I did not see Margrave the following day, but the next morning, a little
after sunrise, he walked into my study, according to his ordinary habit.
“So you know something about Sir Philip Derval?” said I. “What sort of a
man is he?”
“Hateful!” cried Margrave; and then checking himself, burst out into
his merry laugh. “Just like my exaggerations! I am not acquainted with
anything to his prejudice. I came across his track once or twice in the
East. Travellers are always apt to be jealous of each other.”
“You are a strange compound of cynicism and credulity; but I should have
fancied that you and Sir Philip would have been congenial spirits, when
I found, among his favourite books, Van Helmont and Paracelsus. Perhaps
you, too, study Swedenborg, or, worse still, Ptolemy and Lilly?”
“Astrologers? No! They deal with the future! I live for the day; only I
wish the day never had a morrow!”
“Have you not, then that vague desire for the something beyond,--that
not unhappy, but grand discontent with the limits of the immediate
Present, from which man takes his passion for improvement and progress,
and from which some sentimental philosophers have deduced an argument in
favour of his destined immortality?”
“Eh!” said Margrave, with as vacant a stare as that of a peasant whom
one has addressed in Hebrew. “What farrago of words is this? I do not
comprehend you.”
“With your natural abilities,” I asked with interest, “do you never feel
a desire for fame?”
“Fame? Certainly not. I cannot even understand it!”
“Well, then, would you have no pleasure in the thought that you had
rendered a service to humanity?”
Margrave looked bewildered; after a moment’s pause, he took from the
table a piece of bread that chanced to be there, opened the window, and
threw the crumbs into the lane. The sparrows gathered round the crumbs.
“Now,” said Margrave, “the sparrows come to that dull pavement for the
bread that recruits their lives in this world; do you believe that one
sparrow would be silly enough to fly to a house-top for the sake of some
benefit to other sparrows, or to be chirruped about after he was dead?
I care for science as the sparrow cares for bread,--it may help me to
something good for my own life; and as for fame and humanity, I care
for them as the sparrow cares for the general interest and posthumous
approbation of sparrows!”
“Margrave, there is one thing in you that perplexes me more than
all else--human puzzle as you are--in your many eccentricities and
self-contradictions.”
“What is that one thing in me most perplexing?”
“This: that in your enjoyment of Nature you have all the freshness of a
child, but when you speak of Man and his objects in the world, you talk
in the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic. At such times, were I
to close my eyes, I should say to myself, ‘What weary old man is thus
venting his spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love
which has forsaken him?’ Outwardly the very personation of youth, and
revelling like a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints of the
herbage, why have you none of the golden passions of the young,--their
bright dreams of some impossible love, their sublime enthusiasm for
some unattainable glory? The sentiment you have just clothed in the
illustration by which you place yourself on a level with the sparrows is
too mean and too gloomy to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among
the dismal fallacies of gray beards. No man, till man’s energies leave
him, can divorce himself from the bonds of our social kind.”
“Our kind! Your kind, possibly; but I--” He swept his hand over his
brow, and resumed, in strange, absent, and wistful accents: “I wonder
what it is that is wanting here, and of which at moments I have a
dim reminiscence.” Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with more
appearance of friendly interest than I had ever before remarked in his
countenance, “You are not looking well. Despite your great physical
strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients.”
“True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily pain.”
“You have some cause of mental disquietude?”
“Who in this world has not?”
“I never have.”
“Because you own you have never loved. Certainly, you never seem to care
for any one but yourself; and in yourself you find an unbroken sunny
holiday,--high spirits, youth, health, beauty, wealth. Happy boy!”
At that moment my heart was heavy within me.
Margrave resumed,--
“Among the secrets which your knowledge places at the command of your
art, what would you give for one which would enable you to defy and
to deride a rival where you place your affections, which could lock to
yourself, and imperiously control, the will of the being whom you desire
to fascinate, by an influence paramount, transcendent?”
“Love has that secret,” said I,--“and love alone.”
“A power stronger than love can suspend, can change love itself. But if
love be the object or dream of your life, love is the rosy associate
of youth and beauty. Beauty soon fades, youth soon departs. What if
in nature there were means by which beauty and youth can be fixed into
blooming duration,--means that could arrest the course, nay, repair the
effects, of time on the elements that make up the human frame?”
“Silly boy! Have the Rosicrucians bequeathed to you a prescription for
the elixir of life?”
“If I had the prescription I should not ask your aid to discover its
ingredients.”
“And is it in the hope of that notable discovery you have studied
chemistry, electricity, and magnetism? Again I say, Silly boy!”
Margrave did not heed my reply. His face was overcast, gloomy, troubled.
“That the vital principle is a gas,” said he, abruptly, “I am fully
convinced. Can that gas be the one which combines caloric with oxygen?”
“Phosoxygen? Sir Humphrey Davy demonstrates that gas not to be, as
Lavoisier supposed, caloric, but light, combined with oxygen; and he
suggests, not indeed that it is the vital principle itself, but the
pabulum of life to organic beings.” (1)
“Does he?” said Margrave, his, face clearing up. “Possibly, possibly,
then, here we approach the great secret of secrets. Look you, Allen
Fenwick: I promise to secure to you unfailing security from all the
jealous fears that now torture your heart; if you care for that fame
which to me is not worth the scent of a flower, the balm of a breeze,
I will impart to you a knowledge which, in the hands of ambition, would
dwarf into commonplace the boasted wonders of recognized science. I will
do all this, if, in return, but for one month you will give yourself up
to my guidance in whatever experiments I ask, no matter how wild they
may seem to you.”
“My dear Margrave, I reject your bribes as I would reject the moon and
the stars which a child might offer to me in exchange for a toy; but I
may give the child its toy for nothing, and I may test your experiments
for nothing some day when I have leisure.”
I did not hear Margrave’s answer, for at that moment my servant entered
with letters. Lilian’s hand! Tremblingly, breathlessly, I broke the
seal. Such a loving, bright, happy letter; so sweet in its gentle
chiding of my wrongful fears! It was implied rather than said that
Ashleigh Sumner had proposed and been refused. He had now left the
house. Lilian and her mother were coming back; in a few days we should
meet. In this letter were inclosed a few lines from Mrs. Ashleigh. She
was more explicit about my rival than Lilian had been. If no allusion
to his attentions had been made to me before, it was from a delicate
consideration for myself. Mrs. Ashleigh said that “the young man had
heard from L---- of our engagement, and--disbelieved it;” but, as Mrs.
Poyntz had so shrewdly predicted, hurried at once to the avowal of his
own attachment, and the offer of his own hand. On Lilian’s refusal his
pride had been deeply mortified. He had gone away manifestly in more
anger than sorrow.
“Lady Delafield, dear Margaret Poyntz’s aunt, had been most kind in
trying to soothe Lady Haughton’s disappointment, which was rudely
expressed,--so rudely,” added Mrs. Ashleigh, “that it gives us an
excuse to leave sooner than had been proposed,--which I am very glad
of. Lady Delafield feels much for Mr. Sumner; has invited him to
visit her at a place she has near Worthing. She leaves to-morrow in
order to receive him; promises to reconcile him to our rejection,
which, as he was my poor Gilbert’s heir, and was very friendly at
first, would be a great relief to my mind. Lilian is well, and so
happy at the thoughts of coming back.”
When I lifted my eyes from these letters I was as a new man, and the
earth seemed a new earth. I felt as if I had realized Margrave’s idle
dreams,--as if youth could never fade, love could never grow cold.
“You care for no secrets of mine at this moment,” said Margrave,
abruptly.
“Secrets!” I murmured; “none now are worth knowing. I am loved! I am
loved!”
“I bide my time,” said Margrave; and as my eyes met his, I saw there
a look I had never seen in those eyes before, sinister, wrathful,
menacing. He turned away, went out through the sash-door of the study;
and as he passed towards the fields under the luxuriant chestnut-trees,
I heard his musical, barbaric chant,--the song by which the
serpent-charmer charms the serpent,--sweet, so sweet, the very birds on
the boughs hushed their carol as if to listen.
(1) See Sir Humphrey Davy on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light