THE WAKEFUL STATE.
As soon as Lorenza's sight had recovered its power, she glanced
rapidly around her. After examining everything without one of the many
knick-knacks which delight woman brightening her brow, she stopped with
her look upon Balsamo, and nervously shuddered.
"You again?" she said, receding.
On her physiognomy appeared all the tokens of alarm; her lips became
white and perspiration came as pearls at the root of her hair.
"Where am I?" she asked as he said nothing.
"As you know where you came from, you can readily guess where you are,"
he responded.
"You are right in reminding me; I do, indeed, remember. I know that
I have been pursued by you, and torn from the arms of the royal
intermediary whom I chose between heaven and you."
"Then you ought to know that this princess has been unable to defend
you, however powerful she may be."
"You have overruled her by some witching violence," said Lorenza,
wringing her hands, "Oh, saints of mercy, deliver me from this demon!"
"Where do you see anything demoniacal in me," returned Balsamo,
shrugging his shoulders. "Once for all I beg you to lay aside this pack
of puerile beliefs brought from Rome, and all the rubbish of absurd
superstitions which you have carted about with you since you ran away
from the nunnery."
"Oh, my dear nunnery--who will restore me to my dear nunnery?" cried
the Italian, bursting into tears.
"Indeed, a nunnery is much to be deplored," said Balsamo.
Lorenza ran to one of the windows, opened the curtains and
then the sash, but came against iron bars, which were there
unmistakably--however many flowers were masking them.
"If I must live in a prison," she said, "I prefer that whence one goes
to heaven to that which has a trap door into hades." And she began
trying the bars with her dainty hands.
"Were you more reasonable, Lorenza, you would find only flowers at your
window, and not bars."
"Was I not reasonable when you confined me in that other prison, the
one on wheels, with the vampire you call Althotas? But still you kept
your eye on me when by, and never left me till you had breathed into me
that spirit which possesses me and I cannot shake it off. Where is that
horrid old man who frightens me to death? In some corner, I suppose.
Let us hush and listen till his ghostly voice be heard."
"You let your fancy sway you, like a child," said Balsamo. "My friend
and preceptor, Althotas, my second father, is an inoffensive old man
who has never seen you, let alone approached you, or if he did come
near, he would not heed you, being absorbed in his work."
"His work--tell me what the work is!" muttered the Roman.
"He is seeking the elixir of long life, for which superior minds have
been seeking these two thousand years."
"What are you working for?"
"Human perfection."
"A pair of demons!" said Lorenza, lifting her hands to heaven.
"Is this your fit coming on again? You are ignorant of one thing: your
life is divided into two parts. During one, you are gentle, good and
sensible: during the other, you are mad."
"And you shut me up under the vain pretext of this malady."
"It had to be done."
"Oh, barbarian, be cruel, without pity! imprison me, and kill me, but
do not play the hypocrite and pretend to feel for me while you tear me
to pieces."
"Do you call it torture to live in a luxurious suite of rooms?" said
Balsamo with a kindly smile and not at all disturbed.
"With bars to all the issues!"
"Put there for the sake of your life, Lorenza."
"Oh, he roasts me to death at a slow fire, and he talks of my life's
sake!" exclaimed the Italian.
Approaching, he offered to take her hand, but she repelled his as if it
were a serpent.
"Do not touch me!" she said.
"Do you hate me so much, Lorenza!"
"Ask the victim how he likes the executioner."
"It is because I do not want to be one that I restrict your liberty a
little. Could you come and go as you like, who can tell what your folly
might drive you to."
"Wait till I am free some day, and see what I shall do!"
"Lorenza, you are behaving badly toward the husband whom you chose. You
are my wife."
"That was the work of Satan."
"Poor crazy creature!" said the mesmerist, with a tender look.
"I am a daughter of Rome," continued she, "and some day I shall take
revenge."
"Do you say that merely to frighten me?" he asked, gently shaking his
head.
"No, no; I will do what I say."
"What are you saying--and you a Christian woman?" exclaimed Balsamo
with surprising authority in his voice. "Is your creed which bids you
return good for evil but a hypocrisy, that you pretend to follow it,
and you boast of revenge--evil for good?"
"Oh," replied Lorenza, for an instant struck by the argument. "It is
duty, not revenge, to denounce society's enemies."
"If you denounced me as a master in the black art, it would be not be
as an offender against society, but against heaven. Were I to defy
heaven, which need but comprise me as one atom in the myriads slain by
an earthquake or pestilence, but which takes no pains to punish me, why
should weak men like myself undertake to punish me?"
"Heaven forgets, or tolerates--waiting for you to reform," said the
Italian.
"Meanwhile," said the other, smiling, "you are advised to tolerate your
husband, friend and benefactor?"
"Husband? Oh, that I should have to endure your yoke!"
"Oh, what an impenetrable mystery?" muttered the magician, pursuing his
thought rather than heeding the speaker.
"Let us have done. Why do you take away my liberty?"
"Why, having bestowed it on me, would you take it back? Why flee from
your protector? Why unceasingly threaten one who never threatens you,
with revelation of secrets which are not yours and have aims beyond
anything you can conceive?"
"Oh," said Lorenza, without replying to the question, "the prisoner who
yearns for freedom eventually obtains it, and your house bars will no
more hold me than your wagon-sides."
"Happily for you, they are stout," replied Balsamo, with ominous
tranquillity.
"Heaven will send another such storm as befel us in Lorraine, and some
thunderbolt will shatter them."
"Take my advice to pray for nothing of the kind, Lorenza; distrust
these romantic transports: I speak to you as a friend--listen to me."
Stunned at the height of her rebellion, Lorenza listened in spite of
herself, from so much concentrated wrath being in his voice, and gloomy
fire in his eye, while his white but powerful hand opened and shut so
strangely as he slowly and solemnly spoke:
"Mark this, my child, that I have tried to have this place fit for a
queen, with nothing lacking for your comfort. So calm your folly. Live
here as you would do in your convent cell. You must become habituated
to my presence. As I have great sorrows, I will confide in you;
dreadful disappointment, for which I will crave a smile. The kinder,
more patient and attentive you are, the more of your bars I will
remove, so that in some months--who knows how soon?--you will become
perhaps more free than I am, in the sense that you will not want to
curtail my liberty."
"No, no," replied the Italian, unable to understand that firm
resolution could be allied to such gentle words, "no more professions
and falsehoods. You abducted me, so that I am my own property still;
restore me to heaven, if you will not let me be my own mistress. I have
borne with your despotism so far from remembering that you saved me
from the robbers who would have ruined me; but this gratitude is much
enfeebled. A few days more of this captivity against which I revolt,
and I shall no longer feel obliged to you; a few more, and I shall
perhaps believe you were in concert with those highwaymen."
"So you honor me with a captaincy of brigands," sneered Balsamo.
"I do not know about that, but I noticed secret signs and peculiar
words."
"But," replied the other, losing color, "you will never tell them;
never to a living soul? You will bury them in the remotest place in
your memory so that they shall die there, smothered."
"Just the other way," retorted Lorenza, delighted as angry persons are
at having found the antagonist's vulnerable point. "My memory shall
piously preserve those words, which I will repeat over and over again
when alone, and say aloud when the opening comes, as already I have
done."
"To whom?"
"To the princess royal."
"Lorenza, mind this well," said he, clenching his nails in his flesh
to subdue his fury and check his rushing blood at the thought that his
brothers were in danger through the woman whom he had selected to aid
them all, "if you said them, never again will you do so. For the doors
will be kept fastened, those bars pointed at the head, and those walls
reared as high as Babel's."
"I have already told you, Balsamo, that any soul wherein the love of
liberty is reinforced by the hate of tyranny must escape from all
prison houses."
"Well and good; try it, woman; but mark this well: you will only twice
try it. For the first time I will punish you so severely that you will
weep all the tears in your body; and for the second I will strike you
pitilessly that you will pour forth all the blood in your veins."
"Help, help, he is murdering me," shrieked the woman, at the last
paroxysm of wrath, tearing her hair and rolling on the carpet.
For an instant Balsamo considered her with mingled rage and pity, the
latter overcoming the other.
"Come, come, Lorenza, return to your senses, and be calm. A day will
come when you will be rewarded amply for what you have suffered, or
fancy."
"Imprisoned," screamed the Italian, "and beaten."
"These are times to try the mind. You are mad, but you shall be cured."
"Better throw me into a madhouse at once; shut me up in a real jail."
"No, you have warned me what you would do against me."
"Then," said the infuriate, "let me have death straightway."
Springing up with the suppleness and rapidity of the wild beast, she
leaped to break her head against the wall. But Balsamo had merely to
stretch out his hands toward her and utter a single word rather with
his will than with his lips, to stop her dead. She stopped, indeed,
reeled and dropped sleep-stricken in the magnetiser's arms.
The strange enchanter, who seemed to rule all the material part of the
woman though the mental portion baffled him, lifted up Lorenza in his
arms and carried her to the couch; there he laid a long kiss on her
lips, drew the curtains of bed and windows, and left her.
A sweet and blessed sleep enveloped her like the cloak of a kind mother
wrapping the willful child who has much suffered and wept.