“I am very angry,” pouted the maid.
“In heaven’s name, why?” questioned the bachelor.
“You have, so to speak, bought me.”
“Impossible: your price is prohibitive.”
“Indeed, when a thousand pounds—”
“You are worth fifty and a hundred times as much. Pooh!”
“That interjection doesn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t think it is one which needs answering,” said the young man lightly; “there are more important things to talk about than pounds, shillings, and sordid pence.”
“Oh, indeed! Such as—”
“Love, on a day such as this is. Look at the sky, blue as your eyes; at the sunshine, golden as your hair.”
“Warm as your affection, you should say.”
“Affection! So cold a word, when I love you.”
“To the extent of one thousand pounds.”
“Lucy, you are a—woman. That money did not buy your love, but the consent of your step-father to our marriage. Had I not humored his whim, he would have insisted upon your marrying Random.”
Lucy pouted again and in scorn.
“As if I ever would,” said she.
“Well, I don’t know. Random is a soldier and a baronet; handsome and agreeable, with a certain amount of talent. What objection can you find to such a match?”
“One insuperable objection; he isn’t you, Archie—darling.”
“H’m, the adjective appears to be an afterthought,” grumbled the bachelor; then, when she merely laughed teasingly after the manner of women, he added moodily:
“No, by Jove, Random isn’t me, by any manner of means. I am but a poor artist without fame or position, struggling on three hundred a year for a grudging recognition.”
“Quite enough for one, you greedy creature.”
“And for two?” he inquired softly.
“More than enough.”
“Oh, nonsense, nonsense, nonsense!”
“What! when I am engaged to you? Actions speak much louder than remarks, Mr. Archibald Hope. I love you more than I do money.”
“Angel! angel!”
“You said that I was a woman just now. What do, you mean?”
“This,” and he kissed her willing lips in the lane, which was empty save for blackbirds and beetles. “Is any explanation a clear one?”
“Not to an angel, who requires adoration, but to a woman who—Let us walk on, Archie, or we shall be late for dinner.”
The young man smiled and frowned and sighed and laughed in the space of thirty seconds—something of a feat in the way of emotional gymnastics. The freakish feminine nature perplexed him as it had perplexed Adam, and he could not understand this rapid change from poetry to prose. How could it be otherwise, when he was but five-and-twenty, and engaged for the first time? Threescore years and ten is all too short a time to learn what woman really is, and every student leaves this world with the conviction that of the thousand sides which the female of man presents to the male of woman, not one reveals the being he desires to know. There is always a deep below a deep; a veil behind a veil, a sphere within a sphere.
“It’s most remarkable,” said the puzzled man in this instance.
“What is?” asked the enigma promptly.
To avoid an argument which he could not sustain, Archie switched his on to the weather.
“This day in September; one could well believe that it is still the month of roses.”
“What! With those wilted hedges and falling leaves and reaped fields and golden haystacks, and—and—”
She glanced around for further illustrations in the way of contradiction.
“I can see all those things, dear, and the misplaced day also!”
“Misplaced?”
“July day slipped into September. It comes into the landscape of this autumn month, as does love into the hearts of an elderly couple who feel too late the supreme passion.”
Lucy’s eyes swept the prospect, and the spring-like sunshine, revealing all too clearly the wrinkles of aging Nature, assisted her comprehension.
“I understand. Yet youth has its wisdom.”
“And old age its experience. The law of compensation, my dearest. But I don’t see,” he added reflectively, “what your remark and my answer have to do with the view,” whereat Lucy declared that his wits wandered.
Within the last five minutes they had emerged from a sunken lane where the hedges were white with dust and dry with heat to a vast open space, apparently at the World’s-End. Here the saltings spread raggedly towards the stately stream of the Thames, intersected by dykes and ditches, by earthen ramparts, crooked fences, sod walls, and irregular lines of stunted trees following the water-courses. The marshes were shaggy with reeds and rushes, and brown with coarse, fading herbage, although here and there gleamed emerald-hued patches of water-soaked soil, fit for fairy-rings. Beyond a moderately high embankment of turf and timber, the lovers could see the broad river, sweeping eastward to the Nore, with homeward-bound and outward-faring ships afloat on its golden tide. Across the gleaming waters, from where they lipped their banks to the foot of low domestic Kentish hills, stretched alluvial lands, sparsely timbered, and in the clear sunshine clusters of houses, great and small, factories with tall, smoky chimneys, clumps of trees and rigid railway lines could be discerned. The landscape was not beautiful, in spite of the sun’s profuse gildings, but to the lovers it appeared a Paradise. Cupid, lord of gods and men, had bestowed on them the usual rose-colored spectacles which form an important part of his stock-in-trade, and they looked abroad on a fairy world. Was not SHE there: was not HE there: could Romeo or Juliet desire more?
From their feet ran the slim, straight causeway, which was the King’s highway of the district—a trim, prim line of white above the picturesque disorder of the marshes. It skirted the low-lying fields at the foot of the uplands and slipped through an iron gate to end in the far distance at the gigantic portal of The Fort. This was a squat, ungainly pile of rugged gray stone, symmetrically built, but aggressively ugly in its very regularity, since it insulted the graceful curves of Nature everywhere discernible. It stood nakedly amidst the bare, bleak meadows glittering with pools of still water, with not even the leaf of a creeper to soften its menacing walls, although above them appeared the full-foliaged tops of trees planted in the barrack-yard. It looked as though the grim walls belted a secret orchard. What with the frowning battlements, the very few windows diminutive and closely barred, the sullen entrance and the absence of any gracious greenery, Gartley Fort resembled the Castle of Giant Despair. On the hither side, but invisible to the lovers, great cannons scowled on the river they protected, and, when they spoke, received answer from smaller guns across the stream. There less extensive forts were concealed amidst trees and masked by turf embankments, to watch and guard the golden argosies of London commerce.
Lucy, always impressionable, shivered with her hand in that of Archie’s, as she stared at the landscape, melancholy even in the brilliant sunshine.
“I should hate to live in Gartley Fort,” said she abruptly. “One might as well be in jail.”
“If you marry Random you will have to live there, or on a baggage wagon. He is R.G.A. captain, remember, and has to go where glory calls him, like a good soldier.”
“Glory can call until glory is hoarse for me,” retorted the girl candidly. “I prefer an artist’s studio to a camp.”
“Why?” asked Hope, laughing at her vehemence.
“The reason is obvious. I love the artist.”
“And if you loved the soldier?”
“I should mount the baggage wagon and make him Bovril when he was wounded. But for you, dear, I shall cook and sew and bake and—”
“Stop! stop! I want a wife, not a housekeeper.”
“Every sensible man wants the two in one.”
“But you should be a queen, darling.”
“Not with my own consent, Archie: the work is much too hard. Existence on six pounds a week with you will be more amusing. We can take a cottage, you know, and live, the simple life in Gartley village, until you become the P.R.A., and I can be Lady Hope, to walk in silk attire.”
“You shall be Queen of the Earth, darling, and walk alone.”
“How dull! I would much rather walk with you. And that reminds me that dinner is waiting. Let us take the short cut home through the village. On the way you can tell me exactly how you bought me from my step-father for one thousand pounds.”
Archie Hope frowned at the incurable obstinacy of the sex. “I didn’t buy you, dearest: how many times do you wish me to deny a sale which never took place? I merely obtained your step-father’s consent to our marriage in the near future.”
“As if he had anything to do with my marriage, being only my step-father, and having, in my eyes, no authority. In what way did you get his consent—his unnecessary consent,” she repeated with emphasis.
Of course it was waste of breath to argue with a woman who had made up her mind. The two began to walk towards the village along the causeway, and Hope cleared his throat to explain—patiently as to a child.
“You know that your step-father—Professor Braddock—is crazy on the subject of mummies?”
Lucy nodded in her pretty wilful way. “He is an Egyptologist.”
“Quite so, but less famous and rich than he should be, considering his knowledge of dry-as-dust antiquities. Well, then, to make a long story short, he told me that he greatly desired to examine into the difference between the Egyptians and the Peruvians, with regard to the embalming of the dead.”
“I always thought that he was too fond of Egypt to bother about any other country,” said Lucy sapiently.
“My dear, it isn’t the country he cares about, but the civilization of the past. The Incas embalmed their dead, as did the Egyptians, and in some way the Professor heard of a Royal Mummy, swathed in green bandages—so he described it to me.”
“It should be called an Irish mummy,” said Lucy flippantly. “Well?”
“This mummy is in possession of a man at Malta, and Professor Braddock, hearing that it was for sale for one thousand pounds—”
“Oh!” interrupted the girl vivaciously, “so this was why father sent Sidney Bolton away six weeks ago?”
“Yes. As you know, Bolton is your step-father’s assistant, and is as crazy as the Professor on the subject of Egypt. I asked the Professor if he would allow me to marry you—”
“Quite unnecessary,” interpolated Lucy briskly.
Archie passed over the remark to evade an argument.
“When I asked him, he said that he wished you to marry Random, who is rich. I pointed out that you loved me and not Random, and that Random was on a yachting cruise, while I was on the spot. He then said that he could not wait for the return of Random, and would give me a chance.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Well, it seems that he was in a hurry to get this Green Mummy from Malta, as he feared lest some other person should snap it up. This was two months ago, remember, and Professor Braddock wanted the cash at once. Had Random been here he could have supplied it, but as Random was away he told me that if I handed over one thousand pounds to purchase the mummy, that he would permit our engagement now, and our marriage in six months. I saw my chance and took it, for your step-father has always been an obstacle in our path, Lucy, dear. In a week Professor Braddock had the money, as I sold out some of my investments to get it. He then sent Bolton to Malta in a tramp steamer for the sake of cheapness, and now expects him back with the Green Mummy.”
“Has Sidney bought it?”
“Yes. He got it for nine hundred pounds, the Professor told me, and is bringing it back in The Diver—that’s the same tramp steamer in which he went to Malta. So that’s the whole story, and you can see there is no question of you being bought. The thousand pounds went to get your father’s consent.”
“He is not my father,” snapped Lucy, finding nothing else to say.
“You call him so.”
“That is only from habit. I can’t call him Mr. Braddock, or Professor Braddock, when I live with him, so `father’ is the sole mode of address left to me. And after all,” she added, taking her lover’s arm, “I like the Professor; he is very kind and good, although extremely absent-minded. And I am glad he has consented, for he worried me a lot to marry Sir Frank Random. I am glad you bought me.”
“But I didn’t,” cried the exasperated lover.
“I think you did, and you shouldn’t have diminished your income by buying what you could have had for nothing.”
Archie shrugged his shoulders. It was vain to combat her fixed idea.
“I have still three hundred a year left. And you were worth buying.”
“You have no right to talk of me as though I had been bought.”
The young man gasped. “But you said—”
“Oh, what does it matter what I said. I am going to marry you on three hundred a year, so there it is. I suppose when Bolton returns, my father will be glad to see the back of me, and then will go to Egypt with Sidney to explore this secret tomb he is always talking about.”
“That expedition will require more than a thousand pounds,” said Archie dryly. “The Professor explained the obstacles to me. However, his doings have nothing to do with us, darling. Let Professor Braddock fumble amongst the dead if he likes. We live!”
“Apart,” sighed Lucy.
“Only for the next six months; then we can get our cottage and live on love, my dearest.”
“Plus three hundred a year,” said the girl sensibly then she added, “Oh, poor Frank Random!”
“Lucy,” cried her lover indignantly.
“Well, I was only pitying him. He’s a nice man, and you can’t expect him to be pleased at our marriage.”
“Perhaps,” said Hope in an icy tone, “you would like him to be the bridegroom. If so, there is still time.”
“Silly boy!” She took his arm. “As I have been bought, you know that I can’t run away from my purchaser.”
“You denied being bought just now. It seems to me, Lucy, that I am to marry a weather-cock.”
“That is only an impolite name for a woman, dear. You have no sense of humor, Frank, or you would call me an April lady.”
“Because you change every five minutes. H’m! It’s puzzling.”
“Is it? Perhaps you would like me to resemble Widow Anne, who is always funereal. Here she is, looking like Niobe.”
They were strolling through Gartley village by this time, and the cottagers came to their doors and front gates to look at the handsome young couple. Everyone knew of the engagement, and approved of the same, although some hinted that Lucy Kendal would have been wiser to marry the soldier-baronet. Amongst these was Widow Anne, who really was Mrs. Bolton, the mother of Sidney, a dismal female invariably arrayed in rusty, stuffy, aggressive mourning, although her husband had been dead for over twenty years. Because of this same mourning, and because she was always talking of the dead, she was called “Widow Anne,” and looked on the appellation as a compliment to her fidelity. At the present moment she stood at the gate of her tiny garden, mopping her red eyes with a dingy handkerchief.
“Ah, young love, young love, my lady,” she groaned, when the couple passed, for she always gave Lucy a title as though she really and truly had become the wife of Sir Frank, “but who knows how long it may last?”
“As long as we do,” retorted Lucy, annoyed by this prophetic speech.
Widow Anne groaned with relish. “So me and Aaron, as is dead and gone, thought, my lady. But in six months he was knocking the head off me.”
“The man who would lay his hand on a woman save in the way of—”
“Oh, Archie, what nonsense, you talk!” cried Miss Kendal pettishly.
“Ah!” sighed the woman of experience, “I called it nonsense too, my lady, afore Aaron, who now lies with the worms, laid me out with a flat-iron. Men’s fit for jails only, as I allays says.”
“A nice opinion you have of our sex,” remarked Archie dryly.
“I have, sir. I could tell you things as would make your head waggle with horror on there shoulders of yours.”
“What about your son Sidney? Is he also wicked?”
“He would be if he had the strength, which he hasn’t,” exclaimed the widow with uncomplimentary fervor. “He’s Aaron’s son, and Aaron hadn’t much to learn from them as is where he’s gone too,” and she looked downward significantly.
“Sidney is a decent young fellow,” said Lucy sharply. “How dare you miscall your own flesh and blood, Widow Anne? My father thinks a great deal of Sidney, else he would not have sent him to Malta. Do try and be cheerful, there’s a good soul. Sidney will tell you plenty to make you laugh, when he comes home.”
“If he ever does come home,” sighed the old woman.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, it’s all very well asking questions as can’t be answered nohow, my lady, but I be all of a mubble-fubble, that I be.”
“What is a mubble-fubble?” asked Hope, staring.
“It’s a queer-like feeling of death and sorrow and tears of blood and not lifting your head for groans,” said Widow Anne incoherently, “and there’s meanings in mubble-fumbles, as we’re told in Scripture. Not but what the Perfesser’s been a kind gentleman to Sid in taking him from going round with the laundry cart, and eddicating him to watch camphorated corpses: not as what I’d like to keep an eye on them things myself. But there’s no more watching for my boy Sid, as I dreamed.”
“What did you dream?” asked Lucy curiously.
Widow Anne threw up two gnarled hands, wrinkled with age and laundry work, screwing up her face meanwhile.
“I dreamed of battle and murder and sudden death, my lady, with Sid in his cold grave playing on a harp, angel-like. Yes!” she folded her rusty shawl tightly round her spare form and nodded, “there was Sid, looking beautiful in his coffin, and cut into a hash, as you might say, with—”
“Ugh! ugh!” shuddered Lucy, and Archie strove to draw her away.
“With murder written all over his poor face,” pursued the widow. “And I woke up screeching with cramp in my legs and pains in my lungs, and beatings in my heart, and stiffness in my—”
“Oh, hang it, shut up!” shouted Archie, seeing that Lucy was growing pale at this ghoulish recital, “don’t be fool, woman. Professor Braddock says that Bolton’ll be back in three days with the mummy he has been sent to fetch from Malta. You have been having nightmare! Don’t you see how you are frightening Miss Kendal?”
“‘The Witch’ of Endor, sir—”
“Deuce take the Witch of Endor and you also. There’s a shilling. Go and drink yourself into a more cheery frame of mind.”
Widow Anne bit the shilling with one of her two remaining teeth, and dropped a curtsey.
“You’re a good, kind gentleman,” she smirked, cheered at the idea of unlimited gin. “And when my boy Sid do come home a corpse, I hope you’ll come to the funeral, sir.”
“What a raven!” said Lucy, as Widow Anne toddled away in the direction of the one public-house in Gartley village.
“I don’t wonder that the late Mr. Bolton laid her out with a flat-iron. To slay such a woman would be meritorious.”
“I wonder how she came to be the mother of Sidney,” said Miss Kendal reflectively, as they resumed their walk, “he’s such a clever, smart, and handsome young man.”
“I think Bolton owes everything to the Professor’s teaching and example, Lucy,” replied her lover. “He was an uncouth lad, I understand, when your step-father took him into the house six years ago. Now he is quite presentable. I shouldn’t wonder if he married Mrs. Jasher.”
“H’m! I rather think Mrs. Jasher admires the Professor.”
“Oh, he’ll never marry her. If she were a mummy there might be a chance, of course, but as a human being the Professor will never look at her.”
“I don’t know so much about that, Archie. Mrs. Jasher is attractive.”
Hope laughed. “In a mutton-dressed-as-lamb way, no doubt.”
“And she has money. My father is poor and so—”
“You make up a match at once, as every woman will do. Well, let us get back to the Pyramids, and see how the flirtation is progressing.”
Lucy walked on for a few steps in silence. “Do you believe in Mrs. Bolton’s dream, Archie?”
“No! I believe she eats heavy suppers. Bolton will return quite safe; he is a clever fellow, not easily taken advantage of. Don’t bother any more about Widow Anne and her dismal prophecies.”
“I’ll try not to,” replied Lucy dutifully. “All the same, I wish she had not told me her dream,” and she shivered.
THERE WAS ONLY ONE REALLY palatial mansion in Gartley, and that was the ancient Georgian house known as the Pyramids. Lucy’s step-father had given the place this eccentric name on taking up his abode there some ten years previously. Before that time the dwelling had been occupied by the Lord of the Manor and his family. But now the old squire was dead, and his impecunious children were scattered to the four quarters of the globe in search of money with which to rebuild their ruined fortunes. As the village was somewhat isolated and rather unhealthily situated in a marshy country, the huge, roomy old Grange had not been easy to let, and had proved quite impossible to sell. Under these disastrous circumstances, Professor Braddock—who described himself humorously as a scientific pauper—had obtained the tenancy at a ridiculously low rental, much to his satisfaction.
Many people would have paid money to avoid exile in these damp waste lands, which, as it were, fringed civilization, but their loneliness and desolation suited the Professor exactly. He required ample room for his Egyptian collection, with plenty of time to decipher hieroglyphics and study perished dynasties of the Nile Valley. The world of the present day did not interest Braddock in the least. He lived almost continuously on that portion of the mental plane which had to do with the far-distant past, and only concerned himself with physical existence, when it consisted of mummies and mystic beetles, sepulchral ornaments, pictured documents, hawk-headed deities and suchlike things of almost inconceivable antiquity. He rarely walked abroad and was invariably late for meals, save when he missed any particular one altogether, which happened frequently. Absent-minded in conversation, untidy in dress, unpractical in business, dreamy in manner, Professor Braddock lived solely for archaeology. That such a man should have taken to himself a wife was mystery.
Yet he had been married fifteen years before to a widow, who possessed a limited income and one small child. It was the opportunity of securing the use of a steady income which had decoyed Braddock into the matrimonial snare of Mrs. Kendal. To put it plainly, he had married the agreeable widow for her money, although he could scarcely be called a fortune-hunter. Like Eugene Aram, he desired cash to assist learning, and as that scholar had committed murder to secure what he wanted, so did the Professor marry to obtain his ends. These were to have someone to manage the house, and to be set free from the necessity of earning his bread, so that he might indulge in pursuits more pleasurable than money-making. Mrs. Kendal was a placid, phlegmatic lady, who liked rather than loved the Professor, and who desired him more as a companion than as a husband. With Braddock she did not arrange a romantic marriage so much as enter into a congenial partnership. She wanted a man in the house, and he desired freedom from pecuniary embarrassment. On these lines the prosaic bargain was struck, and Mrs. Kendal became the Professor’s wife with entirely successful results. She gave her husband a home, and her child a father, who became fond of Lucy, and who—considering he was merely an amateur parent—acted admirably.
But this sensible partnership lasted only for five years. Mrs. Braddock died of a chill on the liver and left her five hundred a year to the Professor for life, with remainder to Lucy, then a small girl of ten. It was at this critical moment that Braddock became a practical man for the first and last time in his dreamy life. He buried his wife with unfeigned regret—for he had been sincerely attached to her in his absent-minded way—and sent Lucy to a Hampstead boarding school. After an interview with his late wife’s lawyer to see that the income was safe, he sought for a house in the country, and quickly discovered Gartley Grange, which no one would take because of its isolation. Within three months from the burial of Mrs. Braddock, the widower had removed himself and his collection to Gartley, and had renamed his new abode the Pyramids. Here he dwelt quietly and enjoyably—from his dry-as-dust point of view—for ten years, and here Lucy Kendal had come when her education was completed. The arrival of a marriageable young lady made no difference in the Professor’s habits, and he hailed her thankfully as the successor to her mother in managing the small establishment. It is to be feared that Braddock was somewhat selfish in his views, but the fixed idea of archaeological research made him egotistical.
The mansion was three-story, flat-roofed, extremely ugly and unexpectedly comfortable. Built of mellow red brick with dingy white stone facings, it stood a few yards back from the roadway which ran from Gartley Fort through the village, and, at the precise point where the Pyramids was situated, curved abruptly through woodlands to terminate a mile away, at Jessum, the local station of the Thames Railway Line. An iron railing, embedded in moldering stone work, divided the narrow front garden from the road, and on either side of the door—which could be reached by five shallow steps—grew two small yew trees, smartly clipped and trimmed into cones of dull green. These yews possessed some magical significance, which Professor Braddock would occasionally explain to chance visitors interested in occult matters; for, amongst other things Egyptian, the archaeologist searched into the magic of the Sons of Khem, and insisted that there was more truth than superstition in their enchantments.
Braddock used all the vast rooms of the ground floor to house his collection of antiquities, which he had acquired through many laborious years. He dwelt entirely in this museum, as his bedroom adjoined his study, and he frequently devoured his hurried meals amongst the brilliantly tinted mummy cases. The embalmed dead populated his world, and only now and then, when Lucy insisted, did he ascend to the first floor, which was her particular abode. Here was the drawing-room, the dining-room and Lucy’s boudoir; here also were sundry bedrooms, furnished and unfurnished, in one of which Miss Kendal slept, while the others remained vacant for chance visitors, principally from the scientific world. The third story was devoted to the cook, her husband—who acted as gardener—and to the house parlor maid, a composite domestic, who worked from morning until night in keeping the great house clean. During the day these servants attended to their business in a comfortable basement, where the cook ruled supreme. At the back of the mansion stretched a fairly large kitchen garden, to which the cook’s husband devoted his attention. This was the entire domain belonging to the tenant, as, of course, the Professor did not rent the arable acres and comfortable farms which had belonged to the dispossessed family.
Everything in the house went smoothly, as Lucy was a methodical young person, who went by the clock and the almanac. Braddock little knew how much of his undeniable comfort he owed to her fostering care; for, prior to her return from school, he had been robbed right and left by unscrupulous domestics. When his step-daughter arrived he simply handed over the keys and the housekeeping money—a fixed sum—and gave her strict instructions not to bother him. Miss Kendal faithfully observed this injunction, as she enjoyed being undisputed mistress, and knew that, so long as her step-father had his meals, his bed, his bath and his clothes, he required nothing save the constant society of his beloved mummies, of which no one wished to deprive him. These he dusted and cleansed and rearranged himself. Not even Lucy dared to invade the museum, and the mere mention of spring cleaning drove the Professor into displaying frantic rage, in which he used bad language.
On returning from her walk with Archie, the girl had lured her step-father into assuming a rusty dress suit, which had done service for many years, and had coaxed him into a promise to be present at dinner. Mrs. Jasher, the lively widow of the district, was coming, and Braddock approved of a woman who looked up to him as the one wise man in the world. Even science is susceptible to judicious flattery, and Mrs. Jasher was never backward in putting her admiration into words. Female gossip declared that the widow wished to become the second Mrs. Braddock, but if this was really the case, she had but small chance of gaining her end. The Professor had once sacrificed his liberty to secure a competence, and, having acquired five hundred a year, was not inclined for a second matrimonial venture. Had the widow been a dollar heiress with a million at her back he would not have troubled to place a ring on her finger. And certainly Mrs. Jasher had little to gain from such a dreary marriage, beyond a collection of rubbish—as she said—and a dull country house situated in a district inhabited solely by peasants belonging to Saxon times.
Archie Hope left Lucy at the door of the Pyramids and repaired to his village lodgings, for the purpose of assuming evening dress. Lucy, being her own housekeeper, assisted the overworked parlor maid to lay and decorate the table before receiving the guests. Thus Mrs. Jasher found no one in the drawing-room to welcome her, and, taking the privilege of old friendship, descended to beard Braddock in his den. The Professor raised his eyes from a newly bought scarabeus to behold a stout little lady smiling on him from the doorway. He did not appear to be grateful for the interruption, but Mrs. Jasher was not at all dismayed, being a man-hunter by profession. Besides, she saw that Braddock was in the clouds as usual, and would have received the King himself in the same absent-minded manner.
“Pouf! what an abominal smell!” exclaimed the widow, holding a flimsy lace handkerchief to her nose. “Kind of camphor-sandal-wood charnel-house smell. I wonder you are not asphyxiated. Pouf! Ugh! Bur-r-r
The Professor stared at her with cold, fishy eyes. “Did you speak?”
“Oh, dear me, yes, and you don’t even ask me to take a chair. If I were a nasty stuffy mummy, now, you would be embracing me by, this time. Don’t you know that I have come to dinner, you silly man?” and she tapped him playfully with her closed fan.
“I have had dinner,” said Braddock, egotistic as usual.
“No, you have not.” Mrs. Jasher spoke positively, and pointed to a small tray of untouched food on the side table. “You have not even had luncheon. You must live on air, like a chameleon—or on love, perhaps,” she ended in a significantly tender tone.
But she might as well have spoken to the granite image of Horus in the corner. Braddock merely rubbed his chin and stared harder than ever at the glittering visitor.
“Dear me!” he said innocently. “I must have forgotten to eat. Lamplight!” he looked round vaguely. “Of course, I remember lighting the lamps. Time has gone by very rapidly. I am really hungry.” He paused to make sure, then repeated his remark in a more positive manner. “Yes, I am very hungry, Mrs. Jasher.” He looked at her as though she had just entered. “Of course, Mrs. Jasher. Do you wish to see me about anything particular?”
The widow frowned at his inattention, and then laughed. It was impossible to be angry with this dreamer.
“I have come to dinner, Professor. Do try and wake up; you are half asleep and half starved, too, I expect.”
“I certainly feel unaccountably hungry,” admitted Braddock cautiously.
“Unaccountably, when you have eaten nothing since breakfast. You weird man, I believe you are a mummy yourself.”
But the Professor had again returned to examine the scarabeus, this time with a powerful magnifying glass.
“It certainly belongs to the twentieth dynasty,” he murmured, wrinkling his brows.
Mrs. Jasher stamped and flirted her fan pettishly. The creature’s soul, she decided, was certainly not in his body, and until it came back he would continue to ignore her. With the annoyance of a woman who is not getting her own way, she leaned back in Braddock’s one comfortable chair—which she had unerringly selected—and examined him intently. Perhaps the gossips were correct, and she was trying to imagine what kind of a husband he would make. But whatever might be her thoughts, she eyed Braddock as earnestly as Braddock eyed the scarabeus.
Outwardly the Professor did not appear like the savant he was reported to be. He was small of stature, plump of body, rosy as a little Cupid, and extraordinarily youthful, considering his fifty-odd years of scientific wear and tear. With a smooth, clean-shaven face, plentiful white hair like spun silk, and neat feet and hands, he did not look his age. The dreamy look in his small blue eyes was rather belied by the hardness of his thin-lipped mouth, and by the pugnacious push of his jaw. The eyes and the dome-like forehead hinted that brain without much originality; but the lower part of this contradictory countenance might have belonged to a prize-fighter. Nevertheless, Braddock’s plumpness did away to a considerable extent with his aggressive look. It was certainly latent, but only came to the surface when he fought with a brother savant over some tomb-dweller from Thebes. In the soft lamplight he looked like a fighting cherub, and it was a pity—in the interests of art—that the hairless pink and white face did not surmount a pair of wings rather than a rusty and ill-fitting dress suit.
“He’s nane sa dafty as he looks,” thought Mrs. Jasher, who was Scotch, although she claimed to be cosmopolitan. “With his mummies he is all right, but outside those he might be difficult to manage. And these things,” she glanced round the shadowy room, crowded with the dead and their earthly belongings. “I don’t think I would care to marry the British Museum. Too much like hard work, and I am not so young as I was.”
The near mirror—a polished silver one, which had belonged, ages ago, to some coquette of Memphis—denied this uncomplimentary thought, for Mrs. Jasher did not look a day over thirty, although her birth certificate set her down as forty-five. In the lamplight she might have passed for even younger, so carefully had she preserved what remained to her of youth. She assuredly was somewhat stout, and never had been so tall as she desired to be. But the lines of her plump figure were still discernible in the cunningly cut gown, and she carried her little self with such mighty dignity that people overlooked the mortifying height of a trifle over five feet. Her features were small and neat, but her large blue eyes were so noticeable and melting that those on whom she turned them ignored the lack of boldness in chin and nose. Her hair was brown and arranged in the latest fashion, while her complexion was so fresh and pink that, if she did paint—as jealous women averred—she must have been quite an artist with the hare’s foot and the rouge pot and the necessary powder puff.
Mrs. Jasher’s clothes repaid the thought she expended upon them, and she was artistic in this as in other things. Dressed in a crocus-yellow gown, with short sleeves to reveal her beautiful arms, and cut low to display her splendid bust, she looked perfectly dressed. A woman would have declared the wide-netted black lace with which the dress was draped to be cheap, and would have hinted that the widow wore too many jewels in her hair, on her corsage, round her arms, and ridiculously gaudy rings on her fingers. This might have been true, for Mrs. Jasher sparkled like the Milky Way at every movement; but the gleam of gold and the flash of gems seemed to suit her opulent beauty. Her slightest movement wafted around her a strange Chinese perfume, which she obtained—so she said—from a friend of her late husband’s who was in the British Embassy at Pekin. No one possessed this especial perfume but Mrs. Jasher, and anyone who had previously met her, meeting her in the darkness, could have guessed at her identity. With a smile to show her white teeth, with her golden-hued dress and glittering jewels, the pretty widow glowed in that glimmering room like a tropical bird.
The Professor raised his dreamy eyes and laid the beetle on one side, when his brain fully grasped that this charming vision was waiting to be entertained. She was better to look upon even than the beloved scarabeus, and he advanced to shake hands as though she had just entered the room. Mrs. Jasher—knowing his ways—rose to extend her hand, and the two small, stout figures looked absurdly like a pair of chubby Dresden ornaments which had stepped from the mantelshelf.
“Dear lady, I am glad to see you. You have—you have”—the Professor reflected, and then came back with a rush to the present century—“you have come to dinner, if I mistake not.”
“Lucy asked me a week ago,” she replied tartly, for no woman likes to be neglected for a mere beetle, however ancient.
“Then you will certainly get a good dinner,” said Braddock, waving his plump white hands. “Lucy is an excellent housekeeper. I have no fault to find with her—no fault at all. But she is obstinate—oh, very obstinate, as her mother was. Do you know, dear lady, that in a papyrus scroll which I lately acquired I found the recipe for a genuine Egyptian dish, which Amenemha—the last Pharaoh of the eleventh dynasty, you know—might have eaten, and probably did eat. I desired Lucy to serve it to-night, but she refused, much to my annoyance. The ingredients, which had to do with roasted gazelle, were oil and coriander seed and—if my memory serves me—asafoetida.”
“Ugh!” Mrs. Jasher’s handkerchief went again to her mouth. “Say no more, Professor; your dish sounds horrid. I don’t wish to eat it, and be turned into a mummy before my time.”
“You would make a really beautiful mummy,” said Braddock, paying what he conceived was a compliment; “and, should you die, I shall certainly attend to your embalming, if you prefer that to cremation.”
“You dreadful man!” cried the widow, turning pale and shrinking. “Why, I really believe that you would like to see me packed away in one of those disgusting coffins.”
“Disgusting!” cried the outraged Professor, striking one of the brilliantly tinted cases. “Can you call so beautiful a specimen of sepulchral art disgusting? Look at the colors, at the regularity of the hieroglyphics—why, the history of the dead is set out in this magnificent series of pictures.” He adjusted his pince-nez and began to read, “The Osirian, Scemiophis that is a female name, Mrs. Jasher—who—”
“I don’t want to have my history written on my coffin,” interrupted the widow hysterically, for this funereal talk frightened her. “It would take much more space than a mummy case upon which to write it. My life has been volcanic, I can tell you. By the way,” she added hurriedly, seeing that Braddock was on the eve of resuming the reading, “tell me about your Inca mummy. Has it arrived?”
The Professor immediately followed the false trail. “Not yet,” he said briskly, rubbing his smooth hands, “but in three days I expect The Diver will be at Pierside, and Sidney will bring the mummy on here. I shall unpack it at once and learn exactly how the ancient Peruvians embalmed their dead. Doubtless they learned the art from—”
“The Egyptians,” ventured Mrs. Jasher rashly.
Braddock glared. “Nothing of the sort, dear lady,” he snorted angrily. “Absurd, ridiculous! I am inclined to believe that Egypt was merely a colony of that vast island of Atlantis mentioned by Plato. There—if my theory is correct—civilization begun, and the kings of Atlantis—doubtless the gods of historical tribes—governed the whole world, including that portion which we now term South America.”
“Do you mean to say that there were Yankees in those days?” inquired Mrs. Jasher frivolously.
The Professor tucked his hands under his shabby coattails and strode up and down the room warming his rage, which was provoked by such ignorance.
“Good heavens, madam, where have you lived?” he exclaimed explosively—“are you a fool, or merely an ignorant woman? I am talking of prehistoric times, thousands of years ago, when you were probably a stray atom embedded in the slime.”
“Oh, you horrid creature!” cried Mrs. Jasher indignantly, and was about to give Braddock her opinion, if only to show him that she could hold her own, when the door opened.
“How are you, Mrs. Jasher?” said Lucy, advancing.
“Here am I and here is Archie. Dinner is ready. And you—”
“I am very hungry,” said Mrs. Jasher. “I have been called an atom of the slime,” then she laughed and took possession of young Hope.
Lucy wrinkled her brow; she did not approve of the widow’s man-annexing instinct.
ONE MEMBER OF THE BRADDOCK household was not included in the general staff, being a mere appendage of the Professor himself. This was a dwarfish, misshapen Kanaka, a pigmy in height, but a giant in breadth, with short, thick legs, and long, powerful arms. He had a large head, and a somewhat handsome face, with melancholy black eyes and a fine set of white teeth. Like most Polynesians, his skin was of a pale bronze and elaborately tattooed, even the cheeks and chin being scored with curves and straight lines of mystical import. But the most noticeable thing about him was his huge mop of frizzled hair, which, by some process, known only to himself, he usually dyed a vivid yellow. The flaring locks streaming from his head made him resemble a Peruvian image of the sun, and it was this peculiar coiffure which had procured for him the odd name of Cockatoo. The fact that this grotesque creature invariably wore a white drill suit, emphasized still more the suggestion of his likeness to an Australian parrot.
Cockatoo had come from the Solomon Islands in his teens to the colony of Queensland, to work on the plantations, and there the Professor had picked him up as his body servant. When Braddock returned to marry Mrs. Kendal, the boy had refused to leave him, although it was represented to the young savage that he was somewhat too barbaric for sober England. Finally, the Professor had consented to bring him over seas, and had never regretted doing so, for Cockatoo, finding his scientific master a true friend, worshipped him as a visible god. Having been captured when young by Pacific black-birders, he talked excellent English, and from contact with the necessary restraints of civilization was, on the whole, extremely well behaved. Occasionally, when teased by the villagers and his fellow-servants, he would break into childish rages, which bordered on the dangerous. But a word from Braddock always quieted him, and when penitent he would crawl like a whipped dog to the feet of his divinity. For the most part he lived entirely in the museum, looking after the collection and guarding it from harm. Lucy—who had a horror of the creature’s uncanny looks—objected to Cockatoo waiting at the table, and it was only on rare occasions that he was permitted to assist the harassed parlormaid. On this night the Kanaka acted excellently as a butler, and crept softly round the table, attending to the needs of the diners. He was an admirable servant, deft and handy, but his blue-lined face and squat figure together with the obtrusively golden halo, rather worried Mrs. Jasher. And, indeed, in spite of custom, Lucy also felt uncomfortable when this gnome hovered at her elbow. It looked as though one of the fantastical idols from the museum below had come to haunt the living.
“I do not like that Golliwog,” breathed Mrs. Jasher to her host, when Cockatoo was at the sideboard. “He gives me the creeps.”
“Imagination, my dear lady, pure imagination. Why should we not have a picturesque animal to wait upon us?”
“He would wait picturesquely enough at a cannibal feast,” suggested Archie, with a laugh.
“Don’t!” murmured Lucy, with a shiver. “I shall not be able to eat my dinner if you talk so.”
“Odd that Hope should say what he has said,” observed Braddock confidently to the widow. “Cockatoo comes from a cannibal island, and doubtless has seen the consumption of human flesh. No, no, my dear lady, do not look so alarmed. I don’t think he has eaten any, as he was taken to Queensland long before he could participate in such banquets. He is a very decent animal.”
“A very dangerous one, I fancy,” retorted Mrs. Jasher, who looked pale.
“Only when he loses his temper, and I’m always able to suppress that when it is at its worst. You are not eating your meat, my dear lady.”
“Can you wonder at it, and you talk of cannibals?”
“Let us change the conversation to cereals,” suggested Hope, whose appetite was of the best—“wheat, for instance. In this queer little village I notice the houses are divided by a field of wheat. It seems wrong somehow for corn to be bunched up with houses.”
“That’s old Farmer Jenkins,” said Lucy vivaciously; “he owns three or four acres near the public-house and will not allow them to be built over, although he has been offered a lot of money. I noticed myself, Archie, the oddity of finding a cornfield surrounded by cottages. It’s like Alice in Wonderland.”
“But fancy any one offering money for land here,” observed Hope, toying with his claret glass, which had just been refilled, by the attentive Cockatoo, “at the Back-of-Beyond, as it were. I shouldn’t care to live here—the neighborhood is so desolate.”
“All the same you do live here!” interposed Mrs. Jasher smartly, and with a roguish glance at Lucy.
Archie caught the glance and saw the blush on Miss Kendal’s face.
“You have answered your question yourself, Mrs. Jasher,” he—said, smiling. “I have the inducement you hint at to remain here, and certainly, as a landscape painter, I admire the marshes and sunsets. As an artist and an engaged man I stop in Gartley, otherwise I should clear out. But I fail to see why a lady of your attractions should—”
“I may have a sentimental reason also,” interrupted the widow, with a sly glance at the absent-minded Professor, who was drawing hieroglyphics on the table-cloth with a fork; “also, my cottage is cheap and very comfortable. The late Mr. Jasher did not leave me sufficient money to live in London. He was a consul in China, you know, and consuls are never very well paid. I will come in for a large income, however.”
“Indeed,” said Lucy politely, and wondering why Mrs. Jasher was so communicative. “Soon I hope.”
“It may be very soon. My brother, you know—a merchant in Pekin. He has come home to die, and is unmarried. When he does die, I shall go to London. But,” added the widow, meditatively and glancing again at the Professor, “I shall be sorry to leave dear Gartley. Still, the memory of happy hours spent in this house will always remain with me. Ah me! ah me!” and she put her handkerchief to her eyes.
Lucy telegraphed to Archie that the widow was a humbug, and Archie telegraphed back that he quite agreed with her. But the Professor, whom the momentary silence had brought back to the present century, looked up and asked Lucy if the dinner was finished.