“Well, anyway, here goes,” responded Bennett with a shamefaced grin as he whipped the threadbare table-cover from the nearest case and took up mallet and cold-chisel. “We may as well begin on this one, eh?”
The coffin was roughly like a bathtub in shape, perhaps six feet long by two and a half high, and composed of some sort of hard, brittle pottery, evidently baked in a brick-kiln, and apparently shaped by hand, for traces of the makers’ thumb-marks still showed on its exterior. About its upper portion, an inch or so below the junction of lid and body, ran an ornamental molding of the familiar Greek egg-and-dart design, crudely impressed on the clay with a modeling mold before baking. There was no other attempt at decoration and no trace of inscription on the lid.
“Here we are!” Bennett exclaimed as he finished chipping away the scaling of the casket. “Give me a lift with this lid, Dr. Trowbridge?”
I leaned forward to assist him, tugged at the long, convex curved slab of terra-cotta, and craned my neck to glimpse the coffin’s interior.
What I had expected to see I do not quite know. A skeleton, perhaps; possibly a handful of fetid mold; more likely nothing at all. The sight which met my eyes made them fairly start from their sockets, and but for Bennett’s warning cry, I should have let my end of the casket cover clatter to the brick floor.
Cushioned on a mattress of royal purple cloth, a diminutive pillow beneath her head and another supporting her feet, lay a woman—a girl, rather—of such surpassing beauty as might have formed the theme of an Oriental romance. Slender she was, yet possessing the softly rounded curves of budding womanhood, not the angular, boyish thinness of our modern girls. Her skin, a deep, sun-kissed olive, showed every violet vein through its veil of lustrous, velvet tan. Across her breast, folded reposefully, lay hands as softly dimpled as a child’s, their long, pointed nails overlaid with gold leaf or bright gilt paint, so that they shone like ten tiny almond-shaped mirrors in the rays of the hissing student lamps. Her little bare feet, as they dimpled the purple cushion on which they lay, were pinked about sole and toe like those of a baby, and so soft, so free from callouses or roughening of any sort, that it seemed they must have trodden nothing harder than velvet carpets in life, even as they rested on pillows of velvet in death. About ankles, wrists and arms hung bangles of beaten rose-gold studded with topaz, garnet and lapis-lazuli, while a diadem of the same precious composition encircled her brow, binding back the curling black locks which lay about her small face in thick clusters. A robe or shroud of thinnest gauze enveloped her from throat to knees, and about her lower limbs from knee to ankle was wrapped a shawl of brilliant orange silk embroidered with wreaths of shells and roses. Black antimony had been rubbed on her lids to give added size and depth to her eyes, and her full, voluptuous lips, half parted, as though in the gentle respiration of peaceful sleep, were stained vivid vermilion with powdered cinnabar. There was nothing of death, nothing of the charnel-house, about the vision. Indeed, it required a conscious effort to convince me her bosom did not rise and fall with the softly-drawn breath of slumber, and the faint, subtle perfume of violets and orange blossoms which wafted to us from her raiment and hair was no delusion, but a veritable scent imprisoned in the baked-clay tomb for fifteen centuries.
“Ah!” I exclaimed in mingled surprise and admiration.
“Good Lord!” Ellsworth Bennett murmured, staring incredulously at the lovely corpse, his breath rasping sharply between his teeth.
“Nom d’un chat de nom d’un chat!” Jules de Grandin almost shouted, standing on tiptoe to gaze over my shoulder. “It is the Sleeping Beauty en personne!”
With a quick movement he turned to young Bennett, and before the other was aware of his intention had kissed him soundly on each cheek.
“Embrasse moi, mon vieux!” he cried. “Me, I am one great fool of a doubly-damned doubting Thomas! In all my head there is not the sense with which the good God had endowed a goose! Parbleu, we have here the find of the age; our reputation is assured; we shall have fame comparable to that of Boussard, Mordieu, but we are already famous!”
Characteristically, he had assumed charge of the entire proceeding. “We shall take her to the Museum!” he continued, elatedly; “she shall display her so marvelous beauty for all to see our handiwork. She shall—misère de Dieu, behold, my friends, she vanishes!”
It was true. Before our eyes, like a shadowgraph fading on the screen, the lovely being in the ancient coffin was dissolving. Where the full-rounded beauty of feminine perfection had lain a moment before, there stretched a withering, shriveling thing, puckering and wrinkling like a body long immersed in chilled water. The eyeballs had already fallen in, leaving cavernous, unfilled sockets in a face from which every semblance of the bloom of youth had vanished and which showed pinched and desiccated like that of a mummy. The symmetrical, full-fleshed limbs were no more than skin-covered bones as we bent our gaze on the rapidly spreading desolation, and within a space of ten minutes even the skeleton lost its articulation, and nothing but a pile of dust, gray-white and fine as the ashes of cremation, lay upon the purple fabric. While we stared, horrified, even the pillows and mattress which had supported that once-beautiful body, the ethereal, transparent gauze and the heavy, broidered silk of the shawl crumbled like a gaslight filament crushed between thumb and forefinger. Sealed away from contact with the atmosphere for centuries, every vestige of perishable matter, both animal and vegetable, had shuddered into ashes in our oxygen-laden air almost as quickly as if brought in contact with living flame. Only the hard, glittering facets of the gems and the duller gleam of the gold composing her ornaments assured us that the body of a lovely girl had lain before us a short quarter-hour ago.
Ellsworth Bennett was the first to recover his self-possession. “Sic transit gloria mundi!” he remarked with a half-hysterical laugh. “Shall we open the other one?”
De Grandin was shaking like a leaf with emotion. Like all his countrymen, he was as susceptible to the appeal of beauty as a sensitive-plant’s fronds are to the touch, and the spectacle he had witnessed had shocked him almost past endurance. Taking his narrow chin between his forefinger and thumb, he gazed abstractedly at the floor a moment, then turned to our host with a shrug and one of his big quick, elfin smiles. “Regard not my foolishness, I beseech you,” he implored. “Me, I would not suffer such another sight for the wealth of the Indies, but—so great is my curiosity—I would not forego the experience of beholding the contents of that other casket for ten times the Indies’ wealth!”
Together he and Bennett broke the clay scaling of the coffin, and within five minutes, the lid was loosened and ready to be lifted from its place.
“Careful, careful, Trowbridge, my friend!” de Grandin besought as the three of us gently raised the slab of brittle clay. “Who knows what we may discover this time? Beneath this cover there may be—quoi diable!”
Instead of the open coffin we had expected to find beneath the earthen lid, a second covering, curved and molded to conform to the outer lid’s shape, met our gaze.
Bennett, intent on seeing what lay beneath, was about to strike the opaque white substance with his hammer, but a quick cry from de Grandin halted him. “Non, non!” the Frenchman warned. “Can not you see there is an inscription on it? Stand back, my friends”—his sharp, contradictory orders rang out in quick succession like military commands. “Lights, lights for the love of heaven! Bring forward the lamps that I may decipher these words before I die from curiosity!”
Bennett and I each seized a lamp and we held them above the coffin’s inner sealing while the little Frenchman leaned forward, eagerly scanning the inscription.
The curving cover seemed to be made of some softer, less brittle substance than the outer lid—wax, I decided after a hasty inspection—and on it, from top to bottom, in small Greek uncials some sort of message had been etched with a stylus.
De Grandin studied the legend through intently narrowed eyes a few moments, then turned to Bennett with a ge
sture of impatience. “It is no good,” he announced petulantly. “My brain, he has too such burden on him this night; I cannot translate the Greek into English with the readiness I should. Paper, paper and pencil, if you please.
“I shall make a copy of this writing and translate him at my leisure this evening. Tomorrow we shall read him aloud and see what we shall see. Meantime, swear as you hope for heaven, that you will make no move to open this coffin until I shall return. You agree? Bon! To work, then; the writing is long and of an unfamiliar hand. It will take much time to transcribe it on my tablets.”
2. A Portent from the Past
GOLDEN WAFFLES AND RICH, steaming coffee were waiting on the table when I descended the stairs next morning, for Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, maintained a soft spot in her Celtic heart for de Grandin and his gallant manners, and delays which would have made her nearly snap my head off brought only an indulgent smile when occasioned by the little Frenchman’s tardiness. “Sure, Doctor darlin’,” she greeted as I seated myself and looked about for my companion, “Dr. de Grandin wuz doin’ th’ divil’s own bit o’ studyin’ last night, an’ ’twould be unfair ter call ’um from his rist, so ut would.”
“Fear not, my excellent one,” a cheerful voice hailed from the stairs, “already I am here,” and de Grandin stepped quickly into the sunlit dining-room, his face glowing from the recent application of razor-blade and cold water, his little blond mustache waxed to twin needle-points at the corners of his small, sensitive mouth, and every blond hair on his head lying as perfectly in place as though numbered and arranged according to plan.
“Mordieu, what a night!” he exclaimed with a sigh as he drained a preliminary draft of well-creamed coffee and passed the cup back for replenishment. “Cordieu, even yet I doubt me that I saw what I beheld at Monsieur Bennett’s cottage last night, and I am yet in doubt that I translated what I did from the notes I made from the second coffin!”
“Was it so remarkable?” I began, but he cut me short with an upraised hand.
“Remarkable?” he echoed. “Parbleu, my friend, it is amazing, nothing less. Come, let us first discuss this so excellent food, then discuss the message from the past.
“Attend me, if you please,” he ordered, picking up a sheaf of manuscript from the study table when we had finished breakfast. “Give careful ear to what I read, my friend, for I shall show you that which makes even our vision of yesternight fade to insignificance by comparison. Listen:
Kaku, servant and priest of Sebek, dread God of Nilus, son of Amathel the son of Kepher, servants and priests of Sebek, to who so looks hereon, greeting and admonition:
Not of the creed and belief of Christians am I, neither of the bastard cult of the Greek usurpers. Flesh of the flesh and blood of the mighty blood of the race which ruled Upper and Lower Egypt in the days when Ra held sway is Kaku, servant and priest of Sebek. Learned in the laws and magic of the olden priesthood am I, and by the lore and cunning of my forebears have I sealed the virgin Peligia in unwaking sleep beneath this shield of time-defying cerus, even the wax which sets at naught but the father of acids.
Greek and Christian though she be, and daughter of the race which trod upon my ancestors, my heart inclined to her and I would have taken her to wife, but she would not. Wherefore, I, being minded that she should take no other man to husband, devised a plan to slay her and bury her with the ancient rites and ceremonies of my people, that her body should not know corruption, but lie in the tomb until the Seven Ages were passed, and I might take her to myself and dwell with her in Aalu. Nathless, when I had taken her beyond the city gates, and all was ready for her death, my heart turned water within me, and I could not strike the blow. Therefore, by my magic, and by the magic of my priesthood, have I caused a deep sleep to fall on her, even a sleep which knows no waking until the Seven Ages be past and she and I shall dwell together in Amenaand.
For the Seven Ages shall she sleep within this coffin, obedient to the mystic spell I have put on her, and if no man openeth the tomb and waken her before the Seven Ages be past, then she shall become as the dust of Egypt, and be mine forever and forever in the land beyond the setting sun. But if a man of later days shall lift the covering from off this coffin and take her hand in his and call on her by name, and in the name of love, then shall my magic be valueless, and she shall waken and cleave unto her deliverer, and be his own in that land and generation yet unborn. This is the sum of all my spells and learning unable to withstand.
Yet, ye who look hereon, be warned in time or ever ye seek to open this tomb of the living-in-death. I, Kaku, priest and servant of Mighty Sebek, have sealed this virgin within this tomb that she may be mine and not another’s. My shadow, and the shadow of Sebek which is my god, is upon her. Yea, were it seventy times seventy ages instead of seven, and were the earth to perish under our feet, yet would I pursue her until her heart inclines to me.
I, Kaku, servant and priest of Sebek, have sealed this tomb with clay and wax and with my curse, and with the curse of Sebek, my god and master, and the curse of Kaku, and of Kaku’s god, shall smite with terror him who openeth this tomb. And on him in ages yet to come who looks upon this coffin with presumptuous eyes and makes bold to open it, I do pronounce my curse and the curse of Sebek, and I do set myself against him in wager of battle, that his days be not long in the land; neither his nor hers to whom life returns and youth and love for the duration of the seven stones upon the jewel, according to the obedience of the eternal gods of Egypt whose kingdom shall have no end.
I have said.
De Grandin laid the manuscript on the desk and looked at me, his little blue eyes round and shining with excitement.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well?” he mimicked. “Parbleu, I shall say it is well! Many remarkable things have I beheld, my friend, but never such as this. Come, let us hasten, let us fly to the cottage of Monsieur Bennett and see what lies beneath that shield of wax. Mort d’un Chinois, though she subsist but for five little minutes, I must gaze, I must feast my eyes upon that paragon of womanhood whose beauty was so great that even the hand of jealousy forbore to strike!”
3. The Jewel of Seven Stones
DIFFERING FROM HER COMPANION in death as dawn light differs from midnight, the virgin Peligia lay in her terra-cotta coffin when Bennett, de Grandin, and I had lifted off the curving shield of wax. She was some five and twenty years of age, apparently; slightly above middle height, golden-haired and fair-skinned as any Nordic blonde, and as exquisitely proportioned as a Grecian statue of Aphrodite. From tapering white throat to blue-veined, high-arched insteps she was draped in a simple Ionic robe of snowy linen cut in that austerely modest and graceful fashion of ancient Attica in which the upper part of the dress falls downward again from neck to waist in a sort or cape, hiding the outline of the breast while leaving the entire arms and the point of the shoulders bare. Except for two tiny studs of hand-beaten gold which held the robe together over the shoulders and the narrow double border of horizontal purple lines at the bottom of the cape, marking her status as a Roman citizen, her gown was without ornament of any sort, and no jewelry adorned her chaste loveliness save the golden threads with which her white-kid sandals were embroidered and a single strand of small gold disks, joined by minute links and having seven tiny pendants of polished carnelians, which encircled her throat and lay lightly against the gentle swell of her white bosom.
To me there seemed something of the cold finality of death about her pose and figure. After the glowing beauty and barbaric splendor of her unnamed companion, she seemed almost meanly dressed, but de Grandin and Bennett were mute with admiration as they gazed on her.
“Mordieu, she is the spirit of Greece, undebased by evil times, brought down to us within a shell of clay,” the little Frenchman murmured, bending over her and studying her calm, finely molded features like a connoisseur inspecting a bit of priceless statuary.
Young Bennett was almost speechless with mingled excitement an
d homage. “What—what did you say her name was!” he asked thickly, swallowing between words, as though the pressure of his breath forced them back into his throat.
“Peligia,” de Grandin returned, bending closer to study the texture of her robe.
“Peligia,” Bennett, repeated softly. “Peligia—” Scarce aware of what he did, he reached downward and took one of the shapely hands crossed above her quiet breast in his.
Jules de Grandin and I stood fascinated, scarce daring to breathe, for at the whispered name and the pressure of the boy’s fingers on hers, the woman in the coffin stirred, the slender, girlish bosom heaved as if with respiration, and the smooth, wax-white lids fluttered upward from a pair of long gray eyes as gentle as the summer and as glowing as the stars. A wave of upward-rising color flooded her throat, her cheeks; the hue of healthy, buoyant youth showed in her face, and her calmly set lips parted in the faintest suggestion of a smile.
“My lord,” she murmured softly, meeting young Bennett’s gaze with a look of gentle trust. “My lord and my love, at last you have come for me.”
And she spoke in English.
“Morbleu, Friend Trowbridge, look to me, assist me hence to some asylum for lunatics,” de Grandin implored. “I am caduc—mad like a hare of March. I see that which is not and hear words unspoken!”
“Then I’m crazy too,” I rejoined, leaning forward to assist Bennett in his task of lifting the girl from her coffin-bed. “We’re all mad—mad as hatters, but—”
The Horror on the Links Page 54