Chapter V

The Witch of Prague

by F. Marion Crawford

Unorna passed through a corridor which was, indeed, only a long
balcony covered in with arches and closed with windows against the
outer air. At the farther end three steps descended to a dark door,
through the thickness of a massive wall, showing that at this point
Unorna's house had at some former time been joined with another
building beyond, with which it thus formed one habitation. Unorna
paused, holding the key as though hesitating whether she should put
it into the lock. It was evident that much depended upon her
decision, for her face expressed the anxiety she felt. Once she
turned away, as though to abandon her intention, hesitated, and then,
with an impatient frown, opened the door and went in. She passed
through a small, well-lighted vestibule and entered the room
beyond.

The apartment was furnished with luxury, but a stranger would
have received an oddly disquieting impression of the whole at a first
glance. There was everything in the place which is considered
necessary for a bedroom, and everything was perfect of its kind,
spotless and dustless, and carefully arranged in order. But almost
everything was of an unusual and unfamiliar shape, as though designed
for some especial reason to remain in equilibrium in any possible
position, and to be moved from place to place with the smallest
imaginable physical effort. The carved bedstead was fitted with
wheels which did not touch the ground, and levers so placed as to be
within the reach of a person lying in it. The tables were each
supported at one end only by one strong column, fixed to a heavy base
set on broad rollers, so that the board could be run across a bed or
a lounge with the greatest ease. There was but one chair made like
ordinary chairs; the rest were so constructed that the least motion
of the occupant must be accompanied by a corresponding change of
position of the back and arms, and some of them bore a curious
resemblance to a surgeon's operating table, having attachments of
silver-plated metal at many points, of which the object was not
immediately evident. Before a closed door a sort of wheeled
conveyance, partaking of the nature of a chair and of a perambulator,
stood upon polished rails, which disappeared under the door itself,
showing that the thing was intended to be moved from one room to
another in a certain way and in a fixed line. The rails, had the door
been opened, would have been seen to descend upon the other side by a
gentle inclined plane into the centre of a huge marble basin, and the
contrivance thus made it possible to wheel a person into a bath and
out again without necessitating the slightest effort or change of
position in the body. In the bedroom the windows were arranged so
that the light and air could be regulated to a nicety. The walls were
covered with fine basket work, apparently adapted in panels; but
these panels were in reality movable trays, as it were, forming
shallow boxes fitted with closely-woven wicker covers, and filled
with charcoal and other porous substances intended to absorb the
impurities of the air, and thus easily changed and renewed from time
to time. Immediately beneath the ceiling were placed delicate glass
globes of various soft colours, with silken shades, movable from
below by means of brass rods and handles. In the ceiling itself there
were large ventilators, easily regulated as might be required, and
there was a curious arrangement of rails and wheels from which
depended a sort of swing, apparently adapted for moving a person or a
weight to different parts of the room without touching the floor. In
one of the lounges, not far from the window, lay a colossal old man,
wrapped in a loose robe of warm white stuff, and fast asleep.

He was a very old man, so old, indeed, as to make it hard to
guess his age from his face and his hands, the only parts visible as
he lay at rest, the vast body and limbs lying motionless under his
garment, as beneath a heavy white pall. He could not be less than a
hundred years old, but how much older than that he might really be,
it was impossible to say. What might be called the waxen period had
set in, and the high colourless features seemed to be modelled in
that soft, semi-transparent material. The time had come when the
stern furrows of age had broken up into countless minutely-traced
lines, so close and fine as to seem a part of the texture of the
skin, mere shadings, evenly distributed throughout, and no longer
affecting the expression of the face as the deep wrinkles had done in
former days; at threescore and ten, at fourscore, and even at ninety
years. The century that had passed had taken with it its marks and
scars, leaving the great features in their original purity of design,
lean, smooth, and clearly defined. That last change in living man is
rare enough, but when once seen is not to be forgotten. There is
something in the faces of the very, very old which hardly suggests
age at all, but rather the vague possibility of a returning prime.
Only the hands tell the tale, with their huge, shining, fleshless
joints, their shadowy hollows, and their unnatural yellow nails.

The old man lay quite still, breathing softly through his snowy
beard. Unorna came to his side. There was something of wonder and
admiration in her own eyes as she stood there gazing upon the face
which other generations of men and women, all long dead, had looked
upon and known. The secret of life and death was before her each day
when she entered that room, and on the very verge of solution. The
wisdom hardly gained in many lands was striving with all its
concentrated power to preserve that life; the rare and subtle gifts
which she herself possessed were daily exercised to their full in the
suggestion of vitality; the most elaborate inventions of skilled
mechanicians were employed in reducing the labour of living to the
lowest conceivable degree of effort. The great experiment was being
tried. What Keyork Arabian described as the embalming of a man still
alive was being attempted. And he lived. For years they had watched
him and tended him, and looked critically for the least signs of a
diminution or an augmentation in his strength. They knew that he was
now in his one hundred and seventh year, and yet he lived and was no
weaker. Was there a limit; or was there not, since the destruction of
the tissues was arrested beyond doubt, so far as the most minute
tests could show? Might there not be, in the slow oscillations of
nature, a degree of decay, on this side of death, from which a return
should be possible, provided that the critical moment were passed in
a state of sleep and under perfect conditions? How do we know that
all men must die? We suppose the statement to be true by induction,
from the undoubted fact that men have hitherto died within a certain
limit of age. By induction, too, our fathers, our grandfathers, knew
that it was impossible for man to traverse the earth faster than at
the full speed of a galloping horse. After several thousand years of
experience that piece of knowledge, which seemed to be singularly
certain, was suddenly proved to be the grossest ignorance by a man
who had been in the habit of playing with a tea-kettle when a boy. We
ourselves, not very long ago, knew positively, as all men had known
since the beginning of the world, that it was quite impossible to
converse with a friend at a distance beyond the carrying power of a
speaking trumpet. To-day, a boy who does not know that one may talk
very agreeably with a friend a thousand miles away is an ignoramus;
and experimenters whisper among themselves that, if the undulatory
theory of light have any foundation, there is no real reason why we
may not see that same friend at that same distance, as well as talk
with him. Ten years ago we were quite sure that it was beyond the
bounds of natural possibility to produce a bad burn upon the human
body by touching the flesh with a bit of cardboard or a common lead
pencil. Now we know with equal certainty that if upon one arm of a
hypnotised patient we impress a letter of the alphabet cut out of
wood, telling him that it is red-hot iron, the shape of the letter
will on the following day be found on a raw and painful wound not
only in the place we selected but on the other arm, in the exactly
corresponding spot, and reversed as though seen in a looking-glass;
and we very justly consider that a physician who does not know this
and similar facts is dangerously behind the times, since the
knowledge is open to all. The inductive reasoning of many thousands
of years has been knocked to pieces in the last century by a few
dozen men who have reasoned little but attempted much. It would be
rash to assert that bodily death may not some day, and under certain
conditions, be altogether escaped. It is nonsense to pretend that
human life may not possibly, and before long, be enormously
prolonged, and that by some shorter cut to longevity than temperance
and sanitation. No man can say that it will, but no man of average
intelligence can now deny that it may.

Unorna had hesitated at the door, and she hesitated now. It was
in her power, and in hers only, to wake the hoary giant, or at least
to modify his perpetual sleep so far as to obtain from him answers to
her questions. It would be an easy matter to lay one hand upon his
brow, bidding him see and speak--how easy, she alone knew. But on the
other hand, to disturb his slumber was to interfere with the
continuity of the great experiment, to break through a rule lately
made, to incur the risk of an accident, if not of death itself.

She drew back at the thought, as though fearing to startle him,
and then she smiled at her own nervousness. To wake him she must
exercise her will. There was no danger of his ever being roused by
any sound or touch not proceeding from herself. The crash of thunder
had no reverberation for his ears, the explosion of a cannon would
not have penetrated into his lethargy. She might touch him, move him,
even speak to him, but unless she laid her hand upon his waxen
forehead and bid him feel and hear, he would be as unconscious as the
dead. She returned to his side and gazed into his placid face.
Strange faculties were asleep in that ancient brain, and strange
wisdom was stored there, gathered from many sources long ago, and
treasured unconsciously by the memory to be recalled at her
command.

The man had been a failure in his day, a scholar, a student, a
searcher after great secrets, a wanderer in the labyrinths of higher
thought. He had been a failure and had starved, as failures must, in
order that vulgar success may fatten and grow healthy. He had
outlived the few that had been dear to him, he had outlived the power
to feed on thought, he had outlived generations of men, and cycles of
changes, and yet there had been life left in the huge gaunt limbs and
sight in the sunken eyes. Then he had outlived pride itself, and the
ancient scholar had begged his bread. In his hundredth year he had
leaned for rest against Unorna's door, and she had taken him in and
cared for him, and since that time she had preserved his life. For
his history was known in the ancient city, and it was said that he
had possessed great wisdom in his day. Unorna knew that this wisdom
could be hers if she could keep alive the spark of life, and that she
could employ his own learning to that end. Already she had much
experience of her powers, and knew that if she once had the mastery
of the old man's free will he must obey her fatally and
unresistingly. Then she conceived the idea of embalming, as it were,
the living being, in a perpetual hypnotic lethargy, from whence she
recalled him from time to time to an intermediate state, in which she
caused him to do mechanically all those things which she judged
necessary to prolong life.

Seeing her success from the first, she had begun to fancy that
the present condition of things might be made to continue
indefinitely. Since death was to-day no nearer than it had been seven
years ago, there was no reason why it might not be guarded against
during seven years more, and if during seven, why not during ten,
twenty, fifty? She had for a helper a physician of consummate
practical skill--a man whose interest in the result of the trial was,
if anything, more keen than her own; a friend, above all, whom she
believed she might trust, and who appeared to trust her.

But in the course of their great experiment they had together
made rules by which they had mutually agreed to be bound. They had of
late determined that the old man must not be disturbed in his
profound rest by any question tending to cause a state of mental
activity. The test of a very fine instrument had proved that the
shortest interval of positive lucidity was followed by a slight but
distinctly perceptible rise of temperature in the body, and this
could mean only a waste of the precious tissues they were so
carefully preserving. They hoped and believed that the grand crisis
was at hand, and that, if the body did not now lose strength and
vitality for a considerable time, both would slowly though surely
increase, in consequence of the means they were using to instill new
blood into the system. But the period was supreme, and to interfere
in any way with the progress of the experiment was to run a risk of
which the whole extent could only be realised by Unorna and her
companion.

She hesitated therefore, well knowing that her ally would oppose
her intention with all his might, and dreading his anger, bold as she
was, almost as much as she feared the danger to the old man's life.
On the other hand, she had a motive which the physician could not
have, and which, as she was aware, he would have despised and
condemned. She had a question to ask, which she considered of vital
importance to herself, to which she firmly believed that the true
answer would be given, and which, in her womanly impetuosity and
impatience, she could not bear to leave unasked until the morrow,
much less until months should have passed away. Two very powerful
incentives were at work, two of the very strongest which have
influence with mankind, love and a superstitious belief in an
especial destiny of happiness, at the present moment on the very
verge of realisation.

She believed profoundly in herself and in the suggestions of her
own imagination. So fixed and unalterable was that belief that it
amounted to positive knowledge, so far as it constituted a motive of
action. In her strange youth wild dreams had possessed her, and some
of them, often dreamed again, had become realities to her now. Her
powers were natural, those gifts which from time to time are seen in
men and women, which are alternately scoffed at as impostures, or
accepted as facts, but which are never understood either by their
possessor or by those who witness the results. She had from childhood
the power to charm with eye and hand all living things, the
fascination which takes hold of the consciousness through sight and
touch and word, and lulls it to sleep. It was witchery, and she was
called a witch. In earlier centuries her hideous fate would have been
sealed from the first day when, under her childish gaze, a wolf that
had been taken alive in the Bohemian forest crawled fawning to her
feet, at the full length of its chain, and laid its savage head under
her hand, and closed its bloodshot eyes and slept before her. Those
who had seen had taken her and taught her how to use what she
possessed according to their own shadowy beliefs and dim traditions
of the half-forgotten magic in a distant land. They had filled her
heart with longings and her brain with dreams, and she had grown up
to believe that one day love would come suddenly upon her and bear
her away through the enchanted gates of the earthly paradise; once
only that love would come, and the supreme danger of her life would
be that she should not know it when it was at hand.

And now she knew that she loved, for the place of her fondness
for the one man had been taken by her passion for the other, and she
felt without reasoning, where, before, she had tried to reason
herself into feeling. The moment had come. She had seen the man in
whom her happiness was to be, the time was short, the danger great if
she should not grasp what her destiny would offer her but once. Had
the Wanderer been by her side, she would have needed to ask no
question, she would have known and been satisfied. But hours must
pass before she could see him again, and every minute spent without
him grew more full of anxiety and disturbing passion than the last.
The wild love- blossom that springs into existence in a single moment
has elements which do not enter into the gentler being of that other
love which is sown in indifference, and which grows up in slowly
increasing interest, tended and refreshed in the pleasant intercourse
of close acquaintance, to bud and bloom at last as a mild-scented
garden flower. Love at first sight is impatient, passionate,
ruthless, cruel, as the year would be, if from the calendar of the
season the months of slow transition were struck out; if the raging
heat of August followed in one day upon the wild tempests of the
winter; if the fruit of the vine but yesterday in leaf grew rich and
black to-day, to be churned to foam to-morrow under the feet of the
laughing wine treaders.

Unorna felt that the day would be intolerable if she could not
hear from other lips the promise of a predestined happiness. She was
not really in doubt, but she was under the imperious impulse of a
passion which must needs find some response, even in the useless
confirmation of its reality uttered by an indifferent person--the
spirit of a mighty cry seeking its own echo in the echoless, flat
waste of the Great Desert.

Then, too, she placed a sincere faith in the old man's answers
to her questions, regardless of the matter inquired into. She
believed that in the mysterious condition between sleep and waking
which she could command, the knowledge of things to be was with him
as certainly as the memory of what had been and of what was even now
passing in the outer world. To her, the one direction of the faculty
seemed no less possible than the others, though she had not yet
attained alone to the vision of the future. Hitherto the old man's
utterances had been fulfilled to the letter. More than once, as
Keyork Arabian had hinted, she had consulted his second sight in
preference to her own, and she had not been deceived. His greater
learning and his vast experience lent to his sayings something divine
in her eyes; she looked upon him as the Pythoness of Delphi looked
upon the divinity of her inspiration.

The irresistible longing to hear the passionate pleadings of her
own heart solemnly confirmed by the voice in which she trusted
overcame at last every obstacle. Unorna bent over the sleeper,
looking earnestly into his face, and she laid one hand upon his
brow.

"You hear me," she said, slowly and distinctly. "You are
conscious of thought, and you see into the future."

The massive head stirred, the long limbs moved uneasily under
the white robe, the enormous, bony hands contracted, and in the
cavernous eyes the great lids were slowly lifted. A dull stare met
her look.

"Is it he?" she asked, speaking more quickly in spite of
herself. "Is it he at last?"

There was no answer. The lips did not part, there was not even
the attempt to speak. She had been sure that the one word would be
spoken unhesitatingly, and the silence startled her and brought back
the doubt which she had half forgotten.

"You must answer my question. I command you to answer me. Is it
he?"

"You must tell me more before I can answer."

The words came in a feeble piping voice, strangely out of
keeping with the colossal frame and imposing features.

Unorna's face was clouded, and the ready gleam of anger flashed
in her eyes as it ever did at the smallest opposition to her will.

"Can you not see him?" she asked impatiently.

"I cannot see him unless you lead me to him and tell me where he
is."

"Where are you?"

"In your mind."

"And what are you?"

"I am the image in your eyes."

"There is another man in my mind," said Unorna. "I command you
to see him."

"I see him. He is tall, pale, noble, suffering. You love
him."

"Is it he who shall be my life and my death? Is it he who shall
love me as other women are not loved?"

The weak voice was still for a moment, and the face seemed
covered with a veil of perplexity.

"I see with your eyes," said the old man at last.

"And I command you to see into the future with your own!" cried
Unorna, concentrating her terrible will as she grew more
impatient.

There was an evident struggle in the giant's mind, an effort to
obey which failed to break down an obstacle. She bent over him
eagerly and her whole consciousness was centered in the words she
desired him to speak.

Suddenly the features relaxed into an expression of rest and
satisfaction. There was something unearthly in the sudden smile that
flickered over the old waxen face--it was as strange and unnatural as
though the cold marble effigy upon a sepulchre had laughed aloud in
the gloom of an empty church.

"I see. He will love you," said the tremulous tones.

"Then it is he?"

"It is he."

With a suppressed cry of triumph Unorna lifted her head and
stood upright. Then she started violently and grew very pale.

"You have probably killed him and spoiled everything," said a
rich bass voice at her elbow--the very sub-bass of all possible
voices.

Keyork Arabian was beside her. In her intense excitement she had
not heard him enter the room, and he had surprised her at once in the
breaking of their joint convention and in the revelation of her
secret. If Unorna could be said to know the meaning of the word fear
in any degree whatsoever, it was in relation to Keyork Arabian, the
man who during the last few years had been her helper and associate
in the great experiment. Of all men she had known in her life, he was
the only one whom she felt to be beyond the influence of her powers,
the only one whom she felt that she could not charm by word, or
touch, or look. The odd shape of his head, she fancied, figured the
outline and proportions of his intelligence, which was, as it were,
pyramidal, standing upon a base so broad and firm as to place the
centre of its ponderous gravity far beyond her reach to disturb.
There was certainly no other being of material reality that could
have made Unorna start and turn pale by its inopportune
appearance.

"The best thing you can do is to put him to sleep at once," said
the little man. "You can be angry afterwards, and, I thank heaven, so
can I--and shall."

"Forget," said Unorna, once more laying her hand upon the waxen
brow. "Let it be as though I had not spoken with you. Drink, in your
sleep, of the fountain of life, take new strength into your body and
new blood into your heart. Live, and when I next wake you be younger
by as many months as there shall pass hours till then. Sleep."

A low sigh trembled in the hoary beard. The eyelids drooped over
the sunken eyes, there was a slight motion of the limbs, and all was
still, save for the soft and regular breathing.

"The united patience of the seven archangels, coupled with that
of Job and Simon Stylites, would not survive your acquaintance for a
day," observed Keyork Arabian.

"Is he mine or yours?" Unorna asked, turning to him and pointing
to the sleeper.

She was quite ready to face her companion after the first shock
of his unexpected appearance. His small blue eyes sparkled
angrily.

"I am not versed in the law concerning real estate in human kind
in the Kingdom of Bohemia," he answered. "You may have property in a
couple of hundredweight, more or less, of old bones rather the worse
for the wear and tear of a century, but I certainly have some
ownership in the life. Without me, you would have been the possessor
of a remarkably fine skeleton by this time--and of nothing more."

As he spoke, his extraordinary voice ran over half a dozen notes
of portentous depth, like the opening of a fugue on the pedals of an
organ. Unorna laughed scornfully.

"He is mine, Keyork Arabian, alive or dead. If the experiment
fails, and he dies, the loss is mine, not yours. Moreover, what I
have done is done, and I will neither submit to your reproaches nor
listen to your upbraidings. Is that enough?"

"Of its kind, quite. I will build an altar to Ingratitude, we
will bury our friend beneath the shrine, and you shall serve in the
temple. You could deify all the cardinal sins if you would only give
your attention to the subject, merely by the monstrously imposing
proportions you would know how to give them."

"Does it ease you to make such an amazing noise?" inquired
Unorna, raising her eyebrows.

"Immensely. Our friend cannot hear it, and you can. You dare to
tell me that if he dies you are the only loser. Do fifty years of
study count for nothing? Look at me. I am an old man, and unless I
find the secret of life here, in this very room, before many years
are over, I must die--die, do you understand? Do you know what it
means to die? How can you comprehend that word--you girl, you child,
you thing of five and twenty summers!"

"It was to be supposed that your own fears were at the root of
your anger," observed Unorna, sitting down upon her chair and calmly
folding her hands as though to wait until the storm should pass
over.

"Is there anything at the root of anything except Self? You
moth, you butterfly, you thread of floating gossamer! How can you
understand the incalculable value of Self--of that which is all to me
and nothing to you, or which, being yours, is everything to you and
to me nothing? You are so young--you still believe in things, and
interests, and good and evil, and love and hate, truth and falsehood,
and a hundred notions which are not facts, but only contrasts between
one self and another! What were you doing here when I found you
playing with life and death, perhaps with my life, for a gipsy trick,
in the crazy delusion that this old parcel of humanity can see the
shadows of things which are not yet? I saw, I heard. How could he
answer anything save that which was in your own mind, when you were
forcing him with your words and your eyes to make a reply of some
sort, or perish? Ah! You see now. You understand now. I have opened
your eyes a little. Why did he hesitate, and suffer? Because you
asked that to which he knew there was no answer. And you tortured him
with your will until his individuality fell into yours, and spoke
your words."

Unorna's head sank a little and she covered her eyes. The truth
of what he said flashed upon her suddenly and unexpectedly, bringing
with it the doubt which had left her at the moment when the sleeper
had spoken. She could not hide her discomfiture and Keyork Arabian
saw his advantage.

"And for what?" he asked, beginning to pace the broad room. "To
know whether a man will love you or not! You seem to have forgotten
what you are. Is not such a poor and foolish thing as love at the
command of those who can say to the soul, be this, or be that, and
who are obeyed? Have you found a second Keyork Arabian, over whom
your eyes have no power--neither the one nor the other?"

He laughed rather brutally at the thought of her greatest
physical peculiarity, but then suddenly stopped short. She had lifted
her face and those same eyes were fastened upon him, the black and
the gray, in a look so savage and fierce that even he was checked, if
not startled.

"They are certainly very remarkable eyes," he said, more calmly,
and with a certain uneasiness which Unorna did not notice. "I wonder
whom you have found who is able to look you in the face without
losing himself. I suppose it can hardly be my fascinating self whom
you wish to enthrall," he added, conscious after a moment's trial
that he was proof against her influence.

"Hardly," answered Unorna, with a bitter laugh.

"If I were the happy man you would not need that means of
bringing me to your feet. It is a pity that you do not want me. We
should make a very happy couple. But there is much against me. I am
an old man, Unorna. My figure was never of divine proportions, and as
for my face, Nature made it against her will. I know all that--and
yet, I was young once, and eloquent. I could make love then--I
believe that I could still if it would amuse you."

"Try it," said Unorna, who, like most people, could not long be
angry with the gnome-like little sage.