On those last five words his vibrant, metallic voice had swelled to a trumpet-note. Thence it fell again at once to its quieter level.
“Yet that you tell me again, as you told me sixteen centuries ago in Antioch, that I am Cartaphilus, proves that I have touched in you at least a chord of that soul-memory which survives deep down in each of us. What you have remembered is what you called me once before. Let me now help your poor human weakness. Look into this mirror and endeavour to see what once you were when last I was beside you.”
Leaning his elbow on the table beside the Cardinal, Cagliostro extended his left hand, which was gloved in black velvet. Cupped in the palm of it he displayed a crystal sphere something less in circumference than a tennis-ball.
So dominated by now that, in obeying, he experienced no sense of derogating, Rohan directed his gaze as he was bidden. For some moments he stared into the empty depths of the crystal. Suddenly he moved and caught his breath. He leaned forward, peering.
“I see, I see,” he murmured thickly. “I see men; a multitude; an arena; a pillared marble tribune.”
“Centre your gaze upon that tribune,” Cagliostro commanded. “What do you find there?”
“A man of medium height and powerful frame, boldly featured, with eyes that burn their way into one’s brain. He is in white; a snowy chlamys edged with gold. I know his face. Ah! It is yourself.”
“And the man in the chair? Look at him: the man who sits elbow on knee and chin on fist, with a proud sad face that is wreathed in weariness and disdain. Can you name him?”
The Cardinal bent closer still; he hesitated; he was breathing heavily. “Can it be myself?”
The gloved hand closed upon the crystal and was swiftly withdrawn. Cagliostro drew himself erect, and his voice rang hard. “Yourself. Marcus Vinicius, as you then were named.”
The abruptness of movement and tone seemed to shatter a spell. Rohan sat up, restored to a normal alertness. The colour crept back into his cheeks. He passed a hand, long and slim, and delicate as a woman’s, across eyes and brow.
“You are master of strange secrets, sir,” he said slowly and gravely. Then he added a complaint. “My senses are a little dazed, I think.”
“That will pass.” Cagliostro spoke harshly, and waved a hand contemptuously. “No man may look down the ages and hope to escape vertigo. It will pass. What I have discovered to you, however, remains. So that you have faith, you may now prevail where you failed before. To help you I am here; for your soul is now of a strength to bear the secrets I could impart to you, to employ the power which must never be bestowed unworthily. I am at your service, Prince Louis. And my coming is timely, if only so that I may restore your fortune so sadly sapped by the Prince de Guémenée.”
The Cardinal was startled. “You know that?”
Again Cagliostro waved a hand. He was prodigal of gesture. “Does not all the world know it?” he asked, like a man scorning to make a mystery of the possession of knowledge reached by ordinary channels.
It was, indeed, common knowledge how much of his fortune Louis de Rohan had sacrificed to buttress the honour of his family which had been so sadly imperilled by the bankruptcy of his nephew, the Prince de Guémenée. Vast though his wealth might be, it could scarcely bear the strain of some thirty millions which that bankruptcy was imposing upon it. With deeply rooted habits of prodigal expenditure in the maintenance of his more than princely establishment, without knowledge of economy, a knowledge which his munificent spirit scorned to acquire, the Cardinal-Prince was sweeping towards the edge of financial difficulties.
He was not, however, at present concerned with this. His thoughts were consumed in the endeavour to extricate the present startling experience from the fog, as of a dream, that seemed to enshroud it.
“It is all strange,” he murmured. “So very strange! Incredible! And yet something within me seems to compel belief.”
“Now God be thanked that you are at last given grace to conquer the obstinacy of material scepticism. You yield at last to the instinctive knowledge of reincarnation deep in each of us: the oldest and strongest of human beliefs, persistent in spite of temporary occlusions; a belief that is at war with no creed that ever was.”
“Yes, yes, that is true,” the Cardinal agreed, with the eagerness of one who persuades himself. “There is no heresy in that belief. It can be reconciled. No heresy that I can perceive.”
“There is none,” said Cagliostro, as one speaking with full authority. “We will return to that. Meanwhile, there are Your Eminence’s pressing needs.” His tone blended condescension with command.
“Ah, yes.” The Cardinal’s will — never, it must be admitted, of the strongest — continued in suspension, a thing that veered as Cagliostro blew upon it. He smiled wanly. “My nephew’s affairs are absorbing millions.”
Cagliostro, erect, dominant, his great head thrown back, made a wide gesture of effacement. “Dismiss your anxieties. I have been stigmatized a magician, and persecuted as a warlock, by the ignorance of men. But, as you will come to perceive, I practise no magic that is not the natural magic of knowledge, the application of the hidden forces of nature, the fruits of study and of long centuries of experience. Among the secrets I have mastered, building upon what I learned in ancient Egypt from the priests of Isis, who already had glimmerings of these sciences, three are pre-eminent: the elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone with its power of transmuting metals, and the gift of healing all ills to which the flesh is subject, The last I hold at the disposal of suffering mankind; the second I place at the service of those whom I can trust not to abuse the power that gold bestows; the first I guard most jealously from all save the few — the very few — who, under the most rigorous tests, give proof that the indefinite prolongation of their lives will be for the benefit of humanity.
“When I shall have relieved your most urgent need, as I so easily can, and when, thereby, I shall have increased your faith in me, we may, if you so incline, turn our attention to matters of real and abiding weight.”
There was much more of the same kind before they parted on that fateful day. It followed from it that Count Cagliostro presently transferred himself from his Strasbourg lodging to be an honoured guest at the Cardinal-Prince’s imposing Château de Saverne. There, by the orders of a bemused prelate at once attracted and repelled, who knew not what to believe, a laboratory was prepared for him. And there, one day, a month later, he set a crown to the empire he was obtaining over Louis de Rohan by demonstrating that his claim to transmute base metal into gold was no mountebank’s boast. From the crucible set up in that laboratory he withdrew an ingot of pure gold of the value of five thousand livres, which under the Cardinal’s eyes he had transmuted out of lead. He presented it to his noble host, as a mere earnest of all that was to come, with as light and casual a manner as if he were handing him a leaf plucked from a tree in passing.
For the manufacture of more, however, there were certain ingredients that Cagliostro lacked, and so as to come within reach of these he proposed to his noble patron that they should transfer themselves to Paris, to the Hotel de Rohan.