CHAPTER III.

"The secret you are seeking," said the man who had put his hand on Orson Vane's shoulder, "is mine."

Vane's eyes widened slightly, roving the stranger up and down. He was a man of six feet in height, of striking, white-haired beauty, of the type made familiar to us by pictures of the Old Guard under Napoleon. Here was still the Imperial under the strong chin, the white mustache over the shapely lips; the high, clear forehead; the long, thin hands, where veins showed blue, and the nails were rosy. The head was bowed forward of the shoulders; the man, now old, had once been inches taller. You looked, on the spur of first noting him, for the sword and the epaulets, or, at least, for the ribbon of an order. But his clothes were quite plain, nor had his voice any touch of the military.

"I overheard a part of your conversation," the stranger went on, "not intentionally, yet unavoidably. I had either to move or to listen. And you see the place is so full that moving was out of the question. Did you mean what you were saying?"

"About the--"

"The Chinese wall," said the stranger.

"Every word of it," said Vane.

"If the chance to penetrate another's soul came to you, would you take it?"

"At once."

Moncreith laughed aloud. "Where are we?" he said, "in Aladdin's cave? What rubbish!" And he shook himself, as if to disturb a bad dream. He was on the point of reaching for his hat, when he saw the face of the girl in the mirror once more; the sight of it stayed him. He smiled to himself, and waited for the curious conversation between Vane and the stranger to continue.

"My name," the stranger was observing, taking a card from an _etui_, "may possibly be known to you?"

Vane bent his head to the table, read, and looked at the white-haired man with a quick access of interest.

"I am honored," he said. "My name is Orson Vane."

"Oh," said the other, "I knew that. I do not study the human interest in mere theory; I delight in the tangible. That is why I presume upon you"--he waved his hand gracefully--"thus."

"You must join us," said Vane; "there is plenty of room at this table."

"No; I must--if your friend will pardon me--see you alone. Will you come to my place?"

He spoke as youthfully as if he were of Vane's own age.

Vane considered a second or so, and then sprang to his feet.

"Yes," he said, "I will come. Good-night, Luke. Stay on; enjoy yourself. Shall I see you to-morrow? Good-night!"

They went out together, the young man and the one with the white hair. One glance into the mirror flashed from Orson's eyes as he turned to go; it brought him a memory of a burnished halo on a fragile, rosy, beauty. He sighed to himself, wishing he could reach the truth behind the robe of beauty, and, with that sigh, turned with a sort of fierceness upon his companion.

"Well," said Vane, "well?"

They were passing through a most motley thoroughfare. Barrel-organs dotted the asphalt; Italian and Sicilian poverty elbowed the poverty of Russian and Polish Jews. The shops bore signs in Italian, Hebrew, French--in anything but English. The Elevated roared above the music and the chatter; the cool gloom of lower Broadway seemed far away.

"Patience," said the old man, "patience, Mr. Vane. Look about you! How much of the heart of this humanity that reeks all about us do we know? Think,--think of your Chinese wall! Oh--how strange, how very strange that I should have come upon you to-night, when, in despair of ever finding my man, I had gone for distraction to a place where, I thought, philosophy nor science were but little welcome."

"My dear Professor," urged Vane finally, when they were come to a stiller region, where many churches, some parks and ivy-sheltered houses gave an air of age and sobriety and history, "I have no more patience left. Did I not know your name for what it is I would not have followed you. Even now I hardly know whether your name and your title suffice. If it is an adventure, very well. But I have no more patience for mysteries."

"Not even when you are about to penetrate the greatest mystery of all? Oh, youth, youth! Well, we have still a little distance to go. I shall employ it to impress upon you that I, Professor Vanlief, am not over-fond of the title of Professor. It has, here in America, a taint of the charlatan. But it came to me, this title, in a place where only honors were implied. I was, indeed, a fellow student with many of whom the world has since heard; Bismarck was one of them. I have eaten smoked goose with him in Pommern. You see, I am very old, very old. I have spent my life solving a riddle. It is the same riddle that has balked you, my young friend. But I have striven for the solution; you have merely wailed against the riddle's existence."

Vane felt a flush of shame.

"True," he murmured, "true. I never went further into any art, any science, than to find its shortcomings."

"Yet even that," resumed the Professor, "is something. You are, at any rate, the only man for my purpose."

"Your purpose?"

"Yes. It is the same as yours. You are to be the instrument; I furnish the power. You are to be able to feel, to think, as others do."

"Oh!" muttered Vane, "impossible." Now that his wish was called possible of fulfilment, he shrank a little from it. He followed the Professor up a long flight of curving steps, through dim halls, to where a bluish light flickered. As they passed this feeble glow it flared suddenly into a brilliant jet of flame; a door swung open, revealing a somewhat bare chamber fitted up partly as a study, partly as a laboratory. The door closed behind them silently.

"Mere trickery," said the Professor, "the sort of thing that the knaves of science fool the world with. Will you sit down? Here is where I have worked for--for more years than you have lived, Mr. Vane. Here is where I have succeeded. In pursuit of this success I have spent my life and nearly all the fortune that my family made in generations gone. I have this house, and my daughter, and my science. The world spins madly all about me, in this splendid town; here, in this stillness, I have worked to make that world richer than I found it. Will you help me?"

Vane had flung himself upon a wicker couch. He watched his host striding up and down the room with a fervor that had nothing of senility in it. The look of earnestness upon that fine old face was magnetic. Vane's mistrust vanished at sight of it.

"If you will trust me," he answered. He saw himself as the beneficiary, his host as the giver of a great gift.

"I trust you. I heard enough, to-night, to believe you sincere in wishing to see life from another soul than your own. But you must promise to obey my instructions to the letter."

"I promise."

A sense of farce caught Vane. "And now," he said, "what is it? A powder I must swallow, or a trance you pass me into, or what?"

The professor shook his head gravely. "It is none of those things. It is much simpler. I should not wonder but that the ancients knew it. But human life is so much more complex now; the experiences you will gain will be larger than they could ever have been in other ages. Do you realize what I am about to give you? The power to take upon you the soul of another, just as an actor puts on the outer mask of another! And I ask for no reward. Simply the joy of seeing my process active; and afterwards, perhaps, to give my secret to the world. But you are to enjoy it alone, first. Of course--there may be risks. Do you take them?"

"I do," said Vane.

He could hear the whistling of steamers out in the harbor, and the noise of the great town came to him faintly. All that seemed strangely remote. His whole intelligence was centered upon his host, upon the sparsely furnished room, and the secret whose solution he thought himself approaching. He was, for almost the first time in his life, intense in the mere act of existence; he was conscious of no imitation of others; his analysis of self was sunk in an eagerness, a tenseness of purposeness hitherto unfelt.

The professor went to a far, dark corner of the room, and rolled thence a tall, sheeted thing that might have been a painting, or an easel. He held it tenderly; his least motion with it revealed solicitude. When it was immediately in front of where Vane reclined, Vanlief loosed his hold of the thing, and began pacing up and down the room.

"The question of mirrors," he began, after what seemed to Vane an age, "has never, I suppose, interested you."

"On the contrary," said Vane, "I have had Italy searched for the finest of its cheval-glasses. In my dressing-room are several that would give even a man of your fine height, sir, a complete reflection of every detail, from a shoe-lace to an eyebrow. It is not altogether vanity; but I never could do justice to my toilette before a mirror that showed me only a shoulder, or a waist, or a foot, at a time; I want the full-length portrait or nothing. I like to see myself as others will see me; not in piece-meal. The Florentines made lovely mirrors."

"They did." Vanlief smiled sweetly. "Yet I have made a better." He paced the floor again, and then resumed speech. "I am glad you like tall mirrors. You will have learned how careful one must be of them. One more or less in your dressing-room will not matter, eh?"

"I have an excellent man," said Vane. "There has not been a broken mirror in my house for years. He looks after them as if they were his own."

"Ah, better and better."

Vane interrupted the Professor's silence with, "It is a mirror, then?"

"Yes," said Vanlief, nodding at the sheeted mirror, "it is a mirror. Have you ever thought of the wonderfulness of mirrors? What wonder, and yet what simplicity! To think that I--I, a simple, plodding old man of science--should be the only one to have come upon the magic of a mirror!" His talk took the note of monologue. He was pacing, pacing, pacing; smiling at Vane now and then, and fingering the covered mirror with loving touch as he passed near it. "Have you ever, as a child, looked into a mirror in the twilight, and seen there another face beside your own? Have you never thought that to the mirror were revealed more things than the human eye can note? Have you heard of the old, old folk-superstitions; of the bride that may not see herself in a mirror without tragedy touching her; of the Warwickshire mirror that must be covered in a house of death, lest the corpse be seen in it; of the future that some magic mirrors could reveal? Fanciful tales, all of them; yet they have their germ of truth, and for my present discovery I owe them something." He drew the sheet from the mirror, and revealed another veil of gauze resting upon the glass, as, in some houses, the most prized pictures are sometimes doubly covered. "You see; it is just a mirror, a full-length mirror. But, oh, my dear Vane, the wonderfulness of this mirror! I have only to look into this mirror; to veil it; and then, when next you glance into it, if it be within the hour, my soul, my spirit, my very self, passes from the face of the mirror to you! That is the whole secret, or at least, the manifestation of it! Do you wish to be the President, to think his thoughts, feel as he feels, dream as he dreams? He has only to look into this mirror, and you have only to take from it, as one plucks a lily from the pool, the spiritual image he has left there! Think of it, Vane, think of it! Is this not seeing life? Is this not riddling the secret of existence? To reach the innermost depths of another's spirit; to put on his soul, as others can put on your clothes, if you left them on a chair,--is this not a stupendous thing?" In his fever and fervor the professor had exhausted his strength; he flung himself into a chair. Vane saw the old man's eyes glowing and his chest throbbing with passion; he hardly knew whether the whole scene was real or a something imposed upon his senses by a species of hypnotism. He passed his hand before his forehead; he shook his head. Yet nothing changed. Vanlief, in the chair, still quaking with excitement; the mirror, veiled and immobile.

For a time the room stood silent, save for Vanlief's heavy breathing.

"Of course," he resumed presently, in a quieter tone, "you cannot be expected to believe, until you have tried. But trial is the easiest thing in the world. I can teach you the mere externals to be observed in five minutes. One trial will convince you. After that,--my dear Vane, you have the gamut of humanity to go. You can be another man every day. No secret of any human heart will be a secret to you. All wisdom can be gained by you; all knowledge, all thought, can be yours. Oh, Orson Vane, I wonder if you realize your fortune! Or--is it possible that you withdraw?"

Vane got up resolutely.

"No," he said, "I have faith--at last. I am with you, heart and soul. Life seems splendid to me, for the first time. When can I have the mirror taken to my house?"