Having shut himself up in his house for more than a month, with his furnace and crucibles (truly he had made repeated and near approaches to the grand arcanum) he had arrived, as he supposed, at the moment of projection.
He collects the powder and tries it on molten lead; it was a failure. He was too wise to be angry; the long pursuit of his art had taught him patience. But while he is pondering in a profound and gloomy reverie, a retort, which he had forgotten in the furnace, explodes.
He sees in the smoke a pale young man, dressed in mourning, with black hair, and viewing him with a sad and reproachful countenance.
Borrhomeo who lived among chimaeras, is not utterly overcome, as another man might be, and confronts him, amazed, indeed, but not terrified.
The stranger shook his head like a holy young confessor, who hears an evil shrift; and says he, rather sternly—“Borrhomeo! Beware of covetousness which is idolatry. On this sordid pursuit which you call a science, have you wasted your days on earth and your peace hereafter.”
“Young man,” says the alchemist, too much struck by the manner and reproof of the stranger to ask himself how he came there—“Wealth is power to do good as well as evil. To seek it is, therefore, an ambition as honourable as any other.”
“We both know why you seek it, and how you would employ it,” answers the young man gravely.
The old man’s face flushed with anger at this rebuke, and he looked down frowningly to the table whereon lay the book of his spells. But he bethought him this must be a good spirit, and he was abashed. Nevertheless, he roused his courage, and shook his white mane back, and was on the point of answering sternly, when the young man said with a melancholy smile—
“Besides, you will never discover the grand arcanum—the elixir vitae, or the philosopher’s stone.”
His words, which were as soft as snowflakes, fell like an iron mace upon the heart of the seer.
“Perhaps not,” said the astrologer frigidly.
“Not perhaps,” said the stranger.
“At all events, young man—for as such you appear—and I know what spirits seek who take that shape, the science has its charms for me; and when the pleasures of the young are as harmless as the amusements of the aged I’ll hear you question mine.”
“You know not what spirit you are of. As for me, I am contrite and humble—well I may,” says the stranger faintly with a sigh. “Besides, what you have pursued in vain, and will never by your own researches find, I have discovered.”
“What! the—”
“Yes, the tincture that can prolong life to virtual immortality, and the dust that can change that lead into gold; but I care for neither.”
“Why, young man, if this be true,” says Borrhomeo in a rapture of wonder, “you stand before me an angel of wisdom, in power and immortality like a god!”
“No,” says the stranger, “a long-lived fellow, with a long purse—that’s all.”
“All?—everything?” cries the old man. “Will you—will you—”
“Yes, sir, you shall see,” says the young man in black. “Give me that crucible. It is all a matter of proportions. Water, clay, and air are the material of all the vegetable world—the flowers and forests, the wines and the fruits—the seed is both the laboratory and the chemist, and knows how, with the sun’s help, to apportion and combine.”
While he said this with the abstracted manner of one whose mind is mazed in a double reverie, while his hands work out some familiar problem, he tumbled over the alchemist’s papers, and unstopped and stopped his bottles of crystals, precipitates, and elixirs—taking a little from this and a little from that, and throwing all into a small gold cup that stood on the table; but like a juggler, he moved those bottles so deftly, that the quick eyes and retentive soul of the old man vainly sought to catch or keep the order of the process. When he had done there was hardly a thimble-full.
“Is that it?” whispered the old man, twinkling with greedy eyes.
“No,” said the stranger, with a sly smile, “there is one very simple ingredient which you have forgotten.”
He took a large, flat, oval gold box, with some hair set under a crystal in the lid of it, and looking at it for a moment, he seemed to sigh. He tapped it like a snuffbox—there was within it a powder like vermilion, and on the inside of the lid, in the centre, was the small enamel portrait of a beautiful but sinister female face. The features were so very beautiful, and the expression so strangely blended with horror, that it fixed the gaze of the old man for a moment; and—was it illusion?—he thought he saw the face steadily dilating as if it would gradually fill the lid of the box, and even expand to human dimensions.
“Yes,” said the stranger, as having taken some of the red powder, he shut the cover down again with a snap, “she was beautiful, and her lineaments are still clear and bright—nothing like darkness to keep them from fading, and so the poor little miniature is again in prison;” and he dropped the box back into his pocket.
Then he took two iron ladles, and heating in the one his powder to a white heat, and bidding the alchemist melt a pellet of lead in the other, and pour it into the ladle which held the powder, there arose a beautiful purple fire in the bottom of it, with an intense fringe of green and
