“Now, look you here, Sir,” the old philosopher began, taking me by a tassel on my satin doublet, and working himself up until his eyes shone with pleasure, as he unfolded his mad visions to me. “Look you here, Sir! this bare and dingy dungeon that you rightly frown at is a cell more pregnant with ingenuity than ever was the forge of the lame smith of Lemnos. Vulcan! Vulcan never had such teeming fancies as I have harbored in my head for twenty years. Vulcan never coaxed into being such a lovely monster as I have hidden yonder. I tell you, young man,” gasped the old fellow, perspiring with enthusiasm, “Prometheus was a tawdry charlatan in his service to mankind, compared with what I will be. He gave us fire, crude, rough, unruly fire!—unstable, dangerous—a bare, naked gift, spoiled even in the giving by incompleteness; but I, Sir—I have tamed what the bold Son of Clymene only touched. Ah, by the blessed gods! I think I have tamed it—fire and water, I have wed them at yon black altar—deadly foes though some do call them, I have made them work together, the one with the other. Oh, Sir, such servants were never yet enlisted by our kind since the great day of Cyclops! And to think these feeble shaking hands whose poor sinews stand from the wasted flesh like ivy strands about a winter tree, have done it—and this poor head has thought it, persistent and at last successful, through bitter months of toil and anguished disappointment!”
“But, Sir,” I said gently, as the old man checked his incoherent speech for breath—“this monster, Sir, this ‘lovely monster,’ what is it?”
“Ah! I was forgetting you did not know. Look, then! and though you had been unfamous all your life, this moment of precedent knowledge above your fellows shall make you forever famous.” And the old man, like a devotee walking to a shrine, like a lover with hushed breath and brightly kindling eye stealing to his mistress’s hiding-place, led me up to a cavernous recess near the forge, and there lay hands upon a rent and tattered drapery of rough sail-cloth, stained and old, and, making a gesture of silence, pulled it back.
In the dim, weird enchantment of that place, I had been prepared for anything. It was a knightly fashion of the times to be credulous, and that black cobwebbed den, that mad philosopher, so eloquently raving, and all the late circumstance of my arrival fitted me to look for wonders. I had followed him across the grimy floor, pitted with gray pools of furnace-water, through the reek and twining strands of smoke that filled that nether hall; and lastly, when he laid a finger to his lip, and, so reverent and awful, drew back that ancient tattered screen, I frowned a little, stepping back a pace, and drew my ready sword six inches from its scabbard, and watched expectant to see some hideous, horrid, living form chained there—some foul offspring of darkness and accursed ingenuity—some hateful spawn of wizard art and black mother night—some squat, foul, misshapen Caliban—some loathsome thing—I scarce knew what, but strong and sullen and monstrous, for certain! And, instead, the screen ran rattling back, and there before me, in a neat-swept space, and on a platform of oaken planks—glossy in new forged metal, shiny with untarnished filings, gleaming in the pride of burnished brass and rivets—high, bulby, complicated, a maze of pistons and levers and wheels, was a great machine!
Somehow, as I saw that ponderous monster, so full of cunning although so lifeless, a tremor of wondering appreciation ran through my mind, that soulless body fascinated me with a prophetic fear and awe which at another time and in another place I should have laughed at.
I put back my sword, smiling to think it had been so nearly drawn, but yet stood expectant, half wondering, half hoping I knew not what, and gazing raptly on that mighty iron carcass perched there like some black incubus, almost fancying all the love and fear and hope that had gone to fashion its steel limbs or iron sinews might indeed have filled it with a soul that should, as I looked, become articulate and manifest beneath my eyes; half hoping, in my ignorance, that indeed the quintessence of human labor, here consummate, might have got on all that plastic, dull material, some wondrous firstling spirit of a new estate, some link between the worlds of substance and of shadow! And if it so fascinated me, that old man, to whom it owed its being, was even more enthralled. He stood before the shrine with locked hands and bent head, apostrophizing the silent work. “Oh, child of infinitely painful conception,” he muttered, “surely—surely you cannot disappoint me now! Near twenty years have I given to you—twenty years of toil and sweat and ungrudging hope. Long, hot summers have I worked upon you, and dank, dull winters, making and unmaking, building and taking down again, contriving, hoping, despairing, living with you by day and dreaming of you through nights of fitful slumber—surely, dear heir of all my hopes, the reward is at hand, the consummation comes!
“See!” he cried, “how perfect it is! Here in this great round cylinder is room for fire and water. The fire lies all along in that gulley-trench that you can note here through this open trap, and those curling pipes take the hot flame up through that void that will be filled with the other element. Now, when water boils, the vapor that comes from off the top is choleric and fiery past conception. This has been known for long, and John Homersham tried to utilize it by letting the vapor on the spread digits of a wheel; Farinelli of Angoulême suffered it to escape behind his engine—both ways so wasteful that no mortal furnace could keep up power sufficient to be of useful service. But I have bettered these and many others; nothing is wasted here—the hot gases are stored and stocked as they rise above the boiling liquid until they are as strong as the blustering son of Astræus and Aurora, and then, by turning one single tap, I suffer them to escape down yonder iron way, there to fall upon the head of that piston that with a mighty send gives before them and spins the great wheel above, and comes back on the impetus, and takes another buffet from the laboring vapor, and back it goes again, now this way and now that, twirling with fiery zeal those notched wheels above, and working all those bars and rods and pistons. Not one thing of all this complicated structure but has its purpose; not one rivet in yonder thousands but means a month of patient, toilsome thought and labor. Moreover, because it is so strong and heavy, I have put the whole upon that iron carriage, which took me a year to forge, and those solid back wheels are locked with the gear above, and from the axle of that front wheel two chains run up and turn upon a cylinder, so that my sweet one can move at such pace as yet I cannot even think of, and guide himself—in brief, is born and consummate!”
Then, presently, he turned from babbling to his “child,” and speaking louder, with frenzied gestures, the while he strode up and down before it, went wild upon the wondrous things it should do. “It will not fail, I know it! My head is fairly mazed when I forecast all that here with this begins as possible. It shall run, Sir,” he cried, turning rapturously to me—“and fly, and walk, and haul, and pull, and hew wood and draw water, and be a giant stronger than a thousand men, and a craftsman in a hundred crafts of such subtility and gentleness and cunning as no other master craftsman ever was. Down, into ages not yet formed in the void womb of the future, this knowledge I have mastered shall extend, widening as it goes, and men shall no longer strive or suffer; there stands the patient beast on whose broad back another age shall put all its burdens. There is the true winged horse of some other time that shall mock the slow patter of our laggard feet, and knit together the most distant corners of the world within its giant stride. Oh! I can see a happy age, when base material labor shall be over, and men shall lie about and take their fill of restfulness as they have not done since the gates of Eden were shut upon their ancient father’s back! I do see, down the long perspectives of the future, such as yon achieving all things both by sea and shore, plowing their fields for unborn peoples and drawing nets, carrying, fetching, far and near, swift, patient, indomitable! Ah! and winging glorious argosies—mighty vessels such as no man dares dream of now; vast, noble bodies inspirited each with a soul as lies impatient yonder; and those shall plow the green sea waves in scorn of storm and weather, pouring the wealth of far Cathay and Ind into our ready lap, making those things happy necessaries which now none but some few may dare to hope for; bringing the spice the Persian picked this morning to our doors to-morrow, bringing the grape and olive unwithered on their stems, bringing fair Eastern stuffs still wet from out their dye-vats——”
“Jove, old man! that moves me. I was a merchant once. Your words do stir my blood down to the most stagnant corner of my veins!”
“—Bringing pearls from Oman still speckled with the green sea-dew upon them, and sapphires from rugged Ural mines still smelling of their fresh native mother earth; bringing, in swift, tireless keels, Nova Zemblan furs and costly feathered trophies from the South; bringing Biafra’s hoards of ivory and Benin’s stores of blood-red gold; bringing gems warm from tepid sands of Arracan, and sandal-wood from seagirt Nicobar. Ah! pouring the yellow-scented corn of every fertile flat from Manfalout to ancient Abbasiyeh; pouring the Tartar’s millet and the Hindu’s rice into our hungry Western mouths; making those rich who once were poor, and those noble who once were only rich; benefiting both great and little—benefiting both near and far! And I shall have done this—I, poor Master Andrew Faulkener, a man so shabby and so seeming mean, no one of worth or quality would walk in the same side of the road with him!”
So spoke that good fanatic, and as he stopped there came a gentle tap upon the door, and a fair face in the sunlight, and there was Mistress Elizabeth saying, with a merry laugh: “Father! the cloth is laid, and the meal is spread, and old Margery bids me add that, if to-day’s roast is spoiled by waiting, as the last one was, she’ll never cook capon for thee again!” and coming down the maid laid a hand of gentle insistence upon her father’s sleeve, and led him sighing and often looking back up the green stone steps, I following close behind.
We crossed the sunny courtyard, entering on the farther side the other rambling buttress-wing of that ancient pile. Thence we went by clean white flagstoned passages and open oaken doorways to what was once the long servants’ dining-hall. At the near end of the middle table of well-scrubbed boards, so thick and heavy they might have come from the side of some great ship, a clean white slip cloth was laid, with high-backed chairs, one at the head for Andrew Faulkener, and two on either side for me and her, and lower down again were put, below the great oaken salt-cellar, two other places. By one of these stood Dame Margery, fair Elizabeth’s old nurse, an ancient dame in black-velvet cap and spotless ruff and linen, with a comely honest old country face above them, wrinkled and colored like a rosy pippin that has mellowed through the winter on a kitchen cornice shelf. Such was Dame Margery, and, while she curtsied low with folded hands, I bowed as one of my quality might bow in respect to her ancient faithfulness. At the other chair stood their Spanish steward, black Emanuel Marcena. Yes, and, as you may by this time have guessed, that steward was, in flesh and blood, none other but the midnight visitor who had disturbed my rest the night before. I could not doubt it. He wore the same clothes, his swarthy, sullen face was only a little more lifelike now in the daylight, and, if more evidence were wanting, one finger of his left hand—that hand that had held the bloody handkerchief—was done up with cobwebs and linen threads. I knew him on the instant, and stopped and stared to see my vagrant shadow so prosaically standing there at his dinner place, picking his yellow teeth and sniffing the ready roast like a hungry dog. And when he saw me he too started, for I also had been dreadful to him. I was the exact counterpart of that amber gallant that had strode out upon his moonlit heels and scared him with a shout, where, no doubt, he fancied no shouters dwelt, and now here we were face to face, guests at the same table, surely it was strange enough to make us stare!
But, over and above the prejudice of our evening meeting, I already distrusted and disliked Emanuel Marcena. Why it was I do not know, but so much is certain, if one may love, no less surely may one hate at first sight, and as our eyes met, hatred was surely born in his, while mine, as like as not, told through their steady stare, of aversion and dislike. He was a sullen, yellow fellow, lean and tall, with black, crafty eyes set near together; a thin nose, shaped like a vulture’s beak; a small peaked beard, and black hair closely cropped, a crafty, cunning, cruel, ungenerous-looking fellow, who had somehow, it afterward turned out, grown rich as his master’s fortunes failed. He had come into Faulkener’s service when a boy, had flourished while he flourished, and learned a hundred shifts of cruelty and pride from the gay company who once were proud to call his master comrade, and now, like the black fungus that he was, had swelled with conceit and avarice past all conscionable proportions.
Well, we exchanged grim salutations, and sat, and the meal commenced. But all the while we ate and talked I could not help turning to that crafty steward, and each time I did so I found his keen, restless black eyes wandering fugitive about among us. Now he would glance at me over his porringer, and then a half-unconscious scowl dropped down over those dark Cordovian brows. Then perhaps it was the old man he looked at, and a scarce-hid smile of contempt played about the corners of that Southern’s mouth to hear his master babble or answer our talk at random. Lastly, my sleek Iberian would set his glance on sweet country Bess as she sat at her father’s side, and then there burned under his yellow skin such a flush of passion, such a shine of sickly love and aspiration as needed no interpreting, and made me frown—small as my stake was in that game I saw was playing—as black as inky night. But what did it matter to me who picked that English blossom? Why should she not lie on that mean Spanish bosom forever if she would?—’twas less than nothing to me, who would so soon pass on to other ventures—and yet no man was ever born who was not jealous, and, remembering how we had met, how sweet she was and simple, what native courtesy gilded her country manners, what music there was in her voice, and how black that villain looked beside her, I, in spite of myself, resented the first knowledge of the love he bore as keenly as though I had myself a right to her.
Pious, sanctimonious Emanuel Marcena! He stood up saying his grace for meat long after all of us were seated, and crossed his doublet a score of times ere he fell on the viands like a hungry pike. And he was cruel too. A little thing may show how big things go. He caught a fly while we waited between two courses, and, thinking himself unnoticed, held it a moment nicely between his lean, long fingers, then, drawing a straight fine pin from his sleeve, slowly thrust it through the body of that buzzing thing. He stuck the pin up before him, by his pewter mug, and watched with lowering pleasure his victim gyrate. That amused him much, and when the creature’s pain was reduced to numbness he neatly tore one prismatic wing from off its shoulder, and smiled a sour smile to watch how that awoke it. Then, presently, the other wing was wrenched palpitating from the damp and quivering socket, and the victim spun round upon the iron stake that pierced its body. And all this under cover of his dinner-mug, ingenious, light-fingered Emanuel Marcena!
Such was the steward of that curious household. Over against him sat the excellent old country dame, whose mind wandered no further than to speculate upon the price of eggs next market-day, or how her bleaching linen fared; above was the wise-mad scholar, bent and visionary; and by him, ruddy in her country beauty, that wild hedge-rose of his. And as I looked from one to other, and thought of what I was and had been, all seemed strange, unreal, fantastic, and I could only wait with dull patience for what fortune might have next in store.
It was a pleasant, peaceful place, that manor hall! When we had finished our midday meal, and the servitors had gone to their duties, Master Faulkener said a walk in the green fields might do him good—he would go out and take the country air. It was a wise resolve, and he made a show of carrying it through, but he had not crossed the courtyard toward the sunny meadows when he got a sniff of his own smoldering furnace fires. That was too much for him. The scholar’s rustic resolution melted, and, glancing fugitively behind, we saw him presently steal away toward his cellar, and then drop down the stairs, and bar the door, and soon the curling smoke and dancing sparks told that wondrous thing of his was growing once again.
Thus I and the maid were left alone, and for a little space we stood silent by the diamond-latticed window, scarce knowing what to say—I looking down upon that virgin bosom, so smoothly heaving under its veil of country lawn, she thinking I know not what, but pulling a leaf or two to pieces from her window vine. And so we stood for a time, until the lady broke the silence by asking if I would wish to see the house and gardens with her? It was a good suggestion and a comely guide, so we set out at once.
She led me first back through her garden again, naming every flower and bush by country names as we went along, and this brought us to the empty house-front, which we entered. She took me from room to room, and dusty corridor to corridor, chatting and laughing all the way, talking of great kinsmen, and noble, fickle guests who once had called her father friend—all with such a light, contented heart it sounded more like fairy story than stern material fact. Then that tripping guide showed me the one door I had not found, which led through into the rearward house. Here, again, I told her of how I had hunted in vain for such a passage, and she laughed until those ancient corridors resounded to her glee. This door admitted to another region, which we entered, and soon Elizabeth led on down a dusty flight of twilight wooden stairs, until a portal studded with iron barred our way. At this, putting a finger to her mouth in mysterious manner, the damsel asked if I dared enter, to which my answer was that, with sword in hand, and her to watch, I would not hesitate to prise the gates of hell; so we pulled the heavy sullen bolts, and the door turned slowly on its hinges. There before us was displayed a long, dusty corridor, lit by high narrow cobwebbed lattice windows down one side, and dim with moss and stain of wind and weather. From end to end of that soundless vestibule were stacked and piled and hung such mighty stores of various lumber, rare, curious, dreadful, as never surely were brought together before.
It was Andrew Faulkener’s museum-room—the place where he put by all the strange shreds of life and death he collected when the scholar’s fervor was upon him, and now, as his sweet daughter laid one finger on my arm and softly bid me listen, directly down below and under us we heard him hammering at his forge.
“Oh, Sir,” began that maid, whispering in my ear and sweeping her expressive arm round in the direction of those mounds and shelves, “did ever child have such a father? This is the one room that is forbidden me, and it is the one room of our hundreds that I take the most fearful pleasure in. I do wrong to show it, and, indeed, I had not brought you here but that something tells me you are good comrade, true and silent both in great and little. Therefore step lightly and speak small: there is nothing in all the world that stirs my father’s choler but this—to hear a vagrant foot overhead among his treasures.”
Softly, therefore, as any midnight thieves we trod the dust-carpeted floor, and now here, now there, the damsel led me. Now it was at one oriel recess where stood a black oak table and open chests piled with vellum books, all clasped and bound with gold and iron, that we paused. And I opened some of those great tomes, and read, in Norman-Latin, or old Frankish-French, the misty record of those things of long-ago that once had been so new to me. I spelled out how the monkish scribe was stumbling through a passage of that diary that I had seen Cæsar write—saw him repeat, as visionary and incredible, in quaint and crabbed cloister scrawl, the story of the Saxon coming, and how King Harold died. I turned to another book, a little newer, and read, ’mid gorgeous uncials, the story of that remote fight above Crecy, “when good King Edward, with a scanty band of liegemen, was matched against two hundred thousand French abou ye ville of Crecy, and by the Grace of God withstood them upon an August day”—and I could have read on and on without stop or pause down those musty memory-rousing pages but for the gentle interrupter at my side, who laughed to see me so engrossed, and shut the covers to, little knowing of the thoughts that I was thinking, and took me on again.
Then she would halt at a pile of splendid stuffs, half heaped upon the floor, half nailed against the wall, the hangings of courtly rooms and thrones; and, as her sympathetic female fingers spread out the folds of all those ruined webs, I read again upon them, in tarnished gold and filigree, in silken stitching and patient, cunning embroidery, more stories of old Kings and Queens I once was comrade to. On again, to piles and racks of weapons of every age and time: all these I knew, and poised the javelin some Saxon hand had borne in war, and shook, like a dry reed, the long Norman spear, and whirled a rusty pirate scimitar above my head until it hummed again an old forgotten tune of blood and lust and pillage, and, with a stifled shriek, the frightened girl cowered from me.
Oh! a very curious treasure-house indeed! And here the scholar had laid up skins and furs of animals, and there horns and hoofs and talons. Here, grim, melancholy, great birds were standing as though in life, and crumbling, as they waited, with neglect and age. There, in a twilight corner, glimmered the green glassy eyes of an old Thebeian crocodile, and there the shining ivory jaws of monstrous fishes, with warty hides of toads, and shriveled forms of small beasts dried in the kiln of long-silent ages, and now black, shrunken, and ghastly. On the walls were pendent enough simples and electrices to stock twenty witches’ dens, enough mandrake, hellebore, blue monkshood, purple-tinted nightshade to unpeople half a shire; and along by them were withered twigs and leaves would banish every kind of rheum; samples of wondrous shrubs and roots, all neatly docketed, would cure a wife of scolding or a war-horse of a sprain, would cure an adder’s bite, or by the same physic mend a broken limb; ah, and bring you certain luck in peace and war, or light, all out of the same virtue, the fires of love in icy, virgin bosoms.
In that quaint ante-room, dimly illumined by its cobwebbed windows, were astrolabes and hemispheres from the cabin poops of sunken merchantmen; charts whereon great beasts shared with pictured savages whole continents of land, and dolphins and whales did sport where seas ran out into unknown vagueness. There were models of harmless things of foreign art and commerce, and cruel iron jaws and wheels with bloody spikes or beaks for breaking bones or tearing flesh, and teaching the ways of fair civility to heretics. That old man had got together twenty images of Baal from as many lands, and half a hundred bits of divers saints. Here, tied with the strand of the rope that hanged him, was the skin of a dead felon, and near was the true shirt of a martyr whom the Church had canonized a thousand years before. In some way, too, the scholar had possessed him of a Pharaoh still swaddled with his Memphian robes, and there he was propped up against the wall, that kingly ash with mouth locked tight, whose lightest whisper once had made or marred in every court or camp from dusty Ababdah to green Euphrates, and brows set rigid, whose frown had once cost twenty thousand lives, made twenty thousand wives to widows, and eyes shut fast that seemed still to dream of shadowy empery—of golden afternoons in golden ages—a most ancient, a most curious fellow, and I stared hard at him, feeling wondrous neighborly.
But I cannot tell all there was in that strange place. From end to end it was stocked with learned lumber; from end to end my sweet guide led me, pointing, whispering, and shuddering, all on tiptoe and in silence; and then, ere I was nearly satisfied, or had sampled one-quarter of that dusty treasure-hall, she led me through a little wicket, down twenty stairs, and so once more into the fresh open air.
“There, Sir,” she said, “now I have laid bare my father’s riches to you. Is it not a wonderful corridor? Oh! what a full place the world must be, if one man can gather so much strange of it!”
I told her that indeed it was and had been full, right back into the illimitable, of those hopes and fancies to which all yonder shreds did hint of; and thus talking, I of infinite experience watching the sweet wonder and vague speculation dawning in those unruffled child-eyes of hers, we sauntered about the gardens and pleasant paths, and spent a sunny afternoon in her ambient fields.