Part 4
“In ancient days my ancestors,” he began, “were Roman Governors in Spain. At the court of one of them, Vitellius Ponteleone, lived a famous Jewish physician (in old Spanish days the Jews were the first of scientists), by name Ibn Ezra. He made a poison (poison is not the right word, I regret greatly its vulgar suggestiveness) from a mineral which has now vanished from the face of the earth. This poison causes a delicious, pleasureful death, and at the same time arrests physical decay. Now, if you will just let me inject one drop of it into that white arm of yours, you will be immortal--superior to time and change, indestructibly young. You do not seem to realize the greatness of the offer. For this honor I have selected you from all the women in Naples.”
“It is an honor, of course; but, like a proposal of marriage, it seems to me important and to require consideration.”
“Oh, no, it is not important. We have to prepare for life, but for death we are always ready. Besides, I am offering you a chance to choose your own death. How many can do that!”
“Do not think that I am ungrateful, good Count, but--”
“One little drop of the liquid will run through your veins like flame, cutting off thought and all centers of painful sensation. Only a dim sweet memory of pleasant things will remain. Gradually, then, cells and arteries and flesh will harden. In time your body will attain the hardness of a diamond and the whiteness of fine marble. But it is months, years, before the brain dies. I am not really sure that it ever dies. In it, like the iridescent reflections upon a soap bubble, live the shadows of past pleasures. There is no other immortality that can equal this which I offer. Every day that you live now lessens your beauty. In a way every day is a vulgar death. It coarsens and over-colors your skin, dulls the gold of your hair, makes this bodily line, or this, a bit too full. That is why I brought you here to-night, at the height of your beauty, just as love and life have crowned you.”
“It must be a remarkable liquid. Let me see it. Is it with you?”
“No, indeed! It is kept in a vault which it takes an hour to open. It is guarded as are the crown jewels of Italy,” he responded proudly.
“There is no immediate danger,” I thought. “There is time. Now the road lies long before me.”
“I suppose there is an antidote for--this liquid. I will not call it poison, since you dislike the word so greatly.”
“None that is known now. You see it destroys instantly what only patient nature can rebuild.”
“I am greatly interested in it. Show me the other women upon whom you have tried it. I am eager to see its effect.”
“I knew you would be. Come this way.”
We ascended a staircase, where again I felt the sting of light. Upon a landing, half-way up, he paused and pointed to our reflected figures.
“Are we not as if made for each other--you and I? When I sleep the white liquid sleep, I shall arrange that it be beside you.”
My death evidently was firmly determined upon.
At the top he unlocked a door, and we entered a room where some fifty women were dancing a minuet. Above them great crystal chandeliers swung, giving to their jewels and their shimmering silks and satins reflected life. Each one was in an attitude of arrested motion. It was as if they had been frozen in the maddest moment of a dance. But what a horrible sight--this dance of dead women, this mimic merriment of death!
“You know my picture of this scene, do you not?” said he, turning on more light. “They were perfect models, I can assure you. I can paint them for hours in any light.
“When I die I shall bequeath to Naples this art gallery. Will it not be a gift to be proud of? Nothing can surpass it in uniqueness. Then the bodies of these women will have attained the hardness and the whiteness of fine marble. They can in no way be distinguished from it except by their hair.
“Of course now, if the outside world knew of this, I should be punished as a murderer.”
How firmly it is settled in his mind that the outside world is mine no more!
“But then I shall be revered as a scientist who preserved for posterity the most perfect human specimens of the age in which I lived. I shall be looked upon as a God. It is as great to preserve life as it is to make it.”
The next room we entered was a luxurious boudoir. Before an exquisite French dressing-table sat a woman whose bronze hair swept the floor. On either side peacocks stood with outspread tails. Their backs served as a rest for a variety of jeweled hair-pins, one of which she was in the act of picking up.
“That is the Contessa Fabriani. She is not dead yet. She hears every word we say, but she is unable to speak. I am painting her now. You can see the unfinished picture against the wall.”
In an adjoining room a dark-skinned woman of the Orient, whose black and unbound hair showed purplish tints, was reclining upon the back of a Bengal tiger. Other Eastern women lay upon couches and divans.
“See, even in death, what enticing languor! See the arrested dreams in their dark eyes, deep as an Oriental night! These women I have loved very greatly. Sometimes I have a fancy that death cannot touch them. In them there is an electric energy, the stored-up indestructible ardor of the sun, which, I like to fancy, death cannot dissipate.”
“Now here,” said the Count, opening another door, “I will show you an effect I have tried for years to reproduce. This has been the desire of my life.”
He flung back a row of folding windows, making the room on one side open to the sea.
“It is the effect of the blended radiance flung from the water here and the moon, upon dull silver, upon crystal, and the flesh of blond women.”
He turned out the lights. The moon sent an eerie, shivering luster across the crystal and silver decorations, and touched three women in robes of white, who were standing in attitudes of dreaming indolence.
“This thin, ethereal, surface light, this _puissance de lumière_, is what I have tried in vain to prison. I have always been greedy of the difficult and the unattainable. If I could do this, I should be the prince of painters! It is a fact, a real thing, and yet it possesses the magic of dreams, the enchantment of the fleeting and the illusory.
“I wish to be the wizard of light. I wish to be the only one to prison its bright, defiant insubstantiality.
“Can you not see how wonderful it is? It is the dust of light. Reflected upon silver and clear crystal it is what shadow is to sound. Sometimes it seems to me like a thin, clear acid; then like some blue, sweet-smelling volatile liquid, eager again to join the air.
“Have you noticed how it penetrates blond flesh? It reveals, yet transfigures it. I wish you could watch its effect often. Sometimes the wind churns the sea-light into transparent foam. Then I love its curd-like, piled-up whiteness. Sometimes when there is no moon, and only a wan, tremulous luster from the water, the light of a far star is focused on their satins, on their diamonds, struggles eerily among their laces, or flickers mournfully from a pearl. The room then is filled with a regretful, metallic radiance. The stars caress them. They have become impersonal, you see, and the eternal things love them.
“When the autumn moons are high, the light that fills the room is resonant and yellow. It tingles like a crystal. It gives their cold white satins the yellow richness of the peach’s heart, and to the women the enticing languor of life. On such nights the moonlight is musical and makes the crystal vibrate.
“Now, to-night, the light is more like the vanishing ripple of the sea. Is it not wonderful? Look! It is the twin of silence, the ghost of light!”
In his excitement and exhilaration, his eyes shone like the moon-swept sea. I knew that in them, too, slept terrors inconceivable.
“This is the room I have in mind for you. You will queen it by a head over the other women. The color of your dress is right. Your gems, too, are white. Here, sometime, I promise to join you, and together we will be immortal.
“Excuse me just a moment. Wait here. Let me get the liquid and show it to you. You will be fascinated by it, just as other women have been. I never saw one who could resist it.”
As he left, I heard the key turn in the lock. When we entered the other rooms, I remembered that he bolted the doors on the inside. This door, then, was the only one by which he could gain entrance. Swiftly I slipped the bolt. Now I was safe--for a time, unless there was a secret entrance.
It was not far from the window to the water. I laughed with delight. I had dived that distance many a time for pleasure. I was one of the best swimmers in England, and I had always longed for a plunge in this sapphire sea. Now was my chance and life as the goal to gain. I took off my satin gown as gayly as I had put it on. Like the Count of Ponteleone, I, too, admired the play of light on its piled-up whiteness. How merrily the sea-wind came! How it counseled courage!
I took the plunge. Down, down, down I went, cleaving the clear water. The distance up seemed interminable. It was like being born again when at last I saw the white foam feather my arms and felt my lungs expand with air. I swam in the direction of Naples. I could not reach the city, but I could easily reach some fisher’s hut and there gain shelter.
Oh, the delight of that warm, bright water under the moon! I felt that the strength of my arms and my legs was inexhaustible. I exulted in the water as a bird exults in its natural element, the air.
After I had covered what I thought to be a safe distance, I turned on my back and floated. Then I caught sight of the window from which I had leaped. It was brilliantly lighted. Count Ponteleone was leaning from it, his white hair shining like a malevolent flame.
Despite the distance, I could feel the power of his wild blue eyes, which sparkled like the sea. Again I dived, lest they should reassert their power over me and draw me back.
I came up under the shadow of the shore, and made my way along until I reached a boat where Neapolitan fisherwomen were spreading their nets to dry.
They took me in, and for the doubled price of a good month’s fishing brought me that night to Naples.
“Ah, Luigi,” I sobbed, as he folded me in his arms, “little did I think, when you spoke of the dance this morning, that I should spend the night with the dead dancing women of Ponteleone.”
“Nor I that you would solve Naples’ mystery of crime.”
THE MIRROR OF LA GRANJA
_¿Que es el hombre? Un misterio. ¿Que es la vida? ¡Un misterio tambien!_
ESPRONCEDA.
“Sólo en tiempo de Felipe II, cuando el espíritu del Renacimiento se hacía sentir allí, fueron pintadas muchas hermosas damas para su galería de retratos del Prado.”--CARLOS JUSTI.[8]
(In the time of Philip the Second, when the spirit of the Renaissance was being felt, he had many beautiful women painted for his gallery of the Prado.--CARLOS JUSTI.)
I arrived in Toulouse on my homeward way to Spain in the midspring of 1898.
For three years I had toured the world with my violin, giving concerts in its principal cities. I had been flatteringly received. Men had showered their gold upon me; women their flowers and favors. I was acclaimed the Spanish Paganini, the greatest of violinists, the premier artist upon this difficult instrument. I had been surfeited with applause. I had been fêted until I was weary. Now I was looking forward to a well-merited rest in which to gratify my love of art, and, perhaps, try my hand at composing. In addition, I longed for the dignified ease, the cultivated leisure of the life of a Spanish gentleman. During the years of concert giving, I had earned enough to give myself this pleasure. I felt, too, that there is something ignoble in prostituting art to gold and the indiscriminate applause of the multitude. Art should be superior to traffic, accessible only to intelligent understanding and to love.
As I mused, a messenger entered and handed me a telegram. It announced the death of my maternal great-uncle, the Conde de Quederos. The telegram said that before the burial every effort had been made to reach me, and that since there were no direct heirs, I, as nearest in blood, inherited the estate.
I could not grieve over my uncle’s death. I could not be expected to. I had never seen him but once, and that was when I was a child. In addition, I knew that he was old, almost if not quite a centenarian, and that long ago life must have lost its charm. My heart warmed with gratitude toward that kindly Fate which was bestowing favors upon me. Only that morning I had meditated as to what place in Spain, now that my parents were no more, I should choose for a residence. Here was the problem solved without effort on my part and in a most pleasing manner.
I went directly to Cuenca, to the dead Conde’s _castillo_, to the heart of that old Castile which the greedy Romans coveted. As I entered, I read upon the fluted shield above the door, “_Adelante_” (Go on). A brave race truly, whose motto was never to turn back.
In the hall the lined-up servants met me, and each addressed me gravely as Conde de Quederos. That night I had a conference with the steward as to the rooms which I was to occupy.
“The finest suite in the _castillo, Señor mio_, is the one the late Conde occupied. It is called ‘The Suite of the Mirrors.’”
“Mirrors!” The word stirred responsive memory. “Is not there a magic mirror, so called, here in the castle? It seems to me I remember having heard something of the kind.”
“_Si, Señor mio._ It is in the drawing-room from which the suite takes its name. They were all made by the late Conde’s great-grandfather at La Granja. Mirror-making was his hobby.”
Yes, yes; now I recalled the stories my mother had told. Aloud I said: “That is the suite which shall be mine. Show me up.”
“Shall I light the drawing-room?”
“No; open the blinds and leave me while you have my bags unpacked and my chamber made ready.”
The suite consisted of a bed-chamber with dressing-room attached, and a sitting-room, which from its size and adornment was called “The Drawing-Room of the Mirrors.”
Here I sat down to rest and smoke my after-dinner cigar. The dim summer night filled the ancient room with frail shadows, making the mirrors, which reached from floor to ceiling, look like pale plates of tarnished steel.
I remembered it all now! It came back in a vivifying flash of thought. The male members of my mother’s family, excepting the late Conde, had been scientists _enragés_. They had preferred, too, the delusive by-ways, the dangerous and insecure footings, where fact borders upon fancy, where the will-o’-the-wisp of unrealized possibility lures on. They had wasted life and impaired their fortunes in following unattainable fancies and in trying to wrest from nature secrets forbidden to man. They had been men of strange vagaries and inexplainable passions, who found the pleasure of existence in ways not understood by others.
The great-grandfather of the late Conde had been devoted to mirror-making. It was his effort and his wealth that had brought to La Granja the first Venetian _specchiai_, and those who made _verres de cristal_ and wrested from them their secret. He sent to England to Lord Buckingham and to France to Colbert to purchase the knowledge of their workmen in this fascinating art. And it was he who made the sixteen mirrors in the room in which I sat.
Indeed, the age in which he lived had been mad over glass-making. The Council of Ten of the Venetian Republic went so far as to pass a law that its nobles might wed with the glass-makers of Murano without loss of caste. It was the only work which did not detract from a great noble’s dignity.
France imitated Venice and made a similar law. Spain, thanks to the effort of Conde de Quederos, was not behind in the art. Nor did the Conde lose standing among the ancient nobility of Castile for the hours spent at the furnace. With its introduction from Italy had come likewise its patent of nobility.
After the old Conde had gratified his love of mirror-making for years and had made fifteen of the sixteen mirrors which hung in the room in which I sat, his mind was teased with the desire to make a magic mirror.
With this object in view, he devoted himself to the chemistry of glass. He bought all the books and ancient manuscripts procurable upon the subject. He thought of nothing else. He talked of nothing else, until it was commonly reported that he was mad. He insisted that it was possible to make a mirror of such exquisite purity, of such lustrous depth, that, like that Borgian glass which snapped in twain at the touch of poison, it should refuse to reflect material bodies and earthly substances and reproduce only the impassioned dreams of the mind, or the frail and insubstantial spirit forms which, having once been on earth, hover near in attempt to commune again with the creatures of the flesh. What wonder they called him mad!
A few days before his death, however, the sixteenth mirror was brought from La Granja and hung in the place reserved for it. Just what this mirror was like I could not remember having heard. The next night, when I was less weary, I determined to have a look at the old Conde’s productions. In the magic mirror I had no interest. The idea was too absurd. It was a madman’s dream.
The next evening I ordered the chandeliers to be lighted in the great drawing-room, and with my violin tucked under my arm hastened thither. It was a noble room that lay revealed beneath the glitter of the swinging crystals. I was glad that I had not spoiled the first effect by seeing it by day. It was lofty, and long by some forty feet. The floor was worked out in a curiously dim-bright design made of marble and ancient glass bricks, in whose depth glowed _mille fiori_. The ceiling was a richly resplendent canvas, whereon were depicted giant figures representing the loves of Hercules and Omphale. The walls were made up of alternate panels of mirrors, mural paintings continuing the stories of classic lovers, and spaces of mysteriously colored and strangely wrought glass, evidently rare and priceless specimens of the ancient workmen of La Granja.
At a glance the mirrors seemed as much alike as peas in a pod. They reached from floor to ceiling. They were framed uniformly in the heavily ornate frames with which fifteenth-century Italy supplied the world.
Yet the effect was most lovely. Between the feverish panels wherein the passion of flame had prisoned restless colors and the perfervid scenes of classic love, the mirrors interposed spaces of pale neutrality and mysterious calm. They afforded the relief that water affords in the out-of-door landscape. Their unsoundable depths of silence were like a telescopic glimpse into the night of space. They were the mute and motionless keepers of secrets of another world. Their pale passivity was more pleasant than silence. Yet at times they seemed to tell of the possibilities of a spirit life which was centered in colossal calm.
What artistry had been expended upon the decoration of these walls! That dead uncle could have been no ordinary man. My heart thrilled with pride. It was worth being called mad so to have understood the values of light.
Drawing an easy-chair before the central mirror, I took up my violin preparatory to playing. Then I noticed that the frame of the central mirror was unlike the others. I looked about to make sure. Yes, it was the only odd one. And odd enough it was, made of closed flower buds, tiny eggs, and folded leaves. It must mean something, that strange frame. It was not chosen with an eye single to decorative ends. It was an hieroglyph, a symbol. But what one? Each detail represented the sleeping germ of a life principle. In the egg, in the bud, life is folded. They pointed to the mirror edge. Did they mean that there too life was folded?
I leaned forward. The cold face of the mirror confronted me. I started with fear. I was not reflected in it! Nothing was reflected in it! Not an article of furniture, not a picture, not a bead of light from the great chandelier above. I looked about, This was the only odd mirror. I made sure of that. All the others were a-quiver with light and color. I held my hand in front of it. I waved my violin to and fro. In vain! They left not a trace upon its surface. Prickly fear crept over me. I shivered as if from touch of the dead or sweep of their icy breath. The mirror’s pallid passivity added to the horror. It was the silent mockery of the dead. And this horror was born, not of midnight noises and visions, but of silence and the splendor of light.
Only last night in this very room I had called my uncle a madman, a dreamer. How ashamed did I feel of my vain conceit of the evening, confronted with this production of his skill! It was as if some towering ghost smiled down scornful pity upon me, who stood there dancing about like a maniac in the effort to wrest a responsive reflection from that mute surface. Never had anything so undone me, so set me a-tremor with discomfort. I was in touch with something of which I knew nothing, with an unknown force whose extent and power I could not measure.
Controlling my nervousness, I sat down to contemplate the glass. It was like looking into the depths of a pellucid lake, whose surface had never been rumpled by wind or blurred with light. It was like a glance down infinitudes of space, clearly gray and sweetly translucent, but beyond the farthest rim of the worlds where not even star dust floated. It was a place where, defiant of natural law, light existed without object. It was a void over which nature had no power. It was a pale inanity, the antithesis of the life principle which is motion. It was a powerful and repellent nothing. A sickening dizziness assailed me. I felt as if I were perched upon the edge of an abyss wherein material substances were lost. I was conscious of a peculiar revulsion, a sort of mental nausea such as is experienced when watching a serpent move, throwing off electric vibrations at variance with the human organism.
This, then, was the mirror of the dead! It was a place for spectres to disport themselves! It was the gray shadow world where phantoms dwelled! Who could guess what slept within its depths! Who could guess what was looking out upon me now which my physical self could not discern!
I closed my eyes to shut out the sight and lifted the violin. The bow, as if moved by an impulse of its own, struck the slow, prolonged, high notes which announce the Saraband. An inspiration! Why should not I popularize the dance music of Spain as Chopin had that of Poland?
For a time I played on, repeating old airs and improvising new ones, but ever recurring to the Saraband. Nervousness vanished. Others had put up with this non-committal mirror, why should not I? Courage returned. Music exercised its old magic. Again I cared for nothing save my art.
I do not know how long this musical reverie had lasted when, opening my eyes, I saw in the depths of the mirror, but far, far away, a dim white figure. I was playing the Saraband. I noticed that when certain notes were struck the figure could be seen more plainly, that it grew in distinctness and came nearer, while others made it recede and fade away.