"The secret you are seeking," said the man who had put his hand on Orson
Vane's shoulder, "is mine."
Vane's eyes widened slightly, roving the stranger up and down. He was a
man of six feet in height, of striking, white-haired beauty, of the type
made familiar to us by pictures of the Old Guard under Napoleon. Here
was still the Imperial under the strong chin, the white mustache over
the shapely lips; the high, clear forehead; the long, thin hands, where
veins showed blue, and the nails were rosy. The head was bowed forward
of the shoulders; the man, now old, had once been inches taller. You
looked, on the spur of first noting him, for the sword and the epaulets,
or, at least, for the ribbon of an order. But his clothes were quite
plain, nor had his voice any touch of the military.
"I overheard a part of your conversation," the stranger went on, "not
intentionally, yet unavoidably. I had either to move or to listen. And
you see the place is so full that moving was out of the question. Did
you mean what you were saying?"
"About the--"
"The Chinese wall," said the stranger.
"Every word of it," said Vane.
"If the chance to penetrate another's soul came to you, would you take
it?"
"At once."
Moncreith laughed aloud. "Where are we?" he said, "in Aladdin's cave?
What rubbish!" And he shook himself, as if to disturb a bad dream. He
was on the point of reaching for his hat, when he saw the face of the
girl in the mirror once more; the sight of it stayed him. He smiled to
himself, and waited for the curious conversation between Vane and the
stranger to continue.
"My name," the stranger was observing, taking a card from an _etui_,
"may possibly be known to you?"
Vane bent his head to the table, read, and looked at the white-haired
man with a quick access of interest.
"I am honored," he said. "My name is Orson Vane."
"Oh," said the other, "I knew that. I do not study the human interest in
mere theory; I delight in the tangible. That is why I presume upon
you"--he waved his hand gracefully--"thus."
"You must join us," said Vane; "there is plenty of room at this table."
"No; I must--if your friend will pardon me--see you alone. Will you come
to my place?"
He spoke as youthfully as if he were of Vane's own age.
Vane considered a second or so, and then sprang to his feet.
"Yes," he said, "I will come. Good-night, Luke. Stay on; enjoy yourself.
Shall I see you to-morrow? Good-night!"
They went out together, the young man and the one with the white hair.
One glance into the mirror flashed from Orson's eyes as he turned to go;
it brought him a memory of a burnished halo on a fragile, rosy, beauty.
He sighed to himself, wishing he could reach the truth behind the robe
of beauty, and, with that sigh, turned with a sort of fierceness upon
his companion.
"Well," said Vane, "well?"
They were passing through a most motley thoroughfare. Barrel-organs
dotted the asphalt; Italian and Sicilian poverty elbowed the poverty of
Russian and Polish Jews. The shops bore signs in Italian, Hebrew,
French--in anything but English. The Elevated roared above the music and
the chatter; the cool gloom of lower Broadway seemed far away.
"Patience," said the old man, "patience, Mr. Vane. Look about you! How
much of the heart of this humanity that reeks all about us do we know?
Think,--think of your Chinese wall! Oh--how strange, how very strange
that I should have come upon you to-night, when, in despair of ever
finding my man, I had gone for distraction to a place where, I thought,
philosophy nor science were but little welcome."
"My dear Professor," urged Vane finally, when they were come to a
stiller region, where many churches, some parks and ivy-sheltered houses
gave an air of age and sobriety and history, "I have no more patience
left. Did I not know your name for what it is I would not have followed
you. Even now I hardly know whether your name and your title suffice. If
it is an adventure, very well. But I have no more patience for
mysteries."
"Not even when you are about to penetrate the greatest mystery of all?
Oh, youth, youth! Well, we have still a little distance to go. I shall
employ it to impress upon you that I, Professor Vanlief, am not
over-fond of the title of Professor. It has, here in America, a taint of
the charlatan. But it came to me, this title, in a place where only
honors were implied. I was, indeed, a fellow student with many of whom
the world has since heard; Bismarck was one of them. I have eaten smoked
goose with him in Pommern. You see, I am very old, very old. I have
spent my life solving a riddle. It is the same riddle that has balked
you, my young friend. But I have striven for the solution; you have
merely wailed against the riddle's existence."
Vane felt a flush of shame.
"True," he murmured, "true. I never went further into any art, any
science, than to find its shortcomings."
"Yet even that," resumed the Professor, "is something. You are, at any
rate, the only man for my purpose."
"Your purpose?"
"Yes. It is the same as yours. You are to be the instrument; I furnish
the power. You are to be able to feel, to think, as others do."
"Oh!" muttered Vane, "impossible." Now that his wish was called possible
of fulfilment, he shrank a little from it. He followed the Professor up
a long flight of curving steps, through dim halls, to where a bluish
light flickered. As they passed this feeble glow it flared suddenly into
a brilliant jet of flame; a door swung open, revealing a somewhat bare
chamber fitted up partly as a study, partly as a laboratory. The door
closed behind them silently.
"Mere trickery," said the Professor, "the sort of thing that the knaves
of science fool the world with. Will you sit down? Here is where I have
worked for--for more years than you have lived, Mr. Vane. Here is where
I have succeeded. In pursuit of this success I have spent my life and
nearly all the fortune that my family made in generations gone. I have
this house, and my daughter, and my science. The world spins madly all
about me, in this splendid town; here, in this stillness, I have worked
to make that world richer than I found it. Will you help me?"
Vane had flung himself upon a wicker couch. He watched his host
striding up and down the room with a fervor that had nothing of senility
in it. The look of earnestness upon that fine old face was magnetic.
Vane's mistrust vanished at sight of it.
"If you will trust me," he answered. He saw himself as the beneficiary,
his host as the giver of a great gift.
"I trust you. I heard enough, to-night, to believe you sincere in
wishing to see life from another soul than your own. But you must
promise to obey my instructions to the letter."
"I promise."
A sense of farce caught Vane. "And now," he said, "what is it? A powder
I must swallow, or a trance you pass me into, or what?"
The professor shook his head gravely. "It is none of those things. It is
much simpler. I should not wonder but that the ancients knew it. But
human life is so much more complex now; the experiences you will gain
will be larger than they could ever have been in other ages. Do you
realize what I am about to give you? The power to take upon you the soul
of another, just as an actor puts on the outer mask of another! And I
ask for no reward. Simply the joy of seeing my process active; and
afterwards, perhaps, to give my secret to the world. But you are to
enjoy it alone, first. Of course--there may be risks. Do you take
them?"
"I do," said Vane.
He could hear the whistling of steamers out in the harbor, and the noise
of the great town came to him faintly. All that seemed strangely remote.
His whole intelligence was centered upon his host, upon the sparsely
furnished room, and the secret whose solution he thought himself
approaching. He was, for almost the first time in his life, intense in
the mere act of existence; he was conscious of no imitation of others;
his analysis of self was sunk in an eagerness, a tenseness of
purposeness hitherto unfelt.
The professor went to a far, dark corner of the room, and rolled thence
a tall, sheeted thing that might have been a painting, or an easel. He
held it tenderly; his least motion with it revealed solicitude. When it
was immediately in front of where Vane reclined, Vanlief loosed his hold
of the thing, and began pacing up and down the room.
"The question of mirrors," he began, after what seemed to Vane an age,
"has never, I suppose, interested you."
"On the contrary," said Vane, "I have had Italy searched for the finest
of its cheval-glasses. In my dressing-room are several that would give
even a man of your fine height, sir, a complete reflection of every
detail, from a shoe-lace to an eyebrow. It is not altogether vanity; but
I never could do justice to my toilette before a mirror that showed me
only a shoulder, or a waist, or a foot, at a time; I want the
full-length portrait or nothing. I like to see myself as others will
see me; not in piece-meal. The Florentines made lovely mirrors."
"They did." Vanlief smiled sweetly. "Yet I have made a better." He paced
the floor again, and then resumed speech. "I am glad you like tall
mirrors. You will have learned how careful one must be of them. One more
or less in your dressing-room will not matter, eh?"
"I have an excellent man," said Vane. "There has not been a broken
mirror in my house for years. He looks after them as if they were his
own."
"Ah, better and better."
Vane interrupted the Professor's silence with, "It is a mirror, then?"
"Yes," said Vanlief, nodding at the sheeted mirror, "it is a mirror.
Have you ever thought of the wonderfulness of mirrors? What wonder, and
yet what simplicity! To think that I--I, a simple, plodding old man of
science--should be the only one to have come upon the magic of a
mirror!" His talk took the note of monologue. He was pacing, pacing,
pacing; smiling at Vane now and then, and fingering the covered mirror
with loving touch as he passed near it. "Have you ever, as a child,
looked into a mirror in the twilight, and seen there another face beside
your own? Have you never thought that to the mirror were revealed more
things than the human eye can note? Have you heard of the old, old
folk-superstitions; of the bride that may not see herself in a mirror
without tragedy touching her; of the Warwickshire mirror that must be
covered in a house of death, lest the corpse be seen in it; of the
future that some magic mirrors could reveal? Fanciful tales, all of
them; yet they have their germ of truth, and for my present discovery I
owe them something." He drew the sheet from the mirror, and revealed
another veil of gauze resting upon the glass, as, in some houses, the
most prized pictures are sometimes doubly covered. "You see; it is just
a mirror, a full-length mirror. But, oh, my dear Vane, the wonderfulness
of this mirror! I have only to look into this mirror; to veil it; and
then, when next you glance into it, if it be within the hour, my soul,
my spirit, my very self, passes from the face of the mirror to you! That
is the whole secret, or at least, the manifestation of it! Do you wish
to be the President, to think his thoughts, feel as he feels, dream as
he dreams? He has only to look into this mirror, and you have only to
take from it, as one plucks a lily from the pool, the spiritual image he
has left there! Think of it, Vane, think of it! Is this not seeing life?
Is this not riddling the secret of existence? To reach the innermost
depths of another's spirit; to put on his soul, as others can put on
your clothes, if you left them on a chair,--is this not a stupendous
thing?" In his fever and fervor the professor had exhausted his
strength; he flung himself into a chair. Vane saw the old man's eyes
glowing and his chest throbbing with passion; he hardly knew whether
the whole scene was real or a something imposed upon his senses by a
species of hypnotism. He passed his hand before his forehead; he shook
his head. Yet nothing changed. Vanlief, in the chair, still quaking with
excitement; the mirror, veiled and immobile.
For a time the room stood silent, save for Vanlief's heavy breathing.
"Of course," he resumed presently, in a quieter tone, "you cannot be
expected to believe, until you have tried. But trial is the easiest
thing in the world. I can teach you the mere externals to be observed in
five minutes. One trial will convince you. After that,--my dear Vane,
you have the gamut of humanity to go. You can be another man every day.
No secret of any human heart will be a secret to you. All wisdom can be
gained by you; all knowledge, all thought, can be yours. Oh, Orson Vane,
I wonder if you realize your fortune! Or--is it possible that you
withdraw?"
Vane got up resolutely.
"No," he said, "I have faith--at last. I am with you, heart and soul.
Life seems splendid to me, for the first time. When can I have the
mirror taken to my house?"