The Beetle, Richard Marsh [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

“Acquaint!⁠—whom should I acquaint?”

“My good sir! Listen to me, Mr. Lessingham. Let me entreat you very earnestly, to follow my advice. Call another cab⁠—or take this! and go at once to the House. It is not too late. Play the man, deliver the speech you have undertaken to deliver, perform your political duties. By coming with me you will be a hindrance rather than a help, and you may do your reputation an injury from which it never may recover. Do as I counsel you, and I will undertake to do my very utmost to let you have good news by the time your speech is finished.”

He turned on me with a bitterness for which I was unprepared.

“If I were to go down to the House, and try to speak in the state in which I am now, they would laugh at me, I should be ruined.”

“Do you not run an equally great risk of being ruined by staying away?”

He gripped me by the arm.

“Mr. Champnell, do you know that I am on the verge of madness? Do you know that as I am sitting here by your side I am living in a dual world? I am going on and on to catch that⁠—that fiend, and I am back again in that Egyptian den, upon that couch of rugs, with the Woman of the Songs beside me, and Marjorie is being torn and tortured, and burnt before my eyes! God help me! Her shrieks are ringing in my ears!”

He did not speak loudly, but his voice was none the less impressive on that account. I endeavoured my hardest to be stern.

“I confess that you disappoint me, Mr. Lessingham. I have always understood that you were a man of unusual strength; you appear instead, to be a man of extraordinary weakness; with an imagination so ill-governed that its ebullitions remind me of nothing so much as feminine hysterics. Your wild language is not warranted by circumstances. I repeat that I think it quite possible that by tomorrow morning she will be returned to you.”

“Yes⁠—but how? as the Marjorie I have known, as I saw her last⁠—or how?”

That was the question which I had already asked myself, in what condition would she be when we had succeeded in snatching her from her captor’s grip? It was a question to which I had refused to supply an answer. To him I lied by implication.

“Let us hope that, with the exception of being a trifle scared, she will be as sound and hale and hearty as even in her life.”

“Do you yourself believe that she’ll be like that⁠—untouched, unchanged, unstained?”

Then I lied right out⁠—it seemed to me necessary to calm his growing excitement.

“I do.”

“You don’t!”

“Mr. Lessingham!”

“Do you think that I can’t see your face and read in it the same thoughts which trouble me? As a man of honour do you care to deny that when Marjorie Lindon is restored to me⁠—if she ever is!⁠—you fear she will be but the mere soiled husk of the Marjorie whom I knew and loved?”

“Even supposing that there may be a modicum of truth in what you say⁠—which I am far from being disposed to admit⁠—what good purpose do you propose to serve by talking in such a strain?”

“None⁠—no good purpose⁠—unless it be the desire of looking the truth in the face. For, Mr. Champnell, you must not seek to play with me the hypocrite, nor try to hide things from me as if I were a child. If my life is ruined⁠—it is ruined⁠—let me know it, and look the knowledge in the face. That, to me, is to play the man.”

I was silent.

The wild tale he had told me of that Cairene inferno, oddly enough⁠—yet why oddly, for the world is all coincidence!⁠—had thrown a flood of light on certain events which had happened some three years previously and which ever since had remained shrouded in mystery. The conduct of the business afterwards came into my hands⁠—and briefly, what had occurred was this:

Three persons⁠—two sisters and their brother, who was younger than themselves, members of a decent English family, were going on a trip round the world. They were young, adventurous, and⁠—not to put too fine a point on it⁠—foolhardy. The evening after their arrival in Cairo, by way of what is called “a lark,” in spite of the protestations of people who were better informed than themselves, they insisted on going, alone, for a ramble through the native quarter.

They went⁠—but they never returned. Or, rather the two girls never returned. After an interval the young man was found again⁠—what was left of him. A fuss was made when there were no signs of their reappearance, but as there were no relations, nor even friends of theirs, but only casual acquaintances on board the ship by which they had travelled, perhaps not so great a fuss as might have been was made. Anyhow, nothing was discovered. Their widowed mother, alone in England, wondering how it was that beyond the receipt of a brief wire, acquainting her with their arrival at Cairo, she had heard nothing further of their wanderings, placed herself in communication with the diplomatic people over there⁠—to learn that, to all appearances, her three children had vanished from off the face of the earth.

Then a fuss was made⁠—with a vengeance. So far as one can judge the whole town and neighbourhood was turned pretty well upside down. But nothing came of it⁠—so far as any results were concerned, the authorities might just as well have left the mystery of their vanishment alone. It continued where it was in spite of them.

However, some three months afterwards a youth was brought to the British Embassy by a party of friendly Arabs who asserted that they had found him naked and nearly dying in some remote spot in the Wady Haifa desert. It was the brother of the two lost girls. He was as nearly dying as he very well could be without being actually dead when they brought