My recollections of all which I have just attempted to describe were
distinct and vivid; except with respect to time, it seemed to me as
if many hours must have elapsed since I had entered the museum with
Margrave; but the clock on the mantelpiece met my eyes as I turned them
wistfully round the room; and I was indeed amazed to perceive that five
minutes had sufficed for all which it has taken me so long to narrate,
and which in their transit had hurried me through ideas and emotions so
remote from anterior experience.
To my astonishment now succeeded shame and indignation,--shame that
I, who had scoffed at the possibility of the comparatively credible
influences of mesmeric action, should have been so helpless a puppet
under the hand of the slight fellow-man beside me, and so morbidly
impressed by phantasmagorieal illusions; indignation that, by some fumes
which had special potency over the brain, I had thus been, as it were,
conjured out of my senses; and looking full into the calm face at my
side, I said, with a smile to which I sought to convey disdain,--
“I congratulate you, Sir Philip Derval, on having learned in your
travels in the East so expert a familiarity with the tricks of its
jugglers.”
“The East has a proverb,” answered Sir Philip, quietly, “that the
juggler may learn much from the dervish, but the dervish can learn
nothing from the juggler. You will pardon me, however, for the effect
produced on you for a few minutes, whatever the cause of it may be,
since it may serve to guard your whole life from calamities, to which
it might otherwise have been exposed. And however you may consider that
which you have just experienced to be a mere optical illusion, or the
figment of a brain super-excited by the fumes of a vapour, look within
yourself, and tell me if you do not feel an inward and unanswerable
conviction that there is more reason to shun and to fear the creature
you left asleep under the dead jaws of the giant serpent, than there
would be in the serpent itself, could hunger again move its coils, and
venom again arm its fangs.”
I was silent, for I could not deny that that conviction had come to me.
“Henceforth, when you recover from the confusion or anger which
now disturbs your impressions, you will be prepared to listen to my
explanations and my recital in a spirit far different from that with
which you would have received them before you were subjected to the
experiment, which, allow me to remind you, you invited and defied. You
will now, I trust, be fitted to become my confidant and my assistant;
you will advise with me how, for the sake of humanity, we should act
together against the incarnate lie, the anomalous prodigy which glides
through the crowd in the image of joyous beauty. For the present I quit
you. I have an engagement, on worldly affairs, in the town this night.
I am staying at L----, which I shall leave for Derval Court tomorrow
evening. Come to me there the day after to-morrow, at any hour that may
suit you the best. Adieu!”
Here Sir Philip Derval rose and left the room. I made no effort to
detain him. My mind was too occupied in striving to recompose itself and
account for the phenomena that had scared it, and for the strength of
the impressions it still retained.
I sought to find natural and accountable causes for effects so abnormal.
Lord Bacon suggests that the ointments with which witches anointed
themselves might have had the effect of stopping the pores and
congesting the rain, and thus impressing the sleep of the unhappy dupes
of their own imagination with dreams so vivid that, on waking, they were
firmly convinced that they had been borne through the air to the Sabbat.
I remember also having heard a distinguished French traveller--whose
veracity was unquestionable--say, that he had witnessed extraordinary
effects produced on the sensorium by certain fumigations used by an
African pretender to magic. A person, of however healthy a brain;
subjected to the influence of these fumigations, was induced to believe
that he saw the most frightful apparitions.
However extraordinary such effects, they were not incredible,--not at
variance with our notions of the known laws of nature. And to the vapour
or the odours which a powder applied to a lamp had called forth, I was,
therefore, prepared to ascribe properties similar to those which Bacon’s
conjecture ascribed to the witches’ ointment, and the French traveller
to the fumigations of the African conjuror.
But, as I came to that conclusion, I was seized with an intense
curiosity to examine for myself those chemical agencies with which
Sir Philip Derval appeared so familiar; to test the contents in that
mysterious casket of steel. I also felt a curiosity no less eager, but
more, in spite of myself, intermingled with fear, to learn all that Sir
Philip had to communicate of the past history of Margrave. I could but
suppose that the young man must indeed be a terrible criminal, for a
person of years so grave, and station so high, to intimate accusations
so vaguely dark, and to use means so extraordinary, in order to enlist
my imagination rather than my reason against a youth in whom there
appeared none of the signs which suspicion interprets into guilt.
While thus musing, I lifted my eyes and saw Margrave himself there
at the threshold of the ballroom,--there, where Sir Philip had first
pointed him out as the criminal he had come to L---- to seek and disarm;
and now, as then, Margrave was the radiant centre of a joyous group. Not
the young boy-god Iacchus, amidst his nymphs, could, in Grecian frieze
or picture, have seemed more the type of the sportive, hilarious
vitality of sensuous nature. He must have passed unobserved by me, in my
preoccupation of thought, from the museum and across the room in which
I sat; and now there was as little trace in that animated countenance of
the terror it had exhibited at Sir Philip’s approach, as of the change
it had undergone in my trance or my fantasy.
But he caught sight of me, left his young companions, came gayly to my
side.
“Did you not ask me to go with you into that museum about half an hour
ago, or did I dream that I went with you?”
“Yes; you went with me into that museum.”
“Then pray what dull theme did you select to set me asleep there?”
I looked hard at him, and made no reply. Somewhat to my relief, I now
heard my host’s voice,--
“Why, Fenwick, what has become of Sir Philip Derval?”
“He has left; he had business.” And, as I spoke, again I looked hard on
Margrave.
His countenance now showed a change; not surprise, not dismay,
but rather a play of the lip, a flash of the eye, that indicated
complacency,--even triumph.
“So! Sir Philip Derval! He is in L----; he has been here to-night? So!
as I expected.”
“Did you expect it?” said our host. “No one else did. Who could have
told you?”
“The movements of men so distinguished need never take us by surprise.
I knew he was in Paris the other day. It is natural eno’ that he should
come here. I was prepared for his coming.”
Margrave here turned away towards the window, which he threw open and
looked out.
“There is a storm in the air,” said he, as he continued to gaze into the
night.
Was it possible that Margrave was so wholly unconscious of what had
passed in the museum as to include in oblivion even the remembrance of
Sir Philip Derval’s presence before he had been rendered insensible, or
laid asleep? Was it now only for the first time that he learned of
Sir Philip’s arrival in L----, and visit to that house? Was there any
intimation of menace in his words and his aspect?
I felt that the trouble of my thoughts communicated itself to my
countenance and manner; and, longing for solitude and fresh air, I
quitted the house. When I found myself in the street I turned round and
saw Margrave still standing at the open window, but he did not appear to
notice me; his eyes seemed fixed abstractedly on space.