well, then, there will be thirty millions of freemen in France?"
"Yes."
"Among them do you not think there will be one with a bigger brain than another, who will rob them of freedom some fine morning that he may have a larger share than his proper one for himself? Do you not remember a dog we had at Medina which used to eat as much as all the rest together?"
"Yes, and I remember that they all together pitched on him one day and devoured him."
"Because they were dogs; men would have continued to give in to the greediest."
"Do you set the instincts of animals above the intelligence of man?"
"Forsooth, the examples abound by which to prove it. Among the ancients was one Julius Cæsar, and among the moderns one Oliver Cromwell, who ate up the Roman and the English cake, without anybody snatching many crumbs away from them."
"Well, supposing such an usurper comes, he must die some day, being mortal, but before dying he must do good to even those whom he oppressed; for he would have changed the nature of the upper classes. Obliged to have some kind of support, he will choose the popular as the strongest. To the equality which abases, he will oppose the kind which elevates. Equality has no fixed water mark, but takes the level of him who makes it. In raising the lowest classes he will have hallowed a principle unknown before his time. The Revolution will have made the French free; the Protectorate of another Cæsar or Cromwell will have made them equal."
"What a stupid fellow this is!" said Althotas, starting in his chair. "To spend twenty years in bringing up a child so that he shall came and tell you, who taught him all you knew—'Men are equal.' Before the law, maybe; but before death? how about that? One dies in three days—another lives a hundred years! Men, equals before they have conquered death? Oh, the brute, the triple brute!"
Althotas sat back to laugh more freely at Balsamo, who kept his head lowered, gloomy and thoughtful. His instructor took pity on him.
"Unhappy sophist that you are, bear in mind one thing, that men will not be equals until they are immortal. Then they will be gods, and these alone are undying."
"Immortal—what a dream!" sighed the mesmerist.
"Dream? so is the steam, the electric fluid, all that we are hunting after and not yet caught—a dream. But we will seize and they will be realities. Move with me the dust of ages, and see that man in all times has been seeking what I am engaged upon, under the different titles of the Bliss, the Best, the Perfection. Had they found it, this decrepit world would be fresh and rosy as the morning. Instead, see the dry leaf, the corpse, the carrion heap! Is suffering desirable—the corpse pleasant to look upon—the carrion sweet?"
"You yourself are saying that nobody has found this water of life," observed Balsamo, as the old man was interrupted by a dry cough. "I tell you that nobody will find it."
"By this rule there would be no discoveries. Do you think discoveries are novelties which are invented? Not so—they are forgotten things coming up anew. Why were the once-found things forgotten. Because the inventor's life was too short for him to derive from it all its perfection. Twenty times they have nearly consummated the water of life. Chiron would have made Achilles completely immortal but for the lack of the three drops of blood which you refuse me. In the flaw death found a passage, and entered. I repeat that Chiron was another Althotas prevented by an Acharat from completing the work which would save all mankind by shielding it from the divine malediction. Well, what have you to say to that?"
"Merely," said Balsamo, visibly shaken,"that you have your work and I mine. Let each accomplish his, at his risks and perils. But I will not second yours by a crime."
"A crime? when I ask but three drops of blood—one child—and you would deluge a country with billions of gallons! Tell me now who is the cannibal of us two? Ha, ha! you do not answer me."
"My answer is that three drops would be nothing if you were sure of success."
"Are you sure, who would send millions to the scaffold and battle-field? Can you stand up before the Creator and say, 'O Master of Life, in return for four millions of slain men, I will warrant the happiness of humanity.'"
"Master, ask for something else," said Balsamo, eluding the point.
"Ha! you do not answer; you cannot answer," taunted Althotas triumphantly.
"You must be mistaken on the efficacy of the means. It is impossible."
"It looks as if you argued with me, disputed, deem me a liar," said the old alchemist, rolling with cold anger his gray eyes under his white brows.
"No, but I am in contact with men and things, and you dwell in a nook, in the pure abstraction of a student; I see the difficulties and have to point them out."
"You would soon overcome such difficulties if you liked, or believed."
"I do not believe."
"But do you believe that death is an incontestable thing, invincible and infinite? And when you see a dead body, does not the perspiration come to your brow, and a regret is born in your breast?"
"No regret comes in to my breast because I have familiarized myself to all human miseries; and I esteem life as a little thing: but I say in presence of the corpse: 'Dead! thou who wert mighty as a god! O Death! it is thou who reign sovereignly, and nothing can prevail against thee.'"
Althotas listened in silence, with no other token of impatience than fidgeting with a scalpel in his hands. When hisdisciple had finished the solemn and doleful phrase, he smiled while looking round. His eyes, so burning that no secrets seemed to exist for him, stopped on a nook in the room, where a little dog trembled on a handful of straw. It was the last of three of a kind, which Balsamo had provided on request of the elder for his experiments.
"Bring that dog to this table," said he to Balsamo, who laid the creature on a marble slab.
Seeming to foresee its doom and having probably already been handled by the dissector, the animal shuddered, wriggled and yelped at contact of the cold stone.
"So you believe in life, since you do in death?" squeaked Althotas. "This dog looks live enough, eh?"
"Certainly, as it moves and whines."
"How ugly black dogs are! I should like white ones another time. Howl away, you cur," said the vivisectionist with his lugubrious laugh; "howl, to convince Grand Seignior Acharat that you live."
He pierced the animal at a certain muscle so that he whimpered instead of barking.
"Good! push the bell of the air pump hither. But stay, I must ask what kind of death you prefer for him—deem best?"
"I do not know what you mean; death is death, master."
"Very correct, what you say, and I agree with you. Since one kind of death is the same as another, exhaust the air, Acharat."
Balsamo worked the air pump, and the air in the bell of glass hissed out at the bottom, so that the little puppy grew uneasy at the first, looked around, began to sniff, put his paw to the issue till the pain of the pressure made him take it away, and then he fell suffocated, puffed up and asphyxiated.
"Behold the dog dead of apoplexy," pronounced the sage; "this is a fine mode with no long suffering. But you do not seem fully convinced. I suppose you know how well laden I am with resources, and you think I have the method of restoring the respiration."
"No, I am not supposing that. The dog is truly not alive."
"Never mind, we will make assurance doubly sure by killing the canine twice. Lift off the receiver, Acharat."
The glass bell was removed and there lay the victim, never stirring, with eyes shut and heart without abeat.
"Take the scalpel and sever the spinal column without cutting the larynx."
"I do so solely because you say it."
"And to finish the poor creature in case it be not dead," said the other, with the smile of obstinacy peculiar to the aged.
With one incision Balsamo separated the vertebral columna couple of inches from the brain, and opened a yawning gash. The body remained unmoving.
"He is an inert animal, icy cold, forever without movement, eh? You say nothing prevails against death? No power can restore even the appearance of life, far less life itself, to this carcass?"
"Only the miracle of Heaven!"
"But Heaven does not do such things. Supreme wisdom kills because there is reason or benefit in the act. An assassin said so, and he was quite right. Nature has an interest in the death. Now, what will you say if this dog opens his eyes and looks at you?"
"It would much astonish me," said the pupil smiling.
"I am glad to hear that it would do as much as that."
As he drew the dog up to an apparatus which we know as a voltaic pile, he rounded off his words with his false and grating laugh. The pile was composed of a vessel containing strips of metal separated by felt. All were bathed in acidulated water; out of the cup came the two ends of wire—the poles to speak technically.
"Which eye shall it open, Acharat?" inquired the experimentalist.
"The right."
The two extremities were brought together, but parted by a little silk, on a neck muscle. In an instant the dog's right eye opened and stared at Balsamo, who could not help recoiling.
"Look out," said the infernal jester, with his dry laugh; "our dead dog is going to bite you!"
Indeed, the animal, in spite of its sundered spine, with gaping jaws and tremulous eye, suddenly got upon its four legs, and tottered on them. With his hair bristling, Balsamo receded to the door, uncertain whether to flee or remain.
"But we must not frighten you to death in trying to teach you," said Althotas, pushing back the cadaver and the machine; the contact broken, the carcass fell back into immovability.
"You see that we may arrive at the point I spoke of, my son, and prolong life since we can annul death?"
"Not so, for you have only obtained a semblance of life," objected Balsamo.
"In time, we shall make it real. The Roman poets—and they were esteemed prophets—assert that Cassidæus revived the dead."
"But one objection: supposing your elixir perfect and a dog given some, it would live on—until it fell into the hands of a dissector who would cut its throat."
"I thought you would take me there," chuckled the old wizard, clapping his hands.
"Your elixir will not prevent a chimney falling on a man,a bullet going clear through him, or a horse kicking his skull open?"
Althotas eyed the speaker like a fencer watching his antagonist make a lunge which lays him open to defeat.
"No, no, no, and you are a true logician. No, my dear Acharat, such accidents cannot be avoided; the wounds will still be made, but I can stop the vital spirit issuing by the hole. Look!"
Before the other could interfere he drove the lancet into his arm. The old man had so little blood that it was some time flowing to the cut; but when it came it was abundantly.
"Great God! you have hurt yourself!" cried the younger man.
"We must convince you."
Taking up a phial of colorless fluid, he poured a few drops on the wound; instantly the liquid congealed, or rather threw out fibresmaterializing, and, soon a plaster of a yellow hue covered in the gash and stanched the flow. Balsamo had never seen collodion, and he gazed in stupefaction at the old sage.
"You are the wisest of men, father!"
"At least if I have not dealt Death a death-blow, I have given him a thrust under which he will find it hard to rise. You see, my son, that the human frame has brittle bones—I will harden and yet supple them like steel. It has blood which, in flowing out, carries life with it—I will stop the flow. The skin and flesh are soft—I will tan them so that they will turn the edge of steel and blunt the points of spears, while bullets will flatten against it. Only let an Althotas live three hundred years. Well, give me what I want, and I shall live a thousand. Oh, my dear Acharat, all depends on you. Bring me the child."
"I will think it over, and do you likewise reflect."
The sage darted a look of withering scorn on his adept.
"Go!" he snarled, "I will convince you later. Besides, human blood is not so precious that I cannot use a substitute. Go, and let me seek—and I shall find. I have no need of you. Begone!"
Balsamo walked over to the elevator, and with a stamp of the foot, caused it to carry him down to the other floor. Mute, crushed by the genius of this wizard, he was forced to believe in impossible things by his doing them.
Thissame long night had been employed by Countess Dubarry in trying to mold the king's mind to a new policy according to her views.