The Long Night - Stanley Weyman (free novel 24 .txt) 📗

nothing irks them so much as to be over-pressed. Here now I have some things that are thought to be curious, even in Padua, but I do not know whether they will interest you."

"Manuscripts?"

"Yes, manuscripts and the like. This," Basterga lifted one from the table and placed it in his visitor's hands, "is a facsimile, prepared with the utmost care, of the 'Codex Vaticanus,' the most ancient manuscript of the New Testament. Of interest in Geneva, where by the hands of your great printer, Stephens, M. de Beza has done so much to advance the knowledge of the sacred text. But you are looking at that chart?"

"Yes. What is it, if it please you?"

"It is a plan of the ancient city of Aurelia," Basterga replied, "which Caesar, in the first book of his Commentaries places in Switzerland, but which, some say, should be rather in Savoy."

"Indeed, Aurelia?" the Syndic muttered, turning it about. It was a plan beautifully and elaborately finished, but, like most of the plans of that day, it was without names. "Aurelia?"

"Yes, Aurelia."

"But I seem to--is this water?"

"Yes, a lake," Basterga replied, stooping with a faint smile to the plan.

"And this a river?"

"Yes."

"Aurelia? But--I seem to know the line of this wall, and these bastions. Why, it is--Messer Basterga," in a tone of surprise, not unmingled with anger--"you play with me! it is Geneva!"

Basterga permitted his smile to become more apparent. "Oh no, Aurelia," he said lightly and almost jocosely. "Aurelia in Savoy, I assure you. Whatever it is, however, we have no need to take it to heart, Messer Blondel. Believe me, it comes from, and is not on its way to, the Grand Duke's library at Turin."

The Syndic showed his displeasure by putting the map from him.

"Your taste is rather for other things," Basterga continued, affecting to misunderstand the act. "This illuminated manuscript, now, may interest you? It is in characters which are probably strange to you?"

"Is it Hebrew?" the Syndic muttered stiffly, his temper still asserting itself.

"No, it is in the ancient Arabic character; that into which the works of Aristotle were translated as far back as the ninth century of our era. It is a curious treatise by the Arabic sage, Ibn Jasher, who was the teacher of Ibn Zohr, who was the teacher of Averroes. It was carried from Spain to Rome about the year 1000 by the learned Pope Sylvester the Second, who spoke Arabic and of whose library it formed part."

"Indeed!" Blondel responded, staring at it. "It must be of great value. How came it into your possession, Messer Basterga?"

Basterga opened his mouth and shut it again. "I do not think I can tell you that," he said.

"It contains, I suppose, many curious things?"

"Curious?" Basterga replied impulsively, "I should say so! Why, it was in that volume I found----" And there in apparent confusion he broke off. He laughed awkwardly, and then, "Well, you know," he resumed, "we students find many things interest us which would fail to touch the man of affairs". As if he wished to change the subject, he took the manuscript from the Syndic's hand and threw it carelessly on the table.

Messer Blondel thought the carelessness overdone, and, his interest aroused, he followed the manuscript, he scarcely knew why, with his eyes. "I think I have heard the name of Averroes?" he said. "Was he not a physician?"

"He was many things," Basterga answered negligently. "As a physician he was, I believe, rather visionary than practical. I have his _Colliget_, his most famous work in that line, but for my part, in the case of an ordinary disease, I would rather trust myself," with a shrug of contempt, "to the Grand Duke's physician."

"But in the case of an extraordinary disease?" the Syndic asked shrewdly.

Basterga frowned. "I meant in any disease," he said. "Did I say extraordinary?"

"Yes," Messer Blondel answered stoutly. The frown had not escaped him. "But I take it, you are something of a physician yourself?"

"I have studied in the school of Fallopius, the chirurgeon of Padua," the scholar answered coldly. "But I am a scholar, Messer Blondel, not a physician, much less a practitioner of the ancillary art, which I take to be but a base and mechanical handicraft."

"Yet, chemistry--you pursue that?" the other rejoined with a glance at the farther table and its load of strange-looking phials and retorts.

"As an amusement," Basterga replied with a gesture of haughty deprecation. "A parergon, if you please. I take it, a man may dip into the mystical writings of Paracelsus without prejudice to his Latinity; and into the cabalistic lore of the school of Cordova without losing his taste for the pure oratory of the immortal Cicero. Virgil himself, if we may believe Helinandus, gave the weight of his great name to such sports. And Cornelius Agrippa, my learned forerunner in Geneva----"

"Went something farther than that!" the Syndic struck in with a meaning nod, twice repeated. "It was whispered, and more than whispered--I had it from my father--that he raised the devil here, Messer Blondel; the very same that at Louvain strangled one of Agrippa's scholars who broke in on him before he could sink through the floor."

Basterga's face took on an expression of supreme scorn. "Idle tales!" he said. "Fit only for women! Surely you do not believe them, Messer Blondel?"

"I?"

"Yes, you, Messer Syndic."

"But this, at any rate, you'll not deny," Blondel retorted eagerly, "that he discovered the Philosopher's Stone?"

"And lived poor, and died no richer?" Basterga rejoined in a tone of increasing scorn.

"Well, for the matter of that," the Syndic answered more slowly, "that may be explained."

"How?"

"They say, and you must have heard it, that the gold he made in that way turned in three days to egg-shells and parings of horn."

"Yet having it three days," Basterga asked with a sneer, "might he not buy all he wanted?"

"Well, I can only say that my father, who saw him more than once in the street, always told me--and I do not know any one who should have known better----"

"Pshaw, Messer Blondel, you amaze me!" the scholar struck in, rising from his seat and adopting a tone at once contemptuous and dictatorial. "Do you not know," he continued, "that the Philosopher's Stone was and is but a figure of speech, which stands as some say for the perfect element in nature, or as others say for the vital principle--that vivifying power which evades and ever must evade the search of men? Do you not know that the sages whose speculations took that direction were endangered by accusations of witchcraft; and that it was to evade these and to give their researches such an aspect as would command the confidence of the vulgar, that they gave out that they were seeking either the Philosopher's Stone, which would make all men rich, or the Elixir Vitae, which would confer immortality. Believe me, they were themselves no slaves to these expressions; nor were the initiated among their followers. But as time went on, tyros, tempted by sounds, and caught by theories of transmutation, began to interpret them literally, and, straying aside, spent their lives in the vain pursuit of wealth or youth. Poor fools!"

Messer Blondel stared. Had Basterga, assailing him from a different side, broached the precise story to which, in the case of Agrippa or Albertus Magnus, the Syndic was prepared to give credence, he had certainly received the overture with suspicion if not with contempt. He had certainly been very far from staking good florins upon it. But when the experimenter in the midst of the apparatus of science, and surrounded by things which imposed on the vulgar, denied their value, and laughed at the legends of wealth and strength obtained by their means--this fact of itself went very far towards convincing him that Basterga had made a discovery and was keeping it back.

The vital principle, the essential element, the final good, these were fine phrases, though they had a pagan ring. But men, the Syndic argued, did not spend money, and read much and live laborious days, merely to coin phrases. Men did not surround themselves with costly apparatus only to prove a theory that had no practical value. "He has discovered something," Blondel concluded in his mind, "if it be not the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. I am sure he has discovered something." And with eyes grown sharp and greedy, the magistrate raked the room.

The scholar stood thoughtful where he had paused, and did not seem to notice him.

"Then do you mean," Blondel resumed after a while, "that all your work there"--he indicated by a nod the chemical half of the room--"has been thrown away?"

"Well----"

"Not quite, I think?" the Syndic said, his small eyes twinkling. "Eh, Messer Basterga, not quite? Now be candid."

"Well, I would not say," Basterga answered coldly, and as it seemed unwillingly, "that I have not derived something from the researches with which I have amused my leisure. But nothing of value to the general."

"Yet something of value to yourself," Blondel said, his head on one side.

Basterga frowned, then shrugged his shoulders. "Well, yes," he said at length, "as it happens, I have. But a thing of no use to any one else, for the simple reason----"

"That you have only enough for yourself!"

The scholar looked astonished and a little offended.

"I do not know how you learned that," he said curtly, "but you are right. I had no intention of telling you as much, but, as you have guessed that, I do not mind adding that it is a remedy for a disease which the most learned physicians do not pretend to cure."

"A remedy?"

"Yes, vital and certain."

"And you discovered it?"

"No, I did not discover it," Basterga replied modestly. "But the story is so long that I will ask you to excuse me."

"I shall not excuse you if you do not favour me with it," the Syndic answered eagerly. As he leaned forward there was a light in his eyes that had not been in them a few minutes before. His hand, too, shook as he moved it from the arm of his chair to his knee. "Nay, but, I pray you, indulge me," he continued, in a tone anxious and almost submissive. "I shall not betray your secrets. I am no philosopher, and no physician, and, had I the will, I could make no use of your confidence."

"That is true," Basterga replied. "And, after all, the matter is simple. I do not know why I should refuse to oblige you. I have said that I did not discover this remedy. That is so. But it happened that in trying, by way of amusement, certain precipitations, I obtained not that which I sought--nor had I expected," he continued, smiling, "to obtain that, for it was the Elixir of Life, which, as I have told you, does not exist--but a substance new in my experience, and which seemed to me to possess some peculiar properties. I tested it in all the ways known to me, but without benefit or enlightenment; and in the end I was about to cast it aside, when I chanced on a passage in the manuscript of Ibn Jasher--the same, in fact, that I showed you a few minutes ago."

"And you found?" The Syndic's attitude as he leaned forward, with parted