“Has she returned?”
“She has gone up into the room of the arms and the furs, very wornout, from having run so rapidly that I was hardly in time to open the door after I caught sight of her. I was frightened; for she rushed in like a tempest. She ran up the stairs without taking breath, and fell on the great black lion’s-skin on entering the room. There you will find her.”
Balsamo went up precipitately and found her as said. He took her up in his arms and carried her into the inner house where the secret door closed behind them.
He was going to awake her to vent the reproaches on her which were nursed in his wrath, when three knocks on the ceiling notified him that the sage called Althotas, in the upper room, was aware of his arrival and asked speech of him.
Fearing that he would come down, as sometimes happened, or that Lorenza would learn something else detrimental to the Order, he charged her with a fresh supply of the magnetic fluid, and went up by a kind of elevator to Althota’ laboratory.
In the midst of a wilderness of chemical and surgical instruments, phials and plants, this very aged man was a terrible figure at this moment.
Such part of his face as seemed yet to retain life was empurpled with angry fire: his knotted hands like those of a skeleton, trembled and cracked—his deepset eyes seemed to shake loose in the sockets and in a language unknown even to his pupil he poured invectives upon him.
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.