The Mesmerist's Victim. Alexandre Dumas

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      “In the walnut copse, yes. Let us stay here while the prince goes to him. You will have him all to yourself.”

      “Your kindness overwhelms me,” said the prelate who gallantly kissed the lady’s hand.

      “But the King will be worried at not seeing you.”

      “I want to tease him!”

      The duke alighted with the countess, as light as a schoolgirl, and the carriage rolled swiftly away to set down the cardinal on the knoll where the King was looking all about him to see his darling.

      But she, drawing the duke into the covert, said:

      “Heaven sent the cardinal to put us on the track of that magician who told my fortune so true.”

      “I met one—at Vienna, where I was run through the body by a jealous husband. I was all but dead when my magician came up and cured my wound with three drops of an elixir, and brought me to life with three more imbibed.”

      “Mine was a young man—— ”

      “Mine old as Mathusaleh, and adorned with a sounding Greek name, Althotas.”

      The carriage was coming back.

      “I should like to go, if only to vex the King who will not dismiss Choiseul in your favor; but I shall be laughed at.”

      “In good company, then, for I will go with you.”

      At full speed the horses drew the carriage to Paris, containing the young and the old plotter.

CHAPTER X.

       A SEANCE OF MESMERISM.

       Table of Contents

      IT was six P. M.

      Saint Claude Street was in the outskirts on the main road to the Bastile Prison. The house of the Count Felix, alias Baron Balsamo, was a strong building, like a castle; and besides a room used for a chemical laboratory, another study, where the sage Althotas, to whom the duke alluded, concocted his elixir of long life, and the reception rooms, an inner house, to which secret passages led, was secluded from ordinary visitors.

      In a richly furnished parlor of this secret annex, the mysterious man who, with masonic signs and words, had collected his followers on Louis XV. Place, and saved Andrea upon Gilbert’s appeal—he was seated by a lovely Italian woman who seemed rebellious to his entreaties. She had no voice but to reproach and her hand was raised to repulse though it was plain that he adored her and perhaps for that reason.

      Lorenza Feliciani was his wife, but she railed at him for keeping her a prisoner, and a slave, and envied the fate of wild birds.

      It was clear that this frail and irritable creature took a large place in his bosom if not in his life.

      “Lorenza,” he softly pleaded, “why do you, my darling, show this hostility and resistance? Why will you not live with one who loves you beyond expression as a sweet and devoted wife? Then would you have nothing farther to long for, free to bloom in the sunshine like the flowers and spread your wings like the birds you envy. We might go about in company where the fictitious sun, artificial light, glows on the assemblies of society. You would be happy according to your tastes and make me happy in my own way. Why will you not partake of this pleasure, Lorenza, when you have beauty to make all women jealous?”

      “Because you horrify me—you are not religious, and you work your will by the black art!” replied the woman haughtily.

      “Then live as you condemn yourself,” he replied with a look of anger and pity; “and do not complain at what your pride earns you.”

      “I should not complain if you would only leave me alone and not force me to speak to you. Let me die in my cage, for I will not sing to you.”

      “You are mad,” said Balsamo with an effort and trying to smile; “for you know that you shall not die while I am at hand to guard and heal you.”

      “You will not heal me on the day when you find me hanging at my window bars,” she screamed.

      He shuddered.

      “Or stabbed to the heart by this dagger.”

      Pale and perspiring icily, Balsamo looked at the exasperated female, and replied in a threatening voice:

      “You are right; I should not cure you, but I would revive you!”

      The Italian woman uttered a shriek of terror for knowing there was no bounds to the magician’s powers—she believed this—and he was saved.

      A bell rang three times and at equal intervals.

      “My man Fritz,” said Balsamo, “notifying me that a messenger is here—in haste—— ”

      “Good, at last you are going to leave me,” said Lorenza spitefully.

      “Once again,” he responded, taking her cold hand, “but for the last time. Let us dwell in pleasant union; for as fate has joined us, let us make fate our friend, not an executioner.”

      She answered not a word; her dead and fixed eyes seemed to seek in vacancy some thought which constantly escaped her because she had too long sought it, as the sun blinds those who wish to see the very origin of the light. He kissed her hand without her giving any token of life. As then he walked over to the fireplace, she awoke from her torper and let her gaze fall greedily upon him.

      “Ha, ha,” he said, “you want to know how I leave these issueless rooms so that you may escape some day and do me harm, and my brothers of the Masonic Order by revelations. That is why you are so wide awake.”

      But extending his hands, with painful constraint on himself, he made a pass while darting the magnetic fluid from palm and eye upon her eyes and breast, saying imperatively:

      “Sleep!”

      Scarcely was the word pronounced before Lorenza bent like a lily on its stalk; her swinging head inclined and leaned on the sofa cushions; her dead white hands slid down by her sides, rustling her silky dress.

      Seeing how beautiful she was, Balsamo went up to her and placed a kiss on her brow.

      Thereupon her whole countenance brightened up, as if the breath from Love’s own lips had dispelled the cloud; her mouth tremulously parted, her eyes swam in voluptuous tears, and she sighed like those angels may have sighed for the sons of man, when the world was young.

      For an instant the mesmerist contemplated her as one unable to break off his ecstasy but as the bell rang again, he sprang to the fireplace, touched a spring to make the black plate swing aside like a door and so entered the house in Saint Claude Street.

      In a parlor was a German servant confronting a man in courier’s attire and in horseman’s boots armed with large spurs. The vulgar visage announced one lowly СКАЧАТЬ