"Only last month he asked for brimstone, charcoal and niter. We gave him the stuff, seeing no harm. A week ago, as I am passing his cell, there was a great flash and roar. The devil's powders had exploded as steam bursts a tight-lidded vessel! He carries still the marks of a burn."
"No!" Carlyle's smooth features were blank. "Fire—from such stuff as that?"
"That's not all, my Lord. Friar Bacon tells me that if we would give him enough of the stuff and a long tube, he could throw an iron ball across the Thames!"
Turning away with a crafty nod and a meaningful blink, the turnkey led on to the mean little cell in which Roger Bacon had now spent nine years. The visitor was openly affected by the jailer's incredulous story. He had heard strange and terrible things of the Gray Friar. The church, in incarcerating him, had accused him of consorting with the devil. Some whispered that he had learned the secret of immortality. That was the rumor which had brought Thaddeus Carlyle, the second Lord Monfort, into the gloomy confines of Reading Gaol.
The lock scraped shrilly as the jailer turned it. Throwing the heavy door open, he grinned: "Lucky for him you came, my Lord! In another month this lock should have been rusted past turning. Then Friar Bacon would have been forever without hope!"
"Have I, indeed, such hope now?" a soft and gloomy voice inquired.
The turnkey merely winked at the nobleman and hobbled off.
Carlyle was suddenly seized by panic. Now that he was so close to the notorious philosopher, fear smote him and he was on the point of turning back. Yet, ridden by an even greater fear, he stiffened his purpose and advanced. Closing the door, he stared at the white-bearded man seated before a great calfskin-bound book on a ponderous table.
"What hast thou with me, young man?" demanded Roger Bacon, peering shrewdly from under ragged brows.
"Only the admiration of an ignorant man for a very learned one," said Thaddeus Carlyle simply.