Unorna passed through a corridor which was, indeed, only a long balcony
covered in with arches and closed with windows against the outer air.
At the farther end three steps descended to a dark door, through the
thickness of a massive wall, showing that at this point Unorna’s house
had at some former time been joined with another building beyond, with
which it thus formed one habitation. Unorna paused, holding the key
as though hesitating whether she should put it into the lock. It was
evident that much depended upon her decision, for her face expressed
the anxiety she felt. Once she turned away, as though to abandon her
intention, hesitated, and then, with an impatient frown, opened the
door and went in. She passed through a small, well-lighted vestibule and
entered the room beyond.
The apartment was furnished with luxury, but a stranger would have
received an oddly disquieting impression of the whole at a first glance.
There was everything in the place which is considered necessary for a
bedroom, and everything was perfect of its kind, spotless and dustless,
and carefully arranged in order. But almost everything was of an unusual
and unfamiliar shape, as though designed for some especial reason to
remain in equilibrium in any possible position, and to be moved from
place to place with the smallest imaginable physical effort. The carved
bedstead was fitted with wheels which did not touch the ground, and
levers so placed as to be within the reach of a person lying in it. The
tables were each supported at one end only by one strong column, fixed
to a heavy base set on broad rollers, so that the board could be run
across a bed or a lounge with the greatest ease. There was but one chair
made like ordinary chairs; the rest were so constructed that the least
motion of the occupant must be accompanied by a corresponding change
of position of the back and arms, and some of them bore a curious
resemblance to a surgeon’s operating table, having attachments of
silver-plated metal at many points, of which the object was not
immediately evident. Before a closed door a sort of wheeled conveyance,
partaking of the nature of a chair and of a perambulator, stood upon
polished rails, which disappeared under the door itself, showing that
the thing was intended to be moved from one room to another in a certain
way and in a fixed line. The rails, had the door been opened, would have
been seen to descend upon the other side by a gentle inclined plane
into the centre of a huge marble basin, and the contrivance thus made
it possible to wheel a person into a bath and out again without
necessitating the slightest effort or change of position in the body. In
the bedroom the windows were arranged so that the light and air could
be regulated to a nicety. The walls were covered with fine basket work,
apparently adapted in panels; but these panels were in reality movable
trays, as it were, forming shallow boxes fitted with closely-woven
wicker covers, and filled with charcoal and other porous substances
intended to absorb the impurities of the air, and thus easily changed
and renewed from time to time. Immediately beneath the ceiling were
placed delicate glass globes of various soft colours, with silken
shades, movable from below by means of brass rods and handles. In the
ceiling itself there were large ventilators, easily regulated as might
be required, and there was a curious arrangement of rails and wheels
from which depended a sort of swing, apparently adapted for moving a
person or a weight to different parts of the room without touching the
floor. In one of the lounges, not far from the window, lay a colossal
old man, wrapped in a loose robe of warm white stuff, and fast asleep.
He was a very old man, so old, indeed, as to make it hard to guess his
age from his face and his hands, the only parts visible as he lay at
rest, the vast body and limbs lying motionless under his garment, as
beneath a heavy white pall. He could not be less than a hundred years
old, but how much older than that he might really be, it was impossible
to say. What might be called the waxen period had set in, and the high
colourless features seemed to be modelled in that soft, semi-transparent
material. The time had come when the stern furrows of age had broken
up into countless minutely-traced lines, so close and fine as to seem
a part of the texture of the skin, mere shadings, evenly distributed
throughout, and no longer affecting the expression of the face as
the deep wrinkles had done in former days; at threescore and ten, at
fourscore, and even at ninety years. The century that had passed had
taken with it its marks and scars, leaving the great features in their
original purity of design, lean, smooth, and clearly defined. That last
change in living man is rare enough, but when once seen is not to be
forgotten. There is something in the faces of the very, very old which
hardly suggests age at all, but rather the vague possibility of a
returning prime. Only the hands tell the tale, with their huge, shining,
fleshless joints, their shadowy hollows, and their unnatural yellow
nails.
The old man lay quite still, breathing softly through his snowy beard.
Unorna came to his side. There was something of wonder and admiration
in her own eyes as she stood there gazing upon the face which other
generations of men and women, all long dead, had looked upon and known.
The secret of life and death was before her each day when she entered
that room, and on the very verge of solution. The wisdom hardly gained
in many lands was striving with all its concentrated power to preserve
that life; the rare and subtle gifts which she herself possessed were
daily exercised to their full in the suggestion of vitality; the most
elaborate inventions of skilled mechanicians were employed in reducing
the labour of living to the lowest conceivable degree of effort. The
great experiment was being tried. What Keyork Arabian described as the
embalming of a man still alive was being attempted. And he lived. For
years they had watched him and tended him, and looked critically for
the least signs of a diminution or an augmentation in his strength. They
knew that he was now in his one hundred and seventh year, and yet he
lived and was no weaker. Was there a limit; or was there not, since the
destruction of the tissues was arrested beyond doubt, so far as the most
minute tests could show? Might there not be, in the slow oscillations
of nature, a degree of decay, on this side of death, from which a return
should be possible, provided that the critical moment were passed in a
state of sleep and under perfect conditions? How do we know that all
men must die? We suppose the statement to be true by induction, from
the undoubted fact that men have hitherto died within a certain limit of
age. By induction, too, our fathers, our grandfathers, knew that it was
impossible for man to traverse the earth faster than at the full speed
of a galloping horse. After several thousand years of experience that
piece of knowledge, which seemed to be singularly certain, was suddenly
proved to be the grossest ignorance by a man who had been in the habit
of playing with a tea-kettle when a boy. We ourselves, not very long
ago, knew positively, as all men had known since the beginning of the
world, that it was quite impossible to converse with a friend at a
distance beyond the carrying power of a speaking trumpet. To-day, a
boy who does not know that one may talk very agreeably with a friend
a thousand miles away is an ignoramus; and experimenters whisper among
themselves that, if the undulatory theory of light have any foundation,
there is no real reason why we may not see that same friend at that same
distance, as well as talk with him. Ten years ago we were quite sure
that it was beyond the bounds of natural possibility to produce a bad
burn upon the human body by touching the flesh with a bit of cardboard
or a common lead pencil. Now we know with equal certainty that if upon
one arm of a hypnotised patient we impress a letter of the alphabet
cut out of wood, telling him that it is red-hot iron, the shape of the
letter will on the following day be found on a raw and painful wound
not only in the place we selected but on the other arm, in the exactly
corresponding spot, and reversed as though seen in a looking-glass;
and we very justly consider that a physician who does not know this and
similar facts is dangerously behind the times, since the knowledge is
open to all. The inductive reasoning of many thousands of years has
been knocked to pieces in the last century by a few dozen men who have
reasoned little but attempted much. It would be rash to assert that
bodily death may not some day, and under certain conditions, be
altogether escaped. It is nonsense to pretend that human life may not
possibly, and before long, be enormously prolonged, and that by some
shorter cut to longevity than temperance and sanitation. No man can say
that it will, but no man of average intelligence can now deny that it
may.
Unorna had hesitated at the door, and she hesitated now. It was in her
power, and in hers only, to wake the hoary giant, or at least to
modify his perpetual sleep so far as to obtain from him answers to her
questions. It would be an easy matter to lay one hand upon his brow,
bidding him see and speak--how easy, she alone knew. But on the other
hand, to disturb his slumber was to interfere with the continuity of the
great experiment, to break through a rule lately made, to incur the risk
of an accident, if not of death itself.
She drew back at the thought, as though fearing to startle him, and then
she smiled at her own nervousness. To wake him she must exercise her
will. There was no danger of his ever being roused by any sound or touch
not proceeding from herself. The crash of thunder had no reverberation
for his ears, the explosion of a cannon would not have penetrated into
his lethargy. She might touch him, move him, even speak to him, but
unless she laid her hand upon his waxen forehead and bid him feel and
hear, he would be as unconscious as the dead. She returned to his side
and gazed into his placid face. Strange faculties were asleep in that
ancient brain, and strange wisdom was stored there, gathered from
many sources long ago, and treasured unconsciously by the memory to be
recalled at her command.
The man had been a failure in his day, a scholar, a student, a searcher
after great secrets, a wanderer in the labyrinths of higher thought.
He had been a failure and had starved, as failures must, in order that
vulgar success may fatten and grow healthy. He had outlived the few that
had been dear to him, he had outlived the power to feed on thought, he
had outlived generations of men, and cycles of changes, and yet there
had been life left in the huge gaunt limbs and sight in the sunken eyes.
Then he had outlived pride itself, and the ancient scholar had begged
his bread. In his hundredth year he had leaned for rest against Unorna’s
door, and she had taken him in and cared for him, and since that time
she had preserved his life. For his history was known in the ancient
city, and it was said that he had possessed great wisdom in his day.
Unorna knew that this wisdom could be hers if she could keep alive the
spark of life, and that she could employ his own learning to that end.
Already she had much experience of her powers, and knew that if she once
had the mastery of the old man’s free will he must obey her fatally and
unresistingly. Then she conceived the idea of embalming, as it were, the
living being, in a perpetual hypnotic lethargy, from whence she recalled
him from time to time to an intermediate state, in which she caused
him to do mechanically all those things which she judged necessary to
prolong life.
Seeing her success from the first, she had begun to fancy that the
present condition of things might be made to continue indefinitely.
Since death was to-day no nearer than it had been seven years ago, there
was no reason why it might not be guarded against during seven years
more, and if during seven, why not during ten, twenty, fifty? She had
for a helper a physician of consummate practical skill--a man whose
interest in the result of the trial was, if anything, more keen than
her own; a friend, above all, whom she believed she might trust, and who
appeared to trust her.
But in the course of their great experiment they had together made
rules by which they had mutually agreed to be bound. They had of late
determined that the old man must not be disturbed in his profound rest
by any question tending to cause a state of mental activity. The test of
a very fine instrument had proved that the shortest interval of positive
lucidity was followed by a slight but distinctly perceptible rise
of temperature in the body, and this could mean only a waste of the
precious tissues they were so carefully preserving. They hoped and
believed that the grand crisis was at hand, and that, if the body did
not now lose strength and vitality for a considerable time, both would
slowly though surely increase, in consequence of the means they were
using to instill new blood into the system. But the period was supreme,
and to interfere in any way with the progress of the experiment was to
run a risk of which the whole extent could only be realised by Unorna
and her companion.
She hesitated therefore, well knowing that her ally would oppose her
intention with all his might, and dreading his anger, bold as she was,
almost as much as she feared the danger to the old man’s life. On the
other hand, she had a motive which the physician could not have, and
which, as she was aware, he would have despised and condemned. She had a
question to ask, which she considered of vital importance to herself,
to which she firmly believed that the true answer would be given, and
which, in her womanly impetuosity and impatience, she could not bear
to leave unasked until the morrow, much less until months should have
passed away. Two very powerful incentives were at work, two of the very
strongest which have influence with mankind, love and a superstitious
belief in an especial destiny of happiness, at the present moment on the
very verge of realisation.
She believed profoundly in herself and in the suggestions of her own
imagination. So fixed and unalterable was that belief that it amounted
to positive knowledge, so far as it constituted a motive of action. In
her strange youth wild dreams had possessed her, and some of them, often
dreamed again, had become realities to her now. Her powers were natural,
those gifts which from time to time are seen in men and women, which are
alternately scoffed at as impostures, or accepted as facts, but which
are never understood either by their possessor or by those who witness
the results. She had from childhood the power to charm with eye and hand
all living things, the fascination which takes hold of the consciousness
through sight and touch and word, and lulls it to sleep. It was
witchery, and she was called a witch. In earlier centuries her hideous
fate would have been sealed from the first day when, under her childish
gaze, a wolf that had been taken alive in the Bohemian forest crawled
fawning to her feet, at the full length of its chain, and laid its
savage head under her hand, and closed its bloodshot eyes and slept
before her. Those who had seen had taken her and taught her how to
use what she possessed according to their own shadowy beliefs and dim
traditions of the half-forgotten magic in a distant land. They had
filled her heart with longings and her brain with dreams, and she had
grown up to believe that one day love would come suddenly upon her and
bear her away through the enchanted gates of the earthly paradise; once
only that love would come, and the supreme danger of her life would be
that she should not know it when it was at hand.
And now she knew that she loved, for the place of her fondness for
the one man had been taken by her passion for the other, and she felt
without reasoning, where, before, she had tried to reason herself into
feeling. The moment had come. She had seen the man in whom her happiness
was to be, the time was short, the danger great if she should not grasp
what her destiny would offer her but once. Had the Wanderer been by her
side, she would have needed to ask no question, she would have known and
been satisfied. But hours must pass before she could see him again, and
every minute spent without him grew more full of anxiety and disturbing
passion than the last. The wild love-blossom that springs into existence
in a single moment has elements which do not enter into the gentler
being of that other love which is sown in indifference, and which grows
up in slowly increasing interest, tended and refreshed in the pleasant
intercourse of close acquaintance, to bud and bloom at last as
a mild-scented garden flower. Love at first sight is impatient,
passionate, ruthless, cruel, as the year would be, if from the calendar
of the season the months of slow transition were struck out; if the
raging heat of August followed in one day upon the wild tempests of the
winter; if the fruit of the vine but yesterday in leaf grew rich and
black to-day, to be churned to foam to-morrow under the feet of the
laughing wine treaders.
Unorna felt that the day would be intolerable if she could not hear from
other lips the promise of a predestined happiness. She was not really in
doubt, but she was under the imperious impulse of a passion which
must needs find some response, even in the useless confirmation of its
reality uttered by an indifferent person--the spirit of a mighty cry
seeking its own echo in the echoless, flat waste of the Great Desert.
Then, too, she placed a sincere faith in the old man’s answers to her
questions, regardless of the matter inquired into. She believed that
in the mysterious condition between sleep and waking which she could
command, the knowledge of things to be was with him as certainly as the
memory of what had been and of what was even now passing in the outer
world. To her, the one direction of the faculty seemed no less possible
than the others, though she had not yet attained alone to the vision of
the future. Hitherto the old man’s utterances had been fulfilled to the
letter. More than once, as Keyork Arabian had hinted, she had consulted
his second sight in preference to her own, and she had not been
deceived. His greater learning and his vast experience lent to his
sayings something divine in her eyes; she looked upon him as the
Pythoness of Delphi looked upon the divinity of her inspiration.
The irresistible longing to hear the passionate pleadings of her own
heart solemnly confirmed by the voice in which she trusted overcame at
last every obstacle. Unorna bent over the sleeper, looking earnestly
into his face, and she laid one hand upon his brow.
“You hear me,” she said, slowly and distinctly. “You are conscious of
thought, and you see into the future.”
The massive head stirred, the long limbs moved uneasily under the white
robe, the enormous, bony hands contracted, and in the cavernous eyes the
great lids were slowly lifted. A dull stare met her look.
“Is it he?” she asked, speaking more quickly in spite of herself. “Is it
he at last?”
There was no answer. The lips did not part, there was not even the
attempt to speak. She had been sure that the one word would be spoken
unhesitatingly, and the silence startled her and brought back the doubt
which she had half forgotten.
“You must answer my question. I command you to answer me. Is it he?”
“You must tell me more before I can answer.”
The words came in a feeble piping voice, strangely out of keeping with
the colossal frame and imposing features.
Unorna’s face was clouded, and the ready gleam of anger flashed in her
eyes as it ever did at the smallest opposition to her will.
“Can you not see him?” she asked impatiently.
“I cannot see him unless you lead me to him and tell me where he is.”
“Where are you?”
“In your mind.”
“And what are you?”
“I am the image in your eyes.”
“There is another man in my mind,” said Unorna. “I command you to see
him.”
“I see him. He is tall, pale, noble, suffering. You love him.”
“Is it he who shall be my life and my death? Is it he who shall love me
as other women are not loved?”
The weak voice was still for a moment, and the face seemed covered with
a veil of perplexity.
“I see with your eyes,” said the old man at last.
“And I command you to see into the future with your own!” cried Unorna,
concentrating her terrible will as she grew more impatient.
There was an evident struggle in the giant’s mind, an effort to obey
which failed to break down an obstacle. She bent over him eagerly and
her whole consciousness was centered in the words she desired him to
speak.
Suddenly the features relaxed into an expression of rest and
satisfaction. There was something unearthly in the sudden smile that
flickered over the old waxen face--it was as strange and unnatural as
though the cold marble effigy upon a sepulchre had laughed aloud in the
gloom of an empty church.
“I see. He will love you,” said the tremulous tones.
“Then it is he?”
“It is he.”
With a suppressed cry of triumph Unorna lifted her head and stood
upright. Then she started violently and grew very pale.
“You have probably killed him and spoiled everything,” said a rich bass
voice at her elbow--the very sub-bass of all possible voices.
Keyork Arabian was beside her. In her intense excitement she had not
heard him enter the room, and he had surprised her at once in the
breaking of their joint convention and in the revelation of her secret.
If Unorna could be said to know the meaning of the word fear in any
degree whatsoever, it was in relation to Keyork Arabian, the man who
during the last few years had been her helper and associate in the great
experiment. Of all men she had known in her life, he was the only one
whom she felt to be beyond the influence of her powers, the only one
whom she felt that she could not charm by word, or touch, or look. The
odd shape of his head, she fancied, figured the outline and proportions
of his intelligence, which was, as it were, pyramidal, standing upon a
base so broad and firm as to place the centre of its ponderous gravity
far beyond her reach to disturb. There was certainly no other being of
material reality that could have made Unorna start and turn pale by its
inopportune appearance.
“The best thing you can do is to put him to sleep at once,” said the
little man. “You can be angry afterwards, and, I thank heaven, so can
I--and shall.”
“Forget,” said Unorna, once more laying her hand upon the waxen brow.
“Let it be as though I had not spoken with you. Drink, in your sleep,
of the fountain of life, take new strength into your body and new blood
into your heart. Live, and when I next wake you be younger by as many
months as there shall pass hours till then. Sleep.”
A low sigh trembled in the hoary beard. The eyelids drooped over the
sunken eyes, there was a slight motion of the limbs, and all was still,
save for the soft and regular breathing.
“The united patience of the seven archangels, coupled with that of Job
and Simon Stylites, would not survive your acquaintance for a day,”
observed Keyork Arabian.
“Is he mine or yours?” Unorna asked, turning to him and pointing to the
sleeper.
She was quite ready to face her companion after the first shock of his
unexpected appearance. His small blue eyes sparkled angrily.
“I am not versed in the law concerning real estate in human kind in the
Kingdom of Bohemia,” he answered. “You may have property in a couple of
hundredweight, more or less, of old bones rather the worse for the wear
and tear of a century, but I certainly have some ownership in the life.
Without me, you would have been the possessor of a remarkably fine
skeleton by this time--and of nothing more.”
As he spoke, his extraordinary voice ran over half a dozen notes of
portentous depth, like the opening of a fugue on the pedals of an organ.
Unorna laughed scornfully.
“He is mine, Keyork Arabian, alive or dead. If the experiment fails,
and he dies, the loss is mine, not yours. Moreover, what I have done is
done, and I will neither submit to your reproaches nor listen to your
upbraidings. Is that enough?”
“Of its kind, quite. I will build an altar to Ingratitude, we will bury
our friend beneath the shrine, and you shall serve in the temple. You
could deify all the cardinal sins if you would only give your attention
to the subject, merely by the monstrously imposing proportions you would
know how to give them.”
“Does it ease you to make such an amazing noise?” inquired Unorna,
raising her eyebrows.
“Immensely. Our friend cannot hear it, and you can. You dare to tell me
that if he dies you are the only loser. Do fifty years of study count
for nothing? Look at me. I am an old man, and unless I find the secret
of life here, in this very room, before many years are over, I must
die--die, do you understand? Do you know what it means to die? How can
you comprehend that word--you girl, you child, you thing of five and
twenty summers!”
“It was to be supposed that your own fears were at the root of your
anger,” observed Unorna, sitting down upon her chair and calmly folding
her hands as though to wait until the storm should pass over.
“Is there anything at the root of anything except Self? You moth, you
butterfly, you thread of floating gossamer! How can you understand the
incalculable value of Self--of that which is all to me and nothing to
you, or which, being yours, is everything to you and to me nothing? You
are so young--you still believe in things, and interests, and good and
evil, and love and hate, truth and falsehood, and a hundred notions
which are not facts, but only contrasts between one self and another!
What were you doing here when I found you playing with life and death,
perhaps with my life, for a gipsy trick, in the crazy delusion that this
old parcel of humanity can see the shadows of things which are not yet?
I saw, I heard. How could he answer anything save that which was in your
own mind, when you were forcing him with your words and your eyes to
make a reply of some sort, or perish? Ah! You see now. You understand
now. I have opened your eyes a little. Why did he hesitate, and suffer?
Because you asked that to which he knew there was no answer. And you
tortured him with your will until his individuality fell into yours, and
spoke your words.”
Unorna’s head sank a little and she covered her eyes. The truth of what
he said flashed upon her suddenly and unexpectedly, bringing with it the
doubt which had left her at the moment when the sleeper had spoken. She
could not hide her discomfiture and Keyork Arabian saw his advantage.
“And for what?” he asked, beginning to pace the broad room. “To know
whether a man will love you or not! You seem to have forgotten what
you are. Is not such a poor and foolish thing as love at the command of
those who can say to the soul, be this, or be that, and who are obeyed?
Have you found a second Keyork Arabian, over whom your eyes have no
power--neither the one nor the other?”
He laughed rather brutally at the thought of her greatest physical
peculiarity, but then suddenly stopped short. She had lifted her face
and those same eyes were fastened upon him, the black and the gray, in a
look so savage and fierce that even he was checked, if not startled.
“They are certainly very remarkable eyes,” he said, more calmly, and
with a certain uneasiness which Unorna did not notice. “I wonder whom
you have found who is able to look you in the face without losing
himself. I suppose it can hardly be my fascinating self whom you wish to
enthrall,” he added, conscious after a moment’s trial that he was proof
against her influence.
“Hardly,” answered Unorna, with a bitter laugh.
“If I were the happy man you would not need that means of bringing me to
your feet. It is a pity that you do not want me. We should make a very
happy couple. But there is much against me. I am an old man, Unorna. My
figure was never of divine proportions, and as for my face, Nature made
it against her will. I know all that--and yet, I was young once, and
eloquent. I could make love then--I believe that I could still if it
would amuse you.”
“Try it,” said Unorna, who, like most people, could not long be angry
with the gnome-like little sage.