"And now, my friends," he went on to himself, "I think I can teach you not to come into an English gentleman's house again with an idea of stealing his property, to say nothing of abducting his daughter."
The man and woman were still staring at each other by the light of the lamp, each holding each other's trembling hand, when the lamp was suddenly snatched away from the woman and went out. Then, to their horror, the ray shot out again in front of them as though the lamp were floating by itself in the air. It flashed from face to face, both ghastly with fear. Then an invisible hand gripped the man's, and drew him with irresistible force along the passage. The woman grasped his coat, and followed with shuffling feet and shaking limbs, dumb with wonder and fear. The hand led them down the passage, round the corner, and into the study.Then it released them. They heard the door shut and the key turn in the lock. Then there was a click, and the electric cluster above the writing-table shone out, apparently of its own volition. The woman uttered a low scream, and cowered down in a corner of a big sofa that stood by the bay-window. The man, after one terrified glance round the room, began to creep towards the open sash; but the invisible hand gripped him by the collar and pulled him back. His trembling knees gave way under him, and he rolled in a heap on the floor.
Then, to his wondering horror, he saw a stout blackthorn stick which was standing in a corner of the room, jump up into the air and leap towards him. He put his head down on to the carpet, covered his eyes with his hands, and began to moan with terror. The stick came down with what seemed to him superhuman force again and again on his back and shoulders. He whimpered and moaned, and at last howled with pain. He rolled over and looked up, and there was the stick hanging in the air above him. He put up his hands clasped as though in prayer, and down it came on his knuckles. He did not howl this time. His hands unclasped and dropped beside him; his head went back, and he fainted in sheer terror.
"There, my friend," said the Professor aloud, forgetting the presence of the woman for the moment; "mummy or no mummy, I don't thinkyou will come into this house again. And as for you, madam," he went on, "of course, I can't give you a hiding, so the sight of his punishment will have to be enough for you. Still, I think you have had enough of attempted mummy-stealing to last you some time."
The woman stared up into the vacancy out of which the voice came, her eyes dilated, and her lips trembling with the movement of her lower jaw. She saw a jug of water get up off the table and empty itself over her companion's face. Then she fainted, too.
When Pent-Ah came to himself and sat up, he saw an elderly gentleman, tall and erect as a man in the prime of life, standing over him with the blackthorn in one hand and the water-jug in the other.
"I am not going to ask what you two are doing here," he said sternly, "because I know already. If I called the police I could send you both to prison for house-breaking and attempted robbery; but I don't want any fuss, and perhaps you have been punished enough for the present. Ah, I see your accomplice is coming round. You came in by the window, I suppose. Now get out by it as quick as you can, and mind you keep your mouths shut as to what has happened to-night. If you don't," he went on, suddenly changing into Coptic, "beware of the anger of your Lord—of Him who never forgives!"
The man scrambled to his feet, whimpering:
"I go, Lord, I go, and my lips shall be silent as the lips of——"
He cast a frightened glance towards the mummy-case, and then, grasping the woman roughly by the arm, he dragged her towards the open window, saying:
"Come, Neb-Anat, come ere the wrath of our Lord consumes us!"
"Why, where's the Mummy, Dad?" said Miss Nitocris, as she came into her father's study just before breakfast the next morning, and looked in amazement at the empty case.
"Stolen, my dear, I am sorry to say," replied the Professor gravely. "Did you hear any noises in the house last night, or were you sleeping too soundly?"
"I seem to have an idea that I did," she said, "but only a dim one; I thought I only dreamt it. But did you, Dad? Do tell me all about it. What a horrible shame to steal that lovely Mummy! And it was so like me, too. I believe I should have got quite fond of it."
"Yes, dear," continued the Professor, speaking, as she thought, a little nervously. "There was a noise, and I heard it. I came down here and turned the light on. I found the window open and the Mummy gone—and that is all I can tell you about it."
After breakfast Professor Marmion, according to his practice on fine days, lit his pipe, and went out for a stroll on the Common to put in a little hard thinking, while Miss Nitocris, after seeing to certain household matters, sat down in his study and read the papers, in order that she might be able to give him a synopsis of the world's news at lunch. He did not read the newspapers himself, except, perhaps, in the train, when he had nothing better to do. He took no interest in politics, for one thing, and he had still less interest in professional cricket and football, racing, and what is generally called sport. He had a fixed opinion that all the events happening in the world which really mattered, not even excepting the proceedings of learned societies and the criminal and civil Law Courts, could be adequately recorded on a couple of sheets of notepaper. In other words, he had an absolute contempt for everything that makes a newspaper sell, and therefore his daughter hadvery soon learnt to omit these fascinating items entirely.
Curiously enough, his mind seemed to be running on this subject of all things that morning. He had been reading an article in theFortnightlyon the growing sensationalism, and therefore the general decadence of the English Press a day or two before, and this had got connected up in his thoughts with the amazing happenings of the last twelve hours, and he asked himself what would happen if he were to give the narrative of his experiences in a letter to theTimes, supported by the authority of his own distinguished and irreproachable name.
Certainly it would be the most sensational communication that had ever appeared in a newspaper. In a day or two, granted always that theTimeshad no doubts as to his sanity and printed the letter, the whole Press would be ablaze with it; Wimbledon would be besieged by reporters eager to see miracles; and then they would go away and write lurid articles, some about the miracles, if they saw them, and some about an absolutely new form of conjuring that he had invented. Then the scientific Press would take it up, and a very merry battle of wits would begin. He smiled gravely as he thought of the inkshed that would come to pass in acombat à l'outrancebetween the Three Dimensionists and the Four Dimensionists, and how the distinguished scientists on each sidewould hurl their ponderous thunderbolts of wisdom against each other.
Then there would be the religious folk to deal with, for naturally no theologian of any enterprise or self-respect could see a fight like that going on without taking a hand in it. The Churches, of course, had a monopoly of miracles, or at least the traditions of them. The Christian Scientists, blatantly, claimed to work them now, but their subjects died with disgusting regularity. So he quickly came to the conclusion that, if he were once to state in plain English that he could accomplish the seemingly impossible; that he, a mere mortal, could make himself independent of the ordinary conditions of time and space and break with impunity all the laws which govern the physical universe, he would simply make himself the centre of a vortex of frenzied disputation which would shake the social, religious, and scientific worlds to their foundations, and that would certainly not be a pleasant position for an eminent and respected scientist, who was already a certain number of years past middle age—to say nothing of the very real harm that might be done.
Of course, he could settle all the disputes instantly, and dazzle the whole world into the bargain by simply delivering a lecture, say, before the Royal Society, on the existence of a world of four dimensions, and then proving by ocular demonstration that it does exist; but what would happen then? Simply intellectual anarchy.
Every belief that man had held for ages wouldbe negatived. For instance, if there is one dogma to which humanity has clung with unanimous consistency, it is to the dogma that two and two make four. What if he were to prove—as, of course, he could do now that this mysterious hand, outstretched through the mists of the far past, had led him across the horizon which divides the two states of Existence—that, under certain circumstances, they would also make three or five? What if he demonstrated that even the axioms of Euclid could, under different conditions, be both true and false at the same time?
No, the thought of overthrowing such a venerable authority and plunging the scientific world into a hopeless state of intellectual chaos sent a shudder through his nerves. He could not do it.
And yet it was only the bare, solid truth that he did possess these powers. The dream of the death-bridal of Nitocris might possibly have been nothing more than just a dream, or possibly the revival of an episode in a past existence; but the other experiences certainly were not. He had taken off his ring without unbending his finger. Yes, he could do it again now; it was just as easy as taking it off in the ordinary way. He certainly had not been dreaming when the Mummy had become Queen Nitocris and given him the wine. He could not have been mad or dreaming, because his daughter was there. The episode of the strange stealers who had come into his house—that too was real, for they hadleft their lamp and the man's shoes behind them, and the Mummy was gone!
He took a piece of string out of his pocket, tied the two ends, and then with the greatest ease tied another knot in the string without undoing the first.
A motor-car came humming along the road towards him, and he began to think what this place was like a thousand years before motors were heard of. That instant the motor vanished, and he found himself standing in a little glade surrounded by huge forest trees with not so much as a foot-track in sight. He made his way through the trees in what he remembered to be the direction of the road, and presently, through an opening avenue, he saw the sun glittering upon something moving, and heard voices; and then past the end of the avenue half a dozen armoured knights, followed by their squires and a string of men-at-arms guarding a covered waggon, and after these came a motley little crowd of travellers, some on horseback and some on foot, evidently taking advantage of the escort to protect them from robbers.
"Dear me!" said the Professor to himself, not without a little shiver of apprehension, "this is very interesting. I seem to have put myself back into the tenth century. Yes, that is certainly tenth-century armour that they're wearing. I mustn't let them see me, or there's no telling what they'd think of an elderly gentleman in a soft hat and a twentieth-century morning suit.But perhaps," he went on with his reasoning, "they can't see me at all. My condition is N to the fourth now. There's a thousand years between us; I forgot that. At any rate, I'll try it."
He walked quickly down the avenue, and stood by the side of the rugged path looking at the strange spectacle. No one took the slightest notice of him. And then a chill of awful loneliness struck him. Although he could see and move and hear, and, no doubt, eat and drink in this world, he was unexistent as regards the inhabitants of it, and yet he knew perfectly well he was standing by the side of the road where the motor-car ought to be, and over there, a few hundred yards away, Niti would be sitting in her room or walking in the garden—and she wouldn't be born for nearly a thousand years yet.
It was certainly somewhat disquieting, this power of living in two existences and different ages, but it was a matter that would take some little time to get accustomed to.
The next instant the cavalcade and the forest had vanished, and there was the motor-car, just spinning past him. He was on the Wimbledon Common of the twentieth century once more. He stroked his clean-shaven chin with his finger and thumb, and walked slowly along the path by the side of the road, and then across the grass towards the flagstaff.
"I think I begin to see it now," he murmured. "Of course, life, that is to say real, intellectual,or, as some would say, spiritual life, is, after all, the coefficient of that totally unexplainable thing called thought which enables us to explain most things except itself. Time and space and location are only realities to us in so far that we can see them. A human being born blind, dumb, deaf, and without feeling would still, I suppose, be a human being, because it would be conscious of existence; it would breathe and know that its heart was beating, but without sight or sensation there could be no idea of space—time, to it, would be a meaningless series of breaths or heartbeats. Without touch or sight it could have no idea of form or size, which are merely conditions of space, and both the past and the future would be absolutely non-existent for it."
He paused, and walked on a little way in silence, arguing silently with himself as to the correctness of these premises. Then he began aloud again:
"Yes, I think that's about right. And now, suppose that such a being became endowed with the natural senses, one by one. It would go through all the processes of the physical and mental evolution of humanity until it reached the highest of human attributes—the ability to think, and therefore to reason. In other words, from a merely living organism it would, in the old Scriptural language, have become a living soul. That is, obviously, what the words in Genesis were really intended to mean. It would then become capable of development, of proceeding from the partly-known to the more fully known,until, granted perfect physical and mental health, it reached what are generally called the limits of human knowledge."
The Professor's thumb and finger went up to his chin again. He walked another two or three hundred yards in silence; then he recommenced his spoken argument with himself:
"Limits of human knowledge? Yes, that sounds all very well in ordinary language, but are there any? Who was it said that a man trying to reach those limits was like the child who saw a rainbow for the first time, and started out to find the place where it rested? The simile is not bad, not by any means. Just in the same way, we try to imagine the limits of time and space, and we can't do it. Only infinity of space and duration are possible, and yet we can't grasp them; still, they are the only possible states in which we can exist. And now, as I have had a glimpse of the past, I wonder what this place would be like in ten thousand years?
"Good heavens, how cold it is!" He shivered, and buttoned up his coat, and continued, looking about him on the vast snow-field dotted with hummocks of ice which lay bleak and lifeless about him: "Ah, I suppose either the Gulf Stream has got diverted, or the earth's axis has shifted and we are in another glacial epoch.
"We!"
Again the shock of utter isolation struck him, but it seemed to hit him harder this time. The world that he had been born in lay ten thousandyears behind him. For all he knew, he might be standing upon what was now the earth's North Pole. Civilisation, as he had known it, might have been wiped off the face of the earth, and the remnants of humanity flung back into savagery. He looked up at the sun, and saw that it was almost exactly where it had been, and that it had not perceptibly diminished in power.
The idea was not at all pleasant to him, and very naturally his thoughts turned back once more to his cosy home that had been on the edge of Wimbledon Common ten thousand years ago. He remembered, with a curious sort of thrill, some notes which he had to complete that morning for his lecture—and in the same instant he was walking back across the turf towards his house through the warm May sunshine.
"Yes," he said to himself, as he drew a deep breath of the sweet spring air. "I was right; that's it. The fourth dimension is a form of duration in some way correlated with space. I shall have to work that out in the light of the greater knowledge, which Her vanished Majesty has given me, and which I almost attained to in Egypt. Wherefore, existence in a state of four dimensions, or the world of N^4, as I have always called it, is, roughly speaking, one. Time and space are, as it were, two sides of the same shield, and a person living in that world can see both of them at once. Wherefore, past, present, future, length, breadth, thickness, here and there are all the same thing to him. It's a great pity there isn't a fourthdimensional language as well, so that one could state these things a little more precisely. But that, of course, is out of the question.
"Really, I can hardly make myself understand it as far as words and phrases are concerned; still, there it is; and now the question arises: Having got this power, as I certainly have, of transferring myself from one existence to another by a mere effort of thought, because it is very evident that this power is really only an extension or an exaltation—confound the language of the third dimension—I can't say it! Although I understand what it is, it won't go into words. What am I to do with it? Its possibilities are, of course, a little appalling—that is to say, from the point of view of N^3. I have not the slightest desire to shake the fabric of Society to pieces, as I could do, and still less have I taste for spending the rest of my scientific career in what the world would very easily believe to be conjuring tricks. I hope I am not going to be another of the unnumbered proofs of Solomon's wisdom when he said, 'Whoso getteth knowledge, getteth sorrow.' I wonder what sort of advice Her late Majesty of Egypt——
"Dear me, what nonsense I am talking! Her late Majesty? That won't do at all—she has reached the Higher Plane too, so, of course, she can't be dead——"
And then with the force of a powerful electric shock, the terrible fact struck him that, for those who had reached that plane, there was no death! Here was a new light on the weird problem whichhe had somehow been called upon to deal with.
"I wonder what Her Majesty would really think of it?" he murmured, after a few moments of mental bewilderment. "Dear me, who's that?"
He looked up, and, to his utter amazement, he saw Queen Nitocris, arrayed exactly as she had been on that terrible night of her bridal with Menkau-Ra, walking towards him; a perfect incarnation of beauty, but——
"Oh dear me!" said the Professor, "this will never do. Good heavens! everybody in Wimbledon knows me, and—well, of course, Her Majesty is very lovely and all that; but what on earth would people think if any one saw me strolling across the Common in company with an Egyptian Queen—to say nothing of the costume—and the image of my own daughter, too!"
The figure approached, and the Queen, dazzlingly and bewilderingly beautiful, held out her hands to him, and their eyes met and they looked at each other across the gulf of fifty centuries. Impelled by an irresistible impulse coming from whence he knew not, he clasped them in his, and said, apparently by no volition of his own, in the Ancient Tongue:
"Ma-Rimōn greets Nitocris, the Queen! What hath he done that he should be once more so highly honoured?"
At that moment a carriage came by along the road quite close to them. Two of its occupants were looking straight towards them. They passedwithout taking the slightest notice, as they must have done had they seen such a marvellous figure as that of the Queen. And then he remembered that, unless she willed it, no one in the world of N^3 could see her, since it was for her, as it was for him now, to make herself visible or invisible as she chose to pass on to or beyond the lower Plane of Existence. These things were quickly becoming more plain to his comprehension, although, as will be readily understood, it was not a lesson to be learnt very easily.
"Welcome, Ma-Rimōn," replied the Queen, in a voice which filled him with many distant and strange memories, "but let there be no talk between us of honour, for in this state there is neither honour nor dishonour, neither ruler nor subject, neither good nor evil, since all these are absorbed in the Perfect Knowledge. Yet it is the will of the High Gods that I should help thee and guide thee in that new world whose threshold thou hast so lately crossed. It was my hand led thee from the path of Light to the path of Darkness, and for that I have paid the penalty as well as thou.
"For many ages, as time is counted in that other world, we have toiled, sometimes together, sometimes apart, sometimes in honour, sometimes in dishonour, yet ever struggling on to regain the heights which then we had so nearly won. The High Gods permitted me to reach them first, and therefore it was my hand which was stretched out to lead thee across the Border.
"Now, my message to thee is this: Thou hast powers which no other man living in that lower state possesses; see to it that they be used rightly. Forget not that in that other world sin and shame, oppression and misery, are as rife as, within the limits of time, they have ever been. Make it thy concern that the forces of evil shall be weaker and not stronger for the use of these powers to which thou hast attained.
"We shall meet often in that other world, and that living other-self of mine, thy daughter in the flesh and bearer of my name, through every moment of her time-life, I shall watch and guard her, for she, too—although she knows it not—is approaching the light never seen by the Eye of Flesh, and, though strange things should befall her, it will be for thee in that other state, knowing what thou dost in the Higher Life, to help me in this task as in others. Now, farewell, Ma-Rimōn," she said, holding out her hands again.
As he took them, they melted in his grasp, two lustrous eyes looked at him for a moment and grew dim, and he was once more alone on Wimbledon Common.
"I think I'll be getting home," he said, looking at his watch, and he turned and walked slowly with bent head and hands clasped behind his back to the house.
In actual mundane time, to use a somewhat halting expression, Professor Marmion's walk had occupied about a couple of hours. His strange experiences had, of course, occupied none, since they had taken place beyond the bounds of Time.
Meanwhile, Miss Nitocris had finished her digest of the morning papers, given the cook a few directions, and then gone out on the lawn at the back of the house to have a quiet read and enjoy the soft air and sunshine of that lovely May morning. She lay down in a hammock chair in the shade of a fine old cedar at the bottom of the lawn, and began to read, and soon she began to dream. The news in the papers, even the most responsible of them, had been very serious. The shadow of war was once more rising in the East—war which, if it came, England could scarcely escape, and if it did Someone would have to go and fight in that most perilous of all forms of battle, torpedo attack.
The book she had taken with her was oneof exceedingly clever verse written years before by just such another as herself; a girl, beautiful, learned, and yet absolutely womanly, and endowed, moreover, with that gift so rare among learned women, the gift of humour. Long ago, this girl had taken the fever in Egypt, and died of it; but before she died she wrote a book of poems and verses, which, though long forgotten—if ever known—by the multitude, is still treasured and re-read by some, and of these Miss Nitocris was one. Just now the book was open at the hundred and forty-third page, on which there is a portion of a poem entitledNatural Selection.
Miss Nitocris' eyes alternately rested on the page for a few moments and then lifted and looked over the lawn towards the open French windows. The verses ran thus:
"But there comes an idealless lad,With a strut, and a stare, and a smirk;And I watch, scientific though sad,The Law of Selection at work."Of Science he hasn't a trace,He seeks not the How and the Why,But he sings with an amateur's graceAnd he dances much better than I."And we know the more dandified malesBy dance and by song win their wives—'Tis a law that withAvesprevails,And even inHomosurvives."
"Just my precious papa's ideas!" she murmured, with a toss of her head, and something like a little sniff. "What a nuisance it all is! Aristocracyof intellect, indeed! Just as if any of us, even my dear Dad, if heisconsidered one of the cleverest and most learned men in Europe, were anything more than what Newton called himself—a little child picking up pebbles and grains of sand on the shore of a boundless and fathomless ocean, and calling them knowledge. I'm not quite sure that that's correct, but it's something like it. Still, that's not the question. How on earth am I to tell poor Mark? Oh dear! he'll have to be 'Mr Merrill' now, I suppose. What a shame! I've half a mind to rebel, and vindicate the Law of Selection at any price. Ah, there he is. Well, I suppose I've got to get through it somehow."
As she spoke, one of the French windows under the verandah opened, and a man in a panama hat, Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, came out and raised his hat as he stepped off the verandah.
With a sigh and a frown she closed the book sharply, got up and tossed it into the chair. No daintier or more desirable incarnation of the eternal feminine could have been imagined than she presented as she walked slowly across the lawn to meet the man whom the Law of Selection had designated as her natural mate, and whom her father, for reasons presently to be made plain, had forbidden her to marry on pain of exile from his affections for ever.
The face he turned towards her as she approached was not exactly handsome as an artist or some women would have defined the word, but it was strong, honest, and open—just the sort of face,in short, to match the broad shoulders, the long, cleanly-shaped, athletic limbs, and the five feet eleven of young, healthy manhood with which Nature had associated it.
A glance at his face and another one at him generally would, in spite of the costume, have convinced any one who knows the genus that Mark Merrill was a naval officer. He had that quiet air of restrained strength, of the instinctive habit of command which somehow or other does not distinguish any other fighting man in the world in quite the same degree. His name and title were Lieutenant-Commander Mark Gwynne Merrill, of His Majesty's DestroyerBlazer, one of the coolest-headed and yet most judiciously reckless officers in the Service.
There was a light in his wide-set, blue-grey eyes, and a smile on his strong, well-cut lips which were absolutely boyish in their anticipation of sheer delight as she approached; and then, after one glance at her face, his own changed with a suddenness, which, to a disinterested observer, would have been almost comic.
"I'm awfully sorry, Mark," she began, in a tone which literally sent a shiver—a real physical shiver—through him, for he was very, very much in love with her.
"What on earth is the matter, Niti?" he said, looking at the fair face and downcast eyes which, for the first time since he had asked the eternal question and she had answered it according to his heart's desire, had refused to meet his. "Let'shave it out at once. It's a lot better to be shot through the heart than starved to death, you know. I suppose it's something pretty bad, or you wouldn't be looking down at the grass like that," he continued.
"Oh, it's—it's—it's abeastlyshame, that's what it is, so there!" And as she said this Miss Nitocris Marmion, B.Sc., stamped her foot on the turf and felt inclined to burst out crying, just as a milkmaid might have done.
"Which means," said Mark, pulling himself up, as a man about to face a mortal enemy would do, "that the Professor has said 'No.' In other words, he has decided that his learned and lovely daughter shall not, as I suppose he would put it, mate with an animal of a lower order—a mere fighting-man. Well, Miss Marmion——"
"Oh, don't;pleasedon't!" she exclaimed, almost piteously, dropping into a big wicker armchair by the verandah and putting her hands over her eyes.
He had an awful fear that she was going to cry, and, as the Easterns say, he felt his heart turning to water within him. But her highly trained intellect came to her aid. She swallowed the sob, and looked up at him with clear, dry eyes.
"It isn't quite that, Mark," she continued. "You know I wouldn't stand anything like that even from the dear old Dad. Much as I love him, and even, as you know, in some senses almost worship him, it isn't that. It's this theory of heredity of his—this scientific faith—bigotry, I call it, for it is just the same to him as Catholicism was tothe Spaniards in the sixteenth century. In fact, I told him the other night that he reminded me of the Spanish grandee whose daughters were convicted of heresy by the Inquisition, and who showed his devotion to the Church by lighting the faggots which burned them with his own hands."
"And what did he say to that?" said the sailor, not because he wanted to know, but because there was an awkward pause that needed filling.
"I would rather not tell you, Mark, if you don't mind," she said slowly and looking very straightly and steadily at him. "You know—well, I needn't tell you again what I've told you already. You know I care for you, and I always shall, but I cannot—I dare not—disobey my father. I owe all that I ever had to him. He has been father, mother, teacher, friend, companion—everything to me. We are absolutely alone in the world. If I could leave him for anybody, I'd leave him for you, but I won't disobey him and break his heart, as I believe I should, even for you."
"You're perfectly right, Niti, perfectly," said Commander Merrill, in a tone of steady conviction which inspired her with an almost irresistible impulse to get up and kiss him. "You couldn't honestly do anything else, and I know the shortest way to make you hate me would be to ask you to do that something else. But still," he went on, thrusting his hands into thepockets of his Norfolk jacket, "I do think I have a sort of right to have some sort of explanation, and with your permission I shall just ask him for one."
"For goodness' sake, don't do that, Mark—don't!" she pleaded. "You might as well go and ask a Jewish Rabbi why he wouldn't let his daughter marry a Christian. Wise and clever as he is in other things, poor Dad is simply a fanatic in this, and—well, if he did condescend to explain, I'm afraid you might mistake what he would think the correct scientific way of putting it, for an insult, and I couldn't bear to think of you quarrelling. You know you're the only two people in the world I—I—Oh dear, whatshallI do!"
It was at this point that the Law of Natural Selection stepped in. Natural laws of any sort have very little respect for the refinements of what mortals are pleased to call their philosophy. Professor Marmion was a very great man—some men said he was the greatest scientist of his age—but at this moment he was but as a grain of sand among the wheels of the mighty machine which grinds out human and other destinies.
Commander Merrill took a couple of long, swift strides towards the chair in which Nitocris was leaning back with her hands pressed to her eyes. He picked her up bodily, as he might have picked a child of seven up, put her protesting hands aside, and slowly and deliberately kissed her three times squarely on the lips as if hemeant it; and the third time her lips moved too. Then he whispered:
"Good-bye, dear, for the present, at any rate!"
After which he deposited her tenderly in the chair again, and, with just one last look, turned and walked with quick, angry strides across the lawn and round the semi-circular carriage-drive, saying some things to himself between his clenched teeth, and thinking many more.
A few yards outside the gate he came face to face with the Professor.
"Good-morning, sir," said Merrill, with a motion of his hand towards his hat.
"Oh, good-morning, Mr Merrill," replied the Professor a little stiffly, for relations between them had been strained for some considerable time now. "I presume you have been to the house. I am sorry that you did not find me at home, but if it is anything urgent and you have half an hour to spare——"
He stopped in his speech, silenced by a shock of something like shame. He was prevaricating. He knew perfectly well that "it" was the most urgent errand a man could have, next to his duty to his country, that had brought the young sailor to his house. Twenty-four hours ago he would not have noticed such a trifle: but it was no trifle now; for to his clearer vision it was a sin, an evasion of the immutable laws of Truth, utterly unworthy of the companion of Nitocris the Queen in that other existence which he had just left.
"You have seen Niti, I suppose?" he continued, with singular directness.
"Yes," replied Merrill. "You will remember that the week was up this morning, and so I called to learn my fate, and your daughter has told me. I presume that your decision is final, and that, therefore, there is nothing more to be said on the subject."
"My decisions are usually final, Mr Merrill, because I do not arrive at them without due consideration. I am deeply grieved, as I have told you before, but my decision is a deduction from what I consider to be an unbreakable chain of argument which I need not trouble you with. Personally and socially, of course, it would be impossible for me to have the slightest objection to you. In fact, apart from your execrable fighting profession, I like you; but otherwise, as you know, I cannot help looking at you as the survival of an age of barbarism, a hark-back of humanity, for all the honour in which that trade is held by an ignorant and deluded world; and so for the last time it is my painful task to tell you that there can be no union between your blood and mine. Outside that, of course, there is no reason why we should not remain friends."
"Very well, sir," replied Merrill, "I have heard your decision, and Miss Marmion has told me she is resolved to abide by it; I should be something less than a man if I attempted to alter her resolve. We are ordered on foreign service this week, and so for the present, good-bye."
He lifted his hat, turned away and walked down the road with teeth clenched and eyes fixed straight in front of him, and a shade of grey under the tan of his skin.
The Professor looked after him for a few moments and turned in at the gate, saying:
"It's a great pity in some ways—many ways, in fact. He's a fine young fellow and a thorough gentleman, and I'm afraid they're very fond of each other, but of course to let Niti marry him would be the negation of the belief and teaching of more than half a lifetime. I hope the poor girl won't take it too keenly to heart. I'm afraid he seems rather hard hit, poor chap, but of course there's no help for it. Just fancy me the father-in-law of a fighting man, and the grandfather of what might be a brood of fighters! No, no; that is quite out of the question."
The Professor went into the garden feeling just a trifle uncomfortable. He not only loved his daughter dearly, but he also had a very deep and well-justified respect for her intellect and scholarly attainments. Her unfortunate love for a man whom he honestly believed to be a totally unfit mate for her was the only shadow that had ever drifted between them since she had become, not only his daughter, but his friend and companion, and the enthusiastic sharer of his intellectual pursuits. Of course, anything like a scene was utterly out of the question; but there is a silence more eloquent than words, and it was that that he was mostly afraid of.
He found her walking up and down the lawn with her hands behind her back. She was a little paler than usual, and there was a shadow in her eyes. She came towards him, and said quite quietly:
"Mr Merrill has been here, Dad, to say good-bye. I told him, and so we have said it."
The simple words were spoken with a quiet and yet tender dignity which made him feelprouder than ever of his daughter and all the more sorry for her.
"I met him just outside the gate, Niti," he replied, looking at her through a little mist in his eyes, "He spoke most honourably, and like the gentleman that he is. I hope you will believe me——"
"I believe you in everything, Dad," she said quickly; "and since the matter is ended, it will only hurt us both to say any more about it. Now, I have some news," she continued, in a tone whose alteration was well assumed.
"Ah! and what is that, Niti?" he asked, looking up at her with a smile of relief.
"It's something that I hope you will be able to get some of your solemn fun out of. One of the items in the 'Social Intelligence' to-day states that your old friend, Professor Hoskins van Huysman, and his wife and daughter have come to London, and will stay ten days before 'proceeding' to Paris and the South of France, and so, of course, they will be here for your lecture, and naturally he will not resist the temptation of making one of your audience."
"Van Huysman!" exclaimed the Professor. "That Yankee charlatan, confound him! I shouldn't wonder if he had the impudence to take part in the discussion afterwards."
"Then," laughed Nitocris, "you must take care to have all your heavy guns ready for action. But, of course, Dad, you won't let your—well, your scientific feelings get mixed up with social matters,will you? Because, you know, I like Brenda very much; she's the prettiest and brightest girl I know. You know, she can do almost anything, and yet she's as unaffected——"
"As some one else we know," interrupted the Professor with another smile.
"And then, you know, Mrs van Huysman," continued Nitocris with a little flush, "is such a dear, innocent, good-natured thing, so good-hearted and so deliciously American. Of course, you can fight with the Professor as much as you like in print, and in lecture halls—I know you both love it—but you'll still be friends socially, won't you?"
"Which, of course, means garden-parties and river trips, and similar frivolities that learned young ladies love so much. You needn't trouble about that, Niti. I shall not allow my zeal for scientific truth to interfere with your social pleasures, you may be quite sure. Science, as you know, has nothing to do with what we call Society, except as one of the most curious phenomena of Sociology. Drive into town whenever you like and see them. Present my respectful compliments, and ask them to dinner, or whatever you like. And now I must get to my work—I've only three more days, and my notes are not anything like complete."
"Very well, Dad; I think I'll telephone them—they're stopping at the Savoy—extravagant people!—to say that I'll run in this afternoon and have tea. Oh! and, by the way," she added,as he turned towards the house, "there's another item. Lord Leighton has been called home suddenly on some business, and will be here the day after to-morrow."
"Oh! indeed," said the Professor, pausing. "Well, I shall be delighted to see him—but I don't know what I shall have to say to him about that Mummy."
Nitocris turned away towards her chair with a faint smile on her lips. With a woman's rapid intuition, she had seen a glimmer of hope in the conjunction of these two announcements. Although Professor van Huysman's personal fortune was not as great as his attainments or his fame, Brenda would be very rich, for her mother was the only sister of a widower whose sole interest and occupation in life was piling up dollars. He had dollars in everything, from pork and lumber to canned goods, and her own father's scientific inventions, and Brenda was the bright particular star of his affections.
On the other hand, Lord Leighton, son and heir of the invalid Earl of Kyneston, was a fairly well-to-do young nobleman, good-looking, a scholar, and a good sportsman, who had done brilliantly at Cambridge, and then devoted himself to Egyptian exploration with a whole-souled ardour which had quickly won Professor Marmion's heart, and a ready consent to his "trying his luck" with his daughter to boot. This had not a little to do with the present unfortunate condition of her own love affairs.
She had already refused Lord Leighton, letting him down, of course, as gently as possible, but withal firmly and uncompromisingly. Who could better console him than this beautiful and brilliant American girl, and what would better suit that lovely head of hers than an English coronet which was bright with the untarnished traditions of five hundred years?
Wherefore, then and there, Miss Nitocris Marmion, Bachelor of Science, Licentiate of Literature and Art, and Gold-Medallist in Higher Mathematics at the University of London, decided upon her first experiment in match-making.
When the Professor got into his study and shut the door, there was a curious smiling expression upon his refined, intellectual features. Instead of sitting down to his desk, he lit a pipe and began walking up and down the room, communing with his own soul in isolated sentences, as was his wont when he was trying to arrive at any difficult decision.
In order to appreciate his deliberations and their result, it will be necessary to say that Professor Hoskins van Huysman was one of the most distinguished physicists in America, and he had also gained distinction in applied mathematics. In addition to this, he was the inventor of many marvellous contrivances for the demonstration and measurement of the more obscure physical forces. His official position was that of Lecturer and Demonstrator in Physical Science in Harvard University.
He and Professor Marmion had been deadly opponents in the field of controversy for years. The latter had once detected an error in a very learned monograph which he had published in theScientific Americanon the "Co-Relation of the Etheric Forces in the Phenomena of Light and Heat," and of course he had never forgiven him. From that day forth a relentless duel of wits between them had continued. Every essay, monograph, or book that the one published, the other criticised with cold but ruthless severity, to the great delectation of the scientific world, if not to the clarification of its atmosphere.
Socially, they were cordial acquaintances, if not friends. What they really thought of each other was known only to themselves and to their immediate domestic circles.
Naturally Professor Marmion was well aware that his elevation to the higher plane of N^4 gave him an enormous advantage over his adversary, for now he could, if he chose, smite him hip and thigh, in a strictly scientific sense, and reduce him to utter confusion and public ridicule, and the question which he had come to discuss with himself was: In how far, if at all, was he justified in so using the extra-human powers with which he had been endowed?
The moment that he began to do this he became conscious of another curious complication of his recent development. On the higher plane he had argued the matter out with no more emotion than a calculating machine would havebetrayed, and he had come to a conclusion that was absolutely luminous and just: but now that he came to argue the same question on the lower plane he found that he was doing it under human limitations, and therefore with human feelings.
"No," he said in the peculiar low, musing tone which was habitual to him during these monologues, "no; after all, I do not see that there would be any harm in that. Wrong, nay, sinful it would undoubtedly be to prove to demonstration that religious, social, and physical laws, may, under certain changing circumstances, be both true and false at the same time. I am, or was—or whatever it is—perfectly right in considering that to deliberately produce such a chaos as that would do would be the most colossal crime that a man could commit against humanity, as far as this plane is concerned, but there can be no harm in making a few mathematical experiments."
He took a few more turns up and down the room, pulling slowly at his pipe, and with his mind not wholly unoccupied with speculations as to what Professor Van Huysman's feelings might be if he were watching the said experiments. Then he began again:
"At the worst I shall only be carrying certain investigations a few steps farther, and developing theories which have been seriously discussed by the hardest-headed scholars in the world. Both the Greek and the Alexandrian philosophers speculated on the possibility of a state of fourdimensions; and didn't Cayley, before this very Society, deliberately say that at the present rate of progress in the Higher Mathematics, the eye of Intellect might ere long see across the border of tri-dimensional space?
"Surely I cannot do any very great harm by carrying his arguments to their logical conclusions—if I can. Of course, physical demonstrations would never do: I should frighten my brilliant and learned audience out of its seven senses; but, as for mere mathematics—well, I may make them stare, and set a good many highly-respected brains—my gifted friend Huysman's, among them—working pretty hard. Of course, he will be especially furious, but there's no harm in that either. Yes, I shall certainly do it. If he can't understand my demonstrations, that's not my concern."
He went and sat down at his desk, still smiling, and went very carefully through the notes he had already made, and then through Professor Hartley's letter, and his speculations on the Forty-Seventh Proposition. This done, he plunged into a fresh vortex of figures, and symbols, and diagrams, in which he remained for the next two hours, his mind hovering, as it were, over the borderland which at once divides and unites the higher and the lower planes. When he returned to earth, the dreamy, abstracted look faded away from his face; his eyes lit up, and the pleasant smile came back.
He opened the middle drawer in his desk, and took out the first page of the fair copy of his notes, which Nitocris had made for him—thinkingthe while how easy it would have been for him in the state of N^4 to take it out without opening the drawer at all—and looked at it. It was headed:
"RECENT PROGRESS IN THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS."
He crossed the title out carefully, and wrote above it:
"AN EXAMINATION OF SOME SUPPOSED MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITIES."
"There," he murmured, as he put the sheet back; "I think that such a theme, adequately treated, will considerably astonish my learned friends in general, and my esteemed critic, Van Huysman, in particular."
From which remark it will be gathered that Franklin Marmion had certainly recrossed the dividing line between the two Planes of Existence.
"Now, this is just too sweet of you, Niti, to come so soon after we got here. In five minutes more I should have written you a note, asking you and the Professor to come and take lunch with us to-morrow, and here you've anticipated me, so we have the pleasure of seeing you all the sooner."
These were the words with which Miss Brenda van Huysman greeted Nitocris as she entered the drawing-room of the suite of apartments which formed her home for the time being in London. I say her home advisedly, because, although her father and mother also occupied it, she was virtually, if not nominally, mistress undisputed of the splendid camping-place.
She was an almost perfect type of the highly developed, highly educated American girl of to-day, a marvellous compound of intense energy and languorous grace. She had done as brilliantly at Vassar as Nitocris had done at Girton and London, and she had also rowed stroke in the Ladies' Eight, and was champion fencer of the College. Yet as far as her physical presence wasconcerned, she was just a "Gibson Girl" of the daintiest type—fair-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired—her hair had a darker gleam of bronze in it in certain lights—exquisitely moulded features which seemed capable of every sort of expression within a few changing moments, and a poise of head and carriage of body which only perfect health and the most scientific physical training can produce. In a word, she was one of those miraculous developments of femininity which Nature seems to have made a speciality for the particular benefit of the younger branch of the Anglo-Saxon race. As for her dress—well, the shortest and best way to describe that is to say that it exactly suited her.
As she spoke, and their hands met, Mrs van Huysman got up and came towards them, saying:
"Good afternoon, Miss Marmion. We were real glad to get your 'phone, and it's good to see you again. How's the Professor? Too busy to come with you, I suppose, as usual. We see he's going to lecture before the Royal Society on the tenth, and I reckon we shall all be there to listen to him. I shouldn't wonder but there'll be trouble as usual between him and my husband. It seems a pity that two such clever men should waste so much time in scrapping over these scientific things, which don't seem to matter half a cent, anyhow."
"Oh, I don't know," laughed Nitocris, as they shook hands. "You see, Mrs van Huysman,theydo think it matters a great deal, and, besides, I'm quite sure that they both enjoy it very thoroughly.It's their way of taking recreation, you see, just as a couple of pitmen will try and pound one another to pieces, just for the fun of the thing. It's only a case of intellectual fisticuffs, after all."
"Why, certainly," said Brenda, as she rang for tea; "I'm just sure that Poppa never has such a good time as when he thinks he's tearing one of Professor Marmion's theories into little pieces and dancing on them, and I shouldn't wonder if Professor Marmion didn't feel about the same."
"I dare say he does," said Nitocris, remembering what had happened in the morning; "it's only one of the thousand unexplained puzzles of human nature. As you know, my father hates fighting in the physical sense with a hatred which is almost fanatical, and yet, when it comes to a battle of wits, he's like a schoolboy in a football match."
"It's just another development of the same thing," said Brenda. "Man was born a fighting animal, and I guess he'll remain one till the end of time; and with all our progress in civilisation and science, and all that, the man who doesn't enjoy a fight of some sort isn't of very much account. Now, here's tea, which is just now a more interesting subject. Sit down, and we'll talk about vanities. I'm just perishing to see what Regent Street and Bond Street are like. I don't think I've spent ten dollars in London yet. I'm twenty-two to-morrow, Niti, and my grandfather, who is just about the best grandfather a girl ever had, cabled across to the Napier people, and they've sent round the dandiest six-cylinder,thirty-horse landaulette that you ever saw, even in Central Park, and a driver to match—only I shan't have much use for him, except to look after the automobile. I'll run you round in her after tea, and you can reintroduce me to the stores—I mean shops; I forgot we were in London."
Mrs van Huysman, as usual, took a back seat while her daughter dispensed tea, and did most of the talking. She was a lady of moderate proportions, and, unlike a good many American women, she had kept her good looks until very close on fifty. She was full of shrewd common sense, but she had been born in a different generation and in a different grade of life, and therefore her attire inclined rather to magnificence than to elegance, in spite of her daughter's restraining hand and frankly expressed counsel. She had a profound respect for her husband's attainments without in the least understanding them, and she very naturally held an unshakable belief that no quite ordinary woman, as she called herself, had ever been miraculously blessed with such a daughter as she had.
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-greyeyes 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 changedinstantly, 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 youngchauffeurin orthodox costume touched his cap and set the engine going. The gold-laced porters handed them into the two front seats, and thechauffeureffaced himself in thetonneau. 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 thegreat 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 Orientalcurtains 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 ancient 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 werein 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 yetagain 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 ofthy 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! washeonce Ma-Rimōn, 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?