CHAPTER V
At the lower end of the Via del Po, where it debouched upon the river, stood, nicked out of the north side of the street, a little Square of houses known as the Court of Doctors. The buildings in this Square—for the most part unoccupied—were very high, very narrow, very crazy, and so few in number that no more than two or three of them counted to any one of its three sides, the fourth lying open to the stream of fashionable traffic which flowed by it all day.
Quidnuncs had always been a power in Turin; whence this one-time appropriation of a niche to their worship. The Court of Doctors, in its present aspect, was said to date from the Regency of Madame Reale—daughter to the fourth Henry of France, and wife to the first Victor-Amadeus of Savoy—to whose politic superstition it had been indebted for a sort of unofficial charter. For what destinies foreshadowed, for what poisons brewed, for what villainies set bubbling in crucible and alembic within its precincts its past history was responsible, only its own dark heart might know. To this day the atmosphere of that sunless well of brick seemed brassy with chemicals; its doorways emitted a faint stale scent of drugs; an air of stagnant mystery overhung its pavements. But it was mystery grown unnegotiable. The moon of its prosperity had set; black decay hung brooding on its roofs; the ministers to its former notoriety were flown. Not that empirics were fewer than of yore in Turin, nor less potent in their persuasions. But traps for credulity, like traps for mice, miss of their efficacy after a few score, or a few hundred captures; and the bait must be laid down in some other place and form.
There was one building in the Square, however, which of late years had been infinitely successful in reclaiming to itself a full measure of its own past fame, or infamy. This house stood, on the north-east side, one of three compact whose rears were to the river, from whose swift waters only a rotting wharf, sinking in sludge and slime, divided them. In front, panels of starry devices—suns and golden orbs, reeling in strange elliptics on an azure field—betokened the particular business of the house’s master, while they gave the building itself a meretricious distinction over its frowsy neighbours.
This was, in fact, the mystic abode of Spartacus, the famous seer—to whose séances all Turin was thrall in these days—and of his lovely Sibyl Cassandra. They did a roaring business between them there—if any such term may be applied to methods quite cavernous in their secrecy.
Thus, anyone seeking converse with the soothsayer, must commit his destinies to darkness from the outset. He approached the black Egyptian door, and, after a pause to rally his sinking heart, knocked thereon. No sound of footstep answered him from within; but all in a moment the door itself gaped an inky mouth, engulfed him, and closed again noiseless on his entombment. He strained his eyes through pitch—in vain. Not one tiniest theft from darkness could they compass. Suddenly a label sprang to light on a wall—“Ascend.” He saw a stairfoot; stumbled upwards between bat-wing hangings; the light shut behind him. At the turn of the stair another glowed out suddenly—“Ascend”—directed him on and vanished. A third time this occurred, committing him to a short passage, along which he slunk, until, lo! “Greeting!” flashed out an instant before his eyes, was as instantly extinguished, and, halted with strained breath and prickling skin in a close vault of night, he realised that he had gained to the inner Arcanum—the unholy of unholies.
That was a lofty attic room, panelled all round its walls (to confess its properties) with tall mirrors hidden behind black curtains; but those were so controlled, that all or any one of them, answering to a noiseless drop and pulley worked from without, could be made to gather softly away, revealing, unrecognised by the fearful visitor, the lustreless glass behind. One curtain, however, concealed a mid-wall alcove, a cimmerian cavity in which stood a tripod of cunning construction. For under its chafing-dish burned perpetually a concealed lamp, which kept the metal above it at a heat sufficient, at need, to ignite spirit cast upon it, or even gums and aromatic resins, the effect being as of a very immaculate conception of fire. But the dim blue flame thus evoked was of a luminosity just enough to reveal to the terrified observer the pale shadows of misbegotten horrors about him—his own reflection, if he had but known it, in such uncurtained mirrors as were not exposed to the direct rays of the burning naptha; but, so it seemed to him, a film had been withdrawn, in the silent rising of the draperies, from his own mental vision.
Crystal globes there were, moreover; strings of phosphorescent balls, which could be made to travel hither and thither on invisible wires; webs of luminous thread; entanglements of all sorts at command, the wizard himself, like a livid spider, poised in their midst. But, even so, great Spartacus despite, his skill and compelling magic, it is doubtful if, with all, the abode of mystery had won for itself any exceptional notoriety, had it not been for its loveliest mystery of all—that Hebe, who called herself Cassandra, and dropped flowers of prophecy from sweet lips, offering, it might be, asps in roses. She it was that, like a caged nymph butterfly, brought the males to beat their wings upon her crystal prison, scattering about it an incense of golden meal.
One dark evening, in the Spring of 1790, two gentlemen, coming rapidly down the Via del Po, turned into the Court of Doctors and stopped before the Wizard’s door. They wore masks and dominoes. They were both small men, one lean and the other plump. The plump man was by many years the junior of the lean one. He was also by several social degrees his inferior, being no more, indeed, than our friend Caius Sempronius Gracchus (alias the Vicomte di Mirobole) house-steward to his Majesty; while the other was his Majesty himself, no less.
“Is this the place, then?” muttered Victor-Amadeus, drawing a step back. He looked pinched and harried, like some little petit-maître of a Frankenstein pursued by a monster of his own creating. “My heart beats, Mirobole,” he said. “I think I fear the test.”
M. Mirobole clasped his fat hands and opened remonstrant eyes.
“Ah, sire!” he said. “Condescend to deem one truth better than a multitude of conjectures. These hundred shadows on your heart! What if he show you how one tree may cast them all—branches of a single hate, which, if severed at its root, the sunshine shall be yours again without a fleck!”
“You have certainly a reassuring confidence in your Magician, Viscount,” said the King with a smile. Then he sighed. “Well, I have only to reveal myself if he presumes too far. Lead on, my friend.”
M. Mirobole knocked instantly, and softly, on the tomb-like door. It answered with a startling unaccustomed promptitude to his summons; but his Majesty, never having visited here before, was without suspicion of any collusion implied in that show of eagerness to secure him. Forcing himself to resolution and treading on the heels of his companion, he stepped within the black jaws, which snapped immediately on their prey.
Almost simultaneously the tablet on the wall shone out. Craving his royal charge’s close attendance, the Viscount led the way upstairs. He was familiar with the mysteries of the place; though, to be sure, there was no mystery in it all to be compared with that of his own blind faith in the charlatan its master. Presently the two were committed, scarce breathing, to the dark “operating” room.
“I do not like it,” whispered the King suddenly.
There was certainly nothing very likeable in that profound gloom. It was so dense, so gross, as to appear palpable to him; sooty cobwebs seemed to stroke his face; he swept his hand over it disgustedly.
“Understand,” he muttered, in angry agitation, “that you are my mouthpiece; that I will not be betrayed; that—Ah!”—he gave a little jerk and shriek—“something touched me!”
On the instant, light glowed out in the room—or rather diluted darkness than light—and in the same moment an apparition showed itself.
Bonito, in black skull-cap and black skin-tights, his unearthly face and long white hands showing in the gloom like detached members, made a sufficiently ghastly spectacle. Even the little Vicomte, accustomed initiate, could never surmount a certain terror of him under such circumstances. And the present ones found him exceptionally nervous.
“Hail, Spartacus!” he whispered, his voice fluttering like a leaf. “Thou seest before thee a petitioner.”
“For what?”
The soothsayer’s face seemed to hang, a livid intent blot, in the darkness, its lips alone alive.
“For the truth.”
“Canst thou not, then, conceive it save out of Magic? The truth walks in the sun.”
“Nay, but if the sun’s eclipsed? We come to thee to light a candle to the truth obscured.”
“We, sayst thou?”
“I speak for him beside me here.”
“What is his name?”
“Why, were not to withhold it to honour best your skill? Shall Spartacus show no better than the Egyptian’s guile, fitting his prescience to his subject once identified. Name him, quotha! What need? Wiser is Spartacus.”
“Yet not so wise, it seems, as M. Mirobole.”
The King started violently.
“Knowest thou me, too, Magician?” he muttered.
“Ay, Monarch,” answered the pale lips; “and thy purpose in seeking me.”
“Sancta Maria! Tell me, then, what is that.”
“For light on an ancient prophecy.”
“It is true. God in heaven! What prophecy?”
“It occurs in the Almanac for 1700 by Duret de Montbrison; wherein it is stated that in the year 1792 the Monarchy of Sardinia shall suffer an eclipse.”
The King was trembling violently. He regarded the soothsayer by now with a fearful reverence.
“Tell me, Magician,” he said. “The courses of the heavens are, I know, inexorable. Yet may not the results of their forecastings, where directed upon perishable things, be nullified, if those objects be withdrawn? The shadow of its ages ceases from the felled tree. May it not be so?”
“It may be, King.”
“Fatality creeps on me. The land is thick with threatening voices. I am like one in the dark, hearing whispers all about me—not knowing where to strike and where to withhold. If I could but tell the shadow—where it lies—and uproot the tree! Whence threatens this eclipse? Show me the place, if thou lovest rich reward.”
The Wizard, looking upward, raised both his white hands. There floated into the dark above him luminous twin spheres attached, like a two-fold bubble.
“Seest thou those?” he said. “The one is Piedmont, the other is Savoy. So are the hemispheres of the human brain—of which one is dedicate to the fiend, and one to God. Between them is that eternal strife for precedence which we call man’s dual personality. But in the encroachments of either upon either, who is to distinguish between the sources of good and evil. This tree may stand in Piedmont or Savoy. Answer for which, Cassandra!”
With the word, she was there before them. The curtain over the alcove had silently risen and revealed her. The flame in the tripod, going up like a blue draught, shot her tawny drapery with streaks of emerald. A broad cincture, heavy with large green stones, was looped about her hips. Her bare arms and bosom rounded into soft violet shadows. Amid the chestnut loopings of her hair a coil of little jewelled serpents shone entangled. She was lovely in her face—life blooming out of death—her lips incarnadined with lust of sorrow—large eyes of tragic blue. The King looked on her, fascinated.
“Priestess,” said the Wizard, in a hollow voice: “answer, if of thine inspiration thou mayest, whence threatens the shadow of this Kingdom’s foretold eclipse?”
As he spoke, there came out of the darkness a string of little stars, of softest radiance and many colours, which took noiseless flight about the Sibyl’s head, and circled there in wondrous convolutions, faster and faster, until they seemed to whirl like lashing snakes. Then, in a moment, one of a red tint poised itself above her brow, and the rest fled away and were extinguished.
His Majesty, flaccid with awe, was by now in a condition to believe anything. And the priestess answered—in that old soft English voice. Poor Molly’s broken “Frenchings” had by now mended themselves wonderfully; but no call to shriller accents could spoil the quality of the throat which uttered them.
“I see a figure down in Faissigny,” she cried—“the figure of a man. It standeth in the sun like other men, and like other men doth cast its shadow. But, lo! the shadow of this man swells outward from his feet, onward and ever onward, until it engulfs the whole Province, laying it under tribute to his darkness.”
“The Prefect!” muttered the King. He saw his confirmation here of some black suspicions.
“Ask her,” he said, trembling, to the Wizard; “is the figure that of mine own Prefect of Faissigny?”
“Thou hearest, Cassandra?” said Bonito.
“Ay,” she answered; “it is the man!”
The King uttered an ejaculation, and lifted deploring hands.
“What motive in this monstrous thing?”
“The motive,” said the Sibyl, “of resentment, for a reward once promised and withheld; the motive of man’s ambition, which is ruthless; the motive of one whose nature it is to betray all trusts confided in him.”
She really believed, poor girl, on the misrepresentations of her employer, that Cartouche was conspiring to overthrow his.
The King smote his thigh.
“He shall die,” he cried.
Bonito saw, though he did not, how Cassandra started at the word.
“Nay,” he said hurriedly; “the Fates are not to be propitiated with blood. Uproot the tree—not fell it.”
“But the shadow, Magician,” said the King peevishly—“how it hath spread already, sowing the ground with insurrection!”
“That crop would but grow lusty with his blood. Nay, I know not but that only to uproot him might not precipitate the eclipse.”
“My God! You falsify the parable.”
“The parable was thine own, King.”
“What am I to do?”
He was jerking and mowing in a fever of petulance.
The Wizard turned to his priestess.
“Shall nothing, then, arrest this darkness, stunt its growth, and nullify the prophecy?”
“One thing—one man alone,” she answered impassive. Indeed she was only repeating a lesson.
“What thing?” he said.
“To plant another instant in his place, while yet the ground gapes wide from his uprooting.”
“What other?”
She held her hands palm downwards over the chafing-dish. Instantly a lurid smoke rose from it, and in the midst appeared upright letters of fire, which spelt the name Léotade. She raised her hands, and the letters sunk and disappeared (in one piece).
The King muttered the name, evidently at a loss. But the Pythoness, with tranced eyes fixed upon some imaginary figure before her, pointed, her shoulder level with her chin, and spoke its qualifications,—
“I read a healing sweetness there, as of a pine tree taken from some harsh plantation, and put to root within its native soil. The man is of that Province, strong and honoured—no stranger from beyond its bourne, like him that hath planted its pastures with dark hate and shadow, looking to reap the storm. O, name! in thy bright influence I see the clouds dispersing, the darkness leave the land, the eclipse become no more. Pass on in silence!”
The final words seemed as if addressed to some ghostly scene-shifter. She had vanished in their utterance, and the chamber was recommitted to its shadowy glooms.
Shaking with agitation, the King turned upon the Magician.
“Let this Léotade, this sound health-giving tree, supplant the other. I say it, and will see it done. I know him not—what matter! Truth shall be vindicated.”
Bonito laughed grimly.
“Not so easily, O, King! are the powers of darkness despoiled. This Prefect will not budge at thy command.”
“He will not?”
“Why, of what texture, think you, is this same shadow that spreads from before his feet—this shadow of thine eclipse? Is it not woven of black sedition, which ever answers slavishly to him its master, obedient to his least gesture? He’d have a fine dark following, did he once turn him to the sun of monarchy, and march to overwhelm it. Why should he budge? And yet maybe I could induce him.”
“How? Your words fall on me like a pitchy rain, heralding that Egyptian darkness. Before God, how?”
“I’d put a spell on him, a loathing of his office. I care not. Go thine own ways, for me.”
“Nay, good Spartacus, wise Spartacus—thou must help me here indeed.”
“I care not, I say. I say, strike at him openly, if you will, and see him bristle through all his hulking shadow like a boar.”
“I will not. I will have it your way.”
“Well, if you like, give me the warrant to dismiss him, and appoint this Léotade in his place—him or another; what concern is it to me? Only I could so take him with mine art, he’d greet this chance as of a release from bondage—construe it into his resignation offered and accepted—abandon his following, leaving it to die of an atrophy, like a body whose brain is withered.”
“If you could do this thing, and earn my lasting gratitude!—dispel that darkness, and be like Moses honoured with burnt-offerings. I’ll send thee on the warrant. In the meanwhile, take this in earnest of my debt to thee.”
He threw a purse upon the floor—it struck weightily—and turned and left the room with Mirobole. A minute later the door below had shut upon them.
Bonito, with a loud snigger, touched a spring in the wall which acted on the curtain of the alcove, folding it up and away; and, striding to the tripod, took some hidden powder from beneath it, which he cast into the pan. A glowing flame shot up immediately, lighting the whole place, and he called out in ecstasy: “Cassandra, ma belle prêtresse, ma petite!”
She came out from a little room hidden behind the further curtain, and stood up motionless between their inky folds.
“We have won!” he cried boisterously: “we are partners in this triumph! Ministers of Fate, what a triumph! Mine own nominee elected; the other deposed and disgraced. Savoy is ours: we will cross the Alps ere long. Rejoice with me, child! Thine enemy lies low—thou art avenged.”
“Yes, I am avenged,” she answered dully.
He looked at her shrewdly.
“Art thou not satisfied?”
“You will not hurt him else, Bonito?”
“Why should I? He stood in my way; he will stand no longer. That is enough for me.”
“But you will not hurt him?”
“Hurt him, hurt him? Thou art tenderer of him than of his doxy. Look how you smile on while I bleed her—no pity there. And she’ll have to bleed the more for this—we take new life of it—no bottom to our need for funds. She’ll have to bleed again, I say, and make you fresh sport. No tenderness there.”
“You will not hurt him?”
“Plague on the parrot! Why should I hurt him?”
“Swear it.”
“Why, I will. Let him go free, for me, to beggary. I swear it, there.”
“Remember that.”
She dropped the curtain, and was gone.