“You are right! it is nothing but a bedside screen. Such as it is, however, I request you to select for it any spot you choose upon the stone floor of either of these rooms. I shall want to go behind it; and that you may not harbor a thought of an intended evasion on my part, I request that you call your men into the room and give them orders to shoot me if I attempt to pass them!”
“Just as you please, monsieur! Pierre, call the guard.”
In obedience to this summons, the corps de garde filed into the room, twenty-seven strong, and as soon as the last man entered, the officer addressed them, saying, as he pointed to Ravalette, “This gentleman thinks to escape. See to it that he does not pass you alive. The very instant that he appears unattended by myself, fire upon him. I so command you: see that my orders are executed. Does that suit you, Monsieur Ravalette?”
“Perfectly—perfectly! nothing could be better,” said the latter.
“You will place fourteen men around the house to watch the windows, and the other thirteen you will distribute on the stairs and landing,” said the commissary.
“It shall be done,” said the sergeant, as he marched his men from the chamber—but not till I had placed a double-barrelled Deringer and a Colt’s revolver, both freshly capped and loaded, in his hands—for I hated Ravalette; man or demon, I hated him religiously—that being the strongest kind of dislike—and I had an intense desire to ascertain whether he was bullet-proof or not.
During all this time, the father, daughter, lover, myself, and the commissary’s two comrades had said nothing, but at a sign from Ravalette we took our seats in such a position that we commanded the hall-door, that between the two rooms, the recess, the cupboard, and the windows on either side. The commissary placed the convex side of the screen toward us, in the middle of the room, and then taking a seat by my side, said, that so far as he was concerned, all was ready, and from the pallor of his lips, the tone in which he spoke, and from the frequency with which he crossed himself and muttered an orison, compounded of bad French and worse Latin, it was clear that he wished his hands well washed of the whole affair.
“I, too, am ready,” observed the wizard, “and I, who have nothing to conceal, declare that I am he whom yonder man—Im Hokeis, and his Guebre-tribe, have for centuries believed to be the God of Fire and of Flame. The mystery of my being cannot yet be solved. I am not alone! The mastery, over Matter and over Magic, is an inheritance of the ages. We who were once as others are, became doomed ones by reason of the curse of a dying man, and like Isaac Ahasuerus, the Hebrew of Jerusalem, who cursed and spat upon the Man of Sorrows when bearing his gibbet up the steep lane of the Dolorous Way, and whom the Meek one cursed, and bade tarry on earth till he came—even so is he not alone. Powerful in all else, not one of us can read his own future; but for that must depend on gifted ones like yonder Beverly. Such are seldom born; but when they are, there is only one opportunity to make them subservient to our aid—they must be unwedded in soul, else they cannot enter the sleep of Sialam, and in no other way can the scroll of Fate be read for us. Hence the obstacles thrown in his path and in that of yonder girl.... It is possible to shift our fate upon the neutral, whoever he may be; but in this case a strong motive existed to saddle the centuries upon yonder man, who has, in various forms, been my contemporary since ages previous to the laying of the foundations of Babylon and Nineveh.
“There is one more in being—by him I have been foiled—the Stranger—and still another—the mother of this Beverly’s body. I hoped to win him by Magic; I have failed. He has seen me thus, as I am,”—and so saying, Ravalette slowly moved around the screen, continuing to speak all the while, until he reappeared on the other corner—and saying, “and thus.” We were astonished beyond measure at the change that had, in less than twelve seconds, taken place.
Ravalette no longer stood before us, but instead, we saw a thin, lean, little, wrinkled old man, the perfect opposite in everything of the person we had just conversed with. “Miakus! as I live—the man of Portland and of Boston—the same!” exclaimed Beverly, as the figure passed once more from view behind the screen, and almost instantly reappeared in a totally dissimilar guise. “And thus!” said the wizard. “My heaven!” said Beverly, “it is Ettelavar, my mysterious guide and teacher in the kingdom of Trance and Dream!”