[Illustration]

The time passed.  It now began to be a grief to me to see the turgid pallor that gradually overspread the always ashen countenance of Zaleski; I grew to consider the ravaging life that glared and blazed in his sunken eye as too volcanic, demonic, to be canny:  the mystery, I decided at last—­if mystery there were—­was too deep, too dark, for him.  Hence perhaps it was, that I now absented myself more and more from him in the adjoining room in which I slept.  There one day I sat reading over the latest list of horrors, when I heard a loud cry from the vaulted chamber.  I rushed to the door and beheld him standing, gazing with wild eyes at the ebon tablet held straight out in front of him.

‘By Heaven!’ he cried, stamping savagely with his foot.  ’By Heaven!  Then I certainly am a fool! It is the staff of Phaebus in the hand of Hermes!’

I hastened to him.  ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘have you discovered anything?’

‘It is possible.’

‘And has there really been foul play—­murder—­in any of these deaths?’

‘Of that, at least, I was certain from the first.’

‘Great God!’ I exclaimed, ’could any son of man so convert himself into a fiend, a beast of the wilderness....’

‘You judge precisely in the manner of the multitude,’ he answered somewhat petulantly.  ’Illegal murder is always a mistake, but not necessarily a crime.  Remember Corday.  But in cases where the murder of one is really fiendish, why is it qualitatively less fiendish than the murder of many?  On the other hand, had Brutus slain a thousand Caesars—­each act involving an additional exhibition of the sublimest self-suppression—­he might well have taken rank as a saint in heaven.’

Failing for the moment to see the drift or the connection of the argument, I contented myself with waiting events.  For the rest of that day and the next Zaleski seemed to have dismissed the matter of the tragedies from his mind, and entered calmly on his former studies.  He no longer consulted the news, or examined the figures on the tablet.  The papers, however, still arrived daily, and of these he soon afterwards laid several before me, pointing, with a curious smile, to a small paragraph in each.  These all appeared in the advertisement columns, were worded alike, and read as follows: 

’A true son of Lycurgus, having news, desires to know the time and place of the next meeting of his Phyle.  Address Zaleski, at R——­ Abbey, in the county of M——.’

I gazed in mute alternation at the advertisement and at him.  I may here stop to make mention of a very remarkable sensation which my association with him occasionally produced in me.  I felt it with intense, with unpleasant, with irritating keenness at this moment.  It was the sensation of being borne aloft—­aloft—­by a force external to myself—­such a sensation as might possibly tingle through an earthworm when lifted