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
had 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 me 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 he 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?