The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension, Griffith [read with me .txt] 📗

[1] The Doctrine, of course, affords the same explanation of friendships between man and man, and woman and woman.

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[Pg 116] 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 take any notice of the great fact which was beginning to get itself accomplished; but her mother's instinct instantly noticed the subtle[Pg 117] 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,[Pg 118] 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[Pg 119] 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[Pg 120] 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