As he walked, men turned to observe and to follow him, until an inquisitive crowd had formed at a respectful distance in his wake. This was customary. Just as it was customary for him, aloof and absorbed, to appear unconscious of the attention he was attracting.
And then at last he came to pause before the Crucifix in its open shrine. Leaning upon the jewelled head of his ebony cane, he stood for some moments in thoughtful, wistful contemplation.
“Strange, Abdon,” he said at last, over his shoulder, to his servant, “that one who can never have seen Him should so faithfully reproduce His lineaments.” There was an implication here that sent a thrill of awe through the attendant, but respectfully silent, crowd. Then, after a long pause, Cagliostro sighed and spoke again. “Do you remember that evening in Jerusalem when they crucified Him?”
The spectators caught their breath, then held it so as not to miss the answer. Abdon, bowing low with something of the Orient in his manner, replied quietly but distinctly: “You forget, Master, that I have been with you only fifteen hundred years.”
“Ah, true,” said the Count. “I was forgetting. But with so many centuries to remember...” He left the sentence there, shrugged, and sauntered on.
A report of this left the Cardinal-Prince wondering whether this man of marvels was indeed divine or merely the most impudent charlatan that had ever walked the earth. His Eminence, considering it incumbent upon him to resolve the question, sent a gentleman of his following, the Baron de Planta, to command Cagliostro to wait upon him at the Château de Saverne, where his Eminence had his seat.
Cagliostro’s reception of the command reflected his lofty disdain of the mighty of this world.
“If the Cardinal is ill let him come to me, and I will cure him. If he is well he has no need of me, nor I of him.”
That anyone should send such a message to the Cardinal-Prince implied to the Baron de Planta that the end of the world was at hand. And this was confirmed by the manner in which the matchlessly urbane and gracious Cardinal received it.
“Sublime reply, whatever the man may be,” was his liberal opinion.
Louis de Rohan was approaching fifty at the time, but his tall figure still preserved the grace of youth as did his countenance, which, reflecting his mind, was handsome in a rather infantile way; it was so smooth of contours, and so free from lines, that his ashen hair seemed prematurely faded.
Accustomed from earliest youth to sycophancy, the proud independence of Count Cagliostro drew this great prince, temporal and spiritual, to seek the man of marvels at his lodging in Strasbourg, like the humblest suitor. There, attended only by de Planta, he waited without resentment in the thronged ante-chamber to take his turn, as was imposed by one who made a parade of awarding no precedence to rank.
What reservations the Cardinal’s ingenuous mind still harboured on the subject of Count Cagliostro’s claims were dispelled almost as soon as he came to stand in the Count’s presence. Under the hypnotic gaze of the man’s singular eyes, dark and lustrous and of a penetration that seemed unearthly, His Eminence experienced such a sense of awe that his own glance fell abashed. But when he had accepted the proffered chair a mild resentment stirred in him that he, who had borne as an equal the gaze of kings, should have suffered himself so easily to be stared down. Determinedly he raised his eyes again, and compelled himself to meet and hold the other’s glance. Soon, however, whilst Cagliostro, who remained standing before him, talked in a deep vibrant voice and in a language that was only just perceptibly French, the Cardinal became aware that it was not himself but the Count who was exercising this compulsion: that it was his own glance that was being held, and that he was powerless to withdraw it from those glittering orbs that seemed presently to wax and wane as he watched them in a helpless fascination. Rohan began to be pervaded by a sense of his own unreality; it was as if all power of will and of self-assertion had gone out of him. His senses were being further lulled into subjection by the rise and fall in rhythmical hypnotic cadences of the voice addressing him in that curious Italianate French.
“Now that I behold you I perceive the source of your persistence, Monseigneur. We have met before.”
To this the bewildered Cardinal, after a faltering search in his memory, made answer: “I don’t remember.”
“How should you? Between this and that stand for you the walls of a dozen deaths, a dozen re-births. The soul-memory deep within you is choked and smothered by the ponderous strata of all the flesh it has since worn, with the lusts, the passions, the sins and aspirations that belong to each. It was sixteen centuries ago in Antioch. You were a Roman proconsul, and I was, mutatis mutandis, much as I am now, a wanderer upon the face of the earth, a traveller down the ages.”
Even in the befogged state of his senses this was more than His Eminence could be expected to digest. Indeed, indignation at the impudent affront to his intelligence aroused combative ness.
“You will have evidence of this?” he said, in quiet mockery.
“Evidence!” boomed the sonorous voice. “What is evidence? The thing seen. And what shall be seen of the eternal verities by poor human vision, as narrowly restricted to the immediate environment as is that of the blind earthworm to the soil in which it burrows? Can the earthworm see the stars? How, then, help him if he asks for evidence of their existence? And how help man if he asks for evidence of what lies beyond them?”
Despite himself the Cardinal must admit that there was theological authority for these implications.
“And yet,” the mystagogue continued, “since you ask for it, some evidence I shall hope to give you before all is said. So condescend to hear me out.
“You were drawn to me in those far-off days as you are drawn now, which is to say that you were inquisitive about me; inquisitive and mistrustful. Then your Roman arrogance, your Roman scepticism, obfuscated your understanding. You supposed me an impostor, a vain seducer, even as remains of arrogance and scepticism, heritage of those Roman days — a heritage which has cursed and warped your every incarnation — still afflict you now. It is so, Monseigneur. Do not interrupt me.
“In those days I was your friend. I realized the greatness latent in your soul, a soul so closely in tune with mine; and I sought to deliver it from its dull chrysalis of carnal pride, to set it free to soar in the empyrean, and from those calm altitudes to survey eternity. I would have made you lord of Life and Time, you who then, as now, were but the ephemeral lord of a fleshly envelope. I would have spread before you the Fruits of the Tree of Life and rendered you everlasting as myself. But stubborn and obstinate in your puny pride you mocked; and so I left you to your poor carnal limitations, and went my ways.”
And here the Cardinal, deathly pallid, and with eyes that still stared but were now dull and vacant, contrived at last to interrupt him.
It required a supreme effort to break through the web that was being spun about his wits, to conquer a difficulty of articulation such as will trammel a man in dreams. But he conceived that he had received, illumination, and at all costs he must voice it.
“I know you now,” he cried. “You are the Wandering Jew, the accursed cobbler of Jerusalem who spat upon Our Lord, and is doomed to walk the earth until He comes again.”
A smile swept like a shadow across the Olympian calm of Cagliostro’s countenance. Sorrowfully the great, compelling eyes considered the prelate.
“How history repeats itself! So you said then, sixteen hundred years ago. When your wits were baffled by proof of my unaccountable longevity, they took refuge from the intolerable truth in the only explanation legend offered you. But you are wrong now as you were wrong then. I am not the Wandering Jew. I am older than Cartaphilus, older than Jerusalem, where I was with Solomon at the building of the Temple. And I shall survive them both. For I have eaten of the Tree of Life. My elixir vitae is distilled from its fruits. To me, existence is not as a string of beads; a succession of brief moments of consciousness in eternity; fleeting, uncomprehended glimpses of the world. To me, existence is a continuous stream, visible from its source to the limitless ocean of eternity into which it flows. For me, this illusion men call Time has no reality. For I am He Who Is.”