“I tell you that I have had enough,” the alchemist repeated now. “I have perjured my soul to obtain this stone and I am ready to return it to its rightful owners. This stone is a thing of wickedness and blood and it has a woeful history, as old perhaps as the world itself.”
“Return it!” shouted Tring. “Return it! Why, Pan Kreutz, listen to my reasoning. I know not how you have come by this thing—I do not ask at present—but you would be scarce the man I took you for did you not use it for the purpose that we need it. After that we may return it—if indeed it has been stolen—or if it sticks within your conscience to retain it now, then perhaps I——”
“Nay, nay, Johann Tring,” exclaimed the alchemist emphatically, “to its rightful owners it shall go. Here I have kept the secret to myself knowing that the knowledge would tempt you—and indeed you would not have known now unless the secret had burned so heavily in my brain.”
“As you will,” said Tring, humoring the alchemist with his concession, though the purpose in his eyes was of different intent, “but first let us learn from it at once how to transmute baser metals into gold; this I am sure we shall do, then we can be independent of these smirking dogs who rule the universities.”
“Then let our experiments be brief,” said the alchemist. “I have looked too long upon this glittering thing.”
“You should have told me before.” Tring again adopted the attitude of a kindly adviser.
“But, in truth,” went on the alchemist, “I doubt if we can wring that secret from the crystal. I have now an opinion, though perhaps a wrong one, that the crystal only gives us back our own thoughts. We may not call upon it as upon some friendly spirit to tell us what we do not know—we may not wish and have our wishes fulfilled. I begin to doubt it all.” Here he rose to his feet and began to stride about the floor. “It is already having a bad influence upon me. I cannot see straightly in the world of men as once I did. When I have looked into it for minutes and minutes my thoughts come back to me crookedly, and while I have taken much interest in such contemplation, I find that there is too deadly a fascination in gazing into those crystal depths. I have, as I said, found much of interest, and were I alone in the world, I might even pursue these studies to the very limits of human thought, but I sometimes feel as if my very soul were getting caught in the rays of that bright thing.”
“Might I ask,” inquired Tring, unable to restrain his curiosity longer, “how the crystal came into your possession?”
“It was like this”—the alchemist willingly relieved his mind of the secret that he had been bearing alone. “That night when the thieves came here some time ago I entertained them for a bit with some Greek fire and niter.”
“Yes?”