We spoke together for some minutes, and then I ventured to ask, “Was there not something, Master Faulkener, you had to tell or ask of me? I do remember you mentioned such a wish that evening when we parted, and certain circumstances of our short friendship make me curious to know what service it is I have to pay you in return for the hospitality your goodness put upon me.”
“In truth there was something,” Faulkener answered, with a show of embarrassment, “but it was a service better sought of frieze than silk.”
“Tell it, good Sir, tell it! It were detestable did silk repudiate the debts that honest frieze incurred.”
“Why, then, I will, and chance your displeasure. Sweet Bess, get thee out and see to dinner. This gentleman will dine with me to-day!” And as Mistress Elizabeth picked up her pretty skirts and vanished up the grass-grown steps the old recluse turned to me.
CHAPTER XXI
“Now, look you here, Sir,” the old philosopher began, taking me by a tassel on my satin doublet, and working himself up until his eyes shone with pleasure, as he unfolded his mad visions to me. “Look you here, Sir! this bare and dingy dungeon that you rightly frown at is a cell more pregnant with ingenuity than ever was the forge of the lame smith of Lemnos. Vulcan! Vulcan never had such teeming fancies as I have harbored in my head for twenty years. Vulcan never coaxed into being such a lovely monster as I have hidden yonder. I tell you, young man,” gasped the old fellow, perspiring with enthusiasm, “Prometheus was a tawdry charlatan in his service to mankind, compared with what I will be. He gave us fire, crude, rough, unruly fire!—unstable, dangerous—a bare, naked gift, spoiled even in the giving by incompleteness; but I, Sir—I have tamed what the bold Son of Clymene only touched. Ah, by the blessed gods! I think I have tamed it—fire and water, I have wed them at yon black altar—deadly foes though some do call them, I have made them work together, the one with the other. Oh, Sir, such servants were never yet enlisted by our kind since the great day of Cyclops! And to think these feeble shaking hands whose poor sinews stand from the wasted flesh like ivy strands about a winter tree, have done it—and this poor head has thought it, persistent and at last successful, through bitter months of toil and anguished disappointment!”
“But, Sir,” I said gently, as the old man checked his incoherent speech for breath—“this monster, Sir, this ‘lovely monster,’ what is it?”
“Ah! I was forgetting you did not know. Look, then! and though you had been unfamous all your life, this moment of precedent knowledge above your fellows shall make you forever famous.” And the old man, like a devotee walking to a shrine, like a lover with hushed breath and brightly kindling eye stealing to his mistress’s hiding-place, led me up to a cavernous recess near the forge, and there lay hands upon a rent and tattered drapery of rough sail-cloth, stained and old, and, making a gesture of silence, pulled it back.
In the dim, weird enchantment of that place, I had been prepared for anything. It was a knightly fashion of the times to be credulous, and that black cobwebbed den, that mad philosopher, so eloquently raving, and all the late circumstance of my arrival fitted me to look for wonders. I had followed him across the grimy floor, pitted with gray pools of furnace-water, through the reek and twining strands of smoke that filled that nether hall; and lastly, when he laid a finger to his lip, and, so reverent and awful, drew back that ancient tattered screen, I frowned a little, stepping back a pace, and drew my ready sword six inches from its scabbard, and watched expectant to see some hideous, horrid, living form chained there—some foul offspring of darkness and accursed ingenuity—some hateful spawn of wizard art and black mother night—some squat, foul, misshapen Caliban—some loathsome thing—I scarce knew what, but strong and sullen and monstrous, for certain! And, instead, the screen ran rattling back, and there before me, in a neat-swept space, and on a platform of oaken planks—glossy in new forged metal, shiny with untarnished filings, gleaming in the pride of burnished brass and rivets—high, bulby, complicated, a maze of pistons and levers and wheels, was a great machine!
Somehow, as I saw that ponderous monster, so full of cunning although so lifeless, a tremor of wondering appreciation ran through my mind, that soulless body fascinated me with a prophetic fear and awe which at another time and in another place I should have laughed at.