Jack Dillon leant from his open window and looked out over the valley to
where a dull red glow crowned the hill-top. There was a fire somewhere
in the neighbourhood of the distant town; probably a building had been
struck by lightning. The storm had passed, although thunder was still
audible dimly, like the roll of muffled drums or a remote bombardment.
Stillness had reclaimed Hollow Grange.
He was restless, uneasy; he sought to collate his impressions of the
place and its master. Twelve years had elapsed since his one previous
meeting with Dr. Kassimere, and little or no memory of the man had
remained. So much had intervened; the war--and Phryné. Now that he was
alone and could collect his ideas he knew of what Dr. Kassimere's gaunt,
wide-eyed face had reminded him: it was of Thoth, the Ibis-headed god
whose figure he had seen on the walls of the temples during his service
in Egypt.
"Kassimere was always a queer fish, Jack," his father had said; "but
most of his eccentricities were due to his passion for study. The Grange
is the very place Sir Francis" (the specialist) "would have chosen for
your convalescence, and you'll find nothing dangerously exciting in
Kassimere's atmosphere!"
Yet there was that about Dr. Kassimere which he did not and could not
like; his quietly cordial welcome, his courteous regret that his guest's
arrival by an earlier train (a circumstance due to reduced service) had
led to his not being met at the station; the charming simplicity with
which he confessed to the smallness of his household, and to the
pleasure which it afforded him to have the son of an old chum beneath
his roof--all these kindly overtures had left the bird-like eyes cold,
hard, watchful, calculating. The voice was the voice of a friend and a
gentleman, but the face was the face of Thoth.
The mystery of Phryné was solved in a measure. She was Dr. Kassimere's
adopted daughter and the orphaned child of Louis Devant, the famous
Paris cartoonist, who had died penniless in 1911, at the height of his
success. In his selection of a name for her, the brilliant and dissolute
artist had exhibited a breadth of mind which Phryné inherited in an
almost embarrassing degree.
Her mental equipment was bewildering: the erudition of an Oxford don
spiced with more than a dash of Boul' Mich', which made for complexity.
Her curious learning was doubtless due to the setting of a receptive
mind amid such environment, but how she had retained her piquant
vivacity in Hollow Grange was less comprehensible. The servants
formed a small and saturnine company, only two--the housekeeper, Mrs.
Harman, a black and forbidding figure, and Madame Charny, a French
companion--sleeping in the house. Gawly, a surly creature who neglected
the gardens and muttered savagely over other duties, together with his
wife, who cooked, resided at the lodge. There were two maids, who lived
in the village....
The glow from the distant fire seemed to be reflected upon the firs
bordering the terrace below; then Dillon, watching the dull, red light,
remembered that Dr. Kassimere's laboratory adjoined the tiny chapel, and
that, though midnight drew near, the doctor was still at work there.
Owls and other night birds hooted and shrieked among the trees and
many bats were in flight. He found himself thinking of the pyramid
bats of Egypt, and of the ibis-headed Thoth who was the scribe of the
under-world.
Dr. Kassimere had made himself medically responsible for his case, and
had read attentively the letters which Dillon had brought from his own
physician. He was to prescribe on the following day, and to-night the
visitor found Morpheus a treacherous god. Furtive activities disturbed
the house, or so it seemed to the sleepless man tossing on his bed;
alert intelligences within Hollow Grange responded to the night-life of
the owls without, and he seemed to lie in the shadow of a watchfulness
that never slumbered.