A Modern Aladdin

THE END OF THE MASTER'S MONOLOGUE

He finished speaking, and Oliver sat gazing at him open-mouthed. He was bewildered – he was stunned. It began to dawn upon his stupefied wits that he was in the very presence of and face to face with a dreadful, grotesque miracle. "And you," said he, in a low voice, and then stopped short, for the question stuck in his throat.

The other smiled. "And I?" said he. "What is it, then, that you would ask?"

"Are – are you – are you – Nicholas Jovus?"

The other laughed. "What a droll question!" said he. "That thing happened four hundred years ago."

Oliver's skin began to creep; but then he was growing used to that feeling. The two sat watching one another for a little while in silence, the one with dull bewilderment of wonder, the other smiling oddly. Presently the smile broke into a laugh. "You are very droll, Oliver," said he; "you would believe anything that I told you. I have seen and done many strange things in my days, but as for being four hundred years old – Bah! my child, why all this that I have been telling you is only a story, a legend, a tradition, handed down from one to another of us who dabble in alchemy; for I confess to being one of such. No doubt it has grown absurdly as it has been transmitted from man to man. Nevertheless, there are in that story some strange matters – one might almost call them coincidences – that appear to fit in with things that you have seen, and which might, with an irrational mind such as yours, strengthen absurd speculations." He sat watching Oliver smilingly for a while. "That mirror of Nicholas Jovus's," said he, suddenly – "what would you say if I had it in my own possession? Nay, what would you say if it were in this very room?" Oliver looked sharply around, and again the other laughed. "You need not be alarmed," said he; "it is very harmless. But come, I will be perfectly frank; it is in this room, and I will show it to you. It is my intention that we shall thoroughly understand one another, and we must arrive at such understanding now. So understanding one another, we can best be of benefit to each other. But first of all, since we are in the way of being frank, I will begin by making a confession. I confess to you, my dear child – yes, I confess frankly that the ugly suspicions that you have entertained about me have not been entirely without ground. I confess that I had not intended that you should have left that place down yonder, from which you so miraculously escaped. Perhaps this confession may at first shock you, but I am sure, when I explain matters, you will understand that I was not entirely unjustified in seeking to destroy you. I have, I think I may say, very considerable skill in foretelling events by the stars – not foretelling them perfectly, of course, for the science of astrology is not yet perfected, but looking into futurity in a general way. Nevertheless, imperfect as the science of astrology is, my reading of fate was clear enough to teach me who and what you were, and, in a general way, where you were to be found. That reading told me that, unless some heroic remedy were devised, the time drew near when you would be my ruin – " he stopped suddenly, his gaze fixed itself absently above Oliver's head, and Oliver saw his face grow pale and haggard, as if it saw some dreadful vision; he drew in his breath between his shut teeth – "and my death," said he, in a low voice, completing his speech, and shuddering as he spoke the words. Then he passed his hand over his face, and when he drew it away again his expression was as smiling and as debonair as ever. "But we will not speak of such unpleasant things," said he. "I have only mentioned them so far that you might see that I was not altogether inexcusable in seeking to rid myself of you. In conclusion, I will say that about the time that I located with some accuracy the particular spot where you were living, I also discovered that for which I had been seeking for many years – the underground cell in which was Arnold de Villeneuve's laboratory. This house is built upon the ground whereon his stood. It is a wretched tumble-down affair, mean and squalid, yet I have fitted it up for my home; for, as you have discovered, it connects almost directly with that underground vault where the student and the master discovered their great secret.

"Unfortunately, for certain reasons that I need not mention, I could not pass that circle and the sign upon the wall around the door-way. So, not being able to pass it myself, it was a great temptation for me to send you to get those bottles for me, and then, in your destruction, to seal my own security. It was a great temptation, I say, and I yielded to it. What I did was unpleasant to you, perhaps, but that now is all passed and gone. Let it be forgotten, and hereafter we shall, I know, be great friends. That attempt has taught me a lesson. I tried, in spite of fate, to destroy you, and failed; now I will try kindness, and see if that will eliminate you from my life. I have it in my power to make you the richest man in the world – next to myself; and what is more, I will do so, and then we shall separate forever. As for me, I shall live in Paris, for there is no other place in the world for a man of parts like myself. You, upon your part, may live wherever you choose – except in Paris. You shall quit Paris forever. Do you understand? —forever! Should you be so unfortunate as to ever return here, should you be so unhappy as ever to emerge from your obscurity and cross my path, I will annihilate you. But before I annihilate you I will make you suffer the torments of hell, and wish that you had not been born. Do you understand?"

Oliver nodded his head.

"Very well, then, my child, we comprehend one another. Now I will show you Nicholas Jovus's mirror, which I told you was in my possession. It is a unique curiosity in its way."

He rose, and crossing the room to what appeared to be the door of a closet or cabinet, opened it, and showed within a hollow space, partly hidden by a curtain of some heavy black material. Oliver had followed him, and as the master drew back the curtain, he saw within an oval mirror, set in a heavy frame of copper.

"Now, Oliver," said the master, "what is it that you would wish to see?"

The thought of the perils from which he had escaped and the perils which still lay before him was uppermost in Oliver's mind. "I should like," said he, "to see that which will bring me the most danger in my life."

The master laughed. "It is a wise wish, my child," said he; "look and see."

He stood aside, and Oliver came forward and gazed into the glass. At first he saw nothing but his own face reflected clear and sharp as in an ordinary mirror; then suddenly, as he gazed, the bright surface of the glass clouded over as though with a breath blown upon it, and his own face faded away from his view. The next moment it cleared again, and he saw before him the face and form of a young lady, the most beautiful he had ever seen. He had only just time to observe that she sat in the window recess of what appeared to be a large and richly appointed room, and that she was reading a letter. Then all was gone – the master had dropped the curtain across the glass.

Oliver put his fingers to his forehead and looked about him, dazed and bewildered, for he felt as though he were going crazy in the presence of all the grotesque wonders through which he was passing.

The master also seemed disturbed. He frowned; he bit his lips; he looked at Oliver from under his brows. "Who is the young lady?" said he at last.

"I do not know," said Oliver, faintly. "I never saw her before."

"Here is a new complication," said the master. "One woman is more dangerous than a score of men." He brooded for a moment or two, and then his face cleared again. "No matter," said he; "we will not go to meet our difficulties, but will wait till they come to us. All the same, Oliver, take warning by one who knows that whereof he speaks. Avoid the women as you would a pitfall: they have been the ruin of many a better man. Remember that which I have told you of Raymond Lulli. He might perhaps have been living to-day, the richest and happiest man in the world, had he not been so stupid as to love Agnes de Villeneuve."

Oliver made no reply, but even while the other was uttering his warning he had determined in his own mind to seize the very first opportunity of looking again, and at his leisure, into the mirror, and to see again that danger which appeared in so alluring a form.

ACT II

Scene First. —An inn on the road to Flourens

A calash has lately arrived, and the horses are now being baited at the inn stables. The day is excessively warm and sultry, so that the young gentleman who came in the calash is having his bread, and a bottle of the wine for which the inn is famous, served to him under the great chestnut-tree before the door. It is Oliver Munier, but so different from the Oliver that left Paris a year before that even his mother would hardly have known him. He is no longer that peasant lad in blouse who crouched, shrunk together, in the corner of the great coach of the rich American uncle, being carried with thunderous rumble to some hideous and unknown fate which he did not dare to tell even to his own soul. He wore a silk coat, a satin waistcoat, satin breeches, silk stockings, a laced hat; he wore fine cambric cuffs at his wrists, and a lace cravat with a diamond solitaire at his throat, and his manners befitted his dress.

He carried with him a small and curiously wrought iron box, of which he seemed excessively careful, keeping it close beside him, and every now and then touching it with his hand, as though to make sure that it had not been spirited away.

The innkeeper, a merry little pot-bellied rogue, as round as a dumpling and as red as an apple, served him in person, talking garrulously the while. Monsieur was on his way to Flourens? Ah! there was great excitement there to-day. What! Monsieur did not know? He must then be a stranger not to know that Monseigneur the Marquis had left Paris, and was coming back to the château to live.

Oliver was interested. He had seen monseigneur in Flourens once some two or three years before, when he had paid a flying visit to the château to put on another turn of the screw, and to squeeze all the money he could from the starving peasants of the estate, to pay some of his more hungry and clamorous creditors. All Flourens had known that the marquis was over head and ears in debt, and now the little gossiping landlord added the supplement. It was, he told Oliver, through no choice that Monseigneur the Marquis was to come back to the country again, but because he had no more wherewith to support his Paris life. He loathed Flourens, and he loved Paris; he hated the dull life of the country, and he adored the gayety of the city, its powder, its patches, its masques, its court, its vanity, its show, and, most of all, its intrigues and its cards. But all these cost money, for Monseigneur the Marquis had lived like a prince of the blood, and it had cost a deal. Ah, yes! such little matters as intrigues and the cards cost treasures of money in Paris, he had heard say. So now the marquis and the family were coming back again to Flourens.

By the time that the landlord had half done his gossip, Oliver had finished his bread and wine; then, the horses being refreshed, he bade the servant whom he had brought down from Paris with him to order out the calash. The landlord would have assisted Oliver in carrying his iron box, but Oliver would not permit it. He commanded him somewhat sharply to let it alone, and he himself stowed it safely within the calash.

His man-servant was holding the door open for him to enter, and Oliver already had his foot placed upon the step ready to ascend, when the clatter of hoofs and the rumble of a coach caught his attention, and he waited to see it pass.

It was a huge, lumbering affair, as big as a small house, and was dragged thunderously along by six horses. A number of outriders surrounded it as it came sweeping along amid a cloud of dust, in the midst of which the whips of the postilions cracked and snapped like pistol-shots.

So Oliver waited, with some curiosity, until the whole affair had thundered by along the road, with its crashing, creaking, rattling clatter, preceded by the running footmen with their long canes, and the outriders in their uniform of white and blue. It was all gone in a moment – a moment that left Oliver standing dumb and rooted. In that instant of passing he had seen three faces through the open windows of the coach: the first, that of a stout, red-faced man, thick-lipped, sensual; second, that of a lady, pale and large-eyed, once beautiful perhaps, now faded and withered. But the third! The third face was looking directly at him, and it was the glimpse of it that left him rooted, bereft of motion. It was the same face that he had seen that first day in the magic mirror in the master's house; the face that he had seen in that mirror, and unknown to the master, not once, not twice, but scores of times – hundreds of times.

The landlord's voice brought him to himself with a shock. "Monsieur has dropped his handkerchief."

Oliver took the handkerchief mechanically from his hand, and as he entered the coach like one in a dream, he heard the landlord say, as his servant closed the door with a clash.

"That was Monseigneur the Marquis on his way to the Château Flourens."

Scene Second. —The Widow Munier's house in Flourens. Not the poor rude hut that Oliver had left her in when he first went to Paris, but the house of the late Doctor Fouchette – the best house in the town. The Widow Munier is discovered sitting at the window, with her face close to the glass, looking down the street expectantly

Oliver had been gone a year, and that year had wrought great changes with her. All the town knew that a great fortune had come to her, and she was no longer the poor widow Munier, the relict of Jean Munier the tailor; she was Madame Munier.

After Oliver had been gone to Paris a week, there came a letter for her from him, and in the letter was money. Every week after came such another packet with more and more money – enough to lift her from poverty to opulence. She was no longer obliged to eat cabbage soup, or live in the poor little hut on the road. Just about that time Doctor Fouchette died, and, at Oliver's bidding, she took the house for herself. It was very pleasant to her, but there was one thing that she could not understand. Her rich American brother-in-law had distinctly told her that he and Oliver were to go to Paris to choose a house, and that she was then to be sent for to live with them. She had never been sent for, and that was what she did not understand. Yet the weekly letters from Paris compensated for much. In those letters Oliver often told her that he and his uncle were in business together, and were growing rich at such a rate as no one had ever grown rich before. They were in the diamond business, he said, and in a little while he hoped to come home with more money than an East Indian prince. Then, at last, a little while after the twelvemonth had gone by, came a letter saying that he would be home upon the next Wednesday, in the afternoon. So now Madame Munier was sitting at the parlor waiting for that coming.

A calash came rattling along the stony street, and as it passed, the good people came to the doors and windows and looked after it. It did not stop at the inn, but continued straight along until it came to the door of Madame Munier's house. Then it drew up to the foot-way, and a servant in livery sprang to the ground and opened the door. A young gentleman stepped out, carrying an oblong iron box by a handle in the lid.

In thirty minutes all Flourens knew that Oliver Munier had returned home; in sixty minutes they knew he was as rich as Crœsus.

As Oliver released himself from his mother's embrace, he looked around him. It was all very different from the little hut on the road that he had left twelve months ago, but he seemed dissatisfied. He shook his head.

"It will never do," said he.

"What will never do?" said his mother.

"This house, this furniture – all," said Oliver, with a wave of his hand.

His mother stared. "It is a fine house," said she, "and the furniture is handsome. What, then, would you have?"

"The house is small; it is narrow; it is mean," said Oliver.

His mother stared wider than ever. "It is the best house in Flourens," said she.

"Perhaps," said Oliver; "but it does not please me. It will serve for us so long as we remain here, but I hope soon to remove to a better place – one more suitable for people of our condition."

Madame Munier's eyes grew as round as teacups. She began to notice that Oliver's manners and speech were very different from what they had been before he left Flourens a year ago. She herself had never used the barbarous Flourennaise patois.

"Remove to a better place?" she repeated, mechanically. "To one more suitable for people of our condition?"

"Yes," said Oliver. "I have in my mind a château in Normandy of which I have heard. I think of buying it."

Madame Munier's wonder had reached as high as it could soar. She began to wonder whether Oliver had not gone mad.

He gave her scarcely any time to recover before he administered another and a greater shock.