I did not see Margrave the following
day, but the next morning, a little after sunrise,
he walked into my study, according to his ordinary
habit.
“So you know something about
Sir Philip Derval?” said I. “What
sort of a man is he?”
“Hateful!” cried Margrave;
and then checking himself, burst out into his merry
laugh. “Just like my exaggerations!
I am not acquainted with anything to his prejudice.
I came across his track once or twice in the East.
Travellers are always apt to be jealous of each other.”
“You are a strange compound
of cynicism and credulity; but I should have fancied
that you and Sir Philip would have been congenial spirits,
when I found, among his favourite books, Van Helmont
and Paracelsus. Perhaps you, too, study Swedenborg,
or, worse still, Ptolemy and Lilly?”
“Astrologers? No!
They deal with the future! I live for the day;
only I wish the day never had a morrow!”
“Have you not, then that vague
desire for the something beyond, that not
unhappy, but grand discontent with the limits of the
immediate Present, from which man takes his passion
for improvement and progress, and from which some
sentimental philosophers have deduced an argument in
favour of his destined immortality?”
“Eh!” said Margrave, with
as vacant a stare as that of a peasant whom one has
addressed in Hebrew. “What farrago
of words is this? I do not comprehend you.”
“With your natural abilities,”
I asked with interest, “do you never feel a
desire for fame?”
“Fame? Certainly not. I cannot even
understand it!”
“Well, then, would you have
no pleasure in the thought that you had rendered a
service to humanity?”
Margrave looked bewildered; after
a moment’s pause, he took from the table a piece
of bread that chanced to be there, opened the window,
and threw the crumbs into the lane. The sparrows
gathered round the crumbs.
“Now,” said Margrave,
“the sparrows come to that dull pavement for
the bread that recruits their lives in this world;
do you believe that one sparrow would be silly enough
to fly to a house-top for the sake of some benefit
to other sparrows, or to be chirruped about after he
was dead? I care for science as the sparrow cares
for bread, it may help me to something
good for my own life; and as for fame and humanity,
I care for them as the sparrow cares for the general
interest and posthumous approbation of sparrows!”
“Margrave, there is one thing
in you that perplexes me more than all else human
puzzle as you are in your many eccentricities
and self-contradictions.”
“What is that one thing in me most perplexing?”
“This: that in your enjoyment
of Nature you have all the freshness of a child, but
when you speak of Man and his objects in the world,
you talk in the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic.
At such times, were I to close my eyes, I should say
to myself, ’What weary old man is thus venting
his spleen against the ambition which has failed, and
the love which has forsaken him?’ Outwardly
the very personation of youth, and revelling like
a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints
of the herbage, why have you none of the golden passions
of the young, their bright dreams of some
impossible love, their sublime enthusiasm for some
unattainable glory? The sentiment you have just
clothed in the illustration by which you place yourself
on a level with the sparrows is too mean and too gloomy
to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among
the dismal fallacies of gray beards. No man, till
man’s energies leave him, can divorce himself
from the bonds of our social kind.”
“Our kind! Your kind, possibly;
but I ” He swept his hand over his
brow, and resumed, in strange, absent, and wistful
accents: “I wonder what it is that is wanting
here, and of which at moments I have a dim reminiscence.”
Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with more
appearance of friendly interest than I had ever before
remarked in his countenance, “You are not looking
well. Despite your great physical strength, you
suffer like your own sickly patients.”
“True! I suffer at this
moment, but not from bodily pain.”
“You have some cause of mental disquietude?”
“Who in this world has not?”
“I never have.”
“Because you own you have never
loved. Certainly, you never seem to care for
any one but yourself; and in yourself you find an unbroken
sunny holiday, high spirits, youth, health,
beauty, wealth. Happy boy!”
At that moment my heart was heavy within me.
Margrave resumed,
“Among the secrets which your
knowledge places at the command of your art, what
would you give for one which would enable you to defy
and to deride a rival where you place your affections,
which could lock to yourself, and imperiously control,
the will of the being whom you desire to fascinate,
by an influence paramount, transcendent?”
“Love has that secret,” said I, “and
love alone.”
“A power stronger than love
can suspend, can change love itself. But if love
be the object or dream of your life, love is the rosy
associate of youth and beauty. Beauty soon fades,
youth soon departs. What if in nature there were
means by which beauty and youth can be fixed into
blooming duration, means that could arrest
the course, nay, repair the effects, of time on the
elements that make up the human frame?”
“Silly boy! Have the Rosicrucians
bequeathed to you a prescription for the elixir of
life?”
“If I had the prescription I
should not ask your aid to discover its ingredients.”
“And is it in the hope of that
notable discovery you have studied chemistry, electricity,
and magnetism? Again I say, Silly boy!”
Margrave did not heed my reply.
His face was overcast, gloomy, troubled.
“That the vital principle is
a gas,” said he, abruptly, “I am fully
convinced. Can that gas be the one which combines
caloric with oxygen?”
“Phosoxygen? Sir Humphrey
Davy demonstrates that gas not to be, as Lavoisier
supposed, caloric, but light, combined with oxygen;
and he suggests, not indeed that it is the vital principle
itself, but the pabulum of life to organic beings.”
(1)
“Does he?” said Margrave,
his, face clearing up. “Possibly, possibly,
then, here we approach the great secret of secrets.
Look you, Allen Fenwick: I promise to secure
to you unfailing security from all the jealous fears
that now torture your heart; if you care for that fame
which to me is not worth the scent of a flower, the
balm of a breeze, I will impart to you a knowledge
which, in the hands of ambition, would dwarf into
commonplace the boasted wonders of recognized science.
I will do all this, if, in return, but for one month
you will give yourself up to my guidance in whatever
experiments I ask, no matter how wild they may seem
to you.”
“My dear Margrave, I reject
your bribes as I would reject the moon and the stars
which a child might offer to me in exchange for a toy;
but I may give the child its toy for nothing, and
I may test your experiments for nothing some day when
I have leisure.”
I did not hear Margrave’s answer,
for at that moment my servant entered with letters.
Lilian’s hand! Tremblingly, breathlessly,
I broke the seal. Such a loving, bright, happy
letter; so sweet in its gentle chiding of my wrongful
fears! It was implied rather than said that Ashleigh
Sumner had proposed and been refused. He had now
left the house. Lilian and her mother were coming
back; in a few days we should meet. In this letter
were inclosed a few lines from Mrs. Ashleigh.
She was more explicit about my rival than Lilian had
been. If no allusion to his attentions had been
made to me before, it was from a delicate consideration
for myself. Mrs. Ashleigh said that “the
young man had heard from L of
our engagement, and disbelieved it;”
but, as Mrs. Poyntz had so shrewdly predicted, hurried
at once to the avowal of his own attachment, and the
offer of his own hand. On Lilian’s refusal
his pride had been deeply mortified. He had gone
away manifestly in more anger than sorrow.
“Lady Delafield, dear Margaret
Poyntz’s aunt, had been most kind in trying
to soothe Lady Haughton’s disappointment, which
was rudely expressed, so rudely,”
added Mrs. Ashleigh, “that it gives us an excuse
to leave sooner than had been proposed, which
I am very glad of. Lady Delafield feels
much for Mr. Sumner; has invited him to visit
her at a place she has near Worthing. She leaves
to-morrow in order to receive him; promises to
reconcile him to our rejection, which, as he was
my poor Gilbert’s heir, and was very friendly
at first, would be a great relief to my mind.
Lilian is well, and so happy at the thoughts
of coming back.”
When I lifted my eyes from these letters
I was as a new man, and the earth seemed a new earth.
I felt as if I had realized Margrave’s idle
dreams, as if youth could never fade, love
could never grow cold.
“You care for no secrets of
mine at this moment,” said Margrave, abruptly.
“Secrets!” I murmured;
“none now are worth knowing. I am loved!
I am loved!”
“I bide my time,” said
Margrave; and as my eyes met his, I saw there a look
I had never seen in those eyes before, sinister, wrathful,
menacing. He turned away, went out through the
sash-door of the study; and as he passed towards the
fields under the luxuriant chestnut-trees, I heard
his musical, barbaric chant, the song by
which the serpent-charmer charms the serpent, sweet,
so sweet, the very birds on the boughs hushed their
carol as if to listen.