Читать книгу The Insane Root - Rosa Praed - Страница 8

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The Pacha did not till some time later fulfil his promise to show Marillier the legacy of uncanny possessions to which he had referred. October was advancing. The autumnal mists were creeping over parks and squares, and leaves were yellowing and fluttering to earth. London was beginning to fill again, and often, when Marillier paid his semi-professional afternoon call, he found the outer reception-rooms at the Embassy fairly full of visitors, the most important and attractive of whom were admitted one by one to the further sanctum, where the Ambassador, prepared by a careful process of massage, curling, dyeing, and other mysterious toilet arrangements, carried out by Soranzo, his accomplished body-servant, sat in invalid state, and made himself still interesting and agreeable to the charming women who sought his society. He was sprightly, cynical and witty, as they had always found him, and yet scarcely one left him without feeling in an indefinable way that Death's wings hovered over the chamber.

In Marillier's mind this feeling was present at all times. He could not say, medically speaking, that his cure had not been successful. There was no flaw to detect. The special treatment upon which he and the other doctors had disagreed, appeared to be doing its work, but Marillier was not satisfied and could feel no assurance within himself that the old man might not at any time collapse. He was unremitting in his attentions. The treatment was carried out under his own supervision by a young medical student whom he had himself trained and who had been his assistant in the operation, and by Nurse Dalison, in whom he had full confidence. These two, devoted to Marillier, believing in his methods and jealous of his professional reputation, were, like himself, perfectly aware that these slightly unorthodox methods might be called in questionn overtly, if not openly, by the London faculty if it should not be that the Ambassador's complete recovery put the seal on their efficacy.

At that time also, certain diplomatic complications called for greater activity in the Chancellery and more frequent communication with the Abarian capital. An affair of moment in the East, concerning the treatment of Christian subjects upon a province in the dominions of the Emperor of Abaria, gave Ruel Bey an opportunity for advancing himself at the seat of government, upon which the Pacha effusively complimented his first secretary, but which Marillier divined he secretly resented. For it happened that Ruel Bey had been formerly a resident of the place in question, and had a peculiar knowledge of the intricacies of the affair which was at the moment specially valuable. He had received a message of commendation from his Imperial master, which the Pacha duly delivered; and was frankly exultant, informing Marillier that his promotion was now certain, and that it would not surprise him were he, in the event of the Pacha's death, to be appointed his successor. Political intrigue and press of diplomatic work seemed just then to have thrown into the background his suit for the hand of Mademoiselle Isàdas and Marillier found himself wondering whether Rachel Isàdas, who was not officially recognised be considered a fitting mate by the ambitious embryo ambassador. Rachel looked pale and wretched, and seemed to shrink more than ever from touch with the world around her. Once or twice, Marillier found her dispensing tea to the Pacha's visitors, but it was with a shy reserve, a timid hauteur, which accentuated her equivocal position, since it showed her consciousness of it.

No one doubted that there was some tie between her and the Pacha, but to all, it was clear that the Pacha himself felt no anxiety that her claim should be recognised, also that often her presence was distasteful to him. He did not seem at any time to greatly desire her company, and almost the only occasions upon which she appeared to give him any pleasure were when, after the reading over of despatches and transaction of the day's business with Ruel Bey, he requested that the curtains between the rooms should be opened, so that his vexed soul, like that of Saul, might be soothed by her music, which, oddly enough, he preferred to be of a devotional character. Rachel never again sang Irish melodies, but she and Ruel Bey would perform some portion of a stately mass, the two voices blending, or he accompanying Rachel on the violin.

More than once these performances were timed so that Marillier might hear them, and Rachel would smile up at him as he entered and begin again, as though in friendly recognition of his right to be considered and of the claims of their compact of friendship. When he went back to his own house in Harley Street after these evening visits to the Embassy, Marillier would sometimes ask himself whether his pain did not counterbalance his pleasure; yet he made no attempt to cut them short, and would not for the world have missed the experience.

It was clear, however, that Ruel Bey had made no formal proposal to the Pacha for Mademoiselle Isàdas's hand in marriage.

Early one afternoon in the beginning of October, Marillier found the Pacha standing by one of the bookcases peering at the titles of some volumes bound in old leather. One of these he had just taken from its place.

'Can I help you?' asked Marillier. 'I see that you are looking up authorities.'

The Pacha returned to his chair, still holding the volume.

'Do you know this?' he asked. 'It should be in your line of study.'

Marillier took the book from the shrivelled hand which trembled with its weight.

'The Herball of John Gerarde, 1636,' he read. 'Yes, of course I know it. What shall I look up for you?'

'I want to find a passage which relates to a belief held by some ancient writers concerning the mandrake,' he answered. 'I mean the property it was supposed to possess of restoring life to the dying.'

'I don't know that superstition,' replied Marillier. 'I thought the qualities of the root were thought to mainly aphrodisiac.'

'And you look upon the whole thing as most people do, who have had no personal experience of the matter,' said the Pacha, a note of irritation in his voice. 'To such people the mandrake is a mere peg for superstitious legend, as mythological as the ingredients of Circe's potion, with which some old writer identifies it. They forget that there has never been a myth or a mythological being, without some foundation of fact.'

'I agree with you,' replied Marillier. 'It has always been my opinion that myth never gathered round any production of nature unless there were in it something to justify the superstition. That question of occult properties in plants and minerals has always interested me. Take the wychhazel, for instance, medicinally, and in the shape of the divining rod. Take some of the ancient prescriptions in which the virtue of certain plants consisted in their being gathered under particular phases of the moon, and in which human and animal ingredients were used, with magical formulæ. Modern science has left out magical incantations, but it restores exhausted nerve force with a decoction of rabbits' brains, and it employs the blood of bullocks, the thyroid gland and other organic preparations, in the treatment of diseases. As for the moon, its influence on vegetable and animal life cannot be disputed.'

'You remind me,' said the Pacha, 'of that Sclavonic superstition--if you call it so--as to the power of a three-leaved fern grown and gathered with the aid of magical incantations on St John's day at midnight. You know the idea that St John's plants attract wandering spirits, and that other special plants repel them. Then there are the miracle leaves of the Catholic Church, which have made cures as well authenticated as any in the Acts of the Saints, and the holy tree of Kumbum, which grows leaves printed with sacred Thibetan characters. Do you know the plant drosera, which is affected, even at a distance, by particular metals? One might multiply examples. Why did the Sibyl of Cumæ wear a wreath of verbena--a plant that was much used in the temples to stimulate imagination? Have you ever, by the way, tried it on sensitives? Why did the Delphic Pythoness chew laurel to produce ecstasy? Why were beans forbidden to the initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and a special injunction laid upon the Flamen Dialis not so much as to mention them? And then you remember the Greek superstition that beans hidden under manure become living beings?'

'That brings us back to the mandrake,' said Marillier, 'and the old idea that it is engendered under earth, of the corpse of a person put to death for murder. Of course,' he went on, 'we all know the medical properties ascribed to the mandrake. I have often wondered that the root has not a more prominent place in the modern pharmacopoeia. Chloroform has superseded it as an anæsthetic, but I have sometimes thought of verifying the ancients' use of it in surgical operations.'

'How can you suppose that a root of which sorcerers made philtres and that witches fashioned into familiars, would be welcomed into the respectable modern British pharmacopoeia?' said the Pacha, sneeringly. 'Have you seen a genuine mandrake? Most of the little fetiches one buys in the East have been faked.'

'That is clear,' replied Marillier. 'No, I have often wished that I could have seen one gathered.'

'And heard it shriek,' said the Pacha in a peculiar tone. 'I have done so, and I can show you one that I plucked from the earth with my own hands.'

'And did not die after it?' said Marillier, smiling. 'That's the superstition, isn't it, in the Lebanon?'

'No, I did not die,' answered the Pacha. He was silent, and Marillier seemed to see in the old man's face an almost diabolic suggestiveness. 'I lived and flourished,' he added with a queer little laugh. 'The mandrake, you know, is said to bring love and health and fortune to its possessor. My mandrake is my fetish. I confess to the idolatry. Some day I'll tell you my story. Now, as the thing interests you, I'll show you my little oracle. That is perhaps the most uncanny of the possessions which will be yours when I die. May it serve you as faithfully as it has served me.'

While he spoke, the Pacha unlocked a cabinet near, but seemed to hesitate in his intention, and finally pulling out a tray of curiously-shaped stones, began show them one by one to Marillier, and to utter fascinating discourse on the virtues of the snake stone, of the mysterious smalagrana which is perforated as though by invisible worms and is said to possess the gift of prophecy, also the animated ophite that the Greeks interrogated, and a miraculous stone found in the Lebanon, whose voice in answer to a seer's invocations resembles that of a new-born babe.

All these things and others which Isàdas exhibited were remarkable and most rare, but Marillier's fancy was set upon the mandrake, and he again begged the Pacha to let him see it.

The old man seemed still to half repent his promise. It was perfectly evident that he regarded his fetich as something sacred; and Marillier began to speculate fantastically on other legends he had read concerning the power of the mandrake to induce insanity.

Presently, with a solemnity which contrasted with the wildness of his eyes and the fearsome trembling of his claw-like fingers as they fumbled in a dark recess at the back of the cabinet, the Ambassador drew out a box which appeared to be of gold, of Eastern workmanship, and to be inscribed with Arabic characters. He touched a secret spring cunningly concealed beneath an uncut topaz, which formed part of a design in cabalistic figures ornamenting the four corners of the box, carefully calling Marillier's attention as he did so to the special stone covering the spring, and bidding him impress its position upon his memory. The lid flew open, revealing a piece of fine silken tissue laid over the vaguely-defined outline of what seemed to be a doll within. Isàdas's fingers trembled even more as he touched the fabric, and the pallor of his face increased. He looked almost afraid to lift the coverlet. When he did so, there lay exposed a strange little brown image, a root of the potato species distorted into human shape, with grotesquely human features, nose, lips, the indication of eyes, and hairy filaments falling from the sides of the head and forming a kind of beard upon the shrivelled jaw and chin. The creature appeared a distinct miniature effigy of a man. The shape of the limbs was clearly traceable, and two little brown tentacles of arms with rudimentary hands lay, one by the side and the other half over the breast. Bits of the earth from which it had been torn, still clung in the indentations of the shape, and on the top of the head, mingling with the tufts of hair, were the shrivelled remains of a stalk which had been removed or had mouldered away.

Marillier examined the thing with intense curiosity, at the same time revolted by its quasi--human appearance. He was startled by an exclamation from the Pacha--a sound resembling a groan of despair. The old man was bending close over the box, peering down into it with an anxiety that had brought drops of sweat to his forehead beneath the red fez he always wore.

'Do you see--' he gasped. 'Does anything strike you?'

'What?' asked Marillier. 'I see a vegetable monstrosity which is more extraordinarily human than I could have imagined possible in a root plucked straight out of the ground. Why should it cause you any disquietude, Excellency?'

'Why!' repeated Isàdas, 'why! Because--can you not see? It is alive!' And in truth, as Marillier looked at it, one of the little tentacles seemed to move, and the mummy-like breast to flutter slightly.

'I have not dared to open this box since I was taken ill,' the Ambassador went on in the same horror-stricken accents. 'I knew that as the root gave me its life, so, when my life dwindled, its own would return to it again. See! See! The skin has filled out! It seems fleshy, soft, pulsating as when I gathered it, not the shrivelled inanimate thing it was three months ago. Marillier, my doom is fixed. Death's fiat has gone forth. You have deceived yourself and not all your science can save me. It fails, and that of the Medicine Moor himself, if he were alive now, would fail, even as it did before in the hour of my greater desolation. Life! life!' the old man cried, stretching out his arms as though beseeching an inexorable deity. 'Is all to end--to vanish like the morning glory, to rot away like dead autumn leaves? Must the soulless shell of me join the Wandering Ones, hungering in vain for the mortal joys they have lost?'

The Pacha staggered and sank into a chair, his eyes closed, his frame shaking. Suddenly, in deep sepulchral tones, which seemed those of some strange spirit in possession of his feeble frame, he gave forth the Biblical utterance, 'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?'

His breathing grew laboured, and Marillier, fearing failure of the heart's action, administered a reviving draught, and supporting him to his couch, laid him upon the cushions.

After a few minutes the old man recovered his ordinary speech and consciousness. His eyes turned upon Marillier with their usual alert gleam, and in obedience to his injunction the doctor rose, and sharply closing the lid of the jewelled box, put it back into the cabinet.

'Excellency, we must have no more of this,' he said. 'Your nerves are shaken; you have imagined what is not. Put the mandrake out of your thoughts. Forget your superstitious fancies, for they will retard your recovery. The root has no more life in it than a potato would have which had been gathered--how many years?'

'Twenty-five years, all but two weeks,' replied the Pacha. 'You forget, my friend, that the germ of life is in the potato as it is in the grain of corn which for six thousand years may have been enclosed in a mummy case. Life is everywhere--in everything save in the putrefying body of man, and out of that, arises new life in lower form. Life is the one all-pervading essence, and the aim of all magic has been to master the secret by which it can be concentrated, re-created and renewed--the secret that has ever eluded my efforts, and that for me must now remain unsolved. Marillier,' he went on, with fatalistic conviction, 'mark my words. I shall die on the anniversary of the day on which I plucked that mandrake root in the hills behind Milianah.'

'Excellency,' said Marillier, 'you have talked to me of the power of will to accomplish what it pleases. Exercise your own will, and dismiss that phantom fancy. Otherwise, it will take hold of you, and possibly fulfil itself. Remember what you said to me not long ago of the capacity inherent in man, by which he may ally himself with subtle forces of the universe.'

'I spoke of two Forces,' replied the Ambassador. 'One is omnipotent, the other subservient to it, and yet its master. Have you forgotten? They were Love and Will. Love is of two kinds, Marillier, the lower and the higher. It has two forms, the spiritual and the material. For me, twenty-five years ago, the spiritual part of love ceased to exist--nay, I never gained it. It vanished in the hour when I might have made it mine. What was left to me? The pride of life, the lust of the flesh, of which that root--my fetich, my familiar, is a sort of degraded personation. The lust of the flesh dies--it may be to live again in subtler form a Tantalus existence, I know not--I scarcely care; and the pride of life is extinguished. There is no use in telling me to dismiss my phantom fancy, for it is no fancy, but a reality that has made me its slave. I am better now, and let me talk; it clears my brain. Listen, and I will tell you the story of how I plucked that mandrake root.'