by The Mummy;Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension
But it must not be thought that women are the only sexual criminals. There are male as well as female prostitutes made respectable by convention, and the debt-burdened man of title who marries to get gold to re-gild his tarnished coronet is the worst of these; for too often he drags an innocent but ignorant maiden down to his own vile level. Yet the chief criminal of all is not the individual, but the Society which not only encourages, but too often compels the crime. For this it also pays the penalty. The collective crime brings the collective curse, for, if human history proves anything, it proves that the Society which persistently denies the Law of Selection, and continually defiles the Altar of Love, in the end goes down through a foul welter of lust and greed and gluttony into the nethermost Pit of Destruction.
Nitocris had not learned this yet. It was not within the plan of Eternal Justice that her virgin soul, purified by the strenuous labour of many lives towards the Light, should yet be darkened by the shadow of such grim knowledge as this. It was enough for her now that she should be the ministering angel of Love and Light.
But at the same moment, standing on that smooth, shady lawn, there were also two incarnations of the destroying angels of Hate and Darkness, for even here, amidst this pleasant scene of seemingly innocent pleasure and laughter, the Eternal Conflict was being continued, as it is and must be, wherever man comes in contact with his kith and kind.
Soon after Nitocris and Brenda had joined the group, Phadrig approached the Prince, who happened for the moment to be standing alone at the bottom of the lawn, and said softly in Russian:
"Highness, my dream, as you are pleased to call it, has proved true. That is the Queen—she who was once the daughter of the great Rameses, Lady of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms."
"What?" laughed the Prince. "Miss Marmion, that lovely English girl, your old Egyptian Mummy re-vivified! Well, have it as you like. You are welcome to your dreams as long as you use your arts to help me to lay hands on the beautiful reality. I have seen many a fair woman, and thought myself in love with some of them, but by the beard of Ivan, I have never seen one like this. I tell you, Phadrig, that the moment my eyes looked for the first time into hers, only a few minutes ago, I knew that I had found my fate, and, having found it, I shall take very good care that I don't lose it. And you shall help me to keep it; I shall try every fair means first to make her my princess, for, whether she was once Queen of Egypt or not, she is worthy now to sit beside a sovereign on his throne—and it might be that I could some day give her such a place—but have her I will, if not as fairly-won wife and consort, then as stolen slave and plaything, to keep as long as my fancy lasts. And listen, Phadrig," he went on in a low tone, but with savage intensity. "Your life is mine, for I gave it back to you when the lifting of a finger would have sent you into what you would call another incarnation; and from this day forth you must devote it to this end until it is attained, one way or the other. I know you don't care for money as wealth, but in this world it is the right hand of power, and that you love. All that you need shall be yours for the asking in exchange for your faithful service. Are you content with the bargain?"
"No, Highness, that will not content me," replied Phadrig, in a voice that had no expression save unalterable resolve.
"What! Is not that enough for you, a penniless seller of curios?" said the Prince, with a sneer in his tone. "Then I will add to it the ready aid and unquestioning obedience of our secret police, here and in Europe. Will that satisfy you?"
"I do not need the help of your police, Highness," answered the Egyptian, in the same passionless accents. "They are skilful and brave, but they have not the Greater Knowledge. I could turn the wisest of them into a fool, and frighten the bravest out of his senses in a few minutes. Use them yourself, Highness, should it become necessary. They would be less than useless to me."
"Then what will satisfy you?" asked the Prince impatiently, but with no show of anger, for he knew the strange power of the man whose help he needed.
"I do not ask you to believe in the reality of what you call my dreams, Highness," replied Phadrig slowly, "but I do ask—nay, I require, as the price of my faithful service, your solemn promise in writing, signed and attested, that, if and when my dreams become realities, and your own hopes are fulfilled, the independence and sovereignty of the Ancient Land shall be restored; her temples and tombs and palaces shall be rebuilt; her ancient worship revived in my person, and the sceptre of Rameses replaced in the hand of Nitocris the Queen."
The Prince was silent for a few moments. To grant the seemingly extravagant demand meant to reduce the splendid dream and scheme of his life to cold, tangible writing, and to put into this man's hand the power to betray him. On the other hand, their aims were one, and only through him could Phadrig hope to realise his dreams. Of course they were only dreams; but he was faithful to them, and so he would be faithful to him. At the worst it would be easy to arrange a burglary, or, for the matter of that, a murder in Candler's Court, and that would make an end of the matter.
"Very well, Phadrig," he said at length. "It is settled. I will trust you, for it is necessary that we should trust each other. You shall have what you ask for within a week. Now I must go. I shall tell them that I have been arranging the exhibition of your powers which you are going to give them. It will be well to startle them sufficiently to shake their British beef-sense up into something like fear. Make them wonder, but, for the sake of our hostess, don't frighten them too much."
Phadrig only acknowledged his promise with a bow, and he turned away and joined the growing group in which Nitocris and Brenda were still the central objects of attraction.
Chapter XI - The Marvels of Phadrig
*
The time, about an hour or so before tea, was occupied by the guests according to their varying tastes—in tennis, croquet, more or less good-natured gossip, and flirtations which may or may not have been serious.
Nitocris saw with growing cause for self-gratulation that Lord Leighton and Brenda were decidedly attracted towards each other. He, in spite of having received his gracious, but, as he well knew, final congé from Nitocris, still felt that he was not quite playing the game with himself; but for all that it was impossible for him not to see that the emotion, which was even now stirring in his heart, awakened by the first touch of Brenda's hand, and the first meeting of their eyes, was something very different from the tenderly respectful admiration, the real friendship, inevitably exalted by the magic of sex, which, as he saw now, he had innocently mistaken for love.
He managed quite adroitly to separate Brenda from the circle, and to lure her into a stroll about the outside grounds, during which he told her the history and traditions of "The Wilderness" not, of course, omitting the sad little tragedy of the Lady Alicia, all of which Miss Brenda listened to with an interest which was not, perhaps, wholly derived from the story itself. She had never yet met any one who was quite like this learned, much-travelled, quiet-spoken young aristocrat. On her father's side she was descended from one of the oldest Knickerbocker families in the State of New York and her aristocracy responded instinctively to his, and formed a first bond between them.
It need hardly be said that her beauty and her prospective wealth, to say nothing of the bright, mental, and intellectual atmosphere in which she seemed to live and move, had attracted to her many men whom she had inspired with a very genuine desire to link their lives with hers. She was only twenty-two, but she had already refused more than one coronet of respectable dignity, and so far her heart had remained as virgin as it was when she had admired herself in her first long skirt. But now, for the first time in her life, she began to feel a strange disquietude in the presence of a man, and a man, too, whom she had not known for an hour. Nitocris had, happily, told her nothing of what had passed between Lord Leighton and herself, and so the pleasant element in her disquietude was entirely unalloyed.
Her father was already too deeply engrossed in learned converse with his brother professors to ta
ke any notice of the great fact which was beginning to get itself accomplished; but her mother's instinct instantly noticed the subtle change that had come over her daughter, and she saw it with anything but displeasure. All sensible mothers of beautiful daughters are discreetly sanguine. She was far too wise in her generation not to have agreed with Brenda's decision in certain former cases. The idea of her daughter's beauty and her father's millions being bartered for mere rank and social power, however splendid, was utterly repugnant to her. She had married for love, and she wanted Brenda to do the same, whoever the chosen man might be, provided always that he was a man—and in this regard there could be no doubt about Lord Lester Leighton; so as they walked away she said to Nitocris with a confidence which was almost girlish:
"His Lordship is just delightful—now, isn't he, Miss Marmion? Just the sort that you seem to raise over here, and nowhere else. Tells you that you have to take him for a gentleman and nothing else in the first three words he says to you—and Brenda seems to like him. I never saw her go off with a man like that on such short notice, for Brenda's pretty proud and cold with men, for all her nice ways and high spirits."
"You would have to search a long time, Mrs van Huysman," replied Nitocris very demurely, "before you found a better type of the real English gentleman than Lord Leighton. His family is one of the oldest in the country, and, unlike too many of our noble families, the Kynestons have no bar-sinister on their escutcheon."
"I guess you're getting a little beyond me there, Miss Marmion. I don't think I ever heard of a—what is it?—a bar-sinister, before. What might it be?"
Nitocris flushed very faintly as she replied:
"I think I can explain it best, Mrs van Huysman, by saying that it means that Lord Leighton's ancestors have preserved their honour unstained through many generations. Of course, you know that some of our so-called noble families in England spring from anything but a noble origin. There are not a few English dukes and earls who would find it rather awkward to introduce their great-great-grandmothers to their present circle of friends."
"I should think they would, from what I have read of them, the shameless creatures!" said Mrs van Huysman, with a sniff of real republican virtue.
Then the Prince joined them, and the conversation was promptly switched off on to another line of interest.
Tea was served on the Old Lawn under the shade of the great cedars, which made its greatest adornment; and when everybody had had what he or she wanted, and the men had lit their cigarettes—and the Professors, by special permission, their pipes—Nitocris looked across a couple of tables at Oscarovitch, whom she had so far managed most adroitly to keep at an endurable distance, and said:
"Now, Prince, if your friend the Adept is in the mood to astonish us with his wonders, perhaps you will be good enough to tell him that we are all ready and willing to be startled—only I hope that he will be merciful to our ignorance and not frighten us too much."
"I can assure you, Miss Marmion, that my good friend from Egypt will be discretion itself," replied the Prince, with a look and a courtly gesture that inspired Commander Merrill with an almost passionate longing to take him down one of the quiet paths under the beeches for a ten minutes' interlude. "I can promise that he will show you some marvels which even your learned and distinguished father and his confrères may find difficult of explanation: but it shall all be white magic. I understand that your real adept considers the black variety as what you call bad form."
As the company rose and went in little groups towards the tennis-lawn, where Phadrig had elected to display his powers, the three Professors instinctively joined each other in a small phalanx of scepticism. If there was any trick or deception to be discovered all looked to them to do it, and they were almost gleefully aware of their responsibility. Figuratively speaking, they each wore the scalps of many spiritualistic mediums, and both Professor van Huysman and Professor Hartley sensed a possible addition to their belts of scientific wampum which would not be the least of their trophies. It had been agreed to by Phadrig, with a quiet scorn, that they were to take any measures they liked to detect him in any practice that would convict him of being merely a conjurer; and they had accepted the permission with that whole-souled devotion to truth which excludes all idea of pity from the really scientific mind. Franklin Marmion was naturally in a very different frame of mind, although, from reasons of high policy, he assumed a similar mask of almost scornful scepticism; but for all that he was by far the most anxious man in the company.
At the request of their hostess the guests arranged themselves sitting and standing in a spacious circle on the tennis-lawn; and when this was, formed, Phadrig, whose isolation so far from the rest of the company had been satisfactorily explained by the Prince, walked slowly into the middle of it, and, after a quick, keen glance round him—a glance which rested for just a moment or so on Professor Marmion and his confrères, and then on Nitocris, who was sitting beside Brenda attended by Lord Leighton and Merrill—he said in a low but clear and far-reaching voice, and in perfect English:
"Ladies and gentlemen, I have come to the house of the learned Professor Marmion at the request of my very good friend and patron, His Highness Prince Oscar Oscarovitch, to give you a little display of what I may call white magic. But before I begin I must ask you to accept my word of honour as a humble student of the mysteries of what, for want of a better word, we call Nature, that I am not in any sense a conjurer, by which I mean one who performs apparent marvels by merely deceiving your senses.
"What I am going to show you, you really will see. My marvels, if you please to think them such, will be realities, not illusions; and I shall be pleased if you will take every means to satisfy yourselves that they are so. I say this with all the more pleasure because I know that there are present three gentlemen of great eminence in the world of science, and if they are not able to detect me in anything approaching trickery, I think you will take their word for it that I am not deceiving you.
"In order that there may not be the smallest possible chance of error, I will ask Professors Marmion, Hartley, and Van Huysman to come and stand near to me, so that they may be satisfied that I make use of none of the mere conjurer's apparatus. I shall use nothing but the knowledge, and therefore the power, to which it has been my privilege to attain."
Phadrig spoke with all the calm confidence of perfect self-reliance, and therefore his words were not wanting in effect on his audience, critical and sceptical as it was.
"I reckon that's a challenge we can't very well afford to let go," said Professor van Huysman, with a keen look at his two brother scientists. "Of course he's just a trick-merchant, but they're so mighty clever nowadays, especially these fellows from the gorgeous East, that you've got to keep your eyes wide open all the time they've got the platform."
"Certainly," said Professor Hartley, as they moved out from the circle; "it must be trickery of some sort, and we shall be doing a public service by exposing it. What do you think, Marmion? I hope you won't mind the exposure taking place in your own garden and among your own guests?"
"Not a bit, my dear Hartley," replied Franklin Marmion with a smile, which was quite lost upon his absolutely materialistic friends. "We have, as Van Huysman says, received a direct challenge. We should be most unworthy servants of our great Mistress if we did not take it up. Personally, I mean to find out everything that I can."
"And, gentlemen," laughed the Prince, who had been standing with them and now moved away towards Nitocris, "I sincerely hope that what you find out will be worth the learning."
"He's a big man, that," said Professor van Huysman, when he was out of earshot, "but he's not the sort I'd have much use for. I wonder why those people who are on the war-path in his country ever let him out of it alive?"
In accordance with Phadrig's request, they made a triangle of which he was the central point. Without any formula of introduction, he said rather abruptly:
"Professor van Huysman, will you oblige me
by taking a croquet ball and holding it in your hand as tightly as you can?"
Brenda ran out of the circle and gave him one. He took it and gripped it in a fist that looked made to hold things. Phadrig glanced at the ball, and said quietly:
"Follow me!"
Then he turned away, and, in spite of all the Professor's efforts to hold it, the ball somehow slipped through his fingers and fell on to the lawn. Then, to the utter amazement of every one, except Franklin Marmion, it rolled towards the Adept and followed him at a distance of about three yards as he walked round the circle of spectators. He did not even look at it. When he had made the round, he took his place in the Triangle of Science, and the ball stopped at his feet.
"It is now released, Professor," he said to Van Huysman. "You may take it away, if you wish."
There was something in the saying of the last sentence that nettled him. He had seen all, or nearly all, the physical laws, which were to him as the Credo is to a Catholic or the Profession of Faith to a Moslem, openly and shamelessly outraged, defied, and set at nought. To say he was angry would be to give a very inadequate idea of his feelings, because he, the greatest exposer of Spiritualism, Dowieism, and Christian Scientism in the United States, was not only angry, but—for the time being only, as he hoped—utterly bewildered. It was too much, as he would have put it, to take lying down, and so, greatly daring, he took a couple of strides towards Phadrig, and said with a snarl in his voice: