"It is so easy for you to say these things," said Lavendale doubtingly. "You have heard me talk of my mother so often."
"You questioned and I answered," replied the old man. "If it please you to think me a charlatan, you are welcome to your opinion. I have neither gain nor honour to win from you or any man living. K I have my ends and aims, which neither you nor mortal man can aid. If I fail or if I succeed, I do it alone. Human clay cannot help me."
"Why should this house in which I was born have voices which you can hear, and yet for me hold only silence—for me who love every stone in the fabric, for me who have wept the most passionate tears in my life for her I lost here?"
"Because between the disembodied soul and you there is the barrier of the flesh; because you have given yourself up to sensuous things and sensuous pleasures; have eaten and drunk and delighted in the lowest pleasures of your kind. How should such as you hope to hold communion with the clear light of the soul released from clay? You must bring yourself nearer the condition of the dead before you can feel their influence."
"Sublimise myself by the extinguishment of every earthly passion? Nay, my ethereal friend, at two-and-thirty that is not so easy. There is something here," lightly touching his breast, "which pleads too ardently for poor humanity—the heart, Vincenti, the passionate heart of manhood. Do not believe those who tell you that the bad Lord Lavendale has been altogether the slave of his senses. I never loved but once with true fervour. All the rest has been vanity and confusion, the follies of a fop who wanted to lead the fashion, and ever to be first in depravity."
"You have been staunch in friendship," said Vincenti: "I can answer for that. It was a happy hour for me when you found me laid up with fever at an inn at Prague. In a situation which would have made any other Englishman shun me, you succoured and rescued me."
"One eccentricity the more in an eccentric career, my friend. I found a treasure by the wayside; and if you can but hold out long enough to make the great discovery on the threshold of which so many an adept has given up the ghost—"
"Let us not speak of that," interrupted the old man nervously; "there are some things too sublime to be debated as your English Parliament debates a vote of credit or a declaration of war. Those who have gone down to the grave have carried too many of their secrets with them. The approach to the great secret is clouded with darkness, beset with difficulty. Yet who that has searched the secrets of Nature can doubt that there is somewhere in her mysterious realm the vital fire which can prolong the life of man, as surely as there are mineral and vegetable powers which can regulate the blood in the veins, and permeate man's whole frame with healing influences? Is there anything more miraculous in the idea of life prolonged indefinitely than in the spectacle of a fever-patient cured at the point of death? or of a brain distraught restored to sense and calmness by the physician's art?"
Lord Lavendale devoted the next morning to an interview with his steward, and while master and man were closeted in his lordship's study, Herrick Durnford set out for a long morning's ramble in the park, pleased to be free and alone—a privilege which he rarely enjoyed, as Lavendale hated solitude.