Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery (8 page)

I looked over the newspapers by chance. There I beheld the
advertisement of a celebrated
danseuse
who appeared nightly at
Niblo's. The Signorina Caradolce had the reputation of being the most
beautiful as well as the most graceful woman in the world. I instantly
dressed and went to the theatre.

The curtain drew up. The usual semicircle of fairies in white muslin
were standing on the right toe around the enamelled flower-bank, of
green canvas, on which the belated prince was sleeping. Suddenly a
flute is heard. The fairies start. The trees open, the fairies all
stand on the left toe, and the queen enters. It was the Signorina. She
bounded forward amid thunders of applause, and, lighting on one foot,
remained poised in air. Heavens! was this the great enchantress that
had drawn monarchs at her chariot-wheels? Those heavy muscular limbs,
those thick ankles, those cavernous eyes, that stereotyped smile, those
crudely painted cheeks! Where were the vermeil blooms, the liquid
expressive eyes, the harmonious limbs of Animula?

The Signorina danced. What gross, discordant movements! The play of her
limbs was all false and artificial. Her bounds were painful athletic
efforts; her poses were angular and distressed the eye. I could bear it
no longer; with an exclamation of disgust that drew every eye upon me,
I rose from my seat in the very middle of the Signorina's
pas-de-fascination
, and abruptly quitted the house.

I hastened home to feast my eyes once more on the lovely form of my
sylph. I felt that henceforth to combat this passion would be
impossible. I applied my eye to the lens. Animula was there,—but what
could have happened? Some terrible change seemed to have taken place
during my absence. Some secret grief seemed to cloud the lovely
features of her I gazed upon. Her face had grown thin and haggard; her
limbs trailed heavily; the wondrous lustre of her golden hair had
faded. She was ill!—ill, and I could not assist her! I believe at that
moment I would have gladly forfeited all claims to my human birthright,
if I could only have been dwarfed to the size of an animalcule, and
permitted to console her from whom fate had forever divided me.

I racked my brain for the solution of this mystery. What was it that
afflicted the sylph? She seemed to suffer intense pain. Her features
contracted, and she even writhed, as if with some internal agony. The
wondrous forests appeared also to have lost half their beauty. Their
hues were dim and in some places faded away altogether. I watched
Animula for hours with a breaking heart, and she seemed absolutely to
wither away under my very eye. Suddenly I remembered that I had not
looked at the water-drop for several days. In fact, I hated to see it;
for it reminded me of the natural barrier between Animula and myself. I
hurriedly looked down on the stage of the microscope. The slide was
still there,—but, great heavens! the water-drop had vanished! The
awful truth burst upon me; it had evaporated; until it had become so
minute as to be invisible to the naked eye; I had been gazing on its
last atom, the one that contained Animula,—and she was dying!

I rushed again to the front of the lens, and looked through. Alas! the
last agony had seized her. The rainbow-hued forests had all melted
away, and Animula lay struggling feebly in what seemed to be a spot of
dim light. Ah! the sight was horrible; the limbs once so round and
lovely shrivelling up into nothings; the eyes,—those eyes that shone
like heaven—being quenched into black dust; the lustrous golden hair
now lank and discoloured. The last throe came. I beheld that final
struggle of the blackening form—and I fainted.

When I awoke out of a trance of many hours, I found myself lying amid
the wreck of my instrument, myself as shattered in mind and body as it.
I crawled feebly to my bed, from which I did not rise for months.

They say now that I am mad; but they are mistaken. I am poor, for I
have neither the heart nor the will to work; all my money is spent, and
I live on charity. Young men's associations that love a joke invite me
to lecture on Optics before them, for which they pay me and laugh at me
while I lecture. "Linley, the mad microscopist," is the name I go by. I
suppose that I talk incoherently while I lecture. Who could talk sense
when his brain is haunted by such ghastly memories, while ever and anon
among the shapes of death I behold the radiant form of my lost Animula!

I had entered, in an idle mood, the shop of one of those curiosity
venders who are called
marchands de bric-à-brac
in that Parisian
argot
which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in France.

You have doubtless glanced occasionally through the windows of some of
these shops, which have become so numerous now that it is fashionable
to buy antiquated furniture, and that every petty stock broker thinks
he must have his
chambre au moyen âge
.

There is one thing there which clings alike to the shop of the dealer
in old iron, the ware-room of the tapestry maker, the laboratory of the
chemist, and the studio of the painter: in all those gloomy dens where
a furtive daylight filters in through the window-shutters the most
manifestly ancient thing is dust. The cobwebs are more authentic than
the guimp laces, and the old pear-tree furniture on exhibition is
actually younger than the mahogany which arrived but yesterday from
America.

The warehouse of my bric-à-brac dealer was a veritable Capharnaum. All
ages and all nations seemed to have made their rendezvous there. An
Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet, with ebony
panels, brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass; a duchess of the
court of Louis XV. nonchalantly extended her fawn-like feet under a
massive table of the time of Louis XIII., with heavy spiral supports of
oak, and carven designs of chimeras and foliage intermingled.

Upon the denticulated shelves of several sideboards glittered immense
Japanese dishes with red and blue designs relieved by gilded hatching,
side by side with enamelled works by Bernard Palissy, representing
serpents, frogs, and lizards in relief.

From disembowelled cabinets escaped cascades of silver-lustrous Chinese
silks and waves of tinsels which an oblique sunbeam shot through with
luminous beads; while portraits of every era, in frames more or less
tarnished, smiled through their yellow varnish.

The striped breastplate of a damascened suit of Milanese armour
glittered in one corner; loves and nymphs of porcelain, Chinese
grotesques, vases of
céladon
and crackle-ware, Saxon and old Sèvres
cups encumbered the shelves and nooks of the apartment.

The dealer followed me closely through the tortuous way contrived
between the piles of furniture, warding off with his hand the hazardous
sweep of my coat-skirts, watching my elbows with the uneasy attention
of an antiquarian and a usurer.

It was a singular face, that of the merchant; an immense skull,
polished like a knee, and surrounded by a thin aureole of white hair,
which brought out the clear salmon tint of his complexion all the more
strikingly, lent him a false aspect of patriarchal
bonhomie
,
counteracted, however, by the scintillation of two little yellow eyes
which trembled in their orbits like two louis d'or upon quicksilver.
The curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested
the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, slender, full of nerves
which projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and
armed with claws like those on the terminations of bats' wings—shook
with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became
firmer than steel pincers or lobsters' claws when they lifted any
precious article—an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a dish of Bohemian
crystal. This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical
and cabalistic that he would have been burnt on the mere testimony of
his face three centuries ago.

"Will you not buy something from me to-day, sir? Here is a Malay kreese
with a blade undulating like flame. Look at those grooves contrived for
the blood to run along, those teeth set backward so as to tear out the
entrails in withdrawing the weapon. It is a fine character of ferocious
arm, and will look well in your collection. This two-handed sword is
very beautiful. It is the work of Josepe de la Hera; and this
colichemarde
, with its fenestrated guard—what a superb specimen of
handicraft!"

"No; I have quite enough weapons and instruments of carnage. I want a
small figure, something which will suit me as a paper-weight, for I
cannot endure those trumpery bronzes which the stationers sell, and
which may be found on everybody's desk."

The old gnome foraged among his ancient wares, and finally arranged
before me some antique bronzes, so-called at least; fragments of
malachite, little Hindoo or Chinese idols, a kind of poussah-toys in
jade-stone, representing the incarnations of Brahma or Vishnoo, and
wonderfully appropriate to the very undivine office of holding papers
and letters in place.

I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon, all constellated with
warts, its mouth formidable with bristling tusks and ranges of teeth,
and an abominable little Mexican fetich, representing the god
Vitziliputzili
au naturel
, when I caught sight of a charming foot,
which I at first took for a fragment of some antique Venus.

It had those beautiful ruddy and tawny tints that lend to Florentine
bronze that warm living look so much preferable to the gray-green
aspect of common bronzes, which might easily be mistaken for statues in
a state of putrefaction. Satiny gleams played over its rounded forms,
doubtless polished by the amorous kisses of twenty centuries, for it
seemed a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era of art, perhaps
moulded by Lysippus himself.

"That foot will be my choice," I said to the merchant, who regarded me
with an ironical and saturnine air, and held out the object desired
that I might examine it more fully.

I was surprised at its lightness. It was not a foot of metal, but in
sooth a foot of flesh, an embalmed foot, a mummy's foot. On examining
it still more closely the very grain of the skin, and the almost
imperceptible lines impressed upon it by the texture of the bandages,
became perceptible. The toes were slender and delicate, and terminated
by perfectly formed nails, pure and transparent as agates. The great
toe, slightly separated from the rest, afforded a happy contrast, in
the antique style, to the position of the other toes, and lent it an
aërial lightness—the grace of a bird's foot. The sole, scarcely
streaked by a few almost imperceptible cross lines, afforded evidence
that it had never touched the bare ground, and had only come in contact
with the finest matting of Nile rushes and the softest carpets of
panther skin.

"Ha, ha, you want the foot of the Princess Hermonthis!" exclaimed the
merchant, with a strange giggle, fixing his owlish eyes upon me. "Ha,
ha, ha! For a paper-weight! An original idea!—an artistic idea! Old
Pharaoh would certainly have been surprised had some one told him that
the foot of his adored daughter would be used for a paper-weight after
he had had a mountain of granite hollowed out as a receptacle for the
triple coffin, painted and gilded, covered with hieroglyphics and
beautiful paintings of the Judgment of Souls," continued the queer
little merchant, half audibly, as though talking to himself.

"How much will you charge me for this mummy fragment?"

"Ah, the highest price I can get, for it is a superb piece. If I had
the match of it you could not have it for less than five hundred
francs. The daughter of a Pharaoh! Nothing is more rare."

"Assuredly that is not a common article, but still, how much do you
want? In the first place let me warn you that all my wealth consists of
just five louis. I can buy anything that costs five louis, but nothing
dearer. You might search my vest pockets and most secret drawers
without even finding one poor five-franc piece more."

"Five louis for the foot of the Princess Hermonthis! That is very
little, very little indeed. 'Tis an authentic foot," muttered the
merchant, shaking his head, and imparting a peculiar rotary motion to
his eyes. "Well, take it, and I will give you the bandages into the
bargain," he added, wrapping the foot in an ancient damask rag. "Very
fine! Real damask—Indian damask which has never been redyed. It is
strong, and yet it is soft," he mumbled, stroking the frayed tissue
with his fingers, through the trade-acquired habit which moved him to
praise even an object of such little value that he himself deemed it
only worth the giving away.

He poured the gold coins into a sort of medieval alms-purse hanging at
his belt, repeating:

"The foot of the Princess Hermonthis to be used for a paper-weight!"

Then turning his phosphorescent eyes upon me, he exclaimed in a voice
strident as the crying of a cat which has swallowed a fish-bone:

"Old Pharaoh will not be well pleased. He loved his daughter, the dear
man!"

"You speak as if you were a contemporary of his. You are old enough,
goodness knows! but you do not date back to the Pyramids of Egypt," I
answered, laughingly, from the threshold.

I went home, delighted with my acquisition.

With the idea of putting it to profitable use as soon as possible, I
placed the foot of the divine Princess Hermonthis upon a heap of papers
scribbled over with verses, in themselves an undecipherable mosaic work
of erasures; articles freshly begun; letters forgotten, and posted in
the table drawer in stead of the letter-box, an error to which
absent-minded people are peculiarly liable. The effect was charming,
bizarre
, and romantic.