then, as he disappeared within my house, I
murmured:

"And when she strives to look beyond the
shadow, she sees only me! Is there some
prophet-hint of Nature there also, directing me
not to scorn the secret which a wanderer, so
suddenly dropped on my solitude, assures me
that Nature will sometimes reveal to her seeker?
And oh, that dark wanderer; has Nature a marvel
more weird than himself!"

               CHAPTER   LXXVI.

I STRAYED through the forest till noon, in
debate with myself, and strove to shape my wild
doubts into purpose, before I could nerve and
compose myself again to face Margrave alone.

I re-entered the hut. To my surprise,
Margrave was not in the room in which I had
left him, nor in that which adjoined it. I
ascended the stairs to the kind of loft in which
I had been accustomed to pursue my studies,
but in which I had not set foot since my alarm
for Lilian had suspended my labours. There I
saw Margrave quietly seated before the
manuscript of my Ambitious Work, which lay
open on the rude table just as I had left it, in
the midst of its concluding summary.

"I have taken the license of former days, you
see," said Margrave, smiling, "and have hit by
chance on a passage I can understand without
effort. But why such a waste of argument to
prove a fact so simple? In man, as in brute,
life once lost is lost for ever; and that is why
life is so precious to man."

I took the book from his hand, and flung it
aside in wrath. His approval revolted me more
with my own theories than all the argumentative
rebukes of Faber.

"And now," I said, sternly, "the time has
come for the explanation you promised. Before
I can aid you in any experiment that may serve
to prolong your life, I must know how far that
life has been a baleful and destroying influence?"

'I have some faint recollection of having
saved your life from an imminent danger, and if
gratitude were the attribute of man, as it is of
the dog, I should claim your aid to save mine as
a right. Ask me what you will. You must
have seen enough of me to know that I do not
affect either the virtues or vices of others. I
regard both with so supreme an indifference, that
I believe I am vicious or virtuous unawares. I
know not if I can explain what seems to have
perplexed you, but if I cannot explain I have no
intention to lie. Speak; I listen. We have time
enough now before us."

So saying, he reclined back in the chair,
stretching out his limbs wearily. All round this
spoilt darling of Material Nature the aids and
appliances of Intellectual Science! Books, and
telescopes, and crucibles, with the light of day
coming through a small circular aperture in the
boarded casement, as I had constructed the
opening for my experimental observation of the
prismal rays.

While I write, his image is as visible before
my remembrance as if before the actual eye—
beautiful even in its decay, awful even in its
weakness, mysterious as is Nature herself amidst
all the mechanism by which our fancied knowledge
attempts to measure her laws and analyse
her light.

But at that moment no such subtle reflections
delayed my inquisitive eager mind from its
immediate purpose—who and what was this
creature boasting of a secret through which I
might rescue from death the life of her who
was my all upon the earth?

I gathered rapidly and succinctly together all
that I knew and all that I guessed of Margrave's
existence and arts. I commenced from my Vision
in that mimic Golgotha of creatures inferior to
man, close by the scene of man's most trivial
and meaningless pastime. I went on: Derval's
murder; the missing contents of the casket;
the apparition seen by the maniac assassin
guiding him to the horrid deed; the luminous
haunting Shadow; the positive charge in the
murdered man's memoir connecting Margrave
with Louis Grayle, and accusing him of the
murder of Haroun; the night in the moonlit
pavilion at Derval Court; the baneful influence
on Lilian; the struggle between me and himself
in the house by the sea-shore;—The strange All
that is told in this Strange Story.

But, warming as I spoke, and in a kind of
fierce joy to be enabled thus to free my own
heart of the doubts that had burdened it,
now that I was fairly face to face with the
being by whom my reason had been so perplexed,
and my life so tortured, I was restrained by
none of the fears lest my own fancy deceived
me, with which in his absence I had striven to
reduce to natural causes, the portents of terror
and wonder. I stated plainly, directly, the
beliefs, the impressions which I had never dared
even to myself to own without seeking to explain
them away. And coming at last to a close,
I said: "Such are the evidences that seem to
me to justify abhorrence of the life that you ask
me to aid in prolonging. Your own tale of last
night but confirms them. And why to me—to
me—do you come with wild entreaties to
lengthen the life that has blighted my own?
How did you even learn the home in which I
sought unavailing refuge? How—as your hint
to Faber clearly revealed—were you aware
that, in yon house, where the sorrow is veiled,
where the groan is suppressed, where the foot-tread
falls ghostlike, there struggles now between
life and death my heart's twin, my world's
sunshine? Ah! through my terror for her, is it
a demon that tells you how to bribe my
abhorrence into submission, and supple my
reason into use to your ends?"

Margrave had listened to me throughout with
a fixed attention, at times with a bewildered
stare, at times with exclamations of surprise,
but not of denial. And when I had done, he
remained for some moments silent, seemingly
stupified, passing his hand repeatedly over his
brow, in the gesture so familiar to him in former
days.