Book: A Strange Story, Volume 4.
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Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 4.
"You have reason to believe! Why?"
"Oh, a charming young fellow, who, with most of the other gentry resident
at L----, called on me at my hotel, told me that he. had travelled in the
East, and had there heard much of Sir Philip's knowledge of chemistry, and
the cures it had enabled him to perform."
"You speak of Mr. Margrave. He called on you?"
"Yes."
"You did not, I trust, mention to him the existence of Sir Philip's
manuscript."
"Indeed I did; and I said you had promised to examine it. He seemed
delighted at that, and spoke most highly of your peculiar fitness for the
task."
"Give me the manuscript," said I, abruptly, "and after I have looked at it
to-night, I may have something to say to you tomorrow in reference to Mr.
Margrave."
"There is the book," said Strahan; "I have just glanced at it, and find
much of it written in Latin; and I am ashamed to say that I have so
neglected the little Latin I learned in our college days that I could not
construe what I looked at."
I sat down and placed the book before me; Strahan fell into a doze, from
which he was wakened by the housekeeper, who brought in the tea-things.
"Well," said Strahan, languidly, "do you find much in the book that
explains the many puzzling riddles in poor Sir Philip's eccentric life and
pursuits?"
"Yes," said I. "Do not interrupt me."
Strahan again began to doze, and the housekeeper asked if we should want
anything more that night, and if I thought I could find my way to my
bedroom.
I dismissed her impatiently, and continued to read. Strahan woke up again
as the clock struck eleven, and finding me still absorbed in the
manuscript, and disinclined to converse, lighted his candle, and telling
me to replace the manuscript in the desk when I had done with it, and be
sure to lock the desk and take charge of the key, which he took off the
bunch and gave me, went upstairs, yawning.
I was alone in the wizard Forman's chamber, and bending over a stranger
record than had ever excited my infant wonder, or, in later years,
provoked my sceptic smile.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
The Manuscript was written in a small and peculiar handwriting, which,
though evidently by the same person whose letter to Strahan I had read,
was, whether from haste or some imperfection in the ink, much more hard to
decipher. Those parts of the Memoir which related to experiments, or
alleged secrets in Nature, that the writer intimated a desire to submit
exclusively to scholars or men of science, were in Latin,--and Latin
which, though grammatically correct, was frequently obscure. But all
that detained the eye and attention on the page necessarily served to
impress the contents more deeply on remembrance.
The narrative commenced with the writer's sketch of his childhood. Both
his parents had died before he attained his seventh year. The orphan bad
been sent by his guardians to a private school, and his holidays had been
passed at Derval Court. Here his earliest reminiscences were those of the
quaint old room, in which I now sat, and of his childish wonder at the
inscription on the chimneypiece--who and what was the Simon Forman who had
there found a refuge from persecution? Of what nature were the studies he
had cultivated, and the discoveries he boasted to have made?
When he was about sixteen, Philip Derval had begun to read the many mystic
books which the library contained; but without other result on his mind
than the sentiment of disappointment and disgust. The impressions
produced on the credulous imagination of childhood vanished. He went to
the University; was sent abroad to travel: and on his return took that
place in the circles of London which is so readily conceded to a young
idler of birth and fortune. He passed quickly over that period of his
life, as one of extravagance and dissipation, from which he was first
drawn by the attachment for his cousin to which his letter to Strahan
referred. Disappointed in the hopes which that affection had conceived,
and his fortune impaired, partly by some years of reckless profusion, and
partly by the pecuniary sacrifices at which he had effected his cousin's
marriage with another, he retired to Derval Court, to live there in
solitude and seclusion. On searching for some old title-deeds required
for a mortgage, he chanced upon a collection of manuscripts much
discoloured, and, in part, eaten away by moth or damp. These, on
examination, proved to be the writings of Forman. Some of them were
astrological observations and predictions; some were upon the nature of
the Cabbala; some upon the invocation of spirits and the magic of the dark
ages. All had a certain interest, for they were interspersed with
personal remarks, anecdotes of eminent actors in a very stirring time, and
were composed as Colloquies, in imitation of Erasmus,--the second person
in the dialogue being Sir Miles Derval, the patron and pupil; the first
person being Forman, the philosopher and expounder.
But along with these shadowy lucubrations were treatises of a more
uncommon and a more startling character,--discussions on various occult
laws of nature, and detailed accounts of analytical experiments. These
opened a new, and what seemed to Sir Philip a practical, field of
inquiry,--a true border-land between natural science and imaginative
speculation. Sir Philip had cultivated philosophical science at the
University; he resumed the study, and tested himself the truth of various
experiments suggested by Forman. Some, to his surprise, proved
successful, some wholly failed. These lucubrations first tempted the
writer of the memoir towards the studies in which the remainder of his
life had been consumed. But he spoke of the lucubrations themselves as
valuable only where suggestive of some truths which Forman had
accidentally approached, without being aware of their true nature and
importance. They were debased by absurd puerilities, and vitiated by the
vain and presumptuous ignorance which characterized the astrology of the
middle ages. For these reasons the writer intimated his intention (if he
lived to return to England) to destroy Forman's manuscripts, together with
sundry other books, and a few commentaries of his own upon studies which
had for a while misled him,--all now deposited in the safes of the room in
which I sat.
After some years passed in the retirement of Derval Court, Sir Philip was
seized with the desire to travel, and the taste he had imbibed for occult
studies led him towards those Eastern lands in which they took their
origin, and still retain their professors.
Several pages of the manuscript were now occupied with minute statements
of the writer's earlier disappointment in the objects of his singular
research. The so-called magicians, accessible to the curiosity of
European travellers, were either but ingenious jugglers, or produced
effects that perplexed him by practices they had mechanically learned, but
of the rationale of which they were as ignorant as himself. It was not
till he had resided some considerable time in the East, and acquired a
familiar knowledge of its current languages and the social habits of its
various populations, that he became acquainted with men in whom he
recognized earnest cultivators of the lore which tradition ascribes to the
colleges and priesthoods of the ancient world,--men generally living
remote from others, and seldom to be bribed by money to exhibit their
marvels or divulge their secrets. In his intercourse with these sages,
Sir Philip arrived at the conviction that there does exist an art of
magic, distinct from the guile of the conjuror, and applying to certain
latent powers and affinities in nature,--a philosophy akin to that which
we receive in our acknowledged schools, inasmuch as it is equally based on
experiment, and produces from definite causes definite results. In
support of this startling proposition, Sir Philip now devoted more than
half his volume to the details of various experiments, to the process and
result of which he pledged his guarantee as the actual operator. As most
of these alleged experiments appeared to me wholly incredible, and as all
of them were unfamiliar to my practical experience, and could only be
verified or falsified by tests that would require no inconsiderable amount
of time and care, I passed with little heed over the pages in which they
were set forth. I was impatient to arrive at that part of the manuscript
which might throw light on the mystery in which my interest was the
keenest. What were the links which connected the existence of Margrave
with the history of Sir Philip Derval? Thus hurrying on, page after page,
I suddenly, towards the end of the volume, came upon a name that arrested
all my attention,--Haroun of Aleppo. He who has read the words addressed
to mee in my trance may well conceive the thrill that shot through my
heart when I came upon that name, and will readily understand how much
more vividly my memory retains that part of the manuscript to which I now
proceed, than all which had gone before.
"It was," wrote Sir Philip, "in an obscure suburb of Aleppo that I at
length met with the wonderful man from whom I have acquired a
knowledge immeasurably more profound and occult than that which may be
tested in the experiments to which I have devoted so large a share of
this memoir. Haroun of Aleppo had, indeed, mastered every secret in
nature which the nobler, or theurgic, magic seeks to fathom.
"He had discovered the great Principle of Animal Life, which had
hitherto baffled the subtlest anatomist. Provided only that the great
organs were not irreparably destroyed, there was no disease that he
could not cure; no decrepitude to which be could not restore vigour:
yet his science was based on the same theory as that espoused by the
best professional practitioner of medicine, namely, that the true art
of healing is to assist nature to throw off the disease; to summon, as
it were, the whole system to eject the enemy that has fastened on a
part. And thus his processes, though occasionally varying in the
means employed, all combined in this,--namely, the re-invigourating
and recruiting of the principle of life."
No one knew the birth or origin of Haroun; no one knew his age. In
outward appearance he was in the strength and prime of mature manhood;
but, according to testimonies in which the writer of the memoir expressed
a belief that, I need scarcely say, appeared to me egregiously credulous,
Haroun's existence under the same name, and known by the same repute,
could be traced back to more than a hundred years. He told Sir Philip
that he had thrice renewed his own life, and had resolved to do so no
more; he had grown weary of living on. With all his gifts, Haroun owned
himself to be consumed by a profound melancholy. He complained that there
was nothing new to him under the sun; he said that, while he had at his
command unlimited wealth, wealth had ceased to bestow enjoyment, and he
preferred living as simply as a peasant; he had tired out all the
affections and all the passions of the human heart; he was in the universe
as in a solitude. In a word, Haroun would often repeat, with mournful
solemnity: "'The soul is not meant to inhabit this earth and in fleshy
tabernacle for more than the period usually assigned to mortals; and when
by art in repairing the walls of the body we so retain it, the soul
repines, becomes inert or dejected. He only," said Haroun, "would feel
continued joy in continued existence who could preserve in perfection the
sensual part of man, with such mind or reason as may be independent of the
spiritual essence, but whom soul itself has quitted!--man, in short, as
the grandest of the animals, but without the sublime discontent of earth,
which is the peculiar attribute of soul."
One evening Sir Philip was surprised to find at Haroun's house another
European. He paused in his narrative to describe this man. He said that
for three or four years previously he had heard frequent mention, amongst
the cultivators of magic, of an orientalized Englishman engaged in
researches similar to his own, and to whom was ascribed a terrible
knowledge in those branches of the art which, even in the East, are
condemned as instrumental to evil. Sir Philip here distinguished at
length, as he had so briefly distinguished in his conversation with me,
between the two kinds of magic,--that which he alleged to be as pure from
sin as any other species of experimental knowledge, and that by which the
agencies of witchcraft are invoked for the purposes of guilt.
The Englishman, to whom the culture of this latter and darker kind of
magic was ascribed, Sir Philip Derval had never hitherto come across. He
now met him at the house of Haroun; decrepit, emaciated, bowed down with
infirmities, and racked with pain. Though little more than sixty, his
aspect was that of extreme old age; but still on his face there were seen
the ruins of a once singular beauty, and still, in his mind, there was a
force that contrasted the decay of the body. Sir Philip had never met
with an intellect more powerful and more corrupt. The son of a notorious
usurer, heir to immense wealth, and endowed with the talents which justify
ambition, he had entered upon life burdened with the odium of his father's
name. A duel, to which he had been provoked by an ungenerous taunt on his
origin, but in which a temperament fiercely vindictive had led him to
violate the usages prescribed by the social laws that regulate such
encounters, had subjected him to a trial in which he escaped conviction
either by a flaw in the technicalities of legal procedure, or by the
compassion of the jury;[1] but the moral presumptions against him were
sufficiently strong to set an indelible brand on his honour, and an
insurmountable barrier to the hopes which his early ambition had
conceived. After this trial he had quitted his country, to return to it
no more. Thenceforth, much of his life had been passed out of sight or
conjecture of civilized men in remote regions and amongst barbarous
tribes. At intervals, however, he had reappeared in European capitals;
shunned by and shunning his equals, surrounded by parasites, amongst whom
were always to be found men of considerable learning, whom avarice or
poverty subjected to the influences of his wealth. For the last nine or
ten years he had settled in Persia, purchased extensive lands, maintained
the retinue, and exercised more than the power of an Oriental prince.
Such was the man who, prematurely worn out, and assured by physicians that
he had not six weeks of life, had come to Aleppo with the gaudy escort of
an Eastern satrap, had caused himself to be borne in his litter to the
mud-hut of Haroun the Sage, and now called on the magician, in whose art
was his last hope, to reprieve him from the--grave.
He turned round to Sir Philip, when the latter entered the room, and
exclaimed in English, "I am here because you are. Your intimacy with this
man was known to me. I took your character as the guarantee of his own.
Tell me that I am no credulous dupe. Tell him that I, Louis Grayle, am no
needy petitioner. Tell me of his wisdom; assure him of my wealth."
Sir Philip looked inquiringly at Haroun, who remained seated on his carpet
in profound silence.
"What is it you ask of Haroun?"
"To live on--to live on! For every year of life he can give me, I will
load these floors with gold."
"Gold will not tempt Haroun."
"What will?"
"Ask him yourself; you speak his language."
"I have asked him; he vouchsafes me no answer."
Haroun here suddenly roused himself as from a revery. He drew from under
his robe a small phial, from which he let fall a single drop into a cup of
water, and said, "Drink this; send to me tomorrow for such medicaments as
I may prescribe. Return hither yourself in three days; not before!"
When Grayle was gone, Sir Philip, moved to pity, asked Haroun if, indeed,
it were within the compass of his art to preserve life in a frame that
appeared so thoroughly exhausted. Haroun answered, "A fever may so waste
the lamp of life that one ruder gust of air could extinguish the flame,
yet the sick man recovers. This sick man's existence has been one long
fever; this sick man can recover."
"You will aid him to do so?"
"Three days hence I will tell you."
On the third day Grayle revisited Haroun, and, at Haroun's request, Sir
Philip came also. Grayle declared that he had already derived unspeakable
relief from the remedies administered; he was lavish in expressions of
gratitude; pressed large gifts on Haroun, and seemed pained when they were
refused. This time Haroun conversed freely, drawing forth Grayle's own
irregular, perverted, stormy, but powerful intellect.
I can best convey the general nature of Grayle's share in the dialogue
between himself, Haroun, and Derval--recorded in the narrative in words
which I cannot trust my memory to repeat in detail--by stating the effect
it produced on my own mind. It seemed, while I read, as if there passed
before me some convulsion of Nature,--a storm, an earthquake,--outcries
of rage, of scorn, of despair, a despot's vehemence of will, a rebel's
scoff at authority; yet, ever and anon, some swell of lofty thought, some
burst of passionate genius,--abrupt variations from the vaunt of superb
defiance to the wail of intense remorse.
The whole had in it, I know not what of uncouth but colossal,--like the
chant, in the old lyrical tragedy, of one of those mythical giants, who,
proud of descent from Night and Chaos, had held sway over the elements,
while still crude and conflicting, to be crushed under the rocks, upheaved
in their struggle, as Order and Harmony subjected a brightening Creation
to the milder influences throned in Olympus. But it was not till the
later passages of the dialogue in which my interest was now absorbed, that
the language ascribed to this sinister personage lost a gloomy pathos not
the less impressive for the awe with which it was mingled. For, till
then, it seemed to me as if in that tempestuous nature there were still
broken glimpses of starry light; that a character originally lofty, if
irregular and fierce, had been embittered by early and continuous war with
the social world, and had, in that war, become maimed and distorted; that,
under happier circumstances, its fiery strength might have been
disciplined to good; that even now, where remorse was so evidently
poignant, evil could not be irredeemably confirmed.
At length all the dreary compassion previously inspired vanished in one
unqualified abhorrence.
The subjects discussed changed from those which, relating to the common
world of men, were within the scope of my reason. Haroun led his wild
guest to boast of his own proficiency in magic, and, despite my
incredulity, I could not overcome the shudder with which fictions, however
extravagant, that deal with that dark Unknown abandoned to the chimeras of
poets, will, at night and in solitude, send through the veins of men the
least accessible to imaginary terrors.
Grayle spoke of the power he had exercised through the agency of evil
spirits,--a power to fascinate and to destroy. He spoke of the aid
revealed to him, now too late, which such direful allies could afford, not
only to a private revenge, but to a kingly ambition. Had he acquired the
knowledge he declared himself to possess before the feebleness of the
decaying body made it valueless, how he could have triumphed over that
world which had expelled his youth from its pale! He spoke of means by
which his influence could work undetected on the minds of others, control
agencies that could never betray, and baffle the justice that could never
discover. He spoke vaguely of a power by which a spectral reflection of
the material body could be cast, like a shadow, to a distance; glide
through the walls of a prison, elude the sentinels of a camp,--a power
that he asserted to be when enforced by concentrated will, and acting on
the mind, where in each individual temptation found mind the
weakest--almost infallible in its effect to seduce or to appall. And he
closed these and similar boasts of demoniacal arts, which I remember too
obscurely to repeat, with a tumultuous imprecation on their nothingness to
avail against the gripe of death. All this lore he would communicate to
Haroun, in return for what? A boon shared by the meanest peasant,--life,
common life; to breathe yet a while the air, feel yet a while the sun.
Then Haroun replied. He said, with a quiet disdain, that the dark art to
which Grayle made such boastful pretence was the meanest of all abuses of
knowledge, rightly abandoned, in all ages, to the vilest natures. And
then, suddenly changing his tone, he spoke, so far as I can remember the
words assigned to him in the manuscript, to this effect,--
"Fallen and unhappy wretch, and you ask me for prolonged life!--a
prolonged curse to the world and to yourself. Shall I employ spells to
lengthen the term of the Pestilence, or profane the secrets of Nature to
restore vigour and youth to the failing energies of Crime?"
Grayle, as if stunned by the rebuke, fell on his knees with despairing
entreaties that strangely contrasted his previous arrogance. "And it
was," he said, "because his life had been evil that he dreaded death. If
life could be renewed he would repent, he would change; he retracted his
vaunts, he would forsake the arts he had boasted, he would re-enter the
world as its benefactor."
"So ever the wicked man lies to himself when appalled by the shadow of
death," answered Haroun. "But know, by the remorse which preys on thy
soul, that it is not thy soul that addresses this prayer to me. Couldst
thou hear, through the storms of the Mind, the Soul's melancholy whisper,
it would dissuade thee from a wish to live on. While I speak, I behold
it, that Soul,--sad for the stains on its essence, awed by the account it
must render, but dreading, as the direst calamity, a renewal of years
below, darker stains and yet heavier accounts! Whatever the sentence it
may now undergo, it has a hope for mercy in the remorse which the mind
vainly struggles to quell. But darker its doom if longer retained to
earth, yoked to the mind that corrupts it, and enslaved to the senses
which thou bidst me restore to their tyrannous forces."
And Grayle bowed his head and covered his face with his hands in silence
and in trembling.
Then Sir Philip, seized with compassion, pleaded for him. "At least,
could not the soul have longer time on earth for repentance?" And while
Sir Philip was so pleading, Grayle fell prostrate in a swoon like that of
death. When he recovered, his head was leaning on Haroun's knee, and his
opening eyes fixed on the glittering phial which Haroun held, and from
which his lips had been moistened.
"Wondrous!" he murmured: "how I feel life flowing back to me. And that,
then, is the elixir! it is no fable!"
His hands stretched greedily as to seize the phial, and he cried
imploringly, "More, more!" Haroun replaced the vessel in the folds of his
robe, and answered,--
"I will not renew thy youth, but I will release thee from bodily
suffering: I will leave the mind and the soul free from the pangs of the
flesh, to reconcile, if yet possible, their long war. My skill may afford
thee months yet for repentance; Seek, in that interval, to atone for the
evil of sixty years; apply thy wealth where it may most compensate for
injury done, most relieve the indigent, and most aid the virtuous. Listen
to thy remorse; humble thyself in prayer."
Grayle departed, sighing heavily and muttering to himself. The next day
Haroun summoned Sir Philip Derval, and said to him,--
"Depart to Damascus. In that city the Pestilence has appeared. Go
thither thou, to heal and to save. In this casket are stored the surest
antidotes to the poison of the plague. Of that essence, undiluted and
pure, which tempts to the undue prolongation of soul in the prison of
flesh, this casket contains not a drop. I curse not my friend with so
mournful a boon. Thou hast learned enough of my art to know by what
simples the health of the temperate is easily restored to its balance, and
their path to the grave smoothed from pain. Not more should Man covet
from Nature for the solace and weal of the body. Nobler gifts far than
aught for the body this casket contains. Herein are the essences which
quicken the life of those duplicate senses that lie dormant and coiled in
their chrysalis web, awaiting the wings of a future development,--the
senses by which we can see, though not with the eye, and hear, but not by
the ear. Herein are the links between Man's mind and Nature's; herein are
secrets more precious even than these,--those extracts of light which
enable the Soul to distinguish itself from the Mind, and discriminate the
spiritual life, not more from life carnal than life intellectual. Where
thou seest some noble intellect, studious of Nature, intent upon Truth,
yet ignoring the fact that all animal life has a mind and Man alone on the
earth ever asked, and has asked, from the hour his step trod the earth,
and his eye sought the Heaven, 'Have I not a soul; can it perish?'--there,
such aids to the soul, in the innermost vision vouchsafed to the mind,
thou mayst lawfully use. But the treasures contained in this casket are
like all which a mortal can win from the mines he explores,--good or ill
in their uses as they pass to the hands of the good or the evil. Thou
wilt never confide them but to those who will not abuse! and even then,
thou art an adept too versed in the mysteries of Nature not to
discriminate between the powers that may serve the good to good ends, and
the powers that may tempt the good--where less wise than experience has
made thee and me--to the ends that are evil; and not even to thy friend
the most virtuous--if less proof against passion than thou and I have
become--wilt thou confide such contents of the casket as may work on the
fancy, to deafen the conscience and imperil the soul."