“Avec beaucoup de félicité!” Jules de Grandin interrupted with a laugh. “Stretch forth your hand, and touch, mon ami; I am he whom you seek!”
“Ah?” young Monteith stared at the little Frenchman, scarcely knowing how to acknowledge the unusual introduction. “Ah—”
“Précisément,” de Grandin assented as he waved the callers to a seat upon the fireside lounge. “We are very well met, I think; this had promised to be a dull evening. Now, regarding this seemingly so supernatural matter concerning which you would consult Jules de Grandin—” he raised his narrow, black brows till they described twin Saracenic arches and paused expectantly.
Young Monteith ran his hand over his smoothly brushed black hair and directed a look almost of appeal at the little Frenchman. “I hardly know how to begin,” he confessed, then cast a puzzled glance about the room, as though seeking inspiration from the Dresden figurines on the mantelpiece.
“Why not at the beginning?” de Grandin suggested pleasantly as he drew out his slim gold cigarette case, courteously proffered it to the visitors, then held his pocket lighter for them to set the tobacco alight.
“The case concerns my uncle—our uncle’s—death,” Mr. Monteith replied as he expelled a cloud of fragrant gray smoke from his nostrils. “It may have been natural enough—the death certificate read heart failure, and there were no legal complications—but both my sister and I are puzzled, and if you can spare the time to investigate it, we’d—here,” he broke off, drawing a thin packet of papers from his inside pocket, “this is a copy of Uncle Absalom’s will; we might as well start with it as anything.”
The little Frenchman took the sheets of foolscap with their authenticating red seals and held them to the light.
“In the Name of God, Amen,” he read: “I, Absalom Barnstable”—Barn-stable, mon Dieu, what a name!—“being of sound and disposing mind and memory and in full bodily vigor, yet being certain of the near approach of unescapable and inevitable doom, do hereby make, publish and declare this, my last will and testament, hereby revoking any and all other will or wills by me at any time heretofore made.
“First—I commend my spirit to the keeping of God my Savior, and my body to be buried in my plot in Vale Cemetery.
“Second—”
“You can skip the second, third and fourth paragraphs,” Mr. Monteith interrupted; “the fifth is the only one bearing further on our problem.”
“Very well,” de Grandin turned the page and continued: “Fifth— And it is my will and desire that my said nephew and niece, David and Louella Monteith, aforesaid, do take up residence in my house near Harrisonville, New Jersey, as soon as they shall be apprized of the provisions hereof, and shall there remain in residence for the full term of six months, and at the end of that time, unless intervening occurrences shall have prompted them to take such action earlier, or unless it shall have become physically impossible so to do, they shall remove from the said house the mummy of the Priest Sepa and see it safely transported overseas and buried in the sands of the Egyptian desert; and I do especially make the faithful carrying-out of these injunctions conditions precedent to their succession to the residuum of my estate.”
De Grandin finished reading and glanced from the brother to the sister with his odd, unwinking stare.
“We are the residuary legatees of Uncle Absalom’s estate,” David Monteith explained. “It amounts to something like $300,000.”
“Parbleu, for half that sum I should undertake the interment of all the shriveled mummies in the necropolis of Thebes!” the Frenchman returned. “But where is the outré feature of your case, my friends? True, your estimable uncle seems to have been peculiar, but eccentricity is the privilege of age and wealth. Why should you not make yourselves comfortable in his late dwelling for half a year, then bury the so long dead Egyptian gentleman with fitting honors and thereafter enjoy yourselves in any manner seeming good to you?”
It was the girl who answered. “Dr. de Grandin,” she asked in a charmingly modulated contralto voice, “didn’t you notice the odd phraseology in the opening paragraph of Uncle Absalom’s will? If he had said ‘being certain of the near approach of unescapable and inevitable death’ we should have paid little attention to it, for he was past eighty years old, and even though he seemed strong and active as a man of sixty, death couldn’t have been so far away in the natural course of things; but he didn’t say, ‘death,’ he said, ‘unescapable and inevitable doom’.”
“Exactement,” de Grandin agreed calmly, but the sudden light which shone in his little round blue eyes betrayed awaking interest. “Précisément, Mademoiselle; what then?”
“I’m certain that horrible old mummy he mentions in his will had something to do with it,” she shot back in a low, almost breathless voice. “Show him the transcription, David,” she ordered, turning to her brother.
Mr. Monteith produced a second paper from his pocket. “Louella found this in an old escritoire in the library the day before Uncle Absalom died,” he explained. “She meant to ask him about it, but never got the chance. It may shed some light on the case—to you. It only makes it more mysterious to us.”
“Transcription of the Tablet found in the Tomb of Sepa the Priest,” de Grandin read:
“Sepa, servant and priest of Aset, the All-Mother, Who Is and Was and Is to Be, to whoso looks hereon, greeting and admonition:
“Impious stranger, who has defiled the sanctuary of my sepulcher, be thou accursed. Be thy uprisings and thy down-lyings accursed; accursed be thy goings-out and thy returnings; cursed be thou in labor and in rest; may thy nights be filled with terrifying visions and thy days with travail and with pain, and may the wrath of Aset, who Was and Is and Is to Be, be on thee and on thy house for all time. May thy body be the prey to kites and jackals and thy soul endure the torture of the Gods. Unburied shalt thou die, and bodiless and accursed shalt thou wander in Amenti forever and forever, and be this malediction on thee and on thy house until such time as my relics be once again interred in the sands of Khem. I have said.”
“Eh bien, he cursed a vicious curse, this one,” the Frenchman remarked as he concluded. “And what is this we have here?”
Pasted to the bottom of the sheet bearing the translation of the old curse was a newspaper cutting bearing a London dateline:
London, Nov. 16.—The strange death of Richard Bethell, son of Lord Westbury, today revived the legend of the curse of death that hovers over those who disturb the graves of the ancient lords of Egypt.
His death is the tenth among the leaders of Lord Carnarvon’s expedition to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, which uncovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen.
Bethell, who was secretary to Howard Carter, leader of the expedition, was found dead in bed in the aristocratic Bath Club. Physicians are at a loss as to what caused his end.
“U’m?” de Grandin put the paper down and regarded the visitors once more with his direct, level stare. “And what of your late uncle?” he demanded. “Tell me what you can of his life; more particularly of his death.”
Again it was the girl who answered. “Uncle Absalom was educated for the Unitarian ministry,” she began, “but he never accepted the vocation. About the time he was to take up his ministerial work he met a young lady in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and fell violently in love with her. Yankee clippers still traded with the Orient and Near East in those days, and Miss Goodrich’s father, who was a ship-owner, offered Uncle Absalom a share in the business if he would give up his clerical career. He shipped as supercargo on the Polly Hatton at his future father-in-law’s suggestion, and in the course of a three-year cruise touched at Alexandria, Egypt.
“He seems to have had plenty of time to go inland exploring, for he made a trip up the Nile and with a party of Arabs broke into a tomb somewhere near Luxor and brought back several mummies, some papyri and some funerary statues. It was comparatively easy to get such things out of Egypt in those days, so Uncle had little difficulty in bringing his
finds—or would you call them loot?—away. Oddly enough, they proved the foundation of his fortune.
“Unknown to Uncle Absalom and the master of the ship, Mr. Goodrich had died of smallpox while the Polly Hatton was on her cruise, and when they came to appraise his estate he was found to be practically bankrupt. Harriet, his daughter, married a wealthy young ship-chandler, and was the mother of two children when her ‘fiancé’ finally returned to New Bedford.
“But the mummies Uncle Absalom had found proved rather valuable ones. Egyptology was just beginning to be the important science it is today, and the papyri found in the mummy-cases gave a great deal of valuable information the officials of the British Museum had only guessed at before. They paid Uncle £200—a great deal of money in those days—for his finds, and made him a liberal offer for any further antiquities he might bring them.
“When Uncle Absalom returned to New England to find his expected bride already a wife and mother, his entire nature seemed to change almost overnight. The quiet, bookish divinity student was transformed into a desperate adventurer. The Civil War had been over five years, and the country was beginning to drift into the period of hard times which ended in the panic of 1873. Plenty of young men who’d served in the Union army and navy were out of work, and Uncle Absalom had no trouble recruiting a company of followers without respect either for danger or decency, provided there was money to be had for their work.
“Poor Uncle Absalom! I’m afraid everything he did during the next twenty years or so wouldn’t bear too close scrutiny! The returns from his first venture in grave robbery had proved so good that he went into it as a business.
“Even though most of them were Mohammedans and didn’t believe in the old gods, the Egyptians didn’t take kindly to foreigners despoiling the ancient tombs, and Uncle and his men encountered resistance more than once; but the men who had fought with Grant and Sherman and Farragut weren’t the kind to be stopped by unorganized Arabs, or even by the newly organized gendarmerie of Egypt. They robbed and plundered systematically, taking their loot to a sort of buccaneers’ cache they’d established at a desert oasis, and when they’d accumulated enough spoil to make it worth while, they’d take it out in an armed caravan, sometimes striking for the Red Sea, sometimes going boldly to the Mediterranean and woe betide whoever tried to stop them!
“Of course, both the English and the French went through the motions of combating this wholesale grave robbery, but both countries had more important things to attend to, and Uncle’s men helped them subdue rebellious natives more than once; so many of his crimes were winked at officially. Also, the great museums of London, Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg were glad to buy whatever he had for sale, and often bid against each other for his wares; so he grew rich and, in a way, respected. The curators of those museums weren’t so very different from people over here,” she added with a smile. “When I was in school in Washington it was common gossip that the senators and congressmen who championed prohibition most eloquently in the halls of Congress were the bootleggers’ best customers in private life.
“What had started as a purely commercial enterprise with the additional element of adventure to help him forget the way he had been jilted at length became a real passion with Uncle Absalom. He learned to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics, for he’d been a first-rate Greek scholar in college and Boussard’s discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 had furnished the key to the old written language, you know. Long before he retired from his dangerous profession Uncle was rated as one of the foremost authorities on both ancient and modem Egypt, and two universities and the British government made him handsome offers for his services when he finally gave up tomb-robbing as a vocation.
“On his retirement he made a number of gifts to the Egyptian departments of the museums which had been his best customers, but the cream of his finds he retained for his private collection and kept them in his house near Harrisonville.
“I don’t suppose you ever even heard of him, Dr. Trowbridge?” she turned her odd, rather melancholy smile on me. “He’s lived just outside town for almost ten years, but when we came to visit him the taxi driver had never heard of ‘Journey’s End,’ where he lived, and we had a great deal of trouble finding him. You see, he had hardly been outside his own grounds once since settling here, and most of his things, including staple groceries, he bought from a mail order house in Chicago. I don’t believe half-a-dozen people in the whole city knew him, or even knew of him.
“David and I came to visit him last month in response to an urgent invitation. He intimated he intended making us his heirs, and as we’re orphans and were his only living relatives, it seemed no more than human charity to accede to his request.
“He was a wonderful-looking old man, courteous, gentle and very learned. He did everything possible to make us welcome, and we should have been very happy at ‘Journey’s End’ if it hadn’t been for an air of—well—uncanniness, which seemed to permeate the whole place. Somehow, both David and I seemed to feel alien presences there. We’d be reading in the library, or sitting at table, or, perhaps, just going about our affairs in the house, when suddenly we’d have that strange, eerie feeling of someone staring fixedly at the backs of our heads. When we’d turn suddenly—as we always did at first—there’d be no one there, of course; but the feeling was always there, and instead of wearing off it became stronger and stronger. Since Uncle’s death I’ve noticed it more than David has, though.
“Uncle Absalom never mentioned it, and, of course, neither did we—except to each other—but I’m sure he felt it too, for there was a furtive, almost fearful, look in his eyes all the time, and the queer, haunted expression seemed to grow on him, just during the little time of our visit. It was only ten days before his death when he made his will, and you remember how he speaks of ‘unescapable and inevitable doom’—instead of ‘death’—in the opening paragraph.
“Now, I realize all this is not enough to excuse our belief in anything supernatural being involved in Uncle Absalom’s death; that is, not enough to convince a disinterested third party who hadn’t felt the queer, terrifying atmosphere of ‘Journey’s End’ and seen the took of hopeless fear grow into an expression of almost resignation in Uncle Absalom’s face,” she admitted, “and I’m not sure you’ll see anything so very unusual in what occurred the night he died. David will have to tell you about that; curiously enough, though everyone else in the house was awake, I slept through it all, and have no first-hand knowledge of anything.”
“I compliment you, Mademoiselle,” de Grandin declared with one of his characteristically courteous bows. “You tell your story most exceedingly well. Already I am convinced. I shall most gladly undertake the case.
“Now, young Monsieur,” he addressed the crippled boy, “add what you can to the so graphic narrative Mademoiselle your sister has detailed. I listen; I am all attention.”
DAVID MONTEITH TOOK UP the story. “Uncle Absalom died shortly after New Year’s—the ninth of January, to be exact,” he began. “He and Louella had gone to bed about ten o’clock, but I stayed up in the library reading. It’s—pardon the personal reference—it’s rather difficult for me to dress and undress, and sometimes I sit up rather late, just to defer the trouble of going to bed. So—”
“It hurts him,” his sister interrupted, her eyes welling with tears. “Sometimes he suffers terribly, and—”
“Louella, dear, don’t!” the boy cut in. “As I was saying, gentlemen, I sat up late that night, and fell asleep over my book. I woke with a start and found the night, which had been clear and sharp earlier, had become stormy and bitter cold. A perfect gale was blowing, and soft, clinging snowflakes were being dashed against the window-panes with such force that they struck the glass with an audible impact.
“Just what wakened me I can’t say with certainty. I thought at first it was the shrieking of the wind, but, looking back, I’m not so sure; for, blending with the recollection of the dream I’d been having when
I woke, was a sound, or combination of sounds—”
“Mille pardons, Monsieur, but what of this dream?” de Grandin interrupted. “Such stuff as dreams are made on are oftentimes of greatest importance in cases like this.”
“Why,” David Monteith colored slightly, “it was a silly hodgepodge I’d been dreaming, sir; it couldn’t possibly have any bearing on what happened later. I dreamed I heard two people, a man and a woman, come up the stairs from Uncle Absalom’s museum, which was on the ground floor, and pass the library on their way to Uncle’s room. And in the absurd way dreams have of making things appear, I thought I could look right through the solid wall and see them, the way you do in those illusional scenes they sometimes have in the theater. They were both dressed in ancient Egyptian costume, and were speaking together in some outlandish language. I’d been reading Munzinger’s Ostafrikanische Studien when I fell asleep; I expect that accounts for the dream.”
“U’m; possibly,” de Grandin conceded. “What then, if you please?”
“Well, as I said, when I woke I thought I heard a sort of soft, but very clear, chiming sound, something like sleigh-bells heard a long way off, yet different, somehow, and with it what I took to be a woman’s voice singing softly.
“I leaned back in my chair, half asleep still, wondering if some dream image hadn’t carried over into my semiconsciousness, when there came a new sound, totally unlike the others.
“It was my Uncle Absalom’s voice, not very loud, but terribly earnest, arguing with, or pleading with someone. Gradually, as I sat there listening, his words became louder, he almost shouted, then broke off with a sort of scream which seemed to die half-uttered, as though his mouth had suddenly been stopped or his throat grasped in a strangling hold.
“I lifted myself out of my chair and hurried toward the upper story as well as I could, but the stairway leading to the third floor was some twenty feet down the corridor and the stairs were steep and winding; so, with my handicap, I couldn’t make very good time.
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