Chapter XXVII

Porporina, according to the benevolent language of the Invisibles, having no longer any reason to be seriously uneasy about the Chevalier, and thinking that Matteus had not seen very clearly into the affair, felt, when she left the mysterious council chamber, greatly relieved. All that had been said to her floated in her imagination like rays behind a cloud, and anxiety and her will no longer sustaining her, she soon experienced great feebleness in walking. She felt extremely faint and hungry, and the impenetrable hood stifled her. She paused frequently, and was forced to take the arm of her guides in order to reach her room. She sank from debility, and a few minutes after felt revived by a flagon which was offered her, and by the air which circulated freely through the room. Then she observed that her guides had gone in haste, that Matteus was preparing to serve a most tempting supper, and that the little masked doctor, who had put her in a lethargic sleep when she was brought hither, was feeling her pulse and attending to her. She easily recognised him by his wig, and she was certain she had heard his voice, before, though she could not say where.

"Doctor," said she, with a smile, "I think the best thing you can do is to give me supper soon. Nothing but hunger ails me. But I beg you on this occasion to omit the coffee you prepare so well. I am afraid I am not able to bear it now."

"The coffee I prepare," said the doctor, "is an admirable anodyne. Be calm, countess; my prescription is not of that character. Will you now confide in me, and suffer me to sup with you. It is the pleasure of his highness that I do not leave you until you be completely restored, and I think in half an hour refreshment will have done so."

"If such be his highness's pleasure, and your own, doctor, I will have the honor of your company to supper," said Consuelo, suffering Matteus to roll her arm-chair up to the table.

"My company will not be useless," said the doctor, beginning to demolish a superb pheasant, and carving it in an expert manner.

"Were I not here, you would indulge the extreme hunger which follows a long fast, and might injure yourself. I who apprehend no such inconvenience to result to myself, will put the pheasant on my plate, giving you the nice pieces."

The voice of the gastronomical doctor attracted Consuelo's attention, in spite of herself. Great was her surprise, when taking off his mask, he placed it on the table, saying--"Away with this piece of puerility, which keeps me from breathing, and enjoying what I eat." Consuelo shrank back when she recalled, in the _bon vivant_ doctor, the one whom she had seen at her bed-side--Supperville, the physician of the Margravine of Bareith. She had subsequently seen him at a distance at Berlin, without having courage to approach or speak to him. At that time the contrast of his gluttonous appetite, with the emotion and distress she experienced, recalled to her the dryness of his ideas and conversation, amid the consternation and grief of all the family, and she could scarcely restrain her disgust. Supperville, absorbed by the perfume of the pheasant, appeared to pay no attention to her trouble.

Matteus completed the ridiculousness of the situation, by placing himself, with a quick exclamation, before the doctor. The circumspect servant for five minutes had waited on the table without seeing that his face was bare, and it was only when he took the mask for the cover of the _paté_, that he cried out, with terror: "Mercy, doctor! you have let your mask fall on the table!"

"Devil take the artificial face," said he. "Eating with it is impossible. Put it in that corner, and give it to me when I go out."

"As you please, doctor," said Matteus, with a terrified air. "I wash my hands of it. Your lordship is aware that every evening I am required to give an account of all that passes here. It will be in vain for me to say your mask fell off by mistake, for I cannot deny that madame saw what was beneath it."

"Very well, my fine fellow," said the doctor, without being disconcerted, "make your report."

"And you will remark, Master Matteus," said Consuelo, "that I did not in any manner provoke the doctor to this disobedience, and that it is not my fault that I have seen him."

"Be calm, countess," said Supperville, with a full mouth. "The prince is not so black as he seems, and I am not afraid of him. I will say, that since he authorised me to sup with you, he permitted me to remove every obstacle to mastication and deglutition. Besides, I have the honor to be too well known to you, for my voice not to have betrayed me long ago. I therefore divest myself of a vain form which the prince, at the very outset, will be glad of."

"Very well, doctor," said Matteus. "I am glad that you, and not I committed this act." The doctor shrugged his shoulders, laughed at the timid old man, and when Matteus had retired, to change the service, drew his chair a little closer, and said in a low tone to Consuelo:

"Dear signora, I am not such a gourmand as I seem," (Supperville, being considerably filled, spoke somewhat at his ease,) "and my object, when I came to sup with you, was to inform you of matters which concern you greatly."

"Whence, and by whose authority do you seek to speak thus to me?" said Consuelo, who remembered her promise to the Invisibles.

"On my own account, and to please myself," replied Supperville; "do not then be uneasy. I am no spy, and speak, careless who may repeat the words that come from my heart."

For a moment, Consuelo thought it was her duty to make the doctor be silent, and be no accomplice of his treason, but she fancied that a man sufficiently devoted to the Invisibles to undertake to half poison people, to secrete them in out-of-the-way castles, would not act as he did without authority. "This is a snare set for me," said she to herself. "The ordeal begins. Let me watch the attack."

"In the first place, then, I must tell you in whose house, and where you are."

"Are we come to that point?" said Consuelo, "Thank you, doctor--I neither asked nor wished to know."

"_Ta, ta, ta!_" said Supperville. "You have already fallen into the romantic ways into which it pleases the prince to drag his friends. Do not indulge in these toys; the least that can result from them to you, is to increase, when you have yourself gone mad, the number of fools and maniacs in this court. I have no intention to break the promise I gave the prince, to tell you either his name or where you are. About that you should not care, for it would be a mere gratification of your curiosity, and that is not the disease I wish to cure in you, for you are troubled with an excess of confidence. You may then learn without disobeying, or without the risk of displeasing him, (I am interested in not betraying you,) that you are in the house of the best and most absurd of old men--a man of mind, a philosopher, with a soul courageous and tender almost as a hero's or a madman's. He is a dreamer, treating the ideal as a reality, and life as a romance--a _savant_, who, from the study and the acquisition of the quintessence of ideas, has, like Don Quixote after his books of knight-errantry, fancied inns were castles, galley-slaves innocent victims, and wind-mills monsters. He is a saint, if we look at his intentions; a madman, if we think of the results. He has contrived, among other things, a perpetual net of conspiracies, permanent and universal, to paralyze the action of all the wicked of the world; 1. To combat and oppose tyranny in governments. 2. To reform the immorality or barbarism of the laws which govern society. 3. To infuse in the hearts of all men of courage and devotion, the enthusiasm of his propaganda, and the zeal of his doctrines--nothing less--and yet he seeks and expects to realize it! Were he seconded by some sincere and reasonable men, the little good he does might bear fruit. Unfortunately, however, he is surrounded by a clique of intriguers and ambitious impostors, who pretend to share his faith and serve him, but who really make use of his credit to procure good places in all the courts of Europe, and waste the greater part of the money he destines to carry out his plans. Such is the man, and the people around him. You can judge in what hands you are, and the generous protectors who rescued you from the claws of Frederick are not likely to expose you to a greater danger by exalting you to the clouds, merely to let you fall yet lower. You are now warned. Distrust their promises, their fine words, their tragedy, and the tricks of Cagliostro, Saint Germain, and company."

"Are the two persons you have mentioned ready here?" asked Consuelo, not a little troubled, and oscillating between the danger of being played upon by the doctor, and the probability of his assertions.

"I know nothing of the matter," said he. "All is passing in mystery. There are two castles, a visible one and a palpable one, where people who are well known come, and to whom _fêtes_ are given, and where a princely life is exhibited in all frivolity and harmlessness. This castle conceals the other, which is a little subterrean world, exceedingly well masqued. In this invisible castle are all the crude dreamers of his highness--innovators, reformers, inventors, sorcerers, prophets, and alchemists: all the architects of the teeming new society, as they say, ready to swallow up to-morrow, or the day after, all that is of the old, are the mysterious guests he receives, fosters, and consults, without any one above ground being aware that he consults them, or, at least, without any profane mortal being able to explain the noise in the caverns, except by the presence of meteoric lights, and ghosts from the passages below. I imagine now, that the aforesaid charlatans may be a hundred leagues hence, for, in their way, they are great travellers, or in very comfortable rooms, with trap-doors in the floor, not so far away. It is said this old castle was once a rendezvous for the Free-Judges, and that ever since, on account of certain hereditary traditions, the ancestors of our prince have amused themselves by terrible plots, which, as far as I know, never had any result. This is the custom of the country, and the most illustrious brains are not those which are least given to such things. I am not initiated in the wonders of the invisible castle. From time to time I pass a few days here, when my mistress, Princess Sophia of Prussia, Margravine of Bareith, gives me leave to breathe a mouthful of fresh air outside of her domain. Now, I suffer terribly from _ennui_ at the delicious court of Bareith, and as I have a kind of attachment to the prince of whom we speak, and am not sorry sometimes to play a trick on the great Frederick, whom I detest, I do the above-mentioned prince some service, and, above all, amuse myself. As I get orders from him alone, these services are very innocent. The affair of your escape from Spandau, and transportation hither like a poor sleeping bird, was not at all repugnant to me. I knew you would be well treated, and fancied you would amuse yourself. If, on the contrary, you be tormented, if the councillors of his highness seek to take possession of you, and make you aid their evil views----"

"I fear nothing of the kind," said Consuelo, very much amazed at the doctor's explanations. "I will be able to protect myself from their machinations, if they injure my sense of propriety and offend my conscience."

"And are you sure, countess?" said Supperville. "Listen to me. Confide, and presume on nothing. Very reasonable and honest people have left here, signed and sealed for evil. All means are good in the eyes of the intriguers who have the prince in charge, and he is so easily dazzled that he has sent to perdition many souls at the time he fancied he was saving them. You must know these intriguers are very shrewd, that they have terrible secrets, to convince, to persuade, to intoxicate the senses, and impress the imagination. First, is a retinue of tricks and incomprehensible means. Then old stories, systems, and prestiges aid them. They show you spectres, and trifle with the lucidity of your mind; they will besiege you with smiling or dazzling phantasmagoria, and make you superstitious or mad, perhaps, as I have the honor to tell you, and then----"

"What can they expect from me? What am I in the world, for them to catch in their nets?"

"Ah! does not the Countess of Rudolstadt suspect?"

"She has no idea."

"You remember Cagliostro showed you the spectre of your husband, living and acting?"

"How do you know that, if you are not initiated in the secrets of the subterranean world, of which you speak?"

"You told the Princess Amelia, who likes gossiping, as all curious people do. You know, too, that she is very intimate with the spectre of the Count of Rudolstadt?"

"A certain Trismegistus, I am told."

"Yes, I have seen the man; and, at the first glance, he really does resemble Count Albert in a strange manner. He might even be made more so, by dressing his head like Count Albert's, making his face pale, and imitating the air and manners of the deceased. Do you understand now?"

"Less than ever. Why impose this man as Count Albert on me?"

"You are simple and true! Count Albert died, leaving a vast fortune, which is about to pass from the hands of the old Canoness Wenceslawa to those of the young baroness Amelia, Albert's cousin, unless you claim your life estate as dowager. This, in the first place, they will seek to induce you to do."

"True," replied Consuelo, "you make me understand certain words----"

"That is nothing. This life estate, a part of which might be contested, would not satisfy the appetite of the Chevaliers of Industry who seek to take possession of you. You have no child: you need a husband. Well, Count Albert is not dead. He was in a lethargy and buried alive. The devil cured him of that, and Cagliostro gave him a potion; Saint Germain took him away. After a lapse of two years he returns, tells his adventures, throws himself at your feet, consummates his marriage with you, goes to the Giants' Castle, is recognised by the canoness and certain old servants, not very sharp-sighted, calls for an examination and pays the witnesses well. He goes to Vienna with his faithful wife to demand his rights from the empress. A little scandal does not hurt affairs of this kind. Handsome women take an interest in a handsome man, the victim of a sad accident and an old fool of a doctor. The Prince Von Kaunitz, who does not dislike artists, protects you. Your cause triumphs; you return victorious to Riesenberg, and put your cousin Amelia out of doors. You are rich and powerful; you associate with the people here, and with charlatans to reform society, and to change the appearance of the world. All this is very agreeable, and costs nothing, except deceiving you a little, and your taking, in place of an illustrious husband, a handsome adventurer, a man of mind, and a wonderful story-teller. Do you see now? Think! It was my duty as a physician, as a friend of Rudolstadt, as a man of honor, to tell you this. They depended on me to establish, when it became necessary, the identity of Albert and Trismegistus. I saw the former die, however, with eyes not fanciful, but lighted by science. I remarked certain differences between the two men, and knew the adventurer at Berlin long ago. Therefore I cannot lend myself to the imposition. Not I. Neither will you, I am sure, though every exertion be made to induce you to think Albert grew two inches and recovered his health while in the tomb. I hear Matteus returning: he is a good creature, and suspects nothing. I am going now, having told my story. I leave the castle in an hour, having no other business."

After having thus spoken, with remarkable volubility, the doctor put on his mask, and having bowed profoundly to Consuelo, left her to finish her supper alone, if she thought proper. She was not disposed to do so, being completely overpowered by what she had heard, and retired to her room. She enjoyed there a portion of the repose she needed, after the painful perplexities and vague anguish of doubt and uneasiness.