The Witch of Prague Part 14

"He called her Beatrice. The name was suggested to him because he had fallen ill in a city of the South where a woman called Beatrice once lived and was loved by a great poet. That was the train of self-suggestion in his delirium. Mind, do you understand?"

"He suggested to himself the name in his illness."

"In the same way that he suggested to himself the existence of the woman whom he afterwards believed he loved?"

"In exactly the same way."

"It was all a curious and very interesting case of auto-hypnotic suggestion. It made him very mad. He is now cured of it. Do you see that he is cured?"

The sleeper gave no answer. The stiffened limbs did not move, indeed, nor did the glazed eyes reflect the starlight. But he gave no answer.

The lips did not even attempt to form words. Had Unorna been less carried away by the excitement in her own thoughts, or less absorbed in the fierce concentration of her will upon its pa.s.sive subject, she would have noticed the silence and would have gone back again over the old ground. As it was, she did not pause.

"You understand therefore, my Mind, that this Beatrice was entirely the creature of the man's imagination. Beatrice does not exist, because she never existed. Beatrice never had any real being. Do you understand?"

This time she waited for an answer, but none came.

"There never was any Beatrice," she repeated firmly, laying her hand upon the unconscious head and bending down to gaze into the sightless eyes.

The answer did not come, but a s.h.i.+ver like that of an ague shook the long, graceful limbs.

"You are my Mind," she said fiercely. "Obey me! There never was any Beatrice, there is no Beatrice now, and there never can be."

The n.o.ble brow contracted in a look of agonising pain, and the whole frame shook like an aspen leaf in the wind. The mouth moved spasmodically.

"Obey me! Say it!" cried Unorna with pa.s.sionate energy.

The lips twisted themselves, and the face was as gray as the gray snow.

"There is--no--Beatrice." The words came out slowly, and yet not distinctly, as though wrung from the heart by torture.

Unorna smiled at last, but the smile had not faded from her lips when the air was rent by a terrible cry.

"By the Eternal G.o.d of Heaven!" cried the ringing voice. "It is a lie!--a lie!--a lie!"

She who had never feared anything earthly or unearthly shrank back. She felt her heavy hair rising bodily upon her head.

The Wanderer had sprung to his feet. The magnitude and horror of the falsehood spoken had stabbed the slumbering soul to sudden and terrible wakefulness. The outline of his tall figure was distinct against the gray background of ice and snow. He was standing at his full height, his arms stretched up to heaven, his face luminously pale, his deep eyes on fire and fixed upon her face, forcing back her dominating will upon itself. But he was not alone!

"Beatrice!" he cried in long-drawn agony.

Between him and Unorna something pa.s.sed by, something dark and soft and noiseless, that took shape slowly--a woman in black, a veil thrown back from her forehead, her white face turned towards the Wanderer, her white hands hanging by her side. She stood still, and the face turned, and the eyes met Unorna's, and Unorna knew that it was Beatrice.

There she stood, between them, motionless as a statue, impalpable as air, but real as life itself. The vision, if it was a vision, lasted fully a minute. Never, to the day of her death, was Unorna to forget that face, with its deathlike purity of outline, with its unspeakable n.o.bility of feature.

It vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. A low broken sound of pain escaped from the Wanderer's lips, and with his arms extended he fell forwards. The strong woman caught him and he sank to the ground gently, in her arms, his head supported upon her shoulder, as she kneeled under the heavy weight.

There was a sound of quick footsteps on the frozen snow. A Bohemian watchman, alarmed by the loud cry, was running to the spot.

"What has happened?" he asked, bending down to examine the couple.

"My friend has fainted," said Unorna calmly. "He is subject to it. You must help me to get him home."

"Is it far?" asked the man.

"To the House of the Black Mother of G.o.d."

CHAPTER IX

The princ.i.p.al room of Keyork Arabian's dwelling was in every way characteristic of the man. In the extraordinary confusion which at first disturbed a visitor's judgment, some time was needed to discover the architectural bounds of the place. The vaulted roof was indeed apparent, as well as small portions of the wooden flooring. Several windows, which might have been large had they filled the arched embrasures in which they were set, admitted the daylight when there was enough of it in Prague to serve the purpose of illumination. So far as could be seen from the street, they were commonplace windows without shutters and with double cas.e.m.e.nts against the cold, but from within it was apparent that the tall arches in the thick walls had been filled in with a thinner masonry in which the modern frames were set. So far as it was possible to see, the room had but two doors; the one, masked by a heavy curtain made of a Persian carpet, opened directly upon the staircase of the house; the other, exactly opposite, gave access to the inner apartments.

On account of its convenient size, however, the sage had selected for his princ.i.p.al abiding place this first chamber, which was almost large enough to be called a hall, and here he had deposited the extraordinary and heterogeneous collection of objects, or, more property speaking, of remains, upon the study of which he spent a great part of his time.

Two large tables, three chairs and a divan completed the list of all that could be called furniture. The tables were ma.s.sive, dark, and old-fas.h.i.+oned; the feet at each end consisted of thick flat boards sawn into a design of simple curves, and connected by strong crosspieces keyed to them with large wooden bolts. The chairs were ancient folding stools, with movable backs and well-worn cus.h.i.+ons of faded velvet.

The divan differed in no respect from ordinary oriental divans in appearance, and was covered with a stout dark Bokhara carpet of no great value; but so far as its use was concerned, the disorderly heaps of books and papers that lay upon it showed that Keyork was more inclined to make a book-case of it than a couch.

The room received its distinctive character however neither from its vaulted roof, nor from the deep embrasures of its windows, nor from its scanty furniture, but from the peculiar nature of the many curious objects, large and small, which hid the walls and filled almost all the available s.p.a.ce on the floor. It was clear that every one of the specimens ill.u.s.trated some point in the great question of life and death which formed the chief study of Keyork Arabian's latter years; for by far the greater number of the preparations were dead bodies, of men, of women, of children, of animals, to all of which the old man had endeavoured to impart the appearance of life, and in treating some of which he had attained results of a startling nature. The osteology of man and beast was indeed represented, for a huge case, covering one whole wall, was filled to the top with a collection of many hundred skulls of all races of mankind, and where real specimens were missing, their place was supplied by admirable casts of craniums; but this reredos, so to call it, of bony heads, formed but a vast, grinning background for the bodies which stood and sat and lay in half-raised coffins and sarcophagi before them, in every condition produced by various known and lost methods of embalming. There were, it is true, a number of skeletons, disposed here and there in fantastic att.i.tudes, gleaming white and ghostly in their mechanical nakedness, the bones of human beings, the bones of giant orang-outangs, of creatures large and small down to the flimsy little framework of a common bull frog, strung on wires as fine as hairs, which squatted comfortably upon an old book near the edge of a table, as though it had just skipped to that point in pursuit of a ghostly fly and was pausing to meditate a farther spring.

But the eye did not discover these things at the first glance. Solemn, silent, strangely expressive, lay three slim Egyptians, raised at an angle as though to give them a chance of surveying their fellow-dead, the linen bandages unwrapped from their heads and arms and shoulders, their jet-black hair combed and arranged and dressed by Keyork's hand, their faces softened almost to the expression of life by one of his secret processes, their stiffened joints so limbered by his art that their arms had taken natural positions again, lying over the edges of the sarcophagi in which they had rested motionless and immovable through thirty centuries. For the man had pursued his idea in every shape and with every experiment, testing, as it were, the potential imperishability of the animal frame by the degree of life-like plumpness and softness and flexibility which it could be made to take after a mummification of three thousand years. And he had reached the conclusion that, in the nature of things, the human body might vie, in resisting the mere action of time, with the granite of the pyramids. Those had been his earliest trials. The results of many others filled the room.

Here a group of South Americans, found dried in the hollow of an ancient tree, had been restored almost to the likeness of life, and were apparently engaged in a lively dispute over the remains of a meal--as cold as themselves and as human. There, towered the standing body of an African, leaning upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only sight in the sunken eyes to be terrible. There again, surmounting a lay figure wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a Malayan lady--decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved that the soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy, half-drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a little to show the ivory teeth. Other sights there were, more ghastly still, triumphs of preservation, if not of semi-resuscitation, over decay, won on its own most special ground. Triumphs all, yet almost failures in the eyes of the old student, they represented the mad efforts of an almost supernatural skill and superhuman science to revive, if but for one second, the very smallest function of the living body. Strange and wild were the trials he had made; many and great the sacrifices and blood offerings lavished on his dead in the hope of seeing that one spasm which would show that death might yet be conquered; many the engines, the machines, the artificial hearts, the applications of electricity that he had invented; many the powerful reactives he had distilled wherewith to excite the long dead nerves, or those which but two days had ceased to feel. The hidden essence was still undiscovered, the meaning of vitality eluded his profoundest study, his keenest pursuit. The body died, and yet the nerves could still be made to act as though alive for the s.p.a.ce of a few hours--in rare cases for a day. With his eyes he had seen a dead man spring half across a room from the effects of a few drops of musk--on the first day; with his eyes he had seen the dead twist themselves, and move and grin under the electric current--provided it had not been too late. But that "too late" had baffled him, and from his first belief that life might be restored when once gone, he had descended to what seemed the simpler proposition of the two, to the problem of maintaining life indefinitely so long as its magic essence lingered in the flesh and blood. And now he believed that he was very near the truth; how terribly near he had yet to learn.

On that evening when the Wanderer fell to the earth before the shadow of Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house. The brilliant light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in the place, for Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely attached to life for its own sake. The yellow rays flooded the life-like faces of his dead companions, and streamed upwards to the heterogeneous objects that filled the shelves almost to the spring of the vault--objects which all reminded him of the conditions of lives long ago extinct, endless heaps of barbarous weapons, of garments of leather and of fish skin, Amurian, Siberian, Gothic, Mexican, and Peruvian; African and Red Indian masks, models of boats and canoes, sacred drums, Liberian idols, Runic calendars, fiddles made of human skulls, strange and barbaric ornaments, all producing together an amazing richness of colour--all things in which the man himself had taken but a pa.s.sing interest, the result of his central study--life in all its shapes.

He sat alone. The African giant looked down at his dwarf-like form as though in contempt of such half-grown humanity; the Malayan lady's bodiless head turned its smiling face towards him; scores of dead beings seemed to contemplate half in pity, half in scorn, their would-be reviver. Keyork Arabian was used to their company and to their silence.

Far beyond the common human horror of dead humanity, if one of them had all at once nodded to him and spoken to him he would have started with delight and listened with rapture. But they were all still dead, and they neither spoke or moved a finger. A thought that had more hope in it than any which had pa.s.sed through his brain for many years now occupied and absorbed him. A heavy book lay open on the table by his side, and from time to time he glanced at a phrase which seemed to attract him.

It was always the same phrase, and two words alone sufficed to bring him back to contemplation of it. Those two words were "Immortality"

and "Soul." He began to speak aloud to himself, being by nature fond of speech.

"Yes. The soul is immortal. I am quite willing to grant that. But it does not in any way follow that it is the source of life, or the seat of intelligence. The Buddhists distinguished it even from the individuality. And yet life holds it, and when life ends it takes its departure. How soon? I do not know. It is not a condition of life, but life is one of its conditions. Does it leave the body when life is artificially prolonged in a state of unconsciousness--by hypnotism, for instance? Is it more closely bound up with animal life, or with intelligence? If with either, has it a definite abiding place in the heart, or in the brain? Since its presence depends directly on life, so far as I know, it belongs to the body rather than to the brain. I once made a rabbit live an hour without its head. With a man that experiment would need careful manipulation--I would like to try it. Or is it all a question of that phantom, Vitality? Then the presence of the soul depends upon the potential excitability of the nerves, and, as far as we know, it must leave the body not more than twenty-four hours after death, and it certainly does not leave the body at the moment of dying.

But if of the nerves, then what is the condition of the soul in the hypnotic state? Unorna hypnotises our old friend there--and our young one, too. For her, they have nerves. At her touch they wake, they sleep, they move, they feel, they speak. But they have no nerves for me. I can cut them with knives, burn them, turn the life-blood of the one into the arteries of the other--they feel nothing. If the soul is of the nerves--or of the vitality, then they have souls for Unorna, and none for me. That is absurd. Where is that old man's soul? He has slept for years. Has not his soul been somewhere else in the meanwhile? If we could keep him asleep for centuries, or for scores of centuries, like that frog found alive in a rock, would his soul--able by the hypothesis to pa.s.s through rocks or universes--stay by him? Could an ingenious sinner escape d.a.m.nation for a few thousand years by being hypnotised?

Verily the soul is a very unaccountable thing, and what is still more unaccountable is that I believe in it. Suppose the case of the ingenious sinner. Suppose that he could not escape by his clever trick. Then his soul must inevitably taste the condition of the d.a.m.ned while he is asleep. But when he is waked at last, and found to be alive, his soul must come back to him, glowing from the eternal flames. Unpleasant thought! Keyork Arabian, you had far better not go to sleep at present.

Since all that is fantastic nonsense, on the face of it, I am inclined to believe that the presence of the soul is in some way a condition requisite for life, rather than depending upon it. I wish I could buy a soul. It is quite certain that life is not a mere mechanical or chemical process. I have gone too far to believe that. Take man at the very moment of death--have everything ready, do what you will--my artificial heart is a very perfect instrument, mechanically speaking--and how long does it take to start the artificial circulation through the carotid artery? Not a hundredth part so long a time as drowned people often lie before being brought back, without a pulsation, without a breath. Yet I never succeeded, though I have made the artificial heart work on a narcotised rabbit, and the rabbit died instantly when I stopped the machine, which proves that it was the machine that kept it alive.

Perhaps if one applied it to a man just before death he might live on indefinitely, grow fat and flourish so long as the gla.s.s heart worked.

Where would his soul be then? In the gla.s.s heart, which would have become the seat of life? Everything, sensible or absurd, which I can put into words makes the soul seem an impossibility--and yet there is something which I cannot put into words, but which proves the soul's existence beyond all doubt. I wish I could buy somebody's soul and experiment with it."

He ceased and sat staring at his specimens, going over in his memory the fruitless experiments of a lifetime. A loud knocking roused him from his reverie. He hastened to open the door and was confronted by Unorna.

She was paler than usual, and he saw from her expression that there was something wrong.

"What is the matter?" he asked, almost roughly.

"He is in a carriage downstairs," she answered quickly. "Something has happened to him. I cannot wake him, you must take him in--"

"To die on my hands? Not I!" laughed Keyork in his deepest voice. "My collection is complete enough."

She seized him suddenly by both arms, and brought her face near to his.

"If you dare to speak of death----"

She grew intensely white, with a fear she had not before known in her life. Keyork laughed again, and tried to shake himself free of her grip.