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+The Project Gutenberg EBook A Strange Story, by E. B. Lytton, Volume 8.
+#127 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
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+
+Title: A Strange Story, Volume 8.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7699]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on April 22, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORY, LYTTON, V8 ***
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Andrew Heath
+and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXV.
+
+I found Mrs. Ashleigh waiting for me in our usual sitting-room.  She was
+in tears.  She had begun to despond of Lilian's recovery, and she infected
+me with her own alarm.  However, I disguised my participation in her
+fears, soothed and sustained her as I best could, and persuaded her to
+retire to rest.  I saw Faber for a few minutes before I sought my own
+chamber.  He assured me that there was no perceptible change for the worse
+in Lilian's physical state since he had last seen me, and that her mind,
+even within the last few hours, had become decidedly more clear.  He
+thought that, within the next twenty-four hours, the reason would make a
+strong and successful effort for complete recovery; but he declined to
+hazard more than a hope that the effort would not exhaust the enfeebled
+powers of the frame.  He himself was so in need of a few hours of rest
+that I ceased to harass him with questions which he could not answer, and
+fears which he could not appease.  Before leaving him for the night, I
+told him briefly that there was a traveller in my but smitten by a disease
+which seemed to me so grave that I would ask his opinion of the case, if
+he could accompany me to the but the next morning.
+
+My own thoughts that night were not such as would suffer me to sleep.
+
+Before Margrave's melancholy state much of my former fear and abhorrence
+faded away.  This being, so exceptional that fancy might well invest him
+with preternatural attributes, was now reduced by human suffering to human
+sympathy and comprehension; yet his utter want of conscience was still as
+apparent as in his day of joyous animal spirits.  With what hideous
+candour he had related his perfidy and ingratitude to the man to whom, in
+his belief, he owed an inestimable obligation, and with what insensibility
+to the signal retribution which in most natures would have awakened
+remorse!
+
+And by what dark hints and confessions did he seem to confirm the
+incredible memoir of Sir Philip Derval!  He owned that he had borne from
+the corpse of Haroun the medicament to which he ascribed his recovery from
+a state yet more hopeless than that under which he now laboured!  He had
+alluded, rapidly, obscurely, to some knowledge at his command "surer than
+man's."  And now, even now the mere wreck of his former existence--by what
+strange charm did he still control and confuse my reason?  And how was it
+that I felt myself murmuring, again and again, "But what, after all, if
+his hope be no chimera, and if Nature do hide a secret by which I could
+save the life of my beloved Lilian?"
+
+And again and again, as that thought would force itself on me, I rose and
+crept to Lilian's threshold, listening to catch the faintest sound of her
+breathing.  All still, all dark!  In that sufferer recognized science
+detects no mortal disease, yet dares not bid me rely on its amplest
+resources of skill to turn aside from her slumber the stealthy advance of
+death; while in yon log-hut one whose malady recognized science could not
+doubt to be mortal has composed himself to sleep, confident of life!
+Recognized science?--recognized ignorance!  The science of to-day is the
+ignorance of to-morrow!  Every year some bold guess lights up a truth to
+which, but the year before, the schoolmen of science were as blinded as
+moles.
+
+"What, then," my lips kept repeating,--"what if Nature do hide a secret by
+which the life of my life can be saved?  What do we know of the secrets of
+Nature?  What said Newton himself of his knowledge?  'I am like a child
+picking up pebbles and shells on the sand, while the great ocean of Truth
+lies all undiscovered around me!'  And did Newton himself, in the ripest
+growth of his matchless intellect, hold the creed of the alchemists in
+scorn?  Had he not given to one object of their research, in the
+transmutation of metals, his days and his nights?  Is there proof that he
+ever convinced himself that the research was the dream, which we, who are
+not Newtons, call it?[1]  And that other great sage, inferior only to
+Newton--the calculating doubt-weigher, Descartes--had he not believed in
+the yet nobler hope of the alchemists,--believed in some occult nostrum or
+process by which human life could attain to the age of the Patriarchs?"[2]
+
+In thoughts like these the night wore away, the moonbeams that streamed
+through my window lighting up the spacious solitudes beyond,--mead and
+creek, forest-land, mountaintop,--and the silence without broken by the
+wild cry of the night hawk and the sibilant melancholy dirge of the
+shining chrysococyx,[3]--bird that never sings but at night, and
+obstinately haunts the roofs of the sick and dying, ominous of woe and
+death.
+
+But up sprang the sun, and, chasing these gloomy sounds, out burst the
+wonderful chorus of Australian groves, the great kingfisher opening the
+jocund melodious babble with the glee of his social laugh.
+
+And now I heard Faber's step in Lilian's room,--heard through the door her
+soft voice, though I could not distinguish the words.  It was not long
+before I saw the kind physician standing at the threshold of my chamber.
+He pressed his finger to his lip, and made me a sign to follow him.  I
+obeyed, with noiseless tread and stifled breathing.  He awaited me in the
+garden under the flowering acacias, passed his arm in mine, and drew me
+into the open pasture-land.
+
+"Compose yourself," he then said; "I bring you tidings both of gladness
+and of fear.  Your Lilian's mind is restored: even the memories which had
+been swept away by the fever that followed her return to her home in L----
+are returning, though as yet indistinct.  She yearns to see you, to bless
+you for all your noble devotion, your generous, greathearted love; but I
+forbid such interview now.  If, in a few hours, she become either
+decidedly stronger or decidedly more enfeebled, you shall be summoned to
+her side.  Even if you are condemned to a loss for which the sole
+consolation must be placed in the life hereafter, you shall have, at
+least, the last mortal commune of soul with soul.  Courage! courage!  You
+are man!  Bear as man what you have so often bid other men submit to
+endure."
+
+I had flung myself on the ground,--writhing worm that had no home but on
+earth!  Man, indeed!  Man!  All, at that moment, I took from manhood was
+its acute sensibility to love and to anguish!
+
+But after all such paroxysms of mortal pain, there comes a strange lull.
+Thought itself halts, like the still hush of water between two descending
+torrents.  I rose in a calm, which Faber might well mistake for fortitude.
+
+"Well," I said quietly, "fulfil your promise.  If Lilian is to pass away
+from me, I shall see her, at least, again; no wall, you tell me, between
+our minds; mind to mind once more,--once more!"
+
+"Allen," said Faber, mournfully and softly, "why do you shun to repeat my
+words--soul to soul?"
+
+"Ay, ay,--I understand.  Those words mean that you have resigned all hope
+that Lilian's life will linger here, when her mind comes back in full
+consciousness; I know well that last lightning flash and the darkness
+which swallows it up!"
+
+"You exaggerate my fears.  I have not resigned the hope that Lilian will
+survive the struggle through which she is passing, but it will be cruel to
+deceive you--my hope is weaker than it was."
+
+"Ay, ay.  Again, I understand!  Your science is in fault,--it desponds.
+Its last trust is in the wonderful resources of Nature, the vitality
+stored in the young!"
+
+"You have said,--those resources of Nature are wondrous.  The vitality of
+youth is a fountain springing up from the deeps out of sight, when, a
+moment before, we had measured the drops oozing out from the sands, and
+thought that the well was exhausted."
+
+"Come with me,--come.  I told you of another sufferer yonder.  I want your
+opinion of his case.  But can you be spared a few minutes from Lilian's
+side?"
+
+"Yes; I left her asleep.  What is the case that perplexes your eye of
+physician, which is usually keener than mine, despite all the length of my
+practice?"
+
+"The sufferer is young, his organization rare in its vigour.  He has gone
+through and survived assaults upon life that are commonly fatal.  His
+system has been poisoned by the fangs of a venomous asp, and shattered by
+the blast of the plague.  These alone, I believe, would not suffice to
+destroy him.  But he is one who has a strong dread of death; and while the
+heart was thus languid and feeble, it has been gnawed by emotions of hope
+or of fear.  I suspect that he is dying, not from the bite of the reptile,
+not from the taint of the pestilence, but from the hope and the fear that
+have overtasked the heart's functions.  Judge for yourself."
+
+We were now at the door of the hut.  I unlocked it: we entered.  Margrave
+had quitted his bed, and was pacing the room slowly.  His step was less
+feeble, his countenance less haggard than on the previous evening.
+
+He submitted himself to Faber's questioning with a quiet indifference, and
+evidently cared nothing for any opinion which the great physician might
+found on his replies.
+
+When Faber had learned all he could, he said, with a grave smile: "I see
+that my advice will have little weight with you; such as it is, at least
+reflect on it.  The conclusions to which your host arrived in his view of
+your case, and which he confided to me, are, in my humble judgment,
+correct.  I have no doubt that the great organ of the heart is involved in
+the cause of your sufferings; but the heart is a noble and much-enduring
+organ.  I have known men in whom it has been more severely and
+unequivocally affected with disease than it is in you, live on for many
+years, and ultimately die of some other disorder.  But then life was held,
+as yours must be held, upon one condition,--repose.  I enjoin you to
+abstain from all violent action, to shun all excitements that cause moral
+disturbance.  You are young: would you live on, you must live as the old.
+More than this,--it is my duty to warn you that your tenure on earth is
+very precarious; you may attain to many years; you may be suddenly called
+hence tomorrow.  The best mode to regard this uncertainty with the calm in
+which is your only chance of long life, is so to arrange all your worldly
+affairs, and so to discipline all your human anxieties, as to feel always
+prepared for the summons that may come without warning.  For the rest,
+quit this climate as soon as you can,--it is the climate in which the
+blood courses too quickly for one who should shun all excitement.  Seek
+the most equable atmosphere, choose the most tranquil pursuits; and
+Fenwick himself, in his magnificent pride of stature and strength, may be
+nearer the grave than you are."
+
+"Your opinion coincides with that I have just heard?" asked Margrave,
+turning to me.
+
+"In much--yes."
+
+"It is more favourable than I should have supposed.  I am far from
+disdaining the advice so kindly offered.  Permit me, in turn, two or three
+questions, Dr. Faber.  Do you prescribe to me no drugs from your
+pharmacopoeia?"
+
+"Drugs may palliate many sufferings incidental to organic disease, but
+drugs cannot reach organic disease itself."
+
+"Do you believe that, even where disease is plainly organic, Nature
+herself has no alternative and reparative powers, by which the organ
+assailed may recover itself?"
+
+"A few exceptional instances of such forces in Nature are upon record; but
+we must go by general laws, and not by exceptions."
+
+"Have you never known instances--do you not at this moment know one--in
+which a patient whose malady baffles the doctor's skill, imagines or
+dreams of a remedy?  Call it a whim if you please, learned sir; do you not
+listen to the whim, and, in despair of your own prescriptions, comply with
+those of the patient?"
+
+Faber changed countenance, and even started.  Margrave watched him and
+laughed.
+
+"You grant that there are such cases, in which the patient gives the law
+to the physician.  Now, apply your experience to my case.  Suppose some
+strange fancy had seized upon my imagination--that is the doctor's cant
+word for all phenomena which we call exceptional--some strange fancy that
+I had thought of a cure for this disease for which you have no drugs; and
+suppose this fancy of mine to be so strong, so vivid, that to deny me its
+gratification would produce the very emotion from which you warn me as
+fatal,--storm the heart, that you would soothe to repose, by the passions
+of rage and despair,--would you, as my trusted physician, concede or deny
+me my whim?"
+
+"Can you ask?  I should grant it at once, if I had no reason to know that
+the thing that you fancied was harmful."
+
+"Good man and wise doctor!  I have no other question to ask.  I thank
+you."
+
+Faber looked hard on the young, wan face, over which played a smile of
+triumph and irony; then turned away with an expression of doubt and
+trouble on his own noble countenance.  I followed him silently into the
+open air.
+
+"Who and what is this visitor of yours?"  he asked abruptly.
+
+"Who and what?  I cannot tell you."
+
+Faber remained some moments musing, and muttering slowly to himself, "Tut!
+but a chance coincidence,--a haphazard allusion to a fact which he could
+not have known!"
+
+"Faber," said I, abruptly, "can it be that Lilian is the patient in whose
+self-suggested remedies you confide more than in the various learning at
+command of your practised skill?"
+
+"I cannot deny it," replied Faber, reluctantly.  "In the intervals of that
+suspense from waking sense, which in her is not sleep, nor yet altogether
+catalepsy, she has, for the last few days, stated accurately the precise
+moment in which the trance--if I may so call it--would pass away, and
+prescribed for herself the remedies that should be then administered.  In
+every instance, the remedies so self-prescribed, though certainly not
+those which would have occurred to my mind, have proved efficacious.  Her
+rapid progress to reason I ascribe to the treatment she herself ordained
+in her trance, without remembrance of her own suggestions when she awoke.
+I had meant to defer communicating these phenomena in the idiosyncrasy of
+her case until our minds could more calmly inquire into the process by
+which ideas--not apparently derived, as your metaphysical school would
+derive all ideas, from preconceived experiences--will thus sometimes act
+like an instinct on the human sufferer for self-preservation, as the bird
+is directed to the herb or the berry which heals or assuages its ailments.
+We know how the mesmerists would account for this phenomenon of hygienic
+introvision and clairvoyance.  But here, there is no mesmerizer, unless
+the patient can be supposed to mesmerize herself.  Long, however, before
+mesmerism was heard of, medical history attests examples in which patients
+who baffled the skill of the ablest physicians have fixed their fancies on
+some remedy that physicians would call inoperative for good or for harm,
+and have recovered by the remedies thus singularly self-suggested.  And
+Hippocrates himself, if I construe his meaning rightly, recognizes the
+powers for self-cure which the condition of trance will sometimes bestow
+on the sufferer, 'where' (says the father of our art) 'the sight being
+closed to the external, the soul more truthfully perceives the affections
+of the body.'  In short--I own it--in this instance, the skill of the
+physician has been a compliant obedience to the instinct called forth in
+the patient; and the hopes I have hitherto permitted myself to give you
+were founded on my experience that her own hopes, conceived in trance, bad
+never been fallacious or exaggerated.  The simples that I gathered for her
+yesterday she had described; they are not in our herbal.  But as they are
+sometimes used by the natives, I had the curiosity to analyze their
+chemical properties shortly after I came to the colony, and they seemed to
+me as innocent as lime-blossoms.  They are rare in this part of Australia,
+but she told me where I should find them,--a remote spot, which she has
+certainly never visited.  Last night, when you saw me disturbed, dejected,
+it was because, for the first time, the docility with which she had
+hitherto, in her waking state, obeyed her own injunctions in the state of
+trance, forsook her.  She could not be induced to taste the decoction I
+had made from the herbs; and if you found me this morning with weaker
+hopes than before, this is the real cause,--namely, that when I visited
+her at sunrise, she was not in sleep but in trance, and in that trance
+she told me that she had nothing more to suggest or reveal; that on the
+complete restoration of her senses, which was at hand, the abnormal
+faculties vouchsafed to trance would be withdrawn.  'As for my life,' she
+said quietly, as if unconscious of our temporary joy or woe in the term of
+its tenure here,--'as for my life, your aid is now idle; my own vision
+obscure; on my life a dark and cold shadow is resting.  I cannot foresee
+if it will pass away.  When I strive to look around, I see but my
+Allen--'"
+
+"And so," said I, mastering my emotions, "in bidding me hope, you did not
+rely on your own resources of science, but on the whisper of Nature in the
+brain of your patient?"
+
+"It is so."
+
+We both remained silent some moments, and then, as he disappeared within
+my house, I murmured,--
+
+"And when she strives to look beyond the shadow, she sees only me!  Is
+there some prophet-hint of Nature there also, directing me not to scorn
+the secret which a wanderer, so suddenly dropped on my solitude, assures
+me that Nature will sometimes reveal to her seeker?  And oh! that dark
+wanderer--has Nature a marvel more weird than himself?"
+
+[1] "Besides the three great subjects of Newton's labours--the fluxional
+calculus, physical astronomy, and optics--a very large portion of his
+time, while resident in his college, was devoted to researches of which
+scarcely a trace remains.  Alchemy, which had fascinated so many eager and
+ambitious minds, seems to have tempted Newton with an overwhelming force.
+What theories he formed, what experiments he tried, in that laboratory
+where, it is said, the fire was scarcely extinguished for weeks together,
+will never be known.  It is certain that no success attended his labours;
+and Newton was not a man--like Kepler--to detail to the world all the
+hopes and disappointments, all the crude and mystical fancies, which mixed
+themselves up with his career of philosophy...  Many years later we find
+Newton in correspondence with Locke, with reference to a mysterious red
+earth by which Boyle, who was then recently dead, had asserted that he
+could effect the grand desideratum of multiplying gold.  By this time,
+however, Newton's faith had become somewhat shaken by the unsatisfactory
+communications which he had himself received from Boyle on the subject of
+the golden recipe, though he did not abandon the idea of giving the
+experiment a further trial as soon as the weather should become suitable
+for furnace experiments."--Quarterly Review, No. 220, pp. 125, 126.
+
+[2] Southey, in his "Doctor," vol. vi. p. 2, reports the conversation of
+Sir Kenelm Digby with Descartes, in which the great geometrician said,
+"That as for rendering man immortal, it was what he could not venture to
+promise, but that he was very sure he could prolong his life to the
+standard of the patriarchs."  And Southey adds, "that St. Evremond, to
+whom Digby repeated this, says that this opinion of Descartes was well
+known both to his friends in Holland and in France."  By the stress
+Southey lays on this hearsay evidence, it is clear that he was not
+acquainted with the works and biography of Descartes, or be would have
+gone to the fountain-head for authority on Descartes's opinions, namely,
+Descartes himself.  It is to be wished that Southey had done so, for no
+one more than he would have appreciated the exquisitely candid and lovable
+nature of the illustrious Frenchman, and the sincerity with which he
+cherished in his heart whatever doctrine he conceived in his
+understanding.  Descartes, whose knowledge of anatomy was considerable,
+had that passion for the art of medicine which is almost inseparable from
+the pursuit of natural philosophy.  At the age of twenty-four he had
+sought (in Germany) to obtain initiation into the brotherhood of the
+Rosicrucians, but unluckily could not discover any member of the society
+to introduce him.  "He desired," says Cousin, "to assure the health of
+man, diminish his ills, extend his existence.  He was terrified by the
+rapid and almost momentary passage of man upon earth.  He believed it was
+not, perhaps, impossible to prolong its duration."  There is a hidden
+recess of grandeur in this idea, and the means proposed by Descartes for
+the execution of his project were not less grand.  In his "Discourse on
+Method," Descartes says, "If it is possible to find some means to render
+generally men more wise and more able than they have been till now, it is,
+I believe, in medicine that those means must be sought...  I am sure that
+there is no one, even in the medical profession, who will not avow that
+all which one knows of the medical art is almost nothing in comparison to
+that which remains to learn, and that one could be exempted from an
+infinity of maladies, both of body and mind, and even, perhaps, from the
+decrepitude of old age, if one had sufficient lore of their causes and of
+all the remedies which nature provides for them.  Therefore, having design
+to employ all my life in the research of a science so necessary, and
+having discovered a path which appears to me such that one ought
+infallibly, in following, to find it, if one is not hindered prematurely
+by the brevity of life or by the defects of experience, I consider that
+there is no better remedy against those two hindrances than to communicate
+faithfully to the public the little I have found," etc.  ("Discours de la
+Methode," vol. i. OEuvres de Descartes, Cousin's Edition.)  And again, in
+his "Correspondence" (vol.  ix.  p. 341), he says: "The conservation of
+health has been always the principal object of my studies, and I have no
+doubt that there is a means of acquiring much knowledge touching medicine
+which, up to this time, is ignored."  He then refers to his meditated
+Treatise on Animals as only an entrance upon that knowledge.  But whatever
+secrets Descartes may have thought to discover, they are not made known to
+the public according to his promise.  And in a letter to M. Chanut,
+written in 1646 (four years before he died), he says ingenuously: "I will
+tell you in confidence that the notion, such as it is, which I have
+endeavoured to acquire in physical philosophy, had greatly assisted me to
+establish certain foundations for moral philosophy; and that I am more
+easily satisfied upon this point than I am on many others touching
+medicine, to which I have, nevertheless, devoted much more time.  So
+that"--(adds the grand thinker, with a pathetic nobleness )--"so that,
+instead of finding the means to preserve life, I have found another good,
+more easy and more sure, which is--not to fear death."
+
+[3] Chrysococyx lucidus,--namely, the bird popularly called the shining or
+bronzed cuckoo.  "Its note is an exceedingly melancholy whistle, heard at
+night, when it is very annoying to any sick or nervous person who may be
+inclined to sleep.  I have known many instances where the bird has been
+perched on a tree in the vicinity of the room of an invalid, uttering its
+mournful notes, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that it could
+be dislodged from its position."--Dr. Bennett: Gatherings of a Naturalist
+in Australasia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVI.
+
+I strayed through the forest till noon, in debate with myself, and strove
+to shape my wild doubts into purpose, before I could nerve and compose
+myself again to face Margrave alone.
+
+I re-entered the but.  To my surprise, Margrave was not in the room in
+which I had left him, nor in that which adjoined it.  I ascended the
+stairs to the kind of loft in which I had been accustomed to pursue my
+studies, but in which I had not set foot since my alarm for Lilian had
+suspended my labours.  There I saw Margrave quietly seated before the
+manuscript of my Ambitious Work, which lay open on the rude table, just as
+I had left it, in the midst of its concluding summary.
+
+"I have taken the license of former days, you see," said Margrave,
+smiling, "and have hit by chance on a passage I can understand without
+effort.  But why such a waste of argument to prove a fact so simple?  In
+man, as in brute, life once lost is lost forever; and that is why life is
+so precious to man."
+
+I took the book from his hand, and flung it aside in wrath.  His approval
+revolted me more with my own theories than all the argumentative rebukes
+of Faber.
+
+"And now," I said, sternly, "the time has come for the explanation you
+promised.  Before I can aid you in any experiment that may serve to
+prolong your life, I must know how far that life has been a baleful and
+destroying influence?"
+
+"I have some faint recollection of having saved your life from an imminent
+danger, and if gratitude were the attribute of man, as it is of the dog, I
+should claim your aid to serve mine as a right.  Ask me what you will.
+You must have seen enough of me to know that I do not affect either the
+virtues or vices of others.  I regard both with so supreme an
+indifference, that I believe I am vicious or virtuous unawares.  I know
+not if I can explain what seems to have perplexed you, but if I cannot
+explain I have no intention to lie.  Speak--I listen!  We have time enough
+now before us."
+
+So saying, he reclined back in the chair, stretching out his limbs
+wearily.  All round this spoilt darling of Material Nature were the aids
+and appliances of Intellectual Science,--books and telescopes and
+crucibles, with the light of day coming through a small circular aperture
+in the boarded casement, as I had constructed the opening for my
+experimental observation of the prismal rays.
+
+While I write, his image is as visible before my remembrance as if before
+the actual eye,--beautiful even in its decay, awful even in its weakness,
+mysterious as is Nature herself amidst all the mechanism by which our
+fancied knowledge attempts to measure her laws and analyze her light.
+
+But at that moment no such subtle reflections delayed my inquisitive eager
+mind from its immediate purpose,--who and what was this creature boasting
+of a secret through which I might rescue from death the life of her who
+was my all upon the earth?
+
+I gathered rapidly and succinctly together all that I knew and all that I
+guessed of Margrave's existence and arts.  I commenced from my vision in
+that mimic Golgotha of creatures inferior to man, close by the scene of
+man's most trivial and meaningless pastime.  I went on,--Derval's murder;
+the missing contents of the casket; the apparition seen by the maniac
+assassin guiding him to the horrid deed; the luminous haunting shadow; the
+positive charge in the murdered man's memoir connecting Margrave with
+Louis Grayle, and accusing him of the murder of Haroun; the night in the
+moonlit pavilion at Derval Court; the baneful influence on Lilian; the
+struggle between me and himself in the house by the seashore,--the strange
+All that is told in this Strange Story.
+
+But warming as I spoke, and in a kind of fierce joy to be enabled thus to
+free my own heart of the doubts that had burdened it, now that I was
+fairly face to face with the being by whom my reason had been so perplexed
+and my life so tortured.  I was restrained by none of the fears lest my
+own fancy deceived me, with which in his absence I had striven to reduce
+to natural causes the portents of terror and wonder.  I stated plainly,
+directly, the beliefs, the impressions which I had never dared even to
+myself to own without seeking to explain them away.  And coming at last to
+a close, I said: "Such are the evidences that seem to me to justify
+abhorrence of the life that you ask me to aid in prolonging.  Your own
+tale of last night but confirms them.  And why to me--to me--do you come
+with wild entreaties to lengthen the life that has blighted my own?  How
+did you even learn the home in which I sought unavailing refuge?  How--as
+your hint to Faber clearly revealed--were you aware that, in yon house,
+where the sorrow is veiled, where the groan is suppressed, where the
+foot-tread falls ghostlike, there struggles now between life and death my
+heart's twin, my world's sunshine?  Ah! through my terror for her, is it a
+demon that tells you how to bribe my abhorrence into submission, and
+supple my reason into use to your ends?"
+
+Margrave had listened to me throughout with a fixed attention, at times
+with a bewildered stare, at times with exclamations of surprise, but not
+of denial.  And when I had done, he remained for some moments silent,
+seemingly stupefied, passing his hand repeatedly over his brow, in the
+gesture so familiar to him in former days.
+
+At length he said quietly, without evincing any sign either of resentment
+or humiliation,--
+
+"In much that you tell me I recognize myself; in much I am as lost in
+amazement as you in wild doubt or fierce wrath.  Of the effect that you
+say Philip Derval produced on me I have no recollection.  Of himself I
+have only this,--that he was my foe, that he came to England intent on
+schemes to shorten my life or destroy its enjoyments.  All my faculties
+tend to self-preservation; there, they converge as rays in a focus; in
+that focus they illume and--they burn.  I willed to destroy my intended
+destroyer.  Did my will enforce itself on the agent to which it was
+guided?  Likely enough.  Be it so.  Would you blame me for slaying the
+tiger or serpent--not by the naked hand, but by weapons that arm it?  But
+what could tiger and serpent do more against me than the man who would rob
+me of life?  He had his arts for assault, I had mine for self-defence.  He
+was to me as the tiger that creeps through the jungle, or the serpent
+uncoiling his folds for the spring.  Death to those whose life is
+destruction to mine, be they serpent or tiger or man!  Derval perished.
+Yes! the spot in which the maniac had buried the casket was revealed to
+me--no matter how; the contents of the casket passed into my hands.  I
+coveted that possession because I believed that Derval had learned from
+Haroun of Aleppo the secret by which the elixir of life is prepared, and I
+supposed that some stores of the essence would be found in his casket.  I
+was deceived--not a drop!  What I there found I knew not how to use or
+apply, nor did I care to learn.  What I sought was not there.  You see a
+luminous shadow of myself; it haunts, it accosts, it compels you.  Of
+this I know nothing.  Was it the emanation of my intense will really
+producing this spectre of myself, or was it the thing of your own
+imagination,--an imagination which my will impressed and subjugated?  I
+know not.  At the hours when my shadow, real or supposed, was with you, my
+senses would have been locked in sleep.  It is true, however, that I
+intensely desire to learn from races always near to man, but concealed
+from his every-day vision, the secret that I believed Philip Derval had
+carried with him to the tomb; and from some cause or another I cannot now
+of myself alone, as I could years ago, subject those races to my
+command,--I must, in that, act through or with the mind of another.  It is
+true that I sought to impress upon your waking thoughts the images of the
+circle, the powers of the wand, which, in your trance or sleep-walking,
+made you the involuntary agent of my will.  I knew by a dream--for by
+dreams, more or less vivid, are the results of my waking will sometimes
+divulged to myself--that the spell had been broken, the discovery I sought
+not effected.  All my hopes were then transferred from yourself, the dull
+votary of science, to the girl whom I charmed to my thraldom through her
+love for you and through her dreams of a realm which the science of
+schools never enters.  In her, imagination was all pure and all potent;
+and tell me, O practical reasoner, if reason has ever advanced one step
+into knowledge except through that imaginative faculty which is strongest
+in the wisdom of ignorance, and weakest in the ignorance of the wise.
+Ponder this, and those marvels that perplex you will cease to be
+marvellous.  I pass on to the riddle that puzzles you most.  By Philip
+Derval's account I am, in truth, Louis Grayle restored to youth by the
+elixir, and while yet infirm, decrepit, murdered Haroun,--a man of a frame
+as athletic as yours!  By accepting this notion you seem to yourself alone
+to unravel the mysteries you ascribe to my life and my powers.  O wise
+philosopher!  O profound logician! you accept that notion, yet hold my
+belief in the Dervish's tale a chimera!  I am Grayle made young by the
+elixir, and yet the elixir itself is a fable!"
+
+He paused and laughed, but the laugh was no longer even an echo of its
+former merriment or playfulness,--a sinister and terrible laugh, mocking,
+threatening, malignant.
+
+Again he swept his hand over his brow, and resumed,--
+
+"Is it not easier to so accomplished a sage as you to believe that the
+idlers of Paris have guessed the true solution of that problem, my place
+on this earth?  May I not be the love-son of Louis Grayle?  And when
+Haroun refused the elixir to him, or he found that his frame was too far
+exhausted for even the elixir to repair organic lesions of structure in
+the worn frame of old age, may he not have indulged the common illusion of
+fathers, and soothed his death-pangs with the thought that he should live
+again in his son?  Haroun is found dead on his carpet--rumour said
+strangled.  What proof of the truth of that rumour?  Might he not have
+passed away in a fit?  Will it lessen your perplexity if I state
+recollections?  They are vague,--they often perplex myself; but so far
+from a wish to deceive you, my desire is to relate them so truthfully that
+you may aid me to reduce them into more definite form."
+
+His face now became very troubled, the tone of his voice very
+irresolute,--the face and the voice of a man who is either blundering his
+way through an intricate falsehood, or through obscure reminiscences.
+
+"This Louis Grayle! this Louis Grayle!  I remember him well, as one
+remembers a nightmare.  Whenever I look back, before the illness of which
+I will presently speak, the image of Louis Grayle returns to me.  I see
+myself with him in African wilds, commanding the fierce Abyssinians.  I
+see myself with him in the fair Persian valley,-lofty, snow-covered
+mountains encircling the garden of roses.  I see myself with him in the
+hush of the golden noon, reclined by the spray of cool fountains,--now
+listening to cymbals and lutes, now arguing with graybeards on secrets
+bequeathed by the Chaldees,--with him, with him in moonlit nights,
+stealing into the sepulchres of mythical kings.  I see myself with him in
+the aisles of dark caverns, surrounded by awful shapes, which have no
+likeness amongst the creatures of earth.  Louis Grayle!  Louis Grayle! all
+my earlier memories go back to Louis Grayle!  All my arts and powers, all
+that I have learned of the languages spoken in Europe, of the sciences
+taught in her schools, I owe to Louis Grayle.  But am I one and the same
+with him?  No--I am but a pale reflection of his giant intellect.  I have
+not even a reflection of his childlike agonies of sorrow.  Louis Grayle!
+He stands apart from me, as a rock from the tree that grows out from its
+chasms.  Yes, the gossip was right; I must be his son."
+
+He leaned his face on both hands, rocking himself to and fro.  At length,
+with a sigh, he resumed,--
+
+"I remember, too, a long and oppressive illness, attended with racking
+pains, a dismal journey in a wearisome litter, the light hand of the woman
+Ayesha, so sad and so stately, smoothing my pillow or fanning my brows.  I
+remember the evening on which my nurse drew the folds of the litter aside,
+and said, 'See Aleppo! and the star of thy birth shining over its walls!'
+
+"I remember a face inexpressibly solemn and mournful.  I remember the
+chill that the calm of its ominous eye sent through my veins,--the face of
+Haroun, the Sage of Aleppo.  I remember the vessel of crystal he bore in
+his hand, and the blessed relief from my pains that a drop from the
+essence which flashed through the crystal bestowed!  And then--and then--I
+remember no more till the night on which Ayesha came to my couch and said,
+'Rise.'
+
+"And I rose, leaning on her, supported by her.  We went through dim narrow
+streets, faintly lit by wan stars, disturbing the prowl of the dogs, that
+slunk from the look of that woman.  We came to a solitary house, small and
+low, and my nurse said, 'Wait.'
+
+"She opened the door and went in; I seated myself on the threshold.  And
+after a time she came out from the house, and led me, still leaning on
+her, into her chamber.
+
+"A man lay, as in sleep, on the carpet, and beside him stood another man,
+whom I recognized as Ayesha's special attendant,--an Indian.  'Haroun is
+dead,' said Ayesha.  'Search for that which will give thee new life.  Thou
+hast seen, and wilt know it, not I.'
+
+"And I put my hand on the breast of Haroun--for the dead man was he--and
+drew from it the vessel of crystal.
+
+"Having done so, the frown of his marble brow appalled me.  I staggered
+back, and swooned away.
+
+"I came to my senses, recovering and rejoicing, miles afar from the city,
+the dawn red on its distant wall.  Ayesha had tended me; the elixir had
+already restored me.
+
+"My first thought, when full consciousness came back to me, rested on
+Louis Grayle, for he also had been at Aleppo; I was but one of his
+numerous train.  He, too, was enfeebled and suffering; he had sought the
+known skill of Haroun for himself as for me; and this woman loved and had
+tended him as she had loved and tended me.  And my nurse told me that he
+was dead, and forbade me henceforth to breathe his name.
+
+"We travelled on,--she and I, and the Indian her servant,--my strength
+still renewed by the wondrous elixir.  No longer supported by her, what
+gazelle ever roved through its pasture with a bound more elastic than
+mine?
+
+"We came to a town, and my nurse placed before me a mirror.  I did not
+recognize myself.  In this town we rested, obscure, till the letter there
+reached me by which I learned that I was the offspring of love, and
+enriched by the care of a father recently dead.  Is it not clear that
+Louis Grayle was this father?"
+
+"If so, was the woman Ayesha your mother?"
+
+"The letter said that 'my mother had died in my infancy.'  Nevertheless,
+the care with which Ayesha had tended me induced a suspicion that made me
+ask her the very question you put.  She wept when I asked her, and said,
+'No, only my nurse.  And now I needed a nurse no more.' The day after I
+received the letter which announced an inheritance that allowed me to vie
+with the nobles of Europe, this woman left me, and went back to her
+tribe."
+
+"Have you never seen her since?"
+
+Margrave hesitated a moment, and then answered, though with seeming
+reluctance, "Yes, at Damascus.  Not many days after I was borne to that
+city by the strangers who found me half-dead on their road, I woke one
+morning to find her by my side.  And she said, 'In joy and in health you
+did not need me.  I am needed now."'
+
+"Did you then deprive yourself of one so devoted?  You have not made this
+long voyage--from Egypt to Australia--alone,--you, to whom wealth gave no
+excuse for privation?"
+
+"The woman came with me; and some chosen attendants.  I engaged to
+ourselves the vessel we sailed in."
+
+"Where have you left your companions?"
+
+"By this hour," answered Margrave, "they are in reach of my summons; and
+when you and I have achieved the discovery--in the results of which we
+shall share--I will exact no more from your aid.  I trust all that rests
+for my cure to my nurse and her swarthy attendants.  You will aid me now,
+as a matter of course; the physician whose counsel you needed to guide
+your own skill enjoins you to obey my whim--if whim you still call it; you
+will obey it, for on that whim rests your own sole hope of
+happiness,--you, who can love--I love nothing but life.  Has my frank
+narrative solved all the doubts that stood between you and me, in the
+great meeting-grounds of an interest in common?"
+
+"Solved all the doubts!  Your wild story but makes some the darker,
+leaving others untouched: the occult powers of which you boast, and some
+of which I have witnessed,--your very insight into my own household
+sorrows, into the interests I have, with yourself, in the truth of a faith
+so repugnant to reason--"
+
+"Pardon me," interrupted Margrave, with that slight curve of the lip which
+is half smile and half sneer, "if, in my account of myself, I omitted what
+I cannot explain, and you cannot conceive: let me first ask how many of
+the commonest actions of the commonest men are purely involuntary and
+wholly inexplicable.  When, for instance, you open your lips and utter a
+sentence, you have not the faintest idea beforehand what word will follow
+another.  When you move a muscle can you tell me the thought that prompts
+to the movement?  And, wholly unable thus to account for your own simple
+sympathies between impulse and act, do you believe that there exists a man
+upon earth who can read all the riddles in the heart and brain of another?
+Is it not true that not one drop of water, one atom of matter, ever really
+touches another?  Between each and each there is always a space, however
+infinitesimally small.  How, then, could the world go on, if every man
+asked another to make his whole history and being as lucid as daylight
+before he would buy and sell with him?  All interchange and alliance rest
+but on this,--an interest in common.  You and I have established that
+interest: all else, all you ask more, is superfluous.  Could I answer
+each doubt you would raise, still, whether the answer should please or
+revolt you, your reason would come back to the same starting-point,
+--namely, In one definite proposal have we two an interest in common?"
+
+And again Margrave laughed, not in mirth, but in mockery.  The laugh and
+the words that preceded it were not the laugh and the words of the young.
+Could it be possible that Louis Grayle had indeed revived to false youth
+in the person of Margrave, such might have been his laugh and such his
+words.  The whole mind of Margrave seemed to have undergone change since I
+last saw him; more rich in idea, more crafty even in candour, more
+powerful, more concentred.  As we see in our ordinary experience, that
+some infirmity, threatening dissolution, brings forth more vividly the
+reminiscences of early years, when impressions were vigorously stamped, so
+I might have thought that as Margrave neared the tomb, the memories he had
+retained from his former existence, in a being more amply endowed, more
+formidably potent, struggled back to the brain; and the mind that had
+lived in Louis Grayle moved the lips of the dying Margrave.
+
+"For the powers and the arts that it equally puzzles your reason to assign
+or deny to me," resumed my terrible guest, "I will say briefly but this:
+they come from faculties stored within myself, and doubtless conduce to my
+self-preservation,--faculties more or less, perhaps (so Van Helmont
+asserts), given to all men, though dormant in most; vivid and active in me
+because in me self-preservation has been and yet is the strong
+master-passion, or instinct; and because I have been taught how to use and
+direct such faculties by disciplined teachers,--some by Louis Grayle, the
+enchanter; some by my nurse, the singer of charmed songs.  But in much
+that I will to have done, I know no more than yourself how the agency
+acts.  Enough for me to will what I wish, and sink calmly into slumber,
+sure that the will would work somehow its way.  But when I have willed to
+know what, when known, should shape my own courses, I could see, without
+aid from your pitiful telescopes, all objects howsoever far.  What wonder
+in that?  Have you no learned puzzle-brained metaphysicians who tell you
+that space is but an idea, all this palpable universe an idea in the mind,
+and no more?  Why am I an enigma as dark as the Sibyls, and your
+metaphysicians as plain as a hornbook?"  Again the sardonic laugh.
+"Enough: let what I have said obscure or enlighten your guesses, we come
+back to the same link of union, which binds man to man, bids States arise
+from the desert, and foeman embrace as brothers.  I need you and you need
+me; without your aid my life is doomed; without my secret the breath will
+have gone from the lips of your Lilian before the sun of to-morrow is red
+on the hill-tops."
+
+"Fiend or juggler," I cried in rage, "you shall not so enslave and
+enthrall me by this mystic farrago and jargon.  Make your fantastic
+experiment on yourself if you will: trust to your arts and your powers.
+My Lilian's life shall not hang on your fiat.  I trust it--to--"
+
+"To what--to man's skill?  Hear what the sage of the college shall tell
+you, before I ask you again for your aid.  Do you trust to God's saving
+mercy?  Ah, of course you believe in a God?  Who, except a philosopher,
+can reason a Maker away?  But that the Maker will alter His courses to
+hear you; that, whether or not you trust in Him, or in your doctor, it
+will change by a hairbreadth the thing that must be--do you believe this,
+Allen Fenwick?"
+
+And there sat this reader of hearts! a boy in his aspect, mocking me and
+the graybeards of schools.
+
+I could listen no more; I turned to the door and fled down the stairs, and
+heard, as I fled, a low chant: feeble and faint, it was still the old
+barbaric chant, by which the serpent is drawn from its hole by the
+charmer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVII.
+
+To those of my readers who may seek with Julius Faber to explore, through
+intelligible causes, solutions of the marvels I narrate, Margrave's
+confession may serve to explain away much that my own superstitious
+beliefs had obscured.  To them Margrave is evidently the son of Louis
+Grayle.  The elixir of life is reduced to some simple restorative, owing
+much of its effect to the faith of a credulous patient: youth is so soon
+restored to its joy in the sun, with or without an elixir.  To them
+Margrave's arts of enchantment are reduced to those idiosyncrasies of
+temperament on which the disciples of Mesmer build up their
+theories,--exaggerated, in much, by my own superstitions; aided, in part,
+by such natural, purely physical magic as, explored by the ancient
+priest-crafts, is despised by the modern philosophies, and only remains
+occult because Science delights no more in the slides of the lantern which
+fascinated her childhood with simulated phantoms.  To them Margrave is,
+perhaps, an enthusiast, but, because an enthusiast, not less an impostor.
+"L'Homme se pique," says Charron.  Man cogs the dice for himself ere he
+rattles the box for his dupes.  Was there ever successful impostor who did
+not commence by a fraud on his own understanding?  Cradled in Orient
+Fableland, what though Margrave believes in its legends; in a wand, an
+elixir; in sorcerers or Afrites?  That belief in itself makes him keen to
+detect, and skilful to profit by, the latent but kindred credulities of
+others.  In all illustrations of Duper and Duped through the records of
+superstition--from the guile of a Cromwell, a Mahomet, down to the cheats
+of a gypsy--professional visionaries are amongst the astutest observers.
+The knowledge that Margrave had gained of my abode, of my affliction, or
+of the innermost thoughts in my mind, it surely demanded no preternatural
+aids to acquire.  An Old Bailey attorney could have got at the one, and
+any quick student of human hearts have readily mastered the other.  In
+fine, Margrave, thus rationally criticised, is no other prodigy (save in
+degree and concurrence of attributes simple, though not very common) than
+may be found in each alley that harbours a fortune-teller who has just
+faith enough in the stars or the cards to bubble himself while he swindles
+his victims; earnest, indeed, in the self-conviction that he is really a
+seer, but reading the looks of his listeners, divining the thoughts that
+induce them to listen, and acquiring by practice a startling ability to
+judge what the listeners will deem it most seer-like to read in the cards
+or divine from the stars.
+
+
+I leave this interpretation unassailed.  It is that which is the most
+probable; it is clearly that which, in a case not my own, I should have
+accepted; and yet I revolved and dismissed it.  The moment we deal with
+things beyond our comprehension, and in which our own senses are appealed
+to and baffled, we revolt from the Probable, as it seems to the senses of
+those who have not experienced what we have.  And the same principle of
+Wonder that led our philosophy up from inert ignorance into restless
+knowledge, now winding back into shadow land, reverses its rule by the
+way, and, at last, leaves us lost in the maze, our knowledge inert, and
+our ignorance restless.
+
+And putting aside all other reasons for hesitating to believe that
+Margrave was the son of Louis Grayle,--reasons which his own narrative
+might suggest,--was it not strange that Sir Philip Derval, who had
+instituted inquiries so minute, and reported them in his memoir with so
+faithful a care, should not have discovered that a youth, attended by the
+same woman who had attended Grayle, had disappeared from the town on the
+same night as Grayle himself disappeared?  But Derval had related
+truthfully, according to Margrave's account, the flight of Ayesha and her
+Indian servant, yet not alluded to the flight, not even to the existence
+of the boy, who must have been of no mean importance in the suite of Louis
+Grayle, if he were, indeed, the son whom Grayle had made his constant
+companion, and constituted his principal heir.  Not many minutes did I
+give myself up to the cloud of reflections through which no sunbeam of
+light forced its way.  One thought overmastered all; Margrave had
+threatened death to my Lilian, and warned me of what I should learn from
+the lips of Faber, "the sage of the college."  I stood, shuddering, at the
+door of my home; I did not dare to enter.
+
+"Allen," said a voice, in which my ear detected the unwonted tremulous
+faltering, "be firm,--be calm.  I keep my promise.  The hour is come in
+which you may again see the Lilian of old, mind to mind, soul to soul."
+
+Faber's hand took mine, and led me into the house.
+
+"You do, then, fear that this interview will be too much for her
+strength?" said I, whisperingly.
+
+"I cannot say; but she demands the interview, and I dare not refuse it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVIII.
+
+I left Faber on the stairs, and paused at the door of Lilian's room.  The
+door opened suddenly, noiselessly, and her mother came out with one hand
+before her face, and the other locked in Amy's, who was leading her as a
+child leads the blind.  Mrs. Ashleigh looked up, as I touched her, with a
+vacant, dreary stare.  She was not weeping, as was her womanly wont in
+every pettier grief, but Amy was.  No word was exchanged between us.  I
+entered, and closed the door; my eyes turned mechanically to the corner in
+which was placed the small virgin bed, with its curtains white as a
+shroud.  Lilian was not there.  I looked around, and saw her half reclined
+on a couch near the window.  She was dressed, and with care.  Was not that
+her bridal robe?
+
+"Allen!  Allen!" she murmured.  "Again, again my Allen--again, again your
+Lilian!"  And, striving in vain to rise, she stretched out her arms in the
+yearning of reunited love.  And as I knelt beside her, those arms closed
+round me for the first time in the frank, chaste, holy tenderness of a
+wife's embrace.
+
+"Ah!" she said, in her low voice (her voice, like Cordelia's, was ever
+low), "all has come back to me,--all that I owe to your protecting, noble,
+trustful, guardian love!"
+
+"Hush! hush! the gratitude rests with me; it is so sweet to love, to
+trust, to guard! my own, my beautiful--still my beautiful!  Suffering has
+not dimmed the light of those dear eyes to me!  Put your lips to my
+ear.  Whisper but these words: 'I love you, and for your sake I wish to
+live.'"
+
+"For your sake, I pray--with my whole weak human heart--I pray to live!
+Listen.  Some day hereafter, if I am spared, under the purple blossoms of
+yonder waving trees I shall tell you all, as I see it now; all that
+darkened or shone on me in my long dream, and before the dream closed
+around me, like a night in which cloud and star chase each other!  Some
+day hereafter, some quiet, sunlit, happy, happy day!  But now, all I would
+say is this: Before that dreadful morning--"  Here she paused, shuddered,
+and passionately burst forth, "Allen, Allen! you did not believe that
+slanderous letter!  God bless you!  God bless you!  Great-hearted,
+high-souled--God bless you, my darling! my husband!  And He will!  Pray to
+Him humbly as I do, and He will bless you."  She stooped and kissed away
+my tears; then she resumed, feebly, meekly, sorrowfully,--
+
+"Before that morning I was not worthy of such a heart, such a love as
+yours.  No, no; hear me.  Not that a thought of love for another ever
+crossed me!  Never, while conscious and reasoning, was I untrue to you,
+even in fancy.  But I was a child,--wayward as the child who pines for
+what earth cannot give, and covets the moon for a toy.  Heaven had been so
+kind to my lot on earth, and yet with my lot on earth I was secretly
+discontented.  When I felt that you loved me, and my heart told me that I
+loved again, I said to myself, 'Now the void that my soul finds on earth
+will be filled.'  I longed for your coming, and yet when you went I
+murmured, 'But is this the ideal of which I have dreamed?'  I asked for an
+impossible sympathy.  Sympathy with what?  Nay, smile on me,
+dearest!--sympathy with what?  I could not have said.  Ah, Allen, then,
+then, I was not worthy of you!  Infant that I was, I asked you to
+understand me: now I know that I am a woman, and my task is to study you.
+Do I make myself clear?  Do you forgive me?  I was not untrue to you; I
+was untrue to my own duties in life.  I believed, in my vain conceit, that
+a mortal's dim vision of heaven raised me above the earth; I did not
+perceive the truth that earth is a part of the same universe as heaven!
+Now, perhaps, in the awful affliction that darkened my reason, my soul has
+been made more clear.  As if to chastise but to teach me, my soul has been
+permitted to indulge its own presumptuous desire; it has wandered forth
+from the trammels of mortal duties and destinies; it comes back, alarmed
+by the dangers of its own rash and presumptuous escape from the tasks
+which it should desire upon earth to perform.  Allen, Allen, I am less
+unworthy of you now!  Perhaps in my darkness one rapid glimpse of the true
+world of spirit has been vouchsafed to me.  If so, how unlike to the
+visions my childhood indulged as divine!  Now, while I know still more
+deeply that there is a world for the angels, I know, also, that the mortal
+must pass through probation in the world of mortals.  Oh, may I pass
+through it with you, grieving in your griefs, rejoicing in your joy!"
+
+Here language failed her.  Again the dear arms embraced me, and the dear
+face, eloquent with love, hid itself on my human breast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIX.
+
+That interview is over!  Again I am banished from Lilian's room; the
+agitation, the joy of that meeting has overstrained her enfeebled nerves.
+Convulsive tremblings of the whole frame, accompanied with vehement sobs,
+succeeded our brief interchange of sweet and bitter thoughts.  Faber, in
+tearing me from her side, imperiously and sternly warned me that the sole
+chance yet left of preserving her life was in the merciful suspense of the
+emotions that my presence excited.  He and Amy resumed their place in her
+chamber.  Even her mother shared my sentence of banishment.  So Mrs.
+Ashleigh and I sat facing each other in the room below; over me a leaden
+stupor had fallen, and I heard, as a voice from afar or in a dream, the
+mother's murmured wailings,
+
+"She will die! she will die!  Her eyes have the same heavenly look as my
+Gilbert's on the day on which his closed forever.  Her very words are his
+last words,--'Forgive me all my faults to you.' She will die! she will
+die!"
+
+Hours thus passed away.  At length Faber entered the room; he spoke first
+to Mrs. Ashleigh,--meaningless soothings, familiar to the lips of all who
+pass from the chamber of the dying to the presence of mourners, and know
+that it is a falsehood to say "hope," and a mockery as yet, to say,
+"endure."
+
+But he led her away to her own room, docile as a wearied child led to
+sleep, stayed with her some time, and then returned to me, pressing me to
+his breast father-like.
+
+"No hope! no hope!" said I, recoiling from his embrace.  "You are silent.
+Speak! speak!  Let me know the worst."
+
+"I have a hope, yet I scarcely dare to bid you share it; for it grows
+rather out of my heart as man than my experience as physician.  I cannot
+think that her soul would be now so reconciled to earth, so fondly, so
+earnestly, cling to this mortal life, if it were about to be summoned
+away.  You know how commonly even the sufferers who have dreaded death the
+most become calmly resigned to its coming, when death visibly reveals
+itself out from the shadows in which its shape has been guessed and not
+seen.  As it is a bad sign for life when the patient has lost all will to
+live on, so there is hope while the patient, yet young and with no
+perceptible breach in the great centres of life (however violently their
+forts may be stormed), has still intense faith in recovery, perhaps drawn
+(who can say?) from the whispers conveyed from above to the soul.
+
+"I cannot bring myself to think that all the uses for which a reason,
+always so lovely even in its errors, has been restored, are yet fulfilled.
+It seems to me as if your union, as yet so imperfect, has still for its
+end that holy life on earth by which two mortal beings strengthen each
+other for a sphere of existence to which this is the spiritual ladder.
+Through yourself I have hope yet for her.  Gifted with powers that rank
+you high in the manifold orders of man,--thoughtful, laborious, and brave;
+with a heart that makes intellect vibrate to every fine touch of humanity;
+in error itself, conscientious; in delusion, still eager for truth; in
+anger, forgiving; in wrong, seeking how to repair; and, best of all,
+strong in a love which the mean would have shrunk to defend from the fangs
+of the slanderer,--a love, raising passion itself out of the realm of the
+senses, made sublime by the sorrows that tried its devotion,--with all
+these noble proofs in yourself of a being not meant to end here, your life
+has stopped short in its uses, your mind itself has been drifted, a bark
+without rudder or pilot, over seas without shore, under skies without
+stars.  And wherefore?  Because the mind you so haughtily vaunted has
+refused its companion and teacher in Soul.
+
+"And therefore, through you, I hope that she will be spared yet to live
+on; she, in whom soul has been led dimly astray, by unheeding the checks
+and the definite goals which the mind is ordained to prescribe to its
+wanderings while here; the mind taking thoughts from the actual and
+visible world, and the soul but vague glimpses and hints from the instinct
+of its ultimate heritage.  Each of you two seems to me as yet incomplete,
+and your destinies yet uncompleted.  Through the bonds of the heart,
+through the trials of time, ye have both to consummate your marriage.  I
+do not--believe me--I do not say this in the fanciful wisdom of allegory
+and type, save that, wherever deeply examined, allegory and type run
+through all the most commonplace phases of outward and material life.  I
+hope, then, that she may yet be spared to you; hope it, not from my skill
+as physician, but my inward belief as a Christian.  To perfect your own
+being and end, 'Ye will need one another!'"
+
+I started--the very words that Lilian had heard in her vision!
+
+"But," resumed Faber, "how can I presume to trace the numberless links of
+effect up to the First Cause, far off--oh; far off--out of the scope of my
+reason.  I leave that to philosophers, who would laugh my meek hope to
+scorn.  Possibly, probably, where I, whose calling has been but to save
+flesh from the worm, deem that the life of your Lilian is needed yet, to
+develop and train your own convictions of soul, Heaven in its wisdom may
+see that her death would instruct you far more than her life.  I have
+said, Be prepared for either,--wisdom through joy, or wisdom through
+grief.  Enough that, looking only through the mechanism by which this
+moral world is impelled and improved, you know that cruelty is impossible
+to wisdom.  Even a man, or man's law, is never wise but when merciful.
+But mercy has general conditions; and that which is mercy to the myriads
+may seem hard to the one, and that which seems hard to the one in the pang
+of a moment may be mercy when viewed by the eye that looks on through
+eternity."
+
+And from all this discourse--of which I now, at calm distance of time,
+recall every word--my human, loving heart bore away for the moment but
+this sentence, "Ye will need one another;" so that I cried out, "Life,
+life, life!  Is there no hope for her life?  Have you no hope as
+physician?  I am a physician, too; I will see her.  I will judge.  I will
+not be banished from my post."
+
+"Judge, then, as physician, and let the responsibility rest with you.  At
+this moment, all convulsion, all struggle, has ceased; the frame is at
+rest.  Look on her, and perhaps only the physician's eye could distinguish
+her state from death.  It is not sleep, it is not trance, it is not the
+dooming coma from which there is no awaking.  Shall I call it by the name
+received in our schools?  Is it the catalepsy in which life is suspended,
+but consciousness acute?  She is motionless, rigid; it is but with a
+strain of my own sense that I know that the breath still breathes, and the
+heart still beats.  But I am convinced that though she can neither speak,
+nor stir, nor give sign, she is fully, sensitively conscious of all that
+passes around her.  She is like those who have seen the very coffin
+carried into their chamber, and been unable to cry out, 'Do not bury me
+alive!'  Judge then for yourself, with this intense consciousness and this
+impotence to evince it, what might be the effect of your presence,--first
+an agony of despair, and then the complete extinction of life!"
+
+"I have known but one such case,--a mother whose heart was wrapped up in a
+suffering infant.  She had lain for two days and two nights, still, as if
+in her shroud.  All save myself said, 'Life is gone.'  I said, 'Life still
+is there.' They brought in the infant, to try what effect its presence
+would produce; then her lips moved, and the hands crossed upon her bosom
+trembled."
+
+"And the result?" exclaimed Faber, eagerly.  "If the result of your
+experience sanction your presence, come; the sight of the babe rekindled
+life?"
+
+"No; extinguished its last spark!  I will not enter Lilian's room.  I will
+go away,--away from the house itself.  That acute consciousness!  I know
+it well!  She may even hear me move in the room below, hear me speak at
+this moment.  Go back to her, go back!  But if hers be the state which I
+have known in another, which may be yet more familiar to persons of far
+ampler experience than mine, there is no immediate danger of death.  The
+state will last through to-day, through to-night, perhaps for days to
+come.  Is it so?"
+
+"I believe that for at least twelve hours there will be no change in her
+state.  I believe also that if she recover from it, calm and refreshed, as
+from a sleep, the danger of death will have passed away."
+
+"And for twelve hours my presence would be hurtful?"
+
+"Rather say fatal, if my diagnosis be right."
+
+I wrung my friend's hand, and we parted.
+
+Oh, to lose her now!--now that her love and her reason had both returned,
+each more vivid than before!  Futile, indeed, might be Margrave's boasted
+secret; but at least in that secret was hope.  In recognized science I saw
+only despair.
+
+And at that thought all dread of this mysterious visitor vanished,--all
+anxiety to question more of his attributes or his history.  His life
+itself became to me dear and precious.  What if it should fail me in the
+steps of the process, whatever that was, by which the life of my Lilian
+might be saved!
+
+The shades of evening were now closing in.  I remembered that I had left
+Margrave without even food for many hours.  I stole round to the back of
+the house, filled a basket with elements more generous than those of the
+former day; extracted fresh drugs from my stores, and, thus laden, hurried
+back to the hut.  I found Margrave in the room below, seated on his
+mysterious coffer, leaning his face on his hand.  When I entered, he
+looked up, and said,--
+
+"You have neglected me.  My strength is waning.  Give me more of the
+cordial, for we have work before us to-night, and I need support."
+
+He took for granted my assent to his wild experiment; and he was right.
+
+I administered the cordial.  I placed food before him, and this time he
+did not eat with repugnance.  I poured out wine, and he drank it
+sparingly, but with ready compliance, saying, "In perfect health, I looked
+upon wine as poison; now it is like a foretaste of the glorious elixir."
+
+After he had thus recruited himself, he seemed to acquire an energy that
+startlingly contrasted his languor the day before; the effort of breathing
+was scarcely perceptible; the colour came back to his cheeks; his bended
+frame rose elastic and erect.
+
+"If I understood you rightly," said I, "the experiment you ask me to aid
+can be accomplished in a single night?"
+
+"In a single night,--this night."
+
+"Command me.  Why not begin at once?  What apparatus or chemical agencies
+do you need?"
+
+"Ah!" said Margrave, "formerly, how I was misled!  Formerly, how my
+conjectures blundered!  I thought, when I asked you to give a month to the
+experiment I wish to make, that I should need the subtlest skill of the
+chemist.  I then believed, with Van Helmont, that the principle of life is
+a gas, and that the secret was but in the mode by which the gas might be
+rightly administered.  But now all that I need is contained in this
+coffer, save one very simple material,--fuel sufficient for a steady fire
+for six hours.  I see even that is at hand, piled up in your outhouse.
+And now for the substance itself,--to that you must guide me."
+
+"Explain."
+
+"Near this very spot is there not gold--in mines yet undiscovered?--and
+gold of the purest metal?"
+
+"There is.  What then?  Do you, with the alchemists, blend in one
+discovery gold and life?"
+
+"No.  But it is only where the chemistry of earth or of man produces gold,
+that the substance from which the great pabulum of life is extracted by
+ferment can be found.  Possibly, in the attempts at that transmutation of
+metals, which I think your own great chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, allowed
+might be possible, but held not to be worth the cost of the
+process,--possibly, in those attempts, some scanty grains of this
+substance were found by the alchemists, in the crucible, with grains of
+the metal as niggardly yielded by pitiful mimicry of Nature's stupendous
+laboratory; and from such grains enough of the essence might, perhaps,
+have been drawn forth, to add a few years of existence to some feeble
+graybeard,--granting, what rests on no proofs, that some of the alchemists
+reached an age rarely given to man.  But it is not in the miserly
+crucible, it is in the matrix of Nature herself, that we must seek in
+prolific abundance Nature's grand principle,--life.  As the loadstone is
+rife with the magnetic virtue, as amber contains the electric, so in this
+substance, to which we yet want a name, is found the bright life-giving
+fluid.  In the old goldmines of Asia and Europe the substance exists, but
+can rarely be met with.  The soil for its nutriment may there be well-nigh
+exhausted.  It is here, where Nature herself is all vital with youth, that
+the nutriment of youth must be sought.  Near this spot is gold; guide me
+to it."
+
+"You cannot come with me.  The place which I know as auriferous is some
+miles distant, the way rugged.  You can not walk to it.  It is true I have
+horses, but--"
+
+"Do you think I have come this distance and not foreseen and forestalled
+all that I want for my object?  Trouble your self not with conjectures how
+I can arrive at the place.  I have provided the means to arrive at and
+leave it.  My litter and its bearers are in reach of my call.  Give me
+your arm to the rising ground, fifty yards from your door."
+
+I obeyed mechanically, stifling all surprise.  I had made my resolve, and
+admitted no thought that could shake it.  When we reached the summit of
+the grassy hillock, which sloped from the road that led to the seaport,
+Margrave, after pausing to recover breath, lifted up his voice, in a key,
+not loud, but shrill and slow and prolonged, half cry and half chant, like
+the nighthawk's.  Through the air--so limpid and still, bringing near far
+objects, far sounds--the voice pierced its way, artfully pausing, till
+wave after wave of the atmosphere bore and transmitted it on.
+
+In a few minutes the call seemed re-echoed, so exactly, so cheerily, that
+for the moment I thought that the note was the mimicry of the shy mocking
+Lyre-Bird, which mimics so merrily all that it hears in its coverts, from
+the whir of the locust to the howl of the wild dog.
+
+"What king," said the mystical charmer, and as he spoke he carelessly
+rested his hand on my shoulder, so that I trembled to feel that this dread
+son of Nature, Godless and soulless, who had been--and, my heart
+whispered, who still could be--my bane and mind-darkener, leaned upon me
+for support, as the spoilt younger-born on his brother,--"what king," said
+this cynical mocker, with his beautiful boyish face,--"what king in your
+civilized Europe has the sway of a chief of the East?  What link is so
+strong between mortal and mortal, as that between lord and slave?  I
+transport yon poor fools from the land of their birth; they preserve here
+their old habits,--obedience and awe.  They would wait till they starved
+in the solitude,--wait to hearken and answer my call.  And I, who thus
+rule them, or charm them--I use and despise them.  They know that, and yet
+serve me!  Between you and me, my philosopher, there is but one thing
+worth living for,--life for oneself."
+
+Is it age, is it youth, that thus shocks all my sense, in my solemn
+completeness of man?  Perhaps, in great capitals, young men of pleasure
+will answer, "It is youth; and we think what he says!"  Young friends, I
+do not believe you.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXX.
+
+Along the grass-track I saw now, under the moon, just risen, a strange
+procession, never seen before in Australian pastures.  It moved on,
+noiselessly but quickly.  We descended the hillock, and met it on the
+way,--a sable litter, borne by four men, in unfamiliar Eastern garments;
+two other servitors, more bravely dressed, with yataghans and
+silver-hilted pistols in their belts, preceded this sombre equipage.
+Perhaps Margrave divined the disdainful thought that passed through my
+mind, vaguely and half-unconsciously; for he said, with a hollow, bitter
+laugh that had replaced the lively peal of his once melodious mirth,--
+
+"A little leisure and a little gold, and your raw colonist, too, will have
+the tastes of a pacha."
+
+I made no answer.  I had ceased to care who and what was my tempter.  To
+me his whole being was resolved into one problem: Had he a secret by which
+death could be turned from Lilian?
+
+But now, as the litter halted, from the long dark shadow which it cast
+upon the turf the figure of a woman emerged and stood before us.  The
+outlines of her shape were lost in the loose folds of a black mantle, and
+the features of her face were hidden by a black veil, except only the
+dark, bright, solemn eyes.  Her stature was lofty, her bearing majestic,
+whether in movement or repose.
+
+Margrave accosted her in some language unknown to me.  She replied in what
+seemed to me the same tongue.  The tones of her voice were sweet, but
+inexpressibly mournful.  The words that they uttered appeared intended to
+warn, or deprecate, or dissuade; but they called to Margrave's brow a
+lowering frown, and drew from his lips a burst of unmistakable anger.  The
+woman rejoined, in the same melancholy music of voice.  And Margrave then,
+leaning his arm upon her shoulder, as he had leaned it on mine, drew her
+away from the group into a neighbouring copse of the flowering
+eucalypti,--mystic trees, never changing the hues of their pale-green
+leaves, ever shifting the tints of their ash-gray, shedding bark.  For
+some moments I gazed on the two human forms, dimly seen by the glinting
+moonlight through the gaps in the foliage.  Then turning away my eyes, I
+saw, standing close at my side, a man whom I had not noticed before.  His
+footstep, as it stole to me, had fallen on the sward without sound.  His
+dress, though Oriental, differed from that of his companions, both in
+shape and colour; fitting close to the breast, leaving the arms bare to
+the elbow, and of a uniform ghastly white, as are the cerements of the
+grave.  His visage was even darker than those of the Syrians or Arabs
+behind him, and his features were those of a bird of prey,--the beak of
+the eagle, but the eye of the vulture.  His cheeks were hollow; the arms,
+crossed on his breast, were long and fleshless.  Yet in that skeleton form
+there was a something which conveyed the idea of a serpent's suppleness
+and strength; and as the hungry, watchful eyes met my own startled gaze, I
+recoiled impulsively with that inward warning of danger which is conveyed
+to man, as to inferior animals, in the very aspect of the creatures that
+sting or devour.  At my movement the man inclined his head in the
+submissive Eastern salutation, and spoke in his foreign tongue, softly,
+humbly, fawningly, to judge by his tone and his gesture.
+
+I moved yet farther away from him with loathing, and now the human thought
+flashed upon me: was I, in truth, exposed to no danger in trusting myself
+to the mercy of the weird and remorseless master of those hirelings from
+the East,--seven men in number, two at least of them formidably armed, and
+docile as bloodhounds to the hunter, who has only to show them their
+prey?  But fear of man like myself is not my weakness; where fear found
+its way to my heart, it was through the doubts or the fancies in which man
+like myself disappeared in the attributes, dark and unknown, which we give
+to a fiend or a spectre.  And, perhaps, if I could have paused to analyze
+my own sensations, the very presence of this escort-creatures of flesh and
+blood-lessened the dread of my incomprehensible tempter.  Rather, a
+hundred times, front and defy those seven Eastern slaves--I, haughty son
+of the Anglo-Saxon who conquers all races because he fears no odds--than
+have seen again on the walls of my threshold the luminous, bodiless
+Shadow!  Besides: Lilian!  Lilian! for one chance of saving her life,
+however wild and chimerical that chance might be, I would have shrunk not
+a foot from the march of an army.
+
+Thus reassured and thus resolved, I advanced, with a smile of disdain, to
+meet Margrave and his veiled companion, as they now came from the moonlit
+copse.
+
+"Well," I said to him, with an irony that unconsciously mimicked his own,
+"have you taken advice with your nurse?  I assume that the dark form by
+your side is that of Ayesha."
+
+The woman looked at me from her sable veil, with her steadfast solemn
+eyes, and said, in English, though with a foreign accent: "The nurse born
+in Asia is but wise through her love; the pale son of Europe is wise
+through his art.  The nurse says, 'Forbear!'  Do you say, 'Adventure'?"
+
+"Peace!" exclaimed Margrave, stamping his foot on the ground.  "I take no
+counsel from either; it is for me to resolve, for you to obey, and for him
+to aid.  Night is come, and we waste it; move on."
+
+The woman made no reply, nor did I.  He took my arm and walked back to the
+hut.  The barbaric escort followed.  When we reached the door of the
+building, Margrave said a few words to the woman and to the
+litter-bearers.  They entered the but with us.  Margrave pointed out to
+the woman his coffer, to the men the fuel stowed in the outhouse.  Both
+were borne away and placed within the litter.  Meanwhile, I took from the
+table, on which it was carelessly thrown, the light hatchet that I
+habitually carried with me in my rambles.
+
+"Do you think that you need that idle weapon?" said Margrave.  "Do you
+fear the good faith of my swarthy attendants?"
+
+"Nay, take the hatchet yourself; its use is to sever the gold from the
+quartz in which we may find it embedded, or to clear, as this shovel,
+which will also be needed, from the slight soil above it, the ore that the
+mine in the mountain flings forth, as the sea casts its waifs on the
+sands."
+
+"Give me your hand, fellow-labourer!" said Margrave, joyfully.  "Ah, there
+is no faltering terror in this pulse!  I was not mistaken in the Man.
+What rests, but the Place and the Hour?  I shall live!  I shall live!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXI.
+
+Margrave now entered the litter, and the Veiled Woman drew the black
+curtains round him.  I walked on, as the guide, some yards in advance.
+The air was still, heavy, and parched with the breath of the Australasian
+sirocco.
+
+We passed through the meadow-lands, studded with slumbering flocks; we
+followed the branch of the creek, which was linked to its source in the
+mountains by many a trickling waterfall; we threaded the gloom of stunted,
+misshapen trees, gnarled with the stringy bark which makes one of the
+signs of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon, now in all
+her pomp of light, mid-heaven amongst her subject stars, gleamed through
+the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics of antediluvian
+races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendour upon the hollows of
+the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler
+sward, covering the gold below,--Gold, the dumb symbol of organized
+Matter's great mystery, storing in itself, according as Mind, the informer
+of Matter, can distinguish its uses, evil and good, bane and blessing.
+
+Hitherto the Veiled Woman had remained in the rear, with the white-robed,
+skeleton-like image that had crept to my side unawares with its noiseless
+step.  Thus in each winding turn of the difficult path at which the convoy
+following behind me came into sight, I had seen, first, the two
+gayly-dressed, armed men, next the black bier-like litter, and last the
+Black-veiled Woman and the White-robed Skeleton.
+
+But now, as I halted on the tableland, backed by the mountain and fronting
+the valley, the woman left her companion, passed by the litter and the
+armed men, and paused by my side, at the mouth of the moonlit cavern.
+
+There for a moment she stood, silent, the procession below mounting upward
+laboriously and slow; then she turned to me, and her veil was withdrawn.
+
+The face on which I gazed was wondrously beautiful, and severely awful.
+There was neither youth nor age, but beauty, mature and majestic as that
+of a marble Demeter.
+
+"Do you believe in that which you seek?" she asked, in her foreign,
+melodious, melancholy accents.
+
+"I have no belief," was my answer.  "True science has none.  True science
+questions all things, takes nothing upon credit.  It knows but three
+states of the mind,--Denial, Conviction, and that vast interval between
+the two, which is not belief, but suspense of judgment."
+
+The woman let fall her veil, moved from me, and seated herself on a crag
+above that cleft between mountain and creek, to which, when I had first
+discovered the gold that the land nourished, the rain from the clouds had
+given the rushing life of the cataract; but which now, in the drought and
+the hush of the skies, was but a dead pile of stones.
+
+The litter now ascended the height: its bearers halted; a lean hand tore
+the curtains aside, and Margrave descended, leaning, this time, not on the
+Black-veiled Woman, but on the White-robed Skeleton.
+
+There, as he stood, the moon shone full on his wasted form; on his face,
+resolute, cheerful, and proud, despite its hollowed outlines and sicklied
+hues.  He raised his head, spoke in the language unknown to me, and the
+armed men and the litter-bearers grouped round him, bending low, their
+eyes fixed on the ground.  The Veiled Woman rose slowly and came to his
+side, motioning away, with a mute sign, the ghastly form on which he
+leaned, and passing round him silently, instead, her own sustaining arm.
+Margrave spoke again a few sentences, of which I could not even guess the
+meaning.  When he had concluded, the armed men and the litter-bearers came
+nearer to his feet, knelt down, and kissed his hand.  They then rose, and
+took from the bier-like vehicle the coffer and the fuel.  This done, they
+lifted again the litter, and again, preceded by the armed men, the
+procession descended down the sloping hillside, down into the valley
+below.
+
+Margrave now whispered, for some moments, into the ear of the hideous
+creature who had made way for the Veiled Woman.  The grim skeleton bowed
+his head submissively, and strode noiselessly away through the long
+grasses,--the slender stems, trampled under his stealthy feet, relifting
+themselves, as after a passing wind.  And thus he, too, sank out of sight
+down into the valley below.  On the tableland of the hill remained only we
+three,--Margrave, myself, and the Veiled Woman.
+
+She had reseated herself apart, on the gray crag above the dried torrent.
+He stood at the entrance of the cavern, round the sides of which clustered
+parasital plants, with flowers of all colours, some amongst them opening
+their petals and exhaling their fragrance only in the hours of night; so
+that, as his form filled up the jaws of the dull arch, obscuring the
+moonbeam that strove to pierce the shadows that slept within, it stood
+now--wan and blighted--as I had seen it first, radiant and joyous,
+literally "framed in blooms."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXII.
+
+"So," said Margrave, turning to me, "under the soil that spreads around us
+lies the gold which to you and to me is at this moment of no value, except
+as a guide to its twin-born,--the regenerator of life!"
+
+"You have not yet described to me the nature of the substance which we are
+to explore, nor of the process by which the virtues you impute to it are
+to be extracted."
+
+"Let us first find the gold, and instead of describing the life-amber, so
+let me call it, I will point it out to your own eyes.  As to the process,
+your share in it is so simple, that you will ask me why I seek aid from a
+chemist.  The life-amber, when found, has but to be subjected to heat and
+fermentation for six hours; it will be placed, in a small caldron which
+that coffer contains, over the fire which that fuel will feed.  To give
+effect to the process, certain alkalies and other ingredients are
+required; but these are prepared, and mine is the task to commingle them.
+From your science as chemist I need and ask nought.  In you I have sought
+only the aid of a man."
+
+"If that be so, why, indeed, seek me at all?  Why not confide in those
+swarthy attendants, who doubtless are slaves to your orders?"
+
+"Confide in slaves! when the first task enjoined to them would be to
+discover, and refrain from purloining gold!  Seven such unscrupulous
+knaves, or even one such, and I, thus defenceless and feeble!  Such is not
+the work that wise masters confide to fierce slaves.  But that is the
+least of the reasons which exclude them from my choice, and fix my choice
+of assistant on you.  Do you forget what I told you of the danger which
+the Dervish declared no bribe I could offer could tempt him a second time
+to brave?"
+
+"I remember now; those words had passed away from my mind."
+
+"And because they had passed away from your mind, I chose you for my
+comrade.  I need a man by whom danger is scorned."
+
+"But in the process of which you tell me I see no possible danger unless
+the ingredients you mix in your caldron have poisonous fumes."
+
+"It is not that.  The ingredients I use are not poisons."
+
+"What other danger, except you dread your own Eastern slaves?  But, if so,
+why lead them to these solitudes; and, if so, why not bid me be armed?"
+
+"The Eastern slaves, fulfilling my commands, wait for my summons where
+their eyes cannot see what we do.  The danger is of a kind in which the
+boldest son of the East would be more craven, perhaps, than the daintiest
+Sybarite of Europe, who would shrink from a panther and laugh at a ghost.
+In the creed of the Dervish, and of all who adventure into that realm of
+nature which is closed to philosophy and open to magic, there are races in
+the magnitude of space unseen as animalcules in the world of a drop.  For
+the tribes of the drop, science has its microscope.  Of the host of yon
+azure Infinite magic gains sight, and through them gains command over
+fluid conductors that link all the parts of creation.  Of these races,
+some are wholly indifferent to man, some benign to him, and some dreadly
+hostile.  In all the regular and prescribed conditions of mortal being,
+this magic realm seems as blank and tenantless as yon vacant air.  But
+when a seeker of powers beyond the rude functions by which man plies the
+clockwork that measures his hours, and stops when its chain reaches the
+end of its coil, strives to pass over those boundaries at which philosophy
+says, 'Knowledge ends,'--then he is like all other travellers in regions
+unknown; he must propitiate or brave the tribes that are hostile,--must
+depend for his life on the tribes that are friendly.  Though your science
+discredits the alchemist's dogmas, your learning informs you that all
+alchemists were not ignorant impostors; yet those whose discoveries prove
+them to have been the nearest allies to your practical knowledge, ever
+hint in their mystical works at the reality of that realm which is open to
+magic,--ever hint that some means less familiar than furnace and bellows
+are essential to him who explores the elixir of life.  He who once quaffs
+that elixir, obtains in his very veins the bright fluid by which he
+transmits the force of his will to agencies dormant in nature, to giants
+unseen in the space.  And here, as he passes the boundary which divides
+his allotted and normal mortality from the regions and races that magic
+alone can explore, so, here, he breaks down the safeguard between himself
+and the tribes that are hostile.  Is it not ever thus between man and man?
+Let a race the most gentle and timid and civilized dwell on one side a
+river or mountain, and another have home in the region beyond, each, if it
+pass not the intervening barrier, may with each live in peace.  But if
+ambitious adventurers scale the mountain, or cross the river, with design
+to subdue and enslave the population they boldly invade, then all the
+invaded arise in wrath and defiance,--the neighbours are changed into
+foes.  And therefore this process--by which a simple though rare material
+of nature is made to yield to a mortal the boon of a life which brings,
+with its glorious resistance to Time, desires and faculties to subject to
+its service beings that dwell in the earth and the air and the deep--has
+ever been one of the same peril which an invader must brave when he
+crosses the bounds of his nation.  By this key alone you unlock all the
+cells of the alchemist's lore; by this alone understand how a labour,
+which a chemist's crudest apprentice could perform, has baffled the giant
+fathers of all your dwarfed children of science.  Nature, that stores this
+priceless boon, seems to shrink from conceding it to man; the invisible
+tribes that abhor him, oppose themselves to the gain that might give them
+a master.  The duller of those who were the life-seekers of old would have
+told you how some chance, trivial, unlooked-for, foiled their grand hope
+at the very point of fruition,--some doltish mistake, some improvident
+oversight, a defect in the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or
+a flaw in the bellows, or a pupil who failed to replenish the fuel, by
+falling asleep by the furnace.  The invisible foes seldom vouchsafe to
+make themselves visible where they can frustrate the bungler, as they mock
+at his toils from their ambush.  But the mightier adventurers, equally
+foiled in despite of their patience and skill, would have said, 'Not with
+us rests the fault; we neglected no caution, we failed from no oversight.
+But out from the caldron dread faces arose, and the spectres or demons
+dismayed and baffled us.' Such, then, is the danger which seems so
+appalling to a son of the East, as it seemed to a sees in the dark age of
+Europe.  But we can deride all its threats, you and I.  For myself, I own
+frankly I take all the safety that the charms and resources of magic
+bestow.  You, for your safety, have the cultured and disciplined reason
+which reduces all fantasies to nervous impressions; and I rely on the
+courage of one who has questioned, unquailing, the Luminous Shadow, and
+wrested from the hand of the magician himself the wand which concentred
+the wonders of will!"
+
+To this strange and long discourse I listened without interruption, and
+now quietly answered,--
+
+"I do not merit the trust you affect in my courage; but I am now on my
+guard against the cheats of the fancy, and the fumes of a vapour can
+scarcely bewilder the brain in the open air of this mountain-land.  I
+believe in no races like those which you tell me lie viewless in space, as
+do gases.  I believe not in magic; I ask not its aids, and I dread not its
+terrors.  For the rest, I am confident of one mournful courage,--the
+courage that comes from despair.  I submit to your guidance, whatever it
+be, as a sufferer whom colleges doom to the grave submits to the quack who
+says, 'Take my specific and live!'  My life is nought in itself; my life
+lives in another.  You and I are both brave from despair; you would turn
+death from yourself, I would turn death from one I love more than myself.
+Both know how little aid we can win from the colleges, and both,
+therefore, turn to the promises most audaciously cheering.  Dervish or
+magician, alchemist or phantom, what care you and I?  And if they fail us,
+what then?  They cannot fail us more than the colleges do!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXIII.
+
+The gold has been gained with an easy labour.  I knew where to seek for
+it, whether under the turf or in the bed of the creek.  But Margrave's
+eyes, hungrily gazing round every spot from which the ore was disburied,
+could not detect the substance of which he alone knew the outward
+appearance.  I had begun to believe that, even in the description given to
+him of this material, he had been credulously duped, and that no such
+material existed, when, coming back from the bed of the watercourse, I saw
+a faint yellow gleam amidst the roots of a giant parasite plant, the
+leaves and blossoms of which climbed up the sides of the cave with its
+antediluvian relics.  The gleam was the gleam of gold, and on removing the
+loose earth round the roots of the plant, we came on--No, I will not, I
+dare not, describe it.  The gold-digger would cast it aside, the
+naturalist would pause not to heed it; and did I describe it, and
+chemistry deign to subject it to analysis, could chemistry alone detach or
+discover its boasted virtues?
+
+Its particles, indeed, are very minute, not seeming readily to crystallize
+with each other; each in itself of uniform shape and size, spherical as
+the egg which contains the germ of life, and small as the egg from which
+the life of an insect may quicken.
+
+But Margrave's keen eye caught sight of the atoms upcast by the light of
+the moon.  He exclaimed to me, "Found!  I shall live!"  And then, as he
+gathered up the grains with tremulous hands, he called out to the Veiled
+Woman, hitherto still seated motionless on the crag.  At his word she rose
+and went to the place bard by, where the fuel was piled, busying herself
+there.  I had no leisure to heed her.  I continued my search in the soft
+and yielding soil that time and the decay of vegetable life had
+accumulated over the Pre-Adamite strata on which the arch of the cave
+rested its mighty keystone.
+
+
+When we had collected of these particles about thrice as much as a man
+might hold in his hand, we seemed to have exhausted their bed.  We
+continued still to find gold, but no more of the delicate substance, to
+which, in our sight, gold was as dross.
+
+"Enough," then said Margrave, reluctantly desisting.  "What we have gained
+already will suffice for a life thrice as long as legend attributes to
+Haroun.  I shall live,--I shall live through the centuries."
+
+"Forget not that I claim my share."
+
+"Your share--yours!  True--your half of my life!  It is true."  He paused
+with a low, ironical, malignant laugh; and then added, as he rose and
+turned away, "But the work is yet to be done."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXIV.
+
+While we had thus laboured and found, Ayesha had placed the fuel where the
+moonlight fell fullest on the sward of the tableland,--a part of it
+already piled as for a fire, the rest of it heaped confusedly close at
+hand; and by the pile she had placed the coffer.  And there she stood, her
+arms folded under her mantle, her dark image seeming darker still as the
+moonlight whitened all the ground from which the image rose motionless.
+Margrave opened his coffer, the Veiled Woman did not aid him, and I
+watched in silence, while he as silently made his weird and wizard-like
+preparations.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXV.
+
+On the ground a wide circle was traced by a small rod, tipped apparently
+with sponge saturated with some combustible naphtha-like fluid, so that a
+pale lambent flame followed the course of the rod as Margrave guided it,
+burning up the herbage over which it played, and leaving a distinct ring,
+like that which, in our lovely native fable-talk, we call the "Fairy's
+Ring," but yet more visible because marked in phosphorescent light.  On
+the ring thus formed were placed twelve small lamps, fed with the fluid
+from the same vessel, and lighted by the same rod.  The light emitted by
+the lamps was more vivid and brilliant than that which circled round the
+ring.
+
+Within the circumference, and immediately round the woodpile, Margrave
+traced certain geometrical figures, in which--not without a shudder, that
+I overcame at once by a strong effort of will in murmuring to myself the
+name of "Lilian"--I recognized the interlaced triangles which my own hand,
+in the spell enforced on a sleep-walker, had described on the floor of the
+wizard's pavilion.  The figures were traced, like the circle, in flame,
+and at the point of each triangle (four in number) was placed a lamp,
+brilliant as those on the ring.  This task performed, the caldron, based
+on an iron tripod, was placed on the wood-pile.  And then the woman,
+before inactive and unheeding, slowly advanced, knelt by the pile, and
+lighted it.  The dry wood crackled and the flame burst forth, licking the
+rims of the caldron with tongues of fire.
+
+Margrave flung into the caldron the particles we had collected, poured
+over them first a liquid, colourless as water, from the largest of the
+vessels drawn from his coffer, and then, more sparingly, drops from small
+crystal phials, like the phials I had seen in the hand of Philip Derval.
+
+Having surmounted my first impulse of awe, I watched these proceedings,
+curious yet disdainful, as one who watches the mummeries of an enchanter
+on the stage.
+
+"If," thought I, "these are but artful devices to inebriate and fool my
+own imagination, my imagination is on its guard, and reason shall not,
+this time, sleep at her post!"
+
+"And now," said Margrave, "I consign to you the easy task by which you are
+to merit your share of the elixir.  It is my task to feed and replenish
+the caldron; it is Ayesha's to heed the fire, which must not for a moment
+relax in its measured and steady heat.  Your task is the lightest of all
+it is but to renew from this vessel the fluid that burns in the lamps, and
+on the ring.  Observe, the contents of the vessel must be thriftily
+husbanded; there is enough, but not more than enough, to sustain the light
+in the lamps, on the lines traced round the caldron, and on the farther
+ring, for six hours.  The compounds dissolved in this fluid are
+scarce,--only obtainable in the East, and even in the East months might
+have passed before I could have increased my supply.
+
+"I had no months to waste.  Replenish, then, the light only when it begins
+to flicker or fade.  Take heed, above all, that no part of the outer
+ring--no, not an inch--and no lamp of the twelve, that are to its zodiac
+like stars, fade for one moment in darkness."
+
+I took the crystal vessel from his hand.
+
+"The vessel is small," said I, "and what is yet left of its contents is
+but scanty; whether its drops suffice to replenish the lights I cannot
+guess,--I can but obey your instructions.  But, more important by far than
+the light to the lamps and the circle, which in Asia or Africa might scare
+away the wild beasts unknown to this land--more important than light to a
+lamp, is the strength to your frame, weak magician!  What will support you
+through six weary hours of night-watch?"
+
+"Hope," answered Margrave, with a ray of his old dazzling style.  "Hope!
+I shall live,--I shall live through the centuries!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXVI.
+
+One hour passed away; the fagots under the caldron burned clear in the
+sullen sultry air.  The materials within began to seethe, and their
+colour, at first dull and turbid, changed into a pale-rose hue; from time
+to time the Veiled Woman replenished the fire, after she had done so
+reseating herself close by the pyre, with her head bowed over her knees,
+and her face hid under her veil.
+
+The lights in the lamps and along the ring and the triangles now began to
+pale.  I resupplied their nutriment from the crystal vessel.  As yet
+nothing strange startled my eye or my ear beyond the rim of the
+circle,--nothing audible, save, at a distance, the musical wheel-like
+click of the locusts, and, farther still, in the forest, the howl of the
+wild dogs, that never bark; nothing visible, but the trees and the
+mountain-range girding the plains silvered by the moon, and the arch of
+the cavern, the flush of wild blooms on its sides, and the gleam of dry
+bones on its floor, where the moonlight shot into the gloom.
+
+The second hour passed like the first.  I had taken my stand by the side
+of Margrave, watching with him the process at work in the caldron, when I
+felt the ground slightly vibrate beneath my feet, and, looking up, it
+seemed as if all the plains beyond the circle were heaving like the swell
+of the sea, and as if in the air itself there was a perceptible tremor.
+
+I placed my hand on Margrave's shoulder and whispered, "To me earth and
+air seem to vibrate.  Do they seem to vibrate to you?"
+
+"I know not, I care not," he answered impetuously.  "The essence is
+bursting the shell that confined it.  Here are my air and my earth!
+Trouble me not.  Look to the circle! feed the lamps if they fail."
+
+I passed by the Veiled Woman as I walked towards a place in the ring in
+which the flame was waning dim; and I whispered to her the same question
+which I had whispered to Margrave.  She looked slowly around, and
+answered, "So is it before the Invisible make themselves visible!  Did I
+not bid him forbear?"  Her head again drooped on her breast, and her watch
+was again fixed on the fire.
+
+I advanced to the circle and stooped to replenish the light where it
+waned.  As I did so, on my arm, which stretched somewhat beyond the line
+of the ring, I felt a shock like that of electricity.  The arm fell to my
+side numbed and nerveless, and from my hand dropped, but within the ring,
+the vessel that contained the fluid.  Recovering my surprise or my stun,
+hastily with the other hand I caught up the vessel, but some of the scanty
+liquid was already spilled on the sward; and I saw with a thrill of
+dismay, that contrasted indeed the tranquil indifference with which I had
+first undertaken my charge, how small a supply was now left.
+
+I went back to Margrave, and told him of the shock, and of its consequence
+in the waste of the liquid.
+
+"Beware," said he, "that not a motion of the arm, not an inch of the foot,
+pass the verge of the ring; and if the fluid be thus unhappily stinted,
+reserve all that is left for the protecting circle and the twelve outer
+lamps!  See how the Grand Work advances! how the hues in the caldron are
+glowing blood-red through the film on the surface!"
+
+And now four hours of the six were gone; my arm had gradually recovered
+its strength.  Neither the ring nor the lamps had again required
+replenishing; perhaps their light was exhausted less quickly, as it was no
+longer to be exposed to the rays of the intense Australian moon.  Clouds
+had gathered over the sky, and though the moon gleamed at times in the
+gaps that they left in blue air, her beam was more hazy and dulled.  The
+locusts no longer were heard in the grass, nor the howl of the dogs in the
+forest.  Out of the circle, the stillness was profound.
+
+And about this time I saw distinctly in the distance a vast Eye!  It drew
+nearer and nearer, seeming to move from the ground at the height of some
+lofty giant.  Its gaze riveted mine; my blood curdled in the blaze from
+its angry ball; and now as it advanced larger and larger, other Eyes, as
+if of giants in its train, grew out from the space in its rear; numbers on
+numbers, like the spearheads of some Eastern army, seen afar by pale
+warders of battlements doomed to the dust.  My voice long refused an
+utterance to my awe; at length it burst forth shrill and loud,--
+
+"Look! look!  Those terrible Eyes!  Legions on legions!  And hark! that
+tramp of numberless feet; they are not seen, but the hollows of earth echo
+the sound of their march!"
+
+Margrave, more than ever intent on the caldron, in which, from time to
+time, he kept dropping powders or essences drawn forth from his coffer,
+looked up, defyingly, fiercely.
+
+"Ye come," he said, in a low mutter, his once mighty voice sounding hollow
+and labouring, but fearless and firm,--"ye come,--not to conquer, vain
+rebels!--ye whose dark chief I struck down at my feet in the tomb where my
+spell had raised up the ghost of your first human master, the Chaldee!
+Earth and air have their armies still faithful to me, and still I remember
+the war-song that summons them up to confront you!  Ayesha!  Ayesha!
+recall the wild troth that we pledged amongst roses; recall the dread bond
+by which we united our sway over hosts that yet own thee as queen, though
+my sceptre is broken, my diadem reft from my brows!"
+
+The Veiled Woman rose at this adjuration.  Her veil now was withdrawn, and
+the blaze of the fire between Margrave and herself flushed, as with the
+rosy bloom of youth, the grand beauty of her softened face.  It was seen,
+detached as it were, from her dark-mantled form; seen through the mist of
+the vapours which rose from the caldron, framing it round like the clouds.
+that are yieldingly pierced by the light of the evening star.
+
+Through the haze of the vapour came her voice, more musical, more
+plaintive than I had heard it before, but far softer, more tender; still
+in her foreign tongue; the words unknown to me, and yet their sense,
+perhaps, made intelligible by the love, which has one common language and
+one common look to all who have loved,--the love unmistakably heard in the
+loving tone, unmistakably seen in the loving face.
+
+A moment or so more, and she had come round from the opposite side of the
+fire-pile, and bending over Margrave's upturned brow, kissed it quietly,
+solemnly; and then her countenance grew fierce, her crest rose erect; it
+was the lioness protecting her young.  She stretched forth her arm from
+the black mantle, athwart the pale front that now again bent over the
+caldron,--stretched it towards the haunted and hollow-sounding space
+beyond, in the gesture of one whose right hand has the sway of the
+sceptre.  And then her voice stole on the air in the music of a chant, not
+loud, yet far-reaching; so thrilling, so sweet, and yet so solemn, that I
+could at once comprehend how legend united of old the spell of enchantment
+with the power of song.  All that I recalled of the effects which, in the
+former time, Margrave's strange chants had produced on the ear that they
+ravished and the thoughts they confused, was but as the wild bird's
+imitative carol, compared to the depth and the art and the soul of the
+singer, whose voice seemed endowed with a charm to enthrall all the tribes
+of creation, though the language it used for that charm might to them, as
+to me, be unknown.  As the song ceased, I heard, from behind, sounds like
+those I had heard in the spaces before me,--the tramp of invisible feet,
+the whir of invisible wings, as if armies were marching to aid against
+armies in march to destroy.
+
+"Look not in front nor around," said Ayesha.  "Look, like him, on the
+caldron below.  The circle and the lamps are yet bright; I will tell you
+when the light again fails."
+
+I dropped my eyes on the caldron.
+
+"See," whispered Margrave, "the sparkles at last begin to arise, and the
+rose-hues to deepen,--signs that we near the last process."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXVII.
+
+The fifth hour had passed away, when Ayesha said to me, "Lo! the circle is
+fading; the lamps grow dim.  Look now without fear on the space beyond;
+the eyes that appalled thee are again lost in air, as lightnings that
+fleet back into cloud."
+
+I looked up, and the spectres had vanished.  The sky was tinged with
+sulphurous hues, the red and the black intermixed.  I replenished the
+lamps and the ring in front, thriftily, heedfully; but when I came to the
+sixth lamp, not a drop in the vessel that fed them was left.  In a vague
+dismay, I now looked round the half of the wide circle in rear of the two
+bended figures intent on the caldron.  All along that disk the light was
+already broken, here and there flickering up, here and there dying down;
+the six lamps in that half of the circle still twinkled, but faintly, as
+stars shrinking fast from the dawn of day.  But it was not the fading
+shine in that half of the magical ring which daunted my eye and quickened
+with terror the pulse of my heart; the Bushland beyond was on fire.  From
+the background of the forest rose the flame and the smoke,--the smoke,
+there, still half smothering the flame.  But along the width of the
+grasses and herbage, between the verge of the forest and the bed of the
+water-creek just below the raised platform from which I beheld the dread
+conflagration, the fire was advancing,--wave upon wave, clear and red
+against the columns of rock behind,--as the rush of a flood through the
+mists of some Alp crowned with lightnings.
+
+Roused from my stun at the first sight of a danger not foreseen by the
+mind I had steeled against far rarer portents of Nature, I cared no more
+for the lamps and the circle.  Hurrying back to Ayesha, I exclaimed:  "The
+phantoms have gone from the spaces in front; but what incantation or spell
+can arrest the red march of the foe, speeding on in the rear!  While we
+gazed on the caldron of life, behind us, unheeded, behold the Destroyer!"
+
+Ayesha looked, and made no reply; but, as by involuntary instinct, bowed
+her majestic head, then rearing it erect, placed herself yet more
+immediately before the wasted form of the young magician (he still bending
+over the caldron, and hearing me not in the absorption and hope of his
+watch),--placed herself before him, as the bird whose first care is her
+fledgling.
+
+As we two there stood, fronting the deluge of fire, we heard Margrave
+behind us, murmuring low, "See the bubbles of light, how they sparkle and
+dance!  I shall live, I shall live!"  And his words scarcely died in our
+ears before, crash upon crash, came the fall of the age-long trees in the
+forest; and nearer, all near us, through the blazing grasses, the hiss of
+the serpents, the scream of-the birds, and the bellow and tramp of the
+herds plunging wild through the billowy red of their pastures.
+
+Ayesha now wound her arms around Margrave, and wrenched him, reluctant and
+struggling, from his watch over the seething caldron.  In rebuke; of his
+angry exclamations, she pointed to the march of the fire, spoke in
+sorrowful tones a few words in her own language, and then, appealing to me
+in English, said,--
+
+"I tell him that here the Spirits who oppose us have summoned a foe that
+is deaf to my voice, and--"
+
+"And," exclaimed Margrave, no longer with gasp and effort, but with the
+swell of a voice which drowned all the discords of terror and of agony
+sent forth from the Phlegethon burning below,--"and this witch, whom I
+trusted, is a vile slave and impostor, more desiring my death than my
+life.  She thinks that in life I should scorn and forsake her, that in
+death I should die in her arms!  Sorceress, avaunt!  Art thou useless and
+powerless now when I need thee most?  Go!  Let the world be one funeral
+pyre!  What to me is the world?  My world is my life!  Thou knowest that
+my last hope is here,--that all the strength left me this night will die
+down, like the lamps in the circle, unless the elixir restore it.  Bold
+friend, spurn that sorceress away.  Hours yet ere those flames can assail
+us!  A few minutes more, and life to your Lilian and me!"
+
+Thus having said, Margrave turned from us, and cast into the caldron the
+last essence yet left in his empty coffer.  Ayesha silently drew her black
+veil over her face; and turned, with the being she loved, from the terror
+he scorned, to share in the hope that he cherished.
+
+Thus left alone, with my reason disenthralled, disenchanted, I surveyed
+more calmly the extent of the actual peril with which we were threatened,
+and the peril seemed less, so surveyed.
+
+It is true all the Bush-land behind, almost up to the bed of the creek,
+was on fire; but the grasses, through which the flame spread so rapidly,
+ceased at the opposite marge of the creek.  Watery pools were still, at
+intervals, left in the bed of the creek, shining tremulous, like waves of
+fire, in the glare reflected from the burning land; and even where the
+water failed, the stony course of the exhausted rivulet was a barrier
+against the march of the conflagration.  Thus, unless the wind, now still,
+should rise, and waft some sparks to the parched combustible herbage
+immediately around us, we were saved from the fire, and our work might yet
+be achieved.
+
+I whispered to Ayesha the conclusion to which I came.  "Thinkest thou,"
+she answered, without raising her mournful head, "that the Agencies of
+Nature are the movements of chance?  The Spirits I invoked to his aid are
+leagued with the hosts that assail.  A mightier than I am has doomed him!"
+
+Scarcely had she uttered these words before Margrave exclaimed, "Behold
+how the Rose of the alchemist's dream enlarges its blooms from the folds
+of its petals!  I shall live, I shall live!"
+
+I looked, and the liquid which glowed in the caldron had now taken a
+splendour that mocked all comparisons borrowed from the lustre of gems.
+In its prevalent colour it had, indeed, the dazzle and flash of the ruby;
+but out from the mass of the molten red, broke coruscations of all prismal
+hues, shooting, shifting, in a play that made the wavelets them selves
+seem living things, sensible of their joy.  No longer was there scum or
+film upon the surface; only ever and anon a light rosy vapour floating
+up, and quick lost in the haggard, heavy, sulphurous air, hot with the
+conflagration rushing towards us from behind.  And these coruscations
+formed, on the surface of the molten ruby, literally the shape of a Rose,
+its leaves made distinct in their outlines by sparks of emerald and
+diamond and sapphire.
+
+Even while gazing on this animated liquid lustre, a buoyant delight seemed
+infused into my senses; all terrors conceived before were annulled; the
+phantoms, whose armies had filled the wide spaces in front, were
+forgotten; the crash of the forest behind was unheard.  In the reflection
+of that glory, Margrave's wan cheek seemed already restored to the
+radiance it wore when I saw it first in the framework of blooms.
+
+As I gazed, thus enchanted, a cold hand touched my own.
+
+"Hush!"  whispered Ayesha, from the black veil, against which the rays of
+the caldron fell blunt, and absorbed into Dark.  "Behind us, the light of
+the circle is extinct, but there we are guarded from all save the brutal
+and soulless destroyers.  But before!--but before !--see, two of the lamps
+have died out!--see the blank of the gap in the ring Guard that
+breach,--there the demons will enter."
+
+"Not a drop is there left in his vessel by which to replenish the lamps on
+the ring."
+
+"Advance, then; thou hast still the light of the soul, and the demons may
+recoil before a soul that is dauntless and guiltless.  If not, Three are
+lost!--as it is, One is doomed."
+
+Thus adjured, silently, involuntarily, I passed from the Veiled Woman's
+side, over the sere lines on the turf which had been traced by the
+triangles of light long since extinguished, and towards the verge of the
+circle.  As I advanced, overhead rushed a dark cloud of wings,--birds
+dislodged from the forest on fire, and screaming, in dissonant terror, as
+they flew towards the farthermost mountains; close by my feet hissed and
+glided the snakes, driven forth from their blazing coverts, and glancing
+through the ring, unscared by its waning lamps; all undulating by me,
+bright-eyed and hissing, all made innocuous by fear,--even the terrible
+Death-adder, which I trampled on as I halted at the verge of the circle,
+did not turn to bite, but crept harmless away.  I halted at the gap
+between the two dead lamps, and bowed my head to look again into the
+crystal vessel.  Were there, indeed, no lingering drops yet left, if but
+to recruit the lamps for some priceless minutes more?  As I thus stood,
+right into the gap between the two dead lamps strode a gigantic Foot.  All
+the rest of the form was unseen; only, as volume after volume of smoke
+poured on from the burning land behind, it seemed as if one great column
+of vapour, eddying round, settled itself aloft from the circle, and that
+out from that column strode the giant Foot.  And, as strode the Foot, so
+with it came, like the sound of its tread, a roll of muttered thunder.
+
+I recoiled, with a cry that rang loud through the lurid air.
+
+"Courage!" said the voice of Ayesha.  "Trembling soul, yield not an inch
+to the demon!"
+
+At the charm, the wonderful charm, in the tone of the Veiled Woman's
+voice, my will seemed to take a force more sublime than its own.  I folded
+my arms on my breast, and stood as if rooted to the spot, confronting the
+column of smoke and the stride of the giant Foot.  And the Foot halted,
+mute.
+
+Again, in the momentary hush of that suspense, I heard a voice,--it was
+Margrave's.
+
+"The last hour expires, the work is accomplished!  Come! come!  Aid me to
+take the caldron from the fire; and quick!--or a drop may be wasted in
+vapour--the Elixir of Life from the caldron!"
+
+At that cry I receded, and the Foot advanced.
+
+And at that moment, suddenly, unawares, from behind, I was stricken down.
+Over me, as I lay, swept a whirlwind of trampling hoofs and glancing
+horns.  The herds, in their flight from the burning pastures, had rushed
+over the bed of the watercourse, scaled the slopes of the banks.  Snorting
+and bellowing, they plunged their blind way to the mountains.  One cry
+alone, more wild than their own savage blare, pierced the reek through
+which the Brute Hurricane swept.  At that cry of wrath and despair I
+struggled to rise, again dashed to earth by the hoofs and the horns.  But
+was it the dream-like deceit of my reeling senses, or did I see that giant
+Foot stride past through the close-serried ranks of the maddening herds?
+Did I hear, distinct through all the huge uproar of animal terror, the
+roll of low thunder which followed the stride of that Foot?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXVIII.
+
+When my sense had recovered its shock, and my eyes looked dizzily round,
+the charge of the beasts had swept by; and of all the wild tribes which
+had invaded the magical circle, the only lingerer was the brown
+Death-adder, coiled close by the spot where my head had rested.  Beside
+the extinguished lamps which the hoofs had confusedly scattered, the
+fire, arrested by the watercourse, had consumed the grasses that fed it,
+and there the plains stretched, black and desert as the Phlegroean Field
+of the Poet's Hell.  But the fire still raged in the forest beyond,--white
+flames, soaring up from the trunks of the tallest trees, and forming,
+through the sullen dark of the smoke-reek, innumerable pillars of fire,
+like the halls in the City of fiends.
+
+Gathering myself up, I turned my eyes from the terrible pomp of the lurid
+forest, and looked fearfully down on the hoof-trampled sward for my two
+companions.
+
+I saw the dark image of Ayesha still seated, still bending, as I had seen
+it last.  I saw a pale hand feebly grasping the rim of the magical
+caldron, which lay, hurled down from its tripod by the rush of the beasts,
+yards away from the dim fading embers of the scattered wood-pyre.  I saw
+the faint writhings of a frail wasted frame, over which the Veiled Woman
+was bending.  I saw, as I moved with bruised limbs to the place, close by
+the lips of the dying magician, the flash of the ruby-like essence spilled
+on the sward, and, meteor-like, sparkling up from the torn tufts of
+herbage.
+
+I now reached Margrave's side.  Bending over him as the Veiled Woman bent,
+and as I sought gently to raise him, he turned his face, fiercely
+faltering out, "Touch me not, rob me not!  You share with me!  Never!
+never!  These glorious drops are all mine!  Die all else!  I will live!  I
+will live!"  Writhing himself from my pitying arms, he plunged his face
+amidst the beautiful, playful flame of the essence, as if to lap the
+elixir with lips scorched away from its intolerable burning.  Suddenly,
+with a low shriek, he fell back, his face upturned to mine, and on that
+face unmistakably reigned Death!
+
+Then Ayesha tenderly, silently, drew the young head to her lap, and it
+vanished from my sight behind her black veil.
+
+I knelt beside her, murmuring some trite words of comfort; but she heeded
+me not, rocking herself to and fro as the mother who cradles a child to
+sleep.  Soon the fast-flickering sparkles of the lost elixir died out on
+the grass; and with their last sportive diamond-like tremble of light, up,
+in all the suddenness of Australian day, rose the sun, lifting himself
+royally above the mountain-tops, and fronting the meaner blaze of the
+forest as a young king fronts his rebels.  And as there, where the
+bush-fires had ravaged, all was a desert, so there, where their fury had
+not spread, all was a garden.  Afar, at the foot of the mountains, the
+fugitive herds were grazing; the cranes, flocking back to the pools,
+renewed the strange grace of their gambols; and the great kingfisher,
+whose laugh, half in mirth, half in mockery, leads the choir that welcome
+the morn,--which in Europe is night,--alighted bold on the roof of the
+cavern, whose floors were still white with the bones of races, extinct
+before--so helpless through instincts, so royal through Soul--rose Man!
+
+But there, on the ground where the dazzling elixir had wasted its
+virtues,--there the herbage already had a freshness of verdure which, amid
+the duller sward round it, was like an oasis of green in a desert.  And
+there wild-flowers, whose chill hues the eye would have scarcely
+distinguished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar
+beauty.  Towards that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects, whose
+hum of intense joy was musically loud.  But the form of the life-seeking
+sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the wild-flowers, deaf
+to the glee of the insects,--one hand still resting heavily on the rim of
+the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil.  What!
+the wondrous elixir, sought with such hope and well-nigh achieved through
+such dread, fleeting back to the earth from which its material was drawn,
+to give bloom, indeed,--but to herbs: joy indeed,--but to insects!
+
+And now, in the flash of the sun, slowly wound up the slopes that led to
+the circle the same barbaric procession which had sunk into the valley
+under the ray of the moon.  The armed men came first, stalwart and tall,
+their vests brave with crimson and golden lace, their weapons gayly
+gleaming with holiday silver.  After them, the Black Litter.  As they came
+to the place, Ayesha, not raising her head, spoke to them in her own
+Eastern tongue.  A wail was her answer.  The armed men bounded forward,
+and the bearers left the litter.
+
+All gathered round the dead form with the face concealed under the black
+veil; all knelt, and all wept.  Far in the distance, at the foot of the
+blue mountains, a crowd of the savage natives had risen up as if from the
+earth; they stood motionless, leaning on their clubs and spears, and
+looking towards the spot on which we were,--strangely thus brought into
+the landscape, as if they too, the wild dwellers on the verge which
+Humanity guards from the Brute, were among the mourners for the mysterious
+Child of mysterious Nature!  And still, in the herbage, hummed the small
+insects, and still, from the cavern, laughed the great kingfisher.  I said
+to Ayesha, "Farewell! your love mourns the dead, mine calls me to the
+living.  You are now with your own people, they may console you; say if I
+can assist."
+
+"There is no consolation for me!  What mourner can be consoled if the dead
+die forever?  Nothing for him is left but a grave; that grave shall be in
+the land where the song of Ayesha first lulled him to sleep.  Thou assist
+Me,--thou, the wise man of Europe!  From me ask assistance.  What road
+wilt thou take to thy home?"
+
+"There is but one road known to me through the maze of the solitude,--that
+which we took to this upland."
+
+"On that road Death lurks, and awaits thee!  Blind dupe, couldst thou
+think that if the grand secret of life had been won, he whose head rests
+on my lap would have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence which had
+filched from his store of life but a moment?  Me, who so loved and so
+cherished him,--me he would have doomed to the pitiless cord of my
+servant, the Strangler, if my death could have lengthened a hair-breadth
+the span of his being.  But what matters to me his crime or his madness?
+I loved him!  I loved him!"
+
+She bowed her veiled head lower and lower; perhaps, under the veil, her
+lips kissed the lips of the dead.  Then she said whisperingly,--
+
+"Juma the Strangler, whose word never failed to his master, whose prey
+never slipped from his snare, waits thy step on the road to thy home!  But
+thy death cannot now profit the dead, the beloved.  And thou hast had pity
+for him who took but thine aid to design thy destruction.  His life is
+lost, thine is saved."
+
+She spoke no more in the tongue that I could interpret.  She spoke, in the
+language unknown, a few murmured words to her swarthy attendants; then the
+armed men, still weeping, rose, and made a dumb sign to me to go with
+them.  I understood by the sign that Ayesha had told them to guard me on
+my way; but she gave no reply to my parting thanks.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXIX.
+
+I descended into the valley; the armed men followed.  The path, on that
+side of the watercourse not reached by the flames, wound through meadows
+still green, or amidst groves still unscathed.  As a turning in the way
+brought in front of my sight the place I had left behind, I beheld the
+black litter creeping down the descent, with its curtains closed, and the
+Veiled Woman walking by its side.  But soon the funeral procession was
+lost to my eyes, and the thoughts that it roused were erased.  The waves
+in man's brain are like those of the sea, rushing on, rushing over the
+wrecks of the vessels that rode on their surface, to sink, after storm, in
+their deeps.  One thought cast forth into the future now mastered all in
+the past: "Was Lilian living still?"  Absorbed in the gloom of that
+thought, hurried on by the goad that my heart, in its tortured impatience,
+gave to my footstep, I outstripped the slow stride of the armed men, and,
+midway between the place I had left and the home which I sped to, came,
+far in advance of my guards, into the thicket in which the bushmen had
+started up in my path on the night that Lilian had watched for my coming.
+The earth at my feet was rife with creeping plants and many-coloured
+flowers, the sky overhead was half-hid by motionless pines.  Suddenly,
+whether crawling out from the herbage, or dropping down from the trees, by
+my side stood the white-robed and skeleton form,--Ayesha's attendant, the
+Strangler.
+
+I sprang from him shuddering, then halted and faced him.  The hideous
+creature crept towards me, cringing and fawning, making signs of humble
+good-will and servile obeisance.  Again I recoiled,--wrathfully,
+loathingly; turned my face homeward, and fled on.  I thought I had baffled
+his chase, when, just at the mouth of the thicket, he dropped from a bough
+in my path close behind me.  Before I could turn, some dark muffling
+substance fell between my sight and the sun, and I felt a fierce strain at
+my throat.  But the words of Ayesha had warned me; with one rapid hand I
+seized the noose before it could tighten too closely, with the other I
+tore the bandage away from my eyes, and, wheeling round on the dastardly
+foe, struck him down with one spurn of my foot.  His hand, as he fell,
+relaxed its hold on the noose; I freed my throat from the knot, and sprang
+from the copse into the broad sunlit plain.  I saw no more of the armed
+men or the Strangler.  Panting and breathless, I paused at last before the
+fence, fragrant with blossoms, that divided my home from the solitude.
+
+The windows of Lilian's room were darkened; all within the house seemed
+still.
+
+Darkened and silenced Home! with the light and sounds of the jocund day
+all around it.  Was there yet hope in the Universe for me?  All to which I
+had trusted Hope had broken down!  The anchors I had forged for her hold
+in the beds of the ocean, her stay from the drifts of the storm, had
+snapped like the reeds which pierce the side that leans on the barb of
+their points, and confides in the strength of their stems.  No hope in the
+baffled resources of recognized knowledge!  No hope in the daring
+adventures of Mind into regions unknown; vain alike the calm lore of the
+practised physician, and the magical arts of the fated Enchanter!  I had
+fled from the commonplace teachings of Nature, to explore in her
+Shadow-land marvels at variance with reason.  Made brave by the grandeur
+of love, I had opposed without quailing the stride of the Demon, and by
+hope, when fruition seemed nearest, had been trodden into dust by the
+hoofs of the beast!  And yet, all the while, I had scorned, as a dream
+more wild than the word of a sorcerer, the hope that the old man and the
+child, the wise and the ignorant, took from their souls as inborn.  Man
+and fiend had alike failed a mind, not ignoble, not skilless, not abjectly
+craven; alike failed a heart not feeble and selfish, not dead to the
+hero's devotion, willing to shed every drop of its blood for a something
+more dear than an animal's life for itself!  What remained--what remained
+for man's hope?--man's mind and man's heart thus exhausting their all with
+no other result but despair!  What remained but the mystery of mysteries,
+so clear to the sunrise of childhood, the sunset of age, only dimmed by
+the clouds which collect round the noon of our manhood?  Where yet was
+Hope found?  In the soul; in its every-day impulse to supplicate comfort
+and light, from the Giver of soul, wherever the heart is afflicted, the
+mind is obscured.
+
+Then the words of Ayesha rushed over me: "What mourner can be consoled, if
+the Dead die forever?"  Through every pulse of my frame throbbed that
+dread question.  All Nature around seemed to murmur it.  And suddenly, as
+by a flash from heaven, the grand truth in Faber's grand reasoning shone
+on me, and lighted up all, within and without.  Alan alone, of all earthly
+creatures, asks, "Can the Dead die forever?" and the instinct that urges
+the question is God's answer to man!  No instinct is given in vain.
+
+And born with the instinct of soul is the instinct that leads the soul
+from the seen to the unseen, from time to eternity, from the torrent that
+foams towards the Ocean of Death, to the source of its stream, far aloft
+from the Ocean.
+
+"Know thyself," said the Pythian of old.  "That precept descended from
+Heaven."  Know thyself!  Is that maxim wise?  If so, know thy soul.  But
+never yet did man come to the thorough conviction of soul but what he
+acknowledged the sovereign necessity of prayer.  In my awe, in my rapture,
+all my thoughts seemed enlarged and illumined and exalted.  I prayed,--all
+my soul seemed one prayer.  All my past, with its pride and presumption
+and folly, grew distinct as the form of a penitent, kneeling for pardon
+before setting forth on the pilgrimage vowed to a shrine.  And, sure now,
+in the deeps of a soul first revealed to myself, that the Dead do not die
+forever, my human love soared beyond its brief trial of terror and sorrow.
+Daring not to ask from Heaven's wisdom that Lilian, for my sake, might not
+yet pass away from the earth, I prayed that my soul might be fitted to
+bear with submission whatever my Maker might ordain.  And if surviving
+her--without whom no beam from yon material sun could ever warm into joy a
+morrow in human life--so to guide my steps that they might rejoin her at
+last, and, in rejoining, regain forever!
+
+How trivial now became the weird riddle that, a little while before, had
+been clothed in so solemn an awe!  What mattered it to the vast interests
+involved in the clear recognition of Soul and Hereafter, whether or not my
+bodily sense, for a moment, obscured the face of the Nature I should one
+day behold as a spirit?  Doubtless the sights and the sounds which had
+haunted the last gloomy night, the calm reason of Faber would strip of
+their magical seemings; the Eyes in the space and the Foot in the circle
+might be those of no terrible Demons, but of the wild's savage children
+whom I had seen, halting, curious and mute, in the light of the morning.
+The tremor of the ground (if not, as heretofore, explicable by the
+illusory impression of my own treacherous senses) might be but the natural
+effect of elements struggling yet under a soil unmistakably charred by
+volcanoes.  The luminous atoms dissolved in the caldron might as little be
+fraught with a vital elixir as are the splendours of naphtha or phosphor.
+As it was, the weird rite had no magic result.  The magician was not rent
+limb from limb by the fiends.  By causes as natural as ever extinguished
+life's spark in the frail lamp of clay, he had died out of sight--under
+the black veil.
+
+What mattered henceforth to Faith, in its far grander questions and
+answers, whether Reason, in Faber, or Fancy, in me, supplied the more
+probable guess at a hieroglyph which, if construed aright, was but a word
+of small mark in the mystical language of Nature?  If all the arts of
+enchantment recorded by Fable were attested by facts which Sages were
+forced to acknowledge, Sages would sooner or later find some cause for
+such portents--not supernatural.  But what Sage, without cause
+supernatural, both without and within him, can guess at the wonders he
+views in the growth of a blade of grass, or the tints on an insect's wing?
+Whatever art Man can achieve in his progress through time, Man's reason,
+in time, can suffice to explain.  But the wonders of God?  These belong to
+the Infinite; and these, O Immortal! will but develop new wonder on
+wonder, though thy sight be a spirit's, and thy leisure to track and to
+solve an eternity.
+
+As I raised my face from my clasped hands, my eyes fell full upon a form
+standing in the open doorway.  There, where on the night in which Lilian's
+long struggle for reason and life had begun, the Luminous Shadow had been
+beheld in the doubtful light of a dying moon and a yet hazy dawn; there,
+on the threshold, gathering round her bright locks the aureole of the
+glorious sun, stood Amy, the blessed child!  And as I gazed, drawing
+nearer and nearer to the silenced house, and that Image of Peace on its
+threshold, I felt that Hope met me at the door,--Hope in the child's
+steadfast eyes, Hope in the child's welcoming smile!
+
+"I was at watch for you," whispered Amy.  "All is well."
+
+"She lives still--she lives!  Thank God! thank God!"
+
+"She lives,--she will recover!" said another voice, as my head sunk on
+Faber's shoulder.  "For some hours in the night her sleep was disturbed,
+convulsed.  I feared, then, the worst.  Suddenly, just before the dawn,
+she called out aloud, still in sleep,--
+
+"'The cold and dark shadow has passed away from me and from Allen,--passed
+away from us both forever!'
+
+"And from that moment the fever left her; the breathing became soft, the
+pulse steady, and the colour stole gradually back to her cheek.  The
+crisis is past.  Nature's benign Disposer has permitted Nature to restore
+your life's gentle partner, heart to heart, mind to mind--"
+
+"And soul to soul," I cried, in my solemn joy.  "Above as below, soul to
+soul!"  Then, at a sign from Faber, the child took me by the hand and led
+me up the stairs into Lilian's room.
+
+Again those clear arms closed around me in wife-like and holy love, and
+those true lips kissed away my tears,--even as now, at the distance of
+years from that happy morn, while I write the last words of this Strange
+Story, the same faithful arms close around me, the same tender lips kiss
+away my tears.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORY, LYTTON, V8 ***
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