"Two months after you saw him."
"You have no relatives? No cousins, uncles, aunts?"
"None that I ever heard of. I must go, sir."
"Good-night, child. For the present, when you go out in the grounds, be sure that wolf, Ali, is chained up, or you may be sorry that I did not cut his throat, as I am still inclined to do."
She closed the door, ran lightly across the rotunda, and regaining her own room, felt inexpressibly relieved that the ordeal was over—that in future there remained no necessity for her to address one whose very tones made her shudder, and the touch of whose hand filled her with vague dread and loathing.
When the echo of her retreating footsteps died away, St. Elmo threw his cigar out of the window, and walked up and down the quaint and elegant rooms, whose costly bizarrerie would more appropriately have adorned a villa of Parthenope or Lucanian Sybaris, than a country-house in soi-disant "republican" America. The floor, covered in winter with velvet carpet, was of white and black marble, now bare and polished as a mirror, reflecting the figure of the owner as he crossed it. Oval ormolu tables, buhl chairs, and oaken and marquetrie cabinets, loaded with cameos, intaglios, Abraxoids, whose "erudition" would have filled Mnesarchus with envy, and challenged the admiration of the Samian lapidary who engraved the ring of Polycrates; these and numberless articles of vertu testified to the universality of what St. Elmo called his "world-scrapings," and to the reckless extravagance and archaistic taste of the collector. On a verd-antique table lay a satin cushion holding a vellum MS., bound in blue velvet, whose uncial letters were written in purple ink, powdered with gold-dust, while the margins were stiff with gilded illuminations; and near the cushion, as if prepared to shed light on the curious cryptography, stood an exquisite white glass lamp, shaped like a vase, and richly ornamented with Arabic inscriptions in ultra-marine blue—a precious relic of some ruined Laura in the Nitrian desert, by the aid of whose rays the hoary hermits, whom St. Macarius ruled, broke the midnight gloom chanting, "Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison," fourteen hundred years before St. Elmo's birth. Immediately opposite, on an embossed ivory stand, and protected from air and dust by a glass case, were two antique goblets, one of green-veined agate, one of blood-red onyx; and into the coating of wax, spread along the ivory slab, were inserted amphorae, one dry and empty, the other a third full of Falerian, whose topaz drops had grown strangely mellow and golden in the ashy cellars of Herculaneum, and had doubtless been destined for some luxurious triclinium in the days of Titus. A small Byzantine picture, painted on wood, with a silver frame ornamented with cornelian stars, and the background heavily gilded, hung over an etagere, where lay a leaf from Nebuchadnezzar's diary, one of those Babylonish bricks on which his royal name was stamped. Near it stood a pair of Bohemian vases representing the two varieties of lotus—one velvety white with rose-colored veins, the other with delicate blue petals. This latter whim had cost a vast amount of time, trouble, and money, it having been found difficult to carefully preserve, sketch, and paint them for the manufacturer in Bohemia, who had never seen the holy lotus, and required specimens. But the indomitable will of the man, to whose wishes neither oceans nor deserts opposed successful barriers, finally triumphed, and the coveted treasures fully repaid their price as they glistened in the gaslight, perfect as their prototypes slumbering on the bosom of the Nile, under the blazing midnight stars of rainless Egypt. Several handsome rosewood cases were filled with rare books—two in Pali—centuries old; and moth-eaten volumes and valuable MSS.—some in parchment, some bound in boards—recalled the days of astrology and alchemy, and the sombre mysteries of Rosicrucianism. Side by side, on an ebony stand, lay an Elzevir Terence, printed in red letters, and a curious Birman book, whose pages consisted of thin leaves of ivory, gilded at the edges; and here too were black rhyta from Chiusi, and a cylix from Vulci, and one of those quaint Peruvian jars, which was so constructed that, when filled with water, the air escaped in sounds that resembled that of the song or cry of the animal represented on the vase or jar. In the space between the tall windows that fronted the lawn hung a weird, life-size picture that took strange hold on the imagination of all who looked at it. A gray-haired Cimbrian Prophetess, in white vestments and brazen girdle, with canvas mantle fastened on the shoulder by a broad brazen clasp, stood, with bare feet, on a low, rude scaffolding, leaning upon her sword, and eagerly watching, with divining eyes, the stream of blood which trickled from the throat of the slaughtered human victim down into the large brazen kettle beneath the scaffold. The snowy locks and white mantle seemed to flutter in the wind; and those who gazed on the stony, inexorable face of the Prophetess, and into the glittering blue eyes, shuddered and almost fancied they heard the pattering of the gory stream against the sides of the brass caldron. But expensive and rare as were these relics of bygone dynasties and mouldering epochs, there was one other object for which the master would have given everything else in this museum of curiosities, and the secret of which no eyes but his own had yet explored. On a sculptured slab, that once formed a portion of the architrave of the Cave Temple at Elephanta, was a splendid marble miniature, four feet high, of that miracle of Saracenic architecture, the Taj Mahal at Agra. The elaborate carving resembled lacework, and the beauty of the airy dome and slender, glittering minarets of this mimic tomb of Noor-Mahal could find no parallel, save in the superb and matchless original. The richly-carved door that closed the arch of the tomb swung back on golden hinges, and opened only by a curiously-shaped golden key, which never left Mr. Murray's watch-chain; consequently what filled the penetralia was left for the conjecture of the imaginative; and when his mother expressed a desire to examine it, he merely frowned and said hastily:
"That is Pandora's box, MINUS imprisoned hope. I prefer it should not be opened."
Immediately in front of the tomb he had posted a grim sentinel—a black marble statuette of Mors, modeled from that hideous little brass figure which Spence saw at Florence, representing a skeleton sitting on the ground, resting one arm on an urn.
Filled though it was with sparkling bijouterie that would have graced the Barberini or Strozzi cabinets, the glitter of the room was cold and cheerless. No light, childish feet had ever pattered down the long rows of shining tiles; no gushing, mirthful laughter had ever echoed through those lofty windows; everything pointed to the past—a classic, storied past, but dead as the mummies of Karnac, and treacherously, repulsively lustrous as the waves that break in silver circles over the buried battlements, and rustling palms and defiled altars of the proud cities of the plain. No rosy memories of early, happy manhood lingered here; no dewy gleam of the merry morning of life, when hope painted and peopled a smiling world; no magic trifles that prattled of the springtime of a heart, that in wandering to and fro through the earth, had fed itself with dust and ashes, acrid and bitter; had studiously collected only the melancholy symbols of mouldering ruin, desolation, and death, and which found its best type in the Taj Mahal, that glistened so mockingly as the gas-light flickered over it.
A stranger looking upon St. Elmo Murray for the first time, as he paced the floor, would have found it difficult to realize that only thirty-four years had plowed those deep, rugged lines in his swarthy and colorless but still handsome face; where midnight orgies and habitual excesses had left their unmistakable plague-spot, and Mephistopheles had stamped his signet. Blase, cynical, scoffing, and hopeless, he had stranded his life, and was recklessly striding to his grave, trampling upon the feelings of all with whom he associated, and at war with a world, in which his lordly brilliant intellect would have lifted him to any eminence he desired, and which, properly directed, would have made him the benefactor and ornament of the society he snubbed and derided. Like all strong though misguided natures, the power and activity of his mind enhanced his wretchedness, and drove him farther and farther from the path of rectitude; while the consciousness that he was originally capable of loftier, purer aims, and nobler pursuits than those that now engrossed his perverted thoughts, rendered him savagely morose. For nearly fifteen dreary years, nothing but jeers and oaths and sarcasms had crossed his finely sculptured lips, which had forgotten how to smile; and it was only when the mocking demon of the wine-cup looked out from his gloomy gray eyes that his ringing, sneering laugh struck like a dagger to the heart that loved him, that of his proud but anxious and miserable mother. To-night, for the first time since his desperate plunge into the abyss of vice, conscience, which he had believed effectually strangled, stirred feebly, startling him with a faint moan, as unexpected as the echo from Morella's tomb, or the resurrection of Ligeia; and down the murdered years came wailing ghostly memories, which even his iron will could no longer scourge to silence. Clamorous as the avenging Erinnys, they refused to be exorcised, and goaded him almost to frenzy.