"I congratulate you, Sir Philip Derval, on
having learned in your travels in the East so
expert a familiarity with the tricks of its jugglers."

"The East has a proverb," answered Sir Philip,
quietly, "that the juggler may learn much from
the dervish, but the dervish can learn nothing
from the juggler. You will pardon me, however,
for the effect produced on you for a few minutes,
whatever the cause of it may be, since it may serve
to guard your whole life from calamities, to which
it might otherwise have been exposed. And
however you may consider that which you have
just experienced to be a mere optical illusion, or
the figment of a brain super-excited by the fumes
of a vapour, look within yourself and tell me if you
do not feel an inward and unanswerable
conviction that there is more reason to shun and to
fear the creature you left asleep under the dead
jaws of the giant serpent, than there would be in
the serpent itself could the venom return to its
breath?"

I was silent, for I could not deny that that
conviction had come to me.

"Henceforth, when you recover from the
confusion or anger which now disturbs your
impressions, you will be prepared to listen to my
explanations and my recital, in a spirit far
different from that with which you would have
received them before you were subjected to the
experiment, which, allow me to remind you, you
invited and defied. You will now, I trust, be
fitted to become my confidant and my assistant—
you will advise with me, how, for the sake of
humanity, we should act together against the
incarnate lie, the anomalous prodigy which glides
through the crowd in the image of joyous beauty.
For the present, I quit you. I have an engagement
on worldly affairs, in the town this night.
I am staying at L——, which I shall leave for
Derval Court to-morrow evening. Come to me
there the day after to-morrow; at any hour that
may suit you the best. Adieu."

Here, Sir Philip Derval rose, and left the room.
I made no effort to detain him. My mind was
too occupied in striving to recompose itself, and
account for the phenomena that had scared it,
and for the strength of the impressions it still
retained.

I sought to find natural and accountable causes
for effects so abnormal.

Lord Bacon suggests that the ointments with
which witches anointed themselves might have
had the effect of stopping the pores and congesting
the brain, and thus impressing the sleep of
the unhappy dupes of their own imagination
with dreams so vivid that, on waking, they were
firmly convinced that they had been borne
through the air to the Sabbat.

I remembered also having heard a
distinguished French traveller—whose veracity was
unquestionable—say, that he had witnessed
extraordinary effects produced on the sensorium by
certain fumigations used by an African pretender
to magic. A person, of however healthy a brain,
subjected to the influence of these fumigations,
was induced to believe that he saw the most
frightful apparitions.

However extraordinary such effects, they were
not incredible—not at variance with our notions
of the known laws of nature. And to the vapour,
or the odours which a powder applied to a lamp
had called forth, I was, therefore, prepared to
ascribe properties similar to those which Bacon's
conjecture ascribed to the witches' ointment, and
the French traveller to the fumigations of the
African conjuror.

But, as I came to that conclusion, I was seized
with an intense curiosity to examine for myself
those chemical agencies with which Sir Philip
Derval appeared so familiar;—to test the
contents in that mysterious casket of steel. I also
felt a curiosity no less eager, but more, in spite
of myself, intermingled with fear, to learn all that
Sir Philip had to communicate of the past history
of Margrave. I could but suppose that the
young man must indeed be a terrible criminal, for a
person of years so grave, and station so high, to
intimate accusations so vaguely dark, and to use
means so extraordinary in order to enlist my
imagination rather than my reason against a
youth in whom there appeared none of the signs
which suspicion interprets into guilt.

While thus musing, I lifted my eyes and saw
Margrave himself there, at the threshold of the
ball-room—there, where Sir Philip had first
pointed him out as the criminal he had come to
L—— to seek and disarm; and now, as then,
Margrave was the radiant centre of a joyous
group; not the young boy-god, Iacchus, amidst his
nymphs could, in Grecian frieze or picture, have
seemed more the type of the sportive, hilarious
vitality of sensuous nature. He must have
passed, unobserved by me, in my preoccupation
of thought, from the museum and across the
room in which I sat: and now there was as little
trace in that animated countenance of the terror
it had exhibited at Sir Philip's approach, as of
the change it had undergone in my trance or my
phantasy.

But he caught sight of me—left his young
companions—came gaily to my side.

"Did you not ask me to go with you into that
museum about half an hour ago, or did I dream
that I went with you?"

"Yes; you went with me into that museum."

"Then pray what dull theme did you select, to
set me asleep there?"

I looked hard at him, and made no reply.
Somewhat to my relief, I now heard my host's
voice:

"Why, Fenwick, what has become of Sir
Philip Derval?"

"He has left; he had business." And, as I
spoke, again I looked hard on Margrave.

His countenance now showed a change; not
surprise, not dismay, but rather a play of the lip,
a flash of the eye, that indicated complacency—
even triumph.

"So! Sir Philip Derval. He is in L——;
he has been here to-night. So! as I expected."