Dr. Makepeace started to hear his name and threw a sharp look on the speaker. No; he was a complete stranger, and his accent betrayed him as a foreigner. Dr. Makepeace had certainly never seen him in his life before. He began to explain where his chamber was to be found.
“I know it,” interrupted the stranger, “I know it. Bear with me for a moment and I will seek you there.”
Makepeace was a little ruffled that the speaker, knowing his name, did not give him his academic title. “Doctor Makepeace,” he said; “ask for Doctor Makepeace.”
“Surely, surely,” replied the stranger carelessly: “yet Master Makepeace, methinks, served you then.”
More than ever perplexed the doctor sought his room. Only a few minutes had passed when he heard his visitor mounting with no faltering step to his door, and Makepeace opened to him before he knocked. The stranger glanced rapidly round. He seemed to find something familiar in each article of furniture. He ran his eye, with a look of some amused contempt, over the array of worn volumes that lined the walls. “Old books, doctor Makepeace,” he said, “old books. I think you have not changed one these thirty years.”
“Old books are old friends,” said the doctor with a touch of resentment at his tone: “I would not change them.”
“Old friends die, doctor,” observed the stranger, “they die, and then we have no use for them but to bury them.”
“Sir,” said the doctor with a quick reminiscence of his wasted studies, “I have buried my friends: but I love them still. But,” he went on, “it is not of old notions that I have to speak with you. You have shown me this afternoon something newer and,” he added sadly, “it may be, something better than all that old books tell. I ask you to impart to me no secret that might hurt you by the telling. Until now I have maintained that nothing exists in this present world that is not of natural course. If it be an honest mystery that you exercise, tell me, the humblest and poorest of scholars, whether it be the miraculous working of God’s power in human hands or simply the exercise of human art.”
The stranger seated himself, uninvited, in the doctor’s chair, and the doctor took a stool. “Everything,” said the stranger, “is miracle to him who does not know.”
“Great heavens,” cried Makepeace, “that is the beginning of my quotation from the learned Theodorus Gazophylacius. I never heard of the great Gazophylacius until Galiani told me of him: nobody that I know had heard of him. A marvellous scholar, truly, was Gazophylacius, but a pagan at heart, albeit a Byzantine Christian—and sadly drowned in superstition. Shall I show you the passage in the original Greek?” And he feverishly turned the pages of the Speculum to find it.