“If your lordship pleases?”
“Well,” continued Sartines, fixing on the other an eye which he endeavored to make like an inquisitor’s, “he is a man of your age and stature, and bearing; sometimes a mighty nobleman distributing gold, or a charlatan seeking natural secrets, or a dark conspirator allied to the mysterious brotherhood which has vowed in darkness the death of kings and the downfall of thrones.”
“This is vague,” replied Balsamo, “and you cannot guess how many men I have met who would answer to this description! You will have to be more precise if you want my help. In the first place, which is his country by preference?”
“He lives everywhere at home.”
“But at present?”
“In France, where he directs a vast conspiracy.”
“This is a good piece of intelligence. If you know what conspiracy he directs you have one end of a clew in your hands which will lead you up to the man.”
“I am of your opinion.”
“If you believe so, why do you ask my advice? It is useless.”
“It is because I am debating whether or not to arrest him.”
“I do not understand the Not, my lord, for if he conspires—— ”
“But he is in a measure protected by his title—— ”
“Ah, now I follow you. But by what title? Needless to say that I shall be glad to aid you in your searches, my lord.”
“Why, sir, I told you that I knew the names he hides under but I do not know that under which he shows himself, or else—— ”
“You would arrest him? Well, Lord Sartines, it is a blessed thing that I happened in as I did, for I can do you thevery service you want. I will tell you the title he figures under.”
“Pray say it,” said Sartines who expected to hear a falsehood.
“The Count of Fenix.”
“What, the name under which you were announced?”
“My own.”
“Then you would be this Acharat, Balsamo, and Company?”
“It is I,” answered the other simply.
It took Sartines a minute to recover from the amazement which this impudence had caused him.
“You see I guessed,” he said; “I knew that Fenix and Balsamo were one and the same.”
“I confess it. You are a great minister.”
“And you are a great fool,” said the magistrate, stretching out his hand towards his bell.
“How so?”
“Because I am going to have you arrested.”
“Nonsense, a man like me is never arrested,” said Balsamo, stepping between the magistrate and the bell.
“Death of my life, who will prevent it? I want to know.”
“As you want to know, my dear Lieutenant of Police, I will tell you—I shall blow out your brains—and with the more facility and the less injury to myself as this weapon is charged with a noiseless explosive which, for its quality of silence, is not the less deadly.”
Whipping out of his pocket, a pistol, with a barrel of steel as exquisitely carved as though Cellini had chiselled it, he tranquilly leveled it at the eye of Sartines, who lost color and his footing, falling back into his armchair.
“There,” said the other, drawing another chair up to the first and sitting down in it; “now that we are comfortably seated, let us have a chat.”
It was an instant before Lord Sartines was master of himself after so sharp an alarm. He almost looked into the muzzle of the firearm, and felt the ring of its cold iron on his forehead.
“My lord,” he said at last. “I have the advantage over youof knowing the kind of man I coped with and I did not take the cautionary measures I should with an ordinary malefactor.”
“You are irritated and you use harsh words,” replied Balsamo. “But you do not see how unjust you are to one who comes to do you a service. And yet you mistake my intentions. You speak of conspirators, just when I come to speak to you about a conspiracy.”
But the round phrase was all to no purpose as Sartines was not paying great attention to his words: so that the word Conspiracy, which would have made him jump at another time, scarcely caused him to pick up his ears.
“Since you know so well who I am,” he proceeded, “you must know my mission in France. Sent by the Great Frederick—that is as an ambassador, more or less secret of his Prussian Majesty. Who says ambassador, says ‘inquisitor;’ and as I inquire, I am not ignorant of what is going on; and one of the things I have learnt most about is the forestalling of grain.”
Simply as Balsamo uttered the last words they had more power over the Chief of Police than all the others for they made him attentive. He slowly raised his head.
“What is this forestalling of the grain?” he said, affecting as much ease as Balsamo had shown at the opening of the interview. “Will you kindly enlighten me?”
“Willingly, my lord. Skillful speculators have persuaded his Majesty, the King of France, that he ought to build grainaries to save up the grain for the people in case of dearth. So the stores were built. While they were about it they made them on a large scale, sparing no stone or timber. The next thing was to fill them, as empty grainarers are useless. So they filled them. You will reckon on a large quantity of corn being wanted to fill them? Much breadstuffs drawn out of the markets is a means of making the people hungry. For, mark this well, any goods withdrawn from circulation are equivalent to a lack of production. A thousand sacks of corn in the store are the same as a thousand less in the market. Multiply these thousands by a ten only and up goes the price of grain.”
Sartines coughed with irritation. Balsamo stopped quietly till he was done.
“Hence, you see the speculator in the storehouses enriched by the increase in value. Is this clear?”
“Perfectly clear,” replied the other. “But it seems to me that you are bold enough to promise to denounce a crime or a plot of which his Majesty is the author.”
“You understand it plainly,” said Balsamo.
“This is bold, indeed, and I should be curious to know how the King will take the charge. I am afraid that the result will be precisely the same as that I conceived when I looked through your papers; take care, my lord, you will get into the Bastile all the same.”
“How poorly you judge me and how wrong you are in still taking me for a fool. Do you imagine that I, an ambassador, a mere curious investigator, would attack the King in person? That would be the act of a blockhead. Pray hear me out.”
Sartines nodded to the man with the pistol.
“Those who discovered this plot against the French people—pardon the precious time I am consuming, but you will see presently that it is not lost time—they are economists, who, very minute and painstaking, by applying their microscopic lenses to this rigging of the market, have remarked that the King is not working the game alone. They know that his Majesty keeps an exact register of the market rate of grain in the different markets: that he rubs his hands when the rise wins him eight or ten thousand crowns; but they also know that another man is filling his own alongside of his Majesty’s—an official, you will guess—who uses the royal figures for his own behalf. The economists, therefore, not being idiots, will not attack the King, but the man, the public officer, the agent who gambles for his sovereign.”
Sartines tried to shake his wig into the upright but it was no use.
“I am coming to the point, now,” said Balsamo. “In the same way as you know I am the Count of Fenix through your police, I know you are Lord Sartines through mine.”
“What follows?” said the embarrassed magistrate; “a fine discovery that I am Lord Sartines!”
“And that he is the man of the market-notebooks, the gambling, the ring, who, with or without the knowledge of the King, traffics on the appetites of the thirty millions of French whom his functions prescribe him to feed on the lowest possible terms. Now, just imagine the effect in a slight degree of this discovery! You are little loved by the people; the King is not an affectionate man. As soon as the cries of the hungry are heard, yelling for your head, the King, to avoid all suspicion of connivance with you, if any there be, or to do justice if there is no complicity, will hasten to have you strung upon a gibbet like that on which dangled Enguerrand de Marigny, which you may remember?”
“Imperfectly,” stammered Sartines, very pale, “and you show very poor taste to talk of the gibbet to a nobleman of my degree!”
“I could not help bringing him in,” replied Balsamo, “as I seemed to see him again—poor Enguerrand! I swear to you he was a perfect gentleman out of Normandy, of very ancient family and most noble house. He was Lord High Chamberlain and Captain of the Louvre Palace, and eke Count of Longueville, a much more important county than yours of Alby. But still I saw him hooked up on the very gibbet at Montfaucon which was built under his orders, although it was not for the lack of my telling him:
“Enguerrand, my dear friend, have a care! you take a bigger slice out of the cake of finance than Charles of Valois will like. Alas, if you only knew how many chiefs of police, from Pontius Pilate down to your predecessor, who have come to grief!”
Sartines rose, trying in vain to dissimulate the agitation to which he was a prey.
“Well, accuse me if you like,” he said: “what does the testimony of a man like you amount to?”
“Take care, my lord,” Balsamo said: “men of no account were very often the very ones who bring others to account. When I write the particulars of the Great Grain Speculation to my correspondent, or Frederick who is a philosopher, asyou are aware, he will be eager to transcribe it with comments for his friend, Voltaire, who knows how to swing his pen: to Alembert, that admirable geometrician, who will calculate how far these stolen grains, laid in a line side by side, will extend; in short when all the lampoon writers, pamphleteers and caricaturists get wind of this subject, you, my lord of Alby, will be a great deal worse off than my poor Marigny,—for he was innocent, or said so, and I would hardly believe that of your lordship.”
With no longer respect for decorum, Sartines took off his wig and wiped his skull.
“Have it so,” he said, “ruin me if you will. But I have your casket as you have your proofs.”
“Another profound error into which you have fallen, my lord,” said Balsamo: “You are not going to keep this casket.”
“True,” sneered the other; “I forgot that Count Fenix is a knight of the road who robs men by armed force. I did not see your pistol which you have put away. Excuse me, my lord the ambassador.”
“The pistol is no longer wanted, my lord. You surely do not think that I would fight for the casket over your body here where a shout would rouse the house full of servants and police agents?—— No, when I say that you will not keep my casket, I mean that you will restore it to me of your own free will.”
“I?” said the magistrate, laying his fist on the box with so much force that he almost shattered it. “You may laugh, but you shall not take this box but at the cost of my life. Have I not risked it a thousand times—ought I not pour out the last drop of my blood in his Majesty’s service? Kill me, as you are the master; but I shall have enough voice left to denounce you for your crimes. Restore you this,” he repeated, with a bitter laugh, “hell itself might claim it and not make me surrender.”
“I am not going to require the intervention of subterranean powers; merely that of the person who is even now knocking at your street door.”
Three loud knocks thundered at the door.
“And whose carriage is even now entering the yard,” added the mesmerist.
“Some friend of yours who does me the honor to call?”
“Just as you say, a friend of mine.”
“The Right Honorable the Countess Dubarry!” announced a valet at the study door, as the lady, who had not believed she wanted the permission to enter, rushed in. It was the lovely countess, whose perfumed and hooped skirts rustled in the doorway.
“Your ladyship!” exclaimed Sartines, hugging the casket to his bosom in his terror.
“How do you do, Sartines?” she said, with her gay smile.
“And how are you, count?” she added to Fenix, holding out her hand.
He bowed familiarly over it and pressed his lips where the King had so often laid his. In this movement he had time to speak four words to her which the Chief of Police did not hear.
“Oh, here is my casket,” she said.
“Your casket,” stammered the Lieutenant of Police.
“Mine, of course. Oh, you have opened it—do not be nice about what does not belong to you! How delightful this is. This box was stolen from me, and I had the idea of going to Sartines to get it back. You found it, did you, oh, thank you.”
“With all respect to your ladyship,” said Sartines, “I am afraid you are letting yourself be imposed upon.”
“Impose? do you use such a word to me, my lord?” cried Balsamo. “This casket was confided to me by her ladyship a few days ago with all its contents.”
“I know what I know,” persisted the magistrate.
“And I know nothing,” whispered La Dubarry to the mesmerist. “But you have claimed the promise I made you to do anything you asked at the first request.”
“But this box may contain the matter of a dozen conspiracies,” said Sartines.
“My lord, you know that that is not a word to bring you good luck. Do not say it again. The lady asks for her box—are you going to give it to her or not?”
“But at least know, my lady—— ”
“I do not want to know more than I do know,” said the lady: “Restore me my casket—for I have not put myself out for nothing, I would have you to understand!”
“As you please, my lady,” said Sartines humbly and he handed the countess the box, into which Balsamo replaced the papers strewn over the desk.
“Count,” said the lady with her most winning smile, “will you kindly carry my box and escort me to my carriage as I do not like to go back alone through those ugly faces. Thank you, Sartines.”
“My lady,” said Balsamo, “you might tell the count who bears me much ill will from my insisting on having the box, that you would be grieved if anything unpleasant befel me through the act of the police and how badly you would feel.”
She smiled on the speaker.
“You hear what my Lord says, Sartines,” she said; “it is the pure truth: the count is an excellent friend of mine and I should mortally hate you if you were to vex him in any way. Adieu, Sartines.”
He saw them march forth without showing the rage Balsamo expected.
“Well, they have taken the casket but I have the woman,” he chuckled.
To make up for his defeat he began to ring his bell as though to break it.
“How is the lady getting on whom you took into the next room?”
“Very well indeed, my lord: for she got up and went out.”
“Got up? why, she could not stand.”
“That is so, my lord,” said the usher: “but five minutes or so after the Count of Fenix arrived, she awoke from her swoon, from which no scent would arouse her, and walked out. We had no orders to detain her.”
“The villain is a magician,” thought the magistrate. “I have the royal police and he Satan’s.”
That evening he was bled and put to bed: the shock was too great for him to bear, and the doctor said that if he had not been called in he would have died of apoplexy.
In the meantime the count had conducted the lady to her coach. She asked him to step in, and a groom led the Arab horse.
“Lady,” he said, “you have amply paid the slight service I did you. Do not believe what Sartines said about plots and conspiracies. This casket contains my chemical recipes written in the language of Alchemy which his ignorant clerks interpreted according to their lights. Our craft is not yet enfranchised from prejudices and only the young and bright like your ladyship are favorable to it.”
“What would have happened if I had not come to your help?”
“I should have been sent into some prison, but I can melt stone with my breath so that your Bastile would not long have retained me. I should have regretted the loss of the formula for the chemical secrets by which I hope to preserve your marvelous beauty and splendid youthfulness.”
“You set me at ease and you delight me, count. Do you promise me a philter to keep me young?”
“Yes: but ask me for it in another twenty years. You cannot now want to be a child forever!”
“Really, you are a capital fellow! But I would rather have that draft in ten, nay five years—one never knows what may happen.”
“When you like.”
“Oh, a last question. They say that the King is smitten with the Taverney girl. You must tell me; do not spare me if it is true; treat me as a friend and tell me the truth.”
“Andrea Taverney will never be the mistress of the King. I warrant it, as I do not so will it.”
“Oh!” cried Lady Dubarry.
“You doubt? never doubt science.”
“Still, as you have the means, if you would block the King’s fancies—— ”
“I can create sympathies and so I can antipathies. Be at ease, countess, I am on the watch.”
He spoke at random as he was all impatience to get away and rejoin Lorenza.
“Surely, count,” said the lady, “you are not only my prophetof good but my guardian angel. Mind, I will defend you if you help me. Alliance!”
“It is sealed,” he said, kissing her hand.
He alighted and whistling for his horse, mounted and gallopped away.
“To Luciennes,” ordered Lady Dubarry, comforted.
INfive minutes Balsamo was in his vestibule, looking at Fritz and asking with anxiety:
“Has she returned?”
“She has gone up into the room of the arms and the furs, very wornout, from having run so rapidly that I was hardly in time to open the door after I caught sight of her. I was frightened; for she rushed in like a tempest. She ran up the stairs without taking breath, and fell on the great black lion’s-skin on entering the room. There you will find her.”
Balsamo went up precipitately and found her as said. He took her up in his arms and carried her into the inner house where the secret door closed behind them.
He was going to awake her to vent the reproaches on her which were nursed in his wrath, when three knocks on the ceiling notified him that the sage called Althotas, in the upper room, was aware of his arrival and asked speech of him.
Fearing that he would come down, as sometimes happened, or that Lorenza would learn something else detrimental to the Order, he charged her with a fresh supply of the magnetic fluid, and went up by a kind of elevator to Althota’ laboratory.
In the midst of a wilderness of chemical and surgical instruments, phials and plants, this very aged man was a terrible figure at this moment.
Such part of his face as seemed yet to retain life was empurpled with angry fire: his knotted hands like those of a skeleton,trembled and cracked—his deepset eyes seemed to shake loose in the sockets and in a language unknown even to his pupil he poured invectives upon him.
Having left his padded armchair to go to the trap by which Balsamo came up through the floor, he seemed to move solely by his long spider-like arms. It must be extraordinary excitement to make him leave the seat where he conducted his alchemical work and enter into our worldly life.
Balsamo was astonished and uneasy.
“So you come, you sluggard, you coward, to abandon your master,” said Althotas.
As was his habit, the other summoned up all his patience to reply to his master.
“I thought you had only just called me, my friend,” he meekly said.
“Your friend, you vile human creature,” cried the alchemist, “I think you talk to me as if I were one of your sort. Friend? I should think I were more than that: more than your father, for I have reared you, instructed you and enriched you. But you are no friend to me, oh, no! for you have left me, you let me starve, and you will be my death.”
“You have a bilious attack, master, and you will make yourself ill by going on thus.”
“Illness—rubbish! Have I ever been ill save when you made me feel the petty miseries of your mean human life? I, ill, who you know am the physician to others.”
“At all events, master, here I am,” coldly observed Balsamo. “Let us not waste time.”
“You are a nice one to remind me of that. You force me to dole out what ought to be unmeasured to all human creatures. Yes, I am wasting time: my time, like others, is falling drop by drop into eternity when it ought to be itself eternity.”
“Come, master, let us know what is to be done?” asked the other, working the spring which closed the trap in the floor. “You said you were starved. How so, when you know you were doing your fortnight’s absolute fast?”
“Yes; the work of regeneration was commenced thirty-two days ago.”
“What are you complaining about in that case—I see yettwo or three decanters of rainwater, the only thing you take.”
“Of course: but do you think I am a silkworm to perform alone the great task of transformation and rejuvenation? Can I without any strength alone compose my draft of life? Do you think I shall have my ability when I am lying down with no support but refreshing drink, if you do not help me? abandoned to my own resources, and the minute labor of my regeneration—you know you ought to help and succor, if a friend?”
“I am here,” responded Balsamo, taking the old man and placing him in his chair as one might a disagreeable child, “what do you want? You have plenty of distilled water: your loaves of barley and sesame are there; and I have myself given you the white drops you prescribed.”
“Yes; but the elixir is not composed. The last time I was fifty, I had your father to help me, your faithful father. I got it ready a month beforehand. For the blood of a virgin which I had to have, I bought a child of a trader at Mount Ararat where I retired. I bled it according to the rites; I took three drops of arterial blood and in an hour my mixture, only wanting that ingredient, was composed. Therefore my regeneration came off passing well: my hair and teeth fell during the spasms caused by the draft, but they came again—the teeth badly, I admit, for I had neglected to use a golden tube for decanting the liquor. But my hair and nails came as if I were fifteen again. But here I am once more old; and the elixir is not concocted. If it is not soon in this bottle, with all care given to compounding it, the science of a century will be lost in me, and this admirable and sublime secret which I hold will be lost for man, who would thus through me be linked with divinity. Oh, if I go wrong, if I fail, you, Acharat, will have been the cause, and my wrath will be dreadful!”
As these final words made a spark flash from his dying eye, the hideous old man fell back in a convulsion succeeded by violent coughing. Balsamo at once gave him the most eager care. The old doctor came to his senses; his pallor was worse; this slight shaking had so exhausted him that he seemed about to die.
“Tell me what you want, master, and you shall have it, if possible.”
“Possible?” sneered the other, “You know that all is possible with time and science. I have the science; but time is only about to be conquered by me. My dose has succeeded; the white drops have almost eradicated most of my old nature. My strength has nearly disappeared. Youth is mounting and casting off the old bark, so to say. You will remark, Acharat, that the symptoms are excellent; my voice is faint; my sight weakened by three parts; I feel my senses wander at times; the transitions from heat to cold are insensible to me. So it is urgent that I get my draft made so that on the proper day of my fifteenth year, I shall pass from a hundred years to twenty without hesitation. The ingredients are gathered, the gold tube for the decanting is ready; I only lack the three drops of pure blood which I told you of.”
Balsamo made a start in repugnance.
“Oh, well, let us give up the idea of a child,” sneered Althotas, “since you dream of nothing but your wife with whom you shut yourself up instead of coming to aid me.”
“My wife,” repeated Balsamo, sadly: “a wife but in name. I have had to sacrifice all to her, love, desire, all, I repeat, in order to preserve her pure that I may use her spirit as a seer’s to pierce the almost impenetrable. Instead of making me happy, she makes the world so.”
“Poor fool,” said Althotas, “I believe you gabble still of your amelioration of society when I talk to you of eternal youth and life for man.”
“To be acquired at the price of a horrid crime! and even then—— ”
“You doubt—he doubts!”
“But you said you renounced that want: what can you substitute?”
“Oh, the blood of the first virgin creature which I find—or you supply within a week.”
“I will attend to it, master,” said Balsamo.
Another spark of ire kindled the old man’s eye.
“You will see about it!” he said, “that is your reply, is it? However, I expected it, and I am not astonished. Since when,you insignificant worm, does the creature speak thus to its creator? Ah, you see me feeble, solicitating you and you fancy I am at your mercy! Do you think I am fool enough to rely on your mercy? Yes or no, Acharat—and I can read in your heart whether you deceive me or not—ay, read in your heart—for I will judge you and pursue you.”
“Master, have a care! your anger will injure you. I speak nothing but the truth to my master. I will see if I can procure you what you want without its bringing harm, nay, ruin upon us both. I will seek the wretch who will sell you what you wish but I shall not take the crime upon me. That is all I can say.”
“You are very dainty. Then, you would expose me to death, scoundrel; you would save the three drops of the blood of some paltry thing in order to let the wondrous being that I am fall into the eternal abysm. Acharat, mark me,” continued the weird old man, with a frightful smile, “I no longer ask you for anything. I want absolutely nothing of you. I shall wait: but if you do not obey me, I shall take for myself; if you abandon me I shall help myself. You hear? away!”
Without answering the threat in any way, Balsamo prepared all things for the old man’s wants; like a good servant or a pious son attending to his father. Absorbed in quite another thought than that torturing Althotas, he went down through the trap-hole without noticing the old sage’s ironical glance following him. He smiled like an evil genius when he saw the mesmerist beside Lorenza, still asleep.
BEFOREthe Italian beauty, Balsamo stopped, with his heart full of painful but no longer violent thoughts.
“Here I stand,” he mused, “sad but resolute, and plainly seeing my situation. Lorenza hates me and betrayed me as she vowed she would do. My secret is no longer mine but in thehands of this woman who casts it to the winds. I resemble the fox caught in the trap, who gnaws off his leg to get away, but the hunter coming on the morrow and seeing this token can say: ‘He has escaped but I shall know him when I catch him again.’
“Althotas could not understand this misfortune, which is why I have not told him; it breaks all my hope of fortune in this country and consequently in the Old World, of which France is the heart—it is due to this lovely woman, this fair statue with the sweet smile. To this accursed angel I owe captivity, exile or death, with ruin and dishonor meanwhile.
“Hence,” he continued, animating, “the sum of pleasure is surpassed by that of harm, and Lorenza is a noxious thing to me. Oh, serpent with the graceful folds, they stifle: your golden throat is full of venom; sleep on, for I shall be obliged to kill you when you wake.”
With an ominous smile he approached the girl, whose eyes turned to his like the sunflower follows the sun.
“Alas, in slaying her who hates me, I shall slay her who loves.”
His heart was filled with profound grief strangely blended with a vague desire.
“If she might live, harmless?” he muttered. “No, awake, she will renew the struggle—she will kill herself or me, or force me to kill her. Lorenza, your fate is written in letters of fire: to love and to die. In my hands I hold your life and your love.”
The enchantress, who seemed to read his thoughts in an open book, rose, fell at the mesmerist’s feet, and taking one of his hands which she laid on her heart, she said with her lips, moist as coral and as glossy:
“Dead be it, but loved.”
Balsamo could resist no longer; a whirl of flames enveloped him.
“As long as a human being could contend have I struggled,” he sighed; “demon or angel of the future, you ought to be satisfied. I have long enough sacrificed pride and egotism to all the generous passions seething in my heart. No, no, I have not the right to revolt against the only human feeling fermenting in me. I love this woman, and such passionate love will do more against her than the keenest hate. What, when I appear before the Supreme Architect, will not I, the deceiver, the charlatan, the false prophet, have one well cut stone to show for my craftsmanship—not one generous deed to avow, not a single happiness whose memory would comfort me amid eternal sufferings? Oh, no, no, Lorenza, I know that I lose the future by loving you; I know that my revealing angel mounts to heaven while this woman comes down to my arms—but I wish Lorenza!”
“My beloved,” she gasped.
“Will you accept this life instead of the real one?”
“I beg for it, for it is love and bliss.”
“Never will you accuse me before man or heaven of having deceived your heart?”
“Never, never! before heaven and men, I shall thank you for having given me love, the only boon, the only jewel of price in this world.”
Balsamo ran his hand over his forehead.
“Be it so,” he said. “Besides, have I absolutely need of her—is she the only medium? No; while this one makes me happy, the other shall make me rich and mighty. Andrea is predestined and is as clairvoyante as she. Andrea is young, and pure, and I do not love Andrea. Nevertheless, in her mesmeric sleep, she is submissive as you are. In Andrea I have a victim ready to replace you, one to be thecorpus viliof the physician to be employed for experiments. She can fly as far, perhaps farther, in the shades of the Unknown as you. Andrea, I take you for my kingdom. Lorenza, come to my arms for my darling and my wife. With Andrea I am powerful; with Lorenza I am happy! Henceforth, my life is complete, and I realise the dream of Althotas, without the immortality, and become the peer of the gods!”
And lifting up the Italian beauty, he opened his arms from off his heaving breast on which Lorenza enclasped herself as the ivy girdles the oak.
Another life commenced for the magician, unknown to him previously in his active, multiple, perplexed existence. For three days he felt no more anger, apprehension or jealousy;he heard nothing of plots, politics or conspiracies. Beside Lorenza he forgot the whole world. This strange love threw him into felicity composed of stupor and delirium, soaring over humanity, as it were, full of misery and intoxication, a phantom love—for he knew he could at a sign or a word change the sweet mistress into an implacable enemy.
Singularly, she remained of astonishing lucidity as far as regarded himself; but he wanted to learn if this were not sheer sympathy; if she became dark outside of the circle traced by his love—if the eyes of this new Eve clearly seeing in Eden, would not be this blind when expelled from Paradise.
He dared not make a decisive test, but he hoped, and hope was the starry crown to his happiness.
With gentle melancholy Lorenza said to him:
“Acharat, you are thinking of another woman than me, a woman of the North, with fair hair and blue eyes—Acharat, this woman walks beside you and me in your mind. Shall I tell you her name?”
“Yes,” he said in wonderment.
“Wait—it is Andrea.”
“Right. Yes, you can read my mind; one last fear troubles me. Can you still see through space though blocked by material obstacles?”
“Try me.”
He took her hand, and in his mind went away from that place, taking her soul with him.
“What do you see?”
“A vast valley with woods on one side, a town on the other, while a river separates them and is lost in the distance after bathing the walls of a palace.”
“It is so, Lorenza. The wood is Vesinet, the town St. Germain; the palace Maisons. Let us go into the summerhouse behind us. What do you see?”
“A young negro, eating candies.”
“It is Zamore, Countess Dubarry’s blackmoor. Go on.”
“An empty drawing-room, splendidly furnished, with the panels painted with goddesses and Cupids.”
“Next?”
“We are in a lovely boudoir hung with blue satin workedwith flowers in their natural colors. A woman is reclining on a sofa. I have seen her before—it is Countess Dubarry. She is thinking of you—— ”
“Thinking of me? Lorenza, you will drive me mad.”
“You made her the promise to give her the water of beauty which Venus gave to Phaon to be revenged on Sappho.”
“That is so; go on.”
“She makes up her mind to a step, for she rings a bell. A woman comes—it is like her—— ”
“Her sister, Chon?”
“Her sister. She wants the horses put to the carriage! in two hours she will be here.”
Balsamo dropped on his knees.
“Oh heaven, if she should be here in that time, I shall have no more to beg of you for you will have had pity on my happiness.”
“Poor dear,” said she, “why do you fear? Love which completes the physical existence, enlarges the moral one. Like all good passions, love emanates from heaven whence cometh all light.”
“Lorenza, you make me wild with joy.”
Still he waited for this last test; the arrival of Lady Dubarry.
Two strokes of the bell, the signal of an important visitor, from Fritz told him that the vision was realised.
He led Lorenza into the room hung with fur and armor.
“You will not go away from here?” asked the mesmerist.
“Order me to stay and you will find me here on your return. Besides, the Lorenza who loves you is not the one who dreads you.”
“Be it so, my beloved Lorenza; sleep and await me.”
Still struggling with the spell, she laid a last kiss on her husband’s lips, and tottered to sink upon a lounge, murmuring.
“Soon again, my Balsamo, soon?”
He waved his hand: she was already reposing.
As he closed the door he thought he heard a sound: but no, Lorenza was sound asleep. He went through the parlor without fear or any foreshadowing, carrying paradise in his heart.
Lorenza dreamed: it seemed to her that the ceiling opened and that a kind of aged Caliban descended with a regular movement. The air seemed to fail her as two long fleshless arms like living grapnels clutched her white dress, raised her off the divan, and carried her to the trap. This movable platform began to rise, with the grinding of metal and a shrill, hideous laugh issued from the mouth of this human-faced monster who bore her upwards without any shock.
THEbeautiful favorite of Louis XV. had been shown into the parlor where she impatiently waited for Balsamo while turning over the leaves of Holbein’s Dance of Death, which caught her attention on the table. She had just arrived at the picture of the Beauty powdering her cheek before a mirror, when the host opened the door and bowed to her with a smile of joy over his face.
“I am sorry to have made you wait,” he said, “but I was a little out in my calculation about the speed of your horses.”
“Gracious, did you know that I was coming?”
“Certainly; at least you gave the orders for your sister to transmit them for your departure, while lounging in your blue boudoir.”
“Wizard that you are, if you can see all that goes on there, you must apprise me.”
“I only look in where doors are open.”
“But you saw my intention as regards you?”
“I saw that it was good.”
“So are all mine to you, count. But you merit more than mere intentions for it seems to me that you are too good and useful to me in taking the part of tutor the most difficult to play that I know.”
“You make me very happy; what can I do for you?”
“Have you not, to begin with, some of the seed whichmakes one invisible: for on the way it seemed to me that one of Richelieu’s men was riding after me.”
“The Duke of Richelieu cannot be dangerous to you in any meeting,” said the mesmerist.
“But he was, my lord, before this last scheme failed.”
Balsamo comprehended that here was a plot of which Lorenza had not informed him. So he smiled without venturing on the unknown ground.
“I nearly fell a victim to the scheme, in which you had a share.”
“I, in a scheme against you? never.”
“Did you not give Richelieu a philter to make the drinker fail madly in love?”
“Oh, no, my lady: he composes those things himself; I did give him a simple narcotic—a sleeping draft. He called for it on the eve of the day when I sent you the note by my man Fritz to meet me at Sartines.”
“That is it—the very time when the King went to little Taverney’s rooms. It is all clear now, for the narcotic saved us.”
“I am happy to have served your ladyship, though unawares,” he said without knowing the matter.
“Yes; the King must have seen the girl under the influence of this soporific, for he was seen to stagger out of the chapel corridor during the storm, crying ‘She is dead!’ Nothing frightens the King more than the dead, or next to it those in a death-like sleep. Finding Mdlle. de Taverney in a sleep, he took it for death.”
“Yes, like death, with all the appearances,” said the other, remembering that he had fled without reviving Andrea. “Go on, my lady!”
“The King woke with a touch of fever and was only better at noon. He came over to see me in the evening, where I discovered that Richelieu is almost as great a conjurer as your lordship.”
The countess’s triumphant face, and her gesture of coquetry and grace completed her thought, and perfectly encouraged the Italian about her sway over the King.
“So you are satisfied with me?” he asked.
She held out in token of thanks her white, soft and scented hand, only it was not fresh like Lorenza’s.
“Now, count, if you preserved me from a great danger, I believe I have saved you from one not to be despised.”
“I had no need to be grateful to you,” said Balsamo, hiding his emotion, “but I should like to know—— ”
“That casket really contained cipher correspondence which Sartines had his experts write out plain: That is what he brought to Versailles this morning, with blank warrants to imprison parties named in the documents: one was filled with your name, but I would not let him slip that under the royal hand for the signature. Since Damiens stuck him with the penknife, he can be frightened into anything by the bogey of assassination. Sartines persisted and so did I, but the King said with a smile and looking at me in a style which I know:
“‘Let her alone, Sartines: I can refuse her nothing to-day.’
“As I was by, Sartines did not like to vex me by accusing you direct but he talked of the King of Prussia bolstering up the philosophers of a numerous and powerful sect formed of courageous, resolute and skillful adepts, working away underhandedly against his Royal Majesty. He said they spread evil reports, as for instance that the King was in the scheme to starve the people. To which Louis replied: ‘Let anybody come forward, saying so and I will give him the lie by furnishing him with board and lodging for nothing. I will feed him in the Bastile.’”
Balsamo felt a shiver run through him, but he stood firm.
“And the end?”
“It was the day after the sleeping potion, you understand,” he preferred my company to Sartines; and turned to me.
“‘Drive away this ugly man,’ I said, ‘he smells of the prison.’
“‘You had better go, Sartines,’ said the King.
“Seeing he was in a scrape, he came to me and kissing my hand humbly, he said: ‘Lady, let us say no more on this head—(your head, count)—but you will ruin the realm. Since you so strongly wish it, my men shall protect your protegé.’”
The conspirator was buried in thought.
“So you see you must thank me for not having been clapped into the Bastile,” concluded the countess: “not unjust, perhaps, but disagreeable.”
Without replying Balsamo took from his pocket a phial containing a fluid of blood color.
“For the liberty you give me,” he said, “I give you twenty years more youthfulness.”
She slipped the bottle into her corsage and went off, joyous and triumphant.
“They might have been saved but for the coquetry of this woman,” he murmured. “It is the little foot of this courtesan which spurns them into the abyss. Beyond doubt, God is on our side!”
LADYDUBARRYhad not seen the street door close after her before Balsamo hurried up into the room where he had left Lorenza. But she was gone.
Her fine flowered cashmere shawl remained on the cushions as a token of her stay in the room.
A painful thought struck him that she had feigned to sleep. Thus she would have dispelled all uneasiness, doubts and mistrust in her husband’s mind only to flee at the first chance for liberty. This time she would be surer of what to do, instructed by her former experience.
This idea made him bound. He searched without avail after ringing for Fritz to come to him. But nobody was about, as nobody had gone out behind the countess.
To run about, moving the furniture, calling Lorenza, looking without seeing, listening without hearing, thrilling without living, and pondering without thinking—such was the state of the infuriate for three minutes, which were as many ages.
He came out of his hallucination and dipping his hand in a vase of iced water, he held it on his forehead. By his will he chased away that throbbing of the blood in the brainswhich goes on silently in life but when heard means madness or death.
“Come, come, let us reason,” he said, “Lorenza is no more here, and consequently must have gone forth. How? Through Andrea de Taverney I can ascertain all—whether my incorruptible Fritz was bribed and—then, if love is a sham, if science is an error, and fidelity a snare—Balsamo will punish without pity or reservation—like the powerful man smites when he has put aside mercy and preserves but pride. I must let Fritz perceive nothing while I haste to Trianon.”
In taking up his hat to go, he stopped.
“Goodness, I am forgetting the old man,” he said. “I must attend to Althotas before all. In my monstrous love, I left my unfortunate friend to himself—I have been inhuman and ungrateful.”
With the fever animating his movements he sprang to the trap which he lowered and on which he stepped.
Scarcely had he reached the level of the laboratory, than he was struck by the old man’s voice crooning a song. To Balsamo’s high astonishment his first words were not a reproach as he expected; he was received by a natural and simple outburst of gaiety.
The old man was lolling back in his easy chair, snuffing the air as though he were drinking in new life at each sniff. His eyes were filled with dull fire, but the smile on his lips made them lighter as they were fastened on the visitor.
In this close, warm atmosphere, Balsamo felt giddy as if respiration and his strength failed him simultaneously.
“Master,” said he, looking for something to lean against, “you must not stay here: one cannot breathe. Let me open a window overhead for there seems to reek from the floor the odor of blood.”
“Blood? ha, ha, ha!” roared Althotas. “I noticed it but did not mind: it is you who have tender heart and brain who is easily affected.”
“But you have blood on your hands and it is on the table—this smell is of blood—and human blood,” added the younger man, passing his hand over his brow streaming with perspiration.
“Ha, he has a subtile scent,” said the old sage. “Not only does he recognize blood but can tell it is human, too.”
Looking round, Balsamo perceived a brass basin half full with a purple liquid reflected on the sides.
“Whence comes this blood?” he gasped.
He uttered a terrible roar! Part of the table, usually cumbered by alembics, crucibles, flasks, galvanic batteries and the like, was now clothed with a white damask sheet, worked with flowers. Among the flowers here and there, spots of a red hue oozed up. Balsamo took one corner of the sheet and plucked the whole towards him.
His hair bristled up, and his opened mouth could not let the horrible yell come forth—it died in the gullet.
It was the corpse of Lorenza which stiffened on the board. The livid head seemed still to smile and hung back as though drawn down by the weight of her hair.
A large cut yawned above the clavicle, but not a drop of blood was issuing now. The hands were rigid and the eyes closed under the violet lids.
“Yes, thanks for your having placed her under my hand where I could so readily take her,” said the horrible old man; “in her have I found the blood I wanted.”
“Villain of the vilest,” screamed Balsamo, with the cry of despair bursting from all pores, “you have nothing to do but die—for this was my wife since four days ago! You have murdered her to no gain.”
“She was not a virgin?”
Althotas quivered to the eyes at this revelation, as if an electric shock made them oscillate in their orbits. His pupils frightfully dilated; his gums gnashed for want of teeth; his hand let fall the phial of the elixir of long life, and it fell and shivered into a thousand splinters. Stupefied, annihilated, struck at the same time in heart and brain, he dropped back heavily in his armchair.
Balsamo, bending with a sob over the body of his wife, swooned as he was kissing the tresses.
Time passed silently and mournfully in the death-chamber where the blood congealed.
Suddenly in the midst of the night a bell rang in the room itself.
Fritz must have guessed that his master was in the laboratory of Althotas to have sent the warning thither. He repeated it three times and still Balsamo did not lift his head.
In a few minutes the ringing came, still louder, without rousing the mourner from his stupor.
But at another call, the impatient jangle made him look up though not with a start. He questioned the space with the cold solemnity of a corpse coming forth from a grave.
The bell kept on ringing.
Energy, reviving, at last aroused intelligence in the husband of Lorenza Feliciani. He took away his head from hers; it had lost its warmth without warming hers.
“Great news or a great danger,” he said to himself. “I should as lief meet a great danger.”
He rose upright.
“But why should I answer this appeal?” he asked without perceiving the sombre effect of his voice under the gloomy skylight and in the funeral chamber. “Is there anything in this world to alarm or interest me?”
As if to answer him the bell was so roughly shaken that the iron tongue broke loose and fell on a glass alembic which it shivered on the floor.
He held back no longer; besides, it was important that neither Fritz nor another should come here to find him.
With a tranquil tread he opened the trap and descended. When he opened the staircase door, Fritz stood on the top step, pale and breathless, holding a torch in one hand and the broken bell-pull in the other.
At sight of his master, he uttered a cry of satisfaction and then one of surprise and fright. Respectful as he usually was, he took the liberty of seizing him by the arm and dragging him up to a Venetian mirror.
“Look, excellency,” he said.
Balsamo shuddered. In an hour he had grown twenty years older. In his eyes were lustre; in his skin no blood; and over all his lineaments was spread an expression of stupor and lack of intelligence. Bloody foam bathed his lips, and on the white front of his shirt a large blood spot spread. He looked at himself for an instant without recognition. Thenhe plunged his glance steadily into that of his reflected self.
“You are quite right, Fritz,” he said. “But why did you call me?”
“They are here, master,” said the faithful servant, with disquiet: “the five masters.”
“All here?” queried Balsamo, starting.
“With each an armed servant in the yard. They are impatient which is why I rang so often and roughly.”
Without adjusting his dress or hiding the blood spot, Balsamo went down the stairs to the parlor.
“Has your excellency no orders to give me about weapons?” asked the valet.
“Why should I take a sword even?”
“I do not know, I only feared—I thought—— ”
“Thanks, you can go.”
“Yes: but your double-barrelled pistols are in the ebony box on the gilded buffet.”
“Go, I bid you,” said the master, and he entered the parlor.
THEparlor was well lighted, and Balsamo entering could see the grim air of the five men who kept their seats until he was before them and bowed. Then they all rose and returned the salute.
He took an armchair facing theirs without appearing to remark that theirs formed a horse-shoe in front of his so that he occupied the place of the culprit at a trial.
He did not speak first as he would have done on another occasion. From the painful dulness which succeeded the shock to him he looked without seeing.
“You seem to have understood what we come for, brother,” said the man who held the central chair: “yet you were longcoming and we were deliberating if we should not send for you.”
“I do not understand you,” simply replied the mesmerist.
“That did not seem so when you took the place of the accused.”
“Accused?” faltered the other, vaguely. “Still I do not understand.”
“It will not be hard to make you do so,” said the chief officer: “judging by your pale front, dull eyes and tremulous voice. Do you not hear me?”
“Yes, I hear,” was the reply, while he shook his head to drive away the thoughts oppressing him.
“Do you remember, brother,” said the president, “that at the last meeting, the Superior Committee gave you warning of treason meditated by one of the main upholders of the Order?”
“Perhaps so, I do not know.”
“You answer as with a perturbed and tumultuous conscience. But recover—do not be cast down. Answer with the clearness and preciseness which a dreadful position demands. Answer with such certainty that you will convince us, for we come with no more hatred than prejudice. We are the Law. It speaks not till after the judges pronounce.”
Balsamo made no reply.
Seeing the calm and immobility of the accused, the others stared at him not without astonishment, before fastening their eyes on the chief again.
“You are warned. Protect yourself, for I resume.
“After this warning the Order delegated five of the members to watch at Paris about him who was designated as a traitor. It was not easy to watch a man like you, whose power was to enter everywhere. You had at your disposal all the means, which are immense, of our association, given for the triumph of our cause. But we respected the mystery of your conduct as you fluctuated between the adherents of Dubarry, of Richelieu and Rohan. But three days ago, five warrants of arrest, signed by the King and put in motion by Sartines, were presented on the same day to five of our principal agents, very faithful and devoted brothers who have been taken away. Two are put in solitary confinement in the Bastile, two at Vincennes Castle, in the dungeons, and one is in Bicetre in the deepest cell. Did you know of this?”
“No,” replied the accused.
“Strange, with the close connections you have with royalty. But this is stranger still. To arrest those friends, Sartines must have had the note naming them, the only one, under Arabian characters, which was addressed to the Supreme Circle in 1769, when you received them and gave them the grade assigned to them. But the sixth name was the Count of Fenix’s.”
“I grant that,” said Balsamo.
“Then how comes it that they five should be arrested as by that list while you were spared? you deserved prison as well as they. What have you to answer?”
“Nothing.”
“Your pride survives your honor. The police discovered those names in reading our papers which you kept in a casket. One day a woman came out of your house with this casket and went to the Chief of Police. Thus all was discovered. Is this true?”
“Perfectly true.”
The president stood up.
“Who was this woman?” he said. “A fair and passionate one devoted to you body and soul and affectionately loved. Lorenza Feliciani is your wife, Balsamo.”
He groaned in despair.
“A quarter of an hour after she called on the head of the police, you called in your turn. She had sown the seed and you were to gather the harvest. An obedient servant she committed the treachery and you had but to give the finishing touches to the infernal work. Lorenza came out alone. No doubt you arranged this and did not want to be compromised by her company. You came out triumphantly with Lady Dubarry, called there to receive from your mouth the information which she was to pay. You got into the carriage of this courtesan, leaving the papers which ruined us in the hands of Lord Sartines but carrying away the empty casket. Happily we saw you. The light of the All-seeing Eye did not fail us on all occasions.”
Balsamo bowed still without remark.
“I conclude,” said the chief judge. “Two guilty ones are pointed out: the woman who was your accomplice and may have unwittingly injured us by conveying the revelations of our secrets; the second, yourself the Grand Copt, the luminous ray who had the cowardice to let your wife shield you in this deed of treason.”
Balsamo slowly raised his pale face, and fixed on the speaker a glance with the fire in it which had accumulated while the speech was made.
“Why do you accuse this woman?” he demanded.
“We know that you will try to defend her; that you love her to idolatry and prefer her above all. She is your treasure of science, happiness and fortune; the most precious of your instruments.”
“You know this?”
“And that in striking her we hurt you more than in striking you. This is the sentence, then: Joseph Balsamo is a traitor. He has broken his oath, but his science is immense and useful to the Order. He ought to live for the cause he has betrayed; he belongs still to his brothers though he has renounced them. A perpetual prison will protect the society against future perfidy, and at the same time let the brothers gather the gain due to them if only as a forfeit. As for Lorenza Feliciani, a dreadful doom—— ”
“Stay,” said Balsamo, with the greatest calm in his voice. “You are forgetting that I have not defended myself. The accused ought to have a hearing in his justification. One word will suffice—one piece of evidence. Wait for me one moment while I bring the proof I speak of.”
The judges consulted an instant.
“Do you fear that I will commit suicide?” said the accused with a bitter smile. “I wear a ring that would kill this room-full of people were I to open it. Do you fear that I will flee? Let me be escorted, if that be your fear.”
“Go,” said the president.
For only a while did the prisoner disappear; then theyheard his step descending the stairs, heavily. He entered.
On his shoulder was the cold discolored, rigid corpse of Lorenza, with her white hand sweeping the floor.
“As you said, this woman—whom I adored and was my treasure, my only joy, my very life—she betrayed us,” he said: “here she is—take her! The High Justicer of heaven did not wait for you to come and slay her.”
With a movement as swift as lightning, he slid the corpse out of his arms, and rolled it to the feet of the judges. The dark hair and inert hands struck them with all their profound horror while by the lamplight the wound glared with its ominous red, deeply yawning in the midst of the swan-white neck.
“Utter your sentence, now,” said Balsamo.
Aghast, the judges uttered a terror-stricken cry, and fled dizzily in confusion inexpressible. The horses of their carriage and escort were heard neighing in the yard and trampling; the carriage-gate groaned on its hinges and then solemn silence sat once more on the abode of death and despair.