amazement as you in wild doubt or fierce wrath. Of the effect that you
say Philip Derval produced on me I have no recollection. Of himself I
have only this,--that he was my foe, that he came to England intent on
schemes to shorten my life or destroy its enjoyments. All my faculties
tend to self-preservation; there, they converge as rays in a focus; in
that focus they illume and--they burn. 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