I put back my sword, smiling to think it had been so nearly drawn, but yet stood expectant, half wondering, half hoping I knew not what, and gazing raptly on that mighty iron carcass perched there like some black incubus, almost fancying all the love and fear and hope that had gone to fashion its steel limbs or iron sinews might indeed have filled it with a soul that should, as I looked, become articulate and manifest beneath my eyes; half hoping, in my ignorance, that indeed the quintessence of human labor, here consummate, might have got on all that plastic, dull material, some wondrous firstling spirit of a new estate, some link between the worlds of substance and of shadow! And if it so fascinated me, that old man, to whom it owed its being, was even more enthralled. He stood before the shrine with locked hands and bent head, apostrophizing the silent work. “Oh, child of infinitely painful conception,” he muttered, “surely—surely you cannot disappoint me now! Near twenty years have I given to you—twenty years of toil and sweat and ungrudging hope. Long, hot summers have I worked upon you, and dank, dull winters, making and unmaking, building and taking down again, contriving, hoping, despairing, living with you by day and dreaming of you through nights of fitful slumber—surely, dear heir of all my hopes, the reward is at hand, the consummation comes!
“See!” he cried, “how perfect it is! Here in this great round cylinder is room for fire and water. The fire lies all along in that gulley-trench that you can note here through this open trap, and those curling pipes take the hot flame up through that void that will be filled with the other element. Now, when water boils, the vapor that comes from off the top is choleric and fiery past conception. This has been known for long, and John Homersham tried to utilize it by letting the vapor on the spread digits of a wheel; Farinelli of Angoulême suffered it to escape behind his engine—both ways so wasteful that no mortal furnace could keep up power sufficient to be of useful service. But I have bettered these and many others; nothing is wasted here—the hot gases are stored and stocked as they rise above the boiling liquid until they are as strong as the blustering son of Astræus and Aurora, and then, by turning one single tap, I suffer them to escape down yonder iron way, there to fall upon the head of that piston that with a mighty send gives before them and spins the great wheel above, and comes back on the impetus, and takes another buffet from the laboring vapor, and back it goes again, now this way and now that, twirling with fiery zeal those notched wheels above, and working all those bars and rods and pistons. Not one thing of all this complicated structure but has its purpose; not one rivet in yonder thousands but means a month of patient, toilsome thought and labor. Moreover, because it is so strong and heavy, I have put the whole upon that iron carriage, which took me a year to forge, and those solid back wheels are locked with the gear above, and from the axle of that front wheel two chains run up and turn upon a cylinder, so that my sweet one can move at such pace as yet I cannot even think of, and guide himself—in brief, is born and consummate!”
Then, presently, he turned from babbling to his “child,” and speaking louder, with frenzied gestures, the while he strode up and down before it, went wild upon the wondrous things it should do. “It will not fail, I know it! My head is fairly mazed when I forecast all that here with this begins as possible. It shall run, Sir,” he cried, turning rapturously to me—“and fly, and walk, and haul, and pull, and hew wood and draw water, and be a giant stronger than a thousand men, and a craftsman in a hundred crafts of such subtility and gentleness and cunning as no other master craftsman ever was. Down, into ages not yet formed in the void womb of the future, this knowledge I have mastered shall extend, widening as it goes, and men shall no longer strive or suffer; there stands the patient beast on whose broad back another age shall put all its burdens. There is the true winged horse of some other time that shall mock the slow patter of our laggard feet, and knit together the most distant corners of the world within its giant stride. Oh! I can see a happy age, when base material labor shall be over, and men shall lie about and take their fill of restfulness as they have not done since the gates of Eden were shut upon their ancient father’s back! I do see, down the long perspectives of the future, such as yon achieving all things both by sea and shore, plowing their fields for unborn peoples and drawing nets, carrying, fetching, far and near, swift, patient, indomitable! Ah! and winging glorious argosies—mighty vessels such as no man dares dream of now; vast, noble bodies inspirited each with a soul as lies impatient yonder; and those shall plow the green sea waves in scorn of storm and weather, pouring the wealth of far Cathay and Ind into our ready lap, making those things happy necessaries which now none but some few may dare to hope for; bringing the spice the Persian picked this morning to our doors to-morrow, bringing the grape and olive unwithered on their stems, bringing fair Eastern stuffs still wet from out their dye-vats——”
“Jove, old man! that moves me. I was a merchant once. Your words do stir my blood down to the most stagnant corner of my veins!”
“—Bringing pearls from Oman still speckled with the green sea-dew upon them, and sapphires from rugged Ural mines still smelling of their fresh native mother earth; bringing, in swift, tireless keels, Nova Zemblan furs and costly feathered trophies from the South; bringing Biafra’s hoards of ivory and Benin’s stores of blood-red gold; bringing gems warm from tepid sands of Arracan, and sandal-wood from seagirt Nicobar. Ah! pouring the yellow-scented corn of every fertile flat from Manfalout to ancient Abbasiyeh; pouring the Tartar’s millet and the Hindu’s rice into our hungry Western mouths; making those rich who once were poor, and those noble who once were only rich; benefiting both great and little—benefiting both near and far! And I shall have done this—I, poor Master Andrew Faulkener, a man so shabby and so seeming mean, no one of worth or quality would walk in the same side of the road with him!”
So spoke that good fanatic, and as he stopped there came a gentle tap upon the door, and a fair face in the sunlight, and there was Mistress Elizabeth saying, with a merry laugh: “Father! the cloth is laid, and the meal is spread, and old Margery bids me add that, if to-day’s roast is spoiled by waiting, as the last one was, she’ll never cook capon for thee again!” and coming down the maid laid a hand of gentle insistence upon her father’s sleeve, and led him sighing and often looking back up the green stone steps, I following close behind.
We crossed the sunny courtyard, entering on the farther side the other rambling buttress-wing of that ancient pile. Thence we went by clean white flagstoned passages and open oaken doorways to what was once the long servants’ dining-hall. At the near end of the middle table of well-scrubbed boards, so thick and heavy they might have come from the side of some great ship, a clean white slip cloth was laid, with high-backed chairs, one at the head for Andrew Faulkener, and two on either side for me and her, and lower down again were put, below the great oaken salt-cellar, two other places. By one of these stood Dame Margery, fair Elizabeth’s old nurse, an ancient dame in black-velvet cap and spotless ruff and linen, with a comely honest old country face above them, wrinkled and colored like a rosy pippin that has mellowed through the winter on a kitchen cornice shelf. Such was Dame Margery, and, while she curtsied low with folded hands, I bowed as one of my quality might bow in respect to her ancient faithfulness. At the other chair stood their Spanish steward, black Emanuel Marcena. Yes, and, as you may by this time have guessed, that steward was, in flesh and blood, none other but the midnight visitor who had disturbed my rest the night before. I could not doubt it. He wore the same clothes, his swarthy, sullen face was only a little more lifelike now in the daylight, and, if more evidence were wanting, one finger of his left hand—that hand that had held the bloody handkerchief—was done up with cobwebs and linen threads. I knew him on the instant, and stopped and stared to see my vagrant shadow so prosaically standing there at his dinner place, picking his yellow teeth and sniffing the ready roast like a hungry dog. And when he saw me he too started, for I also had been dreadful to him. I was the exact counterpart of that amber gallant that had strode out upon his moonlit heels and scared him with a shout, where, no doubt, he fancied no shouters dwelt, and now here we were face to face, guests at the same table, surely it was strange enough to make us stare!
But, over and above the prejudice of our evening meeting, I already distrusted and disliked Emanuel Marcena. Why it was I do not know, but so much is certain, if one may love, no less surely may one hate at first sight, and as our eyes met, hatred was surely born in his, while mine, as like as not, told through their steady stare, of aversion and dislike. He was a sullen, yellow fellow, lean and tall, with black, crafty eyes set near together; a thin nose, shaped like a vulture’s beak; a small peaked beard, and black hair closely cropped, a crafty, cunning, cruel, ungenerous-looking fellow, who had somehow, it afterward turned out, grown rich as his master’s fortunes failed. He had come into Faulkener’s service when a boy, had flourished while he flourished, and learned a hundred shifts of cruelty and pride from the gay company who once were proud to call his master comrade, and now, like the black fungus that he was, had swelled with conceit and avarice past all conscionable proportions.
Well, we exchanged grim salutations, and sat, and the meal commenced. But all the while we ate and talked I could not help turning to that crafty steward, and each time I did so I found his keen, restless black eyes wandering fugitive about among us. Now he would glance at me over his porringer, and then a half-unconscious scowl dropped down over those dark Cordovian brows. Then perhaps it was the old man he looked at, and a scarce-hid smile of contempt played about the corners of that Southern’s mouth to hear his master babble or answer our talk at random. Lastly, my sleek Iberian would set his glance on sweet country Bess as she sat at her father’s side, and then there burned under his yellow skin such a flush of passion, such a shine of sickly love and aspiration as needed no interpreting, and made me frown—small as my stake was in that game I saw was playing—as black as inky night. But what did it matter to me who picked that English blossom? Why should she not lie on that mean Spanish bosom forever if she would?—’twas less than nothing to me, who would so soon pass on to other ventures—and yet no man was ever born who was not jealous, and, remembering how we had met, how sweet she was and simple, what native courtesy gilded her country manners, what music there was in her voice, and how black that villain looked beside her, I, in spite of myself, resented the first knowledge of the love he bore as keenly as though I had myself a right to her.
Pious, sanctimonious Emanuel Marcena! He stood up saying his grace for meat long after all of us were seated, and crossed his doublet a score of times ere he fell on the viands like a hungry pike. And he was cruel too. A little thing may show how big things go. He caught a fly while we waited between two courses, and, thinking himself unnoticed, held it a moment nicely between his lean, long fingers, then, drawing a straight fine pin from his sleeve, slowly thrust it through the body of that buzzing thing. He stuck the pin up before him, by his pewter mug, and watched with lowering pleasure his victim gyrate. That amused him much, and when the creature’s pain was reduced to numbness he neatly tore one prismatic wing from off its shoulder, and smiled a sour smile to watch how that awoke it. Then, presently, the other wing was wrenched palpitating from the damp and quivering socket, and the victim spun round upon the iron stake that pierced its body. And all this under cover of his dinner-mug, ingenious, light-fingered Emanuel Marcena!