'Certainly it is!' I said. 'Why, Martin, what under heaven can have affected you in this manner? I told you that I had knocked a worm on your coat, and you did not appear to heed it any more than if it had been a speck of dust. It was only when I mentioned the shape it had assumed, that you behaved so unaccountably! What does it mean? Are you afraid of worms, or only of shoulder-straps?' And I laughed at the absurdity of the latter supposition.
'Humph!' said Martin, who seemed to have recovered his equanimity, but not shaken off the impression. 'You laugh. Perhaps you will laugh more when I tell you that it was not the worm, as a worm, of which I was thinking at all, and that my terror—yes, I need not mince words, I was for the moment in abject terror—had to do altogether with the shape that little crawling pest had assumed, and the part of my coat on which he had taken a fancy to lodge himself!'
'No, I should not laugh,' I said; 'but I should ask an explanation of what seems very strange and unaccountable. Shall I lacerate a feeling, or tread upon ground made sacred by a grief, if I do so?'
'Not at all,' was the reply. 'In fact, I feel at this moment very much as the Ancient Mariner may have done the moment before he met the wedding-guest—when, in fact, he had nobody to button-hole, and felt the strong necessity of boring some one!' There was a tone of gayety in this reply, which told me how changeable and mercurial my companion could be; and I read an evident understanding of the character and mission of the noun-substantive 'bore,' which assured me that he was the last person in the world likely to play such a part. 'However,' he concluded, 'wait a bit. When we have concluded the raspberries, and wet our lips with green-seal, I will tell you all that I myself know of a very singular episode in an odd life.'
Half an hour after, the conditions of which he spoke had been accomplished, over the marble at Delmonico's, and he made me the following very singular relation:
'I had returned from a somewhat prolonged stay at Vienna,' he said, 'to Paris, late in 1860. During the fall and winter of that year I spent a good deal of time at the Louvre, making a few studies, and satisfying myself as to some identities that had been called in question during my rambles through the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. I lodged in the little Rue Marie Stuart, not far from the Rue Montorgeuil, and only two or three minutes' walk from the Louvre, having a baker with a pretty wife for my landlord, and a cozy little room in which three persons could sit comfortably, for my domicil. As I did not often have more than two visitors, my room was quite sufficient; and as I spent a large proportion of my evenings at other places than my lodgings, the space was three quarters of the time more than I needed.
'I do not know that I can have any objection to your knowing, before I go any further, that I am and have been for some years a believer in that of which Hamlet speaks when he says: 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.' You may call me a Spiritualist, if you like, for I have no reverence for or aversion to names. I do not call myself so; I only say that I believe that more things come to us in the way of knowledge, than we read, hear, see, taste, smell, or feel with the natural and physical organs. I know, from the most irrefragable testimony, that there are communications made between one and another, when too far apart to reach each other by any of the recognized modes of intercourse; though how or why they are made I have no definite knowledge. Electricity—that 'tongs with which God holds the world'—as a strong but odd thinker once said in my presence, may be the medium of communication; but even this must be informed by a living and sentient spirit, or it can convey nothing. People learn what they would not otherwise know, through mediums which they do not recognize and by processes which they can not explain; and to know this is to have left the beaten track of old beliefs, and plunged into a maze of speculation, which probably makes madmen of a hundred while it is making a wise man of one. But I am wandering too far and telling you nothing.
'One of my few intimates in Paris, a young Prussian by the name of Adolph Von Berg, had a habit of visiting mediums, clairvoyants, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, fortune-tellers. Though I had been in company with clairvoyants in many instances, I had never, before my return to Paris in the late summer of 1860, entered any one of those places in which professional fortune-tellers carried on their business. It was early in September, I think, that at the earnest solicitation of Von Berg, who had been reading and smoking with me at my lodgings, I went with him, late in the evening, to a small two-story house in the Rue La Reynie Ogniard, a little street down the Rue Saint Denis toward the quays of the Seine, and running from Saint Denis across to the Rue Saint Martin. The house seemed to me to be one of the oldest in Paris, although built of wood; and the wrinkled and crazy appearance of the front was eminently suggestive of the face of an old woman on which time had long been plowing furrows to plant disease. The interior of the house, when we entered it by the dingy and narrow hallway, that night, well corresponded with the exterior. A tallow-candle in a tin sconce was burning on the wall, half hiding and half revealing the grime on the plastering, the cobwebs in the corners, and the rickety stairs by which it might be supposed that the occupants ascended to the second story.
'My companion tinkled a small bell that lay upon a little uncovered table in the hall, (the outer door having been entirely unfastened, to all appearance,) and a slattern girl came out from an inner room. On recognizing my companion, who had visited the house before, she led the way without a word to the same room she had herself just quitted. There was nothing remarkable in this. A shabby table, and two or three still more shabby chairs, occupied the room, and a dark wax-taper stood on the table, while at the side opposite the single window a curtain of some dark stuff shut in almost one entire side of the apartment. We took seats on the rickety chairs, and waited in silence, Adolph informing me that the etiquette (strange name for such a place) of the house did not allow of conversation, not with the proprietors, carried on in that apartment sacred to the divine mysteries.
'Perhaps fifteen minutes had elapsed, and I had grown fearfully tired of waiting, when the corner of the curtain was suddenly thrown back, and the figure of a woman stood in the space thus created. Every thing behind her seemed to be in darkness; but some description of bright light, which did not show through the curtain at all, and which seemed almost dazzling enough to be Calcium or Drummond, shed its rays directly upon her side-face, throwing every feature from brow to chin into bold relief, and making every fold of her dark dress visible. But I scarcely saw the dress, the face being so remarkable beyond any thing I had ever witnessed. I had looked to see an old, wrinkled hag—it being the general understanding that all witches and fortune-tellers must be long past the noon of life; but instead, I saw a woman who could not have been over thirty-five or forty, with a figure of regal magnificence, and a face that would have been, but for one circumstance, beautiful beyond description. Apelles never drew and Phidias never chiseled nose or brow of more classic perfection, and I have never seen the bow of Cupid in the mouth of any woman more ravishingly shown than in that feature of the countenance of the sorceress.