The Witch of Prague Part 7

Suddenly the features relaxed into an expression of rest and satisfaction. There was something unearthly in the sudden smile that flickered over the old waxen face--it was as strange and unnatural as though the cold marble effigy upon a sepulchre had laughed aloud in the gloom of an empty church.

"I see. He will love you," said the tremulous tones.

"Then it is he?"

"It is he."

With a suppressed cry of triumph Unorna lifted her head and stood upright. Then she started violently and grew very pale.

"You have probably killed him and spoiled everything," said a rich ba.s.s voice at her elbow--the very sub-ba.s.s of all possible voices.

Keyork Arabian was beside her. In her intense excitement she had not heard him enter the room, and he had surprised her at once in the breaking of their joint convention and in the revelation of her secret.

If Unorna could be said to know the meaning of the word fear in any degree whatsoever, it was in relation to Keyork Arabian, the man who during the last few years had been her helper and a.s.sociate in the great experiment. Of all men she had known in her life, he was the only one whom she felt to be beyond the influence of her powers, the only one whom she felt that she could not charm by word, or touch, or look. The odd shape of his head, she fancied, figured the outline and proportions of his intelligence, which was, as it were, pyramidal, standing upon a base so broad and firm as to place the centre of its ponderous gravity far beyond her reach to disturb. There was certainly no other being of material reality that could have made Unorna start and turn pale by its inopportune appearance.

"The best thing you can do is to put him to sleep at once," said the little man. "You can be angry afterwards, and, I thank heaven, so can I--and shall."

"Forget," said Unorna, once more laying her hand upon the waxen brow.

"Let it be as though I had not spoken with you. Drink, in your sleep, of the fountain of life, take new strength into your body and new blood into your heart. Live, and when I next wake you be younger by as many months as there shall pa.s.s hours till then. Sleep."

A low sigh trembled in the h.o.a.ry beard. The eyelids drooped over the sunken eyes, there was a slight motion of the limbs, and all was still, save for the soft and regular breathing.

"The united patience of the seven archangels, coupled with that of Job and Simon Stylites, would not survive your acquaintance for a day,"

observed Keyork Arabian.

"Is he mine or yours?" Unorna asked, turning to him and pointing to the sleeper.

She was quite ready to face her companion after the first shock of his unexpected appearance. His small blue eyes sparkled angrily.

"I am not versed in the law concerning real estate in human kind in the Kingdom of Bohemia," he answered. "You may have property in a couple of hundredweight, more or less, of old bones rather the worse for the wear and tear of a century, but I certainly have some ownership in the life.

Without me, you would have been the possessor of a remarkably fine skeleton by this time--and of nothing more."

As he spoke, his extraordinary voice ran over half a dozen notes of portentous depth, like the opening of a fugue on the pedals of an organ.

Unorna laughed scornfully.

"He is mine, Keyork Arabian, alive or dead. If the experiment fails, and he dies, the loss is mine, not yours. Moreover, what I have done is done, and I will neither submit to your reproaches nor listen to your upbraidings. Is that enough?"

"Of its kind, quite. I will build an altar to Ingrat.i.tude, we will bury our friend beneath the shrine, and you shall serve in the temple. You could deify all the cardinal sins if you would only give your attention to the subject, merely by the monstrously imposing proportions you would know how to give them."

"Does it ease you to make such an amazing noise?" inquired Unorna, raising her eyebrows.

"Immensely. Our friend cannot hear it, and you can. You dare to tell me that if he dies you are the only loser. Do fifty years of study count for nothing? Look at me. I am an old man, and unless I find the secret of life here, in this very room, before many years are over, I must die--die, do you understand? Do you know what it means to die? How can you comprehend that word--you girl, you child, you thing of five and twenty summers!"

"It was to be supposed that your own fears were at the root of your anger," observed Unorna, sitting down upon her chair and calmly folding her hands as though to wait until the storm should pa.s.s over.

"Is there anything at the root of anything except Self? You moth, you b.u.t.terfly, you thread of floating gossamer! How can you understand the incalculable value of Self--of that which is all to me and nothing to you, or which, being yours, is everything to you and to me nothing? You are so young--you still believe in things, and interests, and good and evil, and love and hate, truth and falsehood, and a hundred notions which are not facts, but only contrasts between one self and another!

What were you doing here when I found you playing with life and death, perhaps with my life, for a gipsy trick, in the crazy delusion that this old parcel of humanity can see the shadows of things which are not yet?

I saw, I heard. How could he answer anything save that which was in your own mind, when you were forcing him with your words and your eyes to make a reply of some sort, or perish? Ah! You see now. You understand now. I have opened your eyes a little. Why did he hesitate, and suffer?

Because you asked that to which he knew there was no answer. And you tortured him with your will until his individuality fell into yours, and spoke your words."

Unorna's head sank a little and she covered her eyes. The truth of what he said flashed upon her suddenly and unexpectedly, bringing with it the doubt which had left her at the moment when the sleeper had spoken. She could not hide her discomfiture and Keyork Arabian saw his advantage.

"And for what?" he asked, beginning to pace the broad room. "To know whether a man will love you or not! You seem to have forgotten what you are. Is not such a poor and foolish thing as love at the command of those who can say to the soul, be this, or be that, and who are obeyed?

Have you found a second Keyork Arabian, over whom your eyes have no power--neither the one nor the other?"

He laughed rather brutally at the thought of her greatest physical peculiarity, but then suddenly stopped short. She had lifted her face and those same eyes were fastened upon him, the black and the gray, in a look so savage and fierce that even he was checked, if not startled.

"They are certainly very remarkable eyes," he said, more calmly, and with a certain uneasiness which Unorna did not notice. "I wonder whom you have found who is able to look you in the face without losing himself. I suppose it can hardly be my fascinating self whom you wish to enthrall," he added, conscious after a moment's trial that he was proof against her influence.

"Hardly," answered Unorna, with a bitter laugh.

"If I were the happy man you would not need that means of bringing me to your feet. It is a pity that you do not want me. We should make a very happy couple. But there is much against me. I am an old man, Unorna. My figure was never of divine proportions, and as for my face, Nature made it against her will. I know all that--and yet, I was young once, and eloquent. I could make love then--I believe that I could still if it would amuse you."

"Try it," said Unorna, who, like most people, could not long be angry with the gnome-like little sage.

CHAPTER VI

"I could make love--yes, and since you tell me to try, I will."

He came and stood before her, straightening his diminutive figure in a comical fashion as though he were imitating a soldier on parade.

"In the first place," he said, "in order to appreciate my skill, you should realise the immense disadvantages under which I labour. I am a dwarf, my dear Unorna. In the presence of that kingly wreck of a Homeric man"--he pointed to the sleeper beside them--"I am a Thersites, if not a pigmy. To have much chance of success I should ask you to close your eyes, and to imagine that my stature matches my voice. That gift at least, I flatter myself, would have been appreciated on the plains of Troy. But in other respects I resemble neither the long-haired Greeks nor the trousered Trojans. I am old and hideous, and in outward appearance I am as like Socrates as in inward disposition I am totally different from him. Admit, since I admit it, that I am the ugliest and smallest man of your acquaintance."

"It is not to be denied," said Unorna with a smile.

"The admission will make the performance so much the more interesting.

And now, as the conjurer says when he begins, observe that there is no deception. That is the figure of speech called lying, because there is to be nothing but deception from beginning to end. Did you ever consider the nature of a lie, Unorna? It is a very interesting subject."

"I thought you were going to make love to me."

"True; how easily one forgets those little things! And yet no woman ever forgave a man who forgot to make love when she expected him to do so.

For a woman, who is a woman, never forgets to be exigent. And now there is no reprieve, for I have committed myself, am sentenced, and condemned to be made ridiculous in your eyes. Can there be anything more contemptible, more laughable, more utterly and hopelessly absurd, than an old and ugly man declaring his unrequited pa.s.sion for a woman who might be his granddaughter? Is he not like a h.o.a.ry old owl, who leaves his mousing to perch upon one leg and hoot love ditties at the evening star, or screech out amorous sonnets to the maiden moon?"

"Very like," said Unorna with a laugh.

"And yet--my evening star--dear star of my fast-sinking evening--golden Unorna--shall I be cut off from love because my years are many? Or rather, shall I not love you the more, because the years that are left are few and scantily blessed? May not your dawn blend with my sunset and make together one short day?"

"That is very pretty," said Unorna, thoughtfully. He had the power of making his speech sound like a deep, soft music.

"For what is love?" he asked. "Is it a garment, a jewel, a fanciful ornament which only boys and girls may wear upon a summer's holiday? May we take it or leave it, as we please? Wear it, if it shows well upon our beauty, or cast it off for others to put on when we limp aside out of the race of fashion to halt and breathe before we die? Is love beauty?

Is love youth? Is love yellow hair or black? Is love the rose upon the lip or the peach blossom in the cheek, that only the young may call it theirs? Is it an outward grace, which can live but so long as the other outward graces are its companions, to perish when the first gray hair streaks the dark locks? Is it a gla.s.s, shivered by the first shock of care as a mirror by a sword-stroke? Is it a painted mask, washed colourless by the first rain of autumn tears? Is it a flower, so tender that it must perish miserably in the frosty rime of earliest winter? Is love the accident of youth, the complement of a fresh complexion, the corollary of a light step, the physical concomitant of swelling pulses and unstrained sinews?"

Keyork Arabian laughed softly. Unorna was grave and looked up into his face, resting her chin upon her hand.

"If that is love, if that is the idol of your shrine, the vision of your dreams, the familiar genius of your earthly paradise, why then, indeed, he who worships by your side, and who would share the habitation of your happiness, must wear Absalom's anointed curls and walk with Agag's delicate step. What matter if he be but a half-witted puppet? He is fair. What matter if he be foolish, faithless, forgetful, inconstant, changeable as the tide of the sea? He is young. His youth shall cover all his deficiencies and wipe out all his sins! Imperial love, monarch and despot of the human soul, is become the servant of boys for the wage of a girl's first thoughtless kiss. If that is love let it perish out of the world, with the bloom of the wood violet in spring, with the flutter of the bright moth in June, with the song of the nightingale and the call of the mocking-bird, with all things that are fair and lovely and sweet but for a few short days. If that is love, why then love never made a wound, nor left a scar, nor broke a heart in this easy-going rose-garden of a world. The rose blooms, blows, fades and withers and feels nothing. If that is love, we may yet all develop into pa.s.sionless promoters of a flat and unprofitable commonwealth; the earth may yet be changed to a sweetmeat for us to feed on, and the sea to sugary lemonade for us to drink, as the mad philosopher foretold, and we may yet all be happy after love has left us."

Unorna smiled, while he laughed again.