My Library

During all this time, the father, daughter, lover, myself, and the commissary’s two comrades had said nothing, but at a sign from Ravalette we took our seats in such a position that we commanded the hall-door, that between the two rooms, the recess, the cupboard, and the windows on either side. The commissary placed the convex side of the screen toward us, in the middle of the room, and then taking a seat by my side, said, that so far as he was concerned, all was ready, and from the pallor of his lips, the tone in which he spoke, and from the frequency with which he crossed himself and muttered an orison, compounded of bad French and worse Latin, it was clear that he wished his hands well washed of the whole affair. “I, too, am ready,” observed the wizard, “and I, who have nothing to conceal, declare that I am he whom yonder man—Im Hokeis, and his Guebre-tribe, have for centuries believed to be the God of Fire and of Flame. The mystery of my being cannot yet be solved. I am not alone! The mastery, over Matter and over Magic, is an inheritance of the ages. We who were once as others are, became doomed ones by reason of the curse of a dying man, and like Isaac Ahasuerus, the Hebrew of Jerusalem, who cursed and spat upon the Man of Sorrows when bearing his gibbet up the steep lane of the Dolorous Way, and whom the Meek one cursed, and bade tarry on earth till he came—even so is