After his death, the portraits of him, which had been numerous, for he had been a munificent encourager of art, were bought up and destroyed—­it was supposed by his heirs, who might have been glad could they have razed his very name from their splendid line.  He had enjoyed a vast wealth; a large portion of this was believed to have been embezzled by a favourite astrologer or soothsayer—­at all events, it had unaccountably vanished at the time of his death.  One portrait alone of him was supposed to have escaped the general destruction; I had seen it in the house of a collector some months before.  It had made on me a wonderful impression, as it does on all who behold it—­a face never to be forgotten; and there was that face in the miniature that lay within my hand.  True, that in the miniature the man was a few years older than in the portrait I had seen, or than the original was even at the time of his death.  But a few years!—­why, between the date in which flourished that direful noble and the date in which the miniature was evidently painted, there was an interval of more than two centuries.  While I was thus gazing, silent and wondering, Mr J——­ said: 

“But is it possible?  I have known this man.”

“How—­where?” I cried.

“In India.  He was high in the confidence of the Rajah of ——­, and wellnigh drew him into a revolt which would have lost the Rajah his dominions.  The man was a Frenchman—­his name de V——­, clever, bold, lawless.  We insisted on his dismissal and banishment:  it must be the same man—­no two faces like his—­yet this miniature seems nearly a hundred years old.”

Mechanically I turned round the miniature to examine the back of it, and on the back was engraved a pentacle; in the middle of the pentacle a ladder, and the third step of the ladder was formed by the date 1765.  Examining still more minutely, I detected a spring; this, on being pressed, opened the back of the miniature as a lid.  Withinside the lid was engraved “Mariana to thee—­Be faithful in life and in death to ——.”  Here follows a name that I will not mention, but it was not unfamiliar to me.  I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as the name borne by a dazzling charlatan, who had made a great sensation in London for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a double murder within his own house—­that of his mistress and his rival.  I said nothing of this to Mr J——­, to whom reluctantly I resigned the miniature.

We had found no difficulty in opening the first drawer within the iron safe; we found great difficulty in opening the second:  it was not locked, but it resisted all efforts till we inserted in the chinks the edge of a chisel.  When we had thus drawn it forth, we found a very singular apparatus in the nicest order.  Upon a small thin book, or rather tablet, was placed a saucer of crystal; this saucer was filled with a clear liquid—­on that liquid floated a kind of compass, with a needle shifting