This was, in fact, the mystic abode of Spartacus, the famous seer—to whose séances all Turin was thrall in these days—and of his lovely Sibyl Cassandra. They did a roaring business between them there—if any such term may be applied to methods quite cavernous in their secrecy.
Thus, anyone seeking converse with the soothsayer, must commit his destinies to darkness from the outset. He approached the black Egyptian door, and, after a pause to rally his sinking heart, knocked thereon. No sound of footstep answered him from within; but all in a moment the door itself gaped an inky mouth, engulfed him, and closed again noiseless on his entombment. He strained his eyes through pitch—in vain. Not one tiniest theft from darkness could they compass. Suddenly a label sprang to light on a wall—“Ascend.” He saw a stairfoot; stumbled upwards between bat-wing hangings; the light shut behind him. At the turn of the stair another glowed out suddenly—“Ascend”—directed him on and vanished. A third time this occurred, committing him to a short passage, along which he slunk, until, lo! “Greeting!” flashed out an instant before his eyes, was as instantly extinguished, and, halted with strained breath and prickling skin in a close vault of night, he realised that he had gained to the inner Arcanum—the unholy of unholies.
That was a lofty attic room, panelled all round its walls (to confess its properties) with tall mirrors hidden behind black curtains; but those were so controlled, that all or any one of them, answering to a noiseless drop and pulley worked from without, could be made to gather softly away, revealing, unrecognised by the fearful visitor, the lustreless glass behind. One curtain, however, concealed a mid-wall alcove, a cimmerian cavity in which stood a tripod of cunning construction. For under its chafing-dish burned perpetually a concealed lamp, which kept the metal above it at a heat sufficient, at need, to ignite spirit cast upon it, or even gums and aromatic resins, the effect being as of a very immaculate conception of fire. But the dim blue flame thus evoked was of a luminosity just enough to reveal to the terrified observer the pale shadows of misbegotten horrors about him—his own reflection, if he had but known it, in such uncurtained mirrors as were not exposed to the direct rays of the burning naptha; but, so it seemed to him, a film had been withdrawn, in the silent rising of the draperies, from his own mental vision.
Crystal globes there were, moreover; strings of phosphorescent balls, which could be made to travel hither and thither on invisible wires; webs of luminous thread; entanglements of all sorts at command, the wizard himself, like a livid spider, poised in their midst. But, even so, great Spartacus despite, his skill and compelling magic, it is doubtful if, with all, the abode of mystery had won for itself any exceptional notoriety, had it not been for its loveliest mystery of all—that Hebe, who called herself Cassandra, and dropped flowers of prophecy from sweet lips, offering, it might be, asps in roses. She it was that, like a caged nymph butterfly, brought the males to beat their wings upon her crystal prison, scattering about it an incense of golden meal.
One dark evening, in the Spring of 1790, two gentlemen, coming rapidly down the Via del Po, turned into the Court of Doctors and stopped before the Wizard’s door. They wore masks and dominoes. They were both small men, one lean and the other plump. The plump man was by many years the junior of the lean one. He was also by several social degrees his inferior, being no more, indeed, than our friend Caius Sempronius Gracchus (alias the Vicomte di Mirobole) house-steward to his Majesty; while the other was his Majesty himself, no less.
“Is this the place, then?” muttered Victor-Amadeus, drawing a step back. He looked pinched and harried, like some little petit-maître of a Frankenstein pursued by a monster of his own creating. “My heart beats, Mirobole,” he said. “I think I fear the test.”
M. Mirobole clasped his fat hands and opened remonstrant eyes.
“Ah, sire!” he said. “Condescend to deem one truth better than a multitude of conjectures. These hundred shadows on your heart! What if he show you how one tree may cast them all—branches of a single hate, which, if severed at its root, the sunshine shall be yours again without a fleck!”
“You have certainly a reassuring confidence in your Magician, Viscount,” said the King with a smile. Then he sighed. “Well, I have only to reveal myself if he presumes too far. Lead on, my friend.”
M. Mirobole knocked instantly, and softly, on the tomb-like door. It answered with a startling unaccustomed promptitude to his summons; but his Majesty, never having visited here before, was without suspicion of any collusion implied in that show of eagerness to secure him. Forcing himself to resolution and treading on the heels of his companion, he stepped within the black jaws, which snapped immediately on their prey.