The Mesmerist's Victim
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Having left his padded armchair to go to the trap by which Balsamo came up through the floor, he seemed to move solely by his long spider-like arms. It must be extraordinary excitement to make him leave the seat where he conducted his alchemical work and enter into our worldly life.
Balsamo was astonished and uneasy.
“So you come, you sluggard, you coward, to abandon your master,” said Althotas.
As was his habit, the other summoned up all his patience to reply to his master.
“I thought you had only just called me, my friend,” he meekly said.
“Your friend, you vile human creature,” cried the alchemist, “I think you talk to me as if I were one of your sort. Friend? I should think I were more than that: more than your father, for I have reared you, instructed you and enriched you. But you are no friend to me, oh, no! for you have left me, you let me starve, and you will be my death.”
“You have a bilious attack, master, and you will make yourself ill by going on thus.”
“Illness – rubbish! Have I ever been ill save when you made me feel the petty miseries of your mean human life? I, ill, who you know am the physician to others.”
“At all events, master, here I am,” coldly observed Balsamo. “Let us not waste time.”
“You are a nice one to remind me of that. You force me to dole out what ought to be unmeasured to all human creatures. Yes, I am wasting time: my time, like others, is falling drop by drop into eternity when it ought to be itself eternity.”
“Come, master, let us know what is to be done?” asked the other, working the spring which closed the trap in the floor. “You said you were starved. How so, when you know you were doing your fortnight’s absolute fast?”
“Yes; the work of regeneration was commenced thirty-two days ago.”
“What are you complaining about in that case – I see yet two or three decanters of rainwater, the only thing you take.”
“Of course: but do you think I am a silkworm to perform alone the great task of transformation and rejuvenation? Can I without any strength alone compose my draft of life? Do you think I shall have my ability when I am lying down with no support but refreshing drink, if you do not help me? abandoned to my own resources, and the minute labor of my regeneration – you know you ought to help and succor, if a friend?”
“I am here,” responded Balsamo, taking the old man and placing him in his chair as one might a disagreeable child, “what do you want? You have plenty of distilled water: your loaves of barley and sesame are there; and I have myself given you the white drops you prescribed.”
“Yes; but the elixir is not composed. The last time I was fifty, I had your father to help me, your faithful father. I got it ready a month beforehand. For the blood of a virgin which I had to have, I bought a child of a trader at Mount Ararat where I retired. I bled it according to the rites; I took three drops of arterial blood and in an hour my mixture, only wanting that ingredient, was composed. Therefore my regeneration came off passing well: my hair and teeth fell during the spasms caused by the draft, but they came again – the teeth badly, I admit, for I had neglected to use a golden tube for decanting the liquor. But my hair and nails came as if I were fifteen again. But here I am once more old; and the elixir is not concocted. If it is not soon in this bottle, with all care given to compounding it, the science of a century will be lost in me, and this admirable and sublime secret which I hold will be lost for man, who would thus through me be linked with divinity. Oh, if I go wrong, if I fail, you, Acharat, will have been the cause, and my wrath will be dreadful!”
As these final words made a spark flash from his dying eye, the hideous old man fell back in a convulsion succeeded by violent coughing. Balsamo at once gave him the most eager care. The old doctor came to his senses; his pallor was worse; this slight shaking had so exhausted him that he seemed about to die.
“Tell me what you want, master, and you shall have it, if possible.”
“Possible?” sneered the other, “You know that all is possible with time and science. I have the science; but time is only about to be conquered by me. My dose has succeeded; the white drops have almost eradicated most of my old nature. My strength has nearly disappeared. Youth is mounting and casting off the old bark, so to say. You will remark, Acharat, that the symptoms are excellent; my voice is faint; my sight weakened by three parts; I feel my senses wander at times; the transitions from heat to cold are insensible to me. So it is urgent that I get my draft made so that on the proper day of my fifteenth year, I shall pass from a hundred years to twenty without hesitation. The ingredients are gathered, the gold tube for the decanting is ready; I only lack the three drops of pure blood which I told you of.”
Balsamo made a start in repugnance.
“Oh, well, let us give up the idea of a child,” sneered Althotas, “since you dream of nothing but your wife with whom you shut yourself up instead of coming to aid me.”
“My wife,” repeated Balsamo, sadly: “a wife but in name. I have had to sacrifice all to her, love, desire, all, I repeat, in order to preserve her pure that I may use her spirit as a seer’s to pierce the almost impenetrable. Instead of making me happy, she makes the world so.”
“Poor fool,” said Althotas, “I believe you gabble still of your amelioration of society when I talk to you of eternal youth and life for man.”
“To be acquired at the price of a horrid crime! and even then – ”
“You doubt – he doubts!”
“But you said you renounced that want: what can you substitute?”
“Oh, the blood of the first virgin creature which I find – or you supply within a week.”
“I will attend to it, master,” said Balsamo.
Another spark of ire kindled the old man’s eye.
“You will see about it!” he said, “that is your reply, is it? However, I expected it, and I am not astonished. Since when, you insignificant worm, does the creature speak thus to its creator? Ah, you see me feeble, solicitating you and you fancy I am at your mercy! Do you think I am fool enough to rely on your mercy? Yes or no, Acharat – and I can read in your heart whether you deceive me or not – ay, read in your heart – for I will judge you and pursue you.”
“Master, have a care! your anger will injure you. I speak nothing but the truth to my master. I will see if I can procure you what you want without its bringing harm, nay, ruin upon us both. I will seek the wretch who will sell you what you wish but I shall not take the crime upon me. That is all I can say.”
“You are very dainty. Then, you would expose me to death, scoundrel; you would save the three drops of the blood of some paltry thing in order to let the wondrous being that I am fall into the eternal abysm. Acharat, mark me,” continued the weird old man, with a frightful smile, “I no longer ask you for anything. I want absolutely nothing of you. I shall wait: but if you do not obey me, I shall take for myself; if you abandon me I shall help myself. You hear? away!”
Without answering the threat in any way, Balsamo prepared all things for the old man’s wants; like a good servant or a pious son attending to his father. Absorbed in quite another thought than that torturing Althotas, he went down through the trap-hole without noticing the old sage’s ironical glance following him. He smiled like an evil genius when he saw the mesmerist beside Lorenza, still asleep.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE ULTIMATE TEST
BEFORE the Italian beauty, Balsamo stopped, with his heart full of painful but no longer violent thoughts.
“Here I stand,” he mused, “sad but resolute, and plainly seeing my situation. Lorenza hates me and betrayed me as she vowed she would do. My secret is no longer mine but in the hands of this woman who casts it to the winds. I resemble the fox caught in the trap, who gnaws off his leg to get away, but the hunter coming on the morrow and seeing this token can say: ‘He has escaped but I shall know him when I catch him again.’
“Althotas could not understand this misfortune, which is why I have not told him; it breaks all my hope of fortune in this country and consequently in the Old World, of which France is the heart – it is due to this lovely woman, this fair statue with the sweet smile. To this accursed angel I owe captivity, exile or death, with ruin and dishonor meanwhile.
“Hence,” he continued, animating, “the sum of pleasure is surpassed by that of harm, and Lorenza is a noxious thing to me. Oh, serpent with the graceful folds, they stifle: your golden throat is full of venom; sleep on, for I shall be obliged to kill you when you wake.”
With an ominous smile he approached the girl, whose eyes turned to his like the sunflower follows the sun.
“Alas, in slaying her who hates me, I shall slay her who loves.”
His heart was filled with profound grief strangely blended with a vague desire.
“If she might live, harmless?” he muttered. “No, awake, she will renew the struggle – she will kill herself or me, or force me to kill her. Lorenza, your fate is written in letters of fire: to love and to die. In my hands I hold your life and your love.”
The enchantress, who seemed to read his thoughts in an open book, rose, fell at the mesmerist’s feet, and taking one of his hands which she laid on her heart, she said with her lips, moist as coral and as glossy:
“Dead be it, but loved.”
Balsamo could resist no longer; a whirl of flames enveloped him.
“As long as a human being could contend have I struggled,” he sighed; “demon or angel of the future, you ought to be satisfied. I have long enough sacrificed pride and egotism to all the generous passions seething in my heart. No, no, I have not the right to revolt against the only human feeling fermenting in me. I love this woman, and such passionate love will do more against her than the keenest hate. What, when I appear before the Supreme Architect, will not I, the deceiver, the charlatan, the false prophet, have one well cut stone to show for my craftsmanship – not one generous deed to avow, not a single happiness whose memory would comfort me amid eternal sufferings? Oh, no, no, Lorenza, I know that I lose the future by loving you; I know that my revealing angel mounts to heaven while this woman comes down to my arms – but I wish Lorenza!”
“My beloved,” she gasped.
“Will you accept this life instead of the real one?”
“I beg for it, for it is love and bliss.”
“Never will you accuse me before man or heaven of having deceived your heart?”
“Never, never! before heaven and men, I shall thank you for having given me love, the only boon, the only jewel of price in this world.”
Balsamo ran his hand over his forehead.
“Be it so,” he said. “Besides, have I absolutely need of her – is she the only medium? No; while this one makes me happy, the other shall make me rich and mighty. Andrea is predestined and is as clairvoyante as she. Andrea is young, and pure, and I do not love Andrea. Nevertheless, in her mesmeric sleep, she is submissive as you are. In Andrea I have a victim ready to replace you, one to be the corpus vili of the physician to be employed for experiments. She can fly as far, perhaps farther, in the shades of the Unknown as you. Andrea, I take you for my kingdom. Lorenza, come to my arms for my darling and my wife. With Andrea I am powerful; with Lorenza I am happy! Henceforth, my life is complete, and I realise the dream of Althotas, without the immortality, and become the peer of the gods!”
And lifting up the Italian beauty, he opened his arms from off his heaving breast on which Lorenza enclasped herself as the ivy girdles the oak.
Another life commenced for the magician, unknown to him previously in his active, multiple, perplexed existence. For three days he felt no more anger, apprehension or jealousy; he heard nothing of plots, politics or conspiracies. Beside Lorenza he forgot the whole world. This strange love threw him into felicity composed of stupor and delirium, soaring over humanity, as it were, full of misery and intoxication, a phantom love – for he knew he could at a sign or a word change the sweet mistress into an implacable enemy.
Singularly, she remained of astonishing lucidity as far as regarded himself; but he wanted to learn if this were not sheer sympathy; if she became dark outside of the circle traced by his love – if the eyes of this new Eve clearly seeing in Eden, would not be this blind when expelled from Paradise.
He dared not make a decisive test, but he hoped, and hope was the starry crown to his happiness.
With gentle melancholy Lorenza said to him:
“Acharat, you are thinking of another woman than me, a woman of the North, with fair hair and blue eyes – Acharat, this woman walks beside you and me in your mind. Shall I tell you her name?”
“Yes,” he said in wonderment.
“Wait – it is Andrea.”
“Right. Yes, you can read my mind; one last fear troubles me. Can you still see through space though blocked by material obstacles?”
“Try me.”
He took her hand, and in his mind went away from that place, taking her soul with him.
“What do you see?”
“A vast valley with woods on one side, a town on the other, while a river separates them and is lost in the distance after bathing the walls of a palace.”
“It is so, Lorenza. The wood is Vesinet, the town St. Germain; the palace Maisons. Let us go into the summerhouse behind us. What do you see?”
“A young negro, eating candies.”
“It is Zamore, Countess Dubarry’s blackmoor. Go on.”
“An empty drawing-room, splendidly furnished, with the panels painted with goddesses and Cupids.”
“Next?”
“We are in a lovely boudoir hung with blue satin worked with flowers in their natural colors. A woman is reclining on a sofa. I have seen her before – it is Countess Dubarry. She is thinking of you – ”
“Thinking of me? Lorenza, you will drive me mad.”
“You made her the promise to give her the water of beauty which Venus gave to Phaon to be revenged on Sappho.”
“That is so; go on.”
“She makes up her mind to a step, for she rings a bell. A woman comes – it is like her – ”
“Her sister, Chon?”
“Her sister. She wants the horses put to the carriage! in two hours she will be here.”
Balsamo dropped on his knees.
“Oh heaven, if she should be here in that time, I shall have no more to beg of you for you will have had pity on my happiness.”
“Poor dear,” said she, “why do you fear? Love which completes the physical existence, enlarges the moral one. Like all good passions, love emanates from heaven whence cometh all light.”
“Lorenza, you make me wild with joy.”
Still he waited for this last test; the arrival of Lady Dubarry.
Two strokes of the bell, the signal of an important visitor, from Fritz told him that the vision was realised.
He led Lorenza into the room hung with fur and armor.
“You will not go away from here?” asked the mesmerist.
“Order me to stay and you will find me here on your return. Besides, the Lorenza who loves you is not the one who dreads you.”
“Be it so, my beloved Lorenza; sleep and await me.”
Still struggling with the spell, she laid a last kiss on her husband’s lips, and tottered to sink upon a lounge, murmuring.
“Soon again, my Balsamo, soon?”
He waved his hand: she was already reposing.
As he closed the door he thought he heard a sound: but no, Lorenza was sound asleep. He went through the parlor without fear or any foreshadowing, carrying paradise in his heart.
Lorenza dreamed: it seemed to her that the ceiling opened and that a kind of aged Caliban descended with a regular movement. The air seemed to fail her as two long fleshless arms like living grapnels clutched her white dress, raised her off the divan, and carried her to the trap. This movable platform began to rise, with the grinding of metal and a shrill, hideous laugh issued from the mouth of this human-faced monster who bore her upwards without any shock.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE LIQUOR OF BEAUTY
THE beautiful favorite of Louis XV. had been shown into the parlor where she impatiently waited for Balsamo while turning over the leaves of Holbein’s Dance of Death, which caught her attention on the table. She had just arrived at the picture of the Beauty powdering her cheek before a mirror, when the host opened the door and bowed to her with a smile of joy over his face.
“I am sorry to have made you wait,” he said, “but I was a little out in my calculation about the speed of your horses.”
“Gracious, did you know that I was coming?”
“Certainly; at least you gave the orders for your sister to transmit them for your departure, while lounging in your blue boudoir.”
“Wizard that you are, if you can see all that goes on there, you must apprise me.”
“I only look in where doors are open.”
“But you saw my intention as regards you?”
“I saw that it was good.”
“So are all mine to you, count. But you merit more than mere intentions for it seems to me that you are too good and useful to me in taking the part of tutor the most difficult to play that I know.”
“You make me very happy; what can I do for you?”
“Have you not, to begin with, some of the seed which makes one invisible: for on the way it seemed to me that one of Richelieu’s men was riding after me.”
“The Duke of Richelieu cannot be dangerous to you in any meeting,” said the mesmerist.
“But he was, my lord, before this last scheme failed.”
Balsamo comprehended that here was a plot of which Lorenza had not informed him. So he smiled without venturing on the unknown ground.
“I nearly fell a victim to the scheme, in which you had a share.”
“I, in a scheme against you? never.”
“Did you not give Richelieu a philter to make the drinker fail madly in love?”
“Oh, no, my lady: he composes those things himself; I did give him a simple narcotic – a sleeping draft. He called for it on the eve of the day when I sent you the note by my man Fritz to meet me at Sartines.”
“That is it – the very time when the King went to little Taverney’s rooms. It is all clear now, for the narcotic saved us.”
“I am happy to have served your ladyship, though unawares,” he said without knowing the matter.
“Yes; the King must have seen the girl under the influence of this soporific, for he was seen to stagger out of the chapel corridor during the storm, crying ‘She is dead!’ Nothing frightens the King more than the dead, or next to it those in a death-like sleep. Finding Mdlle. de Taverney in a sleep, he took it for death.”
“Yes, like death, with all the appearances,” said the other, remembering that he had fled without reviving Andrea. “Go on, my lady!”
“The King woke with a touch of fever and was only better at noon. He came over to see me in the evening, where I discovered that Richelieu is almost as great a conjurer as your lordship.”
The countess’s triumphant face, and her gesture of coquetry and grace completed her thought, and perfectly encouraged the Italian about her sway over the King.
“So you are satisfied with me?” he asked.
She held out in token of thanks her white, soft and scented hand, only it was not fresh like Lorenza’s.
“Now, count, if you preserved me from a great danger, I believe I have saved you from one not to be despised.”
“I had no need to be grateful to you,” said Balsamo, hiding his emotion, “but I should like to know – ”
“That casket really contained cipher correspondence which Sartines had his experts write out plain: That is what he brought to Versailles this morning, with blank warrants to imprison parties named in the documents: one was filled with your name, but I would not let him slip that under the royal hand for the signature. Since Damiens stuck him with the penknife, he can be frightened into anything by the bogey of assassination. Sartines persisted and so did I, but the King said with a smile and looking at me in a style which I know:
“‘Let her alone, Sartines: I can refuse her nothing to-day.’
“As I was by, Sartines did not like to vex me by accusing you direct but he talked of the King of Prussia bolstering up the philosophers of a numerous and powerful sect formed of courageous, resolute and skillful adepts, working away underhandedly against his Royal Majesty. He said they spread evil reports, as for instance that the King was in the scheme to starve the people. To which Louis replied: ‘Let anybody come forward, saying so and I will give him the lie by furnishing him with board and lodging for nothing. I will feed him in the Bastile.’”
Balsamo felt a shiver run through him, but he stood firm.
“And the end?”
“It was the day after the sleeping potion, you understand,” he preferred my company to Sartines; and turned to me.
“‘Drive away this ugly man,’ I said, ‘he smells of the prison.’
“‘You had better go, Sartines,’ said the King.
“Seeing he was in a scrape, he came to me and kissing my hand humbly, he said: ‘Lady, let us say no more on this head – (your head, count) – but you will ruin the realm. Since you so strongly wish it, my men shall protect your protegé.’”
The conspirator was buried in thought.
“So you see you must thank me for not having been clapped into the Bastile,” concluded the countess: “not unjust, perhaps, but disagreeable.”
Without replying Balsamo took from his pocket a phial containing a fluid of blood color.
“For the liberty you give me,” he said, “I give you twenty years more youthfulness.”
She slipped the bottle into her corsage and went off, joyous and triumphant.
“They might have been saved but for the coquetry of this woman,” he murmured. “It is the little foot of this courtesan which spurns them into the abyss. Beyond doubt, God is on our side!”
CHAPTER XXX
THE BLOOD
LADY DUBARRY had not seen the street door close after her before Balsamo hurried up into the room where he had left Lorenza. But she was gone.
Her fine flowered cashmere shawl remained on the cushions as a token of her stay in the room.
A painful thought struck him that she had feigned to sleep. Thus she would have dispelled all uneasiness, doubts and mistrust in her husband’s mind only to flee at the first chance for liberty. This time she would be surer of what to do, instructed by her former experience.
This idea made him bound. He searched without avail after ringing for Fritz to come to him. But nobody was about, as nobody had gone out behind the countess.
To run about, moving the furniture, calling Lorenza, looking without seeing, listening without hearing, thrilling without living, and pondering without thinking – such was the state of the infuriate for three minutes, which were as many ages.
He came out of his hallucination and dipping his hand in a vase of iced water, he held it on his forehead. By his will he chased away that throbbing of the blood in the brains which goes on silently in life but when heard means madness or death.
“Come, come, let us reason,” he said, “Lorenza is no more here, and consequently must have gone forth. How? Through Andrea de Taverney I can ascertain all – whether my incorruptible Fritz was bribed and – then, if love is a sham, if science is an error, and fidelity a snare – Balsamo will punish without pity or reservation – like the powerful man smites when he has put aside mercy and preserves but pride. I must let Fritz perceive nothing while I haste to Trianon.”
In taking up his hat to go, he stopped.
“Goodness, I am forgetting the old man,” he said. “I must attend to Althotas before all. In my monstrous love, I left my unfortunate friend to himself – I have been inhuman and ungrateful.”
With the fever animating his movements he sprang to the trap which he lowered and on which he stepped.
Scarcely had he reached the level of the laboratory, than he was struck by the old man’s voice crooning a song. To Balsamo’s high astonishment his first words were not a reproach as he expected; he was received by a natural and simple outburst of gaiety.
The old man was lolling back in his easy chair, snuffing the air as though he were drinking in new life at each sniff. His eyes were filled with dull fire, but the smile on his lips made them lighter as they were fastened on the visitor.