“Sancta Maria! Tell me, then, what is that.”
“For light on an ancient prophecy.”
“It is true. God in heaven! What prophecy?”
“It occurs in the Almanac for 1700 by Duret de Montbrison; wherein it is stated that in the year 1792 the Monarchy of Sardinia shall suffer an eclipse.”
The King was trembling violently. He regarded the soothsayer by now with a fearful reverence.
“Tell me, Magician,” he said. “The courses of the heavens are, I know, inexorable. Yet may not the results of their forecastings, where directed upon perishable things, be nullified, if those objects be withdrawn? The shadow of its ages ceases from the felled tree. May it not be so?”
“It may be, King.”
“Fatality creeps on me. The land is thick with threatening voices. I am like one in the dark, hearing whispers all about me—not knowing where to strike and where to withhold. If I could but tell the shadow—where it lies—and uproot the tree! Whence threatens this eclipse? Show me the place, if thou lovest rich reward.”
The Wizard, looking upward, raised both his white hands. There floated into the dark above him luminous twin spheres attached, like a two-fold bubble.
“Seest thou those?” he said. “The one is Piedmont, the other is Savoy. So are the hemispheres of the human brain—of which one is dedicate to the fiend, and one to God. Between them is that eternal strife for precedence which we call man’s dual personality. But in the encroachments of either upon either, who is to distinguish between the sources of good and evil. This tree may stand in Piedmont or Savoy. Answer for which, Cassandra!”