TO

MY DEAR MOTHER

CONTENTS

[The Race of Orven]

[The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks]

[The S.S.]

THE RACE OF ORVEN

Never without grief and pain could I remember the fate of PrinceZaleski—victim of a too importunate, too unfortunate Love, which thefulgor of the throne itself could not abash; exile perforce from hisnative land, and voluntary exile from the rest of men! Having renouncedthe world, over which, lurid and inscrutable as a falling star, he hadpassed, the world quickly ceased to wonder at him; and even I, to whom,more than to another, the workings of that just and passionate mind hadbeen revealed, half forgot him in the rush of things.

But during the time that what was called the 'Pharanx labyrinth' wasexercising many of the heaviest brains in the land, my thought turnedrepeatedly to him; and even when the affair had passed from the generalattention, a bright day in Spring, combined perhaps with a latentmistrust of the dénoûment of that dark plot, drew me to his place ofhermitage.

I reached the gloomy abode of my friend as the sun set. It was a vastpalace of the older world standing lonely in the midst of woodland, andapproached by a sombre avenue of poplars and cypresses, through whichthe sunlight hardly pierced. Up this I passed, and seeking out thedeserted stables (which I found all too dilapidated to afford shelter)finally put up my calèche in the ruined sacristy of an old Dominicanchapel, and turned my mare loose to browse for the night on a paddockbehind the domain.

As I pushed back the open front door and entered the mansion, I couldnot but wonder at the saturnine fancy that had led this wayward man toselect a brooding-place so desolate for the passage of his days. Iregarded it as a vast tomb of Mausolus in which lay deep sepulchred howmuch genius, culture, brilliancy, power! The hall was constructed inthe manner of a Roman atrium, and from the oblong pool of turgidwater in the centre a troop of fat and otiose rats fled weaklysquealing at my approach. I mounted by broken marble steps to thecorridors running round the open space, and thence pursued my waythrough a mazeland of apartments—suite upon suite—along many a lengthof passage, up and down many stairs. Dust-clouds rose from theuncarpeted floors and choked me; incontinent Echo coughed answeringricochets to my footsteps in the gathering darkness, and addedemphasis to the funereal gloom of the dwelling. Nowhere was there avestige of furniture—nowhere a trace of human life.

After a long interval I came, in a remote tower of the building andnear its utmost summit, to a richly-carpeted passage, from the ceilingof which three mosaic lamps shed dim violet, scarlet and pale-roselights around. At the end I perceived two figures standing as if insilent guard on each side of a door tapestried with the python's skin.One was a post-replica in Parian marble of the nude Aphrodite ofCnidus; in the other I recognised the gigantic form of the negro Ham,the prince's only attendant, whose fierce, and glistening, and ebonvisage broadened into a grin of intelligence as I came nearer. Noddingto him, I pushed without ceremony into Zaleski's apartment.

The room was not a large one, but lofty. Even in the semi-darkness ofthe very faint greenish lustre radiated from an open censerlikelampas of fretted gold in the centre of the domed encausted roof, acertain incongruity of barbaric gorgeousness in the furnishing filledme with amazement. The air was heavy with the scented odour of thislight, and the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa—the base of thebhang of the Mohammedans—in which I knew it to be the habit of myfriend to assuage himself. The hangings were of wine-coloured velvet,heavy, gold-fringed and embroidered at Nurshedabad. All the world knewPrince Zaleski to be a consummate cognoscente—a profound amateur—aswell as a savant and a thinker; but I was, nevertheless, astounded atthe mere multitudinousness of the curios he had contrived to crowd intothe space around him. Side by side rested a palaeolithic implement, aChinese 'wise man,' a Gnostic gem, an amphora of Graeco-Etruscan work.The general effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom.Flemish sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets,miniature paintings, a winged bull, Tamil scriptures on lacqueredleaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmingods. One whole side of the room was occupied by an organ whose thunderin that circumscribed place must have set all these relics of deadepochs clashing and jingling in fantastic dances. As I entered, thevaporous atmosphere was palpitating to the low, liquid tinkling of aninvisible musical box. The prince reclined on a couch from which adraping of cloth-of-silver rolled torrent over the floor. Beside him,stretched in its open sarcophagus which rested on three brazentrestles, lay the mummy of an ancient Memphian, from the upper part ofwhich the brown cerements had rotted or been rent, leaving thehideousness of the naked, grinning countenance exposed to view.

Discarding his gemmed chibouque and an old vellum reprint of Anacreon,Zaleski rose hastily and greeted me with warmth, muttering at the sametime some commonplace about his 'pleasure' and the 'unexpectedness' ofmy visit. He then gave orders to Ham to prepare me a bed in one of theadjoining chambers. We passed the greater part of the night in adelightful stream of that somnolent and half-mystic talk which PrinceZaleski alone could initiate and sustain, during which he repeatedlypressed on me a concoction of Indian hemp resembling hashish,prepared by his own hands, and quite innocuous. It was after a simplebreakfast the next morning that I entered on the subject which waspartly the occasion of my visit. He lay back on his couch, volumed in aTurkish beneesh, and listened to me, a little wearily perhaps atfirst, with woven fingers, and the pale inverted eyes of old anchoritesand astrologers, the moony greenish light falling on his always wanfeatures.

'You knew Lord Pharanx?' I asked.

'I have met him in "the world." His son Lord Randolph, too, I saw onceat Court at Peterhof, and once again at the Winter Palace of the Tsar.I noticed in their great stature, shaggy heads of hair, ears of a verypeculiar conformation, and a certain aggressiveness of demeanour—astrong likeness between father and son.'

I had brought with me a bundle of old newspapers, and comparing theseas I went on, I proceeded to lay the incidents before him.

'The father,' I said, 'held, as you know, high office in a lateAdministration, and was one of our big luminaries in politics; he hasalso been President of the Council of several learned societies, andauthor of a book on Modern Ethics. His son was rapidly rising toeminence in the corps diplomatique, and lately (though, strictlyspeaking, unebenbürtig) contracted an affiance with the PrinzessinCharlotte Mariana Natalia of Morgen-üppigen, a lady with a strain ofindubitable Hohenzollern blood in her royal veins. The Orven family isa very old and distinguished one, though—especially in moderndays—far from wealthy. However, some little time after Randolph hadbecome engaged to this royal lady, the father insured his life forimmense sums in various offices both in England and America, and thereproach of poverty is now swept from the race. Six months ago, almostsimultaneously, both father and son resigned their various positionsen bloc. But all this, of course, I am telling you on the assumptionthat you have not already read it in the papers.'

'A modern newspaper,' he said, 'being what it mostly is, is the onething insupportable to me at present. Believe me, I never see one.'

'Well, then, Lord Pharanx, as I said, threw up his posts in the fulnessof his vigour, and retired to one of his country seats. A good manyyears ago, he and Randolph had a terrible row over some trifle, and,with the implacability that distinguishes their race, had not sinceexchanged a word. But some little time after the retirement of thefather, a message was despatched by him to the son, who was then inIndia. Considered as the first step in the rapprochement of thisproud and selfish pair of beings, it was an altogether remarkablemessage, and was subsequently deposed to in evidence by a telegraphofficial; it ran:

'"Return. The beginning of the end is come." Whereupon Randolph didreturn, and in three months from the date of his landing in England,Lord Pharanx was dead.'

'Murdered?'

A certain something in the tone in which this word was uttered byZaleski puzzled me. It left me uncertain whether he had addressed to mean exclamation of conviction, or a simple question. I must have lookedthis feeling, for he said at once:

'I could easily, from your manner, surmise as much, you know. Perhaps Imight even have foretold it, years ago.'

'Foretold—what? Not the murder of Lord Pharanx?'

'Something of that kind,' he answered with a smile; 'but proceed—tellme all the facts you know.'

Word-mysteries of this sort fell frequent from the lips of the prince.I continued the narrative.

'The two, then, met, and were reconciled. But it was a reconciliationwithout cordiality, without affection—a shaking of hands across abarrier of brass; and even this hand-shaking was a strictlymetaphorical one, for they do not seem ever to have got beyond theinterchange of a frigid bow. The opportunities, however, forobservation were few. Soon after Randolph's arrival at Orven Hall, hisfather entered on a life of the most absolute seclusion. The mansion isan old three-storied one, the top floor consisting for the most part ofsleeping-rooms, the first of a library, drawing-room, and so on, andthe ground-floor, in addition to the dining and other ordinary rooms,of another small library, looking out (at the side of the house) on alow balcony, which, in turn, looks on a lawn dotted with flower-beds.It was this smaller library on the ground-floor that was now divestedof its books, and converted into a bedroom for the earl. Hither hemigrated, and here he lived, scarcely ever leaving it. Randolph, on hispart, moved to a room on the first floor immediately above this. Someof the retainers of the family were dismissed, and on the remaining fewfell a hush of expectancy, a sense of wonder, as to what these thingsboded. A great enforced quiet pervaded the building, the least unduenoise in any part being sure to be followed by the angry voice of themaster demanding the cause. Once, as the servants were supping in thekitchen on the side of the house most remote from that which heoccupied, Lord Pharanx, slippered and in dressing-gown, appeared at thedoorway, purple with rage, threatening to pack the whole company ofthem out of doors if they did not moderate the clatter of their knivesand forks. He had always been regarded with fear in his own household,and the very sound of his voice now became a terror. His food was takento him in the room he had made his habitation, and it was remarkedthat, though simple before in his gustatory tastes, he now—possiblyowing to the sedentary life he led—became fastidious, insisting onrecherché bits. I mention all these details to you—as I shallmention others—not because they have the least connection with thetragedy as it subsequently occurred, but merely because I know them,and you have requested me to state all I know.'

'Yes,' he answered, with a suspicion of ennui, 'you are right. I mayas well hear the whole—if I must hear a part.'

'Meanwhile, Randolph appears to have visited the earl at least once aday. In such retirement did he, too, live that many of his friendsstill supposed him to be in India. There was only one respect in whichhe broke through this privacy. You know, of course, that the Orvensare, and, I believe, always have been, noted as the most obstinate, themost crabbed of Conservatives in politics. Even among thepast-enamoured families of England, they stand out conspicuously inthis respect. Is it credible to you, then, that Randolph should offerhimself to the Radical Association of the Borough of Orven as acandidate for the next election in opposition to the sitting member? Itis on record, too, that he spoke at three public meetings—reported inlocal papers—at which he avowed his political conversion; afterwardslaid the foundation-stone of a new Baptist chapel; presided at aMethodist tea-meeting; and taking an abnormal interest in the debasedcondition of the labourers in the villages round, fitted up as aclass-room an apartment on the top floor at Orven Hall, and gatheredround him on two evenings in every week a class of yokels, whom heproceeded to cram with demonstrations in elementary mechanics.'

'Mechanics!' cried Zaleski, starting upright for a moment, 'mechanicsto agricultural labourers! Why not elementary chemistry? Why notelementary botany? Why mechanics?'

This was the first evidence of interest he had shown in the story. Iwas pleased, but answered:

'The point is unimportant; and there really is no accounting for thevagaries of such a man. He wished, I imagine, to give some idea to theyoung illiterates of the simple laws of motion and force. But now Icome to a new character in the drama—the chief character of all. Oneday a woman presented herself at Orven Hall and demanded to see itsowner. She spoke English with a strong French accent. Thoughapproaching middle life she was still beautiful, having wild blackeyes, and creamy pale face. Her dress was tawdry, cheap, and loud,showing signs of wear; her hair was unkempt; her manners were not themanners of a lady. A certain vehemence, exasperation, unreposedistinguished all she said and did. The footman refused her admission;Lord Pharanx, he said, was invisible. She persisted violently, pushedpast him, and had to be forcibly ejected; during all which the voice ofthe master was heard roaring from the passage red-eyed remonstrance atthe unusual noise. She went away gesticulating wildly, and vowingvengeance on Lord Pharanx and all the world. It was afterwards foundthat she had taken up her abode in one of the neighbouring hamlets,called Lee.

'This person, who gave the name of Maude Cibras, subsequently called atthe Hall three times in succession, and was each time refusedadmittance. It was now, however, thought advisable to inform Randolphof her visits. He said she might be permitted to see him, if shereturned. This she did on the next day, and had a long interview inprivate with him. Her voice was heard raised as if in angry protest byone Hester Dyett, a servant of the house, while Randolph in low tonesseemed to try to soothe her. The conversation was in French, and noword could be made out. She passed out at length, tossing her headjauntily, and smiling a vulgar triumph at the footman who had beforeopposed her ingress. She was never known to seek admission to the houseagain.

'But her connection with its inmates did not cease. The same Hesterasserts that one night, coming home late through the park, she saw twopersons conversing on a bench beneath the trees, crept behind somebushes, and discovered that they were the strange woman and Randolph.The same servant bears evidence to tracking them to othermeeting-places, and to finding in the letter-bag letters addressed toMaude Cibras in Randolph's hand-writing. One of these was actuallyunearthed later on. Indeed, so engrossing did the intercourse become,that it seems even to have interfered with the outburst of radical zealin the new political convert. The rendezvous—always held under coverof darkness, but naked and open to the eye of the watchfulHester—sometimes clashed with the science lectures, when these latterwould be put off, so that they became gradually fewer, and then almostceased.'

'Your narrative becomes unexpectedly interesting,' said Zaleski; 'butthis unearthed letter of Randolph's—what was in it?'

I read as follows:

'"Dear Mdlle. Cibras,—I am exerting my utmost influence for you withmy father. But he shows no signs of coming round as yet. If I couldonly induce him to see you! But he is, as you know, a person ofunrelenting will, and meanwhile you must confide in my loyal efforts onyour behalf. At the same time, I admit that the situation is aprecarious one: you are, I am sure, well provided for in the presentwill of Lord Pharanx, but he is on the point—within, say, three orfour days—of making another; and exasperated as he is at yourappearance in England, I know there is no chance of your receiving acentime under the new will. Before then, however, we must hope thatsomething favourable to you may happen; and in the meantime, let meimplore you not to let your only too just resentment pass beyond thebounds of reason.

"Sincerely yours,

"RANDOLPH."'

'I like the letter!' cried Zaleski. 'You notice the tone of manlycandour. But the facts—were they true? Did the earl make a newwill in the time specified?'

'No,—but that may have been because his death intervened.'

'And in the old will, was Mdlle. Cibras provided for?'

'Yes,—that at least was correct.'

A shadow of pain passed over his face.

'And now,' I went on, 'I come to the closing scene, in which one ofEngland's foremost men perished by the act of an obscure assassin. Theletter I have read was written to Maude Cibras on the 5th of January.The next thing that happens is on the 6th, when Lord Pharanx left hisroom for another during the whole day, and a skilled mechanic wasintroduced into it for the purpose of effecting some alterations. Askedby Hester Dyett, as he was leaving the house, what was the nature ofhis operations, the man replied that he had been applying a patentarrangement to the window looking out on the balcony, for the betterprotection of the room against burglars, several robberies havingrecently been committed in the neighbourhood. The sudden death of thisman, however, before the occurrence of the tragedy, prevented hisevidence being heard. On the next day—the 7th—Hester, entering theroom with Lord Pharanx's dinner, fancies, though she cannot tell why(inasmuch as his back is towards her, he sitting in an arm-chair by thefire), that Lord Pharanx has been "drinking heavily."

'On the 8th a singular thing befell. The earl was at last induced tosee Maude Cibras, and during the morning of that day, with his ownhand, wrote a note informing her of his decision, Randolph handing thenote to a messenger. That note also has been made public. It reads asfollows:

'"Maude Cibras.—You may come here to-night after dark. Walk to thesouth side of the house, come up the steps to the balcony, and pass inthrough the open window to my room. Remember, however, that you havenothing to expect from me, and that from to-night I blot you eternallyfrom my mind: but I will hear your story, which I know beforehand to befalse. Destroy this note. PHARANX."'

As I progressed with my tale, I came to notice that over thecountenance of Prince Zaleski there grew little by little a singularfixed aspect. His small, keen features distorted themselves into anexpression of what I can only describe as an abnormal inquisitiveness—an inquisitiveness most impatient, arrogant, in its intensity.His pupils, contracted each to a dot, became the central punctaof two rings of fiery light; his little sharp teeth seemed tognash. Once before I had seen him look thus greedily, when, grasping aTroglodyte tablet covered with half-effaced hieroglyphics—his fingerslivid with the fixity of his grip—he bent on it that strenuousinquisition, that ardent questioning gaze, till, by a species ofmesmeric dominancy, he seemed to wrench from it the arcanum it hid fromother eyes; then he lay back, pale and faint from the too arduousvictory.

When I had read Lord Pharanx's letter, he took the paper eagerly frommy hand, and ran his eyes over the passage.

'Tell me—the end,' he said.

'Maude Cibras,' I went on, 'thus invited to a meeting with the earl,failed to make her appearance at the appointed time. It happened thatshe had left her lodgings in the village early that very morning, and,for some purpose or other, had travelled to the town of Bath. Randolph,too, went away the same day in the opposite direction to Plymouth. Hereturned on the following morning, the 9th; soon after walked over toLee; and entered into conversation with the keeper of the inn whereCibras lodged; asked if she was at home, and on being told that she hadgone away, asked further if she had taken her luggage with her; wasinformed that she had, and had also announced her intention of at onceleaving England. He then walked away in the direction of the Hall. Onthis day Hester Dyett noticed that there were many articles of valuescattered about the earl's room, notably a tiara of old Brazilianbrilliants, sometimes worn by the late Lady Pharanx. Randolph—who waspresent at the time—further drew her attention to these by telling herthat Lord Pharanx had chosen to bring together in his apartment many ofthe family jewels; and she was instructed to tell the other servants ofthis fact, in case they should notice any suspicious-looking loafersabout the estate.

'On the 10th, both father and son remained in their rooms all day,except when the latter came down to meals; at which times he would lockhis door behind him, and with his own hands take in the earl's food,giving as his reason that his father was writing a very importantdocument, and did not wish to be disturbed by the presence of aservant. During the forenoon, Hester Dyett, hearing loud noises inRandolph's room, as if furniture was being removed from place to place,found some pretext for knocking at his door, when he ordered her on noaccount to interrupt him again, as he was busy packing his clothes inview of a journey to London on the next day. The subsequent conduct ofthe woman shows that her curiosity must have been excited to the utmostby the undoubtedly strange spectacle of Randolph packing his ownclothes. During the afternoon a lad from the village was instructed tocollect his companions for a science lecture the same evening at eighto'clock. And so the eventful day wore on.

'We arrive now at this hour of eight P.M. on this 10th day of January.The night is dark and windy; some snow has been falling, but has nowceased. In an upper room is Randolph engaged in expounding the elementsof dynamics; in the room under that is Hester Dyett—for Hester hassomehow obtained a key that opens the door of Randolph's room, andtakes advantage of his absence upstairs to explore it. Under her isLord Pharanx, certainly in bed, probably asleep. Hester, trembling allover in a fever of fear and excitement, holds a lighted taper in onehand, which she religiously shades with the other; for the storm isgusty, and the gusts, tearing through the crevices of the rattling oldcasements, toss great flickering shadows on the hangings, whichfrighten her to death. She has just time to see that the whole room isin the wildest confusion, when suddenly a rougher puff blows out theflame, and she is left in what to her, standing as she was on thatforbidden ground, must have been a horror of darkness. At the samemoment, clear and sharp from right beneath her, a pistol-shot rings outon her ear. For an instant she stands in stone, incapable of motion.Then on her dazed senses there supervenes—so she swore—theconsciousness that some object is moving in the room—moving apparentlyof its own accord—moving in direct opposition to all the laws ofnature as she knows them. She imagines that she perceives a phantasm—astrange something—globular-white—looking, as she says, "like agood-sized ball of cotton"—rise directly from the floor before her,ascending slowly upward, as if driven aloft by some invisible force. Asharp shock of the sense of the supernatural deprives her of orderedreason. Throwing forward her arms, and uttering a shrill scream, sherushes towards the door. But she never reaches it: midway she fallsprostrate over some object, and knows no more; and when, an hour later,she is borne out of the room in the arms of Randolph himself, the bloodis dripping from a fracture of her right tibia.

'Meantime, in the upper chamber the pistol-shot and the scream of thewoman have been heard. All eyes turn to Randolph. He stands in theshadow of the mechanical contrivance on which he has been illustratinghis points; leans for support on it. He essays to speak, the muscles ofhis face work, but no sound comes. Only after a time is he able togasp: "Did you hear something—from below?" They answer "yes" inchorus; then one of the lads takes a lighted candle, and together theytroop out, Randolph behind them. A terrified servant rushes up with thenews that something dreadful has happened in the house. They proceedfor some distance, but there is an open window on the stairs, and thelight is blown out. They have to wait some minutes till another isobtained, and then the procession moves forward once more. Arrived atLord Pharanx's door, and finding it locked, a lantern is procured, andRandolph leads them through the house and out on the lawn. But havingnearly reached the balcony, a lad observes a track of smallwoman's-feet in the snow; a halt is called, and then Randolph pointsout another track of feet, half obliterated by the snow, extending froma coppice close by up to the balcony, and forming an angle with thefirst track. These latter are great big feet, made by ponderouslabourers' boots. He holds the lantern over the flower-beds, and showshow they have been trampled down. Some one finds a common scarf, suchas workmen wear; and a ring and a locket, dropped by the burglars intheir flight, are also found by Randolph half buried in the snow. Andnow the foremost reach the window. Randolph, from behind, calls to themto enter. They cry back that they cannot, the window being closed. Atthis reply he seems to be overcome by surprise, by terror. Some onehears him murmur the words, "My God, what can have happened now?" Hishorror is increased when one of the lads bears to him a revoltingtrophy, which has been found just outside the window; it is the frontphalanges of three fingers of a human hand. Again he utters theagonised moan, "My God!" and then, mastering his agitation, makes forthe window; he finds that the catch of the sash has been roughlywrenched off, and that the sash can be opened by merely pushing it up:does so, and enters. The room is in darkness: on the floor under thewindow is found the insensible body of the woman Cibras. She is alive,but has fainted. Her right fingers are closed round the handle of alarge bowie-knife, which is covered with blood; parts of the left aremissing. All the jewelry has been stolen from the room. Lord Pharanxlies on the bed, stabbed through the bedclothes to the heart. Later ona bullet is also found imbedded in his brain. I should explain that atrenchant edge, running along the bottom of the sash, was the obviousmeans by which the fingers of Cibras had been cut off. This had beenplaced there a few days before by the workman I spoke of. Severalsecret springs had been placed on the inner side of the lowerhorizontal piece of the window-frame, by pressing any one of which thesash was lowered; so that no one, ignorant of the secret, could passout from within, without resting the hand on one of these springs, andso bringing down the armed sash suddenly on the underlying hand.

'There was, of course, a trial. The poor culprit, in mortal terror ofdeath, shrieked out a confession of the murder just as the jury hadreturned from their brief consultation, and before they had time topronounce their verdict of "guilty." But she denied shooting LordPharanx, and she denied stealing the jewels; and indeed no pistol andno jewels were found on her, or anywhere in the room. So that manypoints remain mysterious. What part did the burglars play in thetragedy? Were they in collusion with Cibras? Had the strange behaviourof at least one of the inmates of Orven Hall no hidden significance?The wildest guesses were made throughout the country; theoriespropounded. But no theory explained all the points. The ferment,however, has now subsided. To-morrow morning Maude Cibras ends her lifeon the gallows.'

Thus I ended my narrative.

Without a word Zaleski rose from the couch, and walked to the organ.Assisted from behind by Ham, who foreknew his master's every whim, heproceeded to render with infinite feeling an air from the Lakmé ofDelibes; long he sat, dreamily uttering the melody, his head sunken onhis breast. When at last he rose, his great expanse of brow was clear,and a smile all but solemn in its serenity was on his lips. He walkedup to an ivory escritoire, scribbled a few words on a sheet of paper,and handed it to the negro with the order to take my trap and drivewith the message in all haste to the nearest telegraph office.

'That message,' he said, resuming his place on the couch, 'is a lastword on the tragedy, and will, no doubt, produce some modification inthe final stage of its history. And now, Shiel, let us sit together andconfer on this matter. From the manner in which you have expressedyourself, it is evident that there are points which puzzle you—you donot get a clean coup d'oeil of the whole regiment of facts, and theircauses, and their consequences, as they occurred. Let us see if out ofthat confusion we cannot produce a coherence, a symmetry. A great wrongis done, and on the society in which it is done is imposed the task ofmaking it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and ofpunishing it. But what happens? The society fails to rise to theoccasion; on the whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque,does not see the crime in any human sense; is unable to punish it. Nowthis, you will admit, whenever it occurs, is a woful failure: woful Imean, not very in itself, but very in its significance: and there mustbe a precise cause for it. That cause is the lack of something notmerely, or specially, in the investigators of the wrong, but in theworld at large—shall we not boldly call it the lack of culture? Donot, however, misunderstand me: by the term I mean not so muchattainment in general, as mood in particular. Whether or when suchmood may become universal may be to you a matter of doubt. As for me, Ioften think that when the era of civilisation begins—as assuredly itshall some day begin—when the races of the world cease to becredulous, ovine mobs and become critical, human nations, then will bethe ushering in of the ten thousand years of a clairvoyant culture.But nowhere, and at no time during the very few hundreds of years thatman has occupied the earth, has there been one single sign of itspresence. In individuals, yes—in the Greek Plato, and I think in yourEnglish Milton and Bishop Berkeley—but in humanity, never; and hardlyin any individual outside those two nations. The reason, I fancy, isnot so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he isconcerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it being, of course,conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the firstrequisite to a régime of culture, must nick to itself a longer loopof time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquaciousperson—he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, ifthat be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence atnovelty—once assured me that he could never reflect without swellingon the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mightycivilisation of which he likened to the Augustan and Periclean. Acertain stony gaze of anthropological interest with which I regardedhis frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took ahurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, ingeneral, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that theDivinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand yearsof human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than itspart, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption thatit was therefore in any way great in the abstract that occasioned myprofound astonishment, and indeed contempt. Civilisation, if it meansanything, can only mean the art by which men live musicallytogether—to the lutings, as it were, of Panpipes, or say perhaps, totriumphant organ-bursts of martial, marching dithyrambs. Any formuladefining it as "the art of lying back and getting elaborately tickled,"should surely at this hour be too primitive—too Opic—to bringanything but a smile to the lips of grown white-skinned men; and thevery fact that such a definition can still find undoubting acceptancein all quarters may be an indication that the true [Greek: idéa]which this condition of being must finally assume is far indeed—far,perhaps, by ages and aeons—from becoming part of the generalconception. Nowhere since the beginning has the gross problem of livingever so much as approached solution, much less the delicate andintricate one of living together: à propos of which your bodycorporate not only still produces criminals (as the body-naturalfleas), but its very elementary organism cannot so much as catch areally athletic one as yet. Meanwhile you and I are handicapped.The individual travaileth in pain. In the struggle for quality, powers,air, he spends his strength, and yet hardly escapes asphyxiation. Hecan no more wriggle himself free of the psychic gravitations thatinvest him than the earth can shake herself loose of the sun, or he ofthe omnipotences that rivet him to the universe. If by chance oneshoots a downy hint of wings, an instant feeling of contrast puffs himwith self-consciousness: a tragedy at once: the unconscious being "thealone complete." To attain to anything, he must needs screw the head upinto the atmosphere of the future, while feet and hands drip darkichors of despair from the crucifying cross of the crude present—ahorrid strain! Far up a nightly instigation of stars he sees: but hemay not strike them with the head. If earth were a boat, and mine, Iknow well toward what wild azimuths I would compel her helm: butgravity, gravity—chiefest curse of Eden's sin!—is hostile. Whenindeed (as is ordained), the old mother swings herself into a sublimerorbit, we on her back will follow: till then we make to ourselvesIcarian "organa" in vain. I mean to say that it is the plane of stationwhich is at fault: move that upward, you move all. But meantime is itnot Goethe who assures us that "further reacheth no man, make he whatstretching he will"? For Man, you perceive, is not many, but One. It isabsurd to suppose that England can be free while Poland is enslaved;Paris is far from the beginnings of civilisation whilst Toobooloo andChicago are barbaric. Probably no ill-fated, microcephalous son of Adamever tumbled into a mistake quite so huge, so infantile, as did Dives,if he imagined himself rich while Lazarus sat pauper at the gate. Notmany, I say, but one. Even Ham and I here in our retreat are not alone;we are embarrassed by the uninvited spirit of the present; the adamantroot of the mountain on whose summit we stand is based ineradicably inthe low world. Yet, thank Heaven, Goethe was not quite right—as,indeed, he proved in his proper person. I tell you, Shiel, I knowwhether Mary did or did not murder Darnley; I know—as clearly, asprecisely, as a man can know—that Beatrice Cenci was not "guilty" ascertain recently-discovered documents "prove" her, but that the Shelleyversion of the affair, though a guess, is the correct one. It ispossible, by taking thought, to add one cubit—or say a hand, or adactyl—to your stature; you may develop powers slightly—veryslightly, but distinctly, both in kind and degree—in advance of thoseof the mass who live in or about the same cycle of time in which youlive. But it is only when the powers to which I refer are shared by themass—when what, for want of another term, I call the age of theCultured Mood has at length arrived—that their exercise will becomeeasy and familiar to the individual; and who shall say whatpresciences, prisms, séances, what introspective craft, Genieapocalypses, shall not then become possible to the few who standspiritually in the van of men.

'All this, you will understand, I say as some sort of excuse formyself, and for you, for any hesitation we may have shown in looseningthe very little puzzle you have placed before me—one which wecertainly must not regard as difficult of solution. Of course, lookingat all the facts, the first consideration that must inevitably rivetthe attention is that arising from the circumstance that ViscountRandolph has strong reasons to wish his father dead. They are avowedenemies; he is the fiancé of a princess whose husband he is probablytoo poor to become, though he will very likely be rich enough when hisfather dies; and so on. All that appears on the surface. On the otherhand, we—you and I—know the man: he is a person of gentle blood, asmoral, we suppose, as ordinary people, occupying a high station in theworld. It is impossible to imagine that such a person would commit anassassination, or even countenance one, for any or all of the reasonsthat present themselves. In our hearts, with or without clear proof, wecould hardly believe it of him. Earls' sons do not, in fact, go aboutmurdering people. Unless, then, we can so reason as to discover othermotives—strong, adequate, irresistible—and by "irresistible" I mean amotive which must be far stronger than even the love of lifeitself—we should, I think, in fairness dismiss him from our mind.

'And yet it must be admitted that his conduct is not free of blame. Hecontracts a sudden intimacy with the acknowledged culprit, whom he doesnot seem to have known before. He meets her by night, corresponds withher. Who and what is this woman? I think we could not be far wrong inguessing some very old flame of Lord Pharanx's of Théâtre desVariétés type, whom he has supported for years, and from whom, hearingsome story to her discredit, he threatens to withdraw his supplies.However that be, Randolph writes to Cibras—a violent woman, a woman oflawless passions—assuring her that in four or five days she will beexcluded from the will of his father; and in four or five days Cibrasplunges a knife into his father's bosom. It is a perfectly naturalsequence—though, of course, the intention to produce by his wordsthe actual effect produced might have been absent; indeed, the letterof Lord Pharanx himself, had it been received, would have tended toproduce that very effect; for it not only gives an excellentopportunity for converting into action those evil thoughts whichRandolph (thoughtlessly or guiltily) has instilled, but it furthertends to rouse her passions by cutting off from her all hopes offavour. If we presume, then, as is only natural, that there was no suchintention on the part of the earl, we may make the same presumptionin the case of the son. Cibras, however, never receives the earl'sletter: on the morning of the same day she goes away to Bath, with thedouble object, I suppose, of purchasing a weapon, and creating animpression that she has left the country. How then does she know theexact locale of Lord Pharanx's room? It is in an unusual part of themansion, she is unacquainted with any of the servants, a stranger tothe district. Can it be possible that Randolph had told her? And hereagain, even in that case, you must bear in mind that Lord Pharanx alsotold her in his note, and you must recognise the possibility of theabsence of evil intention on the part of the son. Indeed, I may gofurther and show you that in all but every instance in which hisactions are in themselves outré, suspicious, they are rendered, notless outré, but less suspicious, by the fact that Lord Pharanxhimself knew of them, shared in them. There was the cruel barbing ofthat balcony window; about it the crudest thinker would argue thus tohimself: "Randolph practically incites Maude Cibras to murder hisfather on the 5th, and on the 6th he has that window so altered inorder that, should she act on his suggestion, she will be caught onattempting to leave the room, while he himself, the actual culpritbeing discovered en flagrant délit, will escape every shadow ofsuspicion." But, on the other hand, we know that the alteration wasmade with Lord Pharanx's consent, most likely on his initiative—for heleaves his favoured room during a whole day for that very purpose. Sowith the letter to Cibras on the 8th—Randolph despatches it, but theearl writes it. So with the disposal of the jewels in the apartment onthe 9th. There had been some burglaries in the neighbourhood, and thesuspicion at once arises in the mind of the crude reasoner: CouldRandolph—finding now that Cibras has "left the country," that, infact, the tool he had expected to serve his ends has failed him—couldhe have thus brought those jewels there, and thus warned the servantsof their presence, in the hope that the intelligence might so getabroad and lead to a burglary, in the course of which his father mightlose his life? There are evidences, you know, tending to show that theburglary did actually at last take place, and the suspicion is, in viewof that, by no means unreasonable. And yet, militating against it, isour knowledge that it was Lord Pharanx who "chose" to gather thejewels round him; that it was in his presence that Randolph drew theattention of the servant to them. In the matter, at least, of thelittle political comedy the son seems to have acted alone; but yousurely cannot rid yourself of the impression that the radical speeches,the candidature, and the rest of it, formed all of them only a veryelaborate, and withal clumsy, set of preliminaries to the class.Anything, to make the perspective, the sequence of that seem natural.But in the class, at any rate, we have the tacit acquiescence, or eventhe cooperation of Lord Pharanx. You have described the conspiracy ofquiet which, for some reason or other, was imposed on the household; inthat reign of silence the bang of a door, the fall of a plate, becomesa domestic tornado. But have you ever heard an agricultural labourer inclogs or heavy boots ascend a stair? The noise is terrible. The trampof an army of them through the house and overhead, probably jabberinguncouthly together, would be insufferable. Yet Lord Pharanx seems tohave made no objection; the novel institution is set up in his ownmansion, in an unusual part of it, probably against his own principles;but we hear of no murmur from him. On the fatal day, too, the calm ofthe house is rudely broken by a considerable commotion in Randolph'sroom just overhead, caused by his preparation for "a journey toLondon." But the usual angry remonstrance is not forthcoming from themaster. And do you not see how all this more than acquiescence of LordPharanx in the conduct of his son deprives that conduct of half itssignificance, its intrinsic suspiciousness?

'A hasty reasoner then would inevitably jump to the conclusion thatRandolph was guilty of something—some evil intention—though ofprecisely what he would remain in doubt. But a more careful reasonerwould pause: he would reflect that as the father was implicated inthose acts, and as he was innocent of any such intention, so mightpossibly, even probably, be the son. This, I take it, has been the viewof the officials, whose logic is probably far in advance of theirimagination. But supposing we can adduce one act, undoubtedly actuatedby evil intention on the part of Randolph—one act in which his fathercertainly did not participate—what follows next? Why, that we revertat once to the view of the hasty reasoner, and conclude that all theother acts in the same relation were actuated by the same evil motive;and having reached that point, we shall be unable longer to resist theconclusion that those of them in which his father had a share mighthave sprung from a like motive in his mind also; nor should the mereobvious impossibility of such a condition of things have even the veryleast influence on us, as thinkers, in causing us to close our mindagainst its logical possibility. I therefore make the inference, andpass on.

'Let us then see if we can by searching find out any absolutely certaindeviation from right on the part of Randolph, in which we may be quitesure that his father was not an abettor. At eight on the night of themurder it is dark; there has been some snow, but the fall hasceased—how long before I know not, but so long that the intervalbecomes sufficiently appreciable to cause remark. Now the party goinground the house come on two tracks of feet meeting at an angle. Of onetrack we are merely told that it was made by the small foot of a woman,and of it we know no more; of the other we learn that the feet were bigand the boots clumsy, and, it is added, the marks were halfobliterated by the snow. Two things then are clear: that the personswho made them came from different directions, and probably made them atdifferent times. That, alone, by the way, may be a sufficient answer toyour question as to whether Cibras was in collusion with the"burglars." But how does Randolph behave with reference to thesetracks? Though he carries the lantern, he fails to perceive thefirst—the woman's—the discovery of which is made by a lad; but thesecond, half hidden in the snow, he notices readily enough, and at oncepoints it out. He explains that burglars have been on the war-path. Butexamine his horror of surprise when he hears that the window is closed;when he sees the woman's bleeding fingers. He cannot help exclaiming,"My God! what has happened now?" But why "now"? The word cannot referto his father's death, for that he knew, or guessed, beforehand, havingheard the shot. Is it not rather the exclamation of a man whose schemesdestiny has complicated? Besides, he should have expected to find thewindow closed: no one except himself, Lord Pharanx, and the workman,who was now dead, knew the secret of its construction; the burglarstherefore, having entered and robbed the room, one of them, intendingto go out, would press on the ledge, and the sash would fall on hishand with what result we know. The others would then either break theglass and so escape; or pass through the house; or remain prisoners.That immoderate surprise was therefore absurdly illogical, after seeingthe burglar-track in the snow. But how, above all, do you account forLord Pharanx's silence during and after the burglars' visit—if therewas a visit? He was, you must remember, alive all that time; they didnot kill him; certainly they did not shoot him, for the shot is heardafter the snow has ceased to fall,—that is, after, long after, theyhave left, since it was the falling snow that had half obliteratedtheir tracks; nor did they stab him, for to this Cibras confesses. Whythen, being alive, and not gagged, did he give no token of the presenceof his visitors? There were in fact no burglars at Orven Hall thatnight.'

'But the track!' I cried, 'the jewels found in the snow—theneckerchief!'

Zaleski smiled.

'Burglars,' he said, 'are plain, honest folk who have a just notion ofthe value of jewelry when they see it. They very properly regard it asmere foolish waste to drop precious stones about in the snow, and wouldrefuse to company with a man weak enough to let fall his neckerchief ona cold night. The whole business of the burglars was a particularlyinartistic trick, unworthy of its author. The mere facility with whichRandolph discovered the buried jewels by the aid of a dim lantern,should have served as a hint to an educated police not afraid of facingthe improbable. The jewels had been put there with the object ofthrowing suspicion on the imaginary burglars; with the same design thecatch of the window had been wrenched off, the sash purposely leftopen, the track made, the valuables taken from Lord Pharanx's room. Allthis was deliberately done by some one—would it be rash to say at onceby whom?

'Our suspicions having now lost their whole character of vagueness, andbegun to lead us in a perfectly definite direction, let us examine thestatements of Hester Dyett. Now, it is immediately comprehensible to methat the evidence of this woman at the public examinations was lookedat askance. There can be no doubt that she is a poor specimen ofhumanity, an undesirable servant, a peering, hysterical caricature of awoman. Her statements, if formally recorded, were not believed; or ifbelieved, were believed with only half the mind. No attempt was made todeduce anything from them. But for my part, if I wanted speciallyreliable evidence as to any matter of fact, it is precisely from such abeing that I would seek it. Let me draw you a picture of that class ofintellect. They have a greed for information, but the information, tosatisfy them, must relate to actualities; they have no sympathy withfiction; it is from their impatience of what seems to be that springstheir curiosity of what is. Clio is their muse, and she alone. Theirwhole lust is to gather knowledge through a hole, their whole facultyis to peep. But they are destitute of imagination, and do not lie; intheir passion for realities they would esteem it a sacrilege to distorthistory. They make straight for the substantial, the indubitable. Forthis reason the Peniculi and Ergasili of Plautus seem to me far moretrue to nature than the character of Paul Pry in Jerrold's comedy. Inone instance, indeed, the evidence of Hester Dyett appears, on thesurface of it, to be quite false. She declares that she sees a roundwhite object moving upward in the room. But the night being gloomy, hertaper having gone out, she must have been standing in a dense darkness.How then could she see this object? Her evidence, it was argued, mustbe designedly false, or else (as she was in an ecstatic condition) theresult of an excited fancy. But I have stated that such persons,nervous, neurotic even as they may be, are not fanciful. I thereforeaccept her evidence as true. And now, mark the consequence of thatacceptance. I am driven to admit that there must, from some source,have been light in the room—a light faint enough, and diffused enough,to escape the notice of Hester herself. This being so, it must haveproceeded from around, from below, or from above. There are no otheralternatives. Around these was nothing but the darkness of the night;the room beneath, we know, was also in darkness. The light then camefrom the room above—from the mechanic class-room. But there is onlyone possible means by which the light from an upper can diffuse a lowerroom. It must be by a hole in the intermediate boards. We are thusdriven to the discovery of an aperture of some sort in the flooring ofthat upper chamber. Given this, the mystery of the round white object"driven" upward disappears. We at once ask, why not drawn upwardthrough the newly-discovered aperture by a string too small to bevisible in the gloom? Assuredly it was drawn upward. And now havingestablished a hole in the ceiling of the room in which Hester stands,is it unreasonable—even without further evidence—to suspect anotherin the flooring? But we actually have this further evidence. As sherushes to the door she falls, faints, and fractures the lower part ofher leg. Had she fallen over some object, as you supposed, the resultmight have been a fracture also, but in a different part of the body;being where it was, it could only have been caused by placing the footinadvertently in a hole while the rest of the body was in rapid motion.But this gives us an approximate idea of the size of the lower hole;it was at least big enough to admit the foot and lower leg, big enoughtherefore to admit that "good-sized ball of cotton" of which the womanspeaks: and from the lower we are able to conjecture the size of theupper. But how comes it that these holes are nowhere mentioned in theevidence? It can only be because no one ever saw them. Yet the roomsmust have been examined by the police, who, if they existed, must haveseen them. They therefore did not exist: that is to say, the pieceswhich had been removed from the floorings had by that time been neatlyreplaced, and, in the case of the lower one, covered by the carpet, theremoval of which had caused so much commotion in Randolph's room on thefatal day. Hester Dyett would have been able to notice and bring atleast one of the apertures forward in evidence, but she fainted beforeshe had time to find out the cause of her fall, and an hour later itwas, you remember, Randolph himself who bore her from the room. Butshould not the aperture in the top floor have been observed by theclass? Undoubtedly, if its position was in the open space in the middleof the room. But it was not observed, and therefore its position wasnot there, but in the only other place left—behind the apparatus usedin demonstration. That then was one useful object which theapparatus—and with it the elaborate hypocrisy of class, and speeches,and candidature—served: it was made to act as a curtain, a screen. Buthad it no other purpose? That question we may answer when we know itsname and its nature. And it is not beyond our powers to conjecture thiswith something like certainty. For the only "machines" possible to usein illustration of simple mechanics are the screw, the wedge, thescale, the lever, the wheel-and-axle, and Atwood's machine. Themathematical principles which any of these exemplify would, of course,be incomprehensible to such a class, but the first five most of all,and as there would naturally be some slight pretence of trying to makethe learners understand, I therefore select the last; and thisselection is justified when we remember that on the shot being heard,Randolph leans for support on the "machine," and stands in its shadow;but any of the others would be too small to throw any appreciableshadow, except one—the wheel, and-axle—and that one would hardlyafford support to a tall man in the erect position. The Atwood'smachine is therefore forced on us; as to its construction, it is, asyou are aware, composed of two upright posts, with a cross-bar fittedwith pulleys and strings, and is intended to show the motion of bodiesacting under a constant force—the force of gravity, to wit. But nowconsider all the really glorious uses to which those same pulleys maybe turned in lowering and lifting unobserved that "ball of cotton"through the two apertures, while the other strings with the weightsattached are dangling before the dull eyes of the peasants. I need onlypoint out that when the whole company trooped out of the room, Randolphwas the last to leave it, and it is not now difficult to conjecturewhy.

'Of what, then, have we convicted Randolph? For one thing, we haveshown that by marks of feet in the snow preparation was made beforehandfor obscuring the cause of the earl's death. That death must thereforehave been at least expected, foreknown. Thus we convict him ofexpecting it. And then, by an independent line of deduction, we canalso discover the means by which he expected it to occur. It is clearthat he did not expect it to occur when it did by the hand of MaudeCibras—for this is proved by his knowledge that she had left theneighbourhood, by his evidently genuine astonishment at the sight ofthe closed window, and, above all, by his truly morbid desire toestablish a substantial, an irrefutable alibi for himself by going toPlymouth on the day when there was every reason to suppose she would dothe deed—that is, on the 8th, the day of the earl's invitation. On thefatal night, indeed, the same morbid eagerness to build up a clearalibi is observable, for he surrounds himself with a cloud ofwitnesses in the upper chamber. But that, you will admit, is not nearlyso perfect a one as a journey, say, to Plymouth would have been. Whythen, expecting the death, did he not take some such journey? Obviouslybecause on this occasion his personal presence was necessary. When,in conjunction with this, we recall the fact that during theintrigues with Cibras the lectures were discontinued, and again resumedimmediately on her unlooked-for departure, we arrive at the conclusionthat the means by which Lord Pharanx's death was expected to occur wasthe personal presence of Randolph in conjunction with the politicalspeeches, the candidature, the class, the apparatus.

'But though he stands condemned of foreknowing, and being in some sortconnected with, his father's death, I can nowhere find any indicationof his having personally accomplished it, or even of his ever havinghad any such intention. The evidence is evidence of complicity—andnothing more. And yet—and yet—even of this we began by acquittinghim unless we could discover, as I said, some strong, adequate,altogether irresistible motive for such complicity. Failing this, weought to admit that at some point our argument has played us false, andled us into conclusions wholly at variance with our certain knowledgeof the principles underlying human conduct in general. Let us thereforeseek for such a motive—something deeper than personal enmity, strongerthan personal ambition, than the love of life itself! And now, tellme, at the time of the occurrence of this mystery, was the whole pasthistory of the House of Orven fully investigated?'

'Not to my knowledge,' I answered; 'in the papers there were, ofcourse, sketches of the earl's career, but that I think was all.'

'Yet it cannot be that their past was unknown, but only that it wasignored. Long, I tell you, long and often, have I pondered on thathistory, and sought to trace with what ghastly secret has been pregnantthe destiny, gloomful as Erebus and the murk of black-peplosed Nux,which for centuries has hung its pall over the men of this ill-fatedhouse. Now at last I know. Dark, dark, and red with gore and horror isthat history; down the silent corridors of the ages have theseblood-soaked sons of Atreus fled shrieking before the pursuing talonsof the dread Eumenides. The first earl received his patent in 1535 fromthe eighth Henry. Two years later, though noted as a rabid "king'sman," he joined the Pilgrimage of Grace against his master, and wassoon after executed, with Darcy and some other lords. His age was thenfifty. His son, meantime, had served in the king's army under Norfolk.It is remarkable, by the way, that females have all along been rare inthe family, and that in no instance has there been more than one son.The second earl, under the sixth Edward, suddenly threw up a civilpost, hastened to the army, and fell at the age of forty at the battleof Pinkie in 1547. He was accompanied by his son. The third in 1557,under Mary, renounced the Catholic faith, to which, both before andsince, the family have passionately clung, and suffered (at the age offorty) the last penalty. The fourth earl died naturally, but suddenly,in his bed at the age of fifty during the winter of 1566. At midnightof the same day he was laid in the grave by his son. This son waslater on, in 1591, seen by his son to fall from a lofty balcony atOrven Hall, while walking in his sleep at high noonday. Then for sometime nothing happens; but the eighth earl dies mysteriously in 1651 atthe age of forty-five. A fire occurring in his room, he leapt from awindow to escape the flames. Some of his limbs were thereby fractured,but he was in a fair way to recovery when there was a sudden relapse,soon ending in death. He was found to have been poisoned by radixaconiti indica, a rare Arabian poison not known in Europe at that timeexcept to savants, and first mentioned by Acosta some months before.An attendant was accused and tried, but acquitted. The then son of theHouse was a Fellow of the newly-founded Royal Society, and author of anow-forgotten work on Toxicology, which, however, I have read. Nosuspicion, of course, fell on him.'

As Zaleski proceeded with this retrospect, I could not but ask myselfwith stirrings of the most genuine wonder, whether he could possessthis intimate knowledge of all the great families of Europe! It wasas if he had spent a part of his life in making special study of thehistory of the Orvens.

'In the same manner,' he went on, 'I could detail the annals of thefamily from that time to the present. But all through they have beenmarked by the same latent tragic elements; and I have said enough toshow you that in each of the tragedies there was invariably somethinglarge, leering, something of which the mind demands explanation, butseeks in vain to find it. Now we need no longer seek. Destiny did notdesign that the last Lord of Orven should any more hide from the worldthe guilty secret of his race. It was the will of the gods—and hebetrayed himself. "Return," he writes, "the beginning of the end iscome." What end?

The end—perfectly well known to Randolph, needing no explanation forhim. The old, old end, which in the ancient dim time led the firstlord, loyal still at heart, to forsake his king; and another, stilldevout, to renounce his cherished faith, and yet another to set fire tothe home of his ancestors. You have called the two last scions of thefamily "a proud and selfish pair of beings"; proud they were, andselfish too, but you are in error if you think their selfishness apersonal one: on the contrary, they were singularly oblivious of selfin the ordinary sense of the word. Theirs was the pride and theselfishness of race. What consideration, think you, other than theweal of his house, could induce Lord Randolph to take on himself theshame—for as such he certainly regards it—of a conversion toradicalism? He would, I am convinced, have died rather than make thispretence for merely personal ends. But he does it—and the reason? Itis because he has received that awful summons from home; because "theend" is daily coming nearer, and it must not find him unprepared tomeet it; it is because Lord Pharanx's senses are becoming too acute;because the clatter of the servants' knives at the other end of thehouse inflames him to madness; because his excited palate can no longerendure any food but the subtlest delicacies; because Hester Dyett isable from the posture in which he sits to conjecture that he isintoxicated; because, in fact, he is on the brink of the dreadfulmalady which physicians call "General Paralysis of the Insane." Youremember I took from your hands the newspaper containing the earl'sletter to Cibras, in order to read it with my own eyes. I had myreasons, and I was justified. That letter contains three mistakes inspelling: "here" is printed "hear," "pass" appears as "pas," and "room"as "rume." Printers' errors, you say? But not so—one might be, two inthat short paragraph could hardly be, three would be impossible. Searchthe whole paper through, and I think you will not find another. Let usreverence the theory of probabilities: the errors were the writer's,not the printer's. General Paralysis of the Insane is known to havethis effect on the writing. It attacks its victims about the period ofmiddle age—the age at which the deaths of all the Orvens who diedmysteriously occurred. Finding then that the dire heritage of hisrace—the heritage of madness—is falling or fallen on him, he summonshis son from India. On himself he passes sentence of death: it is thetradition of the family, the secret vow of self-destruction handed downthrough ages from father to son. But he must have aid: in these days itis difficult for a man to commit the suicidal act withoutdetection—and if madness is a disgrace to the race, equally so issuicide. Besides, the family is to be enriched by the insurances on hislife, and is thereby to be allied with royal blood; but the money willbe lost if the suicide be detected. Randolph therefore returns andblossoms into a popular candidate.

'For a time he is led to abandon his original plans by the appearanceof Maude Cibras; he hopes that she may be made to destroy the earl;but when she fails him, he recurs to it—recurs to it all suddenly, forLord Pharanx's condition is rapidly becoming critical, patent to alleyes, could any eye see him—so much so that on the last day none ofthe servants are allowed to enter his room. We must therefore regardCibras as a mere addendum to, an extraneous element in, the tragedy,not as an integral part of it. She did not shoot the noble lord, forshe had no pistol; nor did Randolph, for he was at a distance from thebed of death, surrounded by witnesses; nor did the imaginary burglars.The earl therefore shot himself; and it was the small globular silverpistol, such as this'—here Zaleski drew a little embossed Venetianweapon from a drawer near him—'that appeared in the gloom to theexcited Hester as a "ball of cotton," while it was being drawn upwardby the Atwood's machine. But if the earl shot himself he could not havedone so after being stabbed to the heart. Maude Cibras, therefore,stabbed a dead man. She would, of course, have ample time for stealinginto the room and doing so after the shot was fired, and before theparty reached the balcony window, on account of the delay on the stairsin procuring a second light; in going to the earl's door; in examiningthe tracks, and so on. But having stabbed a dead man, she is not guiltyof murder. The message I just now sent by Ham was one addressed to theHome Secretary, telling him on no account to let Cibras die to-morrow.He well knows my name, and will hardly be silly enough to suppose mecapable of using words without meaning. It will be perfectly easy toprove my conclusions, for the pieces removed from, and replaced in, thefloorings can still be detected, if looked for; the pistol is still, nodoubt, in Randolph's room, and its bore can be compared with the bulletfound in Lord Pharanx's brain; above all, the jewels stolen by the"burglars" are still safe in some cabinet of the new earl, and mayreadily be discovered I therefore expect that the dénoûment will nowtake a somewhat different turn.'

That the dénoûment did take a different turn, and pretty strictly inaccordance with Zaleski's forecast, is now matter of history, and theincidents, therefore, need no further comment from me in this place.

THE STONE OF THE EDMUNDSBURY MONKS

'Russia,' said Prince Zaleski to me one day, when I happened to be on avisit to him in his darksome sanctuary—'Russia may be regarded as landsurrounded by ocean; that is to say, she is an island. In the same way,it is sheer gross irrelevancy to speak of Britain as an island,unless indeed the word be understood as a mere modus loquendi arisingout of a rather poor geographical pleasantry. Britain, in reality, is asmall continent. Near her—a little to the south-east—is situated thelarge island of Europe. Thus, the enlightened French traveller passingto these shores should commune within himself: "I now cross to theMainland"; and retracing his steps: "I now return to the fragment rentby wrack and earthshock from the Mother-country." And this I say not inthe way of paradox, but as the expression of a sober truth. I have inmy mind merely the relative depth and extent—the non-insularity, infact—of the impressions made by the several nations on the world. Butthis island of Europe has herself an island of her own: the name of it,Russia. She, of all lands, is the terra incognita, the unknown land;till quite lately she was more—she was the undiscovered, theunsuspected land. She has a literature, you know, and a history, anda language, and a purpose—but of all this the world has hardly so muchas heard. Indeed, she, and not any Antarctic Sea whatever, is the realUltima Thule of modern times, the true Island of Mystery.'

I reproduce these remarks of Zaleski here, not so much on account ofthe splendid tribute to my country contained in them, as because itever seemed to me—and especially in connection with the incident I amabout to recall—that in this respect at least he was a genuine son ofRussia; if she is the Land, so truly was he the Man, of Mystery. I whoknew him best alone knew that it was impossible to know him. He was abeing little of the present: with one arm he embraced the whole past;the fingers of the other heaved on the vibrant pulse of the future. Heseemed to me—I say it deliberately and with forethought—to possessthe unparalleled power not merely of disentangling in retrospect, butof unravelling in prospect, and I have known him to relate comingevents with unimaginable minuteness of precision. He was nothing if notsuperlative: his diatribes, now culminating in a very extravaganza ofhyperbole—now sailing with loose wing through the downy, witched,Dutch cloud-heaps of some quaintest tramontane Nephelococcugia ofthought—now laying down law of the Medes for the actual world ofto-day—had oft-times the strange effect of bringing back to my mindthe very singular old-epic epithet, [Greek: aenemoen]—airy—asapplied to human thought. The mere grip of his memory was not simplyextraordinary, it had in it a token, a hint, of the strange, thepythic—nay, the sibylline. And as his reflecting intellect, moreover,had all the lightness of foot of a chamois kid, unless you couldcontrive to follow each dazzlingly swift successive step, by the sum ofwhich he attained his Alp-heights, he inevitably left on you theastounding, the confounding impression of mental omnipresence.

I had brought with me a certain document, a massive book bound in ironand leather, the diary of one Sir Jocelin Saul. This I had abstractedfrom a gentleman of my acquaintance, the head of a firm of inquiryagents in London, into whose hand, only the day before, it had come. Adistant neighbour of Sir Jocelin, hearing by chance of his extremity,had invoked the assistance of this firm; but the aged baronet, being ina state of the utmost feebleness, terror, and indeed hystericalincoherence, had been able to utter no word in explanation of hiscondition or wishes, and, in silent abandonment, had merely handed thebook to the agent.

A day or two after I had reached the desolate old mansion which theprince occupied, knowing that he might sometimes be induced to take anabsorbing interest in questions that had proved themselves tooprofound, or too intricate, for ordinary solution, I asked him if hewas willing to hear the details read out from the diary, and on hisassenting, I proceeded to do so.

The brief narrative had reference to a very large and very valuableoval gem enclosed in the substance of a golden chalice, which chalice,in the monastery of St. Edmundsbury, had once lain centuries longwithin the Loculus, or inmost coffin, wherein reposed the body of St.Edmund. By pressing a hidden pivot, the cup (which was composed of twoequal parts, connected by minute hinges) sprang open, and in a hollowspace at the bottom was disclosed the gem. Sir Jocelin Saul, I may say,was lineally connected with—though, of course, not descendantfrom—that same Jocelin of Brakelonda, a brother of the Edmundsburyconvent, who wrote the now so celebrated Jocelini Chronica: and thechalice had fallen into the possession of the family, seemingly at sometime prior to the suppression of the monastery about 1537. On it wasinscribed in old English characters of unknown date the words:

The stone itself was an intaglio, and had engraved on its surface thefigure of a mythological animal, together with some nearly obliteratedletters, of which the only ones remaining legible were those formingthe word 'Has.' As a sure precaution against the loss of the gem,another cup had been made and engraved in an exactly similar manner,inside of which, to complete the delusion, another stone of the samesize and cut, but of comparatively valueless material, had been placed.

Sir Jocelin Saul, a man of intense nervosity, lived his life alone in aremote old manor-house in Suffolk, his only companion being a person ofEastern origin, named Ul-Jabal. The baronet had consumed his vitalityin the life-long attempt to sound the too fervid Maelstrom of Orientalresearch, and his mind had perhaps caught from his studies a tinge oftheir morbidness, their esotericism, their insanity. He had for someyears past been engaged in the task of writing a stupendous work onPre-Zoroastrian Theogonies, in which, it is to be supposed, Ul-Jabalacted somewhat in the capacity of secretary. But I will give verbatimthe extracts from his diary:

'June 11.—This is my birthday. Seventy years ago exactly I slid fromthe belly of the great Dark into this Light and Life. My God! My God!it is briefer than the rage of an hour, fleeter than a mid-day trance.Ul-Jabal greeted me warmly—seemed to have been looking forward toit—and pointed out that seventy is of the fateful numbers, its onlyfactors being seven, five, and two: the last denoting the duality ofBirth and Death; five, Isolation; seven, Infinity. I informed him thatthis was also my father's birthday; and his father's; and repeatedthe oft-told tale of how the latter, just seventy years ago to-day,walking at twilight by the churchyard-wall, saw the figure of himselfsitting on a grave-stone, and died five weeks later riving with thepangs of hell. Whereat the sceptic showed his two huge rows of teeth.

'What is his peculiar interest in the Edmundsbury chalice? On eachsuccessive birthday when the cup has been produced, he has asked me toshow him the stone. Without any well-defined reason I have alwaysdeclined, but to-day I yielded. He gazed long into its sky-blue depth,and then asked if I had no idea what the inscription "Has" meant. Iinformed him that it was one of the lost secrets of the world.

'June l5.—Some new element has entered into our existence here.Something threatens me. I hear the echo of a menace against my sanityand my life. It is as if the garment which enwraps me has grown toohot, too heavy for me. A notable drowsiness has settled on my brain—adrowsiness in which thought, though slow, is a thousandfold morefiery-vivid than ever. Oh, fair goddess of Reason, desert not me, thychosen child!

'June 18.—Ul-Jabal?—that man is the very Devil incarnate!

'June 19.—So much for my bounty, all my munificence, to thispoisonous worm. I picked him up on the heights of the Mountain ofLebanon, a cultured savage among cultured savages, and brought him hereto be a prince of thought by my side. What though his plunderedwealth—the debt I owe him—has saved me from a sort of ruin? Have notI instructed him in the sweet secret of Reason?

'I lay back on my bed in the lonely morning watches, my soul heavy aswith the distilled essence of opiates, and in vivid vision knew that hehad entered my apartment. In the twilight gloom his glittering rows ofshark's teeth seemed impacted on my eyeball—I saw them, and nothingelse. I was not aware when he vanished from the room. But at daybreak Icrawled on hands and knees to the cabinet containing the chalice. Theviperous murderer! He has stolen my gem, well knowing that with it hehas stolen my life. The stone is gone—gone, my precious gem. Aweakness overtook me, and I lay for many dreamless hours naked on themarble floor.

'Does the fool think to hide ought from my eyes? Can he imagine that Ishall not recover my precious gem, my stone of Saul?

'June 20.—Ah, Ul-Jabal—my brave, my noble Son of the Prophet ofGod! He has replaced the stone! He would not slay an aged man. Theyellow ray of his eye, it is but the gleam of the great thinker,not—not—the gleam of the assassin. Again, as I lay insemi-somnolence, I saw him enter my room, this time more distinctly. Hewent up to the cabinet. Shaking the chalice in the dawning, some hoursafter he had left, I heard with delight the rattle of the stone. Imight have known he would replace it; I should not have doubted hisclemency to a poor man like me. But the strange being!—he has takenthe other stone from the other cup—a thing of little value to anyman! Is Ul-Jabal mad or I?

'June 21.—Merciful Lord in Heaven! he has not replaced it—notit—but another instead of it. To-day I actually opened the chalice,and saw. He has put a stone there, the same in size, in cut, inengraving, but different in colour, in quality, in value—a stone Ihave never seen before. How has he obtained it—whence? I must bracemyself to probe, to watch; I must turn myself into an eye to searchthis devil's-bosom. My life, this subtle, cunning Reason of mine, hangsin the balance.

'June 22.—Just now he offered me a cup of wine. I almost dashed itto the ground before him. But he looked steadfastly into my eye. Iflinched: and drank—drank.

'Years ago, when, as I remember, we were at Balbec, I saw him one daymake an almost tasteless preparation out of pure black nicotine, whichin mere wanton lust he afterwards gave to some of the dwellers by theCaspian to drink. But the fiend would surely never dream of giving tome that browse of hell—to me an aged man, and a thinker, a seer.

'June 23.—The mysterious, the unfathomable Ul-Jabal! Once again, asI lay in heavy trance at midnight, has he invaded, calm and noiselessas a spirit, the sanctity of my chamber. Serene on the swaying air,which, radiant with soft beams of vermil and violet light, rocked meinto variant visions of heaven, I reclined and regarded him unmoved.The man has replaced the valueless stone in the modern-made chalice,and has now stolen the false stone from the other, which he himselfput there! In patience will I possess this my soul, and watch whatshall betide. My eyes shall know no slumber!

'June 24.—No more—no more shall I drink wine from the hand ofUl-Jabal. My knees totter beneath the weight of my lean body. Daggersof lambent fever race through my brain incessant. Some fibrillarytwitchings at the right angle of the mouth have also arrested myattention.

'June 25.—He has dared at open mid-day to enter my room. I watchedhim from an angle of the stairs pass along the corridor and open mydoor. But for the terrifying, death-boding thump, thump of my heart, Ishould have faced the traitor then, and told him that I knew all histreachery. Did I say that I had strange fibrillary twitchings at theright angle of my mouth, and a brain on fire? I have ceased to write mybook—the more the pity for the world, not for me.

'June 26.—Marvellous to tell, the traitor, Ul-Jabal, has now placedanother stone in the Edmundsbury chalice—also identical in nearlyevery respect with the original gem. This, then, was the object of hisentry into my room yesterday. So that he has first stolen the realstone and replaced it by another; then he has stolen this other andreplaced it by yet another; he has beside stolen the valueless stonefrom the modern chalice, and then replaced it. Surely a man gone rabid,a man gone dancing, foaming, raving mad!

'June 28.—I have now set myself to the task of recovering my jewel.It is here, and I shall find it. Life against life—and which is thebest life, mine or this accursed Ishmaelite's? If need be, I will domurder—I, with this withered hand—so that I get back the heritagewhich is mine.

'To-day, when I thought he was wandering in the park, I stole into hisroom, locking the door on the inside. I trembled exceedingly, knowingthat his eyes are in every place. I ransacked the chamber, dived amonghis clothes, but found no stone. One singular thing in a drawer I saw:a long, white beard, and a wig of long and snow-white hair. As I passedout of the chamber, lo, he stood face to face with me at the door inthe passage. My heart gave one bound, and then seemed wholly to ceaseits travail. Oh, I must be sick unto death, weaker than a bruised reed!When I woke from my swoon he was supporting me in his arms. "Now," hesaid, grinning down at me, "now you have at last delivered all into myhands." He left me, and I saw him go into his room and lock the doorupon himself. What is it I have delivered into the madman's hands?

'July 1.—Life against life—and his, the young, the stalwart, ratherthan mine, the mouldering, the sere. I love life. Not yet am I readyto weigh anchor, and reeve halliard, and turn my prow over the waterypaths of the wine-brown Deeps. Oh no. Not yet. Let him die. Many andmany are the days in which I shall yet see the light, walk, think. I amaverse to end the number of my years: there is even a feeling in me attimes that this worn body shall never, never taste of death. Thechalice predicts indeed that I and my house shall end when the stone islost—a mere fiction at first, an idler's dream then, butnow—now—that the prophecy has stood so long a part of the reality ofthings, and a fact among facts—no longer fiction, but Adamant, sternas the very word of God. Do I not feel hourly since it has gone how thesurges of life ebb, ebb ever lower in my heart? Nay, nay, but there ishope. I have here beside me an Arab blade of subtle Damascene steel,insinuous to pierce and to hew, with which in a street of Bethlehem Isaw a Syrian's head cleft open—a gallant stroke! The edges of this Ihave made bright and white for a nuptial of blood.

'July 2.—I spent the whole of the last night in searching every nookand crack of the house, using a powerful magnifying lens. At times Ithought Ul-Jabal was watching me, and would pounce out and murder me.Convulsive tremors shook my frame like earthquake. Ah me, I fear I amall too frail for this work. Yet dear is the love of life.

'July 7.—The last days I have passed in carefully searching thegrounds, with the lens as before. Ul-Jabal constantly found pretextsfor following me, and I am confident that every step I took was knownto him. No sign anywhere of the grass having been disturbed. Yet mylands are wide, and I cannot be sure. The burden of this mighty task isgreater than I can bear. I am weaker than a bruised reed. Shall I notslay my enemy, and make an end?

'July 8.—Ul-Jabal has been in my chamber again! I watched himthrough a crack in the panelling. His form was hidden by the bed, but Icould see his hand reflected in the great mirror opposite the door.First, I cannot guess why, he moved to a point in front of the mirrorthe chair in which I sometimes sit. He then went to the box in whichlie my few garments—and opened it. Ah, I have the stone—safe—safe!He fears my cunning, ancient eyes, and has hidden it in the one placewhere I would be least likely to seek it—in my own trunk! And yet Idread, most intensely I dread, to look.

'July 9.—The stone, alas, is not there! At the last moment he musthave changed his purpose. Could his wondrous sensitiveness of intuitionhave made him feel that my eyes were looking in on him?

'July 10.—In the dead of night I knew that a stealthy foot had gonepast my door. I rose and threw a mantle round me; I put on my head mycap of fur; I took the tempered blade in my hands; then crept out intothe dark, and followed. Ul-Jabal carried a small lantern which revealedhim to me. My feet were bare, but he wore felted slippers, which to myunfailing ear were not utterly noiseless. He descended the stairs tothe bottom of the house, while I crouched behind him in the deepestgloom of the corners and walls. At the bottom he walked into thepantry: there stopped, and turned the lantern full in the direction ofthe spot where I stood; but so agilely did I slide behind a pillar,that he could not have seen me. In the pantry he lifted the trap-door,and descended still further into the vaults beneath the house. Ah, thevaults,—the long, the tortuous, the darksome vaults,—how had Iforgotten them? Still I followed, rent by seismic shocks of terror. Ihad not forgotten the weapon: could I creep near enough, I felt that Imight plunge it into the marrow of his back. He opened the iron door ofthe first vault and passed in. If I could lock him in?—but he held thekey. On and on he wound his way, holding the lantern near the ground,his head bent down. The thought came to me then, that, had I but thecourage, one swift sweep, and all were over. I crept closer, closer.Suddenly he turned round, and made a quick step in my direction. I sawhis eyes, the murderous grin of his jaw. I know not if he sawme—thought forsook me. The weapon fell with clatter and clangor frommy grasp, and in panic fright I fled with extended arms and theheadlong swiftness of a stripling, through the black labyrinths of thecaverns, through the vacant corridors of the house, till I reached mychamber, the door of which I had time to fasten on myself before Idropped, gasping, panting for very life, on the floor.

'July 11.—I had not the courage to see Ul-Jabal to-day. I haveremained locked in my chamber all the time without food or water. Mytongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth.

'July 12.—I took heart and crept downstairs. I met him in the study.He smiled on me, and I on him, as if nothing had happened between us.Oh, our old friendship, how it has turned into bitterest hate! I hadtaken the false stone from the Edmundsbury chalice and put it in thepocket of my brown gown, with the bold intention of showing it to him,and asking him if he knew aught of it. But when I faced him, my couragefailed again. We drank together and ate together as in the old days oflove.

'July l3.—I cannot think that I have not again imbibed somesoporiferous drug. A great heaviness of sleep weighed on my brain tilllate in the day. When I woke my thoughts were in wild distraction, anda most peculiar condition of my skin held me fixed before the mirror.It is dry as parchment, and brown as the leaves of autumn.

'July l4.—Ul-Jabal is gone! And I am left a lonely, a desolate oldman! He said, though I swore it was false, that I had grown to mistrusthim! that I was hiding something from him! that he could live with meno more! No more, he said, should I see his face! The debt I owe him hewould forgive. He has taken one small parcel with him,—and is gone!

'July l5.—Gone! gone! In mazeful dream I wander with uncovered headfar and wide over my domain, seeking I know not what. The stone he haswith him—the precious stone of Saul. I feel the life-surge ebbing,ebbing in my heart.'

Here the manuscript abruptly ended.

Prince Zaleski had listened as I read aloud, lying back on his Moorishcouch and breathing slowly from his lips a heavy reddish vapour, whichhe imbibed from a very small, carved, bismuth pipette. His face, as faras I could see in the green-grey crepuscular atmosphere of theapartment, was expressionless. But when I had finished he turned fullyround on me, and said:

'You perceive, I hope, the sinister meaning of all this?'

'Has it a meaning?'

Zaleski smiled.

'Can you doubt it? in the shape of a cloud, the pitch of a thrush'snote, the nuance of a sea-shell you would find, had you only insightenough, inductive and deductive cunning enough, not only a meaning,but, I am convinced, a quite endless significance. Undoubtedly, in ahuman document of this kind, there is a meaning; and I may say at oncethat this meaning is entirely transparent to me. Pity only that you didnot read the diary to me before.'

'Why?'

'Because we might, between us, have prevented a crime, and saved alife. The last entry in the diary was made on the 15th of July. Whatday is this?'

'This is the 20th.'

'Then I would wager a thousand to one that we are too late. There isstill, however, the one chance left. The time is now seven o'clock:seven of the evening, I think, not of the morning; the houses ofbusiness in London are therefore closed. But why not send my man, Ham,with a letter by train to the private address of the person from whomyou obtained the diary, telling him to hasten immediately to SirJocelin Saul, and on no consideration to leave his side for a moment?Ham would reach this person before midnight, and understanding that thematter was one of life and death, he would assuredly do your bidding.'

As I was writing the note suggested by Zaleski, I turned and asked him:

'From whom shall I say that the danger is to be expected—from theIndian?'

'From Ul-Jabal, yes; but by no means Indian—Persian.'

Profoundly impressed by this knowledge of detail derived from sourceswhich had brought me no intelligence, I handed the note to the negro,telling him how to proceed, and instructing him before starting fromthe station to search all the procurable papers of the last few days,and to return in case he found in any of them a notice of the death ofSir Jocelin Saul. Then I resumed my seat by the side of Zaleski.

'As I have told you,' he said, 'I am fully convinced that our messengerhas gone on a bootless errand. I believe you will find that what hasreally occurred is this: either yesterday, or the day before, SirJocelin was found by his servant—I imagine he had a servant, though nomention is made of any—lying on the marble floor of his chamber, dead.Near him, probably by his side, will be found a gem—an oval stone,white in colour—the same in fact which Ul-Jabal last placed in theEdmundsbury chalice. There will be no marks of violence—no trace ofpoison—the death will be found to be a perfectly natural one. Yet, inthis case, a particularly wicked murder has been committed. There are,I assure you, to my positive knowledge forty-three—and in one islandin the South Seas, forty-four—different methods of doing murder, anyone of which would be entirely beyond the scope of the introspectiveagencies at the ordinary disposal of society.

'But let us bend our minds to the details of this matter. Let us askfirst, who is this Ul-Jabal? I have said that he is a Persian, and ofthis there is abundant evidence in the narrative other than his merename. Fragmentary as the document is, and not intended by the writer toafford the information, there is yet evidence of the religion of thisman, of the particular sect of that religion to which he belonged, ofhis peculiar shade of colour, of the object of his stay at themanor-house of Saul, of the special tribe amongst whom he formerlylived. "What," he asks, when his greedy eyes first light on thelong-desired gem, "what is the meaning of the inscription 'Has'"—themeaning which he so well knew. "One of the lost secrets of theworld," replies the baronet. But I can hardly understand a learnedOrientalist speaking in that way about what appears to me a very patentcircumstance: it is clear that he never earnestly applied himself tothe solution of the riddle, or else—what is more likely, in spite ofhis rather high-flown estimate of his own "Reason"—that his mind, andthe mind of his ancestors, never was able to go farther back in timethan the Edmundsbury Monks. But they did not make the stone, nor didthey dig it from the depths of the earth in Suffolk—they got it fromsome one, and it is not difficult to say with certainty from whom. Thestone, then, might have been engraved by that someone, or by thesomeone from whom he received it, and so on back into the dimnessesof time. And consider the character of the engraving—it consists of amythological animal, and some words, of which the letters "Has" onlyare distinguishable. But the animal, at least, is pure Persian. ThePersians, you know, were not only quite worthy competitors with theHebrews, the Egyptians, and later on the Greeks, for excellence in theglyptic art, but this fact is remarkable, that in much the same waythat the figure of the scarabaeus on an intaglio or cameo is a prettyinfallible indication of an Egyptian hand, so is that of a priest or agrotesque animal a sure indication of a Persian. We may say, then, fromthat evidence alone—though there is more—that this gem was certainlyPersian. And having reached that point, the mystery of "Has" vanishes:for we at once jump at the conclusion that that too is Persian. ButPersian, you say, written in English characters? Yes, and it wasprecisely this fact that made its meaning one of what the baronetchildishly calls "the lost secrets of the world": for every successiveinquirer, believing it part of an English phrase, was thus hopelesslyled astray in his investigation. "Has" is, in fact, part of the word"Hasn-us-Sabah," and the mere circumstance that some of it has beenobliterated, while the figure of the mystic animal remains intact,shows that it was executed by one of a nation less skilled in the artof graving in precious stones than the Persians,—by a rude, mediaevalEnglishman, in short,—the modern revival of the art owing its origin,of course, to the Medici of a later age. And of this Englishman—whoeither graved the stone himself, or got some one else to do it forhim—do we know nothing? We know, at least, that he was certainly afighter, probably a Norman baron, that on his arm he bore the cross ofred, that he trod the sacred soil of Palestine. Perhaps, to prove this,I need hardly remind you who Hasn-us-Sabah was. It is enough if I saythat he was greatly mixed up in the affairs of the Crusaders, lendinghis irresistible arms now to this side, now to that. He was the chiefof the heterodox Mohammedan sect of the Assassins (this word, Ibelieve, is actually derived from his name); imagined himself to be anincarnation of the Deity, and from his inaccessible rock-fortress ofAlamut in the Elburz exercised a sinister influence on the intricatepolitics of the day. The Red Cross Knights called him Shaikh-ul-Jabal—the Old Man of the Mountains, that very nickname connectinghim infallibly with the Ul-Jabal of our own times. Now threewell-known facts occur to me in connection with this stone of the Houseof Saul: the first, that Saladin met in battle, and defeated, andplundered, in a certain place, on a certain day, this Hasn-us-Sabah,or one of his successors bearing the same name; the second, that aboutthis time there was a cordial rapprochement between Saladin andRichard the Lion, and between the Infidels and the Christiansgenerally, during which a free interchange of gems, then regarded as ofdeep mystic importance, took place—remember "The Talisman," and the"Lee Penny"; the third, that soon after the fighters of Richard, andthen himself, returned to England, the Loculus or coffin of St. Edmund(as we are informed by the Jocelini Chronica) was opened by theAbbot at midnight, and the body of the martyr exposed. On suchoccasions it was customary to place gems and relics in the coffin, whenit was again closed up. Now, the chalice with the stone was taken fromthis loculus; and is it possible not to believe that some knight, towhom it had been presented by one of Saladin's men, had in turnpresented it to the monastery, first scratching uncouthly on itssurface the name of Hasn to mark its semi-sacred origin, or perhapsbidding the monks to do so? But the Assassins, now called, I think, "alHasani" or "Ismaili"—"that accursed Ishmaelite," the baronetexclaims in one place—still live, are still a flourishing sectimpelled by fervid religious fanaticisms. And where think you is theirchief place of settlement? Where, but on the heights of that same"Lebanon" on which Sir Jocelin "picked up" his too doubtful scribe andliterary helper?

'It now becomes evident that Ul-Jabal was one of the sect of theAssassins, and that the object of his sojourn at the manor-house, ofhis financial help to the baronet, of his whole journey perhaps toEngland, was the recovery of the sacred gem which once glittered on thebreast of the founder of his sect. In dread of spoiling all byover-rashness, he waits, perhaps for years, till he makes sure that thestone is the right one by seeing it with his own eyes, and learns thesecret of the spring by which the chalice is opened. He then proceedsto steal it. So far all is clear enough. Now, this too is conceivable,that, intending to commit the theft, he had beforehand provided himselfwith another stone similar in size and shape—these being well known tohim—to the other, in order to substitute it for the real stone, andso, for a time at least, escape detection. It is presumable that thechalice was not often opened by the baronet, and this would thereforehave been a perfectly rational device on the part of Ul-Jabal. Butassuming this to be his mode of thinking, how ludicrously absurdappears all the trouble he took to engrave the false stone in anexactly similar manner to the other. That could not help him inproducing the deception, for that he did not contemplate the stonebeing seen, but only heard in the cup, is proved by the fact thathe selected a stone of a different colour. This colour, as I shallafterwards show you, was that of a pale, brown-spotted stone. But weare met with something more extraordinary still when we come to thelast stone, the white one—I shall prove that it was white—whichUl-Jabal placed in the cup. Is it possible that he had provided twosubstitutes, and that he had engraved these two, without object, inthe same minutely careful manner? Your mind refuses to conceive it; andhaving done this, declines, in addition, to believe that he hadprepared even one substitute; and I am fully in accord with you in thisconclusion.

'We may say then that Ul-Jabal had not prepared any substitute; andit may be added that it was a thing altogether beyond the limits of theprobable that he could by chance have possessed two old gems exactlysimilar in every detail down to the very half-obliterated letters ofthe word "Hasn-us-Sabah." I have now shown, you perceive, that he didnot make them purposely, and that he did not possess them accidentally.Nor were they the baronet's, for we have his declaration that he hadnever seen them before. Whence then did the Persian obtain them? Thatpoint will immediately emerge into clearness, when we have sounded hismotive for replacing the one false stone by the other, and, above all,for taking away the valueless stone, and then replacing it. And inorder to lead you up to the comprehension of this motive, I begin bymaking the bold assertion that Ul-Jabal had not in his possession thereal St. Edmundsbury stone at all.

'You are surprised; for you argue that if we are to take the baronet'sevidence at all, we must take it in this particular also, and hepositively asserts that he saw the Persian take the stone. It is truethat there are indubitable signs of insanity in the document, but it isthe insanity of a diseased mind manifesting itself by fantasticexaggeration of sentiment, rather than of a mind confiding to itselfits own delusions as to matters of fact. There is therefore nothing socertain as that Ul-Jabal did steal the gem; but these two things areequally evident: that by some means or other it very soon passed out ofhis possession, and that when it had so passed, he, for his part,believed it to be in the possession of the baronet. "Now," he cries intriumph, one day as he catches Sir Jocelin in his room—"now you havedelivered all into my hands." "All" what, Sir Jocelin wonders. "All,"of course, meant the stone. He believes that the baronet has doneprecisely what the baronet afterwards believes that he hasdone—hidden away the stone in the most secret of all places, in hisown apartment, to wit. The Persian, sure now at last of victory,accordingly hastens into his chamber, and "locks the door," in order,by an easy search, to secure his prize. When, moreover, the baronet isexamining the house at night with his lens, he believes that Ul-Jabalis spying his movements; when he extends his operations to the park,the other finds pretexts to be near him. Ul-Jabal dogs his footstepslike a shadow. But supposing he had really had the jewel, and haddeposited it in a place of perfect safety—such as, with or withoutlenses, the extensive grounds of the manor-house would certainly haveafforded—his more reasonable rôle would have been that ofunconscious nonchalance, rather than of agonised interest. But, infact, he supposed the owner of the stone to be himself seeking a securehiding-place for it, and is resolved at all costs on knowing thesecret. And again in the vaults beneath the house Sir Jocelin reportsthat Ul-Jabal "holds the lantern near the ground, with his head bentdown": can anything be better descriptive of the attitude of search?Yet each is so sure that the other possesses the gem, that neither isable to suspect that both are seekers.

'But, after all, there is far better evidence of the non-possession ofthe stone by the Persian than all this—and that is the murder of thebaronet, for I can almost promise you that our messenger will return ina few minutes. Now, it seems to me that Ul-Jabal was not reallymurderous, averse rather to murder; thus the baronet is often in hispower, swoons in his arms, lies under the influence of narcotics insemi-sleep while the Persian is in his room, and yet no injury is donehim. Still, when the clear necessity to murder—the clear means ofgaining the stone—presents itself to Ul-Jabal, he does not hesitate amoment—indeed, he has already made elaborate preparations for thatvery necessity. And when was it that this necessity presented itself?It was when the baronet put the false stone in the pocket of a loosegown for the purpose of confronting the Persian with it. But what kindof pocket? I think you will agree with me, that male garments,admitting of the designation "gown," have usually only outerpockets—large, square pockets, simply sewed on to the outside of therobe. But a stone of that size must have made such a pocket bulgeoutwards. Ul-Jabal must have noticed it. Never before has he beenperfectly sure that the baronet carried the long-desired gem about onhis body; but now at last he knows beyond all doubt. To obtain it,there are several courses open to him: he may rush there and then onthe weak old man and tear the stone from him; he may ply him withnarcotics, and extract it from the pocket during sleep. But in thesethere is a small chance of failure; there is a certainty of near orultimate detection, pursuit—and this is a land of Law, swift andfairly sure. No, the old man must die: only thus—thus surely, and thussecretly—can the outraged dignity of Hasn-us-Sabah be appeased. On thevery next day he leaves the house—no more shall the mistrustfulbaronet, who is "hiding something from him," see his face. He carrieswith him a small parcel. Let me tell you what was in that parcel: itcontained the baronet's fur cap, one of his "brown gowns," and asnow-white beard and wig. Of the cap we can be sure; for from the factthat, on leaving his room at midnight to follow the Persian through thehouse, he put it on his head, I gather that he wore it habituallyduring all his waking hours; yet after Ul-Jabal has left him he wandersfar and wide "with uncovered head." Can you not picture thedistracted old man seeking ever and anon with absent mind for hislong-accustomed head-gear, and seeking in vain? Of the gown, too, wemay be equally certain: for it was the procuring of this that ledUl-Jabal to the baronet's trunk; we now know that he did not go thereto hide the stone, for he had it not to hide; nor to seek it, forhe would be unable to believe the baronet childish enough to deposit itin so obvious a place. As for the wig and beard, they had beenpreviously seen in his room. But before he leaves the house Ul-Jabalhas one more work to do: once more the two eat and drink together as in"the old days of love"; once more the baronet is drunken with a deepsleep, and when he wakes, his skin is "brown as the leaves of autumn."That is the evidence of which I spake in the beginning as giving us ahint of the exact shade of the Oriental's colour—it was theyellowish-brown of a sered leaf. And now that the face of the baronethas been smeared with this indelible pigment, all is ready for thetragedy, and Ul-Jabal departs. He will return, but not immediately, forhe will at least give the eyes of his victim time to grow accustomed tothe change of colour in his face; nor will he tarry long, for there isno telling whether, or whither, the stone may not disappear from thatouter pocket. I therefore surmise that the tragedy took place a day ortwo ago. I remembered the feebleness of the old man, his highlyneurotic condition; I thought of those "fibrillary twitchings,"indicating the onset of a well-known nervous disorder sure to end insudden death; I recalled his belief that on account of the loss of thestone, in which he felt his life bound up, the chariot of death wasurgent on his footsteps; I bore in mind his memory of his grandfatherdying in agony just seventy years ago after seeing his own wraith bythe churchyard-wall; I knew that such a man could not be struck by thesudden, the terrific shock of seeing himself sitting in the chairbefore the mirror (the chair, you remember, had been placed there byUl-Jabal) without dropping down stone dead on the spot. I was thus ableto predict the manner and place of the baronet's death—if he bedead. Beside him, I said, would probably be found a white stone. ForUl-Jabal, his ghastly impersonation ended, would hurry to the pocket,snatch out the stone, and finding it not the stone he sought, would inall likelihood dash it down, fly away from the corpse as if fromplague, and, I hope, straightway go and—hang himself.'

It was at this point that the black mask of Ham framed itself betweenthe python-skin tapestries of the doorway. I tore from him the paper,now two days old, which he held in his hand, and under the heading,'Sudden death of a Baronet,' read a nearly exact account of the factswhich Zaleski had been detailing to me.

'I can see by your face that I was not altogether at fault,' he said,with one of his musical laughs; 'but there still remains for us todiscover whence Ul-Jabal obtained his two substitutes, his motive forexchanging one for the other, and for stealing the valueless gem; but,above all, we must find where the real stone was all the time thatthese two men so sedulously sought it, and where it now is. Now, let usturn our attention to this stone, and ask, first, what light does theinscription on the cup throw on its nature? The inscription assures usthat if "this stone be stolen," or if it "chaunges dre," the House ofSaul and its head "anoon" (i.e. anon, at once) shall die. "Dre," I mayremind you, is an old English word, used, I think, by Burns, identicalwith the Saxon "dreogan," meaning to "suffer." So that the writer atleast contemplated that the stone might "suffer changes." But what kindof changes—external or internal? External change—change ofenvironment—is already provided for when he says, "shulde this Stonstalen bee"; "chaunges," therefore, in his mind, meant internalchanges. But is such a thing possible for any precious stone, and forthis one in particular? As to that, we might answer when we know thename of this one. It nowhere appears in the manuscript, and yet it isimmediately discoverable. For it was a "sky-blue" stone; a sky-blue,sacred stone; a sky-blue, sacred, Persian stone. That at once gives usits name—it was a turquoise. But can the turquoise, to the certainknowledge of a mediaeval writer, "chaunges dre"? Let us turn for lightto old Anselm de Boot: that is he in pig-skin on the shelf behind thebronze Hera.'

I handed the volume to Zaleski. He pointed to a passage which read asfollows:

'Assuredly the turquoise doth possess a soul more intelligent than thatof man. But we cannot be wholly sure of the presence of Angels inprecious stones. I do rather opine that the evil spirit doth take uphis abode therein, transforming himself into an angel of light, to theend that we put our trust not in God, but in the precious stone; andthus, perhaps, doth he deceive our spirits by the turquoise: for theturquoise is of two sorts: those which keep their colour, and thosewhich lose it.'[^[1]]

[1]'Assurément la turquoise a une âme plus intelligente quel'âme de l'homme. Mais nous ne pouvons rien establir de certaintouchant la presence des Anges dans les pierres precieuses. Monjugement seroit plustot que le mauvais esprit, qui se transforme enAnge de lumiere se loge dans les pierres precieuses, à fin que l'on nerecoure pas à Dieu, mais que l'on repose sa creance dans la pierreprecieuse; ainsi, peut-être, il deçoit nos esprits par la turquoise:car la turquoise est de deux sortes, les unes qui conservent leurcouleur et les autres qui la perdent.' Anselm de Boot, Book II.

'You thus see,' resumed Zaleski, 'that the turquoise was believed tohave the property of changing its colour—a change which wasuniversally supposed to indicate the fading away and death of itsowner. The good De Boot, alas, believed this to be a property of toomany other stones beside, like the Hebrews in respect of their urim andthummim; but in the case of the turquoise, at least, it is awell-authenticated natural phenomenon, and I have myself seen such aspecimen. In some cases the change is a gradual process; in others itmay occur suddenly within an hour, especially when the gem, long keptin the dark, is exposed to brilliant sunshine. I should say, however,that in this metamorphosis there is always an intermediate stage: thestone first changes from blue to a pale colour spotted with brown, and,lastly, to a pure white. Thus, Ul-Jabal having stolen the stone, findsthat it is of the wrong colour, and soon after replaces it; he supposesthat in the darkness he has selected the wrong chalice, and so takesthe valueless stone from the other. This, too, he replaces, and,infinitely puzzled, makes yet another hopeless trial of the Edmundsburychalice, and, again baffled, again replaces it, concluding now that thebaronet has suspected his designs, and substituted a false stone forthe real one. But after this last replacement, the stone assumes itsfinal hue of white, and thus the baronet is led to think that twostones have been substituted by Ul-Jabal for his own invaluable gem.All this while the gem was lying serenely in its place in the chalice.And thus it came to pass that in the Manor-house of Saul there arose asomewhat considerable Ado about Nothing.'

For a moment Zaleski paused; then, turning round and laying his hand onthe brown forehead of the mummy by his side, he said:

'My friend here could tell you, and he would, a fine tale of theimmensely important part which jewels in all ages have played in humanhistory, human religions, institutions, ideas. He flourished some fivecenturies before the Messiah, was a Memphian priest of Amsu, and, asthe hieroglyphics on his coffin assure me, a prime favourite with oneQueen Amyntas. Beneath these mouldering swaddlings of the grave a greatruby still cherishes its blood-guilty secret on the forefinger of hisright hand. Most curious is it to reflect how in all lands, and atall times, precious minerals have been endowed by men with mysticvirtues. The Persians, for instance, believed that spinelle and thegarnet were harbingers of joy. Have you read the ancient Bishop ofRennes on the subject? Really, I almost think there must be some truthin all this. The instinct of universal man is rarely far at fault.Already you have a semi-comic "gold-cure" for alcoholism, and you haveheard of the geophagism of certain African tribes. What if thescientist of the future be destined to discover that the diamond, andit alone, is a specific for cholera, that powdered rubellite curesfever, and the chryso-beryl gout? It would be in exact conformity withwhat I have hitherto observed of a general trend towards a certaininborn perverseness and whimsicality in Nature.'

Note.—As some proof of the fineness of intuition evidenced byZaleski, as distinct from his more conspicuous powers of reasoning, Imay here state that some years after the occurrence of the tragedy Ihave recorded above, the skeleton of a man was discovered in the vaultsof the Manor-house of Saul. I have not the least doubt that it was theskeleton of Ul-Jabal. The teeth were very prominent. A rotten rope wasfound loosely knotted round the vertebrae of his neck.

THE S.S.

'Wohlgeborne, gesunde Kinder bringen viel mit....

'Wenn die Natur verabscheut, so spricht sie es laut aus: das Geschöpf,das falsch lebt, wird früh zerstört. Unfruchtbarkeit, kümmerlichesDasein, frühzeitiges Zerfallen, das sind ihre Flüche, die Kennzeichenihrer Strenge.' GOETHE. [Footnote: 'Well-made, healthy children bringmuch into the world along with them....

'When Nature abhors, she speaks it aloud: the creature that lives witha false life is soon destroyed. Unfruitfulness, painful existence,early destruction, these are her curses, the tokens of herdispleasure.']

[Greek: Argos de andron echaerothae outo, oste oi douloi auton eschonpanta ta praegmata, archontes te kai diepontes, es ho epaebaesan hoiton apolomenon paides.] HERODOTUS. [Footnote: 'And Argos was sodepleted of Men (i.e. after the battle with Cleomenes) that theslaves usurped everything—ruling and disposing—until such time as thesons of the slain were grown up.']

To say that there are epidemics of suicide is to give expression towhat is now a mere commonplace of knowledge. And so far are they frombeing of rare occurrence, that it has even been affirmed that everysensational case of felo de se published in the newspapers is sure tobe followed by some others more obscure: their frequency, indeed, isout of all proportion with the extent of each particular outbreak.Sometimes, however, especially in villages and small townships, thewildfire madness becomes an all-involving passion, emulating in itsfury the great plagues of history. Of such kind was the craze inVersailles in 1793, when about a quarter of the whole populationperished by the scourge; while that at the Hôtel des Invalides inParis was only a notable one of the many which have occurred during thepresent century. At such times it is as if the optic nerve of the mindthroughout whole communities became distorted, till in the noseless andblack-robed Reaper it discerned an angel of very loveliness. As abrimming maiden, out-worn by her virginity, yields half-fainting to thedear sick stress of her desire—with just such faintings, wanton fires,does the soul, over-taxed by the continence of living, yield voluntaryto the grave, and adulterously make of Death its paramour.

[Footnote: Beaumont and Fletcher: The Maid's Tragedy.]

The mode spreads—then rushes into rage: to breathe is to beobsolete: to wear the shroud becomes comme il faut, this cereclothacquiring all the attractiveness and éclat of a wedding-garment. Thecoffin is not too strait for lawless nuptial bed; and the sweet clodsof the valley will prove no barren bridegroom of a writhing progeny.There is, however, nothing specially mysterious in the operation of apestilence of this nature: it is as conceivable, if not yet asexplicable, as the contagion of cholera, mind being at least assensitive to the touch of mind as body to that of body.

It was during the ever-memorable outbreak of this obscure malady in theyear 1875 that I ventured to break in on the calm of that deep Silencein which, as in a mantle, my friend Prince Zaleski had wrapped himself.I wrote, in fact, to ask him what he thought of the epidemic. Hisanswer was in the laconic words addressed to the Master in the house ofwoe at Bethany:

'Come and see.'

To this, however, he added in postscript: 'but what epidemic?'

I had momentarily lost sight of the fact that Zaleski had so absolutelycut himself off from the world, that he was not in the least likely toknow anything even of the appalling series of events to which I hadreferred. And yet it is no exaggeration to say that those events hadthrown the greater part of Europe into a state of consternation, andeven confusion. In London, Manchester, Paris, and Berlin, especiallythe excitement was intense. On the Sunday preceding the writing of mynote to Zaleski, I was present at a monster demonstration held in HydePark, in which the Government was held up on all hands to the popularderision and censure—for it will be remembered that to many minds themysterious accompaniments of some of the deaths daily occurringconveyed a still darker significance than that implied in mereself-destruction, and seemed to point to a succession of purposelessand hideous murders. The demagogues, I must say, spoke with somewildness and incoherence. Many laid the blame at the door of thepolice, and urged that things would be different were they but placedunder municipal, instead of under imperial, control. A thousandpanaceas were invented, a thousand aimless censures passed. But thepeople listened with vacant ear. Never have I seen the populace soagitated, and yet so subdued, as with the sense of some impending doom.The glittering eye betrayed the excitement, the pallor of the cheek thedoubt, the haunting fear. None felt himself quite safe; menrecognised shuddering the grin of death in the air. To tingle withaffright, and to know not why—that is the transcendentalism of terror.The threat of the cannon's mouth is trivial in its effect on the mindin comparison with the menace of a Shadow. It is the pestilence thatwalketh by night that is intolerable. As for myself, I confess tobeing pervaded with a nameless and numbing awe during all those weeks.And this feeling appeared to be general in the land. The journals hadbut one topic; the party organs threw politics to the winds. I heardthat on the Stock Exchange, as in the Paris Bourse, businessdecreased to a minimum. In Parliament the work of law-threshingpractically ceased, and the time of Ministers was nightly spent inanswering volumes of angry 'Questions,' and in facing motion aftermotion for the 'adjournment' of the House.

It was in the midst of all this commotion that I received PrinceZaleski's brief 'Come and see.' I was flattered and pleased: flattered,because I suspected that to me alone, of all men, would such aninvitation, coming from him, be addressed; and pleased, because many atime in the midst of the noisy city street and the garish, dusty world,had the thought of that vast mansion, that dim and silent chamber,flooded my mind with a drowsy sense of the romantic, till, from veryexcess of melancholy sweetness in the picture, I was fain to close myeyes. I avow that that lonesome room—gloomy in its lunar bath of softperfumed light—shrouded in the sullen voluptuousness of plushy,narcotic-breathing draperies—pervaded by the mysterious spirit of itsbrooding occupant—grew more and more on my fantasy, till theremembrance had for me all the cool refreshment shed by amidsummer-night's dream in the dewy deeps of some Perrhoebian grove ofcornel and lotos and ruby stars of the asphodel. It was, therefore, inall haste that I set out to share for a time in the solitude of myfriend.

Zaleski's reception of me was most cordial; immediately on my entranceinto his sanctum he broke into a perfect torrent of wild, enthusiasticwords, telling me with a kind of rapture, that he was just thenlaboriously engaged in co-ordinating to one of the calculi certain newproperties he had discovered in the parabola, adding with infinitegusto his 'firm' belief that the ancient Assyrians were acquainted withall our modern notions respecting the parabola itself, the projectionof bodies in general, and of the heavenly bodies in particular; andmust, moreover, from certain inferences of his own in connection withthe Winged Circle, have been conversant with the fact that light is notan ether, but only the vibration of an ether. He then galloped on tosuggest that I should at once take part with him in his investigations,and commented on the timeliness of my visit. I, on my part, was anxiousfor his opinion on other and far weightier matters than the concerns ofthe Assyrians, and intimated as much to him. But for two days he wasfirm in his tacit refusal to listen to my story; and, concluding thathe was disinclined to undergo the agony of unrest with which he wasalways tormented by any mystery which momentarily baffled him, I was,of course, forced to hold my peace. On the third day, however, of hisown accord he asked me to what epidemic I had referred. I then detailedto him some of the strange events which were agitating the mind of theoutside world. From the very first he was interested: later on thatinterest grew into a passion, a greedy soul-consuming quest after thetruth, the intensity of which was such at last as to move me even topity.

I may as well here restate the facts as I communicated them to Zaleski.The concatenation of incidents, it will be remembered, started with theextraordinary death of that eminent man of science, ProfessorSchleschinger, consulting laryngologist to the Charité Hospital inBerlin. The professor, a man of great age, was on the point ofcontracting his third marriage with the beautiful and accomplisheddaughter of the Herr Geheimrath Otto von Friedrich. The contemplatedunion, which was entirely one of those mariages de convenance socommon in good society, sprang out of the professor's ardent desire toleave behind him a direct heir to his very considerable wealth. By hisfirst two marriages, indeed, he had had large families, and was at thisvery time surrounded by quite an army of little grandchildren, fromwhom (all his direct descendants being dead) he might have been contentto select his heir; but the old German prejudices in these matters arestrong, and he still hoped to be represented on his decease by a son ofhis own. To this whim the charming Ottilie was marked by her parents asthe victim. The wedding, however, had been postponed owing to a slightillness of the veteran scientist, and just as he was on the point offinal recovery from it, death intervened to prevent altogether theexecution of his design. Never did death of man create a profoundersensation; never was death of man followed by consequences moreterrible. The Residenz of the scientist was a stately mansion nearthe University in the Unter den Linden boulevard, that is to say, inthe most fashionable Quartier of Berlin. His bedroom from aconsiderable height looked out on a small back garden, and in this roomhe had been engaged in conversation with his colleague and medicalattendant, Dr. Johann Hofmeier, to a late hour of the night. During allthis time he seemed cheerful, and spoke quite lucidly on varioustopics. In particular, he exhibited to his colleague a curious strip ofwhat looked like ancient papyrus, on which were traced certaingrotesque and apparently meaningless figures. This, he said, he hadfound some days before on the bed of a poor woman in one of thehorribly low quarters that surround Berlin, on whom he had had occasionto make a post-mortem examination. The woman had suffered frompartial paralysis. She had a small young family, none of whom, however,could give any account of the slip, except one little girl, whodeclared that she had taken it 'from her mother's mouth' after death.The slip was soiled, and had a fragrant smell, as though it had beensmeared with honey. The professor added that all through his illness hehad been employing himself by examining these figures. He wasconvinced, he said, that they contained some archaeologicalsignificance; but, in any case, he ceased not to ask himself how came aslip of papyrus to be found in such a situation,—on the bed of a deadBerlinerin of the poorest class? The story of its being taken from themouth of the woman was, of course, unbelievable. The whole incidentseemed to puzzle, while it amused him; seemed to appeal to theinstinct—so strong in him—to investigate, to probe. For days, hedeclared, he had been endeavouring, in vain, to make anything of thefigures. Dr. Hofmeier, too, examined the slip, but inclined to believethat the figures—rude and uncouth as they were—were only such asmight be drawn by any school-boy in an idle moment. They consistedmerely of a man and a woman seated on a bench, with what looked like anornamental border running round them. After a pleasant evening'sscientific gossip, Dr. Hofmeier, a little after midnight, took hisdeparture from the bed-side. An hour later the servants were rousedfrom sleep by one deep, raucous cry proceeding from the professor'sroom. They hastened to his door; it was locked on the inside; all wasstill within. No answer coming to their calls, the door was broken in.They found their master lying calm and dead on his bed. A window of theroom was open, but there was nothing to show that any one had enteredit. Dr. Hofmeier was sent for, and was soon on the scene. Afterexamining the body, he failed to find anything to account for thesudden demise of his old friend and chief. One observation, however,had the effect of causing him to tingle with horror. On his entrance hehad noticed, lying on the side of the bed, the piece of papyrus withwhich the professor had been toying in the earlier part of the day, andhad removed it. But, as he was on the point of leaving the room, hehappened to approach the corpse once more, and bending over it, noticedthat the lips and teeth were slightly parted. Drawing open the nowstiffened jaws, he found—to his amazement, to his stupefaction—that,neatly folded beneath the dead tongue, lay just such another piece ofpapyrus as that which he had removed from the bed. He drew it out—itwas clammy. He put it to his nose,—it exhaled the fragrance of honey.He opened it,—it was covered by figures. He compared them with thefigures on the other slip,—they were just so similar as twodraughtsmen hastily copying from a common model would make them. Thedoctor was unnerved: he hurried homeward, and immediately submitted thehoney on the papyrus to a rigorous chemical analysis: he suspectedpoison—a subtle poison—as the means of a suicide, grotesquely,insanely accomplished. He found the fluid to be perfectlyinnocuous,—pure honey, and nothing more.

The next day Germany thrilled with the news that ProfessorSchleschinger had destroyed himself. For suicide, however, some of thepapers substituted murder, though of neither was there an atom ofactual proof. On the day following, three persons died by their ownhands in Berlin, of whom two were young members of the medicalprofession; on the day following that, the number rose to nineteen,Hamburg, Dresden, and Aachen joining in the frenzied death-dance;within three weeks from the night on which Professor Schleschinger methis unaccountable end, eight thousand persons in Germany, France, andGreat Britain, died in that startlingly sudden and secret manner whichwe call 'tragic', many of them obviously by their own hands, many, inwhat seemed the servility of a fatal imitativeness, with figured,honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues. Even now—now,after years—I thrill intensely to recall the dread remembrance; but tolive through it, to breathe daily the mawkish, miasmatic atmosphere,all vapid with the suffocating death—ah, it was terror too deep,nausea too foul, for mortal bearing. Novalis has somewhere hinted atthe possibility (or the desirability) of a simultaneous suicide andvoluntary return by the whole human family into the sweet bosom of ourancient Father—I half expected it was coming, had come, then. It wasas if the old, good-easy, meek-eyed man of science, dying, had left hiseffectual curse on all the world, and had thereby convertedcivilisation into one omnivorous grave, one universal charnel-house. Ispent several days in reading out to Zaleski accounts of particulardeaths as they had occurred. He seemed never to tire of listening,lying back for the most part on the silver-cushioned couch, and wearingan inscrutable mask. Sometimes he rose and paced the carpet withnoiseless foot-fall, his steps increasing to the swaying, unevenvelocity of an animal in confinement as a passage here or thereattracted him, and then subsiding into their slow regularity again. Atany interruption in the reading, he would instantly turn to me with acertain impatience, and implore me to proceed; and when our stock ofmatter failed, he broke out into actual anger that I had not broughtmore with me. Henceforth the negro, Ham, using my trap, daily took adouble journey—one before sunrise, and one at dusk—to the nearesttownlet, from which he would return loaded with newspapers. Withunimaginable eagerness did both Zaleski and I seize, morning aftermorning, and evening after evening, on these budgets, to gloat for longhours over the ever-lengthening tale of death. As for him, sleepforsook him. He was a man of small reasonableness, scorning thelimitations of human capacity; his palate brooked no meat when hisbrain was headlong in the chase; even the mild narcotics which were nowhis food and drink seemed to lose something of their power to mollify,to curb him. Often rising from slumber in what I took to be the dead ofnight—though of day or night there could be small certainty in thatdim dwelling—I would peep into the domed chamber, and see him thereunder the livid-green light of the censer, the leaden smoke issuingfrom his lips, his eyes fixed unweariedly on a square piece of ebonywhich rested on the coffin of the mummy near him. On this ebony he hadpasted side by side several woodcuts—snipped from the newspapers—ofthe figures traced on the pieces of papyrus found in the mouths of thedead. I could see, as time passed, that he was concentrating all hispowers on these figures; for the details of the deaths themselves wereall of a dreary sameness, offering few salient points forinvestigation. In those cases where the suicide had left behind himclear evidence of the means by which he had committed the act, therewas nothing to investigate; the others—rich and poor alike, peer andpeasant—trooped out by thousands on the far journey, without leavingthe faintest footprint to mark the road by which they had gone.

This was perhaps the reason that, after a time, Zaleski discarded thenewspapers, leaving their perusal to me, and turned his attentionexclusively to the ebon tablet. Knowing as I full well did the daringand success of his past spiritual adventures,—the subtlety, theimagination, the imperial grip of his intellect,—I did not at alldoubt that his choice was wise, and would in the end be justified.These woodcuts—now so notorious—were all exactly similar in design,though minutely differing here and there in drawing. The following is afacsimile of one of them taken by me at random:

The time passed. It now began to be a grief to me to see the turgidpallor that gradually overspread the always ashen countenance ofZaleski; I grew to consider the ravaging life that glared and blazed inhis sunken eye as too volcanic, demonic, to be canny: the mystery, Idecided at last—if mystery there were—was too deep, too dark, forhim. Hence perhaps it was, that I now absented myself more and morefrom him in the adjoining room in which I slept. There one day I satreading over the latest list of horrors, when I heard a loud cry fromthe vaulted chamber. I rushed to the door and beheld him standing,gazing with wild eyes at the ebon tablet held straight out in front ofhim.

'By Heaven!' he cried, stamping savagely with his foot. 'By Heaven!Then I certainly am a fool! It is the staff of Phaebus in the handof Hermes!'

I hastened to him. 'Tell me,' I said, 'have you discovered anything?'

'It is possible.'

'And has there really been foul play—murder—in any of these deaths?'

'Of that, at least, I was certain from the first.'

'Great God!' I exclaimed, 'could any son of man so convert himself intoa fiend, a beast of the wilderness....'

'You judge precisely in the manner of the multitude,' he answeredsomewhat petulantly. 'Illegal murder is always a mistake, but notnecessarily a crime. Remember Corday. But in cases where the murder ofone is really fiendish, why is it qualitatively less fiendish than themurder of many? On the other hand, had Brutus slain a thousandCaesars—each act involving an additional exhibition of the sublimestself-suppression—he might well have taken rank as a saint in heaven.'

Failing for the moment to see the drift or the connection of theargument, I contented myself with waiting events. For the rest of thatday and the next Zaleski seemed to have dismissed the matter of thetragedies from his mind, and entered calmly on his former studies. Heno longer consulted the news, or examined the figures on the tablet.The papers, however, still arrived daily, and of these he soonafterwards laid several before me, pointing, with a curious smile, to asmall paragraph in each. These all appeared in the advertisementcolumns, were worded alike, and read as follows:

'A true son of Lycurgus, having news, desires to know the time andplace of the next meeting of his Phyle. Address Zaleski, at R----Abbey, in the county of M----.'

I gazed in mute alternation at the advertisement and at him. I may herestop to make mention of a very remarkable sensation which myassociation with him occasionally produced in me. I felt it withintense, with unpleasant, with irritating keenness at this moment. Itwas the sensation of being borne aloft—aloft—by a force external tomyself—such a sensation as might possibly tingle through an earthwormwhen lifted into illimitable airy heights by the strongly-daringpinions of an eagle. It was the feeling of being hurried out beyondone's depth—caught and whiffed away by the all-compelling sweep ofsome rabid vigour into a new, foreign element. Something akin I haveexperienced in an 'express' as it raged with me—winged, rocking,ecstatic, shrilling a dragon Aha!—round a too narrow curve. It was asensation very far from agreeable.

'To that,' he said, pointing to the paragraph, 'we may, I think,shortly expect an answer. Let us only hope that when it comes it may beimmediately intelligible.'

We waited throughout the whole of that day and night, hiding oureagerness under the pretence of absorption in our books. If by chance Ifell into an uneasy doze, I found him on waking ever watchful, andporing over the great tome before him. About the time, however, when,could we have seen it, the first grey of dawn must have been peepingover the land, his impatience again became painful to witness; he roseand paced the room, muttering occasionally to himself. This onlyceased, when, hours later, Ham entered the room with an envelope in hishand. Zaleski seized it—tore it open—ran his eye over thecontents—and dashed it to the ground with an oath.

'Curse it!' he groaned. 'Ah, curse it! unintelligible—every syllableof it!'

I picked up the missive and examined it. It was a slip of papyruscovered with the design now so hideously familiar, except only that thetwo central figures were wanting. At the bottom was written the date ofthe 15th of November—it was then the morning of the 12th—and the name'Morris.' The whole, therefore, presented the following appearance:

My eyes were now heavy with sleep, every sense half-drunken with thevapourlike atmosphere of the room, so that, having abandoned somethingof hope, I tottered willingly to my bed, and fell into a profoundslumber, which lasted till what must have been the time of thegathering in of the shades of night. I then rose. Missing Zaleski, Isought through all the chambers for him. He was nowhere to be seen. Thenegro informed me with an affectionate and anxious tremor in the voicethat his master had left the rooms some hours before, but had saidnothing to him. I ordered the man to descend and look into the sacristyof the small chapel wherein I had deposited my calèche, and in thefield behind, where my horse should be. He returned with the news thatboth had disappeared. Zaleski, I then concluded, had undoubtedlydeparted on a journey.

I was deeply touched by the demeanour of Ham as the hours went by. Hewandered stealthily about the rooms like a lost being. It was likematter sighing after, weeping over, spirit. Prince Zaleski had neverbefore withdrawn himself from the surveillance of this sturdywatchman, and his disappearance now was like a convulsion in theirlittle cosmos. Ham implored me repeatedly, if I could, to throw somelight on the meaning of this catastrophe. But I too was in the dark.The Titanic frame of the Ethiopian trembled with emotion as in broken,childish words he told me that he felt instinctively the approach ofsome great danger to the person of his master. So a day passed away,and then another. On the next he roused me from sleep to hand me aletter which, on opening, I found to be from Zaleski. It was hastilyscribbled in pencil, dated 'London, Nov. 14th,' and ran thus:

'For my body—should I not return by Friday night—you will, no doubt,be good enough to make search. Descend the river, keeping constantlyto the left; consult the papyrus; and stop at the Descensus Aesopi.Seek diligently, and you will find. For the rest, you know my fancy forcremation: take me, if you will, to the crematorium of Père-Lachaise.My whole fortune I decree to Ham, the Lybian.'

Ham was all for knowing the contents of this letter, but I refused tocommunicate a word of it. I was dazed, I was more than ever perplexed,I was appalled by the frenzy of Zaleski. Friday night! It was thenThursday morning. And I was expected to wait through the drearyinterval uncertain, agonised, inactive! I was offended with my friend;his conduct bore the interpretation of mental distraction. The leadenhours passed all oppressively while I sought to appease the keenness ofmy unrest with the anodyne of drugged sleep. On the next morning,however, another letter—a rather massive one—reached me. The coveringwas directed in the writing of Zaleski, but on it he had scribbled thewords: 'This need not be opened unless I fail to reappear beforeSaturday.' I therefore laid the packet aside unread.

I waited all through Friday, resolved that at six o'clock, if nothinghappened, I should make some sort of effort. But from six I remained,with eyes strained towards the doorway, until ten. I was so utterly ata loss, my ingenuity was so entirely baffled by the situation, that Icould devise no course of action which did not immediately appearabsurd. But at midnight I sprang up—no longer would I endure thecarking suspense. I seized a taper, and passed through the door-way. Ihad not proceeded far, however, when my light was extinguished. Then Iremembered with a shudder that I should have to pass through the wholevast length of the building in order to gain an exit. It was an all buthopeless task in the profound darkness to thread my way through thelabyrinth of halls and corridors, of tumble-down stairs, of bat-hauntedvaults, of purposeless angles and involutions; but I proceeded withsomething of a blind obstinacy, groping my way with arms held outbefore me. In this manner I had wandered on for perhaps a quarter of anhour, when my fingers came into distinct momentary contact with whatfelt like cold and humid human flesh. I shrank back, unnerved as Ialready was, with a murmur of affright.

'Zaleski?' I whispered with bated breath.

Intently as I strained my ears, I could detect no reply. The hairs ofmy head, catching terror from my fancies, erected themselves.

Again I advanced, and again I became aware of the sensation of contact.With a quick movement I passed my hand upward and downward.

It was indeed he. He was half-reclining, half-standing against a wallof the chamber: that he was not dead, I at once knew by his uneasybreathing. Indeed, when, having chafed his hands for some time, I triedto rouse him, he quickly recovered himself, and muttered: 'I fainted; Iwant sleep—only sleep.' I bore him back to the lighted room, assistedby Ham in the latter part of the journey. Ham's ecstasies wereinfinite; he had hardly hoped to see his master's face again. Hisgarments being wet and soiled, the negro divested him of them, anddressed him in a tightly-fitting scarlet robe of Babylonish pattern,reaching to the feet, but leaving the lower neck and forearm bare, andgirt round the stomach by a broad gold-orphreyed ceinture. With allthe tenderness of a woman, the man stretched his master thus arrayed onthe couch. Here he kept an Argus guard while Zaleski, in one deepunbroken slumber of a night and a day, reposed before him. When at lastthe sleeper woke, in his eye,—full of divine instinct,—flitted thewonted falchion-flash of the whetted, two-edged intellect; the secret,austere, self-conscious smile of triumph curved his lip; not a trace ofpain or fatigue remained. After a substantial meal on nuts, autumnfruits, and wine of Samos, he resumed his place on the couch; and I satby his side to hear the story of his wandering. He said:

'We have, Shiel, had before us a very remarkable series of murders, anda very remarkable series of suicides. Were they in any way connected?To this extent, I think—that the mysterious, the unparalleled natureof the murders gave rise to a morbid condition in the public mind,which in turn resulted in the epidemic of suicide. But though such anepidemic has its origin in the instinct of imitation so common in men,you must not suppose that the mental process is a conscious one. Aperson feels an impulse to go and do, and is not aware that at bottomit is only an impulse to go and do likewise. He would indeedrepudiate such an assumption. Thus one man destroys himself, andanother imitates him—but whereas the former uses a pistol, the latteruses a rope. It is rather absurd, therefore, to imagine that in any ofthose cases in which the slip of papyrus has been found in the mouthafter death, the cause of death has been the slavish imitativeness ofthe suicidal mania,—for this, as I say, is never slavish. Thepapyrus then—quite apart from the unmistakable evidences of suicideinvariably left by each self-destroyer—affords us definite and certainmeans by which we can distinguish the two classes of deaths; and we arethus able to divide the total number into two nearly equal halves.

'But you start—you are troubled—you never heard or read of murdersuch as this, the simultaneous murder of thousands over wide areas ofthe face of the globe; here you feel is something outside yourexperience, deeper than your profoundest imaginings. To the question"by whom committed?" and "with what motive?" your mind can conceive nopossible answer. And yet the answer must be, "by man, and for humanmotives,"—for the Angel of Death with flashing eye and flaming swordis himself long dead; and again we can say at once, by no one man,but by many, a cohort, an army of men; and again, by no common men,but by men hellish (or heavenly) in cunning, in resource, in strengthand unity of purpose; men laughing to scorn the flimsy prophylactics ofsociety, separated by an infinity of self-confidence and spiritualintegrity from the ordinary easily-crushed criminal of our days.

'This much at least I was able to discover from the first; andimmediately I set myself to the detection of motive by a careful studyof each case. This, too, in due time, became clear to me,—but tomotive it may perhaps be more convenient to refer later on. What nextengaged my attention was the figures on the papyrus, and devoutly did Ihope that by their solution I might be able to arrive at some moreexact knowledge of the mystery.

'The figures round the border first attracted me, and the merereading of them gave me very little trouble. But I was convinced thatbehind their meaning thus read lay some deep esoteric significance; andthis, almost to the last, I was utterly unable to fathom. You perceivethat these border figures consist of waved lines of two differentlengths, drawings of snakes, triangles looking like the Greek delta,and a heart-shaped object with a dot following it. These succeed oneanother in a certain definite order on all the slips. What, I askedmyself, were these drawings meant to represent,—letters, numbers,things, or abstractions? This I was the more readily able to determinebecause I have often, in thinking over the shape of the Roman letter S,wondered whether it did not owe its convolute form to an attempt on thepart of its inventor to make a picture of the serpent; S being thesibilant or hissing letter, and the serpent the hissing animal. Thisview, I fancy (though I am not sure), has escaped the philologists, butof course you know that all letters were originally pictures ofthings, and of what was S a picture, if not of the serpent? Itherefore assumed, by way of trial, that the snakes in the diagramstood for a sibilant letter, that is, either C or S. And thence,supposing this to be the case, I deduced: firstly, that all the otherfigures stood for letters; and secondly, that they all appeared in theform of pictures of the things of which those letters were originallymeant to be pictures. Thus the letter "m," one of the four "liquid"consonants, is, as we now write it, only a shortened form of a wavedline; and as a waved line it was originally written, and was thecharacter by which a stream of running water was represented inwriting; indeed it only owes its name to the fact that when the lipsare pressed together, and "m" uttered by a continuous effort, a certainresemblance to the murmur of running water is produced. The longerwaved line in the diagram I therefore took to represent "m"; and it atonce followed that the shorter meant "n," for no two letters of thecommoner European alphabets differ only in length (as distinct fromshape) except "m" and "n", and "w" and "v"; indeed, just as the Frenchcall "w" "double-ve," so very properly might "m" be called "double-en."But, in this case, the longer not being "w," the shorter could not be"v": it was therefore "n." And now there only remained the heart andthe triangle. I was unable to think of any letter that could ever havebeen intended for the picture of a heart, but the triangle I knew to bethe letter #A.# This was originally written without the cross-bar fromprop to prop, and the two feet at the bottom of the props were notseparated as now, but joined; so that the letter formed a truetriangle. It was meant by the primitive man to be a picture of hisprimitive house, this house being, of course, hut-shaped, andconsisting of a conical roof without walls. I had thus, with theexception of the heart, disentangled the whole, which then (leaving aspace for the heart) read as follows:

But 'c' before 'a' being never a sibilant (except in some few so-called'Romance' languages), but a guttural, it was for the moment discarded;also as no word begins with the letters 'mn'—except 'mnemonics' andits fellows—I concluded that a vowel must be omitted between theseletters, and thence that all vowels (except 'a') were omitted; again,as the double 's' can never come after 'n' I saw that either a vowelwas omitted between the two 's's,' or that the first word ended afterthe first 's.' Thus I got

'm ns sanan... san,'

or, supplying the now quite obvious vowels,

'mens sana in... sano.'

The heart I now knew represented the word 'corpore,' the Latin word for'heart' being 'cor,' and the dot—showing that the word as it stood wasan abbreviation—conclusively proved every one of my deductions.

'So far all had gone flowingly. It was only when I came to consider thecentral figures that for many days I spent my strength in vain. Youheard my exclamation of delight and astonishment when at last a ray oflight pierced the gloom. At no time, indeed, was I wholly in the darkas to the general significance of these figures, for I saw at oncetheir resemblance to the sepulchral reliefs of classical times. In caseyou are not minutely acquainted with the technique of these stones, Imay as well show you one, which I myself removed from an old grave inTarentum.'

He took from a niche a small piece of close-grained marble, about afoot square, and laid it before me. On one side it was exquisitelysculptured in relief.

'This,' he continued, 'is a typical example of the Greek grave-stone,and having seen one specimen you may be said to have seen almost all,for there is surprisingly little variety in the class. You will observethat the scene represents a man reclining on a couch; in his hand heholds a patera, or dish, filled with grapes and pomegranates, andbeside him is a tripod bearing the viands from which he is banqueting.At his feet sits a woman—for the Greek lady never reclined at table.In addition to these two figures a horse's head, a dog, or a serpentmay sometimes be seen; and these forms comprise the almost invariablepattern of all grave reliefs. Now, that this was the real model fromwhich the figures on the papyrus were taken I could not doubt, when Iconsidered the seemingly absurd fidelity with which in each murder thepapyrus, smeared with honey, was placed under the tongue of the victim.I said to myself: it can only be that the assassins have boundthemselves to the observance of a strict and narrow ritual from whichno departure is under any circumstances permitted—perhaps for the sakeof signalling the course of events to others at a distance. But whatritual? That question I was able to answer when I knew the answer tothese others,—why under the tongue, and why smeared with honey?For no reason, except that the Greeks (not the Romans till very late intheir history) always placed an obolos, or penny, beneath the tongueof the dead to pay his passage across the Stygian river of ghosts; forno reason, except that to these same Greeks honey was a sacred fluid,intimately associated in their minds with the mournful subject ofDeath; a fluid with which the bodies of the deceased were anointed, andsometimes—especially in Sparta and the Pelasgic South—embalmed; withwhich libations were poured to Hermes Psuchopompos, conductor of thedead to the regions of shade; with which offerings were made to all thechthonic deities, and the souls of the departed in general. Youremember, for instance, the melancholy words of Helen addressed toHermione in Orestes:

And so everywhere. The ritual then of the murderers was a Greekritual, their cult a Greek cult—preferably, perhaps, a South Greekone, a Spartan one, for it was here that the highly conservativepeoples of that region clung longest and fondliest to thissemi-barbarous worship. This then being so, I was made all the morecertain of my conjecture that the central figures on the papyrus weredrawn from a Greek model.

'Here, however, I came to a standstill. I was infinitely puzzled by therod in the man's hand. In none of the Greek grave-reliefs does any suchthing as a rod make an appearance, except in one well-known examplewhere the god Hermes—generally represented as carrying the caduceus,or staff, given him by Phoebus—appears leading a dead maiden to theland of night. But in every other example of which I am aware thesculpture represents a man living, not dead, banqueting on earth,not in Hades, by the side of his living companion. What then could bethe significance of the staff in the hand of this living man? It wasonly after days of the hardest struggle, the cruellest suspense, thatthe thought flashed on me that the idea of Hermes leading away the deadfemale might, in this case, have been carried one step farther; thatthe male figure might be no living man, no man at all, but Hermeshimself actually banqueting in Hades with the soul of his disembodiedprotégée! The thought filled me with a rapture I cannot describe, andyou witnessed my excitement. But, at all events, I saw that this was atruly tremendous departure from Greek art and thought, to which ingeneral the copyists seemed to cling so religiously. There musttherefore be a reason, a strong reason, for vandalism such as this. Andthat, at any rate, it was no longer difficult to discover; for now Iknew that the male figure was no mortal, but a god, a spirit, a DAEMON(in the Greek sense of the word); and the female figure I saw by themarked shortness of her drapery to be no Athenian, but a Spartan; nomatron either, but a maiden, a lass, a LASSIE; and now I had forced onme lassie daemon, Lacedaemon.

'This then was the badge, the so carefully-buried badge, of thissociety of men. The only thing which still puzzled and confounded me atthis stage was the startling circumstance that a Greek society shouldmake use of a Latin motto. It was clear that either all myconclusions were totally wrong, or else the motto mens sana in corporesano contained wrapped up in itself some acroamatic meaning which Ifound myself unable to penetrate, and which the authors had found noGreek motto capable of conveying. But at any rate, having found thismuch, my knowledge led me of itself one step further; for I perceivedthat, widely extended as were their operations, the society wasnecessarily in the main an English, or at least an English-speakingone—for of this the word "lassie" was plainly indicative: it was easynow to conjecture London, the monster-city in which all things losethemselves, as their head-quarters; and at this point in myinvestigations I despatched to the papers the advertisement you haveseen.'

'But,' I exclaimed, 'even now I utterly fail to see by what mysteriousprocesses of thought you arrived at the wording of the advertisement;even now it conveys no meaning to my mind.'

'That,' he replied,' will grow clear when we come to a rightunderstanding of the baleful motive which inspired these men. I havealready said that I was not long in discovering it. There was only onepossible method of doing so—and that was, by all means, by any means,to find out some condition or other common to every one of the victimsbefore death. It is true that I was unable to do this in some fewcases, but where I failed, I was convinced that my failure was due tothe insufficiency of the evidence at my disposal, rather than to theactual absence of the condition. Now, let us take almost any two casesyou will, and seek for this common condition: let us take, for example,the first two that attracted the attention of the world—the poor womanof the slums of Berlin, and the celebrated man of science. Separated byas wide an interval as they are, we shall yet find, if we look closely,in each case the same pathetic tokens of the still uneliminatedstriae of our poor humanity. The woman is not an old woman, for shehas a "small young" family, which, had she lived, might have beenincreased: notwithstanding which, she has suffered from hemiplegia,"partial paralysis." The professor, too, has had not one, but two,large families, and an "army of grand-children": but note well thestartling, the hideous fact, that every one of his children is dead!The crude grave has gaped before the cock to suck in every one ofthose shrunk forms, so indigent of vital impulse, so pauper of civism,lust, so draughty, so vague, so lean—but not before they have had timeto dower with the ah and wo of their infirmity a whole wretched "armyof grand-children." And yet this man of wisdom is on the point, in hisold age, of marrying once again, of producing for the good of his racestill more of this poor human stuff. You see the lurid significance,the point of resemblance,—you see it? And, O heaven, is it not toosad? For me, I tell you, the whole business has a tragic pitifulnesstoo deep for words. But this brings me to the discussion of a largematter. It would, for instance, be interesting to me to hear what you,a modern European, saturated with all the notions of your little day,what you consider the supreme, the all-important question for thenations of Europe at this moment. Am I far wrong in assuming that youwould rattle off half a dozen of the moot points agitating rivalfactions in your own land, select one of them, and call that "thequestion of the hour"? I wish I could see as you see; I wish to God Idid not see deeper. In order to lead you to my point, what, let me askyou, what precisely was it that ruined the old nations—that brought,say Rome, to her knees at last? Centralisation, you say, top-heavyimperialism, dilettante pessimism, the love of luxury. At bottom,believe me, it was not one of these high-sounding things—it was simplyWar; the sum total of the battles of centuries. But let me explainmyself: this is a novel view to you, and you are perhaps unable toconceive how or why war was so fatal to the old world, because you seehow little harmful it is to the new. If you collected in a promiscuousway a few millions of modern Englishmen and slew them allsimultaneously, what, think you, would be the effect from the point ofview of the State? The effect, I conceive, would be indefinitely small,wonderfully transitory; there would, of course, be a momentary lacunain the boiling surge: yet the womb of humanity is full of sap, anduberant; Ocean-tide, wooed of that Ilithyia whose breasts are many,would flow on, and the void would soon be filled. But the effect wouldonly be thus insignificant, if, as I said, your millions were takenpromiscuously (as in the modern army), not if they were pickedmen----in that case the loss (or gain) would be excessive, andpermanent for all time. Now, the war-hosts of the ancientcommonwealths—not dependent on the mechanical contrivances of themodern army—were necessarily composed of the very best men: thestrong-boned, the heart-stout, the sound in wind and limb. Under theseconditions the State shuddered through all her frame, thrilled adownevery filament, at the death of a single one of her sons in the field.As only the feeble, the aged, bided at home, their number after eachbattle became larger in proportion to the whole than before. Thus thenation, more and more, with ever-increasing rapidity, declined inbodily, and of course spiritual, quality, until the end was reached,and Nature swallowed up the weaklings whole; and thus war, which to themodern state is at worst the blockhead and indecent affairesd'honneur of persons in office—and which, surely, before you and Idie will cease altogether—was to the ancient a genuine andremorselessly fatal scourge.

'And now let me apply these facts to the Europe of our own time. We nolonger have world-serious war—but in its place we have a scourge, theeffect of which on the modern state is precisely the same as theeffect of war on the ancient, only,—in the end,—far more destructive,far more subtle, sure, horrible, disgusting. The name of thispestilence is Medical Science. Yes, it is most true, shudder—shudder—as you will! Man's best friend turns to an asp in hisbosom to sting him to the basest of deaths. The devastating growth ofmedical, and especially surgical, science—that, if you like, for usall, is "the question of the hour!" And what a question! of whatsurpassing importance, in the presence of which all other "questions"whatever dwindle into mere academic triviality. For just as the ancientState was wounded to the heart through the death of her healthy sons inthe field, just so slowly, just so silently, is the modern receivingdeadly hurt by the botching and tinkering of her unhealthy children.The net result is in each case the same—the altered ratio of the totalamount of reproductive health to the total amount of reproductivedisease. They recklessly spent their best; we sedulously conserve ourworst; and as they pined and died of anaemia, so we, unless we repent,must perish in a paroxysm of black-blood apoplexy. And this prospectbecomes more certain, when you reflect that the physician as we knowhim is not, like other men and things, a being of gradual growth, ofslow evolution: from Adam to the middle of the last century the worldsaw nothing even in the least resembling him. No son of Paian he, buta fatherless, full-grown birth from the incessant matrix of ModernTime, so motherly of monstrous litters of "Gorgon and Hydra andChimaeras dire"; you will understand what I mean when you consider thequite recent date of, say, the introduction of anaesthetics orantiseptics, the discovery of the knee-jerk, bacteriology, or even ofsuch a doctrine as the circulation of the blood. We are at this verytime, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enableman to laugh at disease—laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling itsnatural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense ofdestroying its ever-expanding existence. Do you know that at thismoment your hospitals are crammed with beings in human likenesssuffering from a thousand obscure and subtly-ineradicable ills, all ofwhom, if left alone, would die almost at once, but ninety in thehundred of whom will, as it is, be sent forth "cured," likemissionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, tomingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their proteanvileness? Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the childrenare already purblind? Have you gauged the importance of your tremendousconsumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from theirsale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth andthrice loathsome age among the helot-classes? Do you know that in thecourse of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus toHyde Park Corner, during which time I observed some five hundredpeople, of whom twenty-seven only were perfectly healthy, well-formedmen, and eighteen healthy, beautiful women? On every hand—with athrill of intensest joy, I say it!—is to be seen, if not yetcommencing civilisation, then progress, progress—wide as theworld—toward it: only here—at the heart—is there decadence, fattydegeneration. Brain-evolution—and favouring airs—and the ripeningtime—and the silent Will of God, of God—all these in conspiracy seemto be behind, urging the whole ship's company of us to some undreamableluxury of glory—when lo, this check, artificial, evitable. Less death,more disease—that is the sad, the unnatural record; childrenespecially—so sensitive to the physician's art—living on by hundredsof thousands, bearing within them the germs of wide-spreading sorrow,who in former times would have died. And if you consider that theproper function of the doctor is the strictly limited one of curing thecurable, rather than of self-gloriously perpetuating the incurable, youmay find it difficult to give a quite rational answer to this simplequestion: why? Nothing is so sure as that to the unit it is acruelty; nothing so certain as that to humanity it is a wrong; to saythat such and such an one was sent by the All Wise, and musttherefore be not merely permitted, but elaborately coaxed and forced,to live, is to utter a blasphemy against Man at which even the ribaldtongue of a priest might falter; and as a matter of fact, society, injust contempt for this species of argument, never hesitates to hang,for its own imagined good, its heaven-sent catholics, protestants,sheep, sheep-stealers, etc. What then, you ask, would I do with theseunholy ones? To save the State would I pierce them with a sword, orleave them to the slow throes of their agonies? Ah, do not expect me toanswer that question—I do not know what to answer. The whole spirit ofthe present is one of a broad and beautiful, if quite thoughtless,humanism, and I, a child of the present, cannot but be borne along byit, coerced into sympathy with it. "Beautiful" I say: for if anywherein the world you have seen a sight more beautiful than a group ofhospital savants bending with endless scrupulousness over a littlepauper child, concentering upon its frailty the whole human skill andwisdom of ages, so have not I. Here have you the full realisation of aparable diviner than that of the man who went down from Jerusalem toJericho. Beautiful then; with at least surface beauty, like the serpentlachesis mutus; but, like many beautiful things, deadly too,inhuman. And, on the whole, an answer will have to be found. As forme, it is a doubt which has often agitated me, whether the centraldogma of Judaism and Christianity alike can, after all, be really oneof the inner verities of this our earthly being—the dogma, that by theshedding of the innocent blood, and by that alone, shall the race ofman find cleansing and salvation. Will no agony of reluctance overcomethe necessity that one man die, "so that the whole people perish not"?Can it be true that by nothing less than the "three days of pestilence"shall the land be purged of its stain, and is this old divinealternative about to confront us in new, modern form? Does theinscrutable Artemis indeed demand offerings of human blood to suage heranger? Most sad that man should ever need, should ever have needed, tofoul his hand in the [Greek: musaron aima] of his own veins! But whatis, is. And can it be fated that the most advanced civilisation of thefuture shall needs have in it, as the first and chief element of itsglory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism—theimmolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail? Is it indeedpart of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one daybow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he runnot to a waste wilderness? Shall the physician, the accoucheur, ofthe time to come be expected, and commanded, to do on the ephod andbreast-plate, anoint his head with the oil of gladness, and add to thefunction of healer the function of Sacrificial Priest? These you say,are wild, dark questions. Wild enough, dark enough. We know howSparta—the "man-taming Sparta" Simonides calls her—answered them.Here was the complete subordination of all unit-life to the well-beingof the Whole. The child, immediately on his entry into the world, fellunder the control of the State: it was not left to the judgment of hisparents, as elsewhere, whether he should be brought up or not, but acommission of the Phyle in which he was born decided the question. Ifhe was weakly, if he had any bodily unsightliness, he was exposed on aplace called Taygetus, and so perished. It was a consequence of thisthat never did the sun in his course light on man half so godlystalwart, on woman half so houri-lovely, as in stern and stout oldSparta. Death, like all mortal, they must bear; disease, once and forall, they were resolved to have done with. The word which they used toexpress the idea "ugly," meant also "hateful," "vile," "disgraceful"—and I need hardly point out to you the significance of thatfact alone; for they considered—and rightly—that there is nosort of natural reason why every denizen of earth should not beperfectly hale, integral, sane, beautiful—if only very moderate painsbe taken to procure this divine result. One fellow, indeed, calledNancleidas, grew a little too fat to please the sensitive eyes of theSpartans: I believe he was periodically whipped. Under a system so verybarbarous, the super-sweet, egoistic voice of the club-footed poetByron would, of course, never have been heard: one brief egoistic"lament" on Taygetus, and so an end. It is not, however, certain thatthe world could not have managed very well without Lord Byron. The onething that admits of no contradiction is that it cannot manage withoutthe holy citizen, and that disease, to men and to nations, can have butone meaning, annihilation near or ultimate. At any rate, from theseremarks, you will now very likely be able to arrive at someunderstanding of the wording of the advertisements which I sent to thepapers.'

Zaleski, having delivered himself of this singular tirade, paused:replaced the sepulchral relief in its niche: drew a drapery of silvercloth over his bare feet and the hem of his antique garment of Babylon:and then continued:

'After some time the answer to the advertisement at length arrived; butwhat was my disgust to find that it was perfectly unintelligible to me.I had asked for a date and an address: the reply came giving a date,and an address, too—but an address wrapped up in cypher, which, ofcourse, I, as a supposed member of the society, was expected to be ableto read. At any rate, I now knew the significance of the incongruouscircumstance that the Latin proverb mens sana etc. should be adoptedas the motto of a Greek society; the significance lay in this, that themotto contained an address—the address of their meeting-place, or atleast, of their chief meeting-place. I was now confronted with the taskof solving—and of solving quickly, without the loss of an hour—thisenigma; and I confess that it was only by the most violent andextraordinary concentration of what I may call the dissecting faculty,that I was able to do so in good time. And yet there was no specialdifficulty in the matter. For looking at the motto as it stood incypher, the first thing I perceived was that, in order to read thesecret, the heart-shaped figure must be left out of consideration, ifthere was any consistency in the system of cyphers at all, for itbelonged to a class of symbols quite distinct from that of all theothers, not being, like them, a picture-letter. Omitting this,therefore, and taking all the other vowels and consonants whetheractually represented in the device or not, I now got the proverb in theform mens sana in ... pore sano. I wrote this down, and whatinstantly struck me was the immense, the altogether unusual, number ofliquids in the motto—six in all, amounting to no less than one-thirdof the total number of letters! Putting these all together you getmnnnnr, and you can see that the very appearance of the "m's" and"n's" (especially when written) running into one another, of itselfsuggests a stream of water. Having previously arrived at the conclusionof London as the meeting-place, I could not now fail to go on to theinference of the Thames; there, or near there, would I find thosewhom I sought. The letters "mnnnnr," then, meant the Thames: what didthe still remaining letters mean? I now took these remaining letters,placing them side by side: I got aaa, sss, ee, oo, p and i. Juxtaposingthese nearly in the order indicated by the frequency of theiroccurrence, and their place in the Roman alphabet, you at once andinevitably get the word Aesopi. And now I was fairly startled by thissymmetrical proof of the exactness of my own deductions in otherrespects, but, above all, far above all, by the occurrence of that word"Aesopi." For who was Aesopus? He was a slave who was freed for hiswise and witful sallies: he is therefore typical of the liberty of thewise—their moral manumission from temporary and narrow law; he wasalso a close friend of Croesus: he is typical, then, of the union ofwisdom with wealth—true wisdom with real wealth; lastly, and aboveall, he was thrown by the Delphians from a rock on account of his wit:he is typical, therefore, of death—the shedding of blood—as a resultof wisdom, this thought being an elaboration of Solomon's great maxim,"in much wisdom is much sorrow." But how accurately all this fitted inwith what would naturally be the doctrines of the men on whose track Iwas! I could no longer doubt the justness of my reasonings, andimmediately, while you slept, I set off for London.

'Of my haps in London I need not give you a very particular account.The meeting was to be held on the 15th, and by the morning of the 13thI had reached a place called Wargrave, on the Thames. There I hired alight canoe, and thence proceeded down the river in a somewhat zig-zagmanner, narrowly examining the banks on either side, and keeping asharp out-look for some board, or sign, or house, that would seem tobetoken any sort of connection with the word "Aesopi." In this way Ipassed a fruitless day, and having reached the shipping region, madefast my craft, and in a spirit of diablerie spent the night in acommon lodging-house, in the company of the most remarkable humanbeings, characterised by an odour of alcohol, and a certain obtrusivebonne camaraderie which the prevailing fear of death could notaltogether repress. By dawn of the 14th I was on my journey again—on,and ever on. Eagerly I longed for a sight of the word I sought: but Ihad misjudged the men against whose cunning I had measured my own. Ishould have remembered more consistently that they were no ordinarymen. As I was destined to find, there lay a deeper, more cabalisticmeaning in the motto than any I had been able to dream of. I hadproceeded on my pilgrimage down the river a long way past Greenwich,and had now reached a desolate and level reach of land stretching awayon either hand. Paddling my boat from the right to the left bank, Icame to a spot where a little arm of the river ran up some few yardsinto the land. The place wore a specially dreary and deserted aspect:the land was flat, and covered with low shrubs. I rowed into this armof shallow water and rested on my oar, wearily bethinking myself whatwas next to be done. Looking round, however, I saw to my surprise thatat the end of this arm there was a short narrow pathway—a windingroad—leading from the river-bank. I stood up in the boat and followedits course with my eyes. It was met by another road also winding amongthe bushes, but in a slightly different direction. At the end of thiswas a little, low, high-roofed, round house, without doors or windows.And then—and then—tingling now with a thousand raptures—I beheld apool of water near this structure, and then another low house, acounterpart of the first—and then, still leading on in the samedirection, another pool—and then a great rock, heart-shaped—and thenanother winding road—and then another pool of water. All was amodel—exact to the minutest particular—of the device on thepapyrus! The first long-waved line was the river itself; the threeshort-waved lines were the arm of the river and the two pools; thethree snakes were the three winding roads; the two trianglesrepresenting the letter #A# were the two high-roofed round houses; theheart was the rock! I sprang, now thoroughly excited, from the boat,and ran in headlong haste to the end of the last lake. Here there was arather thick and high growth of bushes, but peering among them, my eyeat once caught a white oblong board supported on a stake: on this, inblack letters, was marked the words, "DESCENSUS AESOPI." It wasnecessary, therefore, to go down: the meeting-place was subterranean.It was without difficulty that I discovered a small opening in theground, half hidden by the underwood; from the orifice I found that aseries of wooden steps led directly downwards, and I at once boldlydescended. No sooner, however, had I touched the bottom than I wasconfronted by an ancient man in Hellenic apparel, armed with the Greekziphos and peltè. His eyes, accustomed to the gloom, pierced melong with an earnest scrutiny.

'"You are a Spartan?" he asked at length.

'"Yes," I answered promptly.

'"Then how is it you do not know that I am stone deaf?"

'I shrugged, indicating that for the moment I had forgotten the fact.

'"You are a Spartan?" he repeated.

'I nodded with emphasis.

'"Then, how is it you omit to make the sign?"

'Now, you must not suppose that at this point I was nonplussed, for inthat case you would not give due weight to the strange inherent powerof the mind to rise to the occasion of a sudden emergency—to stretchitself long to the length of an event; I do not hesitate to say thatno combination of circumstances can defeat a vigorous brain fullyalert, and in possession of itself. With a quickness to which thelightning-flash is tardy, I remembered that this was a spot indicatedby the symbols on the papyrus: I remembered that this same papyrus wasalways placed under the tongue of the dead; I remembered, too, thatamong that very nation whose language had afforded the motto, to "turnup the thumb" (pollicem vertere) was a symbol significant of death.I touched the under surface of my tongue with the tip of my thumb. Theaged man was appeased. I passed on, and examined the place.

'It was simply a vast circular hall, the arched roof of which wassupported on colonnades of what I took to be pillars of porphyry. Downthe middle and round the sides ran tables of the same material; thewalls were clothed in hangings of sable velvet, on which, in infinitereproduction, was embroidered in cypher the motto of the society. Thechairs were cushioned in the same stuff. Near the centre of the circlestood a huge statue, of what really seemed to me to be pure beatengold. On the great ebon base was inscribed the word [Greek: LUKURGOS].From the roof swung by brazen chains a single misty lamp.

'Having seen this much I reascended to the land of light, and beingfully resolved on attending the meeting on the next day or night, andnot knowing what my fate might then be, I wrote to inform you of themeans by which my body might be traced. 'But on the next day a newthought occurred to me: I reasoned thus: "these men are not commonassassins; they wage a too rash warfare against diseased life, but notagainst life in general. In all probability they have a quiteimmoderate, quite morbid reverence for the sanctity of healthy life.They will not therefore take mine, unless they suppose me to be theonly living outsider who has a knowledge of their secret, and thereforethink it absolutely necessary for the carrying out of their beneficentdesigns that my life should be sacrificed. I will therefore preventsuch a motive from occurring to them by communicating to another theirwhole secret, and—if the necessity should arise—letting them knowthat I have done so, without telling them who that other is. Thus mylife will be assured." I therefore wrote to you on that day a fullaccount of all I had discovered, giving you to understand, however, onthe envelope, that you need not examine the contents for some littletime.

'I waited in the subterranean vault during the greater part of the nextday; but not till midnight did the confederates gather. What happenedat that meeting I shall not disclose, even to you. All wassacred—solemn—full of awe. Of the choral hymns there sung, thehierophantic ritual, liturgies, paeans, the gorgeous symbolisms—of thewealth there represented, the culture, art, self-sacrifice—of themingling of all the tongues of Europe—I shall not speak; nor shall Irepeat names which you would at once recognise as familiar toyou—though I may, perhaps, mention that the "Morris," whose nameappears on the papyrus sent to me is a well-known littérateur of thatname. But this in confidence, for some years at least.

'Let me, however, hurry to a conclusion. My turn came to speak. I roseundaunted, and calmly disclosed myself; during the moment of hush, ofwide-eyed paralysis that ensued, I declared that fully as I coincidedwith their views in general, I found myself unable to regard theirmethods with approval—these I could not but consider too rash, tooharsh, too premature. My voice was suddenly drowned by one universal,earth-shaking roar of rage and contempt, during which I was surroundedon all sides, seized, pinioned, and dashed on the central table. Allthis time, in the hope and love of life, I passionately shouted that Iwas not the only living being who shared in their secret. But my voicewas drowned, and drowned again, in the whirling tumult. None heard me.A powerful and little-known anaesthetic—the means by which all theirmurders have been accomplished—was now produced. A cloth, saturatedwith the fluid, was placed on my mouth and nostrils. I was stifled.Sense failed. The incubus of the universe blackened down upon my brain.How I tugged at the mandrakes of speech! was a locked pugilist withlanguage! In the depth of my extremity the half-thought, I remember,floated, like a mist, through my fading consciousness, that nowperhaps—now—there was silence around me; that now, could my palsiedlips find dialect, I should be heard, and understood. My whole soulrose focussed to the effort—my body jerked itself upwards. At thatmoment I knew my spirit truly great, genuinely sublime. For I didutter something—my dead and shuddering tongue did babble forth somecoherency. Then I fell back, and all was once more the ancient Dark. Onthe next day when I woke, I was lying on my back in my little boat,placed there by God knows whose hands. At all events, one thing wasclear—I had uttered something—I was saved. With what of strengthremained to me I reached the place where I had left your calèche, andstarted on my homeward way. The necessity to sleep was strong upon me,for the fumes of the anaesthetic still clung about my brain; hence,after my long journey, I fainted on my passage through the house, andin this condition you found me.

'Such then is the history of my thinkings and doings in connection withthis ill-advised confraternity: and now that their cabala is known toothers—to how many others they cannot guess—I think it is notunlikely that we shall hear little more of the Society of Sparta.'

THE END