by The Mummy;Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension
Nitocris was just beginning her second cup of tea when the door opened and her father's foeman in the arena of Science came in. He was the very antithesis of Professor Marmion; a trifle below middle height, square-shouldered and strongly built, with thick, iron-grey hair, and somewhat heavy features which would have been almost commonplace but for the broad, square forehead above them, and the brilliant steel-grey eyes which glittered restlessly under the thick brows, and also a certain sensitiveness about the nostrils and lips which seemed curiously out of keeping with the strength of the lower jaw. His whole being suggested a combination of restless energy and inflexible determination. If he had not been one of America's greatest scientists, he would probably have been one of her most ruthless and despotic Dollar Lords.
"Ah, Miss Marmion, good afternoon! Pleased to see you," he said heartily, as Nitocris got up and held out her hand. "Very kind of you to look us up so soon. How's the Professor? Well, I hope. I see he's scheduled for a lecture before the Royal Society. He's got something startling to tell us about, I hope. It's some time since we had anything of a scientific scrap between us."
"And therefore," said Nitocris, as she took his hand, "I suppose you are just dying for another one."
"Well, not quite dying," laughed the Professor. "Don't look half dead, do I? Just curious, that's all. You can't give me any idea of the subject, I suppose?"
"I could, Professor," she replied, with a malicious twinkle in her eye, because she had already had a talk with her father on the altered title of the lecture, "but if I did, you know, I should only, as we say in England, be spoiling sport. However, I don't think I shall be playing traitor if I tell you to prepare for a little surprise."
Professor van Huysman's manner changed instantly, and the warrior soul of the scientist was in arms.
"Oh yes! A surprise, eh?" he said, with something between a snort and a snarl in his voice. "Then I guess—"
"Poppa, sit down and have some tea," said his daughter, quietly but firmly.
He sat down without a word, took his cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter; listened in silence as long as he could bear the entirely feminine conversation on a subject in which he hadn't the remotest interest, and then he put his cup down with a little jerk, got up with a bigger one, and said, holding out his hand to Miss Nitocris:
"Well, Miss Marmion, I shall have to say good afternoon. You see we've only just reached this side, and I've got quite a lot of things to attend to. Bring your father along to dinner to-morrow night, if you can; I shall be glad to meet him again. You needn't be afraid: we shan't shoot."
When he had gone, Brenda rang and ordered the motor-car to be ready in half an hour. Then they finished their tea and talk, and Brenda and Nitocris went and put on their wraps—not the imitation of the mediæval armour which is used for serious motor-driving, but just dust-cloaks and mushrooms, both of which Brenda lent to her friend. As they came back through the drawing-room, she said to her mother:
"Well, Mamma, the car's ready, I believe. Won't you join us in a little run round town?"
"When I want to take a run into the Other World in one of those infernal machines of yours, Brenda," said her mother, with a mild touch of sarcasm in her tone, "I'll ask you to let me come. This afternoon I feel just a little bit too comfortable for a journey like that."
"It's a curious thing," said Brenda, as they were going down in the lift, "Mamma's as healthy a woman as ever lived, and she's American too, and yet I believe she'd as soon get on top of a broncho as into an automobile."
The car was waiting for them in the courtyard under the glass awning. A smart-looking young chauffeur in orthodox costume touched his cap and set the engine going. The gold-laced porters handed them into the two front seats, and the chauffeur effaced himself in the tonneau. Miss Brenda put one hand on the steering-wheel and the other on the first speed lever, and the car slid away, as though it had been running on ice, towards the great arched entrance.
As they turned to the left on their way westward, a shabbily dressed man and woman stepped back from the roadway on to the pavement. For a moment they stared at the car in mute astonishment; then the man gripped the woman tightly by the arm and led her away out of the ever-passing throng, whispering to her in Coptic:
"Did'st thou see her, Neb-Anat—the Queen—the Queen in the living flesh sitting there in the self-mover, the devil-machine? To what unholy things has she come—she, the daughter of the great Rameses! But it may be that she is held in bondage under the spell of the evil powers that created these devil-chariots which pant like souls in agony and breathe with the breath of Hell. She must be rescued, Neb-Anat."
"Rescued?" echoed the woman, in a tone that was half scorn and half fear. "Is it so long ago that thou hast forgotten how we tried to rescue her mummy from the hands of these infidels? Now, behold, she is alive again, living in the midst of this vast, foul city of the infidels, clothed after the fashion of their women, and yet still beautiful and smiling. Pent-Ah, didst thou not even see her laugh as she rode past us? Alas! I tell thee that our Queen is laid under some awful spell, doubtless because she has in some way incurred the displeasure of the High Gods, and if that is so, not even the Master himself could rescue her. What, then, shall we do?"
"Thy saying is near akin to blasphemy, Neb-Anat," he murmured in reply, "and yet there may be a deep meaning in it. Nevertheless, to-night, nay, this hour, the Master must know of what we have seen."
They walked along, conversing in murmurs, as far as Waterloo Bridge, then they turned and crossed it and walked down Waterloo Road into the Borough Road, and then turned off into a narrow, grimy street which ended in a small court whose three sides were formed of wretched houses, upon which many years of misery, poverty, and crime had set their unmistakable stamp. They crossed the court diagonally and entered a house in the right-hand corner. They went up the worn, carpetless stairs with a rickety handrail on one side and the torn, peeling paper on the other, and stopped before a door which opened on to a narrow landing on the first floor. Pent-Ah knocked with his knuckles on the panel, first three times quickly, and then twice slowly. Then came the sound of the drawing of a bolt, and the door opened.
They went in with shuffling feet and crouching forms, and the woman closed the door behind her. A tall, gaunt, yellow-skinned man, his head perfectly bald and the lower part of his face covered with a heavy white beard and moustache, faced them. His clothing was half Western, half Oriental. A pair of thin, creased, grey tweed trousers met, or almost met, a pair of Turkish slippers, showing an inch of bare, lean ankle in between. His body was covered with a dirty yellow robe of fine woollen stuff, whose ragged fringe reached to his knees, and a faded red scarf was folded twice round his neck, one end hanging down his breast and the other down his back. As Pent-Ah closed the door and bolted it, he said to him in Coptic:
"So ye have returned! What news of the Queen? For without that surely ye would not have dared to come before me."
He spoke the words as a Pharaoh might have spoken them to a slave, and as though the bare, low-ceiled, shabby room, with its tawdry Oriental curtains and ornaments, had been an audience-chamber in the palace of Pepi in old Memphis, for this was he who had once been Anemen-Ha, High Priest of Ptah, in the days when Nitocris was Queen of the Two Kingdoms.
"We have seen her once more, Lord," said Pent-Ah, "scarce an hour ago, dressed after the fashion of these heathen English, and seated in a devil-chariot beside another woman, as fair almost as she. It is true, Lord, even as we said, that our Lady the Queen is in the flesh again, and yet she knows us not. It may be that the High Gods have laid some spell upon her."
"Spell or no spell, the mission which is ours is the same," was the reply. "It is plain that a miracle has been worked. The Mummy which we—I as well as you—were charged to recover and restore to its resting-place, has vanished. The Queen has returned to live yet another life in the flesh, but the command remains the same. Mummy or woman, she shall be taken back to her anci
ent home to await the day when the Divine Assessors shall determine the penalty of her guilt. The task will be hard, yet nothing is impossible to those who serve the High Gods faithfully. Ye have done well to bring me this news promptly. Here is money to pay for your living and your work. Watch well and closely. Know every movement that the Queen makes, and every day inform me by word or in writing of all her actions. On the fourth day from now come here an hour before midnight. Now go."
He counted out five sovereigns to Pent-Ah. Their glitter contrasted strangely with the shabby squalor of the room and the poverty of his own dress, but he gave them as though they had been coppers. Pent-Ah took them with a low obeisance, and dropped them one by one into a pocket in a canvas belt which he wore under his ragged waistcoat. Neb-Anat looked at them greedily as they disappeared.
"The Master's commands shall be obeyed, and the High Gods shall be faithfully served," said Pent-Ah, as he straightened himself up again. "From door to door the Queen shall be watched, and, if it be permitted, Neb-Anat shall become her slave, and so the watch shall be made closer. Is not that so, Neb-Anat?"
"The will of the Master is the law of his slave," she replied, sinking almost to her knees.
"It is enough," replied the Master, who was known to the few who knew him as Phadrig Amena, a Coptic dealer in ancient Egyptian relics and curios in a humble way of business. "Serve faithfully, both of you, and your reward shall not be wanting. Farewell, and the peace of the High Gods be on you."
When they had gone he sat down to the old bureau, took out a sheaf of papers, some white and new, others yellow-grey with age, and yet others which were sheets of the ancient papyrus. The writing on these was in the old Hermetic character; of the rest some were in cursive Greek and some in Coptic. A few only were in English, and about half a dozen in Russian. He read them all with equal ease, and although he knew their contents almost by heart, he pored over them for a good half-hour with scarcely so much as a movement of his lips. Then he put them away and locked the drawer with one of a small bunch of curiously shaped keys which were fastened round his waist by a chain. When he had concealed them in his girdle, he got up and began to pace the floor of the miserable room with long, stately, silent steps as though the dirty, cracked, uneven boards had been the gleaming squares of alternate black and white marble of the floor of the Sanctuary in the now ruined Temple of Ptah in old Memphis. Then, after a while, with head thrown proudly back and hands clasped behind him, he began to speak in the Ancient Tongue, as though he were addressing some invisible presence.
"Yes, truly the Powers of Evil and Darkness have conquered through many generations of men, but the days of the High Gods are unending, and the climax of Fate is not yet. Not yet, O Nitocris, is the murderous crime of thy death-bridal forgotten. The souls of those who died by thy hand in the banqueting chamber of Pepi still call for vengeance out of the glooms of Amenti. The thirst of hate and the hunger of love are still unslaked and unsatisfied. I, Phadrig, the poor trader, who was once Anemen-Ha, hate thee still, and the Russian warrior-prince, who was once Menkau-Ra, shall love thee yet again with a love as fierce as that of old, and so, if the High Gods permit, between love and hate shalt thou pass to the doom that thou hast earned."
He paused in his walk and stood staring blankly out of the grimy little window with eyes which seemed to see through and beyond the smoke-blackened walls of the wretched houses opposite, and away through the mists of Time to where a vast city of temples and palaces lay under a cloudless sky beside a mighty slow-flowing river, and his lips began to move again as those of a man speaking in a dream:
"O Memphis, gem of the Ancient Land and home of a hundred kings, how is thy grandeur humbled and thy glory departed! Thy streets and broad places which once rang with the tramp of mighty hosts and echoed with the songs of jubilant multitudes welcoming them home from victory are buried under the drifting desert sands; in the ruins of thy holy temples the statues of the gods lie prone in the dust, and the owl rears her brood on thy crumbling altars, and hoots to the moon where once rose the solemn chant of priests and the sweet hymns of the Sacred Virgins; the jackal barks where once the mightiest monarchs of earth gave judgment and received tribute; thy tombs are desecrated, and the mummies of kings and queens and holy men have been ravished from them to adorn the unconsecrated halls of the museums of ignorant infidels; the heel of the heathen oppressor has stamped the fair flower of thy beauty into the deep dust of defilement. Alas, what great evil have the sons and daughters of Khem wrought that the High Gods should have visited them with so sore a judgment! How long shall thy bright wings lie folded and idle, O Necheb, Bringer of Victory?"
A deep sigh came from his heaving breast as he turned away and began his walk again. Soon he spoke again, but now in a changed voice from which the note of exaltation had passed away:
"But it is of little use to brood over the lost glories of the past. Our concern is with that which is and that which may—nay, shall be. Who is this Franklin Marmion, this wise man of the infidels? Who is he, and who was he—since, by the changeless law of life and death, each man and woman is a deathless soul which passes into the shadows only to return re-garbed in the flesh to live and work through the interlocked cycles of Eternal Destiny? Was he—ah Gods! was he once Ma-Rim(=o)n, whose footsteps in the days that are dead approached so nearly to the threshold of the Perfect Knowledge, while mine, doubtless for the sin of my longing for mere earthly power and greatness, were caught and held back in a web of my own weaving? And, if so, has he attained while I have lost?
"What if that strange tale which Pent-Ah and Neb-Anat told me of their visit to his house—told, as I thought, to hide their failure under a veil of lies—was true? If so, then he has passed the threshold and taken a place only a little lower than the seats of the gods, a place that I may not approach, barred by the penalty of my accursed folly and pride! Ah well, be it so or be it not, are not the fates of all men in the hands of the High Gods who see all things? We see but a little, and that little, with their help, we must do according to the faith and the hope that is in us."
At this moment there came a knock at the door. It opened at his bidding, and a dirty-faced, ragged-frocked little girl shuffled into the room holding out a letter in her hard, grimy, claw-like hand.
"'Ere's somethin' as has just come for you, Mister Phadrig. Muvver told me ter bring it up, and wot'll yer want for supper, and will yer give me the money?" she said in a piping monotone, still holding out her hand after he had taken the letter. He gave her sixpence, saying:
"Two eggs and some bread. I will make my coffee myself."
She took the coin and shuffled out quickly, for she went not a little in awe of this dark-faced foreign man from mysterious regions beyond her ken, who was doubtless a magician of some sort, and could kill her or change her into a rat by just breathing on her, if he wanted to.
Meantime Nitocris and Brenda were having what the latter called "a perfectly lovely time" in Regent Street and Bond Street and other purlieus of that London paradise which the genius of commerce has created for the delight of his richest and most lavish-handed votaries. Brenda spent her ten dollars and a few thousands more, and then, as it was getting on to dinner-time and Nitocris absolutely refused to let her father eat his meal alone, she ran her out to Wimbledon at a speed for which a mere man would have inevitably been fined, asked herself to dinner, and made herself entirely delightful to the Professor.
But in spite of all her cunning wiles and winning ways she left in absolute ignorance of the subject of the forthcoming lecture.
Chapter IX - "The Wilderness," Wimbledon Common
*
The little estate on Wimbledon Common, which had been in Professor Marmion's family for three generations, was called "The Wilderness." The house was of distinctly composite structure. Tradition said that it had been a royal hunting lodge in the days when Barnes and Putney and Wimbledon were tiny hamlets and the Thames flowed silver-clear through a vast, wild region of forest
and gorse and heather, and the ancestors of the deer in Richmond Park browsed in the shade of ancient oaks and elms and beeches, and antler-crowned monarchs sent their hoarse challenges bellowing across the open spaces which separated their jealously guarded domains.
Generation by generation it had grown with the wealth and importance of its owners, as befits a house that is really a home and not merely a place to live in, until it had become a quaint medley of various styles of architecture from the Elizabethan to the later Georgian. Thus it had come to possess a charm that was all its own, a charm that can never belong to a house that has only been built, and has not grown. Its interior was an embodiment in stone and oak and plaster of cosy comfort and dignified repose, and, though it contained every "modern improvement," all was in such perfect taste and harmony that even the electric light might have been installed in the days of the first James.
The Professor inhabited the northern wing, reputed to have been the original lodge in which kings and queens and great soldiers and statesmen had held revel after the chase, and tradition had endowed it with a quite authentic ghost: which was that of a fair maiden who had been decoyed thither to become the victim of royal passion, and who, strangely enough, poisoned herself in her despair, instead of getting herself made a duchess and founding the honours of a noble family on her own dishonour.
Although, as I have said, quite authentic, for the Professor had seen her so often that he had come to regard her with respectful friendship, the Lady Alicia was not quite an orthodox ghost. She did not come at midnight and wail in distressing fashion over the scene of her sad and shameful death. She seemed to come when and where she listed, whether in the glimpses of the moon or the full sunlight of mid-day. She never passed beyond the limits of the old lodge, and never broke the silence of her coming and goings. None of the present inhabitants of "The Wilderness" had seen her save the Professor, but Nitocris had often shivered with a sudden chill when she chanced to be in her invisible presence, and at such times she would often say to her father:
