The Argosy | Page 3

of the case. Besides, would there
not be something princely in such a theft? You cannot put a man who
steals a diamond worth a hundred and fifty thousand pounds in the
category of common thieves. Such an act verges on the sublime.
One of the things seen and noticed by Captain Ducie was the absence,
through illness, of the mulatto, Cleon, from his duties, and the
substitution in his place of a man whom Ducie had never seen before.
This stranger was both clever and obliging, and Platzoff himself
confessed that the fellow made such a good substitute that he missed
Cleon less than he at first feared he should have done. He was indeed
very assiduous, and found time to do many odd jobs for Captain Ducie,
who contracted quite a liking for him.
Between Ducie and Cleon there existed one of those blind unreasoning
hatreds which spring up full-armed and murderous at first sight. Such
enmities are not the less deadly because they sometimes find no relief
in words. Cleon treated Ducie with as much outward respect and
courtesy as he did any other of his master's guests; no private
communication ever passed between the two, and yet each understood
the other's feelings towards him, and both of them were wise enough to
keep as far apart as possible. Neither of them dreamed at that time of
the strange fruit which their mutual enmity was to bear in time to come.
Meanwhile, Cleon lay sick in his own room, and Captain Ducie was
rather gladdened thereby.

* * * * *
M. Platzoff rarely touched cigar or pipe till after dinner; but, whatever
company he might have, when that meal was over, it was his invariable
custom to retire for an hour or two to the room consecrated to the uses
of the Great Herb, and his guests seldom or never declined to
accompany him. To Captain Ducie, as an inveterate smoker, these
séances were very pleasant.
On the very first evening of the Captain's arrival at Bon Repos, M.
Platzoff had intimated that he was an opium smoker, and that at no very
distant date he would enlighten Ducie as to the practice in question.
About a week later, as they sat down to their pipes and coffee, said
Platzoff, "This is one of my big smoke-nights. To-night I go on a
journey of discovery into Dreamland--a country that no explorations
can exhaust, where beggars are the equals of kings, and where the Fates
that control our actions are touched with a fine eccentricity that in a
more commonplace world would be termed madness. But there nothing
is commonplace."
"You are going to smoke opium?" said Ducie, interrogatively.
"I am going to smoke drashkil. Let me, for this once, persuade you to
follow my example."
"For this once I would rather be excused," said Ducie, laughingly.
Platzoff shrugged his shoulders. "I offer to open for you the golden
gates of a land full of more strange and wondrous things than were ever
dreamed of by any early voyager as being in that new world on whose
discovery he was bent; I offer to open up for you a set of experiences so
utterly fresh and startling that your matter-of-fact English intellect
cannot even conceive of such things. I offer you all this, and you laugh
me down with an air of superiority, as though I were about to present
you with something which, however precious it might be in my eyes, in
yours was utterly without value."
"If I sin at all," said Ducie, "it is through ignorance. The subject is one

respecting which I know next to nothing. But I must confess that about
experiences such as you speak of there is an intangibility--a want of
substance--that to me would make them seem singularly valueless."
"And is not the thing we call life one tissue of intangibilities?" asked
the Russian. "You can touch neither the beginning nor the end of it. Do
not its most cherished pleasures fly you even as you are in the very act
of trying to grasp them? Do you know for certain that you--you
yourself--are really here?--that you do not merely dream that you are
here? What do you know?"
"Your theories are too far-fetched for me," said Ducie. "A dream can be
nothing more than itself--nothing can give it backbone or substance. To
me such things are of no more value than the shadow I cast behind me
when I walk in the sun."
"And yet without substance there could be no shadow," snarled the
Russian.
"Do your experiences in any way resemble those recorded by De
Quincey?"
"They do and do not," answered Platzoff. "I can often trace, or fancy
that I can, a slight connecting likeness, arising probably from