‘Shameful!’ we cried, all three.
‘Can you wonder, then, that I cursed the whole Stuart race, false-hearted, lecherous, and cruel? For the Hall, I could buy it back to-morrow if I chose, but why should I do so when I have no heir?’
‘Ho, you have prospered then!’ said Decimus Saxon, with one of his shrewd sidelong looks. ‘Perhaps you have yourself found out how to convert pots and pans into gold in the way you have spoken of. But that cannot be, for I see iron and brass in this room which would hardly remain there could you convert it to gold.’
‘Gold has its uses, and iron has its uses,’ said Sir Jacob oracularly. ‘The one can never supplant the other.’
‘Yet these officers,’ I remarked, ‘did declare to us that it was but a superstition of the vulgar.’
‘Then these officers did show that their knowledge was less than their prejudice. Alexander Setonius, a Scot, was first of the moderns to achieve it. In the month of March 1602 he did change a bar of lead into gold in the house of a certain Hansen, at Rotterdam, who hath testified to it. He then not only repeated the same process before three learned men sent by the Kaiser Rudolph, but he taught Johann Wolfgang Dienheim of Freibourg, and Gustenhofer of Strasburg, which latter taught it to my own illustrious master—’
‘Who in turn taught it to you,’ cried Saxon triumphantly. ‘I have no great store of metal with me, good sir, but there are my head-piece, back and breast-plate, taslets and thigh-pieces, together with my sword, spurs, and the buckles of my harness. I pray you to use your most excellent and praiseworthy art upon these, and I will promise within a few days to bring round a mass of metal which shall be more worthy of your skill.’
‘Nay, nay,’ said the alchemist, smiling and shaking his head. ‘It can indeed be done, but only slowly and in order, small pieces at a time, and with much expenditure of work and patience. For a man to enrich himself at it he must labour hard and long; yet in the end I will not deny that he may compass it. And now, since the flasks are empty and your young comrade is nodding in his chair, it will perhaps be as well for you to spend as much of the night as is left in repose.’ He drew several blankets and rugs from a corner and scattered them over the floor. ‘It is a soldier’s couch,’ he remarked; ‘but ye may sleep on worse before ye put Monmouth on the English throne. For myself, it is my custom to sleep in an inside chamber, which is hollowed out of the hill.’ With a few last words and precautions for our comfort he withdrew with the lamp, passing through a door which had escaped our notice at the further end of the apartment.
Reuben, having had no rest since he left Havant, had already dropped upon the rugs, and was fast asleep, with a saddle for a pillow. Saxon and I sat for a few minutes longer by the light of the burning brazier.
‘One might do worse than take to this same chemical business,’ my companion remarked, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. ‘See you yon iron-bound chest in the corner?’