carriage clock upon the side table were rapidly closing together upon
the twelve, when a sudden sound fell upon the student’s ear--a sharp,
rather shrill sound, like the hissing intake of a man’s breath who gasps
under some strong emotion. Smith laid down his book and slanted his ear
to listen. There was no one on either side or above him, so that the
interruption came certainly from the neighbour beneath--the same
neighbour of whom Hastie had given so unsavory an account. Smith knew
him only as a flabby, pale-faced man of silent and studious habits, a
man whose lamp threw a golden bar from the old turret even after he had
extinguished his own. This community in lateness had formed a certain
silent bond between them. It was soothing to Smith when the hours stole
on towards dawning to feel that there was another so close who set as
small a value upon his sleep as he did. Even now, as his thoughts turned
towards him, Smith’s feelings were kindly. Hastie was a good fellow, but
he was rough, strong-fibred, with no imagination or sympathy. He could
not tolerate departures from what he looked upon as the model type of
manliness. If a man could not be measured by a public-school standard,
then he was beyond the pale with Hastie. Like so many who are themselves
robust, he was apt to confuse the constitution with the character, to
ascribe to want of principle what was really a want of circulation.
Smith, with his stronger mind, knew his friend’s habit, and made
allowance for it now as his thoughts turned towards the man beneath him.
There was no return of the singular sound, and Smith was about to turn
to his work once more, when suddenly there broke out in the silence of
the night a hoarse cry, a positive scream--the call of a man who is
moved and shaken beyond all control. Smith sprang out of his chair and
dropped his book. He was a man of fairly firm fibre, but there was
something in this sudden, uncontrollable shriek of horror which chilled
his blood and pringled in his skin. Coming in such a place and at such
an hour, it brought a thousand fantastic possibilities into his head.
Should he rush down, or was it better to wait? He had all the national
hatred of making a scene, and he knew so little of his neighbour that he
would not lightly intrude upon his affairs. For a moment he stood in
doubt and even as he balanced the matter there was a quick rattle of
footsteps upon the stairs, and young Monkhouse Lee, half dressed and as
white as ashes, burst into his room.
“Come down!” he gasped. “Bellingham’s ill.”
Abercrombie Smith followed him closely downstairs into the sitting-room
which was beneath his own, and intent as he was upon the matter in hand,
he could not but take an amazed glance around him as he crossed the
threshold. It was such a chamber as he had never seen before--a museum
rather than a study. Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a
thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures
bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the
apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed
statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange,
beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and
Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the
ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was
slung in a double noose.
In the centre of this singular chamber was a large, square table,
littered with papers, bottles, and the dried leaves of some graceful,
palm-like plant. These varied objects had all been heaped together in
order to make room for a mummy case, which had been conveyed from the
wall, as was evident from the gap there, and laid across the front of
the table. The mummy itself, a horrid, black, withered thing, like a
charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with its
clawlike hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up
against the sarcophagus was an old yellow scroll of papyrus, and in
front of it, in a wooden armchair, sat the owner of the room, his head
thrown back, his widely-opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to the
crocodile above him, and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with every
expiration.
“My God! he’s dying!” cried Monkhouse Lee distractedly.
He was a slim, handsome young fellow, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, of a
Spanish rather than of an English type, with a Celtic intensity of
manner which contrasted with the Saxon phlegm of Abercrombie Smith.
“Only a faint, I think,” said the medical student. “Just give me a hand
with him. You take his feet. Now on to the sofa. Can you kick all those
little wooden devils off? What a litter it is! Now he will be all right
if we undo his collar and give him some water. What has he been up to at
all?”
“I don’t know. I heard him cry out. I ran up. I know him pretty well,
you know. It is very good of you to come down.”
“His heart is going like a pair of castanets,” said Smith, laying his
hand on the breast of the unconscious man. “He seems to me to be
frightened all to pieces. Chuck the water over him! What a face he has
got on him!”
It was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline
were equally unnatural. It was white, not with the ordinary pallor of
fear, but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the under side of a
sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having at some time
been considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and
folds, and was shot with a meshwork of wrinkles. Short, stubbly brown
hair bristled up from his scalp, with a pair of thick, wrinkled ears
protruding at the sides. His light grey eyes were still open, the pupils
dilated and the balls projecting in a fixed and horrid stare. It seemed
to Smith as he looked down upon him that he had never seen Nature’s
danger signals flying so plainly upon a man’s countenance, and his
thoughts turned more seriously to the warning which Hastie had given him
an hour before.
“What the deuce can have frightened him so?” he asked.
“It’s the mummy.”
“The mummy? How, then?”
“I don’t know. It’s beastly and morbid. I wish he would drop it. It’s
the second fright he has given me. It was the same last winter. I found
him just like this, with that horrid thing in front of him.”
“What does he want with the mummy, then?”
“Oh, he’s a crank, you know. It’s his hobby. He knows more about these
things than any man in England. But I wish he wouldn’t! Ah, he’s
beginning to come to.”
A faint tinge of colour had begun to steal back into Bellingham’s
ghastly cheeks, and his eyelids shivered like a sail after a calm. He
clasped and unclasped his hands, drew a long, thin breath between his
teeth, and suddenly jerking up his head, threw a glance of recognition
around him. As his eyes fell upon the mummy, he sprang off the sofa,
seized the roll of papyrus, thrust it into a drawer, turned the key, and
then staggered back on to the sofa.
“What’s up?” he asked. “What do you chaps want?”
“You’ve been shrieking out and making no end of a fuss,” said Monkhouse
Lee. “If our neighbour here from above hadn’t come down, I’m sure I
don’t know what I should have done with you.”
“Ah, it’s Abercrombie Smith,” said Bellingham, glancing up at him. “How
very good of you to come in! What a fool I am! Oh, my God, what a fool I
am!”
He sunk his head on to his hands, and burst into peal after peal of
hysterical laughter.
“Look here! Drop it!” cried Smith, shaking him roughly by the shoulder.
“Your nerves are all in a jangle. You must drop these little midnight
games with mummies, or you’ll be going off your chump. You’re all on
wires now.”
“I wonder,” said Bellingham, “whether you would be as cool as I am if
you had seen----”
“What then?”
“Oh, nothing. I meant that I wonder if you could sit up at night with a
mummy without trying your nerves. I have no doubt that you are quite
right. I dare say that I have been taking it out of myself too much
lately. But I am all right now. Please don’t go, though. Just wait for a
few minutes until I am quite myself.”
“The room is very close,” remarked Lee, throwing open the window and
letting in the cool night air.
“It’s balsamic resin,” said Bellingham. He lifted up one of the dried
palmate leaves from the table and frizzled it over the chimney of the
lamp. It broke away into heavy smoke wreaths, and a pungent, biting
odour filled the chamber. “It’s the sacred plant--the plant of the
priests,” he remarked. “Do you know anything of Eastern languages,
Smith?”
“Nothing at all. Not a word.”
The answer seemed to lift a weight from the Egyptologist’s mind.
“By the way,” he continued, “how long was it from the time that you ran
down, until I came to my senses?”
“Not long. Some four or five minutes.”
“I thought it could not be very long,” said he, drawing a long breath.
“But what a strange thing unconsciousness is! There is no measurement to
it. I could not tell from my own sensations if it were seconds or weeks.
Now that gentleman on the table was packed up in the days of the
eleventh dynasty, some forty centuries ago, and yet if he could find his
tongue, he would tell us that this lapse of time has been but a closing
of the eyes and a reopening of them. He is a singularly fine mummy,
Smith.”
Smith stepped over to the table and looked down with a professional eye
at the black and twisted form in front of him. The features, though
horribly discoloured, were perfect, and two little nut-like eyes still
lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. The blotched skin was
drawn tightly from bone to bone, and a tangled wrap of black coarse hair
fell over the ears. Two thin teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the
shrivelled lower lip. In its crouching position, with bent joints and
craned head, there was a suggestion of energy about the horrid thing
which made Smith’s gorge rise. The gaunt ribs, with their parchment-like
covering, were exposed, and the sunken, leaden-hued abdomen, with the
long slit where the embalmer had left his mark; but the lower limbs were
wrapped round with coarse yellow bandages. A number of little
clove-like pieces of myrrh and of cassia were sprinkled over the body,
and lay scattered on the inside of the case.
“I don’t know his name,” said Bellingham, passing his hand over the
shrivelled head. “You see the outer sarcophagus with the inscriptions is
missing. Lot 249 is all the title he has now. You see it printed on his
case. That was his number in the auction at which I picked him up.”
“He has been a very pretty sort of fellow in his day,” remarked
Abercrombie Smith.
“He has been a giant. His mummy is six feet seven in length, and that
would be a giant over there, for they were never a very robust race.
Feel these great knotted bones, too. He would be a nasty fellow to
tackle.”
“Perhaps these very hands helped to build the stones into the pyramids,”
suggested Monkhouse Lee, looking down with disgust in his eyes at the
crooked, unclean talons.
“No fear. This fellow has been pickled in natron, and looked after in
the most approved style. They did not serve hodsmen in that fashion.
Salt or bitumen was enough for them. It has been calculated that this
sort of thing cost about seven hundred and thirty pounds in our money.
Our friend was a noble at the least. What do you make of that small
inscription near his feet, Smith?”
“I told you that I know no Eastern tongue.”
“Ah, so you did. It is the name of the embalmer, I take it. A very
conscientious worker he must have been. I wonder how many modern works
will survive four thousand years?”
He kept on speaking lightly and rapidly, but it was evident to
Abercrombie Smith that he was still palpitating with fear. His hands
shook, his lower lip trembled, and look where he would, his eye always
came sliding round to his gruesome companion. Through all his fear,
however, there was a suspicion of triumph in his tone and manner. His
eyes shone, and his footstep, as he paced the room, was brisk and
jaunty. He gave the impression of a man who has gone through an ordeal,
the marks of which he still bears upon him, but which has helped him to
his end.
“You’re not going yet?” he cried, as Smith rose from the sofa.
At the prospect of solitude, his fears seemed to crowd back upon him,
and he stretched out a hand to detain him.
“Yes, I must go. I have my work to do. You are all right now. I think
that with your nervous system you should take up some less morbid
study.”
“Oh, I am not nervous as a rule; and I have unwrapped mummies before.”
“You fainted last time,” observed Monkhouse Lee.
“Ah, yes, so I did. Well, I must have a nerve tonic or a course of
electricity. You are not going, Lee?”
“I’ll do whatever you wish, Ned.”
“Then I’ll come down with you and have a shakedown on your sofa.
Good-night, Smith. I am so sorry to have disturbed you with my
foolishness.”
They shook hands, and as the medical student stumbled up the spiral and
irregular stair he heard a key turn in a door, and the steps of his two
new acquaintances as they descended to the lower floor.
* * * * *
In this strange way began the acquaintance between Edward Bellingham
and Abercrombie Smith, an acquaintance which the latter, at least, had
no desire to push forward. Bellingham, however, appeared to have taken a
fancy to his rough-spoken neighbour, and made his advances in such a way
that he could hardly be repulsed without absolute brutality. Twice he
called to thank Smith for his assistance, and many times afterwards he
looked in with books, papers and such other civilities as two bachelor
neighbours can offer each other. He was, as Smith soon found, a man of
wide reading, with catholic tastes and an extraordinary memory. His
manner, too, was so pleasing and suave that one came, after a time, to
overlook his repellent appearance. For a jaded and wearied man he was no
unpleasant companion, and Smith found himself, after a time, looking
forward to his visits, and even returning them.
Clever as he undoubtedly was, however, the medical student seemed to
detect a dash of insanity in the man. He broke out at times into a high,
inflated style of talk which was in contrast with the simplicity of his
life.
“It is a wonderful thing,” he cried, “to feel that one can command
powers of good and of evil--a ministering angel or a demon of
vengeance.” And again, of Monkhouse Lee, he said,--“Lee is a good
fellow, an honest fellow, but he is without strength or ambition. He
would not make a fit partner for a man with a great enterprise. He would
not make a fit partner for me.”
At such hints and innuendoes stolid Smith, puffing solemnly at his pipe,
would simply raise his eyebrows and shake his head, with little
interjections of medical wisdom as to earlier hours and fresher air.
One habit Bellingham had developed of late which Smith knew to be a
frequent herald of a weakening mind. He appeared to be for ever talking
to himself. At late hours of the night, when there could be no visitor
with him, Smith could still hear his voice beneath him in a low, muffled
monologue, sunk almost to a whisper, and yet very audible in the
silence. This solitary babbling annoyed and distracted the student, so
that he spoke more than once to his neighbour about it. Bellingham,
however, flushed up at the charge, and denied curtly that he had uttered
a sound; indeed, he showed more annoyance over the matter than the
occasion seemed to demand.
Had Abercrombie Smith had any doubt as to his own ears he had not to go
far to find corroboration. Tom Styles, the little wrinkled man-servant
who had attended to the wants of the lodgers in the turret for a longer
time than any man’s memory could carry him, was sorely put to it over
the same matter.
“If you please, sir,” said he, as he tidied down the top chamber one
morning, “do you think Mr. Bellingham is all right, sir?”
“All right, Styles?”
“Yes, sir. Right in his head, sir.”
“Why should he not be, then?”
“Well, I don’t know, sir. His habits has changed of late. He’s not the
same man he used to be, though I make free to say that he was never
quite one of my gentlemen, like Mr. Hastie or yourself, sir. He’s took
to talkin’ to himself something awful. I wonder it don’t disturb you. I
don’t know what to make of him, sir.”
“I don’t know what business it is of yours, Styles.”
“Well, I takes an interest, Mr. Smith. It may be forward of me, but I
can’t help it. I feel sometimes as if I was mother and father to my
young gentlemen. It all falls on me when things go wrong and the
relations come. But Mr. Bellingham, sir. I want to know what it is that
walks about his room sometimes when he’s out and when the door’s locked
on the outside.”
“Eh? you’re talking nonsense, Styles.”
“Maybe so, sir; but I heard it more’n once with my own ears.”
“Rubbish, Styles.”
“Very good, sir. You’ll ring the bell if you want me.”
Abercrombie Smith gave little heed to the gossip of the old man-servant,
but a small incident occurred a few days later which left an unpleasant
effect upon his mind, and brought the words of Styles forcibly to his
memory.
Bellingham had come up to see him late one night, and was entertaining
him with an interesting account of the rock tombs of Beni Hassan in
Upper Egypt, when Smith, whose hearing was remarkably acute, distinctly
heard the sound of a door opening on the landing below.
“There’s some fellow gone in or out of your room,” he remarked.
Bellingham sprang up and stood helpless for a moment, with the
expression of a man who is half incredulous and half afraid.
“I surely locked it. I am almost positive that I locked it,” he
stammered. “No one could have opened it.”
“Why, I hear some one coming up the steps now,” said Smith.
Bellingham rushed out through the door, slammed it loudly behind him,
and hurried down the stairs. About half-way down Smith heard him stop,
and thought he caught the sound of whispering. A moment later the door
beneath him shut, a key creaked in a lock, and Bellingham, with beads of
moisture upon his pale face, ascended the stairs once more, and
re-entered the room.
“It’s all right,” he said, throwing himself down in a chair. “It was
that fool of a dog. He had pushed the door open. I don’t know how I came
to forget to lock it.”
“I didn’t know you kept a dog,” said Smith, looking very thoughtfully at
the disturbed face of his companion.
“Yes, I haven’t had him long. I must get rid of him. He’s a great
nuisance.”
“He must be, if you find it so hard to shut him up. I should have
thought that shutting the door would have been enough, without locking
it.”
“I want to prevent old Styles from letting him out. He’s of some value,
you know, and it would be awkward to lose him.”
“I am a bit of a dog-fancier myself,” said Smith, still gazing hard at
his companion from the corner of his eyes. “Perhaps you’ll let me have a
look at it.”
“Certainly. But I am afraid it cannot be to-night; I have an
appointment. Is that clock right? Then I am a quarter of an hour late
already. You’ll excuse me, I am sure.”
He picked up his cap and hurried from the room. In spite of his
appointment, Smith heard him re-enter his own chamber and lock his door
upon the inside.
This interview left a disagreeable impression upon the medical student’s
mind. Bellingham had lied to him, and lied so clumsily that it looked as
if he had desperate reasons for concealing the truth. Smith knew that
his neighbour had no dog. He knew, also, that the step which he had
heard upon the stairs was not the step of an animal. But if it were not,
then what could it be? There was old Styles’s statement about the
something which used to pace the room at times when the owner was
absent. Could it be a woman? Smith rather inclined to the view. If so,
it would mean disgrace and expulsion to Bellingham if it were discovered
by the authorities, so that his anxiety and falsehoods might be
accounted for. And yet it was inconceivable that an undergraduate could
keep a woman in his rooms without being instantly detected. Be the
explanation what it might, there was something ugly about it, and Smith
determined, as he turned to his books, to discourage all further
attempts at intimacy on the part of his soft-spoken and ill-favoured
neighbour.
But his work was destined to interruption that night. He had hardly
caught up the broken threads when a firm, heavy footfall came three
steps at a time from below, and Hastie, in blazer and flannels, burst
into the room.
“Still at it!” said he, plumping down into his wonted arm-chair. “What a
chap you are to stew! I believe an earthquake might come and knock
Oxford into a cocked hat, and you would sit perfectly placid with your
books among the ruins. However, I won’t bore you long. Three whiffs of
baccy, and I am off.”
“What’s the news, then?” asked Smith, cramming a plug of bird’s-eye into
his briar with his forefinger.
“Nothing very much. Wilson made 70 for the freshmen against the eleven.
They say that they will play him instead of Buddicomb, for Buddicomb is
clean off colour. He used to be able to bowl a little, but it’s nothing
but half-volleys and long hops now.”
“Medium right,” suggested Smith, with the intense gravity which comes
upon a ’varsity man when he speaks of athletics.
“Inclining to fast, with a work from leg. Comes with the arm about three
inches or so. He used to be nasty on a wet wicket. Oh, by-the-way, have
you heard about Long Norton?”
“What’s that?”
“He’s been attacked.”
“Attacked?”
“Yes, just as he was turning out of the High Street, and within a
hundred yards of the gate of Old’s.”
“But who----”
“Ah, that’s the rub! If you said ‘what,’ you would be more grammatical.
Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on
his throat, I should be inclined to agree with him.”
“What, then? Have we come down to spooks?”
Abercrombie Smith puffed his scientific contempt.
“Well, no; I don’t think that is quite the idea, either. I am inclined
to think that if any showman has lost a great ape lately, and the brute
is in these parts, a jury would find a true bill against it. Norton
passes that way every night, you know, about the same hour. There’s a
tree that hangs low over the path--the big elm from Rainy’s garden.
Norton thinks the thing dropped on him out of the tree. Anyhow, he was
nearly strangled by two arms, which, he says, were as strong and as thin
as steel bands. He saw nothing; only those beastly arms that tightened
and tightened on him. He yelled his head nearly off, and a couple of
chaps came running, and the thing went over the wall like a cat. He
never got a fair sight of it the whole time. It gave Norton a shake up,
I can tell you. I tell him it has been as good as a change at the
seaside for him.”
“A garrotter, most likely,” said Smith.
“Very possible. Norton says not; but we don’t mind what he says. The
garrotter had long nails, and was pretty smart at swinging himself over
walls. By-the-way, your beautiful neighbour would be pleased if he heard
about it. He had a grudge against Norton, and he’s not a man, from what
I know of him, to forget his little debts. But hallo, old chap, what
have you got in your noddle?”
“Nothing,” Smith answered curtly.
He had started in his chair, and the look had flashed over his face
which comes upon a man who is struck suddenly by some unpleasant idea.
“You looked as if something I had said had taken you on the raw.
By-the-way, you have made the acquaintance of Master B. since I looked
in last, have you not? Young Monkhouse Lee told me something to that
effect.”
“Yes; I know him slightly. He has been up here once or twice.”
“Well, you’re big enough and ugly enough to take care of yourself. He’s
not what I should call exactly a healthy sort of Johnny, though, no
doubt, he’s very clever, and all that. But you’ll soon find out for
yourself. Lee is all right; he’s a very decent little fellow. Well, so
long, old chap! I row Mullins for the Vice-Chancellor’s pot on Wednesday
week, so mind you come down, in case I don’t see you before.”
Bovine Smith laid down his pipe and turned stolidly to his books once
more. But with all the will in the world, he found it very hard to keep
his mind upon his work. It would slip away to brood upon the man beneath
him, and upon the little mystery which hung round his chambers. Then his
thoughts turned to this singular attack of which Hastie had spoken, and
to the grudge which Bellingham was said to owe the object of it. The two
ideas would persist in rising together in his mind, as though there were
some close and intimate connection between them. And yet the suspicion
was so dim and vague that it could not be put down in words.
“Confound the chap!” cried Smith, as he shied his book on pathology
across the room. “He has spoiled my night’s reading, and that’s reason
enough, if there were no other, why I should steer clear of him in the
future.”