“Now, look you here, Sir,” the old philosopher began, taking me by a
tassel on my satin doublet, and working himself up until his eyes shone
with pleasure, as he unfolded his mad visions to me. “Look you here,
Sir! this bare and dingy dungeon that you rightly frown at is a cell
more pregnant with ingenuity than ever was the forge of the lame smith
of Lemnos. Vulcan! Vulcan never had such teeming fancies as I have
harbored in my head for twenty years. Vulcan never coaxed into being
such a lovely monster as I have hidden yonder. I tell you, young man,”
gasped the old fellow, perspiring with enthusiasm, “Prometheus was a
tawdry charlatan in his service to mankind, compared with what I will
be. He gave us fire, crude, rough, unruly fire!--unstable, dangerous--a
bare, naked gift, spoiled even in the giving by incompleteness; but I,
Sir--I have tamed what the bold Son of Clymene only touched. Ah, by
the blessed gods! I think I have tamed it--fire and water, I have wed
them at yon black altar--deadly foes though some do call them, I have
made them work together, the one with the other. Oh, Sir, such servants
were never yet enlisted by our kind since the great day of Cyclops! And
to think these feeble shaking hands whose poor sinews stand from the
wasted flesh like ivy strands about a winter tree, have done it--and
this poor head has thought it, persistent and at last successful,
through bitter months of toil and anguished disappointment!”
“But, Sir,” I said gently, as the old man checked his incoherent speech
for breath--“this monster, Sir, this ‘lovely monster,’ what is it?”
“Ah! I was forgetting you did not know. Look, then! and though you
had been unfamous all your life, this moment of precedent knowledge
above your fellows shall make you forever famous.” And the old man,
like a devotee walking to a shrine, like a lover with hushed breath
and brightly kindling eye stealing to his mistress’s hiding-place, led
me up to a cavernous recess near the forge, and there lay hands upon a
rent and tattered drapery of rough sail-cloth, stained and old, and,
making a gesture of silence, pulled it back.
In the dim, weird enchantment of that place, I had been prepared for
anything. It was a knightly fashion of the times to be credulous, and
that black cobwebbed den, that mad philosopher, so eloquently raving,
and all the late circumstance of my arrival fitted me to look for
wonders. I had followed him across the grimy floor, pitted with gray
pools of furnace-water, through the reek and twining strands of smoke
that filled that nether hall; and lastly, when he laid a finger to
his lip, and, so reverent and awful, drew back that ancient tattered
screen, I frowned a little, stepping back a pace, and drew my ready
sword six inches from its scabbard, and watched expectant to see some
hideous, horrid, living form chained there--some foul offspring of
darkness and accursed ingenuity--some hateful spawn of wizard art and
black mother night--some squat, foul, misshapen Caliban--some loathsome
thing--I scarce knew what, but strong and sullen and monstrous, for
certain! And, instead, the screen ran rattling back, and there before
me, in a neat-swept space, and on a platform of oaken planks--glossy
in new forged metal, shiny with untarnished filings, gleaming in the
pride of burnished brass and rivets--high, bulby, complicated, a maze
of pistons and levers and wheels, was a great machine!
Somehow, as I saw that ponderous monster, so full of cunning although
so lifeless, a tremor of wondering appreciation ran through my mind,
that soulless body fascinated me with a prophetic fear and awe which
at another time and in another place I should have laughed at.
I put back my sword, smiling to think it had been so nearly drawn,
but yet stood expectant, half wondering, half hoping I knew not what,
and gazing raptly on that mighty iron carcass perched there like some
black incubus, almost fancying all the love and fear and hope that
had gone to fashion its steel limbs or iron sinews might indeed have
filled it with a soul that should, as I looked, become articulate and
manifest beneath my eyes; half hoping, in my ignorance, that indeed the
quintessence of human labor, here consummate, might have got on all
that plastic, dull material, some wondrous firstling spirit of a new
estate, some link between the worlds of substance and of shadow! And
if it so fascinated me, that old man, to whom it owed its being, was
even more enthralled. He stood before the shrine with locked hands and
bent head, apostrophizing the silent work. “Oh, child of infinitely
painful conception,” he muttered, “surely--surely you cannot disappoint
me now! Near twenty years have I given to you--twenty years of toil
and sweat and ungrudging hope. Long, hot summers have I worked upon
you, and dank, dull winters, making and unmaking, building and taking
down again, contriving, hoping, despairing, living with you by day and
dreaming of you through nights of fitful slumber--surely, dear heir of
all my hopes, the reward is at hand, the consummation comes!
“See!” he cried, “how perfect it is! Here in this great round
cylinder is room for fire and water. The fire lies all along in that
gulley-trench that you can note here through this open trap, and those
curling pipes take the hot flame up through that void that will be
filled with the other element. Now, when water boils, the vapor that
comes from off the top is choleric and fiery past conception. This has
been known for long, and John Homersham tried to utilize it by letting
the vapor on the spread digits of a wheel; Farinelli of Angoulême
suffered it to escape behind his engine--both ways so wasteful that no
mortal furnace could keep up power sufficient to be of useful service.
But I have bettered these and many others; nothing is wasted here--the
hot gases are stored and stocked as they rise above the boiling liquid
until they are as strong as the blustering son of Astræus and Aurora,
and then, by turning one single tap, I suffer them to escape down
yonder iron way, there to fall upon the head of that piston that with
a mighty send gives before them and spins the great wheel above, and
comes back on the impetus, and takes another buffet from the laboring
vapor, and back it goes again, now this way and now that, twirling with
fiery zeal those notched wheels above, and working all those bars and
rods and pistons. Not one thing of all this complicated structure but
has its purpose; not one rivet in yonder thousands but means a month of
patient, toilsome thought and labor. Moreover, because it is so strong
and heavy, I have put the whole upon that iron carriage, which took me
a year to forge, and those solid back wheels are locked with the gear
above, and from the axle of that front wheel two chains run up and
turn upon a cylinder, so that my sweet one can move at such pace as
yet I cannot even think of, and guide himself--in brief, is born and
consummate!”
Then, presently, he turned from babbling to his “child,” and speaking
louder, with frenzied gestures, the while he strode up and down before
it, went wild upon the wondrous things it should do. “It will not
fail, I know it! My head is fairly mazed when I forecast all that here
with this begins as possible. It shall run, Sir,” he cried, turning
rapturously to me--“and fly, and walk, and haul, and pull, and hew
wood and draw water, and be a giant stronger than a thousand men, and
a craftsman in a hundred crafts of such subtility and gentleness and
cunning as no other master craftsman ever was. Down, into ages not yet
formed in the void womb of the future, this knowledge I have mastered
shall extend, widening as it goes, and men shall no longer strive or
suffer; there stands the patient beast on whose broad back another
age shall put all its burdens. There is the true winged horse of some
other time that shall mock the slow patter of our laggard feet, and
knit together the most distant corners of the world within its giant
stride. Oh! I can see a happy age, when base material labor shall
be over, and men shall lie about and take their fill of restfulness
as they have not done since the gates of Eden were shut upon their
ancient father’s back! I do see, down the long perspectives of the
future, such as yon achieving all things both by sea and shore, plowing
their fields for unborn peoples and drawing nets, carrying, fetching,
far and near, swift, patient, indomitable! Ah! and winging glorious
argosies--mighty vessels such as no man dares dream of now; vast, noble
bodies inspirited each with a soul as lies impatient yonder; and those
shall plow the green sea waves in scorn of storm and weather, pouring
the wealth of far Cathay and Ind into our ready lap, making those
things happy necessaries which now none but some few may dare to hope
for; bringing the spice the Persian picked this morning to our doors
to-morrow, bringing the grape and olive unwithered on their stems,
bringing fair Eastern stuffs still wet from out their dye-vats----”
“Jove, old man! that moves me. I was a merchant once. Your words do
stir my blood down to the most stagnant corner of my veins!”
“--Bringing pearls from Oman still speckled with the green sea-dew
upon them, and sapphires from rugged Ural mines still smelling of their
fresh native mother earth; bringing, in swift, tireless keels, Nova
Zemblan furs and costly feathered trophies from the South; bringing
Biafra’s hoards of ivory and Benin’s stores of blood-red gold; bringing
gems warm from tepid sands of Arracan, and sandal-wood from seagirt
Nicobar. Ah! pouring the yellow-scented corn of every fertile flat from
Manfalout to ancient Abbasiyeh; pouring the Tartar’s millet and the
Hindu’s rice into our hungry Western mouths; making those rich who once
were poor, and those noble who once were only rich; benefiting both
great and little--benefiting both near and far! And I shall have done
this--I, poor Master Andrew Faulkener, a man so shabby and so seeming
mean, no one of worth or quality would walk in the same side of the
road with him!”
So spoke that good fanatic, and as he stopped there came a gentle tap
upon the door, and a fair face in the sunlight, and there was Mistress
Elizabeth saying, with a merry laugh: “Father! the cloth is laid, and
the meal is spread, and old Margery bids me add that, if to-day’s roast
is spoiled by waiting, as the last one was, she’ll never cook capon for
thee again!” and coming down the maid laid a hand of gentle insistence
upon her father’s sleeve, and led him sighing and often looking back up
the green stone steps, I following close behind.
We crossed the sunny courtyard, entering on the farther side the other
rambling buttress-wing of that ancient pile. Thence we went by clean
white flagstoned passages and open oaken doorways to what was once
the long servants’ dining-hall. At the near end of the middle table
of well-scrubbed boards, so thick and heavy they might have come from
the side of some great ship, a clean white slip cloth was laid, with
high-backed chairs, one at the head for Andrew Faulkener, and two on
either side for me and her, and lower down again were put, below the
great oaken salt-cellar, two other places. By one of these stood Dame
Margery, fair Elizabeth’s old nurse, an ancient dame in black-velvet
cap and spotless ruff and linen, with a comely honest old country face
above them, wrinkled and colored like a rosy pippin that has mellowed
through the winter on a kitchen cornice shelf. Such was Dame Margery,
and, while she curtsied low with folded hands, I bowed as one of my
quality might bow in respect to her ancient faithfulness. At the other
chair stood their Spanish steward, black Emanuel Marcena. Yes, and,
as you may by this time have guessed, that steward was, in flesh and
blood, none other but the midnight visitor who had disturbed my rest
the night before. I could not doubt it. He wore the same clothes,
his swarthy, sullen face was only a little more lifelike now in the
daylight, and, if more evidence were wanting, one finger of his left
hand--that hand that had held the bloody handkerchief--was done up with
cobwebs and linen threads. I knew him on the instant, and stopped and
stared to see my vagrant shadow so prosaically standing there at his
dinner place, picking his yellow teeth and sniffing the ready roast
like a hungry dog. And when he saw me he too started, for I also had
been dreadful to him. I was the exact counterpart of that amber gallant
that had strode out upon his moonlit heels and scared him with a shout,
where, no doubt, he fancied no shouters dwelt, and now here we were
face to face, guests at the same table, surely it was strange enough to
make us stare!
But, over and above the prejudice of our evening meeting, I already
distrusted and disliked Emanuel Marcena. Why it was I do not know,
but so much is certain, if one may love, no less surely may one hate
at first sight, and as our eyes met, hatred was surely born in his,
while mine, as like as not, told through their steady stare, of
aversion and dislike. He was a sullen, yellow fellow, lean and tall,
with black, crafty eyes set near together; a thin nose, shaped like a
vulture’s beak; a small peaked beard, and black hair closely cropped,
a crafty, cunning, cruel, ungenerous-looking fellow, who had somehow,
it afterward turned out, grown rich as his master’s fortunes failed. He
had come into Faulkener’s service when a boy, had flourished while he
flourished, and learned a hundred shifts of cruelty and pride from the
gay company who once were proud to call his master comrade, and now,
like the black fungus that he was, had swelled with conceit and avarice
past all conscionable proportions.
Well, we exchanged grim salutations, and sat, and the meal commenced.
But all the while we ate and talked I could not help turning to that
crafty steward, and each time I did so I found his keen, restless
black eyes wandering fugitive about among us. Now he would glance
at me over his porringer, and then a half-unconscious scowl dropped
down over those dark Cordovian brows. Then perhaps it was the old man
he looked at, and a scarce-hid smile of contempt played about the
corners of that Southern’s mouth to hear his master babble or answer
our talk at random. Lastly, my sleek Iberian would set his glance on
sweet country Bess as she sat at her father’s side, and then there
burned under his yellow skin such a flush of passion, such a shine
of sickly love and aspiration as needed no interpreting, and made me
frown--small as my stake was in that game I saw was playing--as black
as inky night. But what did it matter to me who picked that English
blossom? Why should she not lie on that mean Spanish bosom forever if
she would?--’twas less than nothing to me, who would so soon pass on to
other ventures--and yet no man was ever born who was not jealous, and,
remembering how we had met, how sweet she was and simple, what native
courtesy gilded her country manners, what music there was in her voice,
and how black that villain looked beside her, I, in spite of myself,
resented the first knowledge of the love he bore as keenly as though I
had myself a right to her.
Pious, sanctimonious Emanuel Marcena! He stood up saying his grace
for meat long after all of us were seated, and crossed his doublet a
score of times ere he fell on the viands like a hungry pike. And he was
cruel too. A little thing may show how big things go. He caught a fly
while we waited between two courses, and, thinking himself unnoticed,
held it a moment nicely between his lean, long fingers, then, drawing
a straight fine pin from his sleeve, slowly thrust it through the
body of that buzzing thing. He stuck the pin up before him, by his
pewter mug, and watched with lowering pleasure his victim gyrate. That
amused him much, and when the creature’s pain was reduced to numbness
he neatly tore one prismatic wing from off its shoulder, and smiled a
sour smile to watch how that awoke it. Then, presently, the other wing
was wrenched palpitating from the damp and quivering socket, and the
victim spun round upon the iron stake that pierced its body. And all
this under cover of his dinner-mug, ingenious, light-fingered Emanuel
Marcena!
Such was the steward of that curious household. Over against him sat
the excellent old country dame, whose mind wandered no further than to
speculate upon the price of eggs next market-day, or how her bleaching
linen fared; above was the wise-mad scholar, bent and visionary; and
by him, ruddy in her country beauty, that wild hedge-rose of his. And
as I looked from one to other, and thought of what I was and had been,
all seemed strange, unreal, fantastic, and I could only wait with dull
patience for what fortune might have next in store.
It was a pleasant, peaceful place, that manor hall! When we had
finished our midday meal, and the servitors had gone to their duties,
Master Faulkener said a walk in the green fields might do him good--he
would go out and take the country air. It was a wise resolve, and
he made a show of carrying it through, but he had not crossed the
courtyard toward the sunny meadows when he got a sniff of his own
smoldering furnace fires. That was too much for him. The scholar’s
rustic resolution melted, and, glancing fugitively behind, we saw him
presently steal away toward his cellar, and then drop down the stairs,
and bar the door, and soon the curling smoke and dancing sparks told
that wondrous thing of his was growing once again.
Thus I and the maid were left alone, and for a little space we stood
silent by the diamond-latticed window, scarce knowing what to say--I
looking down upon that virgin bosom, so smoothly heaving under its veil
of country lawn, she thinking I know not what, but pulling a leaf or
two to pieces from her window vine. And so we stood for a time, until
the lady broke the silence by asking if I would wish to see the house
and gardens with her? It was a good suggestion and a comely guide, so
we set out at once.
She led me first back through her garden again, naming every flower
and bush by country names as we went along, and this brought us to the
empty house-front, which we entered. She took me from room to room, and
dusty corridor to corridor, chatting and laughing all the way, talking
of great kinsmen, and noble, fickle guests who once had called her
father friend--all with such a light, contented heart it sounded more
like fairy story than stern material fact. Then that tripping guide
showed me the one door I had not found, which led through into the
rearward house. Here, again, I told her of how I had hunted in vain for
such a passage, and she laughed until those ancient corridors resounded
to her glee. This door admitted to another region, which we entered,
and soon Elizabeth led on down a dusty flight of twilight wooden
stairs, until a portal studded with iron barred our way. At this,
putting a finger to her mouth in mysterious manner, the damsel asked if
I dared enter, to which my answer was that, with sword in hand, and her
to watch, I would not hesitate to prise the gates of hell; so we pulled
the heavy sullen bolts, and the door turned slowly on its hinges. There
before us was displayed a long, dusty corridor, lit by high narrow
cobwebbed lattice windows down one side, and dim with moss and stain
of wind and weather. From end to end of that soundless vestibule were
stacked and piled and hung such mighty stores of various lumber, rare,
curious, dreadful, as never surely were brought together before.
It was Andrew Faulkener’s museum-room--the place where he put by all
the strange shreds of life and death he collected when the scholar’s
fervor was upon him, and now, as his sweet daughter laid one finger on
my arm and softly bid me listen, directly down below and under us we
heard him hammering at his forge.
“Oh, Sir,” began that maid, whispering in my ear and sweeping her
expressive arm round in the direction of those mounds and shelves, “did
ever child have such a father? This is the one room that is forbidden
me, and it is the one room of our hundreds that I take the most fearful
pleasure in. I do wrong to show it, and, indeed, I had not brought you
here but that something tells me you are good comrade, true and silent
both in great and little. Therefore step lightly and speak small: there
is nothing in all the world that stirs my father’s choler but this--to
hear a vagrant foot overhead among his treasures.”
Softly, therefore, as any midnight thieves we trod the dust-carpeted
floor, and now here, now there, the damsel led me. Now it was at one
oriel recess where stood a black oak table and open chests piled with
vellum books, all clasped and bound with gold and iron, that we paused.
And I opened some of those great tomes, and read, in Norman-Latin,
or old Frankish-French, the misty record of those things of long-ago
that once had been so new to me. I spelled out how the monkish scribe
was stumbling through a passage of that diary that I had seen Cæsar
write--saw him repeat, as visionary and incredible, in quaint and
crabbed cloister scrawl, the story of the Saxon coming, and how King
Harold died. I turned to another book, a little newer, and read, ’mid
gorgeous uncials, the story of that remote fight above Crecy, “when
good King Edward, with a scanty band of liegemen, was matched against
two hundred thousand French abou ye ville of Crecy, and by the Grace of
God withstood them upon an August day”--and I could have read on and on
without stop or pause down those musty memory-rousing pages but for the
gentle interrupter at my side, who laughed to see me so engrossed, and
shut the covers to, little knowing of the thoughts that I was thinking,
and took me on again.
Then she would halt at a pile of splendid stuffs, half heaped upon the
floor, half nailed against the wall, the hangings of courtly rooms and
thrones; and, as her sympathetic female fingers spread out the folds of
all those ruined webs, I read again upon them, in tarnished gold and
filigree, in silken stitching and patient, cunning embroidery, more
stories of old Kings and Queens I once was comrade to. On again, to
piles and racks of weapons of every age and time: all these I knew, and
poised the javelin some Saxon hand had borne in war, and shook, like
a dry reed, the long Norman spear, and whirled a rusty pirate scimitar
above my head until it hummed again an old forgotten tune of blood
and lust and pillage, and, with a stifled shriek, the frightened girl
cowered from me.
Oh! a very curious treasure-house indeed! And here the scholar had
laid up skins and furs of animals, and there horns and hoofs and
talons. Here, grim, melancholy, great birds were standing as though in
life, and crumbling, as they waited, with neglect and age. There, in
a twilight corner, glimmered the green glassy eyes of an old Thebeian
crocodile, and there the shining ivory jaws of monstrous fishes, with
warty hides of toads, and shriveled forms of small beasts dried in
the kiln of long-silent ages, and now black, shrunken, and ghastly.
On the walls were pendent enough simples and electrices to stock
twenty witches’ dens, enough mandrake, hellebore, blue monkshood,
purple-tinted nightshade to unpeople half a shire; and along by them
were withered twigs and leaves would banish every kind of rheum;
samples of wondrous shrubs and roots, all neatly docketed, would cure
a wife of scolding or a war-horse of a sprain, would cure an adder’s
bite, or by the same physic mend a broken limb; ah, and bring you
certain luck in peace and war, or light, all out of the same virtue,
the fires of love in icy, virgin bosoms.
In that quaint ante-room, dimly illumined by its cobwebbed windows,
were astrolabes and hemispheres from the cabin poops of sunken
merchantmen; charts whereon great beasts shared with pictured savages
whole continents of land, and dolphins and whales did sport where seas
ran out into unknown vagueness. There were models of harmless things of
foreign art and commerce, and cruel iron jaws and wheels with bloody
spikes or beaks for breaking bones or tearing flesh, and teaching the
ways of fair civility to heretics. That old man had got together twenty
images of Baal from as many lands, and half a hundred bits of divers
saints. Here, tied with the strand of the rope that hanged him, was the
skin of a dead felon, and near was the true shirt of a martyr whom the
Church had canonized a thousand years before. In some way, too, the
scholar had possessed him of a Pharaoh still swaddled with his Memphian
robes, and there he was propped up against the wall, that kingly ash
with mouth locked tight, whose lightest whisper once had made or marred
in every court or camp from dusty Ababdah to green Euphrates, and brows
set rigid, whose frown had once cost twenty thousand lives, made twenty
thousand wives to widows, and eyes shut fast that seemed still to dream
of shadowy empery--of golden afternoons in golden ages--a most ancient,
a most curious fellow, and I stared hard at him, feeling wondrous
neighborly.
But I cannot tell all there was in that strange place. From end to end
it was stocked with learned lumber; from end to end my sweet guide led
me, pointing, whispering, and shuddering, all on tiptoe and in silence;
and then, ere I was nearly satisfied, or had sampled one-quarter of
that dusty treasure-hall, she led me through a little wicket, down
twenty stairs, and so once more into the fresh open air.
“There, Sir,” she said, “now I have laid bare my father’s riches to
you. Is it not a wonderful corridor? Oh! what a full place the world
must be, if one man can gather so much strange of it!”
I told her that indeed it was and had been full, right back into the
illimitable, of those hopes and fancies to which all yonder shreds did
hint of; and thus talking, I of infinite experience watching the sweet
wonder and vague speculation dawning in those unruffled child-eyes of
hers, we sauntered about the gardens and pleasant paths, and spent a
sunny afternoon in her ambient fields.