Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  “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 Vitæ, 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 d
iscovered 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 lips and a hand on each knee, betrayed an interest so abnormal that it was odd that Basterga did not notice it.

  Instead, “I found that he had made,” the scholar replied quietly, “as far back as the tenth century the same experiment which I had just completed. And with the same result.”

  “He obtained the substance?”

  Basterga nodded.

  “And discovered? What?” Blondel asked eagerly. “Its use?”

  “A certain use,” the other replied cautiously. “Or, rather, it was not he, but an associate, called by him the Physician of Aleppo, who discovered it. This man was the pupil of the learned Rhazes, and the tutor of the equally learned Avicenna, the link, in fact, between them; but his name, for some reason, perhaps because he mixed with his practice a greater degree of mysticism than was approved by the Arabian schools of the next generation, has not come down to us. This man identified the product which had defied Ibn Jasher’s tests with a substance even then considered by most to be fabulous, or to be extracted only from the horn of the unicorn if that animal existed. That it had some of the properties of the fabled substance, he proceeded to prove to the satisfaction of Ibn Jasher by curing of a certain incurable disease five persons.”

  “No more than five?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “The substance was exhausted.”

  Blondel gasped. “Why did he not make more?” he cried. His voice was querulous, almost savage.

  “The experiment,” Basterga answered, “of which it was the product was costly.”

  Blondel’s face turned purple. “Costly?” he cried. “Costly? When the lives of men hung in the balance.”

  “True,” Basterga replied with a smile; “but I was about to say that, costly as it was, it was not its price which hindered the production of a further supply. The reason was more simple. He could not extract it.”

  “Could not? But he had made it once?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Then why could he not make it again?” the Syndic asked. He was genuinely, honestly angry. It was strange how much he took the matter to heart.

  “He could not,” Basterga answered. “He repeated the process again and again, but the peculiar product, which at the first trial had resulted from the precipitation, was not obtained.”

  “There was something lacking!”

  “There was something lacking,” Basterga answered. “But what that was which was lacking, or how it had entered into the alembic in the first instance, could not be discovered. The sage tried the experiment under all known conditions, and particularly when the moon was in the same quarter and when the sun was in the same house. He tried it, indeed, thrice on the corresponding day of the year, but — the product did not issue.”

  “How do you account for that?”

  “Probably, in the first instance, an impurity in one of the drugs introduced a foreign substance into the alembic. That chance never occurred again, as far as I can learn, until, amusing myself with the same precipitation, I — I, Cæsar Basterga of Padua,” the scholar continued, not boastfully but in a tone thoughtful and almost absent, “in the last year of the last century, hit at length upon the same result.”

  The Syndic leaned forward; his hands gripped his knees more tightly. “And you,” he said, “can repeat it?”

  Basterga shook his head sorrowfully. “No,” he said, “I cannot. Not that I have myself essayed the experiment more than thrice. I could not afford it. But a correspondent, M. de Laurens, of Paris, physician to the King, has, at the expense of a wealthy patient, spent more than fifteen thousand florins in essays. Alas, without result.”

  The big man spoke with his eyes on the floor. Had he turned them on the Syndic he must have seen that he was greatly agitated. Beads of moisture stood on his brow, his face was red, he swallowed often and with difficulty. At length, with an effort at composure, “Possibly your product — is not, after all, the same as Ibn Jasher’s?” he said.

  “I tested it in the same way,” Basterga answered quietly.

  “What? By curing persons of that disease?”

  “Yes,” Basterga rejoined. “And I would to Heaven,” he continued, with the first spirt of feeling which he had allowed to escape him, “that I had held my hand after the first proof. Instead, I must needs try it again and again, and again.”

  “For nothing?”

  Basterga shrugged his shoulders. “No,” he said, “not for nothing.” By a gesture he indicated the objects about him. “I am not a poor man now, Messer Blondel. Not for nothing, but too cheaply. And so often that I have now remaining but one portion of that substance which all the science of Padua cannot renew. One portion, only, alas!” he repeated with regret.

  “Enough to cure one person?” the Syndic exclaimed.

  “Yes.”

  “And the disease?” Blondel rose as he spoke. “The disease?” he repeated. He extended his trembling arms to the other. No longer, even if he wished it, could Basterga feign himself blind to the agitation which shook, which almost convulsed, the Syndic’s meagre frame. “The disease? Is it not that which men call the Scholar’s? Is it not that? But I know it is.”

  Basterga with something of astonishment in his face inclined his head.

  “And I have that disease! I!” the Syndic cried, standing before him a piteous figure. He raised his hands above his head in a gesture which challenged the compassion of gods and men. “I! In two years — —” His voice failed, he could not go on.

  “Believe me, Messer Blondel,” Basterga answered after a long and sorrowful pause, “I am grieved. Deeply grieved,” he continued in a tone of feeling, “to hear this. Do the physicians give no hope?”

  “Sons of the Horse-Leech!” the Syndic cried, a new passion shaking him in its turn. “They give me two years! Two years! And it may be less. Less!” he cried, raising his voice. “I, who go to and fro here and there, like other men with no mark upon me! I, who walk the streets in sunshine and rain like other men! Yet, for them the sky is bright, and they have years to live. For me, one more summer, and — night! Two more years at the most — and night! And I, but fifty-eight!”

  The big man looked at him with eyes of compassion. “It may be,” he said, after a pause, “that the physicians are wrong, Messer Blondel. I have known such a case.”

  “They are, they shall be wrong!” Blondel replied. “For you will give me your remedy! It was God led me here to-day, it was God put it in your heart to tell me this. You will give me your remedy and I shall live! You will, will you not? Man, you can pity!” And joining his hands
he made as if he would kneel at the other’s feet. “You can pity, and you will?”

  “Alas, alas,” Basterga replied, much and strongly moved. “I cannot.”

  “Cannot?”

  “Cannot.”

  The Syndic glared at him. “Why?” he cried, “Why not? If I give you — —”

  “If you were to give me the half of your fortune,” Basterga answered solemnly, “it were useless! I myself have the first symptoms of the disease.”

  “You?”

  “Yes, I.”

  The Syndic fell back in his chair. A groan broke from him that bore witness at once to the bitterness of his soul and the finality of the argument. He seemed in a moment shrunk to half his size. In a moment disease and the shadow of death clouded his features; his cheeks were leaden; his eyes, without light or understanding, conveyed no meaning to his brain. “You, too!” he muttered mechanically. “You, too!”

  “Yes,” Basterga replied in a sorrowful voice. “I, too. No wonder I feel for you. I have not known it long, nor has it proceeded far in my case. I have even hopes, at least there are times when I have hopes, that the physicians may be mistaken.”

  Blondel’s small eyes bulged suddenly larger. “In that event?” he cried hoarsely. “In that event surely — —”

  “Even in that event I cannot aid you,” the big man answered, spreading out his hands. “I am pledged by the most solemn oath to retain the one portion I have for the use of the Grand Duke, my patron. And apart from that oath, the benefits I have received at his hand are such as to give him a claim second only to my necessity. A claim, Messer Blondel, which — I say it sorrowfully — I dare not set aside for any private feeling or private gain.”

  Blondel rose violently, his hands clawing the air. “And I must die?” he cried, his voice thick with rage. “I must die because he may be ill? Because — because — —” He stopped, struggling with himself, unable, it seemed, to articulate. By-and-by it became apparent that the pause had another origin, for when he spoke he had conquered his passion. “Pardon me,” he said, still hoarsely, but in a different tone — the tone of one who saw that violence could not help him. “I was forgetting myself. Life — life is sweet to all, Messer Basterga, and we cannot lightly see it pass from us. To have life within sight, to know it within this room, perhaps within reach — —”