“How did you know anything about her planet?” he asked in a constrained tone.
“I cast her nativity two days ago,” answered the merchant, dropping his voice as if from pure laziness, almost to a whisper. “I know something about astrology myself, and as I take in the lady the respectful interest of a friend, I put my services at her disposal, by her own request. I may own that I took a personal interest in finding out whether her destiny would cross my own.” He paused a few moments, during which Lauriston, in spite of the studied incredulity with which he listened to all this, felt his excitement rising. “But I could find nothing to justify my hopes. As far as my skill could serve, I made out that her destiny was bound up with the countrymen of her father, the land of her adoption.”
While setting this down as quackery, the young Englishman was interested and stirred by the Oriental’s measured utterances.
“Yet you say your own planet, horoscope, whatever you call it, gave you an influence over her?” he asked in a careless tone.
“In this way,” the merchant went on: “I can make her sleep, and in her sleep I can bring before her eyes what vision I will; I can learn things concerning her which she herself in her waking hours does not know.”
“Why, that is a sort of mesmerism; they do that over here without any aid from the planets.”
“So you think. So perhaps the sea thinks that her tides advance and recede independently of the moon. And so, in Europe, Nature’s occult marvels are sneered at, and great forces wasted, which we Asiatics turn to account in moulding the courses of our lives.”
“Will you explain?”
“In England a person gifted with this force which his neighbours ignore and he himself cannot understand, casts another into a sleep, a trance. Here is this creature, for good or for ill, at his mercy, in his power. What does he do? Teach him some great truth? Force from him some vital secret? Subdue the acknowledged evil in him to some good end? No. He makes him find a pin, drink a glass of water, blow his nose. Then, having accomplished this noble end at some expenditure of his own vital force, he awakens the sleeper; and what is gained? A dozen fools have gaped, cried: ‘Marvellous!’ or, ‘Well, I never!’ according to their measure of refinement, and gone their ways no whit wiser than before.”
“Yes, well, and you? How do you use this force?”