"Newton, a great geometrician," Porriquet went on, "once sat for twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table; when he emerged from his musings, he was a day out in his reckoning, just as if he had been sleeping. I will go to see him, dear lad; I may perhaps be of some use to him."
"Not for a moment!" Jonathan cried.
"Not though you were King of France—I mean the real old one. You could not go in unless you forced the doors open and walked over my body.
But I will go and tell him you are here, M. Porriquet, and I will put it to him like this, 'Ought he to come up?'
And he will say Yes or No.
I never say,
'Do you wish?' or
'Will you?' or
'Do you want?'
Those words are scratched out of the dictionary.
He let out at me once with a 'Do you want to kill me?' he was so very angry."
Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing to him to come no further, and soon returned with a favorable answer. He led the old gentleman through one magnificent room after another, where every door stood open.
At last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance seated beside the fire.
Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an armchair wrapped in a dressing-gown with some large pattern on it.
The intense melancholy that preyed upon him could be discerned in his languid posture and feeble frame; it was depicted on his brow and white face; he looked like some plant bleached by darkness.
There was a kind of effeminate grace about him; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also noticeable.
His hands were soft and white, like a pretty woman's; he wore his fair hair, now grown scanty, curled about his temples with a refinement of vanity.
The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the weight of its tassel; too heavy for the light material of which it was made.
He had let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a malachite blade with gold mounting, which he had used to cut the leaves of the book.
The amber mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah lay on his knee; the enameled coils lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to draw out its fresh perfume.
And yet there was a complete contradiction between the general feebleness of his young frame and the blue eyes, where all his vitality seemed to dwell; an extraordinary intelligence seemed to look out from them and to grasp everything at once.
That expression was painful to see.
Some would have read despair in it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse.
It was the inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce consign its desires to the depths of its own heart; or of a miser enjoying in imagination all the pleasures that his money could procure for him, while he declines to lessen his hoard; the look of a bound Prometheus, of the fallen Napoleon of 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the strategical blunder that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-four hours of command in vain; or rather it was the same look that Raphael had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of gold at the gaming-table only a few months ago.
He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely common-sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic service had scarcely civilized.
He had given up all the rights of life in order to live; he had despoiled his soul of all the romance that lies in a wish; and almost rejoiced at thus becoming a sort of automaton.
The better to struggle with the cruel power that he had challenged, he had followed Origen's example, and had maimed and chastened his imagination.
The day after he had seen the diminution of the Magic Skin, at his sudden accession of wealth, he happened to be at his notary's house.
A well-known physician had told them quite seriously, at dessert, how a Swiss attacked by consumption had cured himself.
The man had never spoken a word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow-house, adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light diet.
"I will be like that man," thought Raphael to himself.
He wanted life at any price, and so he led the life of a machine in the midst of all the luxury around him.
The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shuddered; there seemed something unnatural about the meagre, enfeebled frame.
In the Marquis, with his eager eyes and careworn forehead, he could hardly recognize the fresh-cheeked and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom he remembered.
If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general preserver of the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would have thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find Childe Harold.
"Good day, pere Porriquet," said Raphael, pressing the old schoolmaster's frozen fingers in his own damp ones; "how are you?"
"I am very well," replied the other, alarmed by the touch of that feverish hand.
"But how about you?"
"Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health."
"You are engaged in some great work, no doubt?"
"No," Raphael answered.
"Exegi monumemtum, pere Porriquet; I have contributed an important page to science, and have now bidden her farewell for ever.
I scarcely know where my manuscript is."
"The style is no doubt correct?" queried the schoolmaster.
"You, I hope, would never have adopted the barbarous language of the new school, which fancies it has worked such wonders by discovering Ronsard!"
"My work treats of physiology pure and simple."
"Oh, then, there is no more to be said," the schoolmaster answered.
"Grammar must yield to the exigencies of discovery.
Nevertheless, young man, a lucid and harmonious style—the diction of Massillon, of M. de Buffon, of the great Racine—a classical style, in short, can never spoil anything——But, my friend," the schoolmaster interrupted himself, "I was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my own interests."
Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence and elegant circumlocutions which in a long professorial career had grown habitual to his old tutor, and almost regretted that he had admitted him; but just as he was about to wish to see him safely outside, he promptly suppressed his secret desire with a stealthy glance at the Magic Skin. It hung there before him, fastened down upon some white material, surrounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic outlines.