Part 5

On the table lay the doctor’s new book, brave in its stamped leather and gilded label: but it was unopened. It was the outcome of five and twenty years of incessant study, and the single offspring of Matthew’s lucubration. And now that it was brought to birth he was in a mood to stifle it. It had been begun in the white heat of the controversies with Rome and Spain, and it lingered in parturition until the fire had burnt low, and the readers who should have applauded it were in their graves. Its author was not very sure that its contentions were true, and he was very sure that they were addressed to deaf ears. Had he gone out into the world he might have learnt what the world was interested in--what battles remained to fight, what causes were already finished. But Matthew’s world consisted of books, and his books were out of date. Of recent political developments, of the growth of scientific knowledge, of the blossoming of a native literature he had no more knowledge than a child. The work which had been begun with enthusiasm had been completed in mechanical drudgery, and too late he was conscious of the fact.

How well he recollected the enthusiasms of 1579! How ardent his friends were that his immense learning should signalise itself in the great national strife with the powers of darkness! If he could only live his life again with the old enthusiasm and the added knowledge of a life that should combine learning and action! The boy, Dacre, blessed with genius, wealth, high birth and noble aspirations--how wide the horizon that opened before him! For Matthew Makepeace it rested only to be forgotten before he died.

It was a strange bird of passage that had dropped the seed from which Matthew’s book grew. Alessandro Galiani was a medical doctor of Padua University when he came to Cambridge, and for a few months resided in Jesus College. Why he came nobody precisely knew; but he claimed to be a Protestant refugee, and he was certainly profoundly learned in many languages, as well as in medicine. He brought letters of introduction from the Chancellor, Lord Burleigh, and it was surmised that he was an agent of the Government, engaged to report on the University. But his talk and conduct were so equivocal that the suspicion presently arose that his Protestantism was simulated, and that he was a papal spy. The sentiments to which he gave expression were certainly Macchiavellian in the highest degree--intolerable to English ears. Wherefore his sojourn at Cambridge ended abruptly after a few months, and he passed away into the same mysterious spaces from which he had come. He was a man of extraordinary powers of observation and suggestion, and from a chance hint that he once let fall Makepeace got the idea of writing his book. It was Galiani who directed his attention to the Jewish and Arabic authors whom he consulted. But how little of the force and insight of the Italian entered into the completed book, Makepeace knew only too well.

So the book lay on the table and Matthew had no heart to open it. Through the window came sounds of merriment from the Fair Yard without. Regularly as August came round Makepeace had heard those sounds for forty years past, but until to-day he had regarded them only as a troublesome distraction, and closed his casement against them. To-day a profound lassitude made him draw his stool from the table, where lay the slighted volume, to the open window. His attention was especially drawn by a strident voice which came from near his chamber. Looking out on the Fair Yard he saw a platform of a few planks, mounted on casks, immediately beneath his window. On it a vagabond charlatan was loudly advertising to a group of gaping rustics the merits of a wonderful heal-all.

“Come buy, my masters, come buy,” he cried. “Buy the infallible salve of the famous doctor Pinchbeck, the ointment that heals the ague, the rheum, the palsy, the serpigo. Let him that goes on one leg but buy, and with thrice laying on he shall go on two. Let him that goes with crutches buy, and he shall dance home in a coranto. One groat only for the learned doctor’s ointment that shall quit you of the cramp, the gout, the quotidian and the tertian. An it rid you not in two days come again and Pinchbeck shall restore you fourfold.”

From time to time an ague-ridden swain mounted the platform, haggled with the quack, reluctantly parted with his groat and departed, dubious of his purchase. On the whole, Dr. Pinchbeck seemed to be doing a fair trade, when, late in the afternoon, an old man, bent double with rheumatism, raised a loud expostulation. He affirmed that he had purchased a box of the ointment on the first day of the fair, and had applied it thrice without the promised result.

He demanded the fourfold restitution of his money, and the mountebank stoutly resisted the claim. Angry cries arose from the bystanders, and it might have gone ill with the empiric, had not a diversion been effected by one of the crowd. This was a tall middle-aged man of somewhat dark complexion and foreign appearance, whose dress distinguished him as a gentleman and possibly a practiser of medicine. He stepped on the platform, spoke a few words to the ointment-vendor, and then, beckoning the old man to him, made him sit on a stool. He gazed fixedly for a few moments in the patient’s eyes, made some mysterious motions of the hands before his face, whispered in his ear, and then, with a few more passes of his hands, bade him stand. The old fellow stood erect without effort; then, at the stranger’s bidding, walked a few easy steps, and with a pleased and puzzled look descended to join his friends in the crowd. Loud applause greeted the wonderful cure, and patients crowded to receive the stranger’s ministrations. The same operations in each case were attended with the same result. Never had there been seen such a wonder at the fair.

Most of all it wrought wonder in Matthew Makepeace. This unknown individual--was he possessed of those miraculous gifts of healing which Makepeace in 400 quarto pages had proved to be extinct? He would accost him and, if possible, learn from his lips whether what he had seen were the operation of nature or of the magic art. Descending in the majesty of his doctor’s robes he mingled in the crowd, and mildly laid his hand on the stranger’s arm. “Pardon, learned sir,” said he, “the curiosity of a scholar--alas! too ignorant of books and all unskilled in the manual acts of healing. I would fain question with you of these same cures that by chance I have witnessed from my chamber.” The stranger was engaged in giving parting words of counsel to some of his patients. He turned at the touch of the doctor’s hand, surveyed him up and down for a moment, and said, “Anon, Master Makepeace, anon: I will be with you presently.”

Dr. Makepeace started to hear his name and threw a sharp look on the speaker. No; he was a complete stranger, and his accent betrayed him as a foreigner. Dr. Makepeace had certainly never seen him in his life before. He began to explain where his chamber was to be found.

“I know it,” interrupted the stranger, “I know it. Bear with me for a moment and I will seek you there.”

Makepeace was a little ruffled that the speaker, knowing his name, did not give him his academic title. “_Doctor_ Makepeace,” he said; “ask for _Doctor_ Makepeace.”

“Surely, surely,” replied the stranger carelessly: “yet _Master_ Makepeace, methinks, served you then.”

More than ever perplexed the doctor sought his room. Only a few minutes had passed when he heard his visitor mounting with no faltering step to his door, and Makepeace opened to him before he knocked. The stranger glanced rapidly round. He seemed to find something familiar in each article of furniture. He ran his eye, with a look of some amused contempt, over the array of worn volumes that lined the walls. “Old books, doctor Makepeace,” he said, “old books. I think you have not changed one these thirty years.”

“Old books are old friends,” said the doctor with a touch of resentment at his tone: “I would not change them.”

“Old friends die, doctor,” observed the stranger, “they die, and then we have no use for them but to bury them.”

“Sir,” said the doctor with a quick reminiscence of his wasted studies, “I _have_ buried my friends: but I love them still. But,” he went on, “it is not of old notions that I have to speak with you. You have shown me this afternoon something newer and,” he added sadly, “it may be, something better than all that old books tell. I ask you to impart to me no secret that might hurt you by the telling. Until now I have maintained that nothing exists in this present world that is not of natural course. If it be an honest mystery that you exercise, tell me, the humblest and poorest of scholars, whether it be the miraculous working of God’s power in human hands or simply the exercise of human art.”

The stranger seated himself, uninvited, in the doctor’s chair, and the doctor took a stool. “Everything,” said the stranger, “is miracle to him who does not know.”

“Great heavens,” cried Makepeace, “that is the beginning of my quotation from the learned Theodorus Gazophylacius. I never heard of the great Gazophylacius until Galiani told me of him: nobody that I know had heard of him. A marvellous scholar, truly, was Gazophylacius, but a pagan at heart, albeit a Byzantine Christian--and sadly drowned in superstition. Shall I show you the passage in the original Greek.” And he feverishly turned the pages of the _Speculum_ to find it?

“You may spare yourself that trouble,” said the stranger composedly. “Shall I finish the quotation? Shall I write it for you?” And he unceremoniously tore a corner from one of the immaculate leaves, took a quill and wrote. “There,” said he, “there, I have written in Greek what follows in your quotation, and I have added my name that you may remember the writer.”

The doctor took it and read the delicate Greek characters: “Demetrius Commagenus. All things are possible to him who knows and wills with earnestness.”

Makepeace was stupified. “Commagenus,” he said: “that is a Greek name, I take it. And yet I would have sworn that the handwriting was Galiani’s, and Galiani was an Italian. Besides, Galiani is dead, or he is sixty years old, less or more, by now: and you--I cannot think that you are past forty.”

Indifferently the self-styled Commagenus replied: “Galiani or Commagenus--what matters? What I wrote then I write now; and always I am your humble servant and the poor scholar who drew wisdom from the lips of the divine Gazophylacius.”

“We talk in dreams,” said Matthew: “Galiani told me--_you_ told me, if you are he--that Gazophylacius died at Rome, ten years after the Turks entered Constantinople: and that was a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Yes,” answered Commagenus, “he died--the more is the pity; for he might have lived, had he chosen to use his own wisdom. Instead of that he imparted it on his death-bed to me. What care had he to live, an outcast in strange lands? But this world lost its wisest man; for I am no Gazophylacius. Only I am always learning.”

“Why, this is as strange a maze as ever man trod,” cried Makepeace. “You tell me that your master died a hundred and forty years ago, and that you, Galiani, were with him at the time.”

“Not Galiani, but Commagenus,” said the stranger in complacent amusement at the doctor’s bewilderment: “that was my name then. I was a youth, twenty years old, when I first came to Constantinople from the country which gave me my name--three years before the siege. There I became the favourite pupil of the great student of natural and medical science, Theodorus Gazophylacius.”

“Why, that makes you a hundred and seventy years old,” feebly remonstrated Makepeace. “Are you then the Wandering Jew?”

“Doctor, I am shocked,” said Commagenus. “Are such fables the stuff of which the _Speculum_ is made? I tell you there is nothing in this world that is not natural. That was my master’s constant teaching: also that to know and to will makes man master of nature. That much I learnt from him while he taught at Constantinople, and it was in my noviciate that I gathered from him the art to work such simple cures as you saw this afternoon. To prolong mere existence by keeping disease at bay--that he esteemed a vulgar art. To live long and die old, feeble and foolish--what gain is that to the man or his fellow-men? To live always, always to be young, always eager, always to be growing in wisdom and power--that was the secret for which he spent a lifetime’s search, and with his dying breath he told me that he had sought it in vain. Death, the last disease, is incurable: there is a stronger will than man’s. But he told me of a door of escape. In his last moments he was possessed with a dread that his discovery would perish in the general eclipse of learning which he foresaw as the result of the disappearance of the Byzantine schools, and, with solemn admonition as to its use, he imparted it to me. Death, the mere accident of the flesh, is transferable with the flesh. With will and knowledge, the spirit--all that you call character, intelligence, consciousness, memory--may pass from form to form, unchanged in the transition and always capable of growth and ripening. Alas, that I have not made better use of my master’s prescriptions! But it has been my evil fate. Another might do better.”

“These are heathen imaginings--snares and delusions of Satan,” cried Makepeace. “What talk is this of tampering with the divine in us? Man, are you a Christian?”

“I am what I am,” replied Commagenus: “but that this is waking fact and no delusion my history shall show you. After my beloved master’s death I set up in medical practice in a certain city of Dalmatia. The fame of my unusual healing powers spread in all the neighbourhood. Unfortunately it reached the ears of the bishop of the diocese. He was a sincere, well-meaning man, kind in all his relations with the laity of his diocese, but a trifle superstitious. He concluded that I was a necromancer and condemned me to be burnt alive. Until the moment when I found myself in a dungeon and on the eve of execution I had never thought to avail myself of the secret communicated to me by my master, and had even questioned its efficacy. The prospect of burning was so extremely repugnant to my feelings that I resolved to make practical trial of it. Shall I show you how it is done? No, you need not shrink from me. I have no wish to pass into simple old Matthew Makepeace. I can do better. Be assured that the will goes not with the act.”

Commagenus rose and fastened his gaze on Matthew. As he did so it seemed to the doctor that he grew and grew to a bulk and stature ineffable and dim. But that, he reasoned with himself, was an illusion of the sense, and for the moments when the fascinating glare was fixed on him he retained his consciousness. Slowly, deliberately, that Matthew might follow every movement in succession, he moved his hands and arms in gyrations and waves more intricate than any that Matthew had witnessed when the Greek stood on the mountebank’s platform that afternoon. Then he stooped over the table, and with extraordinary distinctness of articulation whispered in his ear one word. What that word was I do not know. Matthew Makepeace remembered it once, and forgot it for all the years that he lived afterwards.

The Greek took up his tale again. “My excellent master had informed me that, whether the subject were waking or asleep, the will and the word had equal effect. My gaoler slept in the condemned cell with me and the occasion seemed to me a particularly happy one for testing the accuracy of my master’s conclusions. Though I did not doubt the intensity of my will, in prospect of such an undesirable event as being burnt alive, I confess that I was surprised and more than gratified by the issue of the experiment. I had the satisfaction of leading my gaoler to the stake on the following morning.”

“What,” cried Makepeace: “do you tell me that the man was burnt? True,” he added, as a mitigating consideration suggested itself to his bewildered brain, “he was a papist. But, after all, what were you?”

Commagenus answered with the resignation of a parent satisfying an inquisitive child. “Yes, Matthew Makepeace, when your raiment is past your own use you make a gift of it to some humble dependent. When _he_ has worn it threadbare, what happens? It is burnt. You do not burn it: I did not burn him. Besides, this common man in ages to come will be held in reverence--in another name, I admit--as a martyr to medical science. Nevertheless I was little pleased, as you may think, with the integument which my brutal gaoler had left me. In my new and humble sphere of life I had few opportunities of self-improvement, and, taking the first that offered, I installed myself in the person of a Dominican friar. I am disposed to doubt whether I really bettered myself by my change of profession. I found that it required much ingenuity to sustain the part of crass ignorance which was associated with my new character, and the man’s companions were deplorable people. An accident, which had nearly proved fatal, relieved me of the disagreeable situation. In the course of my professional duties I was directed to take ship for Spain, where the Dominican order had an especial interest in the Office of the Holy Inquisition. On the voyage we fell in with a vessel belonging to a respectable merchant of Marseilles. The merchant, who was likewise the ship’s captain, was in the habit, when occasion offered, of diversifying the routine of commerce by piratical enterprise. With his crew he boarded and took possession of our vessel, informing us that we were his prisoners. As he had a reputation for probity to sustain at Marseilles, he judged it prudent to throw the whole of the crew and passengers of our vessel into the waves. However, learning that there was a clergyman on board, he seized the opportunity of making confession first and receiving plenary absolution from him of an outstanding balance of prior delinquencies. It was natural to avail myself of the opportunity for transferring myself into his person. It was pleasant to see him flounder in the sea with the rest, and I returned--if that is the right word--to Marseilles, in circumstances sufficiently ample to warrant retirement from a profession the ambiguous character of which offended my moral sense. But my experiences in the three careers of life which my destiny had recently forced upon me gave me an indelible prejudice against the Western Church. On the whole I am a Protestant.

“I need not detain you with my subsequent transmigrations. The merchant was elderly and so oppressively respectable that I was glad to exchange into the superior rank of a French marquisate. Since then, from Trebizond to Tarifa, I have studied men and manners in many capacities. Perhaps the time which was pleasantest to me, as a man of science, was spent in Peru with Pizarro, whom I attended as a captain of cavalry. But a fatal wound, inflicted by a poisoned arrow, compelled my return to Spain in the office of a ship’s boatswain. After all my wanderings my conscience reproached me with my culpable neglect of the art in whose elements I had been grounded by the ever-revered Gazophylacius. I resumed the medical studies which I was convinced were best suited to my bent and upbringing, by adopting the features and the status of a freshman in the University of Padua. As the freshman, under no possible circumstances, could have passed his examinations you will see that I conferred on him no small obligation by the assistance which I rendered. In my first year I obtained advancement to the person and professorial chair of Galiani. I am grieved to tell you that I left him seriously unwell at Salerno, ten years ago; and his decease, which followed almost immediately after, proved to me how wise had been my course in transferring myself into the healthy frame of the brother professor who attended him in the earlier phases of his malady. Come, doctor, you have let me chatter on with these tiresome details till I see you are three parts asleep.”

“Asleep!” roared Makepeace, who had been filled with rage, disgust and hatred by the shameless recital. “Asleep! Wretch, thief, assassin, defiler of the sanctuary of man! Begone, skirr, fly! Would that I could crush your basilisk head on the floor as I stand! But stay. I will fetch the University bedel. He shall clap you in the lowest hold of the Castle gaol.”

“Marry, good words, master doctor,” said the imperturbable stranger. “Your bedel, possibly, is a family man; and conscience forbids that, except in the last resort, I should lay a father of a family in a dungeon for crimes that, you are pleased to assert, are of my doing: and, except that I do not propose myself for the office of bedel, it were an easy thing for me to do so. But hearken, my honest friend. I wish you well--no man better. Getting old is a sad affair, sadder even than dying. I think that you are sixty, and I don’t think that just now you are quite in your best health. Has the world gone very well with you? In five years, ten years, will it go better? You have written a silly book that nobody will read, and you are ashamed of it. You have wasted your years of manhood in twisting ropes of sand. And the solitude, Matthew! My heart bleeds to think what your solitude will be. What friend have you to smooth the downhill course? Who cares for the friend of dead books? Altogether, you have very little use now for Matthew Makepeace. Who is it that should sleep in yonder bed?” he asked, pointing to the truckle used by Marmaduke Dacre. “Is he young? Is he comely? Has he friends to love him and be loved? Is he of a quick spirit and a high hope? Matthew Makepeace, you know the acts and the word. The door lies open to you. Take wisdom, and be young.”

“The door lies open to _you_,” shouted Makepeace, throwing it open as he spoke. “Pass out of it, and avoid the chamber of a Christian man: and the foul fiend fly away with you and your abominable suggestions!”

“Doctor Makepeace, I wish you a very good evening,” said his visitor.

* * * * *

The night was far advanced, and Matthew Makepeace had no mind for bed. A dim rush candle, set on a stool in a corner of the apartment, cast flickering shadows on the walls and floor. In an opposite dark corner his pupil slept. But for the dread of awaking him, Makepeace would have paced the room in his perplexity. As it was, he sat bent double on the stool by the window.