Part 20 (1/2)
CHAPTER x.x.xII.
MARGRAVE threw himself on a seat just under the great anaconda; I closed and locked the door. When I had done so, my eye fell on the young man's face, and I was surprised to see that it had lost its colour; that it showed great anxiety, great distress; that his hands were visibly trembling.
”What is this?” he said in feeble tones, and raising himself half from his seat as if with great effort. ”Help me up! come away! Something in this room is hostile to me, hostile, overpowering! What can it be?”
”Truth and my presence,” answered a stern, low voice; and Sir Philip Derval, whose slight form the huge bulk of the dead elephant had before obscured from my view, came suddenly out from the shadow into the full rays of the lamps which lit up, as if for Man's revel, that mocking catacomb for the playmates of Nature which he enslaves for his service or slays for his sport. As Sir Philip spoke and advanced, Margrave sank back into his seat, shrinking, collapsing, nerveless; terror the most abject expressed in his staring eyes and parted lips. On the other hand, the simple dignity of Sir Philip Derval's bearing, and the mild power of his countenance, were alike inconceivably heightened. A change had come over the whole man, the more impressive because wholly undefinable.
Halting opposite Margrave he uttered some words in a language unknown to me, and stretched one hand over the young man's head. Margrave at once became stiff and rigid, as if turned to stone. Sir Philip said to me,--
”Place one of those lamps on the floor,--there, by his feet.”
I took down one of the coloured lamps from the mimic tree round which the huge anaconda coiled its spires, and placed it as I was told.
”Take the seat opposite to him, and watch.”
I obeyed.
Meanwhile, Sir Philip had drawn from his breast-pocket a small steel casket, and I observed, as he opened it, that the interior was subdivided into several compartments, each with its separate lid; from one of these he took and sprinkled over the flame of the lamp a few grains of a powder, colourless and sparkling as diamond dust. In a second or so, a delicate perfume, wholly unfamiliar to my sense, rose from the lamp.
”You would test the condition of trance; test it, and in the spirit.”
And, as he spoke, his hand rested lightly on my head. Hitherto, amidst a surprise not unmixed with awe, I had preserved a certain defiance, a certain distrust. I had been, as it were, on my guard.
But as those words were spoken, as that hand rested on my head, as that perfume arose from the lamp, all power of will deserted me. My first sensation was that of pa.s.sive subjugation; but soon I was aware of a strange intoxicating effect from the odour of the lamp, round which there now played a dazzling vapour. The room swam before me. Like a man oppressed by a nightmare, I tried to move, to cry out, feeling that to do so would suffice to burst the thrall that bound me: in vain.
A time that seemed to me inexorably long, but which, as I found afterwards, could only have occupied a few seconds, elapsed in this preliminary state, which, however powerless, was not without a vague luxurious sense of delight. And then suddenly came pain,--pain, that in rapid gradations pa.s.sed into a rending agony. Every bone, sinew, nerve, fibre of the body, seemed as if wrenched open, and as if some hitherto unconjectured Presence in the vital organization were forcing itself to light with all the pangs of travail. The veins seemed swollen to bursting, the heart labouring to maintain its action by fierce spasms. I feel in this description how language fails me. Enough that the anguish I then endured surpa.s.sed all that I have ever experienced of physical pain. This dreadful interval subsided as suddenly as it had commenced.
I felt as if a something undefinable by any name had rushed from me, and in that rush that a struggle was over. I was sensible of the pa.s.sive bliss which attends the release from torture, and then there grew on me a wonderful calm, and, in that calm, a consciousness of some lofty intelligence immeasurably beyond that which human memory gathers from earthly knowledge. I saw before me the still rigid form of Margrave, and my sight seemed, with ease, to penetrate through its covering of flesh, and to survey the mechanism of the whole interior being.
”View that tenement of clay which now seems so fair, as it was when I last beheld it, three years ago, in the house of Haroun of Aleppo!”
I looked, and gradually, and as shade after shade falls on the mountain side, while the clouds gather, and the sun vanishes at last, so the form and face on which I looked changed from exuberant youth into infirm old age,--the discoloured wrinkled skin, the bleared dim eye, the flaccid muscles, the brittle sapless bones. Nor was the change that of age alone; the expression of the countenance had pa.s.sed into gloomy discontent, and in every furrow a pa.s.sion or a vice had sown the seeds of grief.
And the brain now opened on my sight, with all its labyrinth of cells. I seemed to have the clew to every winding in the maze.
I saw therein a moral world, charred and ruined, as, in some fable I have read, the world of the moon is described to be; yet withal it was a brain of magnificent formation. The powers abused to evil had been originally of rare order,--imagination, and scope, the energies that dare, the faculties that discover. But the moral part of the brain had failed to dominate the mental,--defective veneration of what is good or great; cynical disdain of what is right and just; in fine, a great intellect first misguided, then perverted, and now falling with the decay of the body into ghastly but imposing ruins,--such was the world of that brain as it had been three years ago. And still continuing to gaze thereon, I observed three separate emanations of light,--the one of a pale red hue, the second of a pale azure, the third a silvery spark.
The red light, which grew paler and paler as I looked, undulated from the brain along the arteries, the veins, the nerves. And I murmured to myself, ”Is this the principle of animal life?”
The azure light equally permeated the frame, crossing and uniting with the red, but in a separate and distinct ray, exactly as, in the outer world, a ray of light crosses or unites with a ray of heat, though in itself a separate individual agency. And again I murmured to myself, ”Is this the principle of intellectual being, directing or influencing that of animal life; with it, yet not of it?”
But the silvery spark! What was that? Its centre seemed the brain; but I could fix it to no single organ. Nay, wherever I looked through the system, it reflected itself as a star reflects itself upon water. And I observed that while the red light was growing feebler and feebler, and the azure light was confused, irregular,--now obstructed, now hurrying, now almost lost,--the silvery spark was unaltered, un disturbed. So independent was it of all which agitated and vexed the frame, that I became strangely aware that if the heart stopped in its action, and the red light died out; if the brain were paralyzed, that energetic mind smitten into idiotcy, and the azure light wandering objectless as a meteor wanders over the mora.s.s,--still that silver spark would s.h.i.+ne the same, indestructible by aught that shattered its tabernacle. And I murmured to myself, ”Can that starry spark speak the presence of the soul? Does the silver light s.h.i.+ne within creatures to which no life immortal has been promised by Divine Revelation?”
Involuntarily I turned my sight towards the dead forms in the motley collection, and lo, in my trance or my vision, life returned to them all!--to the elephant and the serpent; to the tiger, the vulture, the beetle, the moth; to the fish and the polypus, and to yon mockery of man in the giant ape.
I seemed to see each as it lived in its native realm of earth, or of air, or of water; and the red light played more or less warm through the structure of each, and the azure light, though duller of hue, seemed to shoot through the red, and communicate to the creatures an intelligence far inferior indeed to that of man, but sufficing to conduct the current of their will, and influence the cunning of their instincts. But in none, from the elephant to the moth, from the bird in which brain was the largest to the hybrid in which life seemed to live as in plants,--in none was visible the starry silver spark. I turned my eyes from the creatures around, back again to the form cowering under the huge anaconda, and in terror at the animation which the carca.s.ses took in the awful illusions of that marvellous trance; for the tiger moved as if scenting blood, and to the eyes of the serpent the dread fascination seemed slowly returning.
Again I gazed on the starry spark in the form of the man. And I murmured to myself, ”But if this be the soul, why is it so undisturbed and undarkened by the sins which have left such trace and such ravage in the world of the brain?” And gazing yet more intently on the spark, I became vaguely aware that it was not the soul, but the halo around the soul, as the star we see in heaven is not the star itself, but its circle of rays; and if the light itself was undisturbed and undarkened, it was because no sins done in the body could annihilate its essence, nor affect the eternity of its duration. The light was clear within the ruins of its lodgment, because it might pa.s.s away, but could not be extinguished.