The Witch of Prague Part 16

"In bed--at his hotel. He will be perfectly well to-morrow."

"Did he wake?" she asked anxiously.

"Yes. We talked together."

"And he was in his right mind?"

"Apparently. But he seems to have forgotten something."

"Forgotten? What? That I had made him sleep?"

"Yes. He had forgotten that too."

"In Heaven's name, Keyork, tell me what you mean! Do not keep me--"

"How impatient women are!" exclaimed Keyork with exasperating calm.

"What is it that you most want him to forget?"

"You cannot mean----"

"I can, and I do. He has forgotten Beatrice. For a witch--well, you are a very remarkable one, Unorna. As a woman of business----" He shook his head.

"What do you mean, this time? What did you say?" Her questions came in a strained tone and she seemed to have difficulty in concentrating her attention, or in controlling her emotions, or both.

"You paid a large price for the information," observed Keyork.

"What price? What are you speaking of? I do not understand."

"Your soul," he answered, with a laugh. "That was what you offered to any one who would tell you that the Wanderer was safe. I immediately closed with your offer. It was an excellent one for me."

Unorna tapped the table impatiently.

"It is odd that a man of your learning should never be serious," she said.

"I supposed that you were serious," he answered. "Besides, a bargain is a bargain, and there were numerous witnesses to the transaction," he added, looking round the room at his dead specimens.

Unorna tried to laugh with him.

"Do you know, I was so nervous that I fancied all those creatures were groaning and shrieking and gibbering at me, when you came in."

"Very likely they were," said Keyork Arabian, his small eyes twinkling.

"And I imagined that the Malayan woman opened her mouth to scream, and that the Peruvian savages turned their heads; it was very strange--at first they groaned, and then they wailed, and then they howled and shrieked at me."

"Under the circ.u.mstances, that is not extraordinary."

Unorna stared at him rather angrily. He was jesting, of course, and she had been dreaming, or had been so overwrought by excitement as to have been made the victim of a vivid hallucination. Nevertheless there was something disagreeable in the matter-of-fact gravity of his jest.

"I am tired of your kind of wit," she said.

"The kind of wit which is called wisdom is said to be fatiguing," he retorted.

"I wish you would give me an opportunity of being wearied in that way."

"Begin by opening your eyes to facts, then. It is you who are trying to jest. It is I who am in earnest. Did you, or did you not, offer your soul for a certain piece of information? Did you, or did you not, hear those dead things moan and cry? Did you, or did you not, see them move?"

"How absurd!" cried Unorna. "You might as well ask whether, when one is giddy, the room is really going round? Is there any practical difference, so far as sensation goes, between a mummy and a block of wood?"

"That, my dear lady, is precisely what we do not know, and what we most wish to know. Death is not the change which takes place at a moment which is generally clearly defined, when the heart stops beating, and the eye turns white, and the face changes colour. Death comes some time after that, and we do not know exactly when. It varies very much in different individuals. You can only define it as the total and final cessation of perception and apperception, both functions depending on the nerves. In ordinary cases Nature begins of herself to destroy the nerves by a sure process. But how do you know what happens when decay is not only arrested but prevented before it has begun? How can you foretell what may happen when a skilful hand has restored the tissues of the body to their original flexibility, or preserved them in the state in which they were last sensitive?"

"Nothing can ever make me believe that a mummy can suddenly hear and understand," said Unorna. "Much less that it can move and produce a sound. I know that the idea has possessed you for many years, but nothing will make me believe it possible."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing short of seeing and hearing."

"But you have seen and heard."

"I was dreaming."

"When you offered your soul?"

"Not then, perhaps. I was only mad then."

"And on the ground of temporary insanity you would repudiate the bargain?"

Unorna shrugged her shoulders impatiently and did not answer. Keyork relinquished the fencing.

"It is of no importance," he said, changing his tone. "Your dream--or whatever it was--seems to have been the second of your two experiences.

You said there were two, did you not? What was the first?"

Unorna sat silent for some minutes, as though collecting her thoughts.

Keyork, who never could have enough light, busied himself with another lamp. The room was now brighter than it generally was in the daytime.

Unorna watched him. She did not want to make confidences to him, and yet she felt irresistibly impelled to do so. He was a strange compound of wisdom and levity, in her opinion, and his light-hearted moods were those which she most resented. She was never sure whether he was in reality tactless, or frankly brutal. She inclined to the latter view of his character, because he always showed such masterly skill in excusing himself when he had gone too far. Neither his wisdom nor his love of jesting explained to her the powerful attraction he exercised over her whole nature, and of which she was, in a manner, ashamed. She could quarrel with him as often as they met, and yet she could not help being always glad to meet him again. She could not admit that she liked him because she dominated him; on the contrary, he was the only person she had ever met over whom she had no influence whatever, who did as he pleased without consulting her, and who laughed at her mysterious power so far as he himself was concerned. Nor was her liking founded upon any consciousness of obligation. If he had helped her to the best of his ability in the great experiment, it was also clear enough that he had the strongest personal interest in doing so. He loved life with a mad pa.s.sion for its own sake, and the only object of his study was to find a means of living longer than other men. All the aims and desires and complex reasonings of his being tended to this simple expression--the wish to live. To what idolatrous self-wors.h.i.+p Keyork Arabian might be capable of descending, if he ever succeeded in eliminating death from the equation of his immediate future, it was impossible to say. The wisdom of ages bids us beware of the man of one idea. He is to be feared for his ruthlessness, for his concentration, for the singular strength he has acquired in the centralization of his intellectual power, and because he has welded, as it were, the rough metal of many pa.s.sions and of many talents into a single deadly weapon which he wields for a single purpose. Herein lay, perhaps, the secret of Unorna's undefined fear of Keyork and of her still less definable liking for him.

She leaned one elbow on the table and shaded her eyes from the brilliant light.

"I do not know why I should tell you," she said at last. "You will only laugh at me, and then I shall be angry, and we shall quarrel as usual."

"I may be of use," suggested the little man gravely. "Besides, I have made up my mind never to quarrel with you again, Unorna."

"You are wise, my dear friend. It does no good. As for your being of use in this case, the most I can hope is that you may find me an explanation of something I cannot understand."

"I am good at that. I am particularly good at explanations--and, generally, at all _post facto_ wisdom."

"Keyork, do you believe that the souls of the dead can come back and be visible to us?"

Keyork Arabian was silent for a few seconds.