As the door closed, he halted, and, maintaining that steady regard under which Monsieur de Guémenée, to his profound annoyance, began to feel uncomfortable, he spoke, subduing his resonant voice.
“If I seem to be inopportune, Monsieur de Guémenée, if I interrupt the criticisms you were about to offer, you have in this more matter for thankfulness than you may suspect.”
The Cardinal smiled his satisfaction at this immediate evidence of Cagliostro’s supernatural gifts of omniscience. But Monsieur de Guémenée did not choose to be impressed.
“An easy guess, sir. I trust, for the sake of the wits of those you delude, that you have more convincing tricks of clairvoyance.”
His Eminence flushed with pain at this coarse insult. He would have spoken, but the mystagogue raised a hand in a gesture that imperiously commanded that the answer be left to him. He had remained standing on wide-planted feet within a yard or so of Monsieur de Guémenée, and his uncanny eyes never left the young man’s face. He spoke quietly.
“There is no ground for resentment. Monsieur de Guémenée but makes himself the mouthpiece of the vulgar and of the base calumny in which the vulgar deal. Men will ever sneer at what they do not understand. That is why they remain fast in the slime of their brutish ignorance. Kindliness dictates that I deliver Your Eminence’s nephew from the fog that envelops him to his own hurt. If Your Eminence will give me leave alone with him for a few moments I shall hope to accomplish it.”
Rohan smiled. “That will be yet another miracle.” He rose at once. “By all means, since you are so generously disposed, enlighten this maladroit young man. I shall be at hand, in my closet.”
He moved, tall and stately, with a silken swish of his scarlet robes, to a little door that led to a small adjoining chamber which he frequently used for his studies. Monsieur de Guémenée sprang to his feet, at first purely out of deference to his uncle. But as the little door dosed upon His Eminence he betrayed yet another reason for that sudden rising.
“Monsieur Cagliostro, I have no wish to hear you. I will not remain to be annoyed by your impertinences.”
The Count, who had deferentially been facing the door through which His Eminence had passed, turned slowly to confront him.
“Are you afraid, Monsieur de Guémenée?”
“Afraid?”
“Of being convinced against your preconceptions, of seeing your prejudices destroyed. Look at me. Look in my face, in my eyes, sir.”
The Prince looked up to meet that burning intent glance, then lowered his eyes again, his manner sullen. “Why should I do that?” he asked contemptuously.
“To conquer the difficulty that you experience in doing it.”
“Difficulty? You want to laugh, I think.” And in defiance, so as to prove how easily he could support those awful eyes, he stared boldly into them.
“Sit down, Monsieur de Guémenée,” the Count commanded, and with a shrug Monsieur de Guémenée sank again into the tall red chair.
“Why, here’s to humour you, then. But I warn you not to strain my patience.” He was conscious even as he spoke that he was using jactancy as a cloak for vague discomfort, for an irritating sense that he was being dominated.
Count Cagliostro began to talk, in a low, crooning voice. “I remember once, nearly two thousand years ago, as I was walking one evening on the shore of Lake Tiberias, I met a man whose mind was as obstinately delimited as is your own to the things that may be apprehended through the bodily senses.”
After that, partly because what the mystagogue said seemed gibberish, partly because of the jargon in which he delivered himself, the Prince could understand but little of what he was being told. But as he listened, consciousness vaguely grew that something was happening to him, something which inspired him with an increasing dread, yet from which he could no longer escape. The glare of the eyes into which he was staring had become intolerable, yet he found himself powerless to seek relief by averting his gaze. His own eyes were held as irresistibly, as inexplicably, as his very will to avert them was caught in some impalpable tentacle against which it seemed useless to struggle. The eyes into which he gazed grew in size to the dimensions of the eyes of an ox; they continued to dilate until they were great twin pools gradually merging into a single glowing pool in which he felt that presently he must plunge and drown himself. And all the while that droning voice growing more and more distant was pursuing with its unintelligible narrative, adding something to the utter subjugation of his senses. Gradually at first, then with increasing swiftness, his consciousness diminished until it was totally blotted out.
For what ensued we must follow Monsieur de Guémenée’s own account as set down by him in a letter some years thereafter. He was awakened from that singular slumber into which he had lapsed by the booming of a great bell, like that of Notre Dame, which resolved itself as consciousness cleared into the tinkling note of the Sevres clock on the tall overmantel. It was striking the hour of ten.
From this he knew that his lapse could only have been momentary, and as he recovered he found that the queer spell to which he had been succumbing was shattered, and he was once more entirely himself. He was still seated in the tall red chair, but Cagliostro no longer stood before him. The man of mystery had moved over to the fireplace, and was planted there now beside the clock, his shoulders to the overmantel.
Monsieur de Guémenée’s first and dominant emotion was indignation, the more bitter because he could not understand the nature of the trick that had been played upon him. It was from anxiety to show that this trick, whatever it might be, had failed that he sprang to his feet and gave expression to his wrath in terms that took no account of Cagliostro’s feelings.
“Miserable buffoon, do you dream that you can constrain me to remain here to listen to your lying explanations? If you do, you are as mistaken as when you suppose that I could be deceived by them. I have nothing to say to you, nothing to hear from you. My affair is with your silly dupe, His Eminence, my uncle.”
Cagliostro remained impassive. “So be it, sir. I’ll not detain you. I merely ask that you remark the time. You will have noted that it has just struck ten.”
“Go to the devil,” said de Guémenée, and strode tempestuously across the room, to pass into the closet to which the Cardinal had withdrawn. He was conscious of being swept along by a tide of ungovernable anger, and this was swollen by the mildness with which the ever urbane Cardinal-Prince received him.
His Eminence stood reading by a bookcase on the far side of the little room. Between him and his nephew there was a writing-table, on which some documents were pinned down by a paper-weight in the shape of a miniature, but fairly solid, silver battle-axe. At his nephew’s gusty entrance he closed the book upon his forefinger and looked up.
“Well, Charles? Has His Excellency satisfied you?”
Recklessly out of his towering passion the young man answered: “Do you suppose me as besotted as yourself that I could condescend to listen to that charlatan’s impostures?”
“Charles!” His Eminence raised his brows, his eyes grew round in horror. “I think you are wanting in respect.”
“What respect do you inspire, you, a Prince of the House of Rohan, lending yourself to the swindling plans of this scoundrel, this gaolbird?”
His Eminence stiffened where he stood. His voice was cold and stern.
“Monsieur, you go too far. You will leave my house at once, and you will never enter it again until you have sued for and obtained pardon, both from me and from Monsieur de Cagliostro, for your insulting words.”