Book: A Strange Story, Volume 3.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 3.
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CHAPTER XXV.
My intercourse with Margrave grew habitual and familiar. He came to my
house every morning before sunrise; in the evenings we were again brought
together: sometimes in the houses to which we were both invited, sometimes
at his hotel, sometimes in my own home.
Nothing more perplexed me than his aspect of extreme youthfulness,
contrasted with the extent of the travels, which, if he were to be
believed, had left little of the known world unexplored. One day I asked
him bluntly how old he was.
"How old do I look? How old should you suppose me to be?"
"I should have guessed you to be about twenty, till you spoke of having
come of age some years ago."
"Is it a sign of longevity when a man looks much younger than he is?"
"Conjoined with other signs, certainly!"
"Have I the other signs?"
"Yes, a magnificent, perhaps a matchless, constitutional organization.
But you have evaded my question as to your age; was it an impertinence to
put it?"
"No. I came of age--let me see--three years ago."
"So long since? Is it possible? I wish I had your secret!"
"Secret! What secret?"
"The secret of preserving so much of boyish freshness in the wear and tear
of man-like passions and man-like thoughts."
"You are still young yourself,--under forty?"
"Oh, yes! some years under forty."
"And Nature gave you a grander frame and a finer symmetry of feature than
she bestowed on me."
"Pooh! pooh! You have the beauty that must charm the eyes of woman, and
that beauty in its sunny forenoon of youth. Happy man! if you love and
wish to be sure that you are loved again."
"What you call love--the unhealthy sentiment, the feverish folly--left
behind me, I think forever, when--"
"Ay, indeed,--when?"
"I came of age!"
"Hoary cynic! and you despise love! So did I once. Your time may come."
"I think not. Does any animal, except man, love its fellow she-animal as
man loves woman?"
"As man loves woman? No, I suppose not."
"And why should the subject animals be wiser than their king? But to
return: you would like to have my youth and my careless enjoyment of
youth?"
"Can you ask,--who would not?" Margrave looked at me for a moment with
unusual seriousness, and then, in the abrupt changes common to his
capricious temperament, began to sing softly one of his barbaric
chants,--a chant different from any I had heard him sing before, made,
either by the modulation of his voice or the nature of the tune, so sweet
that, little as music generally affected me, this thrilled to my very
heart's core. I drew closer and closer to him, and murmured when he
paused,--
"Is not that a love-song?"
"No;" said he, "it is the song by which the serpent-charmer charms the
serpent."
CHAPTER XXVI.
Increased intimacy with my new acquaintance did not diminish the charm of
his society, though it brought to light some startling defects, both in
his mental and moral organization. I have before said that his knowledge,
though it had swept over a wide circuit and dipped into curious,
unfrequented recesses, was desultory and erratic. It certainly was not
that knowledge, sustained and aspiring, which the poet assures us is "the
wing on which we mount to heaven." So, in his faculties themselves there
were singular inequalities, or contradictions. His power of memory in
some things seemed prodigious, but when examined it was seldom accurate;
it could apprehend, but did not hold together with a binding grasp what
metaphysicians call "complex ideas." He thus seemed unable to put it to
any steadfast purpose in the sciences of which it retained, vaguely and
loosely, many recondite principles. For the sublime and beautiful in
literature lie had no taste whatever. A passionate lover of nature, his
imagination had no response to the arts by which nature is expressed or
idealized; wholly unaffected by poetry or painting. Of the fine arts,
music alone attracted and pleased him. His conversation was often
eminently suggestive, touching on much, whether in books or mankind, that
set one thinking; but I never remember him to have uttered any of those
lofty or tender sentiments which form the connecting links between youth
and genius; for if poets sing to the young, and the young hail their own
interpreters in poets, it is because the tendency of both is to idealize
the realities of life,--finding everywhere in the real a something that is
noble or fair, and making the fair yet fairer, and the noble nobler still.
In Margrave's character there seemed no special vices, no special virtues;
but a wonderful vivacity, joyousness, animal good-humour. He was
singularly temperate, having a dislike to wine, perhaps from that purity
of taste which belongs to health absolutely perfect. No healthful child
likes alcohol; no animal, except man, prefers wine to water.
But his main moral defect seemed to me in a want of sympathy, even where
he professed attachment. He who could feel so acutely for himself, be
unmanned by the bite of a squirrel, and sob at the thought that he should
one day die, was as callous to the sufferings of another as a deer who
deserts and butts from him a wounded comrade.
I give an instance of this hardness of heart where I should have least
expected to find it in him.
He had met and joined me as I was walking to visit a patient on the
outskirts of the town, when we fell in with a group of children, just let
loose for an hour or two from their day-school. Some of these children
joyously recognized him as having played with them at their homes; they
ran up to him, and he seemed as glad as themselves at the meeting.
He suffered them to drag him along with them, and became as merry and
sportive as the youngest of the troop.
"Well," said I, laughing, "if you are going to play at leap-frog, pray
don't let it be on the high road, or you will be run over by carts and
draymen; see that meadow just in front to the left,--off with you there!"
"With all my heart," cried Margrave, "while you pay your visit. Come
along, boys."
A little urchin, not above six years old, but who was lame, began to cry;
he could not run,--he should be left behind.
Margrave stooped. "Climb on my shoulder, little one, and I'll be your
horse."
The child dried its tears, and delightedly obeyed. "Certainly," said I to
myself, "Margrave, after all, must have a nature as gentle as it is
simple. What other young man, so courted by all the allurements that
steal innocence from pleasure, would stop in the thoroughfares to play
with children?"
The thought had scarcely passed through my mind when I heard a scream of
agony. Margrave had leaped the railing that divided the meadow from the
road, and, in so doing, the poor child, perched on his shoulder, had,
perhaps from surprise or fright, loosened its hold and fallen heavily; its
cries were piteous. Margrave clapped his hands to his ears, uttered an
exclamation of anger, and not even stopping to lift up the boy, or examine
what the hurt was, called to the other children to come on, and was soon
rolling with them on the grass, and pelting them with daisies. When I
came up, only one child remained by the sufferer,-his little brother, a
year older than himself. The child had fallen on his arm, which was not
broken, but violently contused. The pain must have been intense. I
carried the child to his home, and had to remain there some time. I did
not see Margrave till the next morning. When he then called, I felt so
indignant that I could scarcely speak to him. When at last I rebuked
him for his inhumanity, he seemed surprised; with difficulty remembered
the circumstance, and then merely said, as if it were the most natural
confession in the world,
"Oh, nothing so discordant as a child's wail. I hate discords. I am
pleased with the company of children; but they must be children who laugh
and play. Well, why do you look at me so sternly? What have I said to
shock you?"
"Shock me! you shock manhood itself! Go; I cannot talk to you now. I am
busy."
But he did not go; and his voice was so sweet, and his ways so winning,
that disgust insensibly melted into that sort of forgiveness one accords
(let me repeat the illustration) to the deer that forsakes its comrade.
The poor thing knows no better. And what a graceful beautiful thing this
was!
The fascination--I can give it no other name--which Margrave exercised,
was not confined to me; it was universal,--old, young, high, low, man,
woman, child, all felt it. Never in Low Town had stranger, even the most
distinguished by fame, met with a reception so cordial, so flattering.
His frank confession that he was a natural son, far from being to his
injury, served to interest people more in him, and to prevent all those
inquiries in regard to his connections and antecedents which would
otherwise have been afloat. To be sure, he was evidently rich,--at least
he had plenty of money. He lived in the best rooms in the principal
hotel; was very hospitable; entertained the families with whom he had
grown intimate; made them bring their children,--music and dancing after
dinner. Among the houses in which he had established familiar
acquaintance was that of the mayor of the town, who had bought Dr. Lloyd's
collection of subjects in natural history. To that collection the mayor
had added largely by a very recent purchase. He had arranged these
various specimens, which his last acquisitions had enriched by the
interesting carcasses of an elephant and a hippopotamus, in a large wooden
building contiguous to his dwelling, which had been constructed by a
former proprietor (a retired fox-hunter) as a riding-house; and being a
man who much affected the diffusion of knowledge, he proposed to open this
museum to the admiration of the general public, and, at his death, to
bequeath it to the Athenaeum or Literary Institute of his native town.
Margrave, seconded by the influence of the mayor's daughters, had scarcely
been three days at L---- before he had persuaded this excellent and
public-spirited functionary to inaugurate the opening of his museum by the
popular ceremony of a ball. A temporary corridor should unite the
drawing-rooms, which were on the ground floor, with the building that
contained the collection; and thus the fete would be elevated above the
frivolous character of a fashionable amusement, and consecrated to the
solemnization of an intellectual institute. Dazzled by the brilliancy of
this idea, the mayor announced his intention to give a ball that should
include the surrounding neighbourhood, and be worthy, in all expensive
respects, of the dignity of himself and the occasion. A night had been
fixed for the ball,--a night that became memorable indeed to me! The
entertainment was anticipated with a lively interest, in which even the
Hill condescended to share. The Hill did not much patronize mayors in
general; but when a Mayor gave a ball for a purpose so patriotic, and on a
scale so splendid, the Hill liberally acknowledged that Commerce was, on
the whole, a thing which the Eminence might, now and then, condescend to
acknowledge without absolutely derogating from the rank which Providence
had assigned to it amongst the High Places of earth. Accordingly, the
Hill was permitted by its Queen to honour the first magistrate of Low Town
by a promise to attend his ball. Now, as this festivity had originated in
the suggestion of Margrave, so, by a natural association of ideas, every
one, in talking of the ball, talked also of Margrave.
The Hill had at first affected to ignore a stranger whose debut had been
made in the mercantile circle of Low Town. But the Queen of the Hill now
said, sententiously, "This new man in a few days has become a Celebrity.
It is the policy of the Hill to adopt Celebrities, if the Celebrities pay
respect to the Proprieties. Dr. Fenwick is requested to procure Mr.
Margrave the advantage of being known to the Hill."
I found it somewhat difficult to persuade Margrave to accept the Hill's
condescending overture. He seemed to have a dislike to all societies
pretending to aristocratic distinction,--a dislike expressed with a
fierceness so unwonted, that it made one suppose he had, at some time or
other, been subjected to mortification by the supercilious airs that blow
upon heights so elevated. However, he yielded to my instances, and
accompanied me one evening to Mrs. Poyntz's house. The Hill was encamped
there for the occasion. Mrs. Poyntz was exceedingly civil to him, and
after a few commonplace speeches, hearing that he was fond of music,
consigned him to the caressing care of Miss Brabazon, who was at the head
of the musical department in the Queen of the Hill's administration.
Mrs. Poyntz retired to her favourite seat near the window, inviting me to
sit beside her; and while she knitted in silence, in silence my eye
glanced towards Margrave, in the midst of the group assembled round the
piano.
Whether he was in more than usually high spirits, or whether he was
actuated by a malign and impish desire to upset the established laws of
decorum by which the gayeties of the Hill were habitually subdued into a
serene and somewhat pensive pleasantness, I know not; but it was not many
minutes before the orderly aspect of the place was grotesquely changed.
Miss Brabazon having come to the close of a complicated and dreary sonata,
I heard Margrave abruptly ask her if she could play the Tarantella, that
famous Neapolitan air which is founded on the legendary belief that the
bite of the tarantula excites an irresistible desire to dance. On that
highbred spinster's confession that she was ignorant of the air, and had
not even heard of the legend, Margrave said, "Let me play it to you, with
variations of my own." Miss Brabazon graciously yielded her place at the
instrument. Margrave seated himself,--there was great curiosity to hear
his performance. Margrave's fingers rushed over the keys, and there was a
general start, the prelude was so unlike any known combination of
harmonious sounds. Then he began a chant--song I can scarcely call
it--words certainly not in Italian, perhaps in some uncivilized tongue,
perhaps in impromptu gibberish. And the torture of the instrument now
commenced in good earnest: it shrieked, it groaned, wilder and noisier.
Beethoven's Storm, roused by the fell touch of a German pianist, were mild
in comparison; and the mighty voice, dominating the anguish of the
cracking keys, had the full diapason of a chorus. Certainly I am no judge
of music, but to my ear the discord was terrific,--to the ears of better
informed amateurs it seemed ravishing. All were spellbound; even Mrs.
Poyntz paused from her knitting, as the Fates paused from their web at the
lyre of Orpheus. To this breathless delight, however, soon succeeded a
general desire for movement. To my amazement, I beheld these formal
matrons and sober fathers of families forming themselves into a dance,
turbulent as a children's ball at Christmas; and when, suddenly desisting
from his music, Margrave started up, caught the skeleton hand of lean
Miss Brabazon, and whirled her into the centre of the dance, I could have
fancied myself at a witch's sabbat. My eye turned in scandalized alarm
towards Mrs. Poyntz. That great creature seemed as much astounded as
myself. Her eyes were fixed on the scene in a stare of positive stupor.
For the first time, no doubt, in her life, she was overcome, deposed,
dethroned. The awe of her presence was literally whirled away. The dance
ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Darting from the galvanized mummy
whom he had selected as his partner, Margrave shot to Mrs. Poyntz's side,
and said, "Ten thousand pardons for quitting you so soon, but the clock
warns me that I have an engagement elsewhere." In another moment he was
gone.
The dance halted, people seemed slowly returning to their senses,
looking at each other bashfully and ashamed.
"I could not help it, dear," sighed Miss Brabazon at last, sinking into a
chair, and casting her deprecating, fainting eyes upon the hostess.
"It is witchcraft," said fat Mrs. Bruce, wiping her forehead.
"Witchcraft!" echoed Mrs. Poyntz; "it does indeed look like it. An
amazing and portentous exhibition of animal spirits, and not to be endured
by the Proprieties. Where on earth can that young savage have come from?"
"From savage lands," said I,--"so he says."
"Do not bring him here again," said Mrs. Poyntz. "He would soon turn the
Hill topsy-turvy. But how charming! I should like to see more of him,"
she added, in an under voice, "if he would call on me some morning, and
not in the presence of those for whose Proprieties I am responsible. Jane
must be out in her ride with the colonel."
Margrave never again attended the patrician festivities of the Hill.
Invitations were poured upon him, especially by Miss Brabazon and the
other old maids, but in vain.
"Those people," said he, "are too tamed and civilized for me; and so few
young persons among them. Even that girl Jane is only young on the
surface; inside, as old as the World or her mother. I like youth, real
youth,--I am young, I am young!"
And, indeed, I observed he would attach himself to some young person,
often to some child, as if with cordial and special favour, yet for not
more than an hour or so, never distinguishing them by the same preference
when he next met them. I made that remark to him, in rebuke of his
fickleness, one evening when he had found me at work on my Ambitious Book,
reducing to rule and measure the Laws of Nature.
"It is not fickleness," said he,--"it is necessity."
"Necessity! Explain yourself."
"I seek to find what I have not found," said he; it is my necessity to
seek it, and among the young; and disappointed in one, I turn to the
other. Necessity again. But find it at last I must."
"I suppose you mean what the young usually seek in the young; and if, as
you said the other day, you have left love behind you, you now wander back
to re-find it."
"Tush! If I may judge by the talk of young fools, love may be found
every day by him who looks out for it. What I seek is among the rarest of
all discoveries. You might aid me to find it, and in so doing aid
yourself to a knowledge far beyond all that your formal experiments can
bestow."
"Prove your words, and command my services," said I, smiling somewhat
disdainfully.
"You told me that you had examined into the alleged phenomena of animal
magnetism, and proved some persons who pretend to the gift which the
Scotch call second sight to be bungling impostors. You were right. I
have seen the clairvoyants who drive their trade in this town; a common
gipsy could beat them in their own calling. But your experience must
have shown you that there are certain temperaments in which the gift of
the Pythoness is stored, unknown to the possessor, undetected by the
common observer; but the signs of which should be as apparent to the
modern physiologist, as they were to the ancient priest."
"I at least, as a physiologist, am ignorant of the signs: what are they?"
"I should despair of making you comprehend them by mere verbal
description. I could guide your observation to distinguish them
unerringly were living subjects before us. But not one in a million has
the gift to an extent available for the purposes to which the wise would
apply it. Many have imperfect glimpses; few, few indeed, the unveiled,
lucent sight. They who have but the imperfect glimpses mislead and dupe
the minds that consult them, because, being sometimes marvellously right,
they excite a credulous belief in their general accuracy; and as they are
but translators of dreams in their own brain, their assurances are no more
to be trusted than are the dreams of commonplace sleepers. But where the
gift exists to perfection, he who knows how to direct and to profit by it
should be able to discover all that he desires to know for the guidance
and preservation of his own life. He will be forewarned of every danger,
forearmed in the means by which danger is avoided. For the eye of the
true Pythoness matter has no obstruction, space no confines, time no
measurement."
"My dear Margrave, you may well say that creatures so gifted are rare;
and, for my part, I would as soon search for a unicorn, as, to use your
affected expression, for a Pythoness."
"Nevertheless, whenever there come across the course of your practice some
young creature to whom all the evil of the world is as yet unknown, to
whom the ordinary cares and duties of the world are strange and unwelcome;
who from the earliest dawn of reason has loved to sit apart and to muse;
before whose eyes visions pass unsolicited; who converses with those who
are not dwellers on the earth, and beholds in the space landscapes which
the earth does not reflect--"
"Margrave, Margrave! of whom do you speak?"
"Whose frame, though exquisitely sensitive, has still a health and a
soundness in which you recognize no disease; whose mind has a truthfulness
that you know cannot deceive you, and a simple intelligence too clear to
deceive itself; who is moved to a mysterious degree by all the varying
aspects of external nature,--innocently joyous, or unaccountably
sad,--when, I say, such a being comes across your experience, inform me;
and the chances are that the true Pythoness is found."
I had listened with vague terror, and with more than one exclamation of
amazement, to descriptions which brought Lilian Ashleigh before me; and I
now sat mute, bewildered, breathless, gazing upon Margrave, and rejoicing
that, at least, Lilian he had never seen.
He returned my own gaze steadily, searchingly, and then, breaking
into a slight laugh, resumed:--
"You call my word 'Pythoness' affected. I know of no better. My
recollections of classic anecdote and history are confused and dim; but
somewhere I have read or heard that the priests of Delphi were accustomed
to travel chiefly into Thrace or Thessaly, in search of the virgins who
might fitly administer their oracles, and that the oracles gradually
ceased in repute as the priests became unable to discover the
organization requisite in the priestesses, and supplied by craft and
imposture, or by such imperfect fragmentary developments as belong now to
professional clairvoyants, the gifts which Nature failed to afford.
Indeed, the demand was one that mast have rapidly exhausted so limited a
supply. The constant strain upon faculties so wearying to the vital
functions in their relentless exercise, under the artful stimulants by
which the priests heightened their power, was mortal, and no Pythoness
ever retained her life more than three years from the time that her gift
was elaborately trained and developed."
"Pooh! I know of no classical authority for the details you so
confidently cite. Perhaps some such legends may be found in the
Alexandrian Platonists, but those mystics are no authority on such a
subject. "After all;" I added, recovering from my first surprise, or awe,
"the Delphic oracles were proverbially ambiguous, and their responses
might be read either way,--a proof that the priests dictated the verses,
though their arts on the unhappy priestess might throw her into real
convulsions, and the real convulsions, not the false gift, might shorten
her life. Enough of such idle subjects! Yet no! one question more. If
you found your Pythoness, what then?"
"What then? Why, through her aid I might discover the process of an
experiment which your practical science would assist me to complete."
"Tell me of what kind is your experiment; and precisely because such
little science as I possess is exclusively practical, I may assist you
without the help of the Pythoness."
Margrave was silent for some minutes, passing his hand several times
across his forehead, which was a frequent gesture of his, and then rising,
he answered, in listless accents,--
"I cannot say more now, my brain is fatigued; and you are not yet in the
right mood to hear me. By the way, how close and reserved you are with
me!"
"How so?"
"You never told me that you were engaged to be married. You leave me, who
thought to have won your friendship, to hear what concerns you so
intimately from a comparative stranger."
"Who told you?"
"That woman with eyes that pry and lips that scheme, to whose house you
took me."
"Mrs. Poyntz! is it possible? When?"
"This afternoon. I met her in the street; she stopped me, and, after some
unmeaning talk, asked if I had seen you lately; if I did not find you very
absent and distracted: no wonder;--you were in love. The young lady was
away on a visit, and wooed by a dangerous rival."
"Wooed by a dangerous rival!"
"Very rich, good-looking, young. Do you fear him? You turn pale."
"I do not fear, except so far as he who loves truly, loves humbly, and
fears not that another may be preferred, but that another may be worthier
of preference than himself. But that Mrs. Poyntz should tell you all this
does amaze me. Did she mention the name of the young lady?"