[155] And is not the human body, too, a building, with architectural laws, a structure, tending by the very forces which primarily held it together to drop asunder in time? Not in vain, it seemed, had Prior Saint-Jean come to this mystic place for the improvement of his body's health. Thenceforth that fleshly tabernacle had housed him, had housed his cunning, overwrought and excitable soul, ever the better day by day, and he began to feel his bodily health to be a positive quality or force, the presence near him of that singular being having surely something to do with this result. He and his fascinations, his music, himself, might at least be taken for an embodiment of all those genial influences of earth and sky, and the easy ways of living here, which made him turn, with less of an effort than he had known for many years past, to his daily tasks, and sink so regularly, so immediately, to wholesome rest on returning from them. It was as if Brother Apollyon himself abhorred the spectacle of distress, and mainly for his own satisfaction charmed away other people's maladies. The mere touch of that ice-cold hand, laid on the feverish brow, when the Prior lapsed from time to time into his former troubles, certainly calmed the respiration of a troubled sleeper. Was there magic in it, not wholly natural? The hand might have been a dead one. But then, was it surprising, after all, that the [156] methods of curing men's maladies, as being in very deed the fruit of sin, should have something strange and unlooked-for about them, like some of those Old Testament healings and purifications which the Prior's biblical lore suggested to him? Yet Brother Apollyon, if their surly Janitor, in his less kindly moments, spoke truly, himself greatly needed purification, being not only a thief, but a homicide in hiding from the law. Nay, once, on his annual return from southern or eastern lands, he had been observed on his way along the streets of the great town literally scattering the seeds of disease till his serpent-skin bag was empty. And within seven days the "black death" was there, reaping its thousands. As a wise man declared, he who can best cure disease can also most cunningly engender it.