“My dear boy, you take the matter too seriously,” said his companion. “Your nerves are out of order with your work, and you make too much of it. How could such a thing as this stride about the streets of Oxford, even at night, without being seen?”
“It has been seen. There is quite a scare in the town about an escaped ape, as they imagine the creature to be. It is the talk of the place.”
“Well, it’s a striking chain of events. And yet, my dear fellow, you must allow that each incident in itself is capable of a more natural explanation.”
“What! even my adventure of tonight?”
“Certainly. You come out with your nerves all unstrung, and your head full of this theory of yours. Some gaunt, half famished tramp steals after you, and seeing you run, is emboldened to pursue you. Your fears and imagination do the rest.”
“It won’t do, Peterson; it won’t do.”
“And again, in the instance of your finding the mummy case empty, and then a few moments later with an occupant, you know that it was lamplight, that the lamp was half turned down, and that you had no special reason to look hard at the case. It is quite possible that you may have overlooked the creature in the first instance.”
“No, no; it is out of the question.”
“And then Lee may have fallen into the river, and Norton been garroted. It is certainly a formidable indictment that you have against Bellingham; but if you were to place it before a police magistrate, he would simply laugh in your face.”
“I know he would. That is why I mean to take the matter into my own hands.”
“Eh?”
“Yes; I feel that a public duty rests upon me, and, besides, I must do it for my own safety, unless I choose to allow myself to be hunted by this beast out of the college, and that would be a little too feeble. I have quite made up my mind what I shall do. And first of all, may I use your paper and pens for an hour?”
“Most certainly. You will find all that you want upon that side table.”
Abercrombie Smith sat down before a sheet of foolscap, and for an hour, and then for a second hour, his pen traveled swiftly over it. Page after page was finished and tossed aside while his friend leaned back in his armchair, looking across at him with patient curiosity. At last, with an exclamation of satisfaction, Smith sprang to his feet, gathered his papers up into order, and laid the last one upon Peterson’s desk.
“Kindly sign this as a witness,” he said.
“A witness? Of what?”
“Of my signature, and of the date. The date is the most important. Why, Peterson, my life might hang upon it.”
“My dear Smith, you are talking wildly. Let me beg you to go to bed.”
“On the contrary, I never spoke so deliberately in my life. And I will promise to go to bed the moment you have signed it.”
“But what is it?”
“It is a statement of all that I have been telling you tonight. I wish you to witness it.”
“Certainly,” said Peterson, signing his name under that of his companion. “There you are! But what is the idea?”
“You will kindly retain it, and produce it in case I am arrested.”
“Arrested? For what?”
“For murder. It is quite on the cards. I wish to be ready for every event. There is only one course open to me, and I am determined to take it.”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t do anything rash!”
“Believe me, it would be far more rash to adopt any other course. I hope that we won’t need to bother you, but it will ease my mind to know that you have this statement of my motives. And now I am ready to take your advice and to go to roost, for I want to be at my best in the morning.”
Abercrombie Smith was not an entirely pleasant man to have as an enemy. Slow and easy tempered, he was formidable when driven to action. He brought to every purpose in life the same deliberate resoluteness that had distinguished him as a scientific student. He had laid his studies aside for a day, but he intended that the day should not be wasted. Not a word did he say to his host as to his plans, but by nine o’clock he was well on his way to Oxford.
In the High Street he stopped at Clifford’s, the gunmaker’s, and bought a heavy revolver, with a box of center-fire cartridges. Six of them he slipped into the chambers, and half cocking the weapon, placed it in the pocket of his coat. He then made his way to Hastie’s rooms, where the big oarsman was lounging over his breakfast, with the Sporting Times propped up against the coffeepot.
“Hullo! What’s up?” he asked. “Have some coffee?”
“No, thank you. I want you to come with me, Hastie, and do what I ask you.”
“Certainly, my boy.”
“And bring a heavy stick with you.”
“Hullo!” Hastie stared. “Here’s a hunting crop that would fell an ox.”
“One other thing. You have a box of amputating knives. Give me the longest of them.”
“There you are. You seem to be fairly on the war trail. Anything else?”
“No; that will do.” Smith placed the knife inside his coat, and led the way to the quadrangle. “We are neither of us chickens, Hastie,” said he. “I think I can do this job alone, but I take you as a precaution. I am going to have a little talk with Bellingham. If I have only him to deal with, I won’t, of course, need you. If Ishout, however, up you come, and lam out with your whip as hard as you can lick. Do you understand?”
“All right. I’ll come if I hear you bellow.”
“Stay here, then. I may be a little time, but don’t budge until I come down.”
“I’m a fixture.”
Smith ascended the stairs, opened Bellingham’s door and stepped in. Bellingham was seated behind his table, writing. Beside him, among his litter of strange possessions, towered the mummy case, with its sale number 249 still stuck upon its front, and its hideous occupant stiff and stark within it. Smith looked very deliberately round him, closed the door, and then, stepping across to the fireplace, struck a match and set the fire alight. Bellingham sat staring, with amazement and rage upon his bloated face.
“Well, really now, you make yourself at home,” he gasped.
Smith sat himself deliberately down, placing his watch upon the table, drew out his pistol, cocked it, and laid it in his lap. Then he took the long amputating knife from his bosom, and threw it down in front of Bellingham.
“Now, then,” said he, “just get to work and cut up that mummy.”
“Oh, is that it?” said Bellingham with a sneer.
“Yes, that is it. They tell me that the law can’t touch you. But I have a law that will set matters straight. If in five minutes you have not set to work, I swear by the God who made me that I will put a bullet through your brain!”
“You would murder me?”
Bellingham had half risen, and his face was the color of putty.
“Yes.”
“And for what?”
“To stop your mischief. One minute has gone.”
“But what have I done?”
“I know and you know.”
“This is mere bullying.”
“Two minutes are gone.”
“But you must give reasons. You are a madman—a dangerous madman. Why should I destroy my own property? It is a valuable mummy.”
“You must cut it up, and you must burn it.”
“I will do no such thing.”
“Four minutes are gone.”
Smith took up the pistol and he looked toward Bellingham with an inexorable face. As the second hand stole round, he raised his hand, and the finger twitched upon the trigger.
“There! there! I’ll do it!” screamed Bellingham.
In frantic haste he caught up the knife and hacked at the figure of the mummy, ever glancing round to see the eye and the weapon of his terrible visitor bent upon him. The creature crackled and snapped under every stab of the keen blade. A thick, yellow dust rose up from it. Spices and dried essences rained down upon the floor. Suddenly, with a rending
crack, its backbone snapped asunder, and it fell, a brown heap of sprawling limbs, upon the floor.
“Now into the fire!” said Smith.
The flames leaped and roared as the dried and tinderlike debris was piled upon it. The little room was like the stokehole of a steamer and the sweat ran down the faces of the two men; but still the one stooped and worked, while the other sat watching him with a set face. A thick, fat smoke oozed out from the fire, and a heavy smell of burned resin and singed hair filled the air. In a quarter of an hour a few charred and brittle sticks were all that was left of Lot No. 249.
“Perhaps that will satisfy you,” snarled Bellingham, with hate and fear in his little gray eyes as he glanced back at his tormentor.
“No; I must make a clean sweep of all your materials. We must have no more devil’s tricks. In with all these leaves! They may have something to do with it.”
“And what now?” asked Bellingham, when the leaves also had been added to the blaze.
“Now the roll of papyrus which you had on the table that night. It is in that drawer, I think.”
“No, no,” shouted Bellingham. “Don’t burn that! Why, man, you don’t know what you do. It is unique; it contains wisdom which is nowhere else to be found.”
“Out with it!”
“But look here, Smith, you can’t really mean it. I’ll share the knowledge with you. I’ll teach you all that is in it. Or, stay, let me only copy it before you burn it!”
Smith stepped forward and turned the key in the drawer. Taking out the yellow, curled roll of paper, he threw it into the fire, and pressed it down with his heel. Bellingham screamed, and grabbed at it; but Smith pushed him back and stood over it until it was reduced to a formless, gray ash.
“Now, Master B.,” said he, “I think I have pretty well drawn your teeth. You’ll hear from me again, if you return to your old tricks. And now good morning, for I must go back to my studies.”
And such is the narrative of Abercrombie Smith as to the singular events that occurred in Old College, Oxford, in the spring of ’84. As Bellingham left the university immediately afterward, and was last heard of in the Sudan, there is no one who can contradict his statement. But the wisdom of men is small, and the ways of Nature are strange, and who shall put a bound to the dark things that may be found by those who seek for them?
ELLEN GLASGOW
(1873–1945)
One of ten children, Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, into a well-respected Southern family. At the age of sixteen, her hearing began to fail, and doctors were unable to prevent her from becoming deaf.Although she lived in New York City for a time, she spent most of her life in Richmond. Her first novel, The Descendant, which she began at the age of seventeen, was published anonymously in 1897. Among the novels that followed are Phases of an In ferior Planet (1898), The Battle-Ground (1902), The Ancient Law (1908), Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and Vein of Iron (1935). In This Our Life (1941) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She also published literary criticism, poems, and a collection of short stories, The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923).
The Shadowy Third
(1916)
When the call came I remember that I turned from the telephone in a romantic flutter. Though I had spoken only once to the great surgeon, Roland Maradick, I felt on that December afternoon that to speak to him only once—to watch him in the operating-room for a single hour—was an adventure which drained the colour and the excitement from the rest of life. After all these years of work on typhoid and pneumonia cases, I can still feel the delicious tremor of my young pulses; I can still see the winter sunshine slanting through the hospital windows over the white uniforms of the nurses.
“He didn’t mention me by name. Can there be a mistake ?” I stood, incredulous yet ecstatic, before the superintendent of the hospital.
“No, there isn’t a mistake. I was talking to him before you came down.” Miss Hemphill’s strong face softened while she looked at me. She was a big, resolute woman, a distant Canadian relative of my mother’s, and the kind of nurse I had discovered in the month since I had come up from Richmond, that Northern hospital boards, if not Northern patients, appear instinctively to select. From the first, in spite of her hardness, she had taken a liking—I hesitate to use the word “fancy” for a preference so impersonal—to her Virginia cousin. After all, it isn’t every Southern nurse, just out of training, who can boast a kinswoman in the superintendent of a New York hospital.
“And he made you understand positively that he meant me?” The thing was so wonderful that I simply couldn’t believe it.
“He asked particularly for the nurse who was with Miss Hudson last week when he operated. I think he didn’t even remember that you had a name. When I asked if he meant Miss Randolph, he repeated that he wanted the nurse who had been with Miss Hudson. She was small, he said, and cheerful-looking. This, of course, might apply to one or two of the others, but none of these was with Miss Hudson.”
“Then I suppose it is really true?” My pulses were tingling. “And I am to be there at six o’clock?”
“Not a minute later. The day nurse goes off duty at that hour, and Mrs. Maradick is never left by herself for an instant.”
“It is her mind, isn’t it? And that makes it all the stranger that he should select me, for I have had so few mental cases.”
“So few cases of any kind.” Miss Hemphill was smiling, and when she smiled I wondered if the other nurses would know her. “By the time you have gone through the treadmill in New York, Margaret, you will have lost a good many things besides your inexperience. I wonder how long you will keep your sympathy and your imagination? After all, wouldn’t you have made a better novelist than a nurse?”
“I can’t help putting myself into my cases. I suppose one ought not to?”
“It isn’t a question of what one ought to do, but of what one must. When you are drained of every bit of sympathy and enthusiasm, and have got nothing in return for it, not even thanks, you will understand why I try to keep you from wasting yourself.”
“But surely in a case like this—for Doctor Maradick?”
“Oh, well, of course—for Doctor Maradick.” She must have seen that I implored her confidence, for, after a minute, she let fall carelessly a gleam of light on the situation: “It is a very sad case when you think what a charming man and a great surgeon Doctor Maradick is.”
Above the starched collar of my uniform I felt the blood leap in bounds to my cheeks. “I have spoken to him only once,” I murmured, “but he is charming, and so kind and handsome, isn’t he?”
“His patients adore him.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve seen that. Everyone hangs on his visits.” Like the patients and the other nurses, I also had come by delightful, if imperceptible, degrees to hang on the daily visits of Doctor Maradick. He was, I suppose, born to be a hero to women. From my first day in his hospital, from the moment when I watched, through closed shutters, while he stepped out of his car, I have never doubted that he was assigned to the great part in the play. If I had been ignorant of his spell—of the charm he exercised over his hospital—I should have felt it in the waiting hush, like a drawn breath, which followed his ring at the door and preceded his imperious footstep on the stairs. My first impression of him, even after the terrible events of the next year, records a memory that is both careless and splendid. At that moment, when, gazing through the chinks in the shutters, I watched him, in his coat of dark fur, cross the pavement over the pale streaks of sunshine, I knew beyond any doubt—I knew with a sort of infallible prescience—that my fate was irretrievably bound up with his in the future. I knew this, I repeat, though Miss Hemphill would still insist that my foreknowledge was merely a sentimental gleaning from indiscriminate novels. But it wasn’t only first love, impressionable as my kinswoman believed me to be. It wasn’t only the way he looked. Even more than his appearance—more than the shining dark of
his eyes, the silvery brown of his hair, the dusky glow in his face—even more than his charm and his magnificence, I think, the beauty and sympathy in his voice won my heart. It was a voice, I heard someone say afterwards, that ought always to speak poetry.
So you will see why—if you do not understand at the beginning, I can never hope to make you believe impossible things!—so you will see why I accepted the call when it came as an imperative summons. I couldn’t have stayed away after he sent for me. However much I may have tried not to go, I know that in the end I must have gone. In those days, while I was still hoping to write novels, I used to talk a great deal about “destiny” (I have learned since then how silly all such talk is), and I suppose it was my “destiny” to be caught in the web of Roland Maradick’s personality. But I am not the first nurse to grow lovesick about a doctor who never gave her a thought.
“I am glad you got the call, Margaret. It may mean a great deal to you. Only try not to be too emotional.” I remember that Miss Hemphill was holding a bit of rosegeranium in her hand while she spoke—one of the patients had given it to her from a pot she kept in her room, and the scent of the flower is still in my nostrils—or my memory. Since then—oh, long since then—I have wondered if she also had been caught in the web.
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