He held up the candle, and looked at his own face in the glass.
It had been a beautiful face, but disease had wrecked it. “Food
for the worms,” he said. “Curious to think that in a few hours I
shall be stiff and cold—the journey done, the little game played
out. Ah me, Holly! life is not worth the trouble of life, except
when one is in love—at least, mine has not been; but the boy
Leo’s may be if he has the courage and the faith. Good-bye, my
friend!” and with a sudden access of tenderness he flung his arm
about me and kissed me on the forehead, and then turned to go.
“Look here, Vincey,” I said, “if you are as ill as you think, you
had better let me fetch a doctor.”
“No, no,” he said earnestly. “Promise me that you won’t. I am
going to die, and, like a poisoned rat, I wish to die alone.”
“I don’t believe that you are going to do anything of the sort,”
I answered. He smiled, and, with the word “Remember” on his lips,
was gone. As for myself, I sat down and rubbed my eyes, wondering
if I had been asleep. As this supposition would not bear
investigation I gave it up and began to think that Vincey must
have been drinking. I knew that he was, and had been, very ill,
but still it seemed impossible that he could be in such a
condition as to be able to know for certain that he would not
outlive the night. Had he been so near dissolution surely he
would scarcely have been able to walk, and carry a heavy iron box
with him. The whole story, on reflection, seemed to me utterly
incredible, for I was not then old enough to be aware how many
things happen in this world that the common sense of the average
man would set down as so improbable as to be absolutely
impossible. This is a fact that I have only recently mastered.
Was it likely that a man would have a son five years of age whom
he had never seen since he was a tiny infant? No. Was it likely
that he could foretell his own death so accurately? No. Was it
likely that he could trace his pedigree for more than three
centuries before Christ, or that he would suddenly confide the
absolute guardianship of his child, and leave half his fortune,
to a college friend? Most certainly not. Clearly Vincey was
either drunk or mad. That being so, what did it mean? and what
was in the sealed iron chest?
The whole thing baffled and puzzled me to such an extent that at
last I could stand it no longer, and determined to sleep over it.
So I jumped up, and having put the keys and the letter that
Vincey had left away into my despatch-box, and stowed the iron
chest in a large portmanteau, I turned in, and was soon fast
asleep.
As it seemed to me, I had only been asleep for a few minutes when
I was awakened by somebody calling me. I sat up and rubbed my
eyes; it was broad daylight—eight o’clock, in fact.
“Why, what is the matter with you, John?” I asked of the gyp who
waited on Vincey and myself. “You look as though you had seen a
ghost!”
“Yes, sir, and so I have,” he answered, “leastways I’ve seen a
corpse, which is worse. I’ve been in to call Mr. Vincey, as
usual, and there he lies stark and dead!”
II.
THE YEARS ROLL BY
As might be expected, poor Vincey’s sudden death created a great
stir in the College; but, as he was known to be very ill, and a
satisfactory doctor’s certificate was forthcoming, there was no
inquest. They were not so particular about inquests in those days
as they are now; indeed, they were generally disliked, because of
the scandal. Under all these circumstances, being asked no
questions, I did not feel called upon to volunteer any
information about our interview on the night of Vincey’s decease,
beyond saying that he had come into my rooms to see me, as he
often did. On the day of the funeral a lawyer came down from
London and followed my poor friend’s remains to the grave, and
then went back with his papers and effects, except, of course,
the iron chest which had been left in my keeping. For a week
after this I heard no more of the matter, and, indeed, my
attention was amply occupied in other ways, for I was up for my
Fellowship, a fact that had prevented me from attending the
funeral or seeing the lawyer. At last, however, the examination
was over, and I came back to my rooms and sank into an easy chair
with a happy consciousness that I had got through it very fairly.
Soon, however, my thoughts, relieved of the pressure that had
crushed them into a single groove during the last few days,
turned to the events of the night of poor Vincey’s death, and
again I asked myself what it all meant, and wondered if I should
hear anything more of the matter, and if I did not, what it would
be my duty to do with the curious iron chest. I sat there and
thought and thought till I began to grow quite disturbed over the
whole occurrence: the mysterious midnight visit, the prophecy of
death so shortly to be fulfilled, the solemn oath that I had
taken, and which Vincey had called on me to answer to in another
world than this. Had the man committed suicide? It looked like
it. And what was the quest of which he spoke? The circumstances
were uncanny, so much so that, though I am by no means nervous,
or apt to be alarmed at anything that may seem to cross the
bounds of the natural, I grew afraid, and began to wish I had
nothing to do with them. How much more do I wish it now, over
twenty years afterwards!
As I sat and thought, there came a knock at the door, and a
letter, in a big blue envelope, was brought in to me. I saw at a
glance that it was a lawyer’s letter, and an instinct told me
that it was connected with my trust. The letter, which I still
have, runs thus:—
“Sir,—Our client, the late M. L. Vincey, Esq., who died on the 9th
instant in —— College, Cambridge, has left behind him a Will, of which
you will please find copy enclosed and of which we are the executors.
Under this Will you will perceive that you take a life-interest in
about half of the late Mr. Vincey’s property, now invested in Consols,
subject to your acceptance of the guardianship of his only son, Leo
Vincey, at present an infant, aged five. Had we not ourselves drawn up
the document in question in obedience to Mr. Vincey’s clear and precise
instructions, both personal and written, and had he not then assured us
that he had very good reasons for what he was doing, we are bound to
tell you that its provisions seem to us of so unusual a nature, that we
should have felt bound to call the attention of the Court of Chancery
to them, in order that such steps might be taken as seemed desirable to
it, either by contesting the capacity of the testator or otherwise, to
safeguard the interests of the infant. As it is, knowing that the
testator was a gentleman of the highest intelligence and acumen, and
that he has absolutely no relations living to whom he could have
confided the guardianship of the child, we do not feel justified in
taking this course.
“Awaiting such instructions as you please to send us as regards
the delivery of the infant and the payment of the proportion of
the dividends due to you,
“We remain, Sir, faithfully yours,
“Geoffrey and Jordan.
“Horace L. Holly, Esq.”
I put down the letter, and ran my eye through the Will, which
appeared, from its utter unintelligibility, to have been drawn on
the strictest legal principles. So far as I could discover,
however, it exactly bore out what my friend Vincey had told me on
the night of his death. So it was true after all. I must take the
boy. Suddenly I remembered the letter which Vincey had left with
the chest. I fetched and opened it. It only contained such
directions as he had already given to me as to opening the chest
on Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday, and laid down the outlines of the
boy’s education, which was to include Greek, the higher
Mathematics, and _Arabic_. At the end there was a postscript to
the effect that if the boy died under the age of twenty-five,
which, however, he did not believe would be the case, I was to
open the chest, and act on the information I obtained if I saw
fit. If I did not see fit, I was to destroy all the contents. On
no account was I to pass them on to a stranger.
As this letter added nothing material to my knowledge, and
certainly raised no further objection in my mind to entering on
the task I had promised my dead friend to undertake, there was
only one course open to me—namely, to write to Messrs. Geoffrey
and Jordan, and express my acceptance of the trust, stating that
I should be willing to commence my guardianship of Leo in ten
days’ time. This done I went to the authorities of my college,
and, having told them as much of the story as I considered
desirable, which was not very much, after considerable difficulty
succeeded in persuading them to stretch a point, and, in the
event of my having obtained a fellowship, which I was pretty
certain I had done, allow me to have the child to live with me.
Their consent, however, was only granted on the condition that I
vacated my rooms in college and took lodgings. This I did, and
with some difficulty succeeded in obtaining very good apartments
quite close to the college gates. The next thing was to find a
nurse. And on this point I came to a determination. I would have
no woman to lord it over me about the child, and steal his
affections from me. The boy was old enough to do without female
assistance, so I set to work to hunt up a suitable male
attendant. With some difficulty I succeeded in hiring a most
respectable round-faced young man, who had been a helper in a
hunting-stable, but who said that he was one of a family of
seventeen and well-accustomed to the ways of children, and
professed himself quite willing to undertake the charge of Master
Leo when he arrived. Then, having taken the iron box to town, and
with my own hands deposited it at my banker’s, I bought some
books upon the health and management of children and read them,
first to myself, and then aloud to Job—that was the young man’s
name—and waited.
At length the child arrived in the charge of an elderly person,
who wept bitterly at parting with him, and a beautiful boy he
was. Indeed, I do not think that I ever saw such a perfect child
before or since. His eyes were grey, his forehead was broad, and
his face, even at that early age, clean cut as a cameo, without
being pinched or thin. But perhaps his most attractive point was
his hair, which was pure gold in colour and tightly curled over
his shapely head. He cried a little when his nurse finally tore
herself away and left him with us. Never shall I forget the
scene. There he stood, with the sunlight from the window playing
upon his golden curls, his fist screwed over one eye, whilst he
took us in with the other. I was seated in a chair, and stretched
out my hand to him to induce him to come to me, while Job, in the
corner, was making a sort of clucking noise, which, arguing from
his previous experience, or from the analogy of the hen, he
judged would have a soothing effect, and inspire confidence in
the youthful mind, and running a wooden horse of peculiar
hideousness backwards and forwards in a way that was little short
of inane. This went on for some minutes, and then all of a sudden
the lad stretched out both his little arms and ran to me.
“I like you,” he said: “you is ugly, but you is good.”
Ten minutes afterwards he was eating large slices of bread and
butter, with every sign of satisfaction; Job wanted to put jam on
to them, but I sternly reminded him of the excellent works that
we had read, and forbade it.
In a very little while (for, as I expected, I got my fellowship)
the boy became the favourite of the whole College—where, all
orders and regulations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was
continually in and out—a sort of chartered libertine, in whose
favour all rules were relaxed. The offerings made at his shrine
were simply without number, and I had serious difference of
opinion with one old resident Fellow, now long dead, who was
usually supposed to be the crustiest man in the University, and
to abhor the sight of a child. And yet I discovered, when a
frequently recurring fit of sickness had forced Job to keep a
strict look-out, that this unprincipled old man was in the habit
of enticing the boy to his rooms and there feeding him upon
unlimited quantities of brandy-balls, and making him promise to
say nothing about it. Job told him that he ought to be ashamed of
himself, “at his age, too, when he might have been a grandfather
if he had done what was right,” by which Job understood had got
married, and thence arose the row.
But I have no space to dwell upon those delightful years, around
which memory still fondly hovers. One by one they went by, and as
they passed we two grew dearer and yet more dear to each other.
Few sons have been loved as I love Leo, and few fathers know the
deep and continuous affection that Leo bears to me.
The child grew into the boy, and the boy into the young man,
while one by one the remorseless years flew by, and as he grew
and increased so did his beauty and the beauty of his mind grow
with him. When he was about fifteen they used to call him Beauty
about the College, and me they nicknamed the Beast. Beauty and
the Beast was what they called us when we went out walking
together, as we used to do every day. Once Leo attacked a great
strapping butcher’s man, twice his size, because he sang it out
after us, and thrashed him, too—thrashed him fairly. I walked on
and pretended not to see, till the combat got too exciting, when
I turned round and cheered him on to victory. It was the chaff of
the College at the time, but I could not help it. Then when he
was a little older the undergraduates found fresh names for us.
They called me Charon, and Leo the Greek god! I will pass over my
own appellation with the humble remark that I was never handsome,
and did not grow more so as I grew older. As for his, there was
no doubt about its fitness. Leo at twenty-one might have stood
for a statue of the youthful Apollo. I never saw anybody to touch
him in looks, or anybody so absolutely unconscious of them. As
for his mind, he was brilliant and keen-witted, but not a
scholar. He had not the dulness necessary for that result. We
followed out his father’s instructions as regards his education
strictly enough, and on the whole the results, especially in the
matters of Greek and Arabic, were satisfactory. I learnt the
latter language in order to help to teach it to him, but after
five years of it he knew it as well as I did—almost as well as
the professor who instructed us both. I always was a great
sportsman—it is my one passion—and every autumn we went away
somewhere shooting or fishing, sometimes to Scotland, sometimes
to Norway, once even to Russia. I am a good shot, but even in
this he learnt to excel me.
When Leo was eighteen I moved back into my rooms, and entered him
at my own College, and at twenty-one he took his degree—a
respectable degree, but not a very high one. Then it was that I,
for the first time, told him something of his own story, and of
the mystery that loomed ahead. Of course he was very curious
about it, and of course I explained to him that his curiosity
could not be gratified at present. After that, to pass the time
away, I suggested that he should get himself called to the Bar;
and this he did, reading at Cambridge, and only going up to
London to eat his dinners.
I had only one trouble about him, and that was that every young
woman who came across him, or, if not every one, nearly so, would
insist on falling in love with him. Hence arose difficulties
which I need not enter into here, though they were troublesome
enough at the time. On the whole, he behaved fairly well; I
cannot say more than that.
And so the time went by till at last he reached his twenty-fifth
birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful
history really begins.
III.
THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS
On the day preceding Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday we both
journeyed to London, and extracted the mysterious chest from the
bank where I had deposited it twenty years before. It was, I
remember, brought up by the same clerk who had taken it down. He
perfectly remembered having hidden it away. Had he not done so,
he said, he should have had difficulty in finding it, it was so
covered up with cobwebs.
In the evening we returned with our precious burden to Cambridge,
and I think that we might both of us have given away all the
sleep we got that night and not have been much the poorer. At
daybreak Leo arrived in my room in a dressing-gown, and suggested
that we should at once proceed to business. I scouted the idea as
showing an unworthy curiosity. The chest had waited twenty years,
I said, so it could very well continue to wait until after
breakfast. Accordingly at nine—an unusually sharp nine—we
breakfasted; and so occupied was I with my own thoughts that I
regret to state that I put a piece of bacon into Leo’s tea in
mistake for a lump of sugar. Job, too, to whom the contagion of
excitement had, of course, spread, managed to break the handle
off my Sèvres china tea-cup, the identical one I believe that
Marat had been drinking from just before he was stabbed in his
bath.
At last, however, breakfast was cleared away, and Job, at my
request, fetched the chest, and placed it upon the table in a
somewhat gingerly fashion, as though he mistrusted it. Then he
prepared to leave the room.
“Stop a moment, Job,” I said. “If Mr. Leo has no objection, I
should prefer to have an independent witness to this business,
who can be relied upon to hold his tongue unless he is asked to
speak.”
“Certainly, Uncle Horace,” answered Leo; for I had brought him up
to call me uncle—though he varied the appellation somewhat
disrespectfully by calling me “old fellow,” or even “my avuncular
relative.”
Job touched his head, not having a hat on.
“Lock the door, Job,” I said, “and bring me my despatch-box.”
He obeyed, and from the box I took the keys that poor Vincey,
Leo’s father, had given me on the night of his death. There were
three of them; the largest a comparatively modern key, the second
an exceedingly ancient one, and the third entirely unlike
anything of the sort that we had ever seen before, being
fashioned apparently from a strip of solid silver, with a bar
placed across to serve as a handle, and leaving some nicks cut in
the edge of the bar. It was more like a model of an antediluvian
railway key than anything else.
“Now are you both ready?” I said, as people do when they are
going to fire a mine. There was no answer, so I took the big key,
rubbed some salad oil into the wards, and after one or two bad
shots, for my hands were shaking, managed to fit it, and shoot
the lock. Leo bent over and caught the massive lid in both his
hands, and with an effort, for the hinges had rusted, forced it
back. Its removal revealed another case covered with dust. This
we extracted from the iron chest without any difficulty, and
removed the accumulated filth of years from it with a
clothes-brush.
It was, or appeared to be, of ebony, or some such close-grained
black wood, and was bound in every direction with flat bands of
iron. Its antiquity must have been extreme, for the dense heavy
wood was in parts actually commencing to crumble from age.
“Now for it,” I said, inserting the second key.
Job and Leo bent forward in breathless silence. The key turned,
and I flung back the lid, and uttered an exclamation, and no
wonder, for inside the ebony case was a magnificent silver
casket, about twelve inches square by eight high. It appeared to
be of Egyptian workmanship, and the four legs were formed of
Sphinxes, and the dome-shaped cover was also surmounted by a
Sphinx. The casket was of course much tarnished and dinted with
age, but otherwise in fairly sound condition.
I drew it out and set it on the table, and then, in the midst of
the most perfect silence, I inserted the strange-looking silver
key, and pressed this way and that until at last the lock
yielded, and the casket stood before us. It was filled to the
brim with some brown shredded material, more like vegetable fibre
than paper, the nature of which I have never been able to
discover. This I carefully removed to the depth of some three
inches, when I came to a letter enclosed in an ordinary
modern-looking envelope, and addressed in the handwriting of my
dead friend Vincey.
“_To my son Leo, should he live to open this casket._”
I handed the letter to Leo, who glanced at the envelope, and then
put it down upon the table, making a motion to me to go on
emptying the casket.
The next thing that I found was a parchment carefully rolled up.
I unrolled it, and seeing that it was also in Vincey’s
handwriting, and headed, “Translation of the Uncial Greek Writing
on the Potsherd,” put it down by the letter. Then followed
another ancient roll of parchment, that had become yellow and
crinkled with the passage of years. This I also unrolled. It was
likewise a translation of the same Greek original, but into
black-letter Latin, which at the first glance from the style and
character appeared to me to date from somewhere about the
beginning of the sixteenth century. Immediately beneath this roll
was something hard and heavy, wrapped up in yellow linen, and
reposing upon another layer of the fibrous material. Slowly and
carefully we unrolled the linen, exposing to view a very large
but undoubtedly ancient potsherd of a dirty yellow colour! This
potsherd had in my judgment, once been a part of an ordinary
amphora of medium size. For the rest, it measured ten and a half
inches in length by seven in width, was about a quarter of an
inch thick, and densely covered on the convex side that lay
towards the bottom of the box with writing in the later uncial
Greek character, faded here and there, but for the most part
perfectly legible, the inscription having evidently been executed
with the greatest care, and by means of a reed pen, such as the
ancients often used. I must not forget to mention that in some
remote age this wonderful fragment had been broken in two, and
rejoined by means of cement and eight long rivets. Also there
were numerous inscriptions on the inner side, but these were of
the most erratic character, and had clearly been made by
different hands and in many different ages, and of them, together
with the writings on the parchments, I shall have to speak
presently.
[Illustration] FACSIMILE OF THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS