“Why, here he is!” cries Borrhomeo, with a saturnine smile, and he slaps his broad palm on her shoulder.
But the girl only shrugged, with a little shiver, and said, “What a chill down my back—they’re walking over my grave now.”
[The Italian phrase here is very nearly equivalent.]
“Why they neither hear nor see me!” said the astrologer, amazed.
They went into the inner room, where guests used to sit and drink. But the plague had stopped all that, and the room was empty.
“He’s in there,” said the young man; “you’ll see him presently.”
Borrhomeo was filled with an awful curiosity. He knew the room, he thought, well; and there never had been, he thought, a door where the young man had pointed; but there was now a drapery there like what covers a doorway, and it swelled and swayed slowly in the wind.
“Some centuries?” said the astrologer, looking on the dark drapery. “Geber, perhaps, or Alfarabi—”
“It matters not a pin’s point what his name; you’ll call him ‘my lord,’ simply; and—observe—we alchemists are a potent order, and it behoves you to keep your word with us.”
“I will be true,” said Borrhomeo.
“And use the powers you gain, beneficently,” repeated his guide.
“I’m but a sinner. I will strive, with only an exception, in favour of such things as make wealth and life worth having,” answered the philosopher.
“See, take this, and do as I bid you,” said the youth, giving him a thin round film of human skin.
[How the honest monk who wrote the tale, or even Borrhomeo himself, knew this and many other matters he describes, ’tis for him to say.]
“Breathe on it,” said he.
And when he did so he made him stretch it to the size of a sheet of paper, which he did quite easily.
“Now cover your face with it as with a napkin.”
So he did.
“ ’Twill do; give it to me. It is but a picture. See.”
And it slowly shrunk until its disc was just the same as that of the lady’s miniature in the lid of the box, over which he fixed it.
Borrhomeo beheld his own picture.
“Every adept has his portrait here,” said the young man. “So good a likeness is always pleasant; but these have a power beside, and establish a sympathy between their originals and their possessor which secures discipline and silence.”
“How does it work?” asked Borrhomeo.
“Have I not been your good angel?” said the young man, sitting before him. He extends his legs—pushing out his feet, and letting his chin sink on his chest—he fixes his eyes upon him with a horrible and sarcastic glare, and one of his feet contracts and divides into a goatish stump.
Borrhomeo would have burst into a yell, but he could not.
“It is a nightinare, is it not?” said the stranger, who seemed delighted to hold him, minute after minute, in that spell. At last the shoe and hose that seemed to have shrunk apart like burning parchment, closed over the goatish shin and hoof; and rising, he shook him by the shoulder. With a gasp, the astrologer started to his feet.
“There, I told you it was a nightmare, or—or what you please. I could not have done it but through the picture. You see how fast we have you. You must for once resemble a Christian, Borrhomeo, and with us deal truly and honestly.”
“You’ve promised me the elixir vitae,” the old man said, fearful lest the secret should escape him.
“And you shall have it. Go, bring a cup of wine. He’ll not see you, nor the wine, nor the cup.”
So he brought a cup of Falernian, which he loved the best.
“There’s fifty years of life for every drop,” said the youth.
“Let me live a thousand years, to begin with,” cries Borrhomeo.
“Beware. You’ll tire of it—”
“Nay. Give me the twenty drops.”
So he took the cup, and measured the drops; and as they fell, the wine was agitated with a gentle simmer all over, and threw out ring after ring of purple, green, and gold. And Borrhomeo drank it, and sucked in the last drop in ecstacy, and cried out, blaspheming, with joy and sensual delight—
“And I’m to have this secret, too.”
“This and all others, when you claim them,” said the young man.
“See, ’tis time,” he added.
And Borrhomeo saw that the great misshapen dog he had seen in the street, was sniffing by the stranger’s feet.
When they went into the inner room there was a large table, and many men at either side; and at the head a gigantic man, with a face like the face of a beast, but the flesh was as of a man. Borrhomeo quaked in his presence.
“I am aware of what hath passed, Borrhomeo,” he said. “The condition is this:—You take this vial, and with the fluid it contains and the sponge trace the letter S on every door of every church and religious house within the walls of Milan. The dog will go with you.”
It was a fiend in dog’s shape, says the monkish writer; and had he failed in his task would have torn him in pieces.
So Borrhomeo, that old arch-villain, undertook this office cheerfully, well knowing what its purpose was. For it was a thing notorious, that Satan was himself in a bodily, though phantasmal, shape seen before in Milan, and that he had tempted others to a like fascinorous action; but, happily for their souls, in vain. The Stygian satellites of the fiend had power to smear the door of every unconsecrated house in Milan with that pestilential virus, as, indeed, the citizens with their own eyes, when first the plague broke out, beheld upon their own doors. But they could not defile the church gates, nor the doors of the monasteries; and according to the conditions under which their infernal malice is bound, they could in nowise effect it save by the hand of one who was baptized, which, to the baleful abuse of that holy sacrament, the wretch, Borrhomeo, had been.
He did his accursed and murderous office well
