Conscious that his success at Mittau depended on keeping the Countess’s esteem, he assumed an air of mystery and superiority when talking of the occult calculated to impress her with the utter insignificance of her views in matters of which, as she admitted, she was ignorant. Having made her feel as small as possible, he endeavoured to reconcile her to the phenomena he performed for the benefit of her relations by holding out to her a hope that by similar means it might be possible to evoke the shade of the brother she so yearned to see. When next she met him, he assured her that “Hanachiel,” as he called his “chief” in the spiritual world to whom he owed his marvellous gifts, “had informed him that her intention was good in wishing to communicate with her brother, and that this was only to be accomplished by the study of the occult sciences, in which she might make rapid progress if she would follow his directions unquestioningly.”
In this way, like another Jason steering his Argos-ship of Egyptian Masonry clear of the rocks and quicksands, he sought to round the cape of suspicion and come to a safe anchorage in port. But though he handled the helm with consummate skill, as the Countess herself afterwards acknowledged, it was a perilous sea on which he sailed. Unquestioning obedience, the Countess declared, she could not promise him.
“God Himself,” she said, “could not induce me to act against what my conscience tells me is right and wrong.”
“Then you condemn Abraham for offering up his son?” was Cagliostro’s curious rejoinder. “In his place, what would you have done?”
“I would have said,” replied the Countess: “‘O God, kill Thou my son with a flash of Thy lightning if Thou requirest his life; but ask me not to slay my child, whom I do not think guilty of death.’”
With such a woman, what is a Cagliostro to do? Prevented, so to speak, by this flaw in the wind from coming to anchor in the harbour of her unquestioning faith in him, he sought to reach port by keeping up her hopes. To reconcile her to the magical operations he was obliged to perform in order to retain his influence upon the von Medems, he finally promised her a “magic dream” in which her brother would appear to her.
From the manner in which Cagliostro proceeded to perform this phenomenon, one may obtain an idea of the nature and extent of his marvellous powers. As heretofore his effects had been produced by hypnotic suggestion, accompanied by every accessory calculated to assist it, so now he proceeded on similar lines. That the thoughts of others besides himself should be concentrated on the “magic dream,” the relations of the Countess, as well as herself, were duly agitated by its expectation. With an air of great mystery, which Cagliostro could make so impressive, he delivered to Count von Medem a sealed envelope containing, he said, a question, which he hoped by the dream to have answered. At night, before the Countess retired, he broke the silence which he had imposed on her and her relations during the day to refer once more to the dream, with the object of still further exciting the imagination of all concerned, whose thoughts were fixed upon the coming apparition of the dead, until the prophecy, like many another, worked its own fulfilment.
But this cunningly contrived artifice, familiar to magicians in all ages, and frequently crowned with success, was defeated on the present occasion by the health of the Countess, whose nerves were so excited by the glimpse she expected to have of her dearly beloved brother as to prevent her sleeping at all.
This eventuality, however—which Cagliostro had no doubt allowed for—far from complicating his difficulties, was easily turned to advantage. For, upbraiding the Countess for her weakness and lack of self-control, he declared she need not any longer count on seeing her brother. Nevertheless, he dared not deprive her of all hope. In response to her pleading, and urged by her father and uncle, he was emboldened to promise her the dream for the ensuing night, trusting that in the condition of body and mind to which he perceived she was reduced by the overwrought state of her nerves she might even imagine she had seen her brother.
But though the slippery road along which, impelled by vanity and ambition, he travelled was beset with danger, Cagliostro proceeded undaunted. When his second attempt to evoke the dead failed like the first, he boldly asserted that he himself had prevented the apparition, “being warned by Hanachiel that the vision of her brother would endanger the Countess’s life in her excitable state.” And to render this explanation the more convincing he gave the von Medems, who were plainly disappointed by the failure of the “magic dream,” one of those curious exhibitions of second sight which he was in the habit of knocking off—no other word expresses it—so frequently and successfully for their benefit.