n. I willed to destroy my intended
destroyer. Did my will enforce itself on the agent to which it was
guided? Likely enough. Be it so. Would you blame me for slaying the
tiger or serpent--not by the naked hand, but by weapons that arm it? But
what could tiger and serpent do more against me than the man who
would rob me of life? He had his arts for assault, I had mine for
self-defence. He was to me as the tiger that creeps through the jungle,
or the serpent uncoiling his folds for the spring. Death to those whose
life is destruction to mine, be they serpent or tiger or man! Derval
perished. Yes! the spot in which the maniac had buried the casket was
revealed to me--no matter how; the contents of the casket passed into
my hands. I coveted that possession because I believed that Derval had
learned from Haroun of Aleppo the secret by which the elixir of life is
prepared, and I supposed that some stores of the essence would be found
in his casket. I was deceived--not a drop! What I there found I knew
not how to use or apply, nor did I care to learn. What I sought was not
there. You see a luminous shadow of myself; it haunts, it accosts, it
compels you. Of this I know nothing. Was it the emanation of my intense
will really producing this spectre of myself, or was it the thing
of your own imagination,--an imagination which my will impressed and
subjugated? I know not. At the hours when my shadow, real or supposed,
was with you, my senses would have been locked in sleep. It is true,
however, that I intensely desire to learn from races always near to
man, but concealed from his every-day vision, the secret that I believed
Philip Derval had carried with him to the tomb; and from some cause
or another I cannot now of myself alone, as I could years ago, subject
those races to my command,--I must, in that, act through or with the
mind of another. It is true that I sought to impress upon your waking
thoughts the images of the circle, the powers of the wand, which, in
your trance or sleep-walking, made you the involuntary agent of my will.
I knew by a dream--for by dreams, more or less vivid, are the results
of my waking will sometimes divulged to myself--that the spell had been
broken, the discovery I sought not effected. All my hopes were then
transferred from yourself, the dull votary of science, to the girl whom
I charmed to my thraldom through her love for you and through her
dreams of a realm which the science of schools never ent