by The Mummy;Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension
"You have seen Niti, I suppose?" he continued, with singular directness.
"Yes," replied Merrill. "You will remember that the week was up this morning, and so I called to learn my fate, and your daughter has told me. I presume that your decision is final, and that, therefore, there is nothing more to be said on the subject."
"My decisions are usually final, Mr Merrill, because I do not arrive at them without due consideration. I am deeply grieved, as I have told you before, but my decision is a deduction from what I consider to be an unbreakable chain of argument which I need not trouble you with. Personally and socially, of course, it would be impossible for me to have the slightest objection to you. In fact, apart from your execrable fighting profession, I like you; but otherwise, as you know, I cannot help looking at you as the survival of an age of barbarism, a hark-back of humanity, for all the honour in which that trade is held by an ignorant and deluded world; and so for the last time it is my painful task to tell you that there can be no union between your blood and mine. Outside that, of course, there is no reason why we should not remain friends."
"Very well, sir," replied Merrill, "I have heard your decision, and Miss Marmion has told me she is resolved to abide by it; I should be something less than a man if I attempted to alter her resolve. We are ordered on foreign service this week, and so for the present, good-bye."
He lifted his hat, turned away and walked down the road with teeth clenched and eyes fixed straight in front of him, and a shade of grey under the tan of his skin.
The Professor looked after him for a few moments and turned in at the gate, saying:
"It's a great pity in some ways—many ways, in fact. He's a fine young fellow and a thorough gentleman, and I'm afraid they're very fond of each other, but of course to let Niti marry him would be the negation of the belief and teaching of more than half a lifetime. I hope the poor girl won't take it too keenly to heart. I'm afraid he seems rather hard hit, poor chap, but of course there's no help for it. Just fancy me the father-in-law of a fighting man, and the grandfather of what might be a brood of fighters! No, no; that is quite out of the question."
Chapter VII - Mostly Possibilities
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The Professor went into the garden feeling just a trifle uncomfortable. He not only loved his daughter dearly, but he also had a very deep and well-justified respect for her intellect and scholarly attainments. Her unfortunate love for a man whom he honestly believed to be a totally unfit mate for her was the only shadow that had ever drifted between them since she had become, not only his daughter, but his friend and companion, and the enthusiastic sharer of his intellectual pursuits. Of course, anything like a scene was utterly out of the question; but there is a silence more eloquent than words, and it was that that he was mostly afraid of.
He found her walking up and down the lawn with her hands behind her back. She was a little paler than usual, and there was a shadow in her eyes. She came towards him, and said quite quietly:
"Mr Merrill has been here, Dad, to say good-bye. I told him, and so we have said it."
The simple words were spoken with a quiet and yet tender dignity which made him feel prouder than ever of his daughter and all the more sorry for her.
"I met him just outside the gate, Niti," he replied, looking at her through a little mist in his eyes, "He spoke most honourably, and like the gentleman that he is. I hope you will believe me—"
"I believe you in everything, Dad," she said quickly; "and since the matter is ended, it will only hurt us both to say any more about it. Now, I have some news," she continued, in a tone whose alteration was well assumed.
"Ah! and what is that, Niti?" he asked, looking up at her with a smile of relief.
"It's something that I hope you will be able to get some of your solemn fun out of. One of the items in the 'Social Intelligence' to-day states that your old friend, Professor Hoskins van Huysman, and his wife and daughter have come to London, and will stay ten days before 'proceeding' to Paris and the South of France, and so, of course, they will be here for your lecture, and naturally he will not resist the temptation of making one of your audience."
"Van Huysman!" exclaimed the Professor. "That Yankee charlatan, confound him! I shouldn't wonder if he had the impudence to take part in the discussion afterwards."
"Then," laughed Nitocris, "you must take care to have all your heavy guns ready for action. But, of course, Dad, you won't let your—well, your scientific feelings get mixed up with social matters, will you? Because, you know, I like Brenda very much; she's the prettiest and brightest girl I know. You know, she can do almost anything, and yet she's as unaffected—"
"As some one else we know," interrupted the Professor with another smile.
"And then, you know, Mrs van Huysman," continued Nitocris with a little flush, "is such a dear, innocent, good-natured thing, so good-hearted and so deliciously American. Of course, you can fight with the Professor as much as you like in print, and in lecture halls—I know you both love it—but you'll still be friends socially, won't you?"
"Which, of course, means garden-parties and river trips, and similar frivolities that learned young ladies love so much. You needn't trouble about that, Niti. I shall not allow my zeal for scientific truth to interfere with your social pleasures, you may be quite sure. Science, as you know, has nothing to do with what we call Society, except as one of the most curious phenomena of Sociology. Drive into town whenever you like and see them. Present my respectful compliments, and ask them to dinner, or whatever you like. And now I must get to my work—I've only three more days, and my notes are not anything like complete."
"Very well, Dad; I think I'll telephone them—they're stopping at the Savoy—extravagant people!—to say that I'll run in this afternoon and have tea. Oh! and, by the way," she added, as he turned towards the house, "there's another item. Lord Leighton has been called home suddenly on some business, and will be here the day after to-morrow."
"Oh! indeed," said the Professor, pausing. "Well, I shall be delighted to see him—but I don't know what I shall have to say to him about that Mummy."
Nitocris turned away towards her chair with a faint smile on her lips. With a woman's rapid intuition, she had seen a glimmer of hope in the conjunction of these two announcements. Although Professor van Huysman's personal fortune was not as great as his attainments or his fame, Brenda would be very rich, for her mother was the only sister of a widower whose sole interest and occupation in life was piling up dollars. He had dollars in everything, from pork and lumber to canned goods, and her own father's scientific inventions, and Brenda was the bright particular star of his affections.
On the other hand, Lord Leighton, son and heir of the invalid Earl of Kyneston, was a fairly well-to-do young nobleman, good-looking, a scholar, and a good sportsman, who had done brilliantly at Cambridge, and then devoted himself to Egyptian exploration with a whole-souled ardour which had quickly won Professor Marmion's heart, and a ready consent to his "trying his luck" with his daughter to boot. This had not a little to do with the present unfortunate condition of her own love affairs.
She had already refused Lord Leighton, letting him down, of course, as gently as possible, but withal firmly and uncompromisingly. Who could better console him than this beautiful and brilliant American girl, and what would better suit that lovely head of hers than an English coronet which was bright with the untarnished traditions of five hundred years?
Wherefore, then and there, Miss Nitocris Marmion, Bachelor of Science, Licentiate of Literature and Art, and Gold-Medallist in Higher Mathematics at the University of London, decided upon her first experiment in match-making.
When the Professor got into his study and shut the door, there was a curious smiling expression upon his refined, intellectual features. Instead of sitting down to his desk, he lit a pipe and began walking up and down the room, communing with his own soul in isolated sentences, as was his wont when he was trying to arrive at any difficult decision.
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In order to appreciate his deliberations and their result, it will be necessary to say that Professor Hoskins van Huysman was one of the most distinguished physicists in America, and he had also gained distinction in applied mathematics. In addition to this, he was the inventor of many marvellous contrivances for the demonstration and measurement of the more obscure physical forces. His official position was that of Lecturer and Demonstrator in Physical Science in Harvard University.
He and Professor Marmion had been deadly opponents in the field of controversy for years. The latter had once detected an error in a very learned monograph which he had published in the Scientific American on the "Co-Relation of the Etheric Forces in the Phenomena of Light and Heat," and of course he had never forgiven him. From that day forth a relentless duel of wits between them had continued. Every essay, monograph, or book that the one published, the other criticised with cold but ruthless severity, to the great delectation of the scientific world, if not to the clarification of its atmosphere.
Socially, they were cordial acquaintances, if not friends. What they really thought of each other was known only to themselves and to their immediate domestic circles.
Naturally Professor Marmion was well aware that his elevation to the higher plane of N4 gave him an enormous advantage over his adversary, for now he could, if he chose, smite him hip and thigh, in a strictly scientific sense, and reduce him to utter confusion and public ridicule, and the question which he had come to discuss with himself was: In how far, if at all, was he justified in so using the extra-human powers with which he had been endowed?
The moment that he began to do this he became conscious of another curious complication of his recent development. On the higher plane he had argued the matter out with no more emotion than a calculating machine would have betrayed, and he had come to a conclusion that was absolutely luminous and just: but now that he came to argue the same question on the lower plane he found that he was doing it under human limitations, and therefore with human feelings.
"No," he said in the peculiar low, musing tone which was habitual to him during these monologues, "no; after all, I do not see that there would be any harm in that. Wrong, nay, sinful it would undoubtedly be to prove to demonstration that religious, social, and physical laws, may, under certain changing circumstances, be both true and false at the same time. I am, or was—or whatever it is—perfectly right in considering that to deliberately produce such a chaos as that would do would be the most colossal crime that a man could commit against humanity, as far as this plane is concerned, but there can be no harm in making a few mathematical experiments."
He took a few more turns up and down the room, pulling slowly at his pipe, and with his mind not wholly unoccupied with speculations as to what Professor Van Huysman's feelings might be if he were watching the said experiments. Then he began again:
"At the worst I shall only be carrying certain investigations a few steps farther, and developing theories which have been seriously discussed by the hardest-headed scholars in the world. Both the Greek and the Alexandrian philosophers speculated on the possibility of a state of four dimensions; and didn't Cayley, before this very Society, deliberately say that at the present rate of progress in the Higher Mathematics, the eye of Intellect might ere long see across the border of tri-dimensional space?
"Surely I cannot do any very great harm by carrying his arguments to their logical conclusions—if I can. Of course, physical demonstrations would never do: I should frighten my brilliant and learned audience out of its seven senses; but, as for mere mathematics—well, I may make them stare, and set a good many highly-respected brains—my gifted friend Huysman's, among them—working pretty hard. Of course, he will be especially furious, but there's no harm in that either. Yes, I shall certainly do it. If he can't understand my demonstrations, that's not my concern."
He went and sat down at his desk, still smiling, and went very carefully through the notes he had already made, and then through Professor Hartley's letter, and his speculations on the Forty-Seventh Proposition. This done, he plunged into a fresh vortex of figures, and symbols, and diagrams, in which he remained for the next two hours, his mind hovering, as it were, over the borderland which at once divides and unites the higher and the lower planes. When he returned to earth, the dreamy, abstracted look faded away from his face; his eyes lit up, and the pleasant smile came back.
He opened the middle drawer in his desk, and took out the first page of the fair copy of his notes, which Nitocris had made for him—thinking the while how easy it would have been for him in the state of N4 to take it out without opening the drawer at all—and looked at it. It was headed:
"RECENT PROGRESS IN THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS."
He crossed the title out carefully, and wrote above it:
"AN EXAMINATION OF SOME SUPPOSED MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES."
"There," he murmured, as he put the sheet back; "I think that such a theme, adequately treated, will considerably astonish my learned friends in general, and my esteemed critic, Van Huysman, in particular."
From which remark it will be gathered that Franklin Marmion had certainly recrossed the dividing line between the two Planes of Existence.
Chapter VIII - Miss Brenda Arrives, and Phadrig the Egyptian Prophesies
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"Now, this is just too sweet of you, Niti, to come so soon after we got here. In five minutes more I should have written you a note, asking you and the Professor to come and take lunch with us to-morrow, and here you've anticipated me, so we have the pleasure of seeing you all the sooner."
These were the words with which Miss Brenda van Huysman greeted Nitocris as she entered the drawing-room of the suite of apartments which formed her home for the time being in London. I say her home advisedly, because, although her father and mother also occupied it, she was virtually, if not nominally, mistress undisputed of the splendid camping-place.
She was an almost perfect type of the highly developed, highly educated American girl of to-day, a marvellous compound of intense energy and languorous grace. She had done as brilliantly at Vassar as Nitocris had done at Girton and London, and she had also rowed stroke in the Ladies' Eight, and was champion fencer of the College. Yet as far as her physical presence was concerned, she was just a "Gibson Girl" of the daintiest type—fair-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired—her hair had a darker gleam of bronze in it in certain lights—exquisitely moulded features which seemed capable of every sort of expression within a few changing moments, and a poise of head and carriage of body which only perfect health and the most scientific physical training can produce. In a word, she was one of those miraculous developments of femininity which Nature seems to have made a speciality for the particular benefit of the younger branch of the Anglo-Saxon race. As for her dress—well, the shortest and best way to describe that is to say that it exactly suited her.
As she spoke, and their hands met, Mrs van Huysman got up and came towards them, saying:
"Good afternoon, Miss Marmion. We were real glad to get your 'phone, and it's good to see you again. How's the Professor? Too busy to come with you, I suppose, as usual. We see he's going to lecture before the Royal Society on the tenth, and I reckon we shall all be there to listen to him. I shouldn't wonder but there'll be trouble as usual between him and my husband. It seems a pity that two such clever men should waste so much time in scrapping over these scientific things, which don't seem to matter half a cent, anyhow."
"Oh, I don't know," laughed Nitocris, as they shook hands. "You see, Mrs van Huysman, they do think it matters a great deal, and, besides, I'm quite sure that they both enjoy it very thoroughly. It's their way of taking recreation, you see, just as a couple of pitmen will try and pound one another to pieces, just for the fun of the thing. It's only a case of intellectual fisticuffs, after all."
"Why, certainly," said Brenda, as she rang for tea; "I'm just sure that Poppa never has such a good time as when he thinks he's tearing one of Professor Marmio
n's theories into little pieces and dancing on them, and I shouldn't wonder if Professor Marmion didn't feel about the same."
"I dare say he does," said Nitocris, remembering what had happened in the morning; "it's only one of the thousand unexplained puzzles of human nature. As you know, my father hates fighting in the physical sense with a hatred which is almost fanatical, and yet, when it comes to a battle of wits, he's like a schoolboy in a football match."
"It's just another development of the same thing," said Brenda. "Man was born a fighting animal, and I guess he'll remain one till the end of time; and with all our progress in civilisation and science, and all that, the man who doesn't enjoy a fight of some sort isn't of very much account. Now, here's tea, which is just now a more interesting subject. Sit down, and we'll talk about vanities. I'm just perishing to see what Regent Street and Bond Street are like. I don't think I've spent ten dollars in London yet. I'm twenty-two to-morrow, Niti, and my grandfather, who is just about the best grandfather a girl ever had, cabled across to the Napier people, and they've sent round the dandiest six-cylinder, thirty-horse landaulette that you ever saw, even in Central Park, and a driver to match—only I shan't have much use for him, except to look after the automobile. I'll run you round in her after tea, and you can reintroduce me to the stores—I mean shops; I forgot we were in London."
Mrs van Huysman, as usual, took a back seat while her daughter dispensed tea, and did most of the talking. She was a lady of moderate proportions, and, unlike a good many American women, she had kept her good looks until very close on fifty. She was full of shrewd common sense, but she had been born in a different generation and in a different grade of life, and therefore her attire inclined rather to magnificence than to elegance, in spite of her daughter's restraining hand and frankly expressed counsel. She had a profound respect for her husband's attainments without in the least understanding them, and she very naturally held an unshakable belief that no quite ordinary woman, as she called herself, had ever been miraculously blessed with such a daughter as she had.
