with the quack, reluctantly parted with his groat and departed, dubious
of his purchase. On the whole, Dr. Pinchbeck seemed to be doing a
fair trade, when, late in the afternoon, an old man, bent double with
rheumatism, raised a loud expostulation. He affirmed that he had
purchased a box of the ointment on the first day of the fair, and had
applied it thrice without the promised result.
He demanded the fourfold restitution of his money, and the mountebank
stoutly resisted the claim. Angry cries arose from the bystanders,
and it might have gone ill with the empiric, had not a diversion
been effected by one of the crowd. This was a tall middle-aged man
of somewhat dark complexion and foreign appearance, whose dress
distinguished him as a gentleman and possibly a practiser of medicine.
He stepped on the platform, spoke a few words to the ointment-vendor,
and then, beckoning the old man to him, made him sit on a stool. He
gazed fixedly for a few moments in the patient’s eyes, made some
mysterious motions of the hands before his face, whispered in his ear,
and then, with a few more passes of his hands, bade him stand. The old
fellow stood erect without effort; then, at the stranger’s bidding,
walked a few easy steps, and with a pleased and puzzled look descended
to join his friends in the crowd. Loud applause greeted the wonderful
cure, and patients crowded to receive the stranger’s ministrations.
The same operations in each case were attended with the same result.
Never had there been seen such a wonder at the fair.
Most of all it wrought wonder in Matthew Makepeace. This unknown
individual--was he possessed of those miraculous gifts of healing which
Makepeace in 400 quarto pages had proved to be extinct? He would accost
him and, if possible, learn from his lips whether what he had seen were
the operation of nature or of the magic art. Descending in the majesty
of his doctor’s robes he mingled in the crowd, and mildly laid his hand
on the stranger’s arm. “Pardon, learned sir,” said he, “the curiosity
of a scholar--alas! too ignorant of books and all unskilled in the
manual acts of healing. I would fain question with you of these same
cures that by chance I have witnessed from my chamber.” The stranger
was engaged in giving parting words of counsel to some of his patients.
He turned at the touch of the doctor’s hand, surveyed him up and down
for a moment, and said, “Anon, Master Makepeace, anon: I will be with
you presently.”
Dr. Makepeace started to hear his name and threw a sharp look on the
speaker. No; he was a complete stranger, and his accent betrayed him
as a foreigner. Dr. Makepeace had certainly never seen him in his life
before. He began to explain where his chamber was to be found.
“I know it,” interrupted the stranger, “I know it. Bear with me for a
moment and I will seek you there.”
Makepeace was a little ruffled that the speaker, knowing his name, did
not give him his academic title. “_Doctor_ Makepeace,” he said; “ask
for _Doctor_ Makepeace.”
“Surely, surely,” replied the stranger carelessly: “yet _Master_
Makepeace, methinks, served you then.”
More than ever perplexed the doctor sought his room. Only a few minutes
had passed when he heard his visitor mounting with no faltering step to
his door, and Makepeace opened to him before he knocked. The stranger
glanced rapidly round. He seemed to find something familiar in each
article of furniture. He ran his eye, with a look of some amused
contempt, over the array of worn volumes that lined the walls. “Old
books, doctor Makepeace,” he said, “old books. I think you have not
changed one these thirty years.”
“Old books are old friends,” said the doctor with a touch of resentment
at his tone: “I would not change them.”
“Old friends die, doctor,” observed the stranger, “they die, and then
we have no use for them but to bury them.”
“Sir,” said the doctor with a quick reminiscence of his wasted studies,
“I _have_ buried my friends: but I love them still. But,” he went on,
“it is not of old notions that I have to speak with you. You have shown
me this afternoon something newer and,” he added sadly, “it may be,
something better than all that old books tell. I ask you to impart
to me no secret that might hurt you by the telling. Until now I have
maintained that nothing exists in this present world that is not of
natural course. If it be an honest mystery that you exercise, tell me,
the humblest and poorest of scholars, whether it be the miraculous
working of God’s power in human hands or simply the exercise of human
art.”
The stranger seated himself, uninvited, in the doctor’s chair, and the
doctor took a stool. “Everything,” said the stranger, “is miracle to
him who does not know.”
“Great heavens,” cried Makepeace, “that is the beginning of my
quotation from the learned Theodorus Gazophylacius. I never heard of
the great Gazophylacius until Galiani told me of him: nobody that I
know had heard of him. A marvellous scholar, truly, was Gazophylacius,
but a pagan at heart, albeit a Byzantine Christian--and sadly drowned
in superstition. Shall I show you the passage in the original Greek.”
And he feverishly turned the pages of the _Speculum_ to find it?
“You may spare yourself that trouble,” said the stranger composedly.
“Shall I finish the quotation? Shall I write it for you?” And he
unceremoniously tore a corner from one of the immaculate leaves, took
a quill and wrote. “There,” said he, “there, I have written in Greek
what follows in your quotation, and I have added my name that you may
remember the writer.”
[Illustration: _Chapel Doorway in Master’s Garden._]
The doctor took it and read the delicate Greek characters: “Demetrius
Commagenus. All things are possible to him who knows and wills with
earnestness.”
Makepeace was stupified. “Commagenus,” he said: “that is a Greek
name, I take it. And yet I would have sworn that the handwriting was
Galiani’s, and Galiani was an Italian. Besides, Galiani is dead, or he
is sixty years old, less or more, by now: and you--I cannot think that
you are past forty.”
Indifferently the self-styled Commagenus replied: “Galiani or
Commagenus--what matters? What I wrote then I write now; and always I
am your humble servant and the poor scholar who drew wisdom from the
lips of the divine Gazophylacius.”
“We talk in dreams,” said Matthew: “Galiani told me--_you_ told me, if
you are he--that Gazophylacius died at Rome, ten years after the Turks
entered Constantinople: and that was a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Yes,” answered Commagenus, “he died--the more is the pity; for he
might have lived, had he chosen to use his own wisdom. Instead of that
he imparted it on his death-bed to me. What care had he to live, an
outcast in strange lands? But this world lost its wisest man; for I am
no Gazophylacius. Only I am always learning.”
“Why, this is as strange a maze as ever man trod,” cried Makepeace.
“You tell me that your master died a hundred and forty years ago, and
that you, Galiani, were with him at the time.”
“Not Galiani, but Commagenus,” said the stranger in complacent
amusement at the doctor’s bewilderment: “that was my name then. I was a
youth, twenty years old, when I first came to Constantinople from the
country which gave me my name--three years before the siege. There I
became the favourite pupil of the great student of natural and medical
science, Theodorus Gazophylacius.”
“Why, that makes you a hundred and seventy years old,” feebly
remonstrated Makepeace. “Are you then the Wandering Jew?”
“Doctor, I am shocked,” said Commagenus. “Are such fables the stuff
of which the _Speculum_ is made? I tell you there is nothing in this
world that is not natural. That was my master’s constant teaching:
also that to know and to will makes man master of nature. That much I
learnt from him while he taught at Constantinople, and it was in my
noviciate that I gathered from him the art to work such simple cures as
you saw this afternoon. To prolong mere existence by keeping disease at
bay--that he esteemed a vulgar art. To live long and die old, feeble
and foolish--what gain is that to the man or his fellow-men? To live
always, always to be young, always eager, always to be growing in
wisdom and power--that was the secret for which he spent a lifetime’s
search, and with his dying breath he told me that he had sought it in
vain. Death, the last disease, is incurable: there is a stronger will
than man’s. But he told me of a door of escape. In his last moments
he was possessed with a dread that his discovery would perish in the
general eclipse of learning which he foresaw as the result of the
disappearance of the Byzantine schools, and, with solemn admonition
as to its use, he imparted it to me. Death, the mere accident of the
flesh, is transferable with the flesh. With will and knowledge, the
spirit--all that you call character, intelligence, consciousness,
memory--may pass from form to form, unchanged in the transition and
always capable of growth and ripening. Alas, that I have not made
better use of my master’s prescriptions! But it has been my evil fate.
Another might do better.”
“These are heathen imaginings--snares and delusions of Satan,” cried
Makepeace. “What talk is this of tampering with the divine in us? Man,
are you a Christian?”
“I am what I am,” replied Commagenus: “but that this is waking fact
and no delusion my history shall show you. After my beloved master’s
death I set up in medical practice in a certain city of Dalmatia. The
fame of my unusual healing powers spread in all the neighbourhood.
Unfortunately it reached the ears of the bishop of the diocese. He was
a sincere, well-meaning man, kind in all his relations with the laity
of his diocese, but a trifle superstitious. He concluded that I was a
necromancer and condemned me to be burnt alive. Until the moment when
I found myself in a dungeon and on the eve of execution I had never
thought to avail myself of the secret communicated to me by my master,
and had even questioned its efficacy. The prospect of burning was so
extremely repugnant to my feelings that I resolved to make practical
trial of it. Shall I show you how it is done? No, you need not shrink
from me. I have no wish to pass into simple old Matthew Makepeace. I
can do better. Be assured that the will goes not with the act.”
Commagenus rose and fastened his gaze on Matthew. As he did so it
seemed to the doctor that he grew and grew to a bulk and stature
ineffable and dim. But that, he reasoned with himself, was an illusion
of the sense, and for the moments when the fascinating glare was fixed
on him he retained his consciousness. Slowly, deliberately, that
Matthew might follow every movement in succession, he moved his hands
and arms in gyrations and waves more intricate than any that Matthew
had witnessed when the Greek stood on the mountebank’s platform that
afternoon. Then he stooped over the table, and with extraordinary
distinctness of articulation whispered in his ear one word. What that
word was I do not know. Matthew Makepeace remembered it once, and
forgot it for all the years that he lived afterwards.
The Greek took up his tale again. “My excellent master had informed me
that, whether the subject were waking or asleep, the will and the word
had equal effect. My gaoler slept in the condemned cell with me and the
occasion seemed to me a particularly happy one for testing the accuracy
of my master’s conclusions. Though I did not doubt the intensity of my
will, in prospect of such an undesirable event as being burnt alive,
I confess that I was surprised and more than gratified by the issue
of the experiment. I had the satisfaction of leading my gaoler to the
stake on the following morning.”
“What,” cried Makepeace: “do you tell me that the man was burnt?
True,” he added, as a mitigating consideration suggested itself to his
bewildered brain, “he was a papist. But, after all, what were you?”
Commagenus answered with the resignation of a parent satisfying an
inquisitive child. “Yes, Matthew Makepeace, when your raiment is past
your own use you make a gift of it to some humble dependent. When
_he_ has worn it threadbare, what happens? It is burnt. You do not
burn it: I did not burn him. Besides, this common man in ages to come
will be held in reverence--in another name, I admit--as a martyr to
medical science. Nevertheless I was little pleased, as you may think,
with the integument which my brutal gaoler had left me. In my new and
humble sphere of life I had few opportunities of self-improvement,
and, taking the first that offered, I installed myself in the person
of a Dominican friar. I am disposed to doubt whether I really bettered
myself by my change of profession. I found that it required much
ingenuity to sustain the part of crass ignorance which was associated
with my new character, and the man’s companions were deplorable
people. An accident, which had nearly proved fatal, relieved me of
the disagreeable situation. In the course of my professional duties
I was directed to take ship for Spain, where the Dominican order had
an especial interest in the Office of the Holy Inquisition. On the
voyage we fell in with a vessel belonging to a respectable merchant
of Marseilles. The merchant, who was likewise the ship’s captain, was
in the habit, when occasion offered, of diversifying the routine of
commerce by piratical enterprise. With his crew he boarded and took
possession of our vessel, informing us that we were his prisoners. As
he had a reputation for probity to sustain at Marseilles, he judged
it prudent to throw the whole of the crew and passengers of our
vessel into the waves. However, learning that there was a clergyman
on board, he seized the opportunity of making confession first and
receiving plenary absolution from him of an outstanding balance of
prior delinquencies. It was natural to avail myself of the opportunity
for transferring myself into his person. It was pleasant to see him
flounder in the sea with the rest, and I returned--if that is the right
word--to Marseilles, in circumstances sufficiently ample to warrant
retirement from a profession the ambiguous character of which offended
my moral sense. But my experiences in the three careers of life which
my destiny had recently forced upon me gave me an indelible prejudice
against the Western Church. On the whole I am a Protestant.
“I need not detain you with my subsequent transmigrations. The merchant
was elderly and so oppressively respectable that I was glad to exchange
into the superior rank of a French marquisate. Since then, from
Trebizond to Tarifa, I have studied men and manners in many capacities.
Perhaps the time which was pleasantest to me, as a man of science, was
spent in Peru with Pizarro, whom I attended as a captain of cavalry.
But a fatal wound, inflicted by a poisoned arrow, compelled my return
to Spain in the office of a ship’s boatswain. After all my wanderings
my conscience reproached me with my culpable neglect of the art in
whose elements I had been grounded by the ever-revered Gazophylacius.
I resumed the medical studies which I was convinced were best suited
to my bent and upbringing, by adopting the features and the status
of a freshman in the University of Padua. As the freshman, under no
possible circumstances, could have passed his examinations you will see
that I conferred on him no small obligation by the assistance which I
rendered. In my first year I obtained advancement to the person and
professorial chair of Galiani. I am grieved to tell you that I left
him seriously unwell at Salerno, ten years ago; and his decease, which
followed almost immediately after, proved to me how wise had been my
course in transferring myself into the healthy frame of the brother
professor who attended him in the earlier phases of his malady. Come,
doctor, you have let me chatter on with these tiresome details till I
see you are three parts asleep.”
“Asleep!” roared Makepeace, who had been filled with rage, disgust and
hatred by the shameless recital. “Asleep! Wretch, thief, assassin,
defiler of the sanctuary of man! Begone, skirr, fly! Would that I could
crush your basilisk head on the floor as I stand! But stay. I will
fetch the University bedel. He shall clap you in the lowest hold of the
Castle gaol.”
“Marry, good words, master doctor,” said the imperturbable stranger.
“Your bedel, possibly, is a family man; and conscience forbids that,
except in the last resort, I should lay a father of a family in a
dungeon for crimes that, you are pleased to assert, are of my doing:
and, except that I do not propose myself for the office of bedel, it
were an easy thing for me to do so. But hearken, my honest friend.
I wish you well--no man better. Getting old is a sad affair, sadder
even than dying. I think that you are sixty, and I don’t think that
just now you are quite in your best health. Has the world gone very
well with you? In five years, ten years, will it go better? You have
written a silly book that nobody will read, and you are ashamed of it.
You have wasted your years of manhood in twisting ropes of sand. And
the solitude, Matthew! My heart bleeds to think what your solitude
will be. What friend have you to smooth the downhill course? Who cares
for the friend of dead books? Altogether, you have very little use now
for Matthew Makepeace. Who is it that should sleep in yonder bed?” he
asked, pointing to the truckle used by Marmaduke Dacre. “Is he young?
Is he comely? Has he friends to love him and be loved? Is he of a quick
spirit and a high hope? Matthew Makepeace, you know the acts and the
word. The door lies open to you. Take wisdom, and be young.”
“The door lies open to _you_,” shouted Makepeace, throwing it open as
he spoke. “Pass out of it, and avoid the chamber of a Christian man:
and the foul fiend fly away with you and your abominable suggestions!”
“Doctor Makepeace, I wish you a very good evening,” said his visitor.
* * * * *
The night was far advanced, and Matthew Makepeace had no mind for bed.
A dim rush candle, set on a stool in a corner of the apartment, cast
flickering shadows on the walls and floor. In an opposite dark corner
his pupil slept. But for the dread of awaking him, Makepeace would have
paced the room in his perplexity. As it was, he sat bent double on the
stool by the window.
One thing was clear enough. If what he had seen and heard was not a
fiction or the delusion of his senses, the _Speculum_ was a colossal
stupidity. Even if the rejuvenations of Commagenus were as much in the
course of nature as he affirmed them to be, did they not warrant the
Pope’s most arrogant pretensions? But it was with himself that he was
most concerned. Was it not the fact that, as Commagenus had declared,
his life had been most miserably wasted? And the mistake was past
repair. If only his youth had known! And his mind went back to a short,
happy time, just after he had taken his degree, when he had served as
chaplain in his far-away northern country, at the ancestral castle
of the Dacres. His pupil then had been the present Lord, Marmaduke’s
father; and the pupil had had so much to teach his master about hawks
and horses and hounds that the master had little leisure to repay it
in Greek and Latin. Those were happy days when they had roamed the
Cumbrian fells together. And now this Lord Dacre was great in the
councils of his sovereign, the wise and respected ruler of a barony
that was almost a kingdom in itself. And in his trusting confidence he
had committed his son to the care of his old master at Cambridge; and
that son in course of years would naturally succeed to his father’s
station.
Had Commagenus indeed sat in that chamber, only a few hours since,
and unfolded to him the secret of perpetual youth? Yes: there was the
evidence of the written scrap lying on the open page of the _Speculum_.
True, Commagenus had made a detestable use of his wonderful power. But
with Makepeace it would be different. He was conscious of his sobriety
and virtue, and there were the noble traditions of the house of Dacre
to keep him in the right way. He had abilities, if only he had youth
and opportunity to use them, and the experience of sixty years was a
better guarantee for their proper employment than any that a callow
youth could offer. Clearer, louder than the voices of conscience or
calculation there came back to him, like the drumming burden of an
iterated song, the words “The door is open. Be young.” Was it fancy
that a door seemed to open in the dark book-press opposite, and that
through it he looked out on a sunny haze enveloping blue hills and
waters and the towers of Dacre Castle? And cool breaths from heathery
heights took up the refrain, and whispered to him “Be young.”
Matthew Makepeace crept quietly to the dark corner where his pupil lay.
His will was intense as he had never known it before. He took care that
his shadow should not fall on the sleeper’s face and arouse him. He
made the wonderful passes--with what extraordinary clearness they were
printed on his recollection! He stooped and whispered in his pupil’s
ear the mysterious word.
If Matthew had expected a flash of lightning, the apparition of the
Evil One, the jubilations of triumphant fiends on the success of
his experiment, he was agreeably disappointed. Nothing of the kind
happened. Only in the dim light of the candle he saw a grey shadow
of weary age steal over his pupil’s face, and he felt the vigour and
vitality of youth invade his own limbs as with the intoxication of
wine. Then the wick suddenly flickered in the candle-socket and went
out. He heard Marmaduke turn over in his bed with an uneasy sigh.
Then Makepeace woke to reason and a horrible dread. He dared not
relight the candle for fear of rousing the sleeper. In the dark, before
he was discovered, he must repeat the process which should restore each
to his own person. In the dark, as nearly as he could, he went through
the magical passes, and with extraordinary vehemence he willed himself
back into Matthew Makepeace. But the word! Great heavens! It had passed
from him as suddenly and completely as the light of the extinguished
candle. In vain he racked his memory of every language, living or dead.
It had no meaning in any language, living or dead: of that he felt
sure, and he was sure of nothing else. For an hour, by his pupil’s
bedside, he tore his hair in desperate efforts to recall it. For an
hour he alternately cursed Commagenus and prayed that he might return
before day to give him the forgotten word. Then the grey morning light
began to creep through the casement, and the birds woke and sang.
There could be no shadow of doubt about it. There lay Matthew Makepeace
before him, and the old man was drowsily stirring his limbs as the
light broadened into day. And young Dacre, in a doctor’s gown, was
looking down upon him, tortured with horrible thoughts. One thing was
certain. He could never pass himself off as Marmaduke. Conscience,
gratitude, affection forbade it. Besides, the thing was impossible.
He, the torpid pedant, could never play the part of the young and
chivalrous heir of the Dacres: and there would be Marmaduke to convict
the imposture. Before his pupil woke, before the discovery was made, he
must disappear from Cambridge. Quietly and in haste he took down his
pupil’s clothes from the closet where they hung, and exchanged for them
his doctor’s robes. Then he descended his stairs and stepped out into
the cool shadows of the August morning. The porter was just opening the
gate. He nodded familiarly to young Dacre as he passed. That was the
last which any soul in Jesus College saw of Matthew Makepeace.
Unless, indeed, it were that same Matthew Makepeace who, with the
homing instinct of a dying animal, crept back to Cambridge in poverty
and wretchedness, and died in widow Pearson’s house in 1654. In any
case the flagstone in the chapel transept told a lie: it was Marmaduke
Dacre that lay beneath it.