“The Devil!” said Jehan aside, “this is a long time to wait for a crown.”
“Others have thought,” continued the musing archdeacon, “that it was better to work with a ray from Sirius. But it is not easy to get such a ray pure, on account of the simultaneous presence of other stars which blend with it. Flamel! What a name for one of the elect, Flamma!—Yes, fire. That is all: the diamond lurks in the coal; gold is to be found in fire. But how to extract it? Magistri declares that there are certain feminine names possessing so sweet and mysterious a spell that it is enough to pronounce them during the operation. Let us read what Manu says under this head: ‘Where women are reverenced, the divinities rejoice; where they are scorned, it is vain to pray to God. A woman’s mouth is ever pure; it is like running water, it is like a sunbeam. A woman’s name should be agreeable, soft, fantastic; it should end with long vowels, and sound like words of blessing.’ Yes, the sage is right,—indeed, Maria, Sophia, Esmeral—Damnation! again that thought!”
And he closed the book violently.
He passed his hand across his brow, as if to drive away the idea which possessed him; then he took from the table a nail and a small hammer, the handle of which was curiously painted with cabalistic letters.
“For some time,” said he with a bitter smile, “I have failed in all my experiments; a fixed idea possesses me, and is burned into my brain as with a red-hot iron. I have not even succeeded in discovering the lost secret of Cassiodorus, whose lamp burned without wick or oil. And yet it is a simple matter!”
“A plague upon him!” muttered Jehan.
“A single wretched thought, then,” continued the priest, “is enough to make a man weak and mad! Oh, how Claude Pernelle would laugh me to scorn,—she who could not for an instant turn Nicolas Flamel from his pursuit of the great work! Why, I hold in my hand the magic hammer of Ezekiel! At every blow which the terrible rabbi, in the seclusion of his cell, struck on this nail with this hammer, that one of his foes whom he had condemned, were he two thousand leagues away, sank an arm‘s-length into the earth, which swallowed him up. The King of France himself, having one night knocked heedlessly at the magician’s door, sank knee-deep into the pavement of his own city of Paris. Well, I have the hammer and the nail, and they are no more powerful tools in my hand than a cooper’s tiny mallet would be to a smith; and yet I only need to recover the magic word uttered by Ezekiel as he struck his nail.”
“Nonsense!” thought Jehan.
“Let me see, let me try,” resumed the archdeacon, eagerly. “If I succeed, I shall see a blue spark flash from the head of the nail. ‘Emen-Hétan! Emen-Hétan!’ That’s not it. ‘Sigéani! Sigéani!’ May this nail open the gates of the tomb for every one who bears the name of Phoebus! A curse upon it! Always, always and forever the same idea!”
And he threw the hammer from him angrily. Then he sank so far forward over the table that Jehan lost sight of him behind the huge back of the chair. For some moments he saw nothing but his fist convulsively clinched upon a book. All at once Dom Claude rose, took up a pair of compasses, and silently engraved upon the wall, in capital letters, this Greek word: ‘ANáTKH.
“My brother is mad,” said Jehan to himself; “it would have been much simpler to write Fatum; every one is not obliged to understand Greek.”
The archdeacon resumed his seat in his arm-chair, and bowed his head on his hands, like a sick man whose brow is heavy and burning.
The student watched his brother in surprise. He, who wore his heart on his sleeve, who followed no law in the world but the good law of Nature, who gave free rein to his passions, and in whom the fountain of strong feeling was always dry, so clever was he at draining it daily,—he could not guess the fury with which the sea of human passions bubbles and boils when it is denied all outlet; how it gathers and grows, how it swells, how it overflows, how it wears away the heart, how it breaks forth in repressed sobs and stifled convulsions, until it has rent its dikes and burst its bed. Claude Frollo’s stern and icy exterior, that cold surface of rugged and inaccessible virtue, had always misled Jehan. The jovial student had never dreamed of the boiling lava which lies deep and fiery beneath the snowy front of ?tna.
We know not if he was suddenly made aware of these things; but, feather-brain though he was, he understood that he had seen what he was never meant to see, that he had surprised his elder brother’s soul in one of its most secret moments, and that he must not let Claude discover it. Noting that the archdeacon had relapsed into his former immobility, he drew his head back very softly, and made a slight noise behind the door, as if he had just arrived, and wished to warn his brother of his approach.