My Work, my Philosophical Work-the ambitious hope of my intellectual
life--how eagerly I returned to it again! Far away from my household
grief, far away from my haggard perplexities--neither a Lilian nor a
Margrave there!
As I went over what I had before written, each link in its chain of
reasoning seemed so serried, that to alter one were to derange all; and
the whole reasoning was so opposed to the possibility of the wonders I
myself had experienced, so hostile to the subtle hypotheses of a Faber, or
the childlike belief of an Amy, that I must have destroyed the entire work
if I had admitted such contradictions to its design!
But the work was I myself!--I, in my solid, sober, healthful mind, before
the brain had been perplexed by a phantom. Were phantoms to be allowed as
testimonies against science? No; in returning to my Book, I returned to
my former Me!
How strange is that contradiction between our being as man and our being
as Author! Take any writer enamoured of a system: a thousand things may
happen to him every day which might shake his faith in that system; and
while he moves about as mere man, his faith is shaken. But when he
settles himself back into the phase of his being as author, the mere act
of taking pen in hand and smoothing the paper before him restores his
speculations to their ancient mechanical train. The system, the beloved
system, reasserts its tyrannic sway, and he either ignores, or moulds into
fresh proofs of his theory as author, all which, an hour before, had given
his theory the lie in his living perceptions as man.
I adhered to my system,--I continued my work. Here, in the barbarous
desert, was a link between me and the Cities of Europe. All else might
break down under me. The love I had dreamed of was blotted out from the
world, and might never be restored; my heart might be lonely, my life be
an exile's. My reason might, at last, give way before the spectres which
awed my senses, or the sorrow which stormed my heart. But here at least
was a monument of my rational thoughtful Me,--of my individualized
identity in multiform creation. And my mind, in the noon of its force,
would shed its light on the earth when my form was resolved to its
elements. Alas! in this very yearning for the Hereafter, though but the
Hereafter of a Name, could I see only the craving of Mind, and hear not
the whisper of Soul!
The avocation of a colonist, usually so active, had little interest for
me. This vast territorial lordship, in which, could I have endeared its
possession by the hopes that animate a Founder, I should have felt all the
zest and the pride of ownership, was but the run of a common to the
passing emigrant, who would leave no son to inherit the tardy products of
his labour. I was not goaded to industry by the stimulus of need. I
could only be ruined if I risked all my capital in the attempt to improve.
I lived, therefore, amongst my fertile pastures, as careless of culture as
the English occupant of the Highland moor, which he rents for the range of
its solitudes.
I knew, indeed, that if ever I became avaricious, I might swell my modest
affluence into absolute wealth. I had revisited the spot in which I had
discovered the nugget of gold, and had found the precious metal in rich
abundance just under the first coverings of the alluvial soil. I
concealed my discovery from all. I knew that, did I proclaim it, the
charm of my bush-life would be gone. My fields would be infested by all
the wild adventurers who gather to gold as the vultures of prey round a
carcass; my servants would desert me, my very flocks would be
shepherdless!
Months again rolled on months. I had just approached the close of my
beloved Work, when it was again suspended, and by an anguish keener than
all which I had previously known.
Lilian became alarmingly ill. Her state of health, long gradually
declining, had hitherto admitted checkered intervals of improvement, and
exhibited no symptoms of actual danger. But now she was seized with a
kind of chronic fever, attended with absolute privation of sleep, an
aversion to even the lightest nourishment, and an acute nervous
susceptibility to all the outward impressions of which she had long seemed
so unconscious; morbidly alive to the faintest sound, shrinking from the
light as from a torture. Her previous impatience at my entrance into her
room became aggravated into vehement emotions, convulsive paroxysms of
distress; so that Faber banished me from her chamber, and, with a heart
bleeding at every fibre, I submitted to the cruel sentence.
Faber had taken up his abode in my house and brought Amy with him; one or
the other never left Lilian, night or day. The great physician spoke
doubtfully of the case, but not despairingly.
"Remember," he said, "that in spite of the want of sleep, the abstinence
from food, the form has not wasted as it would do were this fever
inevitably mortal. It is upon that phenomenon I build a hope that I have
not been mistaken in the opinion I hazarded from the first. We are now in
the midst of the critical struggle between life and reason; if she
preserve the one, my conviction is that she will regain the other. That
seeming antipathy to yourself is a good omen. You are inseparably
associated with her intellectual world; in proportion as she revives to
it, must become vivid and powerful the reminiscences of the shock that
annulled, for a time, that world to her. So I welcome, rather than fear,
the over-susceptibility of the awakening senses to external sights and
sounds. A few days will decide if I am right. In this climate the
progress of acute maladies is swift, but the recovery from them is yet
more startlingly rapid. Wait, endure, be prepared to submit to the will
of Heaven; but do not despond of its mercy."
I rushed away from the consoler,--away into the thick of the forests, the
heart of the solitude. All around me, there, was joyous with life; the
locust sang amidst the herbage; the cranes gambolled on the banks of the
creek; the squirrel-like opossums frolicked on the feathery boughs. "And
what," said I to myself,--"what if that which seems so fabulous in the
distant being whose existence has bewitched my own, be substantially true?
What if to some potent medicament Margrave owes his glorious vitality, his
radiant youth? Oh, that I had not so disdainfully turned away from his
hinted solicitations--to what?--to nothing guiltier than lawful
experiment. Had I been less devoted a bigot to this vain schoolcraft,
which we call the Medical Art, and which, alone in this age of science,
has made no perceptible progress since the days of its earliest
teachers--had I said, in the true humility of genuine knowledge, 'these
alchemists were men of genius and thought; we owe to them nearly all the
grand hints of our chemical science,--is it likely that they would have
been wholly drivellers and idiots in the one faith they clung to the
most?'--had I said that, I might now have no fear of losing my Lilian.
Why, after all, should there not be in Nature one primary essence, one
master substance; in which is stored the specific nutriment of life?"
Thus incoherently muttering to the woods what my pride of reason would not
have suffered me gravely to say to my fellow-men, I fatigued my tormented
spirits into a gloomy calm, and mechanically retraced my steps at the
decline of day. I seated myself at the door of my solitary log-hut, lean
ing my cheek upon my hand, and musing. Wearily I looked up, roused by a
discord of clattering hoofs and lumbering wheels on the hollow-sounding
grass-track. A crazy groaning vehicle, drawn by four horses, emerged from
the copse of gum-trees,--fast, fast along the road, which no such pompous
vehicle had traversed since that which had borne me--luxurious satrap for
an early colonist--to my lodge in the wilderness. What emigrant rich
enough to squander in the hire of such an equipage more than its cost in
England, could thus be entering on my waste domain? An ominous thrill
shot through me.
The driver--perhaps some broken-down son of luxury in the Old World, fit
for nothing in the New World but to ply, for hire, the task that might
have led to his ruin when plied in sport--stopped at the door of my hut,
and called out, "Friend, is not this the great Fenwick Section, and is not
yonder long pile of building the Master's house?"
Before I could answer I heard a faint voice, within the vehicle, speaking
to the driver; the last nodded, descended from his seat, opened the
carriage-door, and offered his arm to a man, who, waving aside the
proffered aid, descended slowly and feebly; paused a moment as if for
breath, and then, leaning on his staff, walked from the road, across the
sward rank with luxuriant herbage, through the little gate in the new-set
fragrant wattle-fence, wearily, languidly, halting often, till he stood
facing me, leaning both wan and emaciated hands upon his staff, and his
meagre form shrinking deep within the folds of a cloak lined thick with
costly sables. His face was sharp, his complexion of a livid yellow, his
eyes shone out from their hollow orbits, unnaturally enlarged and fatally
bright. Thus, in ghastly contrast to his former splendour of youth and
opulence of life, Margrave stood before me.
"I come to you," said Margrave, in accents hoarse and broken, "from the
shores of the East. Give me shelter and rest. I have that to say which
will more than repay you."
Whatever, till that moment, my hate and my fear of this unexpected
visitant, hate would have been inhumanity, fear a meanness, conceived for
a creature so awfully stricken down.
Silently, involuntarily, I led him into the house. There he rested a few
minutes, with closed eyes and painful gasps for breath. Meanwhile, the
driver brought from the carriage a travelling-bag and a small wooden chest
or coffer, strongly banded with iron clamps. Margrave, looking up as the
man drew near, exclaimed fiercely, "Who told you to touch that chest? How
dare you? Take it from that man, Fenwick! Place it here,--here by my
side!"
I took the chest from the driver, whose rising anger at being so
imperiously rated in the land of democratic equality was appeased by the
gold which Margrave lavishly flung to him.
"Take care of the poor gentleman, squire," he whispered to me, in the
spontaneous impulse of gratitude, "I fear he will not trouble you long.
He must be monstrous rich. Arrived in a vessel hired all to himself, and
a train of outlandish attendants, whom he has left behind in the town
yonder. May I bait my horses in your stables? They have come a long
way."
I pointed to the neighbouring stables, and the man nodded his thanks,
remounted his box, and drove off.
I returned to Margrave. A faint smile came to his lips as I placed the
chest beside him.
"Ay, ay," he muttered. "Safe! safe! I shall soon be well again,--very
soon! And now I can sleep in peace!"
I led him into an inner room, in which there was a bed. He threw himself
on it with a loud sigh of relief. Soon, half raising himself on his
elbow, he exclaimed, "The chest--bring it hither! I need it always beside
me! There, there! Now for a few hours of sleep; and then, if I can take
food, or some such restoring cordial as your skill may suggest, I shall be
strong enough to talk. We will talk! we will talk!"
His eyes closed heavily as his voice fell into a drowsy mutter: a moment
more and he was asleep.
I watched beside him, in mingled wonder and compassion. Looking into that
face, so altered yet still so young, I could not sternly question what had
been the evil of that mystic life, which seemed now oozing away through
the last sands in the hour-glass. I placed my hand softly on his pulse:
it scarcely beat. I put my ear to his breast, and involuntarily sighed,
as I distinguished in its fluttering heave that dull, dumb sound, in which
the heart seems knelling itself to the greedy grave!
Was this, indeed, the potent magician whom I had so feared!--this the
guide to the Rosicrucian's secret of life's renewal, in whom, but an hour
or two ago, my fancies gulled my credulous trust!
But suddenly, even while thus chiding my wild superstitions, a fear, that
to most would seem scarcely less superstitious, shot across me. Could
Lilian be affected by the near neighbourhood of one to whose magnetic
influence she had once been so strangely subjected? I left Margrave still
sleeping, closed and locked the door of the hut, went back to my dwelling,
and met Amy at the threshold. Her smile was so cheering that I felt at
once relieved.
"Hush!" said the child, putting her finger to her lips, "she is so quiet!
I was coming in search of you, with a message from her."
"From Lilian to me--what! to me!"
"Hush! About an hour ago, she beckoned me to draw near to her, and then
said, very softly: 'Tell Allen that light is coming back to me, and it all
settles on him--on him. Tell him that I pray to be spared to walk by his
side on earth, hand-in-hand to that heaven which is no dream, Amy. Tell
him that,--no dream!'"
While the child spoke my tears gushed, and the strong hands in which I
veiled my face quivered like the leaf of the aspen. And when I could
command my voice, I said plaintively,--
"May I not, then, see her?--only for a moment, and answer her message
though but by a look?"
"No, no!"
"No! Where is Faber?"
"Gone into the forest, in search of some herbs, but he gave me this note
for you."
I wiped the blinding tears from my eyes, and read these lines:--
"I have, though with hesitation, permitted Amy to tell you the cheering
words, by which our beloved patient confirms my belief that reason is
coming back to her,--slowly, labouringly, but if she survive, for
permanent restoration. On no account attempt to precipitate or disturb
the work of nature. As dangerous as a sudden glare of light to eyes long
blind and newly regaining vision in the friendly and soothing dark would
be the agitation that your presence at this crisis would cause. Confide
in me."
I remained brooding over these lines and over Lilian's message long and
silently, while Amy's soothing whispers stole into my ear, soft as the
murmurs of a rill heard in the gloom of forests. Rousing myself at
length, my thoughts returned to Margrave. Doubtless he would soon awake.
I bade Amy bring me such slight nutriment as I thought best suited to his
enfeebled state, telling her it was for a sick traveller, resting himself
in my hut. When Amy returned, I took from her the little basket with
which she was charged, and having, meanwhile, made a careful selection
from the contents of my medicine-chest, went back to the hut. I had not
long resumed my place beside Margrave's pillow before he awoke.
"What o'clock is it?" he asked, with an anxious voice.
"About seven."
"Not later? That is well; my time is precious."
"Compose yourself, and eat."
I placed the food before him, and he partook of it, though sparingly, and
as if with effort. He then dozed for a short time, again woke up, and
impatiently demanded the cordial, which I had prepared in the mean while.
Its effect was greater and more immediate than I could have anticipated,
proving, perhaps, how much of youth there was still left in his system,
however undermined and ravaged by disease. Colour came back to his cheek,
his voice grew perceptibly stronger. And as I lighted the lamp on the
table near us--for it was growing dark--he gathered himself up, and spoke
thus,--
"You remember that I once pressed on you certain experiments. My object
then was to discover the materials from which is extracted the specific
that enables the organs of life to expel disease and regain vigour. In
that hope I sought your intimacy,--an intimacy you gave, but withdrew."
"Dare you complain? Who and what was the being from whose intimacy I
shrank appalled?"
"Ask what questions you please," cried Margrave, impatiently, "later--if I
have strength left to answer them; but do not interrupt me, while I
husband my force to say what alone is important to me and to you.
Disappointed in the hopes I had placed in you, I resolved to repair to
Paris,--that great furnace of all bold ideas. I questioned learned
formalists; I listened to audacious empirics. The first, with all their
boasted knowledge, were too timid to concede my premises; the second, with
all their speculative daring, too knavish to let me trust to their
conclusions. I found but one man, a Sicilian, who comprehended the
secrets that are called occult, and had the courage to meet Nature and all
her agencies face to face. He believed, and sincerely, that he was
approaching the grand result, at the very moment when he perished from
want of the common precautions which a tyro in chemistry would have taken.
At his death the gaudy city became hateful; all its pretended pleasures
only served to exhaust life the faster. The true joys of youth are those
of the wild bird and wild brute, in the healthful enjoyment of Nature. In
cities, youth is but old age with a varnish. I fled to the East; I passed
through the tents of the Arabs; I was guided--no matter by whom or by
what--to the house of a Dervish, who had had for his teacher the most
erudite master of secrets occult, whom I knew years ago at Aleppo---Why
that exclamation?"
"Proceed. What I have to say will come--later."
"From this Dervish I half forced and half purchased the secret I sought to
obtain. I now know from what peculiar substance the so-called elixir of
life is extracted; I know also the steps of the process through which that
task is accomplished. You smile incredulously. What is your doubt?
State it while I rest for a moment. My breath labours; give me more of
the cordial."
"Need I tell you my doubt? You have, you say, at your command the elixir
of life of which Cagliostro did not leave his disciples the recipe; and
you stretch out your hand for a vulgar cordial which any village chemist
could give you!"
"I can explain this apparent contradiction. The process by which the
elixir is extracted from the material which hoards its essence is one that
requires a hardihood of courage which few possess. This Dervish, who had
passed through that process once, was deaf to all prayer, and unmoved by
all bribes, to attempt it again. He was poor; for the secret by which
metals may be transmuted is not, as the old alchemists seem to imply,
identical with that by which the elixir of life is extracted. He had only
been enabled to discover, in the niggard strata of the lands within range
of his travel, a few scanty morsels of the glorious substance. From these
he had extracted scarcely enough of the elixir to fill a third of that
little glass which I have just drained. He guarded every drop for
himself. Who that holds healthful life as the one boon above all price
to the living, would waste upon others what prolongs and recruits his own
being? Therefore, though he sold me his secret, he would not sell me his
treasure."
"Any quack may sell you the information how to make not only an elixir,
but a sun and a moon, and then scare you from the experiment by tales of
the danger of trying it! How do you know that this essence which the
Dervish possessed was the elixir of life, since, it seems, you have not
tried on yourself what effect its precious drops could produce? Poor
wretch, who once seemed to me so awfully potent! do you come to the
Antipodes in search of a drug that only exists in the fables by which a
child is amused?"
"The elixir of life is no fable," cried Margrave, with a kindling of eye,
a power of voice, a dilatation of form, that startled me in one just
before so feeble. "That elixir was bright in my veins when we last met.
From that golden draught of the life-spring of joy I took all that can
gladden creation. What sage would not have exchanged his wearisome
knowledge for my lusty revels with Nature? What monarch would not have
bartered his crown, with its brain-ache of care, for the radiance that
circled my brows, flashing out from the light that was in me? Oh again,
oh again! to enjoy the freedom of air with the bird, and the glow of the
sun with the lizard; to sport through the blooms of the earth, Nature's
playmate and darling; to face, in the forest and desert, the pard and the
lion,--Nature's bravest and fiercest,--her firstborn, the heir of her
realm, with the rest of her children for slaves!"
As these words burst from his lips, there was a wild grandeur in the
aspect of this enigmatical being which I had never beheld in the former
time of his affluent, dazzling youth. And, indeed, in his language, and
in the thoughts it clothed, there was an earnestness, a concentration, a
directness, a purpose, which had seemed wanting to his desultory talk in
the earlier days I expected that reaction of languor and exhaustion would
follow his vehement outbreak of passion, but, after a short pause, he went
on with steady accents. His will was sustaining his strength. He was
determined to force his convictions on me, and the vitality, once so rich,
rallied all its lingering forces to the aid of its intense desire.
"I tell you, then," he resumed, with deliberate calmness, "that, years
ago, I tested in my own person that essence which is the sovereign
medicament. In me, as you saw me at L----, you beheld the proof of its
virtues. Feeble and ill as I am now, my state was incalculably more
hopeless when formerly restored by the elixir. He from whom I then took
the sublime restorative died without revealing the secret of its
composition. What I obtained was only just sufficient to recruit the lamp
of my life, then dying down--and no drop was left for renewing the light
which wastes its own rays in the air that it gilds. Though the Dervish
would not sell me his treasure, he permitted me to see it. The appearance
and odour of this essence are strangely peculiar,--unmistakable by one who
has once beheld and partaken of it. In short, I recognized in the hands
of the Dervish the bright life-renewer, as I had borne it away from the
corpse of the Sage of Aleppo."
"Hold! Are you then, in truth, the murderer of Haroun, and is your true
name Louis Grayle?"
"I am no murderer, and Louis Grayle did not leave me his name. I again
adjure you to postpone, for this night at least, the questions you wish to
address to me.
"Seeing that this obstinate pauper possessed that for which the pale
owners of millions, at the first touch of palsy or gout, would consent to
be paupers, of course I coveted the possession of the essence even more
than the knowledge of the substance from which it is extracted. I had no
coward fear of the experiment, which this timid driveller had not the
nerve to renew. But still the experiment might fail. I must traverse
land and sea to find the fit place for it, while, in the rags of the
Dervish, the unfailing result of the experiment was at hand. The Dervish
suspected my design, he dreaded my power. He fled on the very night in
which I had meant to seize what he refused to sell me. After all, I
should have done him no great wrong; for I should have left him wealth
enough to transport himself to any soil in which the material for the
elixir may be most abundant; and the desire of life would have given his
shrinking nerves the courage to replenish its ravished store. I had Arabs
in my pay, who obeyed me as hounds their master. I chased the fugitive.
I came on his track, reached a house in a miserable village, in which, I
was told, he had entered but an hour before. The day was declining, the
light in the room imperfect. I saw in a corner what seemed to me the form
of the Dervish,--stooped to seize it, and my hand closed on an asp. The
artful Dervish had so piled his rags that they took the shape of the form
they had clothed, and he had left, as a substitute for the giver of life,
the venomous reptile of death.
"The strength of my system enabled me to survive the effect of the poison;
but during the torpor that numbed me, my Arabs, alarmed, gave no chase to
my quarry. At last, though enfeebled and languid, I was again on my
horse. Again the pursuit, again the track! I learned--but this time by a
knowledge surer than man's--that the Dervish had taken his refuge in a
hamlet that had sprung up over the site of a city once famed through
Assyria. The same voice that in formed me of his whereabouts warned me
not to pursue. I rejected the warning. In my eager impatience I sprang
on to the chase; in my fearless resolve I felt sure of the prey. I
arrived at the hamlet wearied out, for my forces were no longer the same
since the bite of the asp. The Dervish eluded me still; he had left the
floor, on which I sank exhausted, but a few minutes before my horse
stopped at the door. The carpet, on which he had rested, still lay on the
ground. I dismissed the youngest and keenest of my troop in search of the
fugitive. Sure that this time he would not escape, my eyes closed in
sleep.
"How long I slept I know not,--a long dream of solitude, fever, and
anguish. Was it the curse of the Dervish's car pet? Was it a taint in
the walls of the house, or of the air, which broods sickly and rank over
places where cities lie buried? I know not; but the Pest of the East had
seized me in slumber. When my senses recovered I found myself alone,
plundered of my arms, despoiled of such gold as I had carried about me.
All had deserted and left me, as the living leave the dead whom the Plague
has claimed for its own. As soon as I could stand I crawled from the
threshold. The moment my voice was heard, my face seen, the whole squalid
populace rose as on a wild beast,--a mad dog. I was driven from the place
with imprecations and stones, as a miscreant whom the Plague had overtaken
while plotting the death of a holy man. Bruised and bleeding, but still
defying, I turned in wrath on that dastardly rabble; they slunk away from
my path. I knew the land for miles around. I had been in that land
years, long years ago. I came at last to the road which the caravans take
on their way to Damascus. There I was found, speechless and seemingly
lifeless, by some European travellers. Conveyed to Damascus, I languished
for weeks between life and death. But for the virtue of that essence,
which lingered yet in my veins, I could not have survived--even thus
feeble and shattered. I need not say that I now abandoned all thought of
discovering the Dervish. I had at least his secret, if I had failed of
the paltry supply he had drawn from its uses. Such appliances as he had
told me were needful are procured in the East with more ease than in
Europe. To sum up, I am here, instructed in all the knowledge, and
supplied with all the aids, which warrant me in saying, 'Do you care for
new life in its richest enjoyments, if not for yourself, for one whom you
love and would reprieve from the grave? Then, share with me in a task
that a single night will accomplish, and ravish a prize by which the life
that you value the most will be saved from the dust and the worm, to live
on, ever young, ever blooming, when each infant, new-born while I speak,
shall have passed to the grave. Nay, where is the limit to life, while
the earth hides the substance by which life is renewed?"
I give as faithfully as I can recall them the words in which Margrave
addressed me. But who can guess by cold words transcribed, even were they
artfully ranged by a master of language, the effect words produce when
warm from the breath of the speaker? Ask one of an audience which some
orator held enthralled, why his words do not quicken a beat in the
reader's pulse, and the answer of one who had listened will be, "The words
took their charm from the voice and the eye, the aspect, the manner, the
man!" So it was with the incomprehensible being before me. Though his
youth was faded, though his beauty was dimmed, though my fancies clothed
him with memories of abhorrent dread, though my reason opposed his
audacious beliefs and assumptions, still he charmed and spell-bound me;
still he was the mystical fascinator; still, if the legends of magic had
truth for their basis, he was the born magician,--as genius, in what
calling soever, is born with the gift to enchant and subdue us.
Constraining myself to answer calmly, I said, "You have told me your
story; you have defined the object of the experiment in which you ask me
to aid. You do right to bid me postpone my replies or my questions. Seek
to recruit by sleep the strength you have so sorely tasked. To-morrow--"
"To-morrow, ere night, you will decide whether the man whom out of all
earth I have selected to aid me shall be the foe to condemn me to perish!
I tell you plainly I need your aid, and your prompt aid. Three days from
this, and all aid will be too late!"
I had already gained the door of the room, when he called to me to come
back.
"You do not live in this but, but with your family yonder. Do not tell
them that I am here; let no one but yourself see me as I now am. Lock the
door of the but when you quit it. I should not close my eyes if I were
not secure from intruders."
"There is but one in my house, or in these parts, whom I would except from
the interdict you impose. You are aware of your own imminent danger; the
life, which you believe the discovery of a Dervish will indefinitely
prolong, seems to my eye of physician to hang on a thread. I have already
formed my own conjecture as to the nature of the disease that enfeebles
you. But I would fain compare that conjecture with the weightier opinion
of one whose experience and skill are superior to mine. Permit me, then,
when I return to you to-morrow, to bring with me the great physician to
whom I refer. His name will not, perhaps, be unknown to you: I speak of
Julius Faber."
"A physician of the schools! I can guess well enough how learnedly he
would prate, and how little he could do. But I will not object to his
visit, if it satisfies you that, since I should die under the hands of the
doctors, I may be permitted to indulge my own whim in placing my hopes in
a Dervish. Yet stay. You have, doubtless, spoken of me to this Julius
Faber, your fellow-physician and friend? Promise me, if you bring him
here, that you will not name me,--that you will not repeat to him the tale
I have told you, or the hope which has led me to these shores. What I
have told you, no matter whether, at this moment, you consider me the dupe
of a chimera, is still under the seal of the confidence which a patient
reposes in the physician he himself selects for his confidant. I select
you, and not Julius Faber!"
"Be it as you will," said I, after a moment's reflection. "The moment you
make yourself my patient, I am bound to consider what is best for you.
And you may more respect, and profit by, an opinion based upon your purely
physical condition than by one in which you might suppose the advice was
directed rather to the disease of the mind than to that of the body."
"How amazed and indignant your brother-physician will be if he ever see me
a second time! How learnedly he will prove that, according to all correct
principles of science and nature, I ought to be dead!"
He uttered this jest with a faint weary echo of his old merry, melodious
laugh, then turned his face to the wall; and so I left him to repose.