"What farrago of words is this? I do not comprehend you."
"With your natural abilities," I asked with interest, "do you never feel a desire for fame?"
"Fame? Certainly not. I cannot even understand it!"
"Well, then, would you have no pleasure in the thought that you had rendered a service to humanity?"
Margrave looked bewildered; after a moment's pause, he took from the table a piece of bread that chanced to be there, opened the window, and threw the crumbs into the lane. The sparrows gathered round the crumbs.
"Now," said Margrave, "the sparrows come to that dull pavement for the bread that recruits their lives in this world; do you believe that one sparrow would be silly enough to fly to a house-top for the sake of some benefit to other sparrows, or to be chirruped about after he was dead? I care for science as the sparrow cares for bread,--it may help me to something good for my own life; and as for fame and humanity, I care for them as the sparrow cares for the general interest and posthumous approbation of sparrows!"
"Margrave, there is one thing in you that perplexes me more than all else--human puzzle as you are--in your many eccentricities and self-contradictions."
"What is that one thing in me most perplexing?"
"This: that in your enjoyment of Nature you have all the freshness of a child, but when you speak of Man and his objects in the world, you talk in the vein of some worn-out and hoary cynic. At such times, were I to close my eyes, I should say to myself, 'What weary old man is thus venting his spleen against the ambition which has failed, and the love which has forsaken him?' Outwardly the very personation of youth, and revelling like a butterfly in the warmth of the sun and the tints of the herbage, why have you none of the golden passions of the young,--their bright dreams of some impossible love, their sublime enthusiasm for some unattainable glory? The sentiment you have just clothed in the illustration by which you place yourself on a level with the sparrows is too mean and too gloomy to be genuine at your age. Misanthropy is among the dismal fallacies of gray beards. No man, till man's energies leave him, can divorce himself from the bonds of our social kind."
"Our kind! Your kind, possibly; but I--" He swept his hand over his brow, and resumed, in strange, absent, and wistful accents: "I wonder what it is that is wanting here, and of which at moments I have a dim reminiscence." Again he paused, and gazing on me, said with more appearance of friendly interest than I had ever before remarked in his countenance, "You are not looking well. Despite your great physical strength, you suffer like your own sickly patients."
"True! I suffer at this moment, but not from bodily pain."
"You have some cause of mental disquietude?"
"Who in this world has not?"
"I never have."
"Because you own you have never loved. Certainly, you never seem to care for any one but yourself; and in yourself you find an unbroken sunny holiday,--high spirits, youth, health, beauty, wealth. Happy boy!"
At that moment my heart was heavy within me.
Margrave resumed,--
"Among the secrets which your knowledge places at the command of your art, what would you give for one which would enable you to defy and to deride a rival where you place your affections, which could lock to yourself, and imperiously control, the will of the being whom you desire to fascinate, by an influence paramount, transcendent?"
"Love has that secret," said I,--"and love alone."
"A power stronger than love can suspend, can change love itself. But if love be the object or dream of your life, love is the rosy associate of youth and beauty. Beauty soon fades, youth soon departs. What if in nature there were means by which beauty and youth can be fixed into blooming duration,--means that could arrest the course, nay, repair the effects, of time on the elements that make up the human frame?"
"Silly boy! Have the Rosicrucians bequeathed to you a prescription for the elixir of life?"
"If I had the prescription I should not ask your aid to discover its ingredients."
"And is it in the hope of that notable discovery you have studied chemistry, electricity, and magnetism? Again I say, Silly boy!"
Margrave did not heed my reply. His face was overcast, gloomy, troubled.
"That the vital principle is a gas," said he, abruptly, "I am fully convinced. Can that gas be the one which combines caloric with oxygen?"
"Phosoxygen? Sir Humphrey Davy demonstrates that gas not to be, as Lavoisier supposed, caloric, but light, combined with oxygen; and he suggests, not indeed that it is the vital principle itself, but the pabulum of life to organic beings." [1]
"Does he?" said Margrave, his, face clearing up. "Possibly, possibly, then, here we approach the great secret of secrets. Look you, Allen Fenwick: I promise to secure to you unfailing security from all the jealous fears that now torture your heart; if you care for that fame which to me is not worth the scent of a flower, the balm of a breeze, I will impart to you a knowledge which, in the hands of ambition, would dwarf into commonplace the boasted wonders of recognized science.