‘You must be famished after your long sleep,’ he answered noncommittally. ‘Wait here, I’ll boil some eggs and make some chocolate.’
He was busy in the kitchen a few minutes, but busy as his hands were he was even busier with his thoughts. Here was a complication. This lovely girl who despite the date of her birth was physically no more than two and twenty had been literally dropped on his doorstep. In all the strange new modern world where fate had put her she knew no one but him; she was as utterly his responsibility as if she were a baby—and she had just demanded that he tell her she was beautiful at half-past three each morning.
A clinking sound as of metal striking stone attracted his attention as he bore the tray of food into the living-room. Pausing at the front door, he looked out across the lawn.
Sharply defined in the moonlight, a man was working at the bright tile in his sidewalk, forcing it from its place with a light crowbar. As Fullerton’s gaze fell on him the man paused in his labor and raised his head.
It was his new neighbor, the man before whose house the tile had been set. A shaft of moonlight striking through the unleafed boughs of a tree picked his face out of the shadow as an actor’s features on a darkened stage. It was a handsome face, with features clear-cut as an image on a coin, high cheekbones, a wide and full-lipped mouth, and wide, black restless eyes with drooping lids and haughty, high-arched brows. Now it was convulsed in a frown of hot fury. He glared about him with a look of hatred sharp and pitiless as a bared knife, then once more bent to his labor.
Fullerton stepped quickly from the hall into the firelit sanctuary of the living-room. There was a chilly feeling at his spine as he drew the curtains tighter over the windows.
He had, too, a curiously unpleasant feeling in the region of his stomach. Distinctly as if he were hearing them pronounced, he recalled the warning of the papyrus:
‘—if she waketh at thy bidding and looketh on thee with favor, know that I, Harmichis, servant of the Most High Gods of olden Egypt, will do thee battle for her.’ She had wakened at his bidding—did she look on him with favor? And if she did—— He put the thought away deliberately, and placed the eggs and chocolate on the coffee table before her.
Fitting Helena into the modern scene was something of a problem at first. It was impossible to take her shopping in a costume which essentially was like a modern nightrobe, but Fullerton was equal to the emergency. He had her stand on sheets of paper and with a pencil traced the outlines of her feet. With these, and with the help of an obliging saleswoman, he bought her a pair of shoes and stockings to accompany them. While she remained indoors enveloped in his bathrobe he took her chiton to a shop and bought a dress and cloak from its measurements. Thus clothed she sallied out with him, and for the first time in his life he understood why women love to shop.
The classic vogue in women’s styles seemed to have been created for her benefit, she wore the latest modes as if they had been planned for her.
When the fashionable coiffeur put his shears to her knee-length hair she cried out as if he had cut her flesh with the keen steel, but when the process was completed and she emerged from the booth with her amber-blonde hair waved up from neck and temples and a nest of curls massed high on her head she surveyed her image in the mirror with a gurgle of wide-eyed delight. ‘I did not think I was so beautiful,’ she confided to him. ‘Art sure’—she eyed him archly—‘art sure thou wilt not reconsider and hold me to the offer which I made thee on the night thou wakened me?’
‘What offer?’ he asked, purposely obtuse.
She took his hand in hers and raised it. For the barest fraction of a second his palm brushed the bright curls that clustered like a crown upon her head. ‘If thou should wish to change thy mind——’ she began. Then a salesgirl came with an armful of dresses, and the sudden tenseness which had gripped his heart as if it were a giant hand relaxed.
It was almost incredible how quickly she learned English, and how readily she fitted into modern life. Eating with a knife and fork at first gave her a little trouble, she was superstitiously afraid of taxicabs and subways at first, and her first trip in an elevator terrified her almost to the point of swooning, but within a month she might have been mistaken for one of the season’s crop of débutantes.
The change in him was almost as noticeable as the transformation in her. The icy shell of rage and hatred which he had worn round him for the past ten years began to melt away as he found new interest in life. They went everywhere—did everything—together. To watch the changes in her face while they were at the opera or the play, to see the smiles break through the statuesque calm of her classic features when he introduced her to a new experience—the movies, a new food, horseback riding, skating on the frozen lake in Prospect Park, skiing in the Adirondacks—these things gave him pleasure of a sort he had not thought to know again. He and Millicent had never had much common interest. To Helena he was the sun around which all the worlds revolved. She looked to him for advice, guidance, and protection. The feeling he was indispensable to someone gave him a new grip on life. He went to see his lawyers and had them prepare a petition to restore his civil rights. As soon as he was no longer a legal corpse he would initiate adoption proceedings. Helena—his daughter.
One of his first moves was to give up the house in South Brooklyn and take a new place on the Heights where they could look across the bay at the tall spires of Manhattan, bright with sunlight in the daytime, jewel-dotted with the glow of countless lighted windows after dark.
One April morning he drove through the block where he had lived when Helena was brought to him. His house was still vacant. FOR RENT signs hung in the windows. Three doors farther down the street he stopped his car and looked down at the sidewalk. The bright tile still twinkled amid the gray paving-blocks. ‘Too bad, old chap,’ he chuckled as he set the car in motion, ‘but there’s no use keeping that thing there. Your date with Helena is off. But definitely.’
A curtain stirred at a front window as he spoke, and for a second he glimpsed a face peering from the darkened house. It was the same face he had seen in the moonlight the night Helena came to him, but changed. Now it was like a skull that had been lightly fleshed over, a dead-white face with a blue growth of beard on cheek and chin, and narrow, venomous eyes.
Something—some unwonted sound must have awakened him, for he sat abruptly upright in the darkness, ears strained to catch a repetition of the noise. A sense of apprehension lay on him, in his inner ear a tocsin sounded an alarm insistently. Listening in the smothering darkness, he was not certain if he’d heard a sound, or if it were the sudden stopping of a sound that wakened him.
Then through the blackness of the darkened house it came again. A scream, a woman’s scream so brief that he could hardly trust the evidence of his ears. A cry of stark and utter terror uncontrolled that stopped almost as quickly as it started, but seemed to leave a tingling echo of shrill horror quivering in the air.
Helena! The cry—if it had been a cry—came from the direction of the front room where she slept.
He fumbled in the darkness for a weapon of some sort. His hands closed on the first thing that they touched, a heavy flask of toilet water, and swinging the stout bottle like a club he ran on tip-toe down the hall.
A little trickle of dim light flowed out into the darkened hall beneath her door—as if someone had spilled a splash of luminance upon her floor and some of it had filtered across the sill.
Breathlessly, he bent his head to listen, laid cautious fingers on the doorknob. Voices, muted to a ghostly murmur, came to him from the room beyond.
‘—but that was more than a full thousand years ago, Harmichis——’
A short, dry laugh, as frigid as a breath from an ice-cave, broke through the girl’s low pleading. ‘Know’st not, my Helena, there be three things which time is powerless to soften, a sword, a diamond, and the hatred of a servant of the Olden Gods?’
‘Nay, not hatred, surely, good Harmichis. Once thou
dids’t say thou loved me——’
Again the short, sharp, terrifying laugh. ‘As thou has said, that was a thousand years ago, O Helena. Think’st thou I put thee in the mystic sleep to save thee harmless from the Saracen invader only to have thee fall into the hands of this outlander? Thou lovest him, dost thou not?’
‘Yes, that I do; better than my life or sight or blood or breath, with all my heart and soul and spirit, but——’
‘Then make thee ready for the sleep that truly knows no waking, Helena. This time thou’lt have no second chance. No other man shall take thy hand and call thy name and bid thee rise to live and love, for thou’lt be dust. Bare thy white throat to the knife of my vengeance——’
Fullerton drove in the door with a tremendous kick. On the floor beside her bed knelt Helena, her hands upraised to implore mercy from the man who towered over her, winding one hand in her glowing hair and holding a short copper-bladed knife against her throat with the other.
He recognized the intruder, the handsome, dark-skinned face, lean to emaciation, the lips drawn back in a reptilian smile of hatred about to be satiated—Philamon—Harmichis—the Egyptian priest whose love had driven him to hypnotize this girl so that she slept a thousand years, and who had followed her across those years to——
The Egyptian had hurled the girl down to the floor so violently that she lay in semi-consciousness, her hands stretched out before her like a diver’s when he strikes the water, and turned on him. His teeth were very white against his swarthy skin, the hatred in his eyes was like a living thing. ‘Now, outlander!’
‘You bet it’s now!’ Fullerton drew back the heavy bottle. ‘You’re overdue in hell a thousand years——’
The bottle hurtled through the air with devastating force, missed the Egyptian as he dodged with weasel-like agility, smashed with a shattering crash against the wall, and—he was unarmed as the other advanced slowly, knife upraised.
Fullerton snatched up a slipper-chair and held it like a shield before him. Not a moment too soon, either, for the copper-bladed sacrificial knife, heavy with a grip of gold-encrusted lapis lazuli, came whining at him, struck the chair seat with a vicious pung, pierced it almost as if it had been cardboard, and thrust its needle point a full six inches through the fragile wood.
He hurled the chair at his advancing enemy, heard it crash with splintering legs against the wall as the other dropped to one knee, then felt his ankle seized as in a snare as the Egyptian slid across the floor and grasped him in a flying tackle.
They fell together in a thrashing heap, rolled over flailing, gouging, punching, digging at each other’s throats. Despite his slenderness the Egyptian was slightly heavier, and fought with the wild desperation of a mad man. But the years of heavy labor Fullerton had put in while he served his sentence stood him in good stead now. With a heave he drew the other to him, hugged him as a bear might hug its prey, and rolled until he felt the wiry body under him.
‘Now, you damned desert rat——’
He felt a searing pain rake his right forearm, then his left, the coat of his pajamas ripped to tatters, and a line of bright blood marked the rents made in the fabric. From some hidden pocket in the linen smock he wore, Harmichis had jerked out a copper weapon like a set of brass knuckles, but armed with curving razor-bladed claws instead of knobs on its rings.
Now his face was rowled by the tear-talons—he could taste the salty blood upon his tongue, for the blades had cut clear through his cheek—in a moment they would reach his throat, his jugular.
With an effort calling up his final ounce of strength he rose to his knees, tottered to his feet, dragged the other after him, hurled him off with all his force.
‘Get up!’ His voice was hoarse and croaking in his own ears, choked with blood and all but stifled with the pounding of his heart. ‘Get up, you truant from hell’s fire, and fight like a man!’
He stumbled toward the Egyptian who lay sprawled on his back, his head bent forward at a seemingly impossible angle, a look of utter, shocked surprise upon his face.
‘Get up!’ he repeated, seizing the supine man’s throat. ‘Get on your feet and fight, or I’ll——’
Then he saw it. From the corner of the Egyptian’s mouth a little stream of blood welled, slackening and growing with each failing labored palpitation of his heart.
The fellow lay with his back pressed against the bottom of the broken chair, and the knife—his knife—that had pierced through the flimsy wood had struck deep in his back and pierced his lung when he fell on it.
Fullerton began to laugh. A ghastly laugh that rose and trilled and mounted like a shriek of sheer hysteria. ‘Caught in his own trap—taken in his own net—killed with his own knife!’ he almost screamed, and staggered, sagging to his knees with loss of blood and utter exhaustion.
The sounds of the world were coming back again, but slowly, softly, as from a great distance. He could hear the casual noises of street traffic, the hooting of a taxi’s horn, the rumble of a subway train as it slid into Clark Street station; far away the low, melodious belling of a Staten Island ferry’s whistle.
Somebody bent above him. Somebody bathed his bleeding lacerated cheeks with sweet cool water, someone cried until her tears fell like a benediction on his upturned face. ‘O Full-ah-tohn, my lord, my life, my only love!’ The syllables were thick with tears, but freighted with a very agony of adoration. ‘Arise, awake, my breath, my heart, my thrice-belovèd——’
‘You’re asking me to wake—as I did you, my dear?’ he answered weakly.
‘Oh, yes, belovèd, speak and tell me that you will not die——’
‘Helena!’
She bent above him tenderly. Her hair was on his forehead, her breath was cool and sweet against his cheek.
‘Yes, Full-ah-tohn?’
‘Will you—when I get well—will you marry me? I’m almost old enough to be your father, but—you’ve given me something to live for—you’ve——’
‘Hai!’ Her delighted exclamation interrupted his whispered avowal. ‘Thou old enough to be my sire, O Full-ah-tohn? Dost thou not realize I am a full thousand years thy elder?’
He was too weak to rise, but with her arm beneath his neck, her hands behind his head to guide it, and her lips to find his, he could kiss her.
And in that kiss there was the lighting of another hearth-fire, the hanging of another crane.
Glamour
THE WIND TRAMPED ROUND and round the fieldstone walls of the clubhouse, muttering and moaning; seemingly it maundered threats and wailed pleas alternately. Rain sweated on the recessed windows, glazing them with black opacity until the mullioned panes gave back distorted mirrorings of the gun-room, vague and indistinct as oil paintings smeared with a rag before they had a chance to dry. In the eight-foot fireplace beech and pine logs piled in alternating layers upon the hammered iron firedogs blazed a roaring holocaust and washed the freestone floor and adz-cut oaken beams of the ceiling with ruddy light. From the radio a bass voice bellowed lustily:
‘Then all of my days I’ll sing the praise
Of brown October ale . . .’
Harrigan felt like a cat in a strange alley. Newly come to Washington as a member of the scientific staff of the Good Roads Bureau, he had permitted himself to be talked into joining the Izaak Walton Gun and Rod Club, being assured he would find some kindred spirits there. ‘None o’ your dam’ lily-fingered pen-pushers an’ desk-hoppers there,’ Jack Bellamy had told him. ‘They’re men like you an’ me, son. Two-fisted, hairy-chested sportsmen, capable o’ handlin’ liquor or an argument like gentlemen. Lawyers, bankers, doctors, scientists; not a Gov’ment clerk in a car-load of ’em.’
Used to outdoor life and with some experience with both rod and gun, Harrigan had risen eagerly to the bait, but already he began to have his doubts. The station wagon from the club had met him at Vienna Junction, depositing him on the clubhouse porch a little after five. Bellamy, whom he had expected to meet him, had not shown up; t
here was no one there he knew, and the members gathered in small cliques at dinner and in the gunroom afterward. No one but the white-jacketed colored waiter seemed aware of his existence, and he only when an upraised finger signaled orders for a fresh mug of old musty.
‘New feller here?’ The booming challenge at his elbow startled him. ‘Didn’t remember seein’ you before. My name’s Crumpacker, Judge Lucius Q. Crumpacker. What’s yours? Mind if I sit by you?’
The big man dropped into the vacant hickory chair between Harrigan and the fire-warmed hearth and beckoned to the waiter. ‘Double Scotch and soda, Jake,’ he ordered. ‘You know my brand—and no ice, remember. When I want ice-water with a little whisky in it I’ll tell you.’
He lit a cigar which seemed half a yard in length, blew a series of quick, angry smoke rings like the pompons of exploding shrapnel, and turned again to Harrigan, bushy eyebrows working up and down like agitated caterpillars.
‘Had a dev’lish mean experience this evenin’,’ he confided in a voice that sounded somehow like an angry mastiff’s growl. ‘Ordered off an old hag’s land. ’Pon my word, I was. We ought to run the old hadrian out o’ the county. She has no business here, ought to be in the poor-house, or jail. Devilish old virago.’ He worried at the end of his cigar until it flattened and unraveled like a frayed-out rope, then flung the ruin in the fire and lit another stogie. ‘Umph. Land wasn’t posted, either.’
‘But I thought all that was taken care of,’ ventured Harrigan as the silence lengthened. ‘I was told the club had made arrangements with the local land owners to let us shoot on their land for a stipulated yearly fee and a guarantee to reimburse them for any damages they might sustain.’
‘Right. Quite right. There is such an arrangement, and by its terms the yokels have a right to post their land whenever they get tired of takin’ money from us, but that old scold down by Gunpowder Creek refuses either to post her land or sign a contract with us. She’s got nothing but a weed-patch and a flock o’ moultin’ hens. You could ride a regiment o’ cavalry across her place, and all you’d trample would be goldenrod and ragweed, but the old she-devil won’t let one of us set foot across her line. She’s the last one of a family that settled here in 1635, and though there’s nothing but the cellar and chimneys of the old mansion left she still puts on the high and mighty air with us and treats us like a lot o’ trespassers and interlopers.
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