II. — THE HERMIT

AN OLD MAN WAS SITTING alone in a small room. He was at a table facing the door; behind him was another door. The walls were bare of pictures: the table was a large one, and it was almost completely covered with a set of Tarot cards. The old man was moving them very carefully from place to place, making little notes on a sheet of paper, and sometimes consulting an old manuscript book that lay by him. He was so absorbed that he did not hear the step outside, and it was not till the door opened that he looked up with a sudden exclamation. Henry Lee came lightly into the room.

“Why, Henry!” the old man said. Henry looked at the table, let his eyes run over the whole arrangement of the cards, and smiled.

“Still no nearer, grandfather?” he asked.

“Nearer? No, no, not nearer yet,” his grandfather answered. “Not quite, yet awhile. But I shall do it.” He sighed a little. “I keep the account very carefully,” he said, “and some day I shall do it. I spend all my time on it.”

Henry nodded towards the other door. “And—they?” he asked, lowering his voice a trifle.

“Yes,” the old man said. “I watch them too. But, you know—it’s too difficult. But I must do it at last. You’re not... you’re not coming back to help me, are you?”

“Why, I may even do that,” Henry said, taking off his motoring-coat.

Aaron Lee got to his feet. He was certainly very old—nearly a century, one might think, looking at the small wizened figure, dark-skinned and bald; but his movements, though slow, were not uncertain: his hands were steady as he leaned on the table, and if his voice shook a little, it was with excitement and not from senility.

“What do you mean, Henry?” he asked. “Have you found out anything? What have you heard? Have you—have you the secret?”

Henry sat down on the edge of the table, and idly fingered one of the cards. “Don’t believe me too much,” he said. “I don’t believe myself. I don’t know about the secret—no, I think we still have to find that out. But I think"—he dropped the card and looked burningly at his grandfather —"I think I have found the originals.”

Aaron gave a short gasp. “It’s not possible,” he began, and fell into a fit of trembling so great that he dropped again into his chair. When to a degree it had passed, he said once more, “It’s not possible.”

“You think not?” the younger man asked.

“Tell me,” Aaron exclaimed, leaning forward, “what are they? Why do you believe—how can you—that—” His voice stopped, so anxious was he, but after a moment’s pause he added—"Tell me; tell me.”

“It is so unlikely,” Henry began, “and yet with them there is nothing either likely or unlikely, is there? One cannot tell how they will move to-morrow. Tell me first, grandfather, do you still watch my future every day?”

“Every day by the cards,” Aaron said.

“And did yesterday promise nothing for to-day?” the young man asked.

“Nothing that I thought important,” Aaron answered. “Something was to come to you, some piece of good luck; the ace of cups lay on the Wheel of Fortune —but I thought it had to do with your law. I put it by to ask you about when you came.”

“You are old, grandfather,” Henry said. “Are the cups only deniers for you to think so?”

“But what could I think?” Aaron protested. “It was a day’s chance—I couldn’t—But what is it? What have you found?”

“I have told you I am betrothed,” Henry went on, using the solemn word as if deliberately, “and her father has had left him—by a friend of his who is dead—a collection of playing-cards... O, the usual thing, except for a set of the symbols. He showed them to us and I tell you, grandfather, I think it is the very one original set. I’ve come here to-night to see.”

“Have you got them?” the old one asked eagerly, but Henry shook his head.

“Time enough,” he said. “Listen, among them is not the Chariot an Egyptian car, devised with two sphinxes, driven by a Greek, and having on it paintings of cities and islands?”

“It is just that,” the other said.

“And Death—is not Death a naked peasant, with a knife in his hand, with his sandals slung at his side?”

“It is so,” the other said again.

“Certainly then they are the same,” Henry concluded. “But let us look at them, for that’s why I have come.”

The old man got up, and took from an inner pocket of his coat a key. He walked slowly to the inner door, and Henry followed him. He put the key in the lock, turned it, and opened the door. Within the room they were on the point of entering, and directly before them, there hung from ceiling to floor thick black curtains, and for a moment, as he laid his hand on one of these, the old man hesitated. Then he half pulled it aside, half lifted it, and went through, holding it so that his grandson might enter after him.

The place into which they came was smaller than the outer room. It was hung all round with a heavy black stuff, and it was filled with a curious pale light, which certainly did not come through any window or other opening. The colour of that pale light was uncertain; it seemed to change softly from one hue to another—now it was red, as if it were the reflection of a very distant fire; now it was green, as if diffused through invisible waters that covered them; now it was darker and half obscured by vapour; now those vapours were dispelled and the clear pallour of early dawn exhibited itself within the room. To this changing phenomenon of light the two men paid no attention; they were gazing at a table which stood in the centre.

It was a table made of some strange kind of wood: so much could be seen from the single central support which opened at the bottom into four foot-pieces, and each of these again into some twelve or fourteen claws, upon the whole fifty-six of which the table rested. But the top was hidden, for it was covered by a plate of what looked like gold, marked very intricately with a pattern, or perhaps with two patterns, one of squares, and one of circles, so that the eyes, as with a chessboard, saw now one and now the other as predominant. Upon that plate of gold were a number of little figures, each about three inches high, also of gold, it seemed, very wonderfully wrought; so that the likeness to the chess-board was even more pronounced, for to any hasty spectator (could such a one ever have penetrated there) the figures might have seemed like those in a game; only there were many of them, and they were all in movement. Gently and continuously they went, immingling, unresting—as if to some complicated measure, and as if of their own volition. There must have been nearly a hundred of them, and from the golden plate upon which they went came a slight sound of music—more like an echo than a sound—sometimes quickening, sometimes slowing, to which the golden figures kept a duteous rhythm, or perhaps the faint sound itself was but their harmonized movement upon their field.

Henry took a few steps forward, slowly and softly, almost as if he were afraid that those small images would overhear him, and softly and slowly Aaron followed. They paused at a little distance from the table, and stood gazing at the figures, the young man in a careful comparison of them with his memory of the newly found cards. He saw among them those who bore the coins, and those who held swords or staffs or cups; and among those he searched for the shapes of the Greater Trumps, and one by one his eyes found them, but each separately, so that as he fastened his attention on one the rest faded around it to a golden blur. But there they were, in exact presentation —the juggler who danced continuously round the edge of the circle, tossing little balls up and catching them again; the Emperor and Empress; the masculine and feminine hierophants; the old anchorite treading his measure and the hand-clasped lovers wheeling in theirs; a Sphinx-drawn chariot moving in a dancing guard of the four lesser orders; an image closing the mouth of a lion, and another bearing a cup closed by its hand, and another with scales but with unbandaged eyes—which had been numbered in the paintings under the titles of strength and temperance and justice; the wheel of fortune turning between two blinded shapes who bore it; two other shapes who bore between them a pole or cross on which hung by his foot the image of a man; the swift ubiquitous form of a sickle-armed Death; a horned mystery bestriding two chained victims; a tower that rose and fell into pieces, and then was re-arisen in some new place; and the woman who wore a crown of stars, and the twin beasts who had each of them on their heads a crescent moon, and the twin children on whose brows were two rayed suns in glory —the...