He looked up old newspapers and magazines, called at Tom Philter's lodgings, and, with that gentleman's aid, raked over the gutter of the past for any scrap of scandal against Mr. Topsparkle; but he could discover no more than the journalist had told him in the first instance. There had been a lady in the house in Soho Square, nearly forty years ago, and that lady had been called Mrs. Topsparkle; but as she had never appeared in public with her lord, it had been concluded that she possessed no legal right to that name. John Churchill's encounter with Topsparkle had been town talk for a week or so, the conqueror of Blenheim and Malplaquet being at that period famous only for his personal beauty, and for the scandalous adventures of his early youth—an intrigue with a duchess, a chivalrous descent from an upper window—and an imputation of venality which went to prove that the avarice of the future hero was already engrained in the stripling of the present. The mysterious lady's sudden death, in the very flower of her youth, had imparted a fictitious interest, and she had made herself briefly famous by that untimely doom. The papers gave exaggerated descriptions of her beauty and broadly hinted that her fate had been as tragic as that of Desdemona. The Flying Post described how the Nickers had broken all Mr. Topsparkle's windows with halfpence, soon after the poor lady's funeral. Topsparkle was alluded to as the City Othello, and in one scurrilous print was denounced as an "und-t-ct-d ass-ss-n." However baseless the slander may have been, it had evidently been freely circulated, and Topsparkle's subsequent residence abroad for more than a generation had given a kind of colour to the foul charge. Nor was this vaguely defined tragedy the only dusky page in the millionaire's history. His general character had been vicious, his habits on the Continent had been reported as abominable. He had been an admiring follower in the footsteps of the Regent Orleans, and of lesser lights in the same diabolical firmament.
And this man was Judith's husband. Yet what was it to him whether she was happy or miserable? that old sweetheart of his, whose round white arms had been wreathed round his neck that night in the little Chinese room at Lady Skirmisham's, what time she swore she would be his wife, and urged him to be true to her. Well, he had not been true; he had played the fool with fortune, had sacrificed the one real love of his life to mere braggadocio and the idle vanity of an hour, and his reward was an empty heart.
Vainly did he try to fan those red embers into a new flame, to burn before a new altar. He would have been very glad to fall in love with Squire Bosworth's daughter. Again and again he told himself that she was younger and lovelier than Judith, and that in her love he might find the renewal of his wasted youth, find contentment and length of years more surely than in that sacred art which old Vincenti had cultivated with the enthusiast's devotion for nearly half a century, and which seemed to have brought him but little nearer to those three great mysteries which he sought to fathom:—
The secret of illimitable wealth by the transmutation of meaner metals into gold and silver.
The secret of prolonged existence, to be found in some universal panacea, guessed at, almost grasped, yet always escaping the seeker.
And thirdly, the secret of intellectual power—the intercommunion of flesh and deity, the link between this mortal clay and the ethereal world of angels and demons.
It seemed to Lavendale, in his dreams of the past and of the dead, in his vivid recalling of half-forgotten words, the touch, the kiss of long ago, that this communion between severed souls was not unknown to human sense. If it could thus be granted in our sleeping hours, why not also to our waking senses? To him there was something more than mere memory in the dreamer's commune with the dead.
Vincenti pored over his old black-letter books: Roger Bacon's "Cure of Old Age;" or the "Art of Distillation, or Practical Physick, together with the preparation of Precipiolum, the Universal Medicine of Paracelsus;" or the "Golden Work of Hermes Trismegistus, translated out of Hebrew into Arabick, then into Greek, afterwards into Latin;" very precious volumes these, in the old Venetian's sight, treasuries of the wisdom of Eastern sages, hoarded up in the dim distance of the remote past to be the guide of searchers after truth in the present.
His toil of nearly half a century had brought him to the threshold of the temple, but it had not enabled him to open the door of the sanctuary. The secret was still a secret, and he felt life waning. All those things which made this world pleasant to the common race of mortals Vincenti had sacrificed to the necromancer's grander idea of bliss; he had nothing to live for except the realisation of that one hope; and if he should die without having mastered even the meanest of those three great secrets, he must needs confess that he had lived and laboured in vain.
"Others may follow me," he said, with a simplicity of resignation that was almost heroic. "Others will read what I have written, and may profit by labours that have just missed fruition. The truth must be revealed, the secret must be found. It is only a question of time and patience."