CHAPTER XXXIX.
The Manuscript was written in a small and peculiar handwriting, which,
though evidently by the same person whose letter to Strahan I had read,
was, whether from haste or some imperfection in the ink, much more hard to
decipher. Those parts of the Memoir which related to experiments, or
alleged secrets in Nature, that the writer intimated a desire to submit
exclusively to scholars or men of science, were in Latin,--and Latin
which, though grammatically correct, was frequently obscure. But all
that detained the eye and attention on the page necessarily served to
impress the contents more deeply on remembrance.
The narrative commenced with the writer's sketch of his childhood. Both
his parents had died before he attained his seventh year. The orphan bad
been sent by his guardians to a private school, and his holidays had been
passed at Derval Court. Here his earliest reminiscences were those of the
quaint old room, in which I now sat, and of his childish wonder at the
inscription on the chimneypiece--who and what was the Simon Forman who had
there found a refuge from persecution? Of what nature were the studies he
had cultivated, and the discoveries he boasted to have made?
When he was about sixteen, Philip Derval had begun to read the many mystic
books which the library contained; but without other result on his mind
than the sentiment of disappointment and disgust. The impressions
produced on the credulous imagination of childhood vanished. He went to
the University; was sent abroad to travel: and on his return took that
place in the circles of London which is so readily conceded to a young
idler of birth and fortune. He passed quickly over that period of his
life, as one of extravagance and dissipation, from which he was first
drawn by the attachment for his cousin to which his letter to Strahan
referred. Disappointed in the hopes which that affection had conceived,
and his fortune impaired, partly by some years of reckless profusion, and
partly by the pecuniary sacrifices at which he had effected his cousin's
marriage with another, he retired to Derval Court, to live there in
solitude and seclusion. On searching for some old title-deeds required
for a mortgage, he chanced upon a collection of manuscripts much
discoloured, and, in part, eaten away by moth or damp. These, on
examination, proved to be the writings of Forman. Some of them were
astrological observations and predictions; some were upon the nature of
the Cabbala; some upon the invocation of spirits and the magic of the dark
ages. All had a certain interest, for they were interspersed with
personal remarks, anecdotes of eminent actors in a very stirring time, and
were composed as Colloquies, in imitation of Erasmus,--the second person
in the dialogue being Sir Miles Derval, the patron and pupil; the first
person being Forman, the philosopher and expounder.
But along with these shadowy lucubrations were treatises of a more
uncommon and a more startling character,--discussions on various occult
laws of nature, and detailed accounts of analytical experiments. These
opened a new, and what seemed to Sir Philip a practical, field of
inquiry,--a true border-land between natural science and imaginative
speculation. Sir Philip had cultivated philosophical science at the
University; he resumed the study, and tested himself the truth of various
experiments suggested by Forman. Some, to his surprise, proved
successful, some wholly failed. These lucubrations first tempted the
writer of the memoir towards the studies in which the remainder of his
life had been consumed. But he spoke of the lucubrations themselves as
valuable only where suggestive of some truths which Forman had
accidentally approached, without being aware of their true nature and
importance. They were debased by absurd puerilities, and vitiated by the
vain and presumptuous ignorance which characterized the astrology of the
middle ages. For these reasons the writer intimated his intention (if he
lived to return to England) to destroy Forman's manuscripts, together with
sundry other books, and a few commentaries of his own upon studies which
had for a while misled him,--all now deposited in the safes of the room in
which I sat.
After some years passed in the retirement of Derval Court, Sir Philip was
seized with the desire to travel, and the taste he had imbibed for occult
studies led him towards those Eastern lands in which they took their
origin, and still retain their professors.
Several pages of the manuscript were now occupied with minute statements
of the writer's earlier disappointment in the objects of his singular
research. The so-called magicians, accessible to the curiosity of
European travellers, were either but ingenious jugglers, or produced
effects that perplexed him by practices they had mechanically learned, but
of the rationale of which they were as ignorant as himself. It was not
till he had resided some considerable time in the East, and acquired a
familiar knowledge of its current languages and the social habits of its
various populations, that he became acquainted with men in whom he
recognized earnest cultivators of the lore which tradition ascribes to the
colleges and priesthoods of the ancient world,--men generally living
remote from others, and seldom to be bribed by money to exhibit their
marvels or divulge their secrets. In his intercourse with these sages,
Sir Philip arrived at the conviction that there does exist an art of
magic, distinct from the guile of the conjuror, and applying to certain
latent powers and affinities in nature,--a philosophy akin to that which
we receive in our acknowledged schools, inasmuch as it is equally based on
experiment, and produces from definite causes definite results. In
support of this startling proposition, Sir Philip now devoted more than
half his volume to the details of various experiments, to the process and
result of which he pledged his guarantee as the actual operator. As most
of these alleged experiments appeared to me wholly incredible, and as all
of them were unfamiliar to my practical experience, and could only be
verified or falsified by tests that would require no inconsiderable amount
of time and care, I passed with little heed over the pages in which they
were set forth. I was impatient to arrive at that part of the manuscript
which might throw light on the mystery in which my interest was the
keenest. What were the links which connected the existence of Margrave
with the history of Sir Philip Derval? Thus hurrying on, page after page,
I suddenly, towards the end of the volume, came upon a name that arrested
all my attention,--Haroun of Aleppo. He who has read the words addressed
to mee in my trance may well conceive the thrill that shot through my
heart when I came upon that name, and will readily understand how much
more vividly my memory retains that part of the manuscript to which I now
proceed, than all which had gone before.
"It was," wrote Sir Philip, "in an obscure suburb of Aleppo that I at
length met with the wonderful man from whom I have acquired a
knowledge immeasurably more profound and occult than that which may be
tested in the experiments to which I have devoted so large a share of
this memoir. Haroun of Aleppo had, indeed, mastered every secret in
nature which the nobler, or theurgic, magic seeks to fathom.
"He had discovered the great Principle of Animal Life, which had
hitherto baffled the subtlest anatomist. Provided only that the great
organs were not irreparably destroyed, there was no disease that he
could not cure; no decrepitude to which be could not restore vigour:
yet his science was based on the same theory as that espoused by the
best professional practitioner of medicine, namely, that the true art
of healing is to assist nature to throw off the disease; to summon, as
it were, the whole system to eject the enemy that has fastened on a
part. And thus his processes, though occasionally varying in the
means employed, all combined in this,--namely, the re-invigourating
and recruiting of the principle of life."
No one knew the birth or origin of Haroun; no one knew his age. In
outward appearance he was in the strength and prime of mature manhood;
but, according to testimonies in which the writer of the memoir expressed
a belief that, I need scarcely say, appeared to me egregiously credulous,
Haroun's existence under the same name, and known by the same repute,
could be traced back to more than a hundred years. He told Sir Philip
that he had thrice renewed his own life, and had resolved to do so no
more; he had grown weary of living on. With all his gifts, Haroun owned
himself to be consumed by a profound melancholy. He complained that there
was nothing new to him under the sun; he said that, while he had at his
command unlimited wealth, wealth had ceased to bestow enjoyment, and he
preferred living as simply as a peasant; he had tired out all the
affections and all the passions of the human heart; he was in the universe
as in a solitude. In a word, Haroun would often repeat, with mournful
solemnity: "'The soul is not meant to inhabit this earth and in fleshy
tabernacle for more than the period usually assigned to mortals; and when
by art in repairing the walls of the body we so retain it, the soul
repines, becomes inert or dejected. He only," said Haroun, "would feel
continued joy in continued existence who could preserve in perfection the
sensual part of man, with such mind or reason as may be independent of the
spiritual essence, but whom soul itself has quitted!--man, in short, as
the grandest of the animals, but without the sublime discontent of earth,
which is the peculiar attribute of soul."
One evening Sir Philip was surprised to find at Haroun's house another
European. He paused in his narrative to describe this man. He said that
for three or four years previously he had heard frequent mention, amongst
the cultivators of magic, of an orientalized Englishman engaged in
researches similar to his own, and to whom was ascribed a terrible
knowledge in those branches of the art which, even in the East, are
condemned as instrumental to evil. Sir Philip here distinguished at
length, as he had so briefly distinguished in his conversation with me,
between the two kinds of magic,--that which he alleged to be as pure from
sin as any other species of experimental knowledge, and that by which the
agencies of witchcraft are invoked for the purposes of guilt.
The Englishman, to whom the culture of this latter and darker kind of
magic was ascribed, Sir Philip Derval had never hitherto come across. He
now met him at the house of Haroun; decrepit, emaciated, bowed down with
infirmities, and racked with pain. Though little more than sixty, his
aspect was that of extreme old age; but still on his face there were seen
the ruins of a once singular beauty, and still, in his mind, there was a
force that contrasted the decay of the body. Sir Philip had never met
with an intellect more powerful and more corrupt. The son of a notorious
usurer, heir to immense wealth, and endowed with the talents which justify
ambition, he had entered upon life burdened with the odium of his father's
name. A duel, to which he had been provoked by an ungenerous taunt on his
origin, but in which a temperament fiercely vindictive had led him to
violate the usages prescribed by the social laws that regulate such
encounters, had subjected him to a trial in which he escaped conviction
either by a flaw in the technicalities of legal procedure, or by the
compassion of the jury;[1] but the moral presumptions against him were
sufficiently strong to set an indelible brand on his honour, and an
insurmountable barrier to the hopes which his early ambition had
conceived. After this trial he had quitted his country, to return to it
no more. Thenceforth, much of his life had been passed out of sight or
conjecture of civilized men in remote regions and amongst barbarous
tribes. At intervals, however, he had reappeared in European capitals;
shunned by and shunning his equals, surrounded by parasites, amongst whom
were always to be found men of considerable learning, whom avarice or
poverty subjected to the influences of his wealth. For the last nine or
ten years he had settled in Persia, purchased extensive lands, maintained
the retinue, and exercised more than the power of an Oriental prince.
Such was the man who, prematurely worn out, and assured by physicians that
he had not six weeks of life, had come to Aleppo with the gaudy escort of
an Eastern satrap, had caused himself to be borne in his litter to the
mud-hut of Haroun the Sage, and now called on the magician, in whose art
was his last hope, to reprieve him from the--grave.
He turned round to Sir Philip, when the latter entered the room, and
exclaimed in English, "I am here because you are. Your intimacy with this
man was known to me. I took your character as the guarantee of his own.
Tell me that I am no credulous dupe. Tell him that I, Louis Grayle, am no
needy petitioner. Tell me of his wisdom; assure him of my wealth."
Sir Philip looked inquiringly at Haroun, who remained seated on his carpet
in profound silence.
"What is it you ask of Haroun?"
"To live on--to live on! For every year of life he can give me, I will
load these floors with gold."
"Gold will not tempt Haroun."
"What will?"
"Ask him yourself; you speak his language."
"I have asked him; he vouchsafes me no answer."
Haroun here suddenly roused himself as from a revery. He drew from under
his robe a small phial, from which he let fall a single drop into a cup of
water, and said, "Drink this; send to me tomorrow for such medicaments as
I may prescribe. Return hither yourself in three days; not before!"
When Grayle was gone, Sir Philip, moved to pity, asked Haroun if, indeed,
it were within the compass of his art to preserve life in a frame that
appeared so thoroughly exhausted. Haroun answered, "A fever may so waste
the lamp of life that one ruder gust of air could extinguish the flame,
yet the sick man recovers. This sick man's existence has been one long
fever; this sick man can recover."
"You will aid him to do so?"
"Three days hence I will tell you."
On the third day Grayle revisited Haroun, and, at Haroun's request, Sir
Philip came also. Grayle declared that he had already derived unspeakable
relief from the remedies administered; he was lavish in expressions of
gratitude; pressed large gifts on Haroun, and seemed pained when they were
refused. This time Haroun conversed freely, drawing forth Grayle's own
irregular, perverted, stormy, but powerful intellect.
I can best convey the general nature of Grayle's share in the dialogue
between himself, Haroun, and Derval--recorded in the narrative in words
which I cannot trust my memory to repeat in detail--by stating the effect
it produced on my own mind. It seemed, while I read, as if there passed
before me some convulsion of Nature,--a storm, an earthquake,--outcries
of rage, of scorn, of despair, a despot's vehemence of will, a rebel's
scoff at authority; yet, ever and anon, some swell of lofty thought, some
burst of passionate genius,--abrupt variations from the vaunt of superb
defiance to the wail of intense remorse.
The whole had in it, I know not what of uncouth but colossal,--like the
chant, in the old lyrical tragedy, of one of those mythical giants, who,
proud of descent from Night and Chaos, had held sway over the elements,
while still crude and conflicting, to be crushed under the rocks, upheaved
in their struggle, as Order and Harmony subjected a brightening Creation
to the milder influences throned in Olympus. But it was not till the
later passages of the dialogue in which my interest was now absorbed, that
the language ascribed to this sinister personage lost a gloomy pathos not
the less impressive for the awe with which it was mingled. For, till
then, it seemed to me as if in that tempestuous nature there were still
broken glimpses of starry light; that a character originally lofty, if
irregular and fierce, had been embittered by early and continuous war with
the social world, and had, in that war, become maimed and distorted; that,
under happier circumstances, its fiery strength might have been
disciplined to good; that even now, where remorse was so evidently
poignant, evil could not be irredeemably confirmed.
At length all the dreary compassion previously inspired vanished in one
unqualified abhorrence.
The subjects discussed changed from those which, relating to the common
world of men, were within the scope of my reason. Haroun led his wild
guest to boast of his own proficiency in magic, and, despite my
incredulity, I could not overcome the shudder with which fictions, however
extravagant, that deal with that dark Unknown abandoned to the chimeras of
poets, will, at night and in solitude, send through the veins of men the
least accessible to imaginary terrors.
Grayle spoke of the power he had exercised through the agency of evil
spirits,--a power to fascinate and to destroy. He spoke of the aid
revealed to him, now too late, which such direful allies could afford, not
only to a private revenge, but to a kingly ambition. Had he acquired the
knowledge he declared himself to possess before the feebleness of the
decaying body made it valueless, how he could have triumphed over that
world which had expelled his youth from its pale! He spoke of means by
which his influence could work undetected on the minds of others, control
agencies that could never betray, and baffle the justice that could never
discover. He spoke vaguely of a power by which a spectral reflection of
the material body could be cast, like a shadow, to a distance; glide
through the walls of a prison, elude the sentinels of a camp,--a power
that he asserted to be when enforced by concentrated will, and acting on
the mind, where in each individual temptation found mind the
weakest--almost infallible in its effect to seduce or to appall. And he
closed these and similar boasts of demoniacal arts, which I remember too
obscurely to repeat, with a tumultuous imprecation on their nothingness to
avail against the gripe of death. All this lore he would communicate to
Haroun, in return for what? A boon shared by the meanest peasant,--life,
common life; to breathe yet a while the air, feel yet a while the sun.
Then Haroun replied. He said, with a quiet disdain, that the dark art to
which Grayle made such boastful pretence was the meanest of all abuses of
knowledge, rightly abandoned, in all ages, to the vilest natures. And
then, suddenly changing his tone, he spoke, so far as I can remember the
words assigned to him in the manuscript, to this effect,--
"Fallen and unhappy wretch, and you ask me for prolonged life!--a
prolonged curse to the world and to yourself. Shall I employ spells to
lengthen the term of the Pestilence, or profane the secrets of Nature to
restore vigour and youth to the failing energies of Crime?"
Grayle, as if stunned by the rebuke, fell on his knees with despairing
entreaties that strangely contrasted his previous arrogance. "And it
was," he said, "because his life had been evil that he dreaded death. If
life could be renewed he would repent, he would change; he retracted his
vaunts, he would forsake the arts he had boasted, he would re-enter the
world as its benefactor."
"So ever the wicked man lies to himself when appalled by the shadow of
death," answered Haroun. "But know, by the remorse which preys on thy
soul, that it is not thy soul that addresses this prayer to me. Couldst
thou hear, through the storms of the Mind, the Soul's melancholy whisper,
it would dissuade thee from a wish to live on. While I speak, I behold
it, that Soul,--sad for the stains on its essence, awed by the account it
must render, but dreading, as the direst calamity, a renewal of years
below, darker stains and yet heavier accounts! Whatever the sentence it
may now undergo, it has a hope for mercy in the remorse which the mind
vainly struggles to quell. But darker its doom if longer retained to
earth, yoked to the mind that corrupts it, and enslaved to the senses
which thou bidst me restore to their tyrannous forces."
And Grayle bowed his head and covered his face with his hands in silence
and in trembling.
Then Sir Philip, seized with compassion, pleaded for him. "At least,
could not the soul have longer time on earth for repentance?" And while
Sir Philip was so pleading, Grayle fell prostrate in a swoon like that of
death. When he recovered, his head was leaning on Haroun's knee, and his
opening eyes fixed on the glittering phial which Haroun held, and from
which his lips had been moistened.
"Wondrous!" he murmured: "how I feel life flowing back to me. And that,
then, is the elixir! it is no fable!"
His hands stretched greedily as to seize the phial, and he cried
imploringly, "More, more!" Haroun replaced the vessel in the folds of his
robe, and answered,--
"I will not renew thy youth, but I will release thee from bodily
suffering: I will leave the mind and the soul free from the pangs of the
flesh, to reconcile, if yet possible, their long war. My skill may afford
thee months yet for repentance; Seek, in that interval, to atone for the
evil of sixty years; apply thy wealth where it may most compensate for
injury done, most relieve the indigent, and most aid the virtuous. Listen
to thy remorse; humble thyself in prayer."
Grayle departed, sighing heavily and muttering to himself. The next day
Haroun summoned Sir Philip Derval, and said to him,--
"Depart to Damascus. In that city the Pestilence has appeared. Go
thither thou, to heal and to save. In this casket are stored the surest
antidotes to the poison of the plague. Of that essence, undiluted and
pure, which tempts to the undue prolongation of soul in the prison of
flesh, this casket contains not a drop. I curse not my friend with so
mournful a boon. Thou hast learned enough of my art to know by what
simples the health of the temperate is easily restored to its balance, and
their path to the grave smoothed from pain. Not more should Man covet
from Nature for the solace and weal of the body. Nobler gifts far than
aught for the body this casket contains. Herein are the essences which
quicken the life of those duplicate senses that lie dormant and coiled in
their chrysalis web, awaiting the wings of a future development,--the
senses by which we can see, though not with the eye, and hear, but not by
the ear. Herein are the links between Man's mind and Nature's; herein are
secrets more precious even than these,--those extracts of light which
enable the Soul to distinguish itself from the Mind, and discriminate the
spiritual life, not more from life carnal than life intellectual. Where
thou seest some noble intellect, studious of Nature, intent upon Truth,
yet ignoring the fact that all animal life has a mind and Man alone on the
earth ever asked, and has asked, from the hour his step trod the earth,
and his eye sought the Heaven, 'Have I not a soul; can it perish?'--there,
such aids to the soul, in the innermost vision vouchsafed to the mind,
thou mayst lawfully use. But the treasures contained in this casket are
like all which a mortal can win from the mines he explores,--good or ill
in their uses as they pass to the hands of the good or the evil. Thou
wilt never confide them but to those who will not abuse! and even then,
thou art an adept too versed in the mysteries of Nature not to
discriminate between the powers that may serve the good to good ends, and
the powers that may tempt the good--where less wise than experience has
made thee and me--to the ends that are evil; and not even to thy friend
the most virtuous--if less proof against passion than thou and I have
become--wilt thou confide such contents of the casket as may work on the
fancy, to deafen the conscience and imperil the soul."
Sir Philip took the casket, and with it directions for use, which he did
not detail. He then spoke to Haroun about Louis Grayle, who had inspired
him with a mingled sentiment of admiration and abhorrence, of pity and
terror. And Haroun answered thus, repeating the words ascribed to him, so
far as I can trust, in regard to them--as to all else in this marvellous
narrative--to a memory habitually tenacious even in ordinary matters, and
strained to the utmost extent of its power, by the strangeness of the
ideas presented to it, and the intensity of my personal interest in
whatever admitted a ray into that cloud which, gathering fast over my
reason, now threatened storm to my affections,--
"When the mortal deliberately allies himself to the spirits of evil, he
surrenders the citadel of his being to the guard of its enemies; and those
who look from without can only dimly guess what passes within the
precincts abandoned to Powers whose very nature we shrink to contemplate,
lest our mere gaze should invite them. This man, whom thou pitiest, is
not yet everlastingly consigned to the fiends, because his soul still
struggles against them. His life has been one long war between his
intellect, which is mighty, and his spirit, which is feeble. The
intellect, armed and winged by the passions, has besieged and oppressed
the soul; but the soul has never ceased to repine and to repent. And at
moments it has gained its inherent ascendancy, persuaded revenge to drop
the prey it had seized, turned the mind astray from hatred and wrath into
unwonted paths of charity and love. In the long desert of guilt, there
have been green spots and fountains of good. The fiends have occupied the
intellect which invoked them, but they have never yet thoroughly mastered
the soul which their presence appalls. In the struggle that now passes
within that breast, amidst the flickers of waning mortality, only Allah,
whose eye never slumbers, can aid."
Haroun then continued, in words yet more strange and yet more
deeply graved in my memory,--
"There have been men (thou mayst have known such), who, after an illness
in which life itself seemed suspended, have arisen, as out of a sleep,
with characters wholly changed. Before, perhaps, gentle and good and
truthful, they now become bitter, malignant, and false. To the persons
and the things they had before loved, they evince repugnance and loathing.
Sometimes this change is so marked and irrational that their kindred
ascribe it to madness,--not the madness which affects them in the
ordinary business of life, but that which turns into harshness and
discord the moral harmony that results from natures whole and complete.
But there are dervishes who hold that in that illness, which had for its
time the likeness of death, the soul itself has passed away, and an evil
genius has fixed itself into the body and the brain, thus left void of
their former tenant, and animates them in the unaccountable change from
the past to the present existence. Such mysteries have formed no part of
my study, and I tell you the conjecture received in the East without
hazarding a comment whether of incredulity or belief. But if, in this war
between the mind which the fiends have seized, and the soul which implores
refuge of Allah; if, while the mind of yon traveller now covets life
lengthened on earth for the enjoyments it had perverted its faculties to
seek and to find in sin, and covets so eagerly that it would shrink from
no crime and revolt from no fiend that could promise the gift, the soul
shudderingly implores to be saved from new guilt, and would rather abide
by the judgment of Allah on the sins that have darkened it than pass
forever irredeemably away to the demons,--if this be so, what if the
soul's petition be heard; what if it rise from the ruins around it; what
if the ruins be left to the witchcraft that seeks to rebuild them? There,
if demons might enter, that which they sought as their prize has escaped
them; that which they find would mock them by its own incompleteness even
in evil. In vain might animal life the most perfect be given to the
machine of the flesh; in vain might the mind, freed from the check of the
soul, be left to roam at will through a brain stored with memories of
knowledge and skilled in the command of its faculties; in vain, in
addition to all that body and brain bestow on the normal condition of man,
might unhallowed reminiscences gather all the arts and the charms of the
sorcery by which the fiends tempted the soul, before it fled, through the
passions of flesh and the cravings of mind: the Thing, thus devoid of a
soul, would be an instrument of evil, doubtless,--but an instrument that
of itself could not design, invent, and complete. The demons themselves
could have no permanent hold on the perishable materials. They might
enter it for some gloomy end which Allah permits in his inscrutable
wisdom; but they could leave it no trace when they pass from it, because
there is no conscience where soul is wanting. The human animal without
soul, but otherwise made felicitously perfect in its mere vital
organization, might ravage and destroy, as the tiger and the serpent may
destroy and ravage, and, the moment after, would sport in the sunlight
harmless and rejoicing, because, like the serpent and the tiger, it is
incapable of remorse."
"Why startle my wonder," said Derval, "with so fantastic an image?"
"Because, possibly, the image may come into palpable form! I know, while
I speak to thee, that this miserable man is calling to his aid the evil
sorcery over which he boasts his control. To gain the end he desires, he
must pass through a crime. Sorcery whispers to him how to pass through
it, secure from the detection of man. The soul resists, but in resisting,
is weak against the tyranny of the mind to which it has submitted so long.
Question me no more. But if I vanish from thine eyes, if thou hear that
the death which, to my sorrow and in my foolishness I have failed to
recognize as the merciful minister of Heaven, has removed me at last from
the earth, believe that the pale Visitant was welcome, and that I humbly
accept as a blessed release the lot of our common humanity."
Sir Philip went to Damascus. There he found the pestilence raging, there
he devoted himself to the cure of the afflicted; in no single instance, so
at least he declared, did the antidotes stored in the casket fail in their
effect. The pestilence had passed, his medicaments were exhausted, when
the news reached him that Haroun was no more. The Sage had been found,
one morning, lifeless in his solitary home, and, according to popular
rumour, marks on his throat betrayed the murderous hand of the strangler.
Simultaneously, Louis Grayle had disappeared from the city, and was
supposed to have shared the fate of Haroun, and been secretly buried by
the assassins who had deprived him of life. Sir Philip hastened to
Aleppo. There he ascertained that on the night in which Haroun died,
Grayle did not disappear alone; with him were also missing two of his
numerous suite,--the one, an Arab woman, named Ayesha, who had for some
years been his constant companion, his pupil and associate in the mystic
practices to which his intellect had been debased, and who was said to
have acquired a singular influence over him, partly by her beauty and
partly by the tenderness with which she had nursed him through his long
decline; the other, an Indian, specially assigned to her service, of whom
all the wild retainers of Grayle spoke with detestation and terror. He
was believed by them to belong to that murderous sect of fanatics whose
existence as a community has only recently been made known to Europe, and
who strangle their unsuspecting victim in the firm belief that they
thereby propitiate the favour of the goddess they serve. The current
opinion at Aleppo was, that if those two persons had conspired to murder
Haroun, perhaps for the sake of the treasures he was said to possess, it
was still more certain that they had made away with their own English
lord, whether for the sake of the jewels he wore about him, or for the
sake of treasures less doubtful than those imputed to Haroun, and of which
the hiding-place would be to them much better known.
"I did not share that opinion," wrote the narrator, "for I assured
myself that Ayesha sincerely loved her awful master; and that love
need excite no wonder, for Louis Grayle was one whom if a woman, and
especially a woman of the East, had once loved, before old age and
infirmity fell on him, she would love and cherish still more devotedly
when it became her task to protect the being who, in his day of power
and command, had exalted his slave into the rank of his pupil and
companion. And the Indian whom Grayle had assigned to her service was
allowed to have that brute kind of fidelity which, though it recoils
from no crime for a master, refuses all crime against him.
"I came to the conclusion that Haroun had been murdered by order
of Louis Grayle,--for the sake of the elixir of life,--murdered by
Juma the Strangler; and that Grayle himself had been aided in his
flight from Aleppo, and tended, through the effects of the
life-giving drug thus murderously obtained, by the womanly love of the
Arab woman Ayesha. These convictions (since I could not, without
being ridiculed as the wildest of dupes, even hint at the vital
elixir) I failed to impress on the Eastern officials, or even on a
countryman of my own whom I chanced to find at Aleppo. They only
arrived at what seemed the common-sense verdict,--namely, that Haroun
might have been strangled, or might have died in a fit (the body,
little examined, was buried long before I came to Aleppo); and that
Louis Grayle was murdered by his own treacherous dependents. But all
trace of the fugitives was lost.
"And now," wrote Sir Philip, "I will state by what means I discovered
that Louis Grayle still lived,--changed from age into youth; a new
form, a new being; realizing, I verily believe, the image which
Haroun's words had raised up, in what then seemed to me the
metaphysics of fantasy,---criminal, without consciousness of crime;
the dreadest of the mere animal race; an incarnation of the blind
powers of Nature,--beautiful and joyous, wanton and terrible and
destroying! Such as ancient myths have personified in the idols of
Oriental creeds; such as Nature, of herself, might form man in her
moments of favour, if man were wholly the animal, and spirit were no
longer the essential distinction between himself and the races to
which by superior formation and subtler perceptions he would still be
the king.
"But this being is yet more dire and portentous than the mere animal
man, for in him are not only the fragmentary memories of a pristine
intelligence which no mind, unaided by the presence of soul, could
have originally compassed, but amidst that intelligence are the
secrets of the magic which is learned through the agencies of spirits
the most hostile to our race. And who shall say whether the fiends do
not enter at their will this void and deserted temple whence the soul
has departed, and use as their tools, passive and unconscious, all the
faculties which, skilful in sorcery, still place a mind at the
control of their malice?
"It, was in the interest excited in me by the strange and terrible fate
that befell an Armenian family with which I was slightly acquainted,
that I first traced--in the creature I am now about to describe, and
whose course I devote myself to watch, and trust to bring to a
close--the murderer of Haroun for the sake of the elixir of youth.
"In this Armenian family there were three daughters; one of them--"
I had just read thus far when a dim shadow fell over the page, and a cold
air seemed to breathe on me,--cold, so cold, that my blood halted in my
veins as if suddenly frozen! Involuntarily I started, and looked up, sure
that some ghastly presence was in the room. And then, on the opposite
side of the wall, I beheld an unsubstantial likeness of a human form.
Shadow I call it, but the word is not strictly correct, for it was
luminous, though with a pale shine. In some exhibition in London there is
shown a curious instance of optical illusion; at the end of a corridor you
see, apparently in strong light, a human skull. You are convinced it is
there as you approach; it is, however, only a reflection from a skull at a
distance. The image before me was less vivid, less seemingly prominent
than is the illusion I speak of. I was not deceived. I felt it was a
spectrum, a phantasm; but I felt no less surely that it was a reflection
from an animate form,--the form and face of Margrave; it was there,
distinct, unmistakable. Conceiving that he himself must be behind me, I
sought to rise, to turn round, to examine. I could not move: limb and
muscle were overmastered by some incomprehensible spell. Gradually my
senses forsook me; I became unconscious as well as motionless. When I
recovered, I heard the clock strike three. I must have been nearly two
hours insensible! The candles before me were burning low. My eyes rested
on the table; the dead man's manuscript was gone!
[1] The reader will here observe a discrepancy between Mrs. Poyntz's
account and Sir Philip Derval's narrative. According to the former, Louis
Grayle was tried in his absence from England, and sentenced to three
years' imprisonment, which his flight enabled him to evade. According to
the latter, Louis Grayle stood his trial, and obtained an acquittal. Sir
Philip's account must, at least, be nearer the truth than the lady's,
because Louis Grayle could not, according to English law, have been tried
on a capital charge without being present in court. Mrs. Poyntz tells her
story as a woman generally does tell a story,--sure to make a mistake when
she touches on a question of law; and--unconsciously perhaps to
herself--the woman of the World warps the facts in her narrative so as to
save the personal dignity of the hero, who has captivated her interest,
not from the moral odium of a great crime, but the debasing position of a
prisoner at the bar. Allen Fenwick, no doubt, purposely omits to notice
the discrepancy between these two statements, or to animadvert on the
mistake which, in the eyes of a lawyer, would discredit Mrs. Poyntz's. It
is consistent with some of the objects for which Allen Fenwick makes
public his Strange Story, to invite the reader to draw his own inferences
from the contradictions by which, even in the most commonplace matters
(and how much more in any tale of wonder!), a fact stated by one person is
made to differ from the same fact stated by another. The rapidity with
which a truth becomes transformed into fable, when it is once sent on its
travels from lip to lip, is illustrated by an amusement at this moment in
fashion. The amusement is this: In a party of eight or ten persons, let
one whisper to another an account of some supposed transaction, or a piece
of invented gossip relating to absent persons, dead or alive; let the
person, who thus first hears the story, proceed to whisper it, as exactly
as he can remember what he has just heard, to the next; the next does the
same to his neighbour, and so on, till the tale has run the round of the
party. Each narrator, as soon as he has whispered his version of the
tale, writes down what he has whispered. And though, in this game, no one
has had any interest to misrepresent, but, on the contrary, each for his
own credit's sake strives to repeat what he has heard as faithfully as he
can, it will be almost invariably found that the story told by the first
person has received the most material alterations before it has reached
the eighth or the tenth. Sometimes the most important feature of the
whole narrative is altogether omitted; sometimes a feature altogether new
and preposterously absurd has been added. At the close of the experiment
one is tempted to exclaim, "How, after this, can any of those portions of
history which the chronicler took from hearsay be believed?" But, above
all, does not every anecdote of scandal which has passed, not through ten
lips, but perhaps through ten thousand, before it has reached us, become
quite as perplexing to him who would get at the truth, as the marvels he
recounts are to the bewildered reason of Fenwick the Sceptic?
