"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 lowerthan 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 hisrichest 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.
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 plasterof 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:
"There is something cold in the room, Dad. I suppose your friend the Lady Alicia is paying you a visit. Idowish she would allow me to make her acquaintance."
And to this he would sometimes reply with perfect gravity:
"Yes, she has just come in: she is standing by the window yonder." And this had happened so often that Nitocris, like her father, had come to regard the wraith, or astral body, as the Professor deemed it, of the unhappy lady almost as a member of the family. Of course, after he had passed the border into the realm of N^4, Franklin Marmion speedily came to look upon her visits as the merest commonplaces.
But as the unhappy Lady Alicia will have no part to play in the action of this narrative, her little story must be accepted as a perhaps excusable digression.
There were about four acres of comfortably wooded land about the house, of which nearly an acre had formed the pleasaunce of the old lodge. This was now a beautifully-kept modern garden, with a broad, gently-sloping lawn, whose turf had been growing more and more velvety year by year for over three centuries, and divided from it by a low box-hedge was another, levelled up and devoted to tennis and new-style croquet. The Old Lawn, as it was called, sloped away from a broad verandah which ran the whole length of the central wing and formed the approach to the big drawing-room and dining-room, and acosy breakfast-room of early Georgian style, and these, with her study and "snuggery" and bedroom on the next floor, formed the peculiar domain of Miss Nitocris.
She and the Professor were just sitting down to an early breakfast on the morning of the garden-party, which had been arranged for the day but one after the arrival of the Huysmans, when the post came in. There were a good many letters for both, for each had many interests in life. The Professor only ran his eye over the envelopes and then put the bundle aside for consideration in the solitude of his own den. Nitocris did the same, picked one out and left the others for similar treatment after she had interviewed the cook about lunch and refreshments for the afternoon, and the butler on the subject of cooling drinks, for it promised to be a perfect English day in June—which is, of course, the most delicious day that you may find under any skies between the Poles.
She opened the one she had selected and skimmed its contents. Then her eyelids lifted, and she said:
"Oh!"
"What is the matter, Niti?" asked her father, looking up from his cutlet. "Nothing gone wrong with your arrangements, I hope."
"Oh dear, no," she replied, with something like exultation in her voice, "quite the reverse, Dad. This is from Brenda, and Brenda is an angel disguised in petticoats and picture hats. Listen."
Then she began to read:
"My dearest Niti,—I am going to take what I'm afraid English people would think a great liberty. The trouble is this: When the Professor (mine, I mean) was making his tour of the Russian Universities two years ago, he received a great deal of courtesy and help from no less a person than the celebrated Prince Oscar Oscarovitch—the modern Skobeleff, you know—who was very interested in Poppa's work, and took a lot of trouble to smooth things out for him. Well, the Prince, as of course you know, is in London now. He called yesterday, and when I mentioned your party, he said he was very sorry he had not the honour of your father's acquaintance as well as mine. The grammar's a bit wrong there, but you know what I mean. That, of course, meant that he wants to come; and, to be candid, I should like to bring him, for even an American girl here doesn't always get a Prince, and a famous man as well, to take around, so, as the time is so short, may we include him in our party? If you have forgiven me and are going to say 'yes,' I must tell you that the Prince would like to compensate for his intrusion—that's the way he puts it—by helping entertain your guests. It seems that he has met with a man who can work miracles, an Egyptian——"
"My dearest Niti,—I am going to take what I'm afraid English people would think a great liberty. The trouble is this: When the Professor (mine, I mean) was making his tour of the Russian Universities two years ago, he received a great deal of courtesy and help from no less a person than the celebrated Prince Oscar Oscarovitch—the modern Skobeleff, you know—who was very interested in Poppa's work, and took a lot of trouble to smooth things out for him. Well, the Prince, as of course you know, is in London now. He called yesterday, and when I mentioned your party, he said he was very sorry he had not the honour of your father's acquaintance as well as mine. The grammar's a bit wrong there, but you know what I mean. That, of course, meant that he wants to come; and, to be candid, I should like to bring him, for even an American girl here doesn't always get a Prince, and a famous man as well, to take around, so, as the time is so short, may we include him in our party? If you have forgiven me and are going to say 'yes,' I must tell you that the Prince would like to compensate for his intrusion—that's the way he puts it—by helping entertain your guests. It seems that he has met with a man who can work miracles, an Egyptian——"
At this point Professor Marmion looked up again suddenly with an almost imperceptible start, and, for the first time, took an interest in Miss Huysman's letter.
"——named Phadrig. The Prince assures me that he is not a conjurer in the professional sense,and would be deeply insulted to be called one; also that no amount of money would induce him to give a display of his powers justformoney. He will come to-day, if you like, and do wonderful things, which, from what the Prince says, will astonish and perhaps frighten us a bit, but only because the Prince once saved his life and got him out of a very bad place he had got into with a Turkish Pascha. Now, that is my little story. Please 'phone me as soon as you can so that I can let the Prince know. It will be just too sweet of you and the Professor to say 'yes.'—Your devoted chum,Brenda."
"——named Phadrig. The Prince assures me that he is not a conjurer in the professional sense,and would be deeply insulted to be called one; also that no amount of money would induce him to give a display of his powers justformoney. He will come to-day, if you like, and do wonderful things, which, from what the Prince says, will astonish and perhaps frighten us a bit, but only because the Prince once saved his life and got him out of a very bad place he had got into with a Turkish Pascha. Now, that is my little story. Please 'phone me as soon as you can so that I can let the Prince know. It will be just too sweet of you and the Professor to say 'yes.'
—Your devoted chum,Brenda."
"Well, Dad," she asked, as she put the letter down, "what do you say?"
"Just what you want to say, my dear Niti," he replied, carefully spreading some marmalade on a triangle of toast "Personally, I must confess that I should rather like to see some of this so-called magician's alleged magic. I know that some of these fellows are extraordinarily clever, and I have no doubt that he will show us something interesting, if you care to see it."
"Then that settles it," said Nitocris, rising; "I will go and ring up the Savoy at once. Perhaps the Egyptian gentleman might be able to help you with that Forty-Seventh Proposition problem of Professor Hartley's."
"Perhaps," answered Franklin Marmion drily, and went on with his breakfast.
The party which gradually assembled on the lawn about four was somewhat small, but very select. Nitocris had too much common sense and too much real consideration for her friends and acquaintances to get together a mere mob of well-dressed people of probably incompatible tastes and temperament, and call it a party. She disliked an elbowing crowd and a clatter of fashionably shrill tongues with all the aversion of a delicately developed sensibility. No consideration of rank or social power or wealth had the slightest weight with her when she was distributing cards of invitation, wherefore the said cards were all the more eagerly awaited by those who did, and did not, get them. The result of this in the present case was that, although every one accepted and came, rather less than fifty people had the run of the broad lawns and the leafy wilderness about them on that momentous afternoon.
The first of the arrivals was Professor Hartley, reputed to be the greatest mathematician in England. He was a large man with rather heavy features, lit up by alert grey eyes, a big, dome-like cranium, and a manner that was modest almost todiffidence. He brought his wife, a slim and somewhat stern-featured lady, who, in the domestic sense, kept him in his place with inflexible decision, and worshipped him in his professional capacity, and two pretty, well-dressed, and obviously well-bred daughters. Their carriage drew up, turned into the drive precisely at four. Punctuality was the Professor's one and only social vice.
Next came Commander Merrill in a hansom. This would be one of the very few meetings that he could hope for with his lost beloved—as he now sadly thought of her—before he put H.M.S.Blazerinto commission, and so punctuality on his part was both natural and excusable. Then came a few more carriages containing very nice people with whom we have here but little concern; and then Miss Brenda, deeply regretting her beautiful Napier, with her father and mother in a very smart Savoy turn-out followed by a coronetted brougham drawn by a splendid pair of black Orloffs. This was followed by an equally smart dog-cart driven by a rather slightly-built but well set-up young man with a light moustache, bronzed skin, and brilliant blue eyes. He was good-looking, but if his features had been absolutely plain he could never have looked commonplace, for this was Lord Lester Leighton, son of the Earl of Kyneston, and twenty generations of unblemished descent had made him the aristocrat that he was.
Nitocris did not like pompous announcements by servants, and so she received her guests, who were all acquaintances or friends, in the greatporch through which many a brilliant presence had passed, and had two maids waiting inside to see to the wants of the ladies, and their own coachman and a couple of grooms to attend to matters outside.
Merrill was made as happy as possible by a bright smile, a real hand-clasp instead of the usual Society paw-waggle, and instructions to go and make himself agreeable and useful. Brenda also received a hearty "shake"—Nitocris did not believe in kissing in public—and when the Professor and Mrs Huysman had gone in, she whispered:
"I suppose that's the Prince's brougham. You must wait here, dear, and do the introductions. You're responsible, you know."
Brenda assented with a nod and a smile, as the brougham drew up and the smart tiger jumped down and opened the door. The Prince got out, and was followed by Phadrig the Adept. As she looked at the two men, Nitocris felt as though a wave of cold air had suddenly enveloped her whole being—body and soul.
"Niti, this is our friend, Prince Oscar Oscarovitch, whom you have been kind enough to let me invite by proxy. Prince, this is Miss Nitocris Marmion."
Of course all the world knew of Oscar Oscarovitch, the modern Skobeleff, the lineal descendant of Ivan the Terrible, the crystal-brained, steel-willed man who was to be the saviour and regenerator of half-ruined, revolution-rent Russia, but this was the first time that Nitocris had met him in her present life. When she had returned hisstately bow, she looked up and saw with a strange intuition, which somehow seemed half-reminiscent an almost perfect type of the primitive warrior through the disguise of his faultless twentieth-century attire. He was nearly two inches over six feet, but he was so exquisitely proportioned that he looked less than his height. His skin was fair and smooth, but tanned to an olive-brown. His forehead was of medium height, straight and square, with jet-black brows drawn almost straight across it above a pair of rather soft, dreamy eyes that were blue or black according to the mood of their possessor. His nose was strong and slightly curved, with delicately sensitive nostrils. A dark glossy moustache and beard trimmedà laTsar, partly hid full, almost sensual lips and a powerful somewhat projecting chin.
As their eyes met the shiver of revulsion passed through her again. She hardly heard his murmured compliments, but her attention awoke when he turned to the man who was standing behind him, and said with a very graceful gesture of his left hand:
"Miss Marmion, this is the gentleman whom you have so graciously permitted me to bring to your house. This is Phadrig the Adept, as he is known in his own ancient land of Egypt, a worker of wonders which really are wonders, and not mere sleight-of-hand conjuring tricks. He has been good enough to accompany me in order to convince the learned of the West that the Immemorial East could still teach it something if it chose."
Nitocris bowed, and as she looked at the figurewhich now stood beside the Prince, she shivered again. She had a swift sense of standing in the presence of implacable enemies, and yet she had never seen these men before, and, for all she knew, she had not an enemy in the world. She was intensely relieved when Lord Lester Leighton came up and held out his hand, and she was able to ask the Prince and his companion to go through to the lawn.
No one would have recognised the shabby denizen of the grimy room in Candler's Court, Borough High Street, in the tall, dignified Eastern gentleman who walked with slow and stately step through the spacious old hall of "The Wilderness." He was clad in a light frock-coat suit of irreproachable cut and fit. The correctly-creased trousers met brightly-burnished, narrow-toed tan boots; a black-tasselled scarlet tarbush was set square on his high forehead, and the dark red tie under his two-ply collar just added the necessary touch of Oriental colour to his costume, and went excellently with the lighter red of the tarbush. It is hardly necessary to say that when he and the Prince went out on to the lawn, they were, as a Society paper report of the function would have put it, "the observed of all observers."
"I'm so glad you were able to be here in time for my little party, Lord Leighton," said Nitocris, when she had ended the welcoming of the other guests. "Dad will be delighted, too——"
She stopped rather suddenly, remembering that Dad would have to tell his young friend the sadstory of the mysterious loss of the Mummy; but another subject was uppermost in her mind just then, and, taking refuge in it, she went on quickly:
"Come along to the lawn. I want to introduce you to a very distinguished gentleman—and his wife and daughter. No less a person, my lord, than the great Professor Hoskins van Huysman!"
"What!" exclaimed Leighton, with a laugh that was almost boyish for such a serious and learned young man. "TheHuysman: the Professor's most doughty antagonist in the arena of symbols and theorems? Oh, now thatisgood!"
"Yes; I think you will find him very interesting," replied Nitocris, hoping in her soul that he would find Brenda a great deal more interesting. "Come along, or Dad will be beginning to think that I am neglecting my duties, and I must be on quite my best behaviour to-day. We are favoured by the presence of another very celebrated celebrity to-day. That tall man who came in just before you was Prince Oscar Oscarovitch."
"Oh yes," he said lightly; "I recognised the brute."
"The brute? Dear me, that is rather severe. Then you know His Highness?" she asked in a low, almost eager, voice.
"There are not many men in the Near or Far East who have not some cause to know His Highness," he replied in a serious tone, tinged by the suspicion of a sneer. "He is about the finest specimen of the well-veneered savage that even Russia has produced for the last century.He is a brilliant scholar, statesman, and soldier; delightful among his equals—or those he chooses to consider so—charming to men, and, they say, almost irresistible to women; but to his opponents and his inferiors, a pitiless brute-beast without heart, or soul, or honour. A curious mixture: but that's the man."
"How awful!" murmured Nitocris. "Fancy a man like that being in such a position!"
But, although she did not understand why, she had heard his harshly-spoken words with a positive sense of relief. They exactly translated and crystallised her first inexplicable feelings of desperate aversion—almost of terror.
She led Leighton to a little group on the left side of the lawn, composed of the three Professors and the wives and daughters of two of them. As they approached them, Nitocris became sensible of a curious kind of nervousness. She did not know that by this commonplace action she was reuniting two links in a long-severed chain of destiny, but she had a dim consciousness that she was going to do something much more important than merely introducing two strangers to each other. She looked quite anxiously at Brenda, who had turned towards them as they came near, and saw that, just for the fraction of a second, her eyes brightened, and a passing flush deepened the delicate colour in her cheeks. It was almost like a glance of recognition, and yet she had only heard his name two or three times, and certainly had never seen him before. Then she lookedswiftly at Leighton. Yes, there was a flush under his tan and a new light in his eyes. When she had completed the introductions she looked away for a moment, and said in her soul:
"Thank goodness! If that is not a case of love at first sight, I shan't believe that there is any such thing, whatever the poets and romancers may say."
Yes, her womanly intuition was right as far as it reached; but she could not yet grasp the full meaning of the marvel which she had helped to bring about. With her father, she believed in the Doctrine of Re-Incarnation as the only one which affords a logical and entirely just solution of the bewildering puzzles and ghastly problems of human life as seen by the eyes of ignorance. She had grasped in its highest meaning the truth—that Man is really a living soul, living from eternity to eternity. An immortality with one end to it was to her an unthinkable proposition which could not possibly be true. For her, as for her father, Eternal Life and Eternal Justice were one. Where a man ended one life, from that point he began the next: for good or for evil, for ignorance or for knowledge. A life lived and ended in righteousness (not, of course, in the narrow theological sense of the term) began again in righteousness, and in evil meant inexorably a re-beginning in evil. That was Fate, because it was also immutable Justice. Man possessed the Divine gift of free will to use or abuse as he would, so far as his own life-conduct was concerned; but there was no evasionof the adamantine law of the survival and progress of the fittest, which, in the course of ages, infallibly proved to be the best. This, in a word, was why "some are born to honour and some to dishonour."
Yet she had still to fathom an even subtler mystery than this: the mystery of sexual love. Why should one man and one woman, out of all the teeming millions of humanity, be irresistibly attracted to each other by a force which none can analyse or define? Why should a woman, confronted with the choice between two men, one of whom possesses every apparent advantage over the other, yet feel her heart go out to that other, and impel her to follow him, even to the leaving of father and mother and home, and all else that has been dear to her? Why in the soul of every true man and woman is Love, when it comes, made Lord of all, and all in all? It is because Love is co-eternal with Life, and these two have loved, perchance wedded, many times before in other lives which they have lived together, and, with the succession of these lives, their love has grown stronger and purer, until "falling in love" is merely a recognition of lovers; unconscious, no doubt, to those who have not progressed far enough in wisdom, but none the less necessary and inevitable for that.[1]
Is it not from ignorance of this truth, or wilful denial of this law, that all the miseries of mismarriage come forth? Again the woman has the choice. She obeys the bidding of her own lust of wealth and comfort and social power, or she submits to the pressure of family influence, or the stress of poverty, and crushes—or thinks she does—the ages-old love out of her heart and marries the man she does not love, never has loved, and never can. She has defied the eternal Law of Selection. She has desecrated the sanctity of an immortal soul, and she has defiled the temple of her body. She has sold herself for a price in the market-place, and has become a prostitute endowed by law with a conventional respectability, and for this crime she pays the penalty of unsated heart-hunger. Instead of the fruits of Eden distilling their sweet juices into her blood, the apples of Gomorrah turn perpetually to ashes in her mouth. Often weariness and despair drive her to the brief intoxication of the anodyne of adultery, a further crime which is only the natural consequence of the first.
But it must not be thought that women are the only sexual criminals. There are male as well as female prostitutes made respectable by convention, and the debt-burdened man of title who marries to get gold to re-gild his tarnished coronet is the worst of these; for too often he drags an innocent but ignorant maiden down to his own vile level. Yet the chief criminal of all is not the individual, but the Society which not only encourages, but too often compels the crime. For this it also pays the penalty. The collective crimebrings the collective curse, for, if human history proves anything, it proves that the Society which persistently denies the Law of Selection, and continually defiles the Altar of Love, in the end goes down through a foul welter of lust and greed and gluttony into the nethermost Pit of Destruction.
Nitocris had not learned this yet. It was not within the plan of Eternal Justice that her virgin soul, purified by the strenuous labour of many lives towards the Light, should yet be darkened by the shadow of such grim knowledge as this. It was enough for her now that she should be the ministering angel of Love and Light.
But at the same moment, standing on that smooth, shady lawn, there were also two incarnations of the destroying angels of Hate and Darkness, for even here, amidst this pleasant scene of seemingly innocent pleasure and laughter, the Eternal Conflict was being continued, as it is and must be, wherever man comes in contact with his kith and kind.
Soon after Nitocris and Brenda had joined the group, Phadrig approached the Prince, who happened for the moment to be standing alone at the bottom of the lawn, and said softly in Russian:
"Highness, my dream, as you are pleased to call it, has proved true. That is the Queen—she who was once the daughter of the great Rameses, Lady of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms."
"What?" laughed the Prince. "Miss Marmion,that lovely English girl, your old Egyptian Mummy re-vivified! Well, have it as you like. You are welcome to your dreams as long as you use your arts to help me to lay hands on the beautiful reality. I have seen many a fair woman, and thought myself in love with some of them, but by the beard of Ivan, I have never seen one like this. I tell you, Phadrig, that the moment my eyes looked for the first time into hers, only a few minutes ago, I knew that I had found my fate, and, having found it, I shall take very good care that I don't lose it. And you shall help me to keep it; I shall try every fair means first to make her my princess, for, whether she was once Queen of Egypt or not, she is worthy now to sit beside a sovereign on his throne—and it might be that I could some day give her such a place—but have her I will, if not as fairly-won wife and consort, then as stolen slave and plaything, to keep as long as my fancy lasts. And listen, Phadrig," he went on in a low tone, but with savage intensity. "Your life is mine, for I gave it back to you when the lifting of a finger would have sent you into what you would call another incarnation; and from this day forth you must devote it to this end until it is attained, one way or the other. I know you don't care for money as wealth, but in this world it is the right hand of power, and that you love. All that you need shall be yours for the asking in exchange for your faithful service. Are you content with the bargain?"
"No, Highness, that will not content me," repliedPhadrig, in a voice that had no expression save unalterable resolve.
"What! Is not that enough for you, a penniless seller of curios?" said the Prince, with a sneer in his tone. "Then I will add to it the ready aid and unquestioning obedience of our secret police, here and in Europe. Will that satisfy you?"
"I do not need the help of your police, Highness," answered the Egyptian, in the same passionless accents. "They are skilful and brave, but they have not the Greater Knowledge. I could turn the wisest of them into a fool, and frighten the bravest out of his senses in a few minutes. Use them yourself, Highness, should it become necessary. They would be less than useless to me."
"Then what will satisfy you?" asked the Prince impatiently, but with no show of anger, for he knew the strange power of the man whose help he needed.
"I do not ask you to believe in the reality of what you call my dreams, Highness," replied Phadrig slowly, "but I do ask—nay, I require, as the price of my faithful service, your solemn promise in writing, signed and attested, that, if and when my dreams become realities, and your own hopes are fulfilled, the independence and sovereignty of the Ancient Land shall be restored; her temples and tombs and palaces shall be rebuilt; her ancient worship revived in my person, and the sceptre of Rameses replaced in the hand of Nitocris the Queen."
The Prince was silent for a few moments. To grant the seemingly extravagant demand meant to reduce the splendid dream and scheme of his life to cold, tangible writing, and to put into this man's hand the power to betray him. On the other hand, their aims were one, and only through him could Phadrig hope to realise his dreams. Of course they were only dreams; but he was faithful to them, and so he would be faithful to him. At the worst it would be easy to arrange a burglary, or, for the matter of that, a murder in Candler's Court, and that would make an end of the matter.
"Very well, Phadrig," he said at length. "It is settled. I will trust you, for it is necessary that we should trust each other. You shall have what you ask for within a week. Now I must go. I shall tell them that I have been arranging the exhibition of your powers which you are going to give them. It will be well to startle them sufficiently to shake their British beef-sense up into something like fear. Make them wonder, but, for the sake of our hostess, don't frighten them too much."
Phadrig only acknowledged his promise with a bow, and he turned away and joined the growing group in which Nitocris and Brenda were still the central objects of attraction.
[1]The Doctrine, of course, affords the same explanation of friendships between man and man, and woman and woman.
[1]The Doctrine, of course, affords the same explanation of friendships between man and man, and woman and woman.
[1]The Doctrine, of course, affords the same explanation of friendships between man and man, and woman and woman.
The time, about an hour or so before tea, was occupied by the guests according to their varying tastes—in tennis, croquet, more or less good-natured gossip, and flirtations which may or may not have been serious.
Nitocris saw with growing cause for self-gratulation that Lord Leighton and Brenda were decidedly attracted towards each other. He, in spite of having received his gracious, but, as he well knew, finalcongéfrom Nitocris, still felt that he was not quite playing the game with himself; but for all that it was impossible for him not to see that the emotion, which was even now stirring in his heart, awakened by the first touch of Brenda's hand, and the first meeting of their eyes, was something very different from the tenderly respectful admiration, the real friendship, inevitably exalted by the magic of sex, which, as he saw now, he had innocently mistaken for love.
He managed quite adroitly to separate Brenda from the circle, and to lure her into a stroll about the outside grounds, during which he told her the history and traditions of "The Wilderness" not, of course, omitting the sad little tragedy of the LadyAlicia, all of which Miss Brenda listened to with an interest which was not, perhaps, wholly derived from the story itself. She had never yet met any one who was quite like this learned, much-travelled, quiet-spoken young aristocrat. On her father's side she was descended from one of the oldest Knickerbocker families in the State of New York and her aristocracy responded instinctively to his, and formed a first bond between them.
It need hardly be said that her beauty and her prospective wealth, to say nothing of the bright, mental, and intellectual atmosphere in which she seemed to live and move, had attracted to her many men whom she had inspired with a very genuine desire to link their lives with hers. She was only twenty-two, but she had already refused more than one coronet of respectable dignity, and so far her heart had remained as virgin as it was when she had admired herself in her first long skirt. But now, for the first time in her life, she began to feel a strange disquietude in the presence of a man, and a man, too, whom she had not known for an hour. Nitocris had, happily, told her nothing of what had passed between Lord Leighton and herself, and so the pleasant element in her disquietude was entirely unalloyed.
Her father was already too deeply engrossed in learned converse with his brother professors to take any notice of the great fact which was beginning to get itself accomplished; but her mother's instinct instantly noticed the subtlechange that had come over her daughter, and she saw it with anything but displeasure. All sensible mothers of beautiful daughters are discreetly sanguine. She was far too wise in her generation not to have agreed with Brenda's decision in certain former cases. The idea of her daughter's beauty and her father's millions being bartered for mere rank and social power, however splendid, was utterly repugnant to her. She had married for love, and she wanted Brenda to do the same, whoever the chosen man might be, provided always that he was a man—and in this regard there could be no doubt about Lord Lester Leighton; so as they walked away she said to Nitocris with a confidence which was almost girlish:
"His Lordship is just delightful—now, isn't he, Miss Marmion? Just the sort that you seem to raise over here, and nowhere else. Tells you that you have to take him for a gentleman and nothing else in the first three words he says to you—and Brenda seems to like him. I never saw her go off with a man like that on such short notice, for Brenda's pretty proud and cold with men, for all her nice ways and high spirits."
"You would have to search a long time, Mrs van Huysman," replied Nitocris very demurely, "before you found a better type of the real English gentleman than Lord Leighton. His family is one of the oldest in the country, and, unlike too many of our noble families, the Kynestons have no bar-sinister on their escutcheon."
"I guess you're getting a little beyond me there,Miss Marmion. I don't think I ever heard of a—what is it?—a bar-sinister, before. What might it be?"
Nitocris flushed very faintly as she replied:
"I think I can explain it best, Mrs van Huysman, by saying that it means that Lord Leighton's ancestors have preserved their honour unstained through many generations. Of course, you know that some of our so-called noble families in England spring from anything but a noble origin. There are not a few English dukes and earls who would find it rather awkward to introduce their great-great-grandmothers to their present circle of friends."
"I should think they would, from what I have read of them, the shameless creatures!" said Mrs van Huysman, with a sniff of real republican virtue.
Then the Prince joined them, and the conversation was promptly switched off on to another line of interest.
Tea was served on the Old Lawn under the shade of the great cedars, which made its greatest adornment; and when everybody had had what he or she wanted, and the men had lit their cigarettes—and the Professors, by special permission, their pipes—Nitocris looked across a couple of tables at Oscarovitch, whom she had so far managed most adroitly to keep at an endurable distance, and said:
"Now, Prince, if your friend the Adept is in the mood to astonish us with his wonders, perhaps you will be good enough to tell him that we are all ready and willing to be startled—only Ihope that he will be merciful to our ignorance and not frighten us too much."
"I can assure you, Miss Marmion, that my good friend from Egypt will be discretion itself," replied the Prince, with a look and a courtly gesture that inspired Commander Merrill with an almost passionate longing to take him down one of the quiet paths under the beeches for a ten minutes' interlude. "I can promise that he will show you some marvels which even your learned and distinguished father and hisconfrèresmay find difficult of explanation: but it shall all be white magic. I understand that your real adept considers the black variety as what you call bad form."
As the company rose and went in little groups towards the tennis-lawn, where Phadrig had elected to display his powers, the three Professors instinctively joined each other in a small phalanx of scepticism. If there was any trick or deception to be discovered all looked to them to do it, and they were almost gleefully aware of their responsibility. Figuratively speaking, they each wore the scalps of many spiritualistic mediums, and both Professor van Huysman and Professor Hartley sensed a possible addition to their belts of scientific wampum which would not be the least of their trophies. It had been agreed to by Phadrig, with a quiet scorn, that they were to take any measures they liked to detect him in any practice that would convict him of being merely a conjurer; and they had accepted the permission with that whole-souled devotionto truth which excludes all idea of pity from the really scientific mind. Franklin Marmion was naturally in a very different frame of mind, although, from reasons of high policy, he assumed a similar mask of almost scornful scepticism; but for all that he was by far the most anxious man in the company.
At the request of their hostess the guests arranged themselves sitting and standing in a spacious circle on the tennis-lawn; and when this was, formed, Phadrig, whose isolation so far from the rest of the company had been satisfactorily explained by the Prince, walked slowly into the middle of it, and, after a quick, keen glance round him—a glance which rested for just a moment or so on Professor Marmion and hisconfrères, and then on Nitocris, who was sitting beside Brenda attended by Lord Leighton and Merrill—he said in a low but clear and far-reaching voice, and in perfect English:
"Ladies and gentlemen, I have come to the house of the learned Professor Marmion at the request of my very good friend and patron, His Highness Prince Oscar Oscarovitch, to give you a little display of what I may call white magic. But before I begin I must ask you to accept my word of honour as a humble student of the mysteries of what, for want of a better word, we call Nature, that I am not in any sense a conjurer, by which I mean one who performs apparent marvels by merely deceiving your senses.
"What I am going to show you, you reallywill see. My marvels, if you please to think them such, will be realities, not illusions; and I shall be pleased if you will take every means to satisfy yourselves that they are so. I say this with all the more pleasure because I know that there are present three gentlemen of great eminence in the world of science, and if they are not able to detect me in anything approaching trickery, I think you will take their word for it that I am not deceiving you.
"In order that there may not be the smallest possible chance of error, I will ask Professors Marmion, Hartley, and Van Huysman to come and stand near to me, so that they may be satisfied that I make use of none of the mere conjurer's apparatus. I shall use nothing but the knowledge, and therefore the power, to which it has been my privilege to attain."
Phadrig spoke with all the calm confidence of perfect self-reliance, and therefore his words were not wanting in effect on his audience, critical and sceptical as it was.
"I reckon that's a challenge we can't very well afford to let go," said Professor van Huysman, with a keen look at his two brother scientists. "Of course he's just a trick-merchant, but they're so mighty clever nowadays, especially these fellows from the gorgeous East, that you've got to keep your eyes wide open all the time they've got the platform."
"Certainly," said Professor Hartley, as they moved out from the circle; "it must be trickery ofsome sort, and we shall be doing a public service by exposing it. What do you think, Marmion? I hope you won't mind the exposure taking place in your own garden and among your own guests?"
"Not a bit, my dear Hartley," replied Franklin Marmion with a smile, which was quite lost upon his absolutely materialistic friends. "We have, as Van Huysman says, received a direct challenge. We should be most unworthy servants of our great Mistress if we did not take it up. Personally, I mean to find out everything that I can."
"And, gentlemen," laughed the Prince, who had been standing with them and now moved away towards Nitocris, "I sincerely hope that what you find out will be worth the learning."
"He's a big man, that," said Professor van Huysman, when he was out of earshot, "but he's not the sort I'd have much use for. I wonder why those people who are on the war-path in his country ever let him out of it alive?"
In accordance with Phadrig's request, they made a triangle of which he was the central point. Without any formula of introduction, he said rather abruptly:
"Professor van Huysman, will you oblige me by taking a croquet ball and holding it in your hand as tightly as you can?"
Brenda ran out of the circle and gave him one. He took it and gripped it in a fist that looked made to hold things. Phadrig glanced at the ball, and said quietly:
"Follow me!"
Then he turned away, and, in spite of all the Professor's efforts to hold it, the ball somehow slipped through his fingers and fell on to the lawn. Then, to the utter amazement of every one, except Franklin Marmion, it rolled towards the Adept and followed him at a distance of about three yards as he walked round the circle of spectators. He did not even look at it. When he had made the round, he took his place in the Triangle of Science, and the ball stopped at his feet.
"It is now released, Professor," he said to Van Huysman. "You may take it away, if you wish."
There was something in the saying of the last sentence that nettled him. He had seen all, or nearly all, the physical laws, which were to him as the Credo is to a Catholic or the Profession of Faith to a Moslem, openly and shamelessly outraged, defied, and set at nought. To say he was angry would be to give a very inadequate idea of his feelings, because he, the greatest exposer of Spiritualism, Dowieism, and Christian Scientism in the United States, was not only angry, but—for the time being only, as he hoped—utterly bewildered. It was too much, as he would have put it, to take lying down, and so, greatly daring, he took a couple of strides towards Phadrig, and said with a snarl in his voice:
"I guess you mean really ifyouwish, Mr Miracle-Worker. It was mighty clever, however you did it, but you haven't got me to believe that physical laws are frauds yet. You want me to pick that ball up?"
"Certainly, Professor—if you can—now," replied Phadrig, with a little twitch of his lips which might have been a smile, or something else.
Hoskins van Huysman was a strong man, and he knew it. Not very many years before, he had been able to shoulder a sack of flour and take it away at a run, and now he could bend a poker across his shoulders without much trouble. He stooped down and gripped the ball, expecting, of course, to lift it quite easily. It didn't move. He put more force into his arms and tried again. For "all the move he got on it," as he said afterwards, it might have weighed a ton. It was ridiculous, but it was a fact. In spite of all his pulling and straining, the ball remained where it was as though it had been rooted in the foundations of the world. He was wise enough to know when he was beaten, so he let go, and when he pulled himself up, somewhat flushed after his exertions, he said:
"Well, Mister Phadrig, I don't know how you do it, but I've got to confess that it lets me out. I'm beaten. If you can make the law of gravitation do what you want, you're a lot bigger man in physics than I am."
He turned and went back to his place, looking, as his daughter whispered to Nitocris, "pretty well shaken up." The Prince caught Phadrig's eye for an instant, and said:
"Miss Marmion, will you confound the wisdom of the wise and bring the ball here?"
It was not the words but the challenge in themthat impelled her to rise from her chair, aided by Merrill's hand, and not the one that the Prince held out, and walk across the lawn towards Phadrig. She took no notice of him. She just stooped and picked up the ball and carried it back to her chair. She tossed it down on the grass, and sat down again without a word, quaking with many inward emotions, but outwardly as calm as ever. What Professor van Huysman said to himself when he saw this will be better left to himself.
It might have been expected that the miracle, or at least the extraordinary defiance of physical law which had been accomplished by Phadrig, would have produced something like consternation among the bulk of the spectators. It did nothing of the sort. They were, perhaps, above the ordinary level of Society intellect in London; but they only saw something wonderful in what had been done. Nothing would have persuaded them that it was not the result of such skill as produced the marvels of the Egyptian Hall, simply because they were not capable of grasping its inner significance. Could they have done that, the panic which Professor Marmion was beginning to fear would probably have broken the party up in somewhat unpleasant fashion. As it was they contented themselves with saying: "How exceedingly clever!" "He must be quite a remarkable man!" "I wonder we've never heard of him before!" "He must make a great deal of money!" "I wonder if I could persuade the dear Prince—what a charming man he is!—to bring himto my next At Home day?" and so on, perfectly ignorant, as it was well they should be, that they had witnessed a real conquest of Knowledge over Force.
Phadrig, who seemed to be the least interested person on the lawn, looked about him, and said as quietly as before:
"I should be very much obliged if the best tennis player in the company will do me the honour to have a game with me."
Now, it so happened that Brenda, in addition to her other athletic honours, had recently won the Ladies' Tennis Tournament at Washington, which carried with it the Championship of the State for the year, and so this challenge appealed both to her pride in the game and her spirit of adventure. She looked round at Nitocris, and said:
"I've half a mind to try, Niti. I suppose he won't strike me with lightning or send me down through the earth if I happen to beat him. Shall I?"
"Yes, do," replied her hostess, with a suspicion of mischief in her voice; "those dear Professors of ours are puzzling so delightfully over the first miracle, or whatever it was, that Idowant to see them worried a little more. It will be a wholesome chastening for the overweening pride of knowledge."
"Very well," laughed Brenda, rising and dropping a light cloak from her shoulders. "It's the first time I've had the honour of playing against a magician, mind, so you mustn't be too hard on me if I lose."
Lord Leighton fetched her racquet and one for Phadrig, and they went together towards the tennis-court in which he was standing. The three Professors left their places and stood at one end of the net, Messrs Hartley and Van Huysman indulging in audible growls of baffled scepticism, and Franklin Marmion silently observant, divided between interest and amusement. He could not help imagining what would happen if he were to stand in the middle of the circle and remove himself to the Higher Plane, and then go round shaking hands and saying, "Good afternoon."
Brenda acknowledged Phadrig's bow with a gracious nod as she took her place. Then Lord Leighton handed the other racquet to the Adept. To his astonishment he declined it with another bow, saying:
"I thank you, my lord, but I do not need it."
"What!" exclaimed the other, with a frank stare of astonishment. "Excuse me, but tennis without a racquet, you know—are you going to play with your hands?"
"To some extent, yes, my lord," replied Phadrig, as he took his place. "Will you ask Miss van Huysman if she will be kind enough to serve?"
Brenda would. Phadrig stood on the middle line between the two courts with his hands folded in front of him. She certainly felt a little nervous, but she knew her skill, and she sent a scorcher of an undercut skimming across the net. The ball stopped dead. Phadrig gave a flick with hisright forefinger, and it hopped back over the net and ran swiftly along the ground to Brenda's feet. She flushed as she picked it up and changed courts. Then she raised her racquet and sent a really vicious slasher into the opposite court. Phadrig, without moving, raised his hand at the same moment. The ball, hard as it had been driven, stopped in mid-air over the net, hung there for a moment, then dropped on Brenda's side and rolled to her feet again. She picked it up, walked to the net with it in her hand, and said quite good-humouredly:
"I think you're a bit too smart for me, Mr Phadrig. I can't pretend to play against a gentleman who can suspend the law of gravitation just to win a game of tennis."
"I did not do it to win the game, Miss van Huysman," he replied with a gentle smile; "I only desired to amuse you and the other guests of Professor Marmion. Now, it may be that some excellent but ignorant people here may think that that ball is bewitched, as they would call it, so if you will give it to me, I will send it out of reach."
She handed him the ball, wondering what was going to happen next. He took it and put it on the thumb of his right hand as one does with a coin when tossing. He flicked it into the air, and, to the amazement of every one, saving always Franklin Marmion, it rose slowly up to the cloudless sky, followed by the gaze of a hundred eyes, and vanished. Then he bowed again to Brenda, and said in the most commonplace tone:
"It is out of harm's way now. Thank you once more for your condescension."
"But how did it go up like that?" asked Brenda, looking him frankly and somewhat defiantly in the eyes.
"That, Miss Huysman," he replied with perfect gravity, "was only a demonstration of what Spiritualists and Theosophists are accustomed to call levitation. It is only a matter of reversing the force of gravity."
"Is that all?" laughed Brenda, as she turned away. "You talk of it as though it were a matter of turning a paper bag inside out."
"The one is as easy as the other," he smiled. "It is only a question of knowing how to do it."
She walked back to her chair very much mystified, and, for the first time in her so far triumphal journey through the interlude between the eternities which we call life, a trifle humiliated: but that fact, of course, she kept to herself. As she dropped back in her chair, she said to Lord Leighton:
"That was pretty wonderful, wasn't it? I'm quite certain that there's no trickery about it. What he did, he really did do."
"I don't pretend to be able to explain it," he replied, "but for all that I've seen very much the same sort of thing done by the fakirs in India, and I think it's generally admitted that that is either a matter of trickery or hypnotism. They make you believe you see what you really don't see at all."
"That's about it," said Merrill, with a short laugh, "Of course no one who knows anything about the East will deny that hypnotism is a fact, although I must say that these same fakirs have tried it with me more than once and found me a quite hopeless subject."
Even as though he had heard him, Phadrig came towards them at the moment, and said in his polite, impersonal tone:
"Commander Merrill, I am going to try one or two experiments now which I should like to have very closely watched. I know that there is no keener observer in the world than the skilled British naval officer. May I ask for your assistance?"
There was something in his tone which made it quite impossible to refuse, so he replied:
"You have shown us a good many wonders already, Mr Phadrig, and unless you've hypnotised the whole of us, I haven't a notion how you have done it; but if I can find you out I will."
"That is exactly what I wish, sir," said Phadrig, as he bowed to the ladies and went back to the centre of the circle. Merrill followed him, and, with the three Professors, formed a square about him.
Phadrig, turning slowly round so that his voice might reach all his audience, said:
"Ladies and gentlemen, you have all heard of or seen the strange performances of the Indian fakirs: the growing of the mango plant, the so-called basket trick, and the throwing into the air of a rope up which the performer climbs fromview of the spectators. I am not going to say whether those are tricks or not. Their knowledge may be different from mine, therefore I do not question it. I only propose to show you the same kind of performance without the use of any coverings or concealment, and leave you and these four gentlemen to discover any deception on my part if you can. I will begin by giving you a new version of the mango trick, if trick it is, with variations. Professor Marmion, would you have the goodness to ask one of the young ladies to bring me one of those beautiful white roses of yours?"
Franklin Marmion was on the point of saying: "I'll bring you one myself, and see what you can do with it," but he was a sportsman in his way, and, seeing that his guests were so far not all inclined to be frightened at what they had seen, he refrained from spoiling the "entertainment," as they evidently took it to be, and so he asked his daughter to go and get one of her nicest Marèchal Niels.
She rose from her chair and went to her favourite tree; Merrill followed her with a ready penknife. They came back with a fine half-blown rose on a leafy twig about nine inches long. As she held it out to Phadrig he declined it with a bow and a wave of his hand, saying:
"I thank you, Miss Marmion, but it will be better for me not to touch it. Some one might think that I had bewitched it in some way; will you be kind enough to give it to Commander Merrill and ask him to put the stem into the turf: about two inches down, please."
She handed the rose to Merrill, and as he took it their eyes met for an instant, and she flushed ever so slightly. He, with many unspoken thoughts, knelt down, made a little hole in the turf with his knife, and planted the rose. When he stood up again Phadrig went on in the same quiet impersonal voice:
"Now, ladies and gentlemen, you know that this rose is of a pale cream colour slightly tinted with red. It shall now grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses. It will not be necessary for me to touch it."
This somehow appealed more closely to such imagination as the majority of the spectators possessed. They had regarded the other marvels they had seen merely as bewilderingly clever examples of legerdemain: but for a man to make a single sprig of rose grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses without even touching it meant something quite unbelievable—until they had seen it. Instinctively the circle narrowed, and Phadrig noting this, said:
"Pray, come as close as you like, ladies and gentlemen, as long as you do not pass my guardians, for they have undertaken that you shall not be deceived."
The result was that a smaller circle was formed round the square, at the angles of which stood Merrill and the three men of science. Phadrig stood at one side facing the east. Then he spread his hands out above the rose, and said slowly:
"Earth feeds, sun warms, and air refreshes:wherefore grow, rose, that the power of the Greater Knowledge may be manifested, and that those who believed not before may now see and believe."
He raised his hands with a spreading movement and, to the utter amazement of every one except Franklin Marmion, who now saw that this man certainly had approached to within measurable distance of the borderland which he had himself so lately crossed—wherefore in his eyes there was nothing at all marvellous in anything he had done—the leaves on the sprig grew rapidly out into branches as the main stem increased in height and thickness, red and white buds appeared under the leaves and swelled out into full blooms with a rapidity that would have been quite incredible if a hundred keen eyes had not been watching the marvel so closely; and within ten minutes a fine rose-bush, some three feet high, loaded with red and white and creamy blossoms, stood where Merrill had planted the sprig.
After the first gasps of astonishment there arose quite a chorus of requests from the younger members of Phadrig's audience for a rose to keep in memory of the marvel they had seen; but he shook his head, and said with a smile of deprecation:
"I regret that it is not possible for me to grant what you ask. For your own sakes I cannot do it. If I gave you those roses they would never fade, and it might be that those who possessed them would never die. Far be it from me to curse you with such a terrible gift as immortality on earth."
The gravely, almost sadly spoken words fellupon his hearer's ears like so many snowflakes. Instinctively they shrank back from the beautiful bush as though it had been the fabled Upas. They had begun to fear now for the first time. But there was one among them, a young fellow of twenty-two, named Martin Caine, who was already known as one of the most daring and far-sighted of the rising generation of chemical investigators, to whom the prospect of an endless life devoted to his darling science was anything but a curse. Intoxicated for the moment by what he had seen, he sprang forward, exclaiming:
"I'll risk the curse if I can have the life!"
As his hand touched one of the roses, Phadrig's darted out and caught his wrist. He was a powerful youth, but the instant Phadrig's hand gripped him he stopped, as though he had been suddenly stricken by paralysis. He turned a white, scared face with fear-dilated eyes upward, and said in a half-choked voice:
"What's the matter? If what you say's true, give me eternal life, and I'll give it to Science."
"My young friend," said Phadrig, with a slow shake of his head, "you are grievously mistaken. You have eternal life already. You may kill your body, or it may die of age or disease, but the life of your soul is not yours to take or keep. Only the High Gods can dispose of that. Who am I that I should abet you in defying their decrees? Here is my refusal of your mad request."
He plucked the rose which Caine had touched, held it to his lips and breathed on it. The nextinstant the withered leaves fell to the ground, and lay there dry and shrivelled. The stalk was brown and dry. As he released Caine's wrist he dropped the stalk in the middle of the bush, and said in a loud tone:
"As thou hast lived, die—as all things must which shall live again."
As quickly as the rose-bush had grown and flowered so quickly, it withered and died. In a few moments there was nothing left of it but a few dry sticks lying in a little heap of dust.
The circle suddenly widened out as the people shrank back, every face showing, not only wonder now, but actual fear; and now Franklin Marmion felt that Phadrig had been allowed to go as far as a due consideration for the sanity of his guests would permit. The other two Professors were disputing in low, anxious tones, as if even their scepticism was shaken at last: Martin Caine had drifted away through the opening press to hide his terror and chagrin. The Adept stood impassively triumphant beside the poor relics of the rose-bush, but obviously enjoying the consternation that he had produced—for now the lust of power which ever attends upon imperfect knowledge had taken hold of him, and he was devising yet another marvel for their bewilderment. But before he had arrived at his decision, something else happened which was quite outside his programme.
The Prince broke the chilly silence by saying to Nitocris in a tone loud enough for every one to hear:
"I hope, Miss Marmion, that I have justified myintrusion by the skill which my friend Phadrig has displayed for the entertainment of your guests?"
She turned and looked at him, and, as their glances met, he saw a change come over her. Her eyes grew darker: her features acquired an almost stony rigidity utterly strange to her. His eyelids lifted quickly, and he shrank back from her as a man might do who had seen the wraith of one long dead, but once well known.
"Nitocris!" he murmured in Russian. "Phadrig was right: it is the Queen!"
She swept past him—Oscar Oscarovitch, the man who aspired to the throne of the Eastern Empire of Europe—as though he had been one of his own slaves in the old days, and faced Phadrig.
"It is enough, Anemen-Ha that was. Hast thou not learned wisdom yet, after so many lives? Is the inmost chamber of thy soul still closed in rebellion against the precepts of the High Gods? No more of thy poor little mummeries for the deception of the ignorant! Go, and without further display of the weakness which thou hast presumptuously mistaken for strength. The Queen commands—go!"
Only Phadrig and Franklin Marmion saw that it was not Nitocris, the daughter of the English man of science, but the daughter of the great Rameses who stood there crowned and robed as Queen of the Two Kingdoms.
Phadrig raised the palms of his hands to his forehead, bowed before her, and murmured:
"The Queen has but to speak to be obeyed! It is even as I feared. But the Prince——"
"I who was and am, know what thou wouldst say. Go, or——"
"Royal Egypt, I go! But as thou art mighty, have mercy, and make the manner of my going easy."
Nitocris turned away with a gesture of utter contempt, walked slowly towards her father, and said in English:
"Dad, I think our friend the Adept is a little tired after his wonder-working. I dare say most of us would be if we could do what he has been doing. He seems quite exhausted. I think you had better ask the Prince to let his coachman take him home."
Oscar Oscarovitch's soul was in a tumult of bewilderment, but his almost perfect training made it possible for him to say as quietly as though he had been taking leave of his hostess at a reception in London:
"Miss Marmion, we must thank you for your great consideration. As you say, our friend is undoubtedly fatigued, and, as I have an appointment at the Embassy this evening, I will ask you to allow me to take my leave as well."
With a comprehensive bow of farewell to the company, and a somewhat limp handshake with Professor Marmion and his daughter, he put his arm through that of his defeated and humiliated accomplice, and led him away through an opening which the still dazed spectators instinctively made for them.