“You may spare yourself that trouble,” said the stranger composedly. “Shall I finish the quotation? Shall I write it for you?” And he unceremoniously tore a corner from one of the immaculate leaves, took a quill and wrote. “There,” said he, “there, I have written in Greek what follows in your quotation, and I have added my name that you may remember the writer.”
Chapel Doorway in Master’s Garden.
The doctor took it and read the delicate Greek characters: “Demetrius Commagenus. All things are possible to him who knows and wills with earnestness.”
Makepeace was stupified. “Commagenus,” he said: “that is a Greek name, I take it. And yet I would have sworn that the handwriting was Galiani’s, and Galiani was an Italian. Besides, Galiani is dead, or he is sixty years old, less or more, by now: and you—I cannot think that you are past forty.”
Indifferently the self-styled Commagenus replied: “Galiani or Commagenus—what matters? What I wrote then I write now; and always I am your humble servant and the poor scholar who drew wisdom from the lips of the divine Gazophylacius.”
“We talk in dreams,” said Matthew: “Galiani told me—you told me, if you are he—that Gazophylacius died at Rome, ten years after the Turks entered Constantinople: and that was a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Yes,” answered Commagenus, “he died—the more is the pity; for he might have lived, had he chosen to use his own wisdom. Instead of that he imparted it on his death-bed to me. What care had he to live, an outcast in strange lands? But this world lost its wisest man; for I am no Gazophylacius. Only I am always learning.”
“Why, this is as strange a maze as ever man trod,” cried Makepeace. “You tell me that your master died a hundred and forty years ago, and that you, Galiani, were with him at the time.”
“Not Galiani, but Commagenus,” said the stranger in complacent amusement at the doctor’s bewilderment: “that was my name then. I was a youth, twenty years old, when I first came to Constantinople from the country which gave me my name—three years before the siege. There I became the favourite pupil of the great student of natural and medical science, Theodorus Gazophylacius.”