by The Mummy;Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension
"He is ready. Are the men below?"
"All, Highness, save Grovno at the wheel and Hartog on the look-out. They will see nothing, as they did before," came the whispered reply.
"Very well, then. You and I can manage this between us. You have the line?"
The captain nodded, and they went into the room, softly closing the door. In a few minutes they came out again, carrying between them a long bundle of blankets lashed from end to end with thin line. They took it aft along the alloway and out on to the lower deck by the stern. Two iron doors of a port used for coaling stood open on the starboard side. On the deck lay a couple of pigs of iron lashed together. These the captain made fast to one end of the bundle and lifted them towards the port. Oscarovitch took hold of the other end. They lifted it. The weights dropped outside the port, and the bundle followed them. The captain started up, clasped his hands to his forehead, and said in a gasping whisper:
"Holy God, Highness, what have we done?"
"What do you mean, Derevskin? You have obeyed my orders; that is all. Is it not enough for you?"
"Yes, Highness—but who or what was that man? Was he really a man?"
"Are you mad, Derevskin?"
"No, Highness, I hope not: but did you hear—or, rather, did you not hear?"
"What, you fool?"
"He—it—the body—it made no splash when it touched the water!"
The stammered words struck Oscarovitch like so many puffs of frozen air. No, the body of Franklin Marmion had made no splash. It had vanished through the port into silence. That was all. He beat back his own terror with the exertion of all his will-power, and said in a sneering whisper:
"Derevskin, you are either mad or drunk; but I will forgive you this time because you have obeyed. Go to bed, and don't forget to be either sober or sane when I come on deck."
The captain bowed his head, and went forward with shambling steps and shaking limbs. Oscarovitch closed the port with hands which all his force could not keep steady, and betook himself to bed, to lie awake for the rest of the short summer night wondering vainly what really had happened.
He had had his bath and dressed soon after six, and went on deck. The captain was on the bridge, and he joined him.
"Good morning, Derevskin!"
"I have the honour to wish Your Highness good morning!"
"Nothing happened during the night worth reporting, I suppose?"
"No, Highness, nothing."
"Very good: but I have slept badly, and you look as if you had been on the bridge all night. Perhaps it is necessary among all these islands, and I am pleased that you are so watchful, especially as I have guests on board. Come down to your room now and send your steward for a bottle. It will do neither of us any harm."
There was a somewhat lengthy conversation over this early breakfast of champagne and biscuits after the door had been closed and locked, and when it was finished, Oscarovitch and his captain understood each other as completely as was necessary.
An hour later he saw Nitocris walking about the upper deck looking pale and anxious. He went to her and said in a tone which intentionally betrayed his own nervousness:
"Good morning, Miss Marmion! Have you seen anything of the Professor?"
"No, Prince, I have not. I went to his room just now and knocked. There was no reply and I opened the door. The room was empty, but he had evidently been to bed. Is he not on deck?"
"No, Miss Marmion, he is not. He said last night that he would like his bath about six, and the steward I sent to valet him went to his room and found it as you say. I have had the ship searched high and low, and from stem to stern, and there is no sign of him. I have had every one questioned, and no one has seen anything of him since last night."
"Oh, my poor, poor Dad, I have lost him! Yes, I suppose it must have been that. He has walked overboard."
"Walked overboard, Miss Marmion?"
"Yes, yes, it must be that. Prince Oscarovitch, my father, like most very clever men, had one dangerous failing. He walked in his sleep and did things unconsciously. That was why he told you about the ghost at 'The Wilderness' just as though he really had seen it. Yes, he must have got up in the night and come on deck, and walked overboard, and so I have lost the best friend I ever had, or shall have. You must excuse me, Prince. I must go to my room. The very sunlight seems horrible now. Jenny will look after me. Good morning!"
Her face was white and her eyes were staring at nothing. She spoke with a horrible, stony calm which, crime-hardened as he was, sent a thrilling shiver through his nerves. A spasm of remorse shook him; then his self-control came back, and he offered her his arm in silence. He led her down to the saloon, and gave her into Jenny's charge. Then he went on deck again, lit a cigar, and proceeded to congratulate himself on the great good fortune which had, from his point of view at least, so happily explained away the disappearance of Franklin Marmion.
Chapter XXIV - The Lust that was—and Is
*
Nitocris kept her room until nearly seven the following evening. Oscarovitch made frequent enquiries of Jenny as to her condition, and always received the same reply. Her mistress was in a semi-unconscious state, and she could only rouse her every now and then to take a little nourishment. Unfortunately there was no doctor on board. He had had news in Copenhagen that his mother was lying very ill at Hamburg, and, as the cruise was then intended to be only a very short one, he had been given leave to go to her.
The Prince wished to go back to Copenhagen, but this Nitocris absolutely refused. She had determined to fight her sorrow alone, and when she had conquered it, she would go back to England and her friends—which was exactly what Oscarovitch had determined she should not do. She was absolutely at his mercy now. He would be something worse than a fool to let such a golden opportunity go by—and so the Grashna's bowsprit was kept pointing eastward, and the leagues between her and Oscarburg were being flung behind her as fast as the whirling screws could devour them.
The only question that he had to ask himself was: How? and to that an easy answer at once suggested itself: The Horus Stone.
When he went down to what he expected would be a lonely dinner, he was more than agreeably surprised to find Nitocris dressed in a black evening costume, which was the nearest approach to mourning that her available wardrobe made possible, already in the saloon.
He bowed to her with a gesture of reverence, which meant far more than mere formal politeness, and said in a low tone:
"Miss Marmion, I need not say how pleased I am to find that you are able to leave your room. May I hope that you will be able to dine?"
"Yes, Prince," she replied, in the same cold, mechanical voice in which she had answered the tidings of her father's death. "The worst is over now, I hope. Some time and some way we must all leave the world and, at least, there is the consolation that my father has left it perhaps a little better and a little wiser than he found it. That, I think is as much as the ordinary mortal may be permitted to hope for. We who hold the Doctrine do not sorrow for the dead: we only sorrow for ourselves who are left to wait until we may, perhaps, meet again."
"The Doctrine, Miss Marmion?" he asked, as he placed a chair for her at his right hand. "May I ask what the Doctrine is?"
"Of re-incarnation," she replied, sitting down and looking at him across the corner of the table.
"Really? I most sincerely wish that I could believe in it. Mr Amena, whom I took the great liberty of bringing to your garden-party, a man of very remarkable powers, as you saw, holds the Doctrine, as you call it, and he has been trying for months to convert me to it; but, as I said going to Elsinore, I'm afraid I am too hopelessly materialistic for any conversion to be possible in my case, at least as far as my present experiences have gone."
"As the belief so must be the faith," she said with a grave smile. "It is no more possible to have true faith when you do not really believe than it is to be hungry when you have not got an appetite. That is quite a material simile; but I thin
k it is true."
"Absolutely true!" he replied, looking at her again with a note of interrogation in each eye. "But, really, these things are too deep for me, a mere human animal. And now, talking about appetite, here comes the soup."
The dinner à deux was just what he had intended it to be, simple and yet perfect in every detail. The subject of Franklin Marmion's departure from the world was, as if by mutual consent, dropped. Oscarovitch comforted such conscience as he had by trying to believe that what Nitocris had said about her belief in the Doctrine was to her really true. He also honestly believed that she had faced her great sorrow in solitude, and overcome it in the strength of that belief. Their conversation turned easily away to other topics, and by the time that coffee was brought in and he had obtained her permission to light a cigarette, his beautiful guest appeared to have left the recent past behind her, for the time being at least, and was almost as she had been during the run up to Elsinore.
Her manner was that of complete composure, and it is hardly necessary to say that this mastery of her emotion forced him to a degree of admiration, almost of worship, which the physical charm that appealed only to his animal senses could never have inspired. Here, truly, was the ideal Empress of the Russias and the East sitting almost beside him. And now the psychological moment had come!
"Will you excuse me for a couple of minutes, Miss Marmion?" he asked, as he finished his coffee and rose from his chair. "Going back to what you were saying about re-incarnation: I have something in my room which I hope may interest you. I got it from my friend, the miracle-worker. He told me a long story about it that I don't want to trouble you with: but the thing in itself is quite worth seeing. At least, I never saw anything like it before."
"Then please let me see it," she replied, assenting with an inclination of her head. "If that is so it must be, as you say, well worth seeing."
He went to his room and came back with a large square morocco case in his hand. He gave it to her, and said:
"Do me the favour to open it, and tell me what you think of it."
She touched the spring and the cover flew up. She half-expected what she saw. There, lying in a nest of soft black velvet, encircled by a triple halo of whitely gleaming diamonds, was the Horus Stone. In an instant she travelled back through fifty centuries to the scene of the death-bridal of her other self, Nitocris the Queen, in the banqueting-hall of the Palace of Pepi. Then it had lain gleaming on her breast, and now she saw it again with the eyes of flesh, after nearly five thousand years. Now, too, she grasped in all the fullness of its evil meaning the reason why Oscarovitch had brought it to her in such an hour as this. With utter contempt in her soul and a smile on her lips, she leaned back in her chair and said in a voice which had a note of ecstasy in it:
"Oh, Prince, how lovely! What a glorious gem! The diamonds are, of course, splendid, but they are only a setting for the emerald. What a magnificent stone! Rich as you are, you are very fortunate to be the possessor of such a treasure—for treasure it surely must be."
"It is, as you say, a magnificent stone," he replied, looking steadily into her questioning eyes. "But if what Amena told me was true, it is something more than a unique gem. There is an inscription on it, some characters carved in the stone which are, as he said, the history of it, but to me they are as unintelligible as the Assyrian cuneiform would be. Possibly you may know something of them. If you do, here is a lens that will help your sight."
She took the glass from him and bent down over the gem. She read the sacred symbol of the Trinity as she had read it and known it ages before. But while she was gazing at it, she also read the intent of the man who had given it into her hands. She put the lens aside, and, laying her palms on her temples, she looked deep down into the luminous depths of the great emerald in a silence which Oscarovitch interpreted into such meaning as he was able to make for himself.
Minute after minute passed in silence, and still her eyes were fixed upon the Stone. Her face became like that of a beautiful masterpiece of Phidias: pure, cold, and true. A feeling of something like awe crept over him as he watched her, and he found himself asking whether, after all, Phadrig's story might have been true. But, true or not, there was the fascination which, as Phadrig had told him, had lured Isaac Josephus to his self-inflicted doom. Her eyes were chained to the gem: her face was no longer that of a living woman dominated by her own will. After all his disbelief, there was an enchantment in the Stone, for here, even she, Nitocris, had succumbed to it.
He sat and waited for a few minutes longer. If there is magic in the Stone, let it work, he thought; and so he sat and watched her until he saw that the fixed stare of her eyes and the rigidity of her now perfectly statuesque face convinced him that the magic of the Stone had, as Phadrig had told him, made him the possessor of it, absolute master of the man or woman who had gazed upon its fatal beauty.
Then he got up and, reaching over her shoulders, took up the diamond chain, glistening under the soft light of the starry dome of the saloon, shook it out into a flood of white radiance, lifted it above her head, and let it fall very gently round her neck. The Horus Stone, as though endowed with sentience, fell and rested where it had rested five thousand years before. As it touched her flesh Nitocris felt a tremor of indescribable emotion, not only of the body but of the soul, pass through her. She leaned back in her chair again, and whispered:
"Is it really mine now, Prince? But no! How could I take it from you—I who can give nothing in exchange for such a treasure? No, no, you must take it back. I am not worthy to wear it."
He laid his hands gently on her arms, and said in a soft, murmuring tone which sounded like the purring of a tiger-cat:
"Nitocris, if all the choicest gems in all the world could be put into a crucible and fused into one, all its splendour would still be unworthy to lie on that white breast of yours. Give me your love, Nitocris. I am hungering and thirsting for it. Come with me to Oscarburg, and you shall be crowned Princess—and after that Empress—Empress of the Russias and the East. I will give you a dominion such as the great Catherine never dared to dream of. Say yes, and in a month you shall be seated on her throne. It is only a little word, dearest, only a little word—will you not say it, and be my Princess, my Queen, my Empress?"
"I am tired now, Oscar," she said wearily, "so much has happened in so short a time. Yes, I will, if it is possible: but let me go now. No, you must not kiss me yet. Remember that Russian saying, 'Take thy thoughts to bed with thee, for the morning is wiser than the evening.' Good-night, Oscar, I am very tired. You shall have your answer in the morning. May I take this with me?"
"Yes," he replied, giving her his hand as she rose from her chair, and bowing over hers until his lips touched it. "Take it, unworthy as it is, as an earnest of the realisation of the happy dreams that will come to me to-night. Au revoir, pas adieu!"
"Auf viedersehn, mein Oscar!" she replied as she passed him, leaving the sensation of a gentle flutter of her hand in his. "We shall understand each other better still before long—I hope."
"It is my dearest wish. Good-night, Nitocris, and when the dawn comes may it find nothing but sunshine in that sweet soul of yours!"
Nitocris went to her room and found her maid waiting, white-faced and anxious. She was frightened and nearly worn out with caring for her mistress. She would have been very glad to have been back that very night at "The Wilderness," even if it had lost its master.
"Go to bed at once, Jenny; you look like a ghost, as you may well do after all the trouble I've given you. No, I don't really want you, and you want sleep rather badly. Go to bed, like a good girl. It will not be the first time that I have undressed myself."
And when Jenny had gone and she had locked the door, Nitocris stripped herself, save for the collar of diamonds and the pendant Horus Stone. She took a long veil of Indian muslin out of her dress-box and wound it round her after the fashion of old Egypt, leaving her left breast bare. Only the Ureaus Crown was wanting to make her, in the
flesh, Nitocris the Queen: but here on her bosom flashed and flamed the Horus Stone—hers once again, as it had been in the far-off past, symbol of her sovereignty, and proof of her faith in the one true Doctrine.
She looked at the lovely reflection in the long mirror behind her dressing-table, and said to herself in a low, whispering laugh:
"This for you, Oscar Oscarovitch that is, Menkau-Ra who was! Yes, you may dream your pleasant dreams to-night; you may take me to your lonely castle in Viborg Bay; you may make me marry you, as you think I shall—and here is my wedding gift—mine again after all these ages—blessed be for ever the Holy Trinity, Osiris, Isis, and Horus. May the Most High Gods help and protect me!"
She raised the Sacred Stone to her lips as she spoke, turned off the light, and lay down in her bed to dream dreams of forgotten ages.
Chapter XXV - The Passing of Phadrig
*
In all London, or, indeed, in any capital of Europe, there were no more angrily puzzled men than Nicol Hendry and his colleague and subordinates. He was perfectly certain now that Phadrig Amena held the key to the conspiracy which had resulted in the disappearance of Prince Zastrow. Oscarovitch had vanished. He had been traced to Copenhagen, and then absolutely lost sight of. Three agents, all picked experts, had been put on to watch Phadrig and the Pentanas, as they were known to him, and within a fortnight they had all died. One had fallen down crossing the north side of Trafalgar Square: the verdict had been heart failure. Another threw himself into the river from the Tower Bridge; and the third, a woman who was one of the most skilful spies in the service of the International, had made his acquaintance and had dinner with him at the "Monico," and was found dead the next morning with an empty morphia syringe in her hand and a swollen puncture in her left arm.