The Alchemist
High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose
sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the
primeval forest, stands the old chateau of my ancestors. For
centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and
rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the
proud house whose honoured line is older even than the moss-grown
castle walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of
generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of
time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and
formidable fortresses in all France. From its machicolated parapets
and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been
defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps
of the invader.
But since those glorious years all is changed. A poverty but little
above the level of dire want, together with a pride of name that
forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have
prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in
pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the
overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the
ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the
sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries
within, all tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages
passed, first one, then another of the four great turrets were left
to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly reduced
descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.
It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining
tower that I, Antoine, last of the unhappy and accursed Comtes de
C——, first saw the light of day, ninety long years ago. Within
these walls, and amongst the dark and shadowy forests, the wild
ravines and grottoes of the hillside below, were spent the first
years of my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had
been killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I was born, by
the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted
parapets of the castle; and my mother having died at my birth, my
care and education devolved solely upon one remaining servitor, an
old and trusted man of considerable intelligence, whose name I
remember as Pierre. I was an only child, and the lack of
companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the
strange care exercised by my aged guardian in excluding me from the
society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here
and there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill. At
the time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me
because my noble birth placed me above association with such
plebeian company. Now I know that its real object was to keep from
my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line, that were
nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed
in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage hearths.
Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours
of my childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the
shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim
or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood that
clothes the side of the hill near its foot. It was perhaps an
effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade of
melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark
and occult in Nature most strongly claimed my attention.
Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what
small knowledge of it I was able to gain, seemed to depress me
much. Perhaps it was at first only the manifest reluctance of my
old preceptor to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave
rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great
house; yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able to piece together
disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling
tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had
a sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always
deemed strange, but which now became dimly terrible. The
circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all the
Comtes of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto
considered this but a natural attribute of a family of short-lived
men, I afterward pondered long upon these premature deaths, and
began to connect them with the wanderings of the old man, who often
spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives of the
holders of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty-two
years. Upon my twenty-first birthday, the aged Pierre gave to me a
family document which he said had for many generations been handed
down from father to son, and continued by each possessor. Its
contents were of the most startling nature, and its perusal
confirmed the gravest of my apprehensions. At this time, my belief
in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated, else I should have
dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my
eyes.
The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century,
when the old castle in which I sat had been a feared and
impregnable fortress. It told of a certain ancient man who had once
dwelt on our estates, a person of no small accomplishments, though
little above the rank of peasant; by name, Michel, usually
designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his
sinister reputation. He had studied beyond the custom of his kind,
seeking such things as the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Elixir of
Eternal Life, and was reputed wise in the terrible secrets of Black
Magic and Alchemy. Michel Mauvais had one son, named Charles, a
youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, and who had
therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the Wizard. This pair, shunned
by all honest folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices.
Old Michel was said to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to
the Devil, and the unaccountable disappearances of many small
peasant children were laid at the dreaded door of these two. Yet
through the dark natures of the father and the son ran one
redeeming ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring
with fierce intensity, whilst the youth had for his parent a more
than filial affection.
One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest
confusion by the vanishment of young Godfrey, son to Henri the
Comte. A searching party, headed by the frantic father, invaded the
cottage of the sorcerers and there came upon old Michel Mauvais,
busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron. Without certain
cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the Comte
laid hands on the aged wizard, and ere he released his murderous
hold his victim was no more. Meanwhile joyful servants were
proclaiming the finding of young Godfrey in a distant and unused
chamber of the great edifice, telling too late that poor Michel had
been killed in vain. As the Comte and his associates turned away
from the lowly abode of the alchemists, the form of Charles Le
Sorcier appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the
menials st [...]