"Reflect, O King, reflect, ere it prove too late! Make your choice between an inevitable, speedy and revolting demise here on Earth, and the prospect of a further reign in Meleager under such conditions as I have already indicated to you."
With this last earnest appeal Fajal watched me narrowly for some seconds, whilst I remained voiceless and irresolute. Seeing me thus still obdurate in my indecision, he sighed heavily and then sought in the folds of his vest, whence he drew forth a thin packet that he presented to me with these significant words: "If you doubt my warning and advice, look in this mirror steadily a while, and you will then understand."
I had scarcely transferred the package to the breast of my coat before I noticed an entering figure darken the patch of sunlight formed by the open door at the other end of the byre. It was Mr Davies returned from his fern cutting and now bent on an inspection of his stock. He saw nothing unusual however in my seeking thus the society of his new servant, who was now diligently cleaning the racks overhead. I delayed for a few minutes' talk with the farmer before bidding him good-morning and walking back to the inn.
In the verandah I found Dr Wayne smoking a pipe and enjoying the rare sunshine of this fleeting St Luke's Summer. We smiled at one another as I passed within, but I did not pause to converse, for I was impatient to open my concealed parcel. So I went upstairs and seated myself on a chair in the full light shed from the open window. Having unwound some folds of cloth I extricated the mirror of which Fajal had spoken, and found it to be a moderate-sized rectangular piece of thick glass without any frame and offering no peculiarity of aspect. Taking it in both my hands and in full glare of the sunlit window, I set to gaze intently in the expectation of some development whose nature I already half divined. As I prepared for this careful inspection of myself, or rather my counterfeit, I recalled to mind a picture I had seen years ago in the Wiertz Museum in what was then the capital of the Belgian kingdom, representing a youthful courtesan of the Mid-Victorian era stripped bare to the waist and contemplating herself in a cheval-glass. But in the painter's canvas the glass itself returned no true image of her comely complacent face and her swelling breasts, but in their stead a leering female skeleton, a revelation that seemed in no wise to shake the lady's composure. So in my own case I had a shrewd premonition I was destined to receive some shock of this nature out of the innocent-looking mirror lately presented to me. Of this shadowy encounter before me however I experienced no dread; very possibly the glass would reveal to me my own anatomy as a suitable memento mori to dissipate any lingering notions I might still entertain as to the undesirability of prolonging my life by a refusal to return to Meleager. But why, I asked myself, should I be afraid to survey my own basic framework? Are we not all mere skeletons clothed in an exiguous garment of skin and tissue, and animated by some mysterious internal engine which keeps intact the fleshy envelope and supplies the motive power of mind and muscle?
The perfectly smooth complexion that confronted my inquiring look suggested nothing save the early stages of manhood, though there was perceptible in the eyes a weary nervous expression, that hinted at a youth marred or tempered by experience and disillusion. Many minutes must have been occupied in contemplation of this beautiful and yet spurious specimen of juvenile physiognomy before I began to note a very slight alteration in the skin and outlines of the face before me; tiny delicate pencillings like the ghosts of hoar-frost tracery were forming below the lids and at the corners of the temples; the rotundity of the cheeks seemed to shrink; queer vindictive lines started here and there on the countenance, spoiling its fixed impression of repose and announcing anxiety and discontent. I grew overwhelmingly interested in this whimsical exhibition of scientific magic (if I may so describe it); of alarm or disgust I felt no scintilla as yet, so absorbed was I in my attitude of inquisitive observation. Having once declared itself visibly, this metamorphosis of the face seemed to develop more rapidly; the skin was bereft of its freshness and became sallow and somewhat transparent; I could tell the staring bones within, and the contours of the skull were clearly defined. The hair had lost its sheen, and the throat its firmness and fulness. But it no more horrified me to detect my own skeleton peeping forth through the imprisoning flesh than it would have startled me to see my naked body on stripping to bathe. Whatever might be my final decision, whether to remain on Earth and perish, or to proceed to Meleager and live, Fajal's device could exercise no sort of influence over my well-ordered mind. It was uncanny, unwholesome, unnatural; but as a practical argument for its acknowledged purpose it must prove utterly unavailing, and was in truth almost childish in its conception.
I was still absorbed in watching this phenomenon of the disunion of body and bones with complete unconcern, when my nimble imagination suddenly darted into a diverse channel of speculation. From my present medical or scientific abstraction I found myself sharply recalling Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in the Campo Santo of Pisa, wherein are depicted for the edification of the careless Christian the three stages of human decay after death. It was a morbid but persistent theme, and not only did I fail to exclude it from my unwilling brain, but other paintings and representations equally or even more gruesome, such as the decadent artists of the days of the later Medicean princes loved to depict, arose to my prolific fancy. I recalled Zumbo's horrible wax figures, exhibiting at once the loathsome corruption of the flesh and the exquisite torments of hell-fire, wherewith a certain Tuscan Grand Duchess was wont to stimulate to self-denying piety a mind engrossed by the pomps of rank and riches. With these unwelcome but spontaneous memories there now supervened a physical sensation that was most repugnant. The room itself, despite the fresh sea breeze and the cheerful sunshine, grew close and oppressive; there arose an intolerable smell of putrefaction, the unmistakable bouquet of the charnel-house; and this insidious encroaching odour filled my whole being with a sense of disgust that I found impossible to expel.
Meanwhile in the mirror itself the process of disintegration was advancing apace. At first I sought to ignore the changing tints of the rotting flesh and the entry of the worms and other vermin of the abandoned dead, and haply I might have succeeded in my mental struggle, had it not been for the increasing and well-nigh overpowering stench of the tomb which seemed to gather and enfold me in its dank miasmatic embrace. The pure light of the sunlit room had yielded to a dingy crepuscule, in which alone was plainly visible that accursed rectangle of glass with its surface churning out horror upon horror not only for the retina but also for the nostrils. And in the midst of this dissolving creeping mutating picture of human corruption there still shone out intact the feverish unfaded eyes that were stretched wide with a blank despair. I searched and searched with questioning dilated pupils their awful counterparts in the cruel glass, as though I were striving to force them to surrender up their appalling secret. At length I seemed to obtain the solution I sought yet dreaded to receive: it was Finality. What I saw being enacted before me by proxy was my own fate, my utter blotting out from the page of life, and not a mere stage, painful and ugly doubtless, but nevertheless only an intermediate stage to another phase of existence, as I had hitherto devoutly held. At last I realised that my own appointed portion was but this mean trilogy: the grave, corruption and nothingness; for the Hereafter owned no longer any concern with myself, the amphibian of two worlds, who had evaded his manifest duties alike on Earth and in Meleager. I remembered with a shudder Fajal's solemn warning as to the dire effects of that youth-bestowing and yet death-dealing fountain wherein I had so often been immersed. Was it really so? Had I in my flight from my kingdom lost that priceless yet elusive endowment, the soul? A faint gleam of hope in the midst of my terror shot suddenly into the mirk of my anguish, when I recalled Anzoni's farewell greeting to myself and his expressed desire for a mutual meeting in the halls of the Hereafter. Ah, but then Anzoni had assumed I was going to meet my fate like a hero, and had no intention of slinking back to Earth!
Thus, despite this vague consoling thought, this clutching at a fescue in the whirlpool of my despair, I became obsessed with a fierce longing and determination at all costs to cheat death and to cling to every chance that is vital and physical. Fajal's mission had triumphed. I grew frenzied at the fearful prospect adumbrated for me on this glassy screen; I was frantic to quit the Earth, and equally frantic to stake anything and everything on a second translation to Meleager. I tried to dash the mirror from my hands, only to discover that, like Medea's poisoned coronet, the accursed thing clung to the flesh of my palms and fingers, and refused to be shaken off. In my madness of terror I screamed aloud, and with the glass still adhering like burning wax to my skin I dashed myself against the wall repeatedly till I shattered to atoms the devilish instrument of torture in my ravings.
I can call to mind nothing further until I returned to sufficient consciousness again to see Dr Wayne's anxious and expectant face bent over me, as I lay prone on the boards surrounded by a mass of glittering fragments and splinters. My hands were cut and bleeding, but already the kind Doctor was tending them with some soothing antiseptic, and the pain was endurable. I allowed myself to be enticed to bed, where I passed the remainder of the day recovering from the double shock of mind and body I had so lately sustained. As usual, Dr Wayne spoke very little, and though his honest face betrayed his keen curiosity over my latest adventure, he asked no questions, and indeed scarcely ventured any comment, except the remark that there was a most peculiar scent of violets in the room, which was odd, seeing it was mid-October.