At length he said, quietly, without, evincing
any sign either of resentment or humiliation:

"In much that you tell me I recognise myself;
in much I am as lost in amazement as you
in wild doubt or fierce wrath. Of the effect that
you say Philip Derval produced on me I have no
recollection. Of himself I have only this; that
he was my foe, that he came to England intent
on schemes to shorten my life or destroy its
enjoyments. All my faculties tend to self-
preservation; there they converge as rays in a
focus; in that focus they illume and—they burn. I
willed to destroy my intended destroyer. Did
my will enforce itself on the agent to which it
was guided? Likely enough. Be it so. Would
you blame me for slaying the tiger or serpent—
not by the naked hand, but by weapons that arm
it? But what could tiger and serpent do more
against me than the man who would rob me
of life? He had his arts for assault, I had
mine for self-defence. He was to me as the
tiger that creeps through the jungle, or the
serpent uncoiling his folds for the spring. Death
to those whose life is destruction to mine, be
they serpent, or tiger, or man! Derval perished.
Yes! the spot in which the maniac had buried
the casket was revealed to me—no matter how;
the contents of the casket passed into my hands.
I coveted that possession because I believed that
Derval had learned from Haroun of Aleppo the
secret by which the elixir of life is prepared, and
I supposed that some stores of the essence would
be found in his casket. I was deceived; not a
drop! What I there found I knew not how to
use or apply, nor did I care to learn. What I
sought was not there. You see a luminous
shadow of myself; it haunts, it accosts, it
compels you. Of this I know nothing. Was it the
emanation of my intense will really producing
this spectre of myself? or was it the thing of
your own imagination—an imagination which
my will impressed and subjugated? I know not.
At the hours when my shadow, real or supposed,
was with you, my senses would have been locked
in sleep. It is true, however, that I intensely
desired to learn from races always near to man,
but concealed from his every-day vision, the
secret that I believed Philip Derval had carried
with him to the tomb; and from some cause or
another I cannot now of myself alone, as I could
years ago, subject those races to my command
—I must, in that, act through or with the mind
of another. It is true that I sought to impress
upon your waking thoughts the images of the
circle, the powers of the wand, which, in your
trance or sleep-walking, made you the involuntary
agent of my will. I knew by a dream—for
by dreams, more or less vivid, are the results of
my waking will sometimes divulged to myself—
that the spell had been broken, the discovery
I sought not effected. All my hopes were
then transferred from yourself, the dull
votary of science, to the girl whom I charmed
to my thraldom through her love for you, and
through her dreams of a realm which the science
of schools never enters. In her, imagination was
all pure and all potent, and tell me, oh, practical
reasoner, if reason has ever advanced one step
into knowledge except through that imaginative
faculty which is strongest in the wisdom of
ignorance, and weakest in the ignorance of the
wise. Ponder this, and those marvels that
perplex you will cease to be marvellous. I pass
on to the riddle that puzzles you most. By
Philip Derval's account I am, in truth, Louis
Grayle restored to youth by the elixir, and, while
yet infirm, decrepit, murdered Haroun—a man
of a frame as athletic as yours! By accepting
this notion you seem to yourself alone to unravel
the mysteries you ascribe to my life and my
powers. Oh, wise philosopher! oh, profound
logician! you accept that notion, yet hold my
belief in the Dervish's tale a chimera! I am
Grayle made young by the elixir, and yet the
elixir itself is a fable!"

He paused and laughed, but the laugh was no
longer even an echo of its former merriment or
playfulness—a sinister and terrible laugh,
mocking, threatening, malignant.

Again he swept his hand over his brows and
resumed:

"Is it not easier to so accomplished a sage as
you to believe that the idlers of Paris have
guessed the true solution of that problem—my
place on this earth? May I not be the love-son
of Louis Grayle? And when Haroun refused
the elixir to him, or he found that his frame
was too far exhausted for even the elixir to
repair organic lesions of structure in the worn
frame of old age, may he not have indulged the
common illusion of fathers, and soothed his
death-pangs with the thought that he should
live again in his son? Haroun is found dead on
his carpet—rumour said strangled. What proof
of the truth of that rumour? Might he not
have passed away in a fit? Will it lessen your
perplexity if I state recollections? They are
vague—they often perplex myself; but so far
from a wish to deceive you, my desire is to
relate them so truthfully that you may aid me
to reduce them into more definite form."

His face now became very troubled, the tone
of his voice very irresolute: the face and the
voice of a man who is either blundering his
way through an intricate falsehood, or through
obscure reminiscences.

"This Louis Grayle! this Louis Grayle! I
remember him well, as one remembers a nightmare.
Whenever I look back, before the illness
of which I will presently speak, the image of
Louis Grayle returns to me. I see myself with
him in African wilds, commanding the fierce
Abyssynians. I see myself with him in the fair
Persian valley—lofty, snow-covered mountains
encircling the garden of roses. I see myself
with him in the hush of the golden noon,
reclined by the spray of cool fountains; now
listening to cymbals and lutes; now arguing
with greybeards on secrets bequeathed by the
Chaldees. With him, with him in moonlit
nights, stealing into the sepulchres of mythical
kings. I see myself with him in the aisles of
dark caverns, surrounded by awful shapes, which
have no likeness amongst the creatures of earth.