The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame. In the Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom he remembered. If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find Childe Harold.
“Good day, pere Porriquet,” said Raphael, pressing the old schoolmaster’s frozen fingers in his own damp ones; “how are you?”
“I am very well,” replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that feverish hand. “But how about you?”
“Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health.”
“You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?”
“No,” Raphael answered. “Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her farewell for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is.”
“The style is no doubt correct?” queried the schoolmaster. “You, I hope, would never have adopted the barbarous language of the new school, which fancies it has worked such wonders by discovering Ronsard!”
“My work treats of physiology pure and simple.”
“Oh, then, there is no more to be said,” the schoolmaster answered. “Grammar must yield to the exigencies of discovery. Nevertheless, young man, a lucid and harmonious style—the diction of Massillon, of M. de Buffon, of the great Racine—a classical style, in short, can never spoil anything——But, my friend,” the schoolmaster interrupted himself, “I was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my own interests.”
Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly suppressed his secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin. It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material, surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic outlines. Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every least whim, and had lived so as not to cause the slightest movement in the terrible talisman. The Magic Skin was like a tiger with which he must live without exciting its ferocity. He bore patiently, therefore, with the old schoolmaster’s prolixity.