The Château, all in all, was a savage, stone-locked, cold-harbour of a place, the teeth of whose very ghosts chattered as they walked its vaulted corridors. It was haunted throughout by sounds and whispers of cold—the boom of subterranean waters; the high rustle of snow; the growl of ice splitting in the great glaciers opposite. The wind whistled in its halls, lifting the skirts of the tapestry in a sort of stately dance, as if the phantom figures thereon were at a minuet to warm themselves. There was not a closet in all its recesses which might have been called cosy, nor a rat behind its wainscoting which had grown sleek on plenty.
Dr Bonito, private physician to the Count, was himself as waxy a spectre as any which inhabited there. His face was like a topographical map, with all its features in low relief—wrinkles for rivers, dull eyes for lakes, a nose like a rudimentary volcano. There was no expression whatever on it but what seemed to derive from drought and starvation, and no colour but a bilious glaze, which pimpled here and there into red. A death-mask of him might very well have stood for a chart of the dead moon.
The doctor was said to be a Rosicrucian, a member of that queer sect (then somewhat out of date) which mixed up alchemy with ethics, and thought to coin a millennium out of the alloy. Or it had thought to once. Rosicrucianism was not founded, professedly, to interfere with the polity or religions of States, but simply to pursue the True Philosophy—to “follow the Gleam.” Yet no secret society, I suppose, has ever failed, when success has brought it self-conscious of its power, to abuse its mission; and certainly Dr Bonito, as a latter-day Frater Roseæ-Crucis, distilled other and less perfumed waters than utilitarianism from his alembics. He was an empiric, in fact, and lived on the gross superstition of his employer—barely, it is true, but resignedly, since Di Rocco had promised him a legacy proportionate with his services in keeping him alive, and a very bonanza should he conduct him well over the Biblical span. For which reason Bonito scarcely resented his present treatment, because he counted every penny now withheld from him as a penny invested against his future.
Plumpness, under the circumstances, was hardly to be expected of him; but the doctor was so very thin that, when he hugged himself, his elbows seemed to meet in his waist. Mr Trix (as he liked to be called), sitting opposite at a little table, with a solitary candle burning between, laughed to see him so caress himself.
“You have no bowels,” he said, “consequently no hunger. What is the matter with you then, old Bonito?”
The physician, who, in order that he might cherish his numb fingers, had put down on the table an instrument which he had been engaged in correcting—an astrolabe so antique in construction that it might have dated from Hipparchus—answered, with a peevish wince of his breath,—
“Hunger, child? What dost thou know of the hunger of the soul?”
“Something,” said Trix.
“Something!” echoed the other. “Ay, the baffled appetites of one whose sensorium is but a mirror to reflect back into his brain the visible lusts of the flesh.”
Mr Trix laughed again, pulling at his long pipe. He had a reckless young dark face, jet-eyebrowed, winsome out of wickedness, and handsome enough to be a perpetual passport to his desires. His form, properly slim and elastic for the “blade” that he was, was “sheathed,” quite elegantly for di Rocco, in cloth of a fine black, and with a ruff of Valenciennes lace at its breast. A glass and a bottle of old wine stood at his elbow.